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branwen's sortings

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Sorting the MCU (Peter Parker)


abhorsen.

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I’m a Brooklynite, so Captain America’s exchange with Spiderman in Civil War made my day and remains one of my favorite exchanges… like, ever. “Queens.” “Brooklyn.” Queens is not the best borough, obviously (which is why Steve wins the fight, in an art-reflects-reality kind of why), but Queens is still adjacent to the best borough and has the 7 train, so it deserves props nonetheless and may be the second best borough, all things considered. By this somewhat questionable logic, I decided to sort Spiderman.

Note: When I sort, I use the sortinghatchats system - +here’s (M to be safe) a link to their ‘basics’ post. To briefly summarize, though, they sort everyone on two different (and equally important) aspects of their personality: the first (your “primary” house) is why you do things, where the second (your “secondary” house) is how you do things.

Primary (the “why”)

Peter is a Gryffindor primary, and it’s perfectly encapsulated in one of the first things he says in the MCU. When Tony Stark asks him in Captain America: Civil War why he does what he does, this is what Peter says:

“Because I’ve been me my whole life, and I’ve had these powers for six months. I read books, I build computers. And yeah, I would love to play football, but I couldn’t then, so I shouldn’t now…. When you can do the things that I can, but you don’t, and then the bad things happen… they happen because of you.”

That’s the pure, driven, idealism of a Gryffindor primary. From sortinghatchats:

Gryffindor Primaries trust their moral intuitions. They feel what’s right in their gut, and that matters and guides them. If they don’t listen to and act on that, it feels immoral.

There’s a reason Steve (a strong Gryffindor primary himself) reacts the way he does to Peter in Civil War - when he asks Peter whether Tony told him anything else and Peter says, “That you’re wrong, you think you’re right. That makes you dangerous,” Steve’s immediate reaction it to tell him that he’s “got heart.” That’s a framing that Steve fundamentally understands and respects, and it’s because they share a primary and see the world through a very similar lens.

That’s a thread that continues throughout Spiderman: Homecoming, too. Peter doesn’t always really know what he’s doing - he’s 15, awkward and clearly needed more guidance than he got - but he knows what’s right, and he knows that he needs to be making a difference in the world. Everything in his life revolves around stopping “the bad things” - he doesn’t think twice about quitting extracurriculars he seems to have enjoyed and disappointing the girl he has a crush on, because what matters is doing what’s right.

Most superheroes would have left Liz at the dance - the stakes of doing nothing were just too high. The difference between Peter and other superheroes is that Peter doesn’t seem to regret it - nor does he seem to regret turning down an invitation to join the Avengers. That was a huge invitation, and it’s what he clearly wanted earlier on in the movie (and likely still would like to do in the future)… but leaving the dance and turning down Tony were the right things to do, so he did them and didn’t seem to dwell on it after the fact. Even after he puts on his new suit when he gets home, there’s no indication that he’s thinking about what he gave up - he’s just psyched to have the suit.

And that’s not because Peter is incapable of hesitation, regret, guilt. He does hesitate (and ultimately refuse) to use his alter-ego as a party trick, even though it probably would have impressed everyone there and made his life a lot easier. He also clearly feels guilty about lying to May - it’s a necessary wrong, but it’s still wrong.

Peter is only willing to give up being a superhero when his hero tells him, point blank, that what he did on the ferry was wrong. He did something to stop “the bad things,” and it made the situation worse. I wouldn’t call him burned at that point in the movie, even if just momentarily, but I do think that he’s slightly charred, and I think he stops being Spiderman because he’s confused about what the right thing for him to do is, especially since he doesn’t hesitate to pick it back up when the smoke clears and he sees it clearly again. He doesn’t have the tools he probably needs, but it doesn’t matter, because to Peter, right is right, and if he has to suffer or even die for it, so be it.

Secondary (the “how”)

His secondary is a little more hazy, though I do ultimately come down on the side of a Ravenclaw primary:

Ravenclaw Secondaries plan. They collect information, they strategize. They have tools. They run hypotheticals and try to plan ahead for things that might come up. They build things that they can use later. They feel less at home in improvisation and more comfortable planning ahead and taking the time to be prepared.

The case for Ravenclaw is an easy one. Being bitten by a spider opened the door for Peter to become a superhero, but he walked through it on his own. While Homecoming doesn’t go into the details too much (which I actually liked), it’s made clear in both Civil War and Homecoming that a lot of Peter’s powers are things that he’s responsible for - for example, he tells Tony that he created the webbing, and we see him experimenting with it at school. He’s developed his tools, and with them, he’s confident and sure of his abilities.

It’s also strongly implied (and even overtly shown, at a few points) that Peter absorbs a lot of knowledge that just isn’t very likely to be useful. He likes to tinker with electronics, and MJ mentions that he’d recently quit robotics lab (along with marching band). He seems to have a track record of looking for new things to learn, and a lot of them don’t seem likely to be particularly useful.

In addition, Peter doesn’t really seem to rely on others the way a lot of the other MCU heroes do. When he’s buried in rubble, he initially calls for help… but he quickly decides that the only person who’s coming to save him is him. His friend Ned ultimately helps him, but it’s not in the strong, decisive way that other superheroes, both MCU and otherwise, gather people around them - Ned is helpful, but he’s not an integral part of Peter’s day-to-day hero-ing.

There are points where Peter comes across as being great at improvising - there's nothing that could have prepared him for a huge Ant-Man or having to rescue Dr. Strange from a powerful villain in a spaceship, for example, and he clearly didn't prepare to break through the window on the National Monument either. However, I see both Ant-Man and Dr. Strange as actually being an example of his Ravenclaw secondary; he didn't pull those solutions from nowhere, he pulled them from pop culture. His finding a way to use them isn't evidence of him being exceptionally adaptable - it's evidence of his building up a broad toolkit that can be used in a wide variety of situations.

To summarize: Peter is a Gryffindor primary and a Ravenclaw secondary.

(Italicized sorting quotes from sortinghatchats.)

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