BWprowl wrote:Actually, he does:
Actually, that's from the issue after "The Night Gwen Stacy Died", "The Green Goblin's Last Stand". And I'd hardly call him saying "my woman" just that
one time "the entire way" like you'd claimed.
And another:
"My lady" sounds like something a chivalrous character like Silverbolt would say, especially in the context here of Peter acting as the avenging hero.
The story literally ends with Mary Jane locking herself in an apartment with a grieving Peter.
She just closes the door to stay and grieve with Peter. He'd told her to get out because he didn't believe she was "torn up" about Gwen's death, saying she wouldn't even care if her own mother had died, given this carefree attitude MJ always presented at the time in the comics. It was a turning point in their friendship certainly, but they didn't hook up. It would be many years before they even started dating, after Peter had a relationship with Black Cat.
So you want to give credit to this exploitive mess for starting that idiotic trend?
No, I'm saying it's not part of that idiotic trend because it happened long before that sort of shock-value storytelling was a thing. I tend to think of the death (and return) of Superman in the 90s as the start of that trend.
Really, if the point of it wasn't shock value, and it wasn't to clear the way for Peter to hook up with MJ, as you claim, then at the end of it, what WAS the point of this story? To build the Green Goblin up as a true, monstrous villain to Spider-Man? Can't, he dies in Part 2 of the story. Was it to give Peter a motivating death to carry through his actions? Pretty sure he already got that when Uncle Ben got killed in his origin story. So...nothing. The story exists purely for attention-grabbing shock-value, the writers simply proving that they *could* do something, without thinking about why. It's iconic in that role, in that it paved the way for more nuanced storytelling where heroes didn't strictly always win and bad things could happen, but that still doesn't mean it deserves any credit for being a good story.
Green Goblin was the first super villain to learn Spidey's true identity, and attacked him by attacking his loved ones. It was really a rarity in which it actually showed what could happen if the villain knew who the hero was. With a secret identity, the loved ones of the hero are generally targeted out of coincidence, or otherwise something that has nothing to do with the hero themselves, but this story was about the consequences of the hero directly. And that is a big theme throughout the Spider-Man comics. I would equate Gwen's death to being as much of a motivational factor for Peter as Uncle Ben's death was, albeit in a different aspect for Peter and his personal life. Unlike Uncle Ben, it was a consequence of Peter being Spider-Man rather than having the power to do something yet not doing anything about it, like letting the Burglar get away only for him to end up murdering someone Peter cared about out of pure coincidence. It wasn't merely shock-value like you claim and it's something that still effects the character even today given the lessons he learned from that story. It's a great story, and understandably widely seen as one of the most iconic comic book stories of all time.
