The Good and Bad of Spiderman’s Mr. Negative
My knowledge of Spiderman is fairly limited. I’ve seen the movies, I’ve played most of the games, and I watched the cartoon in the 90’s. I hadn’t heard of Mr. Negative until he appeared in Marvel’s Spiderman, and I mistakenly thought he was an original creation for the game. Not so! As it turns out, he’s been around for years with largely the same backstory. In the game, he serves as a regular antagonist and you have several boss fights against him. I’m not sure the game should have emphasized his role so centrally over all of the other villains in the game, but there was a lot I liked about him. Here’s what I liked and didn’t like about Mr. Negative.
Mr. Negative has no appreciation of nuance; everything is black and white to him.
The Good: His Powers Reflect the Zeitgeist
Mr. Negative has some unique powers that make him fun to battle. He can toss powerful blasts, summon up monsters, and smack you around pretty easily. His best power, however, is his ability to bring out the worst in people. By touching his victims, he can bring out their most negative thoughts and effectively recruit them to his army. This power may be just an excuse to give Mr. Negative an army of enemies for you to beat up, but it also reflects the current focus on anger in our culture. Whether it’s the ability of social media or political figures to incite anger or radicalize ordinary people or the news stories about the unfortunate consequences of anger, we spend a lot of time today talking about our anger. Mr. Negative’s power capture this moment well; with just a touch, he turns ordinary people into angry foot soldiers in his creepy army.
Yeah you don’t want to be evil, but the new suit looks really cool.
The Bad: His Magic Feels a Little Out of Place
All of Spiderman’s villains reflect some kind of technology gone wrong. Rhino has an exo-skeleton that gives him superhuman powers. Shocker has a suit that controls electricity (and I guess Electro has the ability to do this without a suit). Doctor Octopus has his arms, Vulture has his wings, and Green Goblin has his sled. Mr. Negative’s power are a little more magical and don’t relate to a specific technology (though, like a lot of supervillians, he did get his abilities through an experiment gone wrong). I’m not saying magic can’t play a role in Spiderman, but it does feel a little out of place in a world that’s so focused on technology. As superheroes are depicted more and more realistically, magic is going to look more and more out of place. As much as Mr. Negative seems to epitomize our current culture, his magical abilities feel a little out of place.
I wonder why all his troops wear masks and he doesn’t? He’s like the opposite of Bane that way.
The Good: He Brings a Little Diversity to the Sinister Six
I’m not sure if this makes me sound like a social justice warrior or a white supremacist, but I sometimes think Spiderman spends kind of a lot of time beating up middle age white males. Whether it’s Doctor Octopus or Green Goblin or Rhino or Electro or Scorpion or Vulture or Shocker or Kingpin, Spiderman’s rogues gallery has all the diversity of a Friends rerun. Heck the only non-white villain is Tombstone, who is an Albino white male (with the power to make other villains also white, oddly enough). Spiderman’s enemies list is almost conspicuously homogenous, and Mr. Negative gives a little diversity to the cast that definitely needs it. Seriously, these guys really need to expand their recruiting efforts.
Just saying, maybe you guys could take out some targeted ads in some minority focused magazines? No one is saying that you need to hire an unqualified candidate! Just expand your recruiting net a little bit.
The Bad: He Stands in the Way of the Bigger Conflict
Not to be too spoilery, but Mr. Negative isn’t ultimately the biggest enemy in the game. While he’s definitely the focus of the game’s first portion, he slides into the background later on. This seems like a real shame. Again, I don’t mean to spoil the story, but Mr. Negative could have very easily been targeting someone much closer to Peter for legitimate reasons. The game could have focused on Peter uncovering the reason for the conflict and then bringing the conflict back to the story’s real Big Bad. Admittedly, this would make Mr. Negative’s recruitment to the Sinister Six a little more awkward, but theThe fact that he is so focused on the Mayor throughout the game seems like a wasted opportunity. He winds up being just one of the Sinister Six, and not the one your final battle is focused on.
