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Why have these toys taken two full years to make it to stores?
MJ was looking forward to senior year with Peter and Ned -
but the reveal of Peter's Spider-Man identity disrupts her plans.
For three whole movies, Michelle Jones was basically the smartest, most "together" member of the entire cast, running circles around everyone around her. Heck, in this movie alone, she's the one who puts Doctor Strange in his place instead of letting the grown-ass magic man literally bully literal children for his mistakes. And then, at the end of the movie, when Peter's about to erase himself from the world's mind, she begs him - forthrightly demands - to come find her and tell her, to fix it. She made her desires utterly clear to him, with no question. And then Peter Parker, our hero, blithely ignores them because he decides he knows better than her. Throughout the entire narrative, he keeps apologizing for the stuff he's putting her through, she keeps telling him "you don't need to apologize, I'm here because I want to be," and when it all comes down to it at the end, he demonstrates that he's repeatedly managed to not hear the message and doesn't really value her opinion and desires. You're a real winner, Pete!
This figure is wearing the oversized stripey sweater she had for most of the movie - it's most recognizable from the climax,
of course, but she was already wearing it when she got to the Sanctum Sanctorum. What she doesn't have, however, is the broken Black Dahlia necklace Peter gave her in London. That's because the majority of this sculpt is the same seen on the last MJ figure, and giving her the necklace would have required remolding the chest; at that point, they might as well mold the sweater on, and then that would need new articulation, and that would mean remolding the rest of the torso... which it turns out they already did, because her pockets are higher up on the pants this time, so why does she not have her necklace?
Honestly, they might have been able to get away with just changing the upper torso, if it had been done like Miles Morales' was: hide the balljoint way up inside the sweater and it'd be fine. Heck, they might even have been able to reuse his arms, given the size similarities between a real-life girl and a comicbook teen. As before, the figure has a balljointed head, hinged neck, swivel/hinged shoulders, elbows, and wrists, a balljointed chest and hips, swivel thighs, double-hinged knees, and swivel/hinged ankles. The chest is somewhat limited by the sweater, of course; no surprise there.
When Tom Holland and Zendaya started dating, someone joked that,
if they get married, he should take her last name, and henceforth be known as "Tom." This is a different head than last time, and not just because her ponytail hangs differently - it's a new facial sculpt entirely, neither as happy nor as angry as last time. But we really couldn't get a second head on this $25 action figure? (That is, this action figure Hasbro is charging us $25 for, not an action figure that's worth $25.) Even the same head, with a cut or a bandaid painted on, would have been something.
At least she gets something on that giant card with her: the Macchina di Kadavus, the box Dr. Strange used to store the spell he messed up. That's a pretty cool thing to include, but it doesn't mean this toy should cost what Hasbro tells you it should cost. For $25, she'd need to include an alternate head with her hat sculpted on, and swappable arms so she could be wearing the coat she had on when they went to the Sanctum. And also some dinner rolls to throw at Spider-Man.
When it becomes clear the only way to not destroy reality is to hard reboot Peter's life, MJ makes him promise to do what the hero do: save her. But then he decides not to. Because she got a little bonkus of the konkus. He abandons her to a fate she made painfully clear she didn't want, that she was counting on him to rescue her from. Screw your agency, girl! Only a boy can pick how you live your life! The funniest thing they could do now would be to have Peter finally go explain who he is to her, she remembers, and then she breaks up with him for ignoring her and taking so long.
-- 01/12/24
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