Reposting So I Can Read This When I'm Not Falling Asleep So I Can Fully Appreciate It

reposting so I can read this when I'm not falling asleep so I can fully appreciate it

going to be so annoying in anon right now bc im ashamed of my nerdiness. /j or whatever. so uh, hi! been obsessed with your noir stuff for probably over a year now and i finallt finished reading the comics- yes ik. it took me a while. motivation and all that jazz.

i feel like i have his personality down (i want to write for him- fic or just essay shit or rp, idk— and also just want to get him.) but honestly personality is such a difficult thinf for me to get beyond pure vibes. my general consensus is obviously the anger issues and passion, obsessive tendencies, and care and love that peter often has to balance with his “i cant let myself be close to people because theyre gonna die” vibes and him trying to convince himself and others hes a lone wolf.

im tied up a lot with him masking- because its canon (beyond the pun, even), like when he says he practiced lines and the like. its heavily implied (if not outright said, my memory is spotty and im running off no sleep rn lol, sorry if im wrong) that a lot of his behaviors as the spider-man are based off him trying to be adult like and forcinf himself to grow up and out of a lot of the softness that he’s even shown to have in the beginning of vol1. and while i do think the bitterness and anger and the like are genuine parts of his personality, they also lowkey come from him putting on airs to repress a lot of the fear and hurt and loss he’s suffered… idk. and like, he is noir in and out of the mask (at least after everything in ewoaf) but hes still… that identity he has… its jaded and hurt and repressed and lowkey masking to some degree, still. idk!!! all my opinion, but i’m finding it very hard to balance the aspects of his personality and what is just him and what is airs he’s putting on.

anyway, sorry for the ramble!! basically, tldr; what are your thoughts on peter’s personality, like how you would describe it ig, with and without the mask?

It’s been so long since I’ve flexed these muscles. Let’s get into it. And also im not the best at completely discerning and writing out personalities either but if we all come together I think we could do it. Socratic seminar style

Okay first off I agree w everything you’ve said already. And honestly there’s nothing wrong with working off vibes!! Vibes are a solid foundation and flexible enough to account for the irrational, impulsive teenager that Pete can be.

The anger issues are a give in not just for this Pete but any Peter Parker really. But the world and life that Pete has found himself in are so cruel and taxing and unfair that it’s dialed all the way up to 11. So much of that has to do with agency as a young person in a corrupt city. Even without all the noir 30s shit, being young is hard and frustrating because of the lack of control over yourself and your situation. It’s like when you’re restrained and your body kinda buzzes until you can explode and get yourself out. It’s like that but.. personality wise? And also just like the simple state of the body in the 30s and how that affects mood and disposition. Exhausted, cold, hungry—-and then after the bite, alien, dangerous, othering.

I think this ties into his passion and obsessive tendencies too. He needs to do something. Everyday either feels stagnant or worse so he locks in on this drive to change anything. This is also totally helped by the fact that he was raised by Aunt May and Uncle Ben, who are incredibly incredibly driven and outspoken, so much so that Ben was killed for it. And I like to think that he’s kicked it into high gear to keep Ben alive in a sense. He’s trying to keep up with what he thinks Ben would have believed. Which of course, he doesn’t always understand…

Peter is, for all intents and purposes, explicitly said to be naive by Urich. Issue 1, Urich is already like damn this kid is going to burn himself out because he doesn’t know any better. And he’s not wrong! But I think his naivety goes even deeper than that, where he’s even just not completely comprehending what Uncle Ben stood for. I think this is most notable in his choice of costume—or should I say uniform (and also the Frankenstein stuff but that’s way too much to explain for this)?

He’s literally dressed in his uncle’s WWI helmet, trench, and is using his gun. The uniform that was hidden away in a trunk, I think? There’s a lot that can be said about him dressing himself in wartime gear, but that’s for another time. But WWI, that was famously so violent and unprecedented and horrifying, that had soldiers coming home with awful PTSD? And not to mention that socialists don’t like war? Come on Pete, there are connections your neurons need be synapsing here. It’s such a teenager thing for him to do. Here’s why MY fight is good, and the other ones are bad. And that’s another thing—-the kid is righteous in a way that boarders (or completely bleeds into, depending on the situation) haughtiness. One of my personal favorite ways to portray this lack of awareness is to make all his feelings psychosomatic. Can’t reflect if you’re just feeling it instead of thinking!

And you mention that he’s the spider in and out of the mask, which I also agree with. That’s why he’s so infuriating to figure out cause it’s like where does the kid stop and the vigilante begin, but I think that’s a lot of what makes up who he is. But yeah, where he mentions he practices lines to make himself come off as more intimidating, more grown, shows that there is some differences in how he portrays himself, but it’s not necessarily the case that his personality is different. The moment that really exemplifies is this when he says a cool line, it doesn’t get him into that speakeasy, and he thinks ‘that usually works in the movies.’ COME ONNN that’s a kid under there! He’s playing at what he thinks an adult is.

This idea of him sort of putting on a show of what he thinks is grown would be where the Felicia relationship could have fit if anyone had bothered to treat it with the gravity it needed to be handled with. The first time Felicia makes a move he’s visibly uncomfortable, but this kind of relationship continues and he appears to be a more willing participant because this is what adults do. It’s fucked up but it’s noir and everything’s shitty. There’s narrative purpose to it.

I think for balancing his disposition in and out of the mask, a big player is how consciously he’s putting up a front. There is totally a level of subconscious repression just day-to-day because of the horrifying things he’s witnessed. It’s not safe to be vulnerable. And we know there’s something under all that anger! He loves physics, he wants to go to college, he can joke and laugh with Robbie, we’ve seen him get comfortable and smile around Urich. It’s just that anger is his emotional outlet. It’s an appropriate emotion to portray that won’t make him any more vulnerable than he already is. He cares so deeply about people and his community and it infuriates him that everyone is living the way they are—uncertain and despairing and powerless. These are constants in and out of the mask. It’s just that adding the mask means he is now trying to put on a persona, in a way. A kinda shitty one, until post ewaf where he’s just crushed emotionally. There’s a progression on how dependent he allows himself to be over the course of the two volumes, but talking about that’s just gonna make this reply even longer lol

Okay this is such a long winded ramble and now that im here im not even sure I hit every point you brought up. But that’s okay because this can be an open conversation 💪

I hope this is somewhat helpful? I get kinda nervous writing this out in case it seems like it isn’t true to canon LMAO. I spend so much time thinking about him w personal head canons and way-too-deep blink-and-you-miss-it analysis that im not sure how much I diverge from the comics LOLL