Another day, another controversy that has the video game community up in arms. This time around, it’s Mary-Jane from the upcoming Spider-Man 2 at the center of the debate. The character has had a bit of a redesign in the sequel to the 2018 game, and some gamers are furious at her new look.
MJ’s redesign isn’t majorly different from the first game. The image of Mary-Jane—along with the other characters in the game—can be seen on the gallery in the PlayStation store’s Spider-Man 2 page, but it was after the images were posted on Twitter that the new look for the character began to start making a stir amongst fans.
Twitter users @silverxsable, @DomtheBombYT, and @GermanStrands all posted the new redesign for Mary-Jane (DomtheBomb also posted all the other character posters too), and the response was a little extreme. Queue the jokes about letting Venom keep MJ or the outrage of Peter having to spend all day fighting crime only to come home to this “mid” MJ. GermanStrands’s tweet was even arguing that MJ is beautiful in the new game, but the response was fierce and sarcastic, as is to be expected when the internet has an opinion.
So what is the big deal, and why are people so angry? Well, some folks are simply arguing that they think the new Mary-Jane look is “ugly,” which, in my humble opinion, is a load of rubbish. She looks like a normal, everyday woman, and yet this is not only enough to make people angry, but to consider her “ugly” and unworthy of Peter’s affections. Seriously? If this is what counts as ugly in this day and age, what hope do we lowly normies have?
There are others who are making much more valid points about the redesign, though, those being related to how old the character now looks. There is no denying that the new MJ looks considerably older than she did in the first game, which is a little bit of an odd choice from the devs at Insomniac.
There are also some arguments that in the comics, MJ was always said to be noticeably gorgeous, with supermodel-level looks. This is part of what makes her relationship with Peter so endearing, with her an unobtainable beauty and him being the nerdy, everyday, average Joe (before getting his spidey powers, of course). But these are Insomniac’s games, not the comics.
No matter what you think about Mary-Jane’s redesign in Spider-Man 2, you’ll have to wait until the game releases on Oct. 20 to see exactly what she looks like. There is one key thing to be taken away from all of this, though, and that is that no matter what you do with a character, there is always going to be someone online ready to complain about it, as we saw with Aloy in Horizon Forbidden West and Abby in The Last of Us Part 2.
