It is one year since I finished and published the last chapter of The Final Act, a Mary Jane-centric Parksborn fanfic. Actually it can’t be a Parksborn fic, because one of them is dead and remains dead. In my heart and soul of course it’s a Parksborn fic (love transcends death easily), but it’s – well –
It’s really about growing up in the 00s. It’s really about me growing up in the 00s. And it was written in a different time, a less painful time. The finale makes my heart hurt now. I suppose it should.
I hope my fellow Peter, Mary Jane, Harry, and Spider-Man lovers can get something out of it. It’s hands down the best thing I’ve ever written.
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 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.