This is only of interest to the most diehard of diehard Raimi Spider-Man fans, I know, but if anyone actually wants to read and keep The Final Act, I stuck it in a PDF. Just in case AO3 ever deletes the fic or somehow becomes unavailable, you know?
Sorry this looks so clunky. I have no idea how to upload it as just the link. Still, maybe this looks okay on a desktop?
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.
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.
I am aware I have died on this hill before but people who really strenuously argue that fanfic isn’t “real writing” drive me insane. what do you meeeaaaaannn. besides the fact that any attempt to define “real art” vs “fake art” is inherently reactionary, it just doesn’t make any sense. it’s Writing. people Write it. what the fuck are you talking about.
“it’s totally self-indulgent with no standards for quality and criticism is borderline not allowed”
are you like. aware of the concept of hobbies? if someone regularly posted pictures of their hobbyist knitting projects on their blog, it would be considered rude to drop in with “criticism.” that’s still a real art form.
“most of it is really bad”
I cannot stress enough how much perceived quality is not a valid metric for determining what is and isn’t art
“it’s just porn”
I’m going to kill you
“it’s full of unchecked misogyny, racism, queerphobia, etc”
I have some really bad news about every artistic medium ever
“you didn’t put in the work of making your own world/characters, you just copied someone else’s”
tv shows with writers’ rooms. ghost writers. franchises where different works are written by different people. adaptations and retellings. sorry guys I guess none of these are real writing anymore.
There is an endemic problem in spinoff novels or cross-media properties like comics, where you’ll get a very talented author recruited whose work is generally excellent, and everyone’s excited, but then it turns out they don’t know how to write fanfiction.
And the result is that the spinoff is really bad. Because the author completely fails to capture the vocal cadence or behavior or motivations of someone else’s characters, the narrative tone of the series…they try too hard to the point of making in-universe references feel stilted and unnatural, or do WAY too much exposition about things that shouldn’t need to be explained at this level of barrier-of-entry.
The ability to be a chameleon, to figure out and match the “feel” of characters and a world you didn’t create, is a learned skill.
(Also there are absolutely people who drop in with unsolicited criticism on someone’s hobby knitting or quilting or whatever, and they’re dicks.)
Title: Us Fandom: Spider-Man (Insomniac games) Relationship: Peter/Harry Summary: Harry’s thoughts as he dies. (Well, you know. Sort of dies.) An experiment in second-person perspective!
I have an ongoing Raimiverse Parksborn fic up on AO3 now.
Well, I say “Parksborn” but it’s not in the traditional sense, because it’s set immediately post (actually, sort of during) Spider-Man 3 and thus one of them is dead. It’s more of a… I don’t know what it is. Let’s call it a character study of Mary Jane, a love letter to the Spider-Man Trilogy and a hate letter to the 2000s, with a LOT of deeply personal things thrown in there that you won’t actually recognize.
I’ve been working on it since 2021. Here’s the first two chapters.
Well shit, Henry Jenkins, out here in 1997 dropping truth bombs
Oh hey I need this for a research paper I’m writing, thank you!
i mean he had been out here since 1988 dropping such bombs:
“‘fandom’ is a vehicle of marginalized subcultural groups (women, the young, gays, etc.) to pry open space for their cultural concerns within dominant representations; it is a way of appropriating media texts and rereading them in a way that serves different interests, a way of transforming mass culture into a popular culture”
Jenkins, Henry. “Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten: Fan Writing as Textual Poaching.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 5, no. 2 (1988): 85–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295038809366691.
there are even some earlier works in fan studies but that’s what i have ready to hand.
