Joe Straczynski’s recent arc on Amazing Spider-Man has been drawing some heat — though since a few of the secrets have been revealed, the criticisms have changed from “Tell me Joe hasn’t resurrected the Gwen clone story line” (he hasn’t) to … well, for spoilers’ sake, I’ll drop it below the fold here …
The only thing I will mention, the only thing that did surprise me, was the degree to which some folks have turned on *Gwen*. I’ve heard of the madonna/whore dynamic, but I’ve never actually seen it played out this strenously.
I can’t even begin to count the number of posts I’ve seen from folks who are calling Gwen a slut, a whore, and a tramp…that this destroys her as a person…that it would be better if she had been raped than having had consensual sex.
Better to be *raped*? Having sex with someone makes that person a *whore*?
And, as if to prove his point, a few posts down, some one says …
But i dont understand the point of the story. Gwen’s been dead for a NUMBER of years, why was there this need to desecrate her memory?
For the record, I had no idea how Joe was doing to deal with the clues he’d dropped about what was going on. While the execution of the present storyline hasn’t been the top of Joe’s form, the backstory works, IMO, quite nicely. I just thought it was interesting the sorts of reactions that have come out of the latest revelations.
(Btw, as an off-hand comment tossed into a different post, JMS notes, “Oh, and for the first time in five years, there is an office somewhere in England with the words Babylon 5 on the door….”)
(via the B5JMS Digest mailing list)