The Final Act

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]

final acts

I just published the last chapter today of something I’ve been working on since 2021. It was a Spider-Man fanfiction called The Final Act. No doubt it’s laughable and (sigh) cringe, because it’s fanfiction, but I took it so seriously, and I loved it so much.

It’s not really about Spider-Man at all, of course. It’s about me, and what it was like to come of age in the early ’00s. That author’s note about the ’00s being a different world but “some things were the same though” is the slash across the heart of the story. Does that matter to anyone? I don’t think I’ll ever write anything as good again.

anistarrose:

the under-praised backbone of any fandom:

  • fan wiki editors
  • fan wiki editors who move the wiki off of fandom.com and to an independent host, especially
  • transcript writers
  • image description writers
  • fic rec list curators
  • translators
  • everyone who archives an ephemeral ARG or website-based lore dump
  • everyone who archives and preserves related media in general, for that matter

prepare4trouble:

Does anybody else track their life though a series of obsessions? Like “ah yes, i remember that happening, i was obsessing over Star Gate Atlantis at the time,” or, “this was during my Supernatural era.” I can map out my whole life in this way.

Life things

I don’t write in this journal quite as much anymore because I went back to my paper journal for a bit. I hadn’t written in it since 2014. It was nice to see it again. (It’s a VERY thick folder.)

My mental health has not been great since the job loss but to be honest I think the antipsychotics I’m on aren’t helping either. I just feel so utterly unmotivated all the time, and my attention span is shot. I can barely focus on anything longer than five minutes. I spend a lot of time on Twitter and it leaves me in utter and complete despair. The world is awful.

I asked for an autism assessment and they sent me the forms to get a child assessed, twice, which makes me feel just greaaaaat.