Misress Gluon said:
I
Already
DID!!!
Like fifteen times now! All across the forums!! Hell, I just spelled it out YESTERDAY.
But fine fine fine.
A VERY big part of the SHRA is a registration of all known abilities. Now, at first, this doesn't seem like a totally big thing.
"Pete didn't tell Tony about his spider sense, so what?" So what? You guys keep telling me how Pete totally trusted Tony, but only enough to not tell him what he's capable of? That Tony actually stumbled across it with the same technology he employs in his own armour for the users protection?
And if you were to ask any high class thinker who literally makes projections of the future to create plans, they're going to absolutely think, "What else is he hiding?" And "Why wouldn't he tell me?"
You put that doubt into someone, and gaining their trust isn't exactly something most people would give. It changes a lot of things.
Ah, the spider-sense thing.
I don't put a lot of thought into that one scene for one sole reason: it doesn't make a lick of sense. Let's get the obvious out of the way: Peter has mentioned his spider-sense before. He's mentioned it over and over through the years. He's mentioned it relatively recently, in New Avengers. He mentioned it
specifically to Tony during The Other -- a third of which was written by JMS, by the way -- who then conducted elaborate tests on his abilities! At the very,
very least, Reed Richards should more than know all about it, considering the amount of times he's studied Peter. So we know for a fact that this is a glitch in continuity. Strike one.
Then you take the logical ramifications in. Peter saw fit to release his identity to the world even knowing what obvious risks it poses to his loved ones, to actively support the registration act despite that it's something he would've fought tooth and nail against before, to violently act out against people who were eating breakfast with him not a week ago because he so very blindly trusts that Tony has everything accounted for...and throughout all this, you're telling me we're supposed to believe that he never got around to actually registering? Or that if he did register, that he for some reason didn't feel like including his spider-sense alongside
every single other secret he's revealed? But...why? That makes no sense. And I'm not just saying that facetiously, it really doesn't make any sense. What possible benefit could he obtain from it? At the time of his registration he had every faith in Stark and no reason to doubt him. And also, why in the world would
Stark alert Peter to the fact that he knows about the spider-sense? This is a guy who chooses his words with utmost precision and colors everything with precise manipulation. If Peter keeping the spider-sense from him was something that's been bugging him out (hah), why in the sphincter of hell let it slip so
casually in the middle of a seeming harmless conversation? In fact, the impression that the scene itself gives is that
Peter is the one disturbed about the revelation and the Stark himself is just fine and nonchalant about it. All in all, a very solid strike two.
Then you take into the account that the incident is never mentioned again. Ever. SHIELD itself
never ever at any point suggests that they bring in Peter for not registering, or registering falsely...and these guys have known about Peter Parker's true identity and every single one of his powers back from the
Nick Fury days. Stark never brings up any spider-sense in any manner whatsoever, even though he's since berated Pete on a whole lot of other things such as betraying his country and turning on his government and yada yada. You'd think that, if the betrayal were as severe as all that, it would affect him somehow. Pete himself never brings it up again, either. It's almost as if the writers themselves realized the glitch and sought to have it removed from the records. Strike three.
Maybe I could still take that scene seriously with one or even two strikes, but not all three. Ultimately, if I'm
forced to take it seriously, I can
maybe buy that scene as Peter not totally trusting Tony enough to let him in on all aspects of his life. I'm really not so sure that I can take it as a scene of Peter overtly or intentionally flaunting the law. And I realize that the two seem to contradict each other, but to be fair the scene more than contradicts itself. It falls apart under even the slightest bit of scrutiny. The more I think about it, the less sense it makes. So, I don't.
Mistress Gluon said:
I'd say it was fairly intense. Seeing heros and villans locked up in a dimension known for absolute harsh conditions and low life expectancies. It's like Nazi Germany, it probably wasn't AS bad as we always paint it, but if you think about it, you never see elaborate buildings that are well kept, either when it comes to mind.
Pete was still probably in a good amount of shock from seeing this little Negative Zone prison.
It would probably be like saying you ressurected a concentration camp to use as a prison, and someone just found out. Explaining it to them simply later on in a few hours hardly has them in the right frame of mind to talk.
I do think Pete got the wrong impression of things. Like a lot of people even who argue about anything in Civil War, they kind of see some things, but not all things and how they work together. Just what they initially see, and want to see. (Storm survived barely Clor with Sue's help. Clor didn't get his ass handed to him by Storm).
Pete was distraught, and that sort of feeling doesn't just go away after lunch or after a walk. If I told you I built a prison in hell for prisoners and you visited it, I doubt you'd be of stable mind to talk about it for probably a few days. I doubt after a sandwich, you'd have considered everything you might have to say, and then would be capable of talking to me about it.
Hell, Tony, Reed, and Pym took all night just to come up with it. I doubt Pete can grasp it completely in a 12th of the time.
Then maybe that says more about the situation than it says about Peter. If Peter could be so distraught over the situation he's seeing as to be completely incapable of viewing it objectively, maybe
that itself is a telling factor of the prison. If seeing something like that makes him so sick to his stomach as to be bolting for the hills at first opportunity, maybe someone should rethink the impression that this prison is giving in the first place, and if maybe they aren't going about all this the wrong way in the first place. Or does the "bare bones" approach to things apply only to people and not to situations? If something like this needed hours upon days of justification and
explaining in order to be remotely acceptable, maybe it shouldn't actually be accepted.
Normally, I hate Hudlin's work on Black Panther with the passion of a million burning babies, but he wrote something very interesting in BP #25. Reed Richards and Storm are
having a conversation about various Civil War events. Cue bickering and politics. The topic turns to Wakanda's own policies on metahumans, and Reed offers a very detailed, in-depth, thought-provoking, bullet-proof analysis on why Wakanda itself supports registration, or ought to. Storm gives an even more interesting response:
"You are a genius, Reed. Because that level of rationalization is beyond my imagination."
The point, and one that I agree with, seems to be that just because an idea is big and long and complicated doesn't mean that it's necessarily right; all it means is that it's big and long and complicated. And even worse, the more difficult it is to understand, the less it applies to the people that actually need to understand it. In fact, in instinctively going for one of the more convoluted scenarios conceivable, Reed may in reality be diverging from the facts at hand and looking for things that aren't there. Projecting his intentions, as it were. I've seen you offer more or less the same idea, before: "Reed and Tony are geniuses, see, and their level of planning and intuition and big-picture-seeing is far beyond the kin of average people to understand." But you see how that isn't really an advantage, if your goal is to make the average person understand you. You see how, most of the times all it does is place you
outside the picture. The people who already agreed with you will keep on agreeing with you. The people who never agreed with you in the first place are not going to suddenly agree with you just because you take longer to say the same thing you've already said. You might, with luck, convince some of the fence-sitters, though the fact that they're fence-sitting in the first place seems to suggest that they'd be equally susceptible to a similar speech from the other side. The fact that one sees things with more precision and cohesion isn't particularly anything to brag about unless you can make it relatable to people on
their terms...and how can you do that, when your mindset is as unrelatable to them as theirs are to you?
This is not me saying, "Simple sentences and short, vague descriptions are better." This is me saying, "Don't be shocked when people don't fall in line with things they can't understand."
Here's something I'm noticing, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong: You give the impression a lot of times that most if not all of the anti-regs are just being anti-regs because they simply don't know any better, because they were coerced, because they're just following the cool kids, because their egos can't deal with this change, or because they just like being rebels...or something else like that. You've been implying that if only Tony or someone could just have the chance to sit down with the them and slowly, methodically go over all the facts and benefits and make them
really understand the big picture and just what is going on...well, even these wayward sheep would simply have no
choice but to magically see the light and come around to to the correct way of thinking. I mean, your whole reason for why Peter ran away from Daddy to join with the anti-regs was because he
misunderstood what Daddy was saying. "If only he sat down and thought about it, he would agree."
Now, I'm not necessarily arguing that the anti-regs aren't all just dumb sheep (in fact, I'm sure a bunch of them are) and I'm not going to touch on how correct Tony's way of thinking may be. I'm just pointing out something I believe I've said before, which is: If it were as easy to win the anti-regs over as simply talking to these people and getting them to really
understand the plan, no one would have needed to fight in any dang war in the first place. These people all have specific reasons for either thinking the registration is wrong or for opposing it.
Those specific reasons should be the ones that you addess if you want to side with you, not the ones that they were fighting against in the first place!
This is partially the reason why I had such a hard time swallowing all the discussion about the two sides "talking it out," throughout the entirety of this event right back from when it started last spring. People would claim that Cap should have tried to talk more with Tony, or that Tony should have tried to talk more with Cap, or people would claim that Cap was stupid for not listening to Tony or that Tony was stupid for not listening to Cap, or whatever. Putting aside my personal preferences for who
should have listened to who, my question was always what anyone thought that this
could possibly accomplish. "You know that act that you've been fighting all this time? Well it's really not that bad. Now stop fighting it!" or "You know how you want us to register? Well we don't want to register. Okay?" All that either side would be offering the other is the exact same present wrapped in slightly different packages. The fact that someone doesn't like what you're giving him is not a cue for you to try to give him more of the same thing. What both sides
want is not for the other to try and sell them on the same ideas over and over and over and over again; what both sides actually
want is compromise. Unless anyone on either side was actually willing to compromise, and compromise big, I just don't see what anyone actually expected to happen.
We see the one event throughout this entire event that had more people switching sides than anything else; wasn't the Thunderbolts, and it wasn't the prison...it was Bill Foster's death, something that actually had
nothing whatsoever to do with the specifics of the act itself! Several anti-regs got scared and turned sides, and several pro-regs got annoyed and turned sides. And none of it had a lick to do with what they
actually felt about registration in the first place.
In a smart world, everyone would listen to everyone and then agree on the best possible outcome for everyone. What actually
happens is that everyone wants to be right and no one wants to be wrong, and just because one dresses up their words in fancy prose and complex situations doesn't make your right any more right than anyone else's right. Believe me, I've tried.
), I don't see any wild bouts of overreaction or irrationality. I see two grown men (later three, including Reed) having a heated argument about an incredibly divisive subject matter, and being divided about it. It could have gone better, maybe, but how much better was it liable to be? Like I said, do you think Peter somehow got the wrong impression about things? Was Tony somehow unclear about the facts? Were things misunderstood? No, I think both of them saw a very clear picture of the other at that moment.
