After her best friend sacrifices himself to save her lover, Mary Jane Watson tells a lie that quickly spirals out of all control.
Her lie gives Amberson Osborn, father of Norman and grandfather of Harry, the impetus to run for mayor of New York City. His opponent is Rio Morales, mother of the newest superhero in town. It’s time for Mary Jane to go down swinging an election.
Back in 2021, I began work on a Raimi Spider-Man fanfiction called The Final Act. It was an impassioned defence of Mary Jane Watson, it was big on Parksborn, and it made a stab at explaining some of the plot holes in the Spider-Man Trilogy. I thought that was it, and then everything changed.
The Final Act is actually about coming of age in the mid-00s. You don’t really know me, but I’m older than you think. I grew up with the Spider-Man movies. The first time I ever felt like a true adult was when I visited New York as a teen without my parents in 2006, a year and three months before Spider-Man 3 came out. I really and truly fell in love with New York, and some of this fanfiction is an attempt to recapture that. It’s also about suicide (so be warned), about journalism, about fandom, and about how some cycles just repeat again and again and again.
I put A LOT of my soul and my teenagerhood into this story. It features plenty of anger, a lot of musings about abstract concepts of heroism, many references to the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, not one but infinite multiverses, and some songs.
Here it is.
The Final Act – Chapter 1 – PanicPixieDreamGirl – Spider-Man (Movies – Raimi) [Archive of Our Own]