Since the release of Brand New Day, everyone has found scenes they have resonated with or scenes worth talking about. One of the bigger scenes being discussed has sparked a surprising amount of conversation online and includes a female character being scrutinized, as usual.
SPOILERS FOR BRAND NEW DAY AHEAD! (thought it was an 8/10 movie, highly recommend)
To understand the scene that started all of this discourse, we need to understand how we ended up here. So, to catch you up to speed on the Marvel Universe, here are the important points:
- In No Way Home, Peter Parker is publicly outed as Spider-Man and wants to go back to the way things were.
- He gets the help of Doctor Strange, who casts a spell intended to make everyone forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man.
- The spell works, but there is a catch. People don’t just forget that Peter Parker is Spider-Man. They forget Peter Parker entirely. His civilian identity is essentially erased from people’s memories, including those of his girlfriend, MJ, and his best friend, Ned.
So, by the end of No Way Home, Peter is left with a strange contradiction. Spider-Man still exists. In fact, Spider-Man is more recognizable than ever. But Peter Parker, the person underneath the mask, has effectively disappeared. That separation is important because the rest of Peter’s life now exists in the shadow of that loss. He has chosen to preserve the world around him at the expense of his own personal relationships.
And that brings us to Brand New Day.
Peter’s love interest from the previous two movies no longer remembers him and even rejects him in this film. The conversation surrounding the scene becomes about much more than whether MJ was right or wrong to reject him. Instead, it becomes about what rejection means to Peter Parker and the men who see themselves in him.
NEWSFLASH: NICE GUYS CAN GET REJECTED TOO
MJ rejects the hero.
She reads a letter that was meant to be given to her four years earlier, a letter filled with Peter’s feelings and everything he wishes he could have told her. And instead of swooning at the realization that the man standing in front of her apparently loves her, MJ is confused. She’s angry. She’s disappointed.
And when she finally says the words Peter has been dreading to hear, “I don’t love you,” the theater reaction becomes almost as interesting as the scene itself.
When I watched this scene in theaters, there were multiple voices immediately piping up to call MJ a bitch, along with other insults directed at her for rejecting Peter. Then it got even more interesting when MJ asked Peter for a ride home. People were angry that she would even ask him for one, with some arguing that she should just walk home.
Except there is a pretty important detail being overlooked here.
MJ has no idea what is happening.
Peter has essentially taken her away from her apartment because he believes he is protecting her. From her perspective, a man she doesn’t remember has suddenly appeared in her life, after low-key keeping tabs on her and showing up at her home like earlier in the film, pretending to be someone else, told her who he REALLY is and that they used to be together, revealed intimate details about a relationship she has no memory of, and then essentially removed her from her own home.
Of course she wants a ride back. Where else is she supposed to go?
This is where I think the reaction to MJ becomes particularly interesting.
Because Peter’s feelings are completely understandable. His pain is real. His loneliness is real. His desire to have MJ remember him is real.
But none of that makes MJ responsible for not returning those feelings.
And that distinction seems to disappear the moment rejection enters the conversation.
Peter can be heartbroken.
MJ can still say no.
And what makes the reaction even stranger is that MJ isn’t even being cold-hearted toward Peter. She is empathetic toward him. She acknowledges how much the letter means, and she even tells him that she can understand why the person he wrote the letter for would love him. Even after everything, when she could have easily been irate, she still lets him reconnect with his best friend as Spider-Man. She even encourages him to tell Ned the truth and insists that Frank Castle go help him during the final fight sequence.
She never mocked his feelings or treated his love as something stupid. She never made him feel ashamed for caring about her. After the scene plays out, you can see how much empathy she carries for him. Yet, according to the internet, her “crime is simply that she is being honest about the fact that she does not feel the same way.
That seems to get lost in a lot of the conversation surrounding this scene. MJ isn’t saying, “You’re a terrible person, and nobody could ever love you.” She’s saying, “I understand why someone could love you. I just don’t.”
He withheld the truth from MJ because he believed that protecting her was the right thing to do. And in doing so, he took away her ability to make an informed choice about her own life. His intentions were rooted in love, but intentions do not erase consequences. Peter protected MJ from the pain of remembering, but he also protected himself from having to confront what might happen if she chose not to come back to him.
And there is something heartbreaking about that because Peter was not some insignificant part of MJ’s past. He was an important part of who she was. Their relationship shaped both of their lives, yet MJ is now living without any memory of it. Peter knows what she lost. He knows what they were. She doesn’t.
So when MJ rejects him, she is not rejecting the same relationship Peter remembers. She is responding to a reality that she has been given without the context he possesses. Peter walks into that conversation carrying four years of memories, grief, love, and longing. MJ walks into it trying to understand why a man she barely knows is telling her that they were once in love.
Peter’s pain is real, but so is MJ’s lack of choice. His love for her does not give him the right to decide what she should know, just as her past love for him does not give him the right to assume she will love him again.
And somehow, to a large portion of the internet, that makes her insane, ungrateful, or cruel.
Why?
Because underneath some of these reactions is an uncomfortable idea about what men are supposedly “owed” for being “good.”
Peter saved her. Peter protected her. Peter loved her. Peter carried the emotional weight of losing their relationship. Peter kept loving her even after she couldn’t remember him. And because of all of this, there seems to be an expectation that MJ should eventually reward him with the one thing he actually wants.
Her love.
But that’s not really love anymore. That’s a transaction.
If I do enough good things for you, you owe me affection. If I protect you, you owe me affection. If I sacrifice for you, you owe me affection. If I am a good man, you owe me affection. That is where the conversation around the “nice guy” mentality becomes important.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be loved. There is nothing wrong with wanting companionship, intimacy, or a relationship. And there is certainly nothing wrong with feeling devastated when someone you love doesn’t love you back.
The problem begins when kindness becomes an investment. When being a good person is treated as a currency that should eventually be exchanged for romantic access.
Because then “nice guy” stops meaning someone who genuinely tries to be kind. It starts meaning someone who believes that kindness should eventually pay dividends.
And rejection becomes interpreted as a bad investment.
This is also where I think the conversation about the male loneliness epidemic needs a little more nuance.
Men are lonely. That loneliness is real. The desire for companionship is real. The difficulty many men have forming meaningful relationships is real. But women cannot be prescribed as the treatment for male loneliness.
A woman rejecting you does not create your loneliness. And a woman accepting you does not cure it.
Peter’s loneliness deserves empathy. MJ’s boundaries deserve empathy too. Those two ideas do not cancel each other out. In fact, I think Peter’s story becomes more powerful when we allow him to experience rejection without turning MJ into a villain for causing it.
Because sometimes being a good person means doing something simply because it is the right thing to do. Not because someone will love you for it. Not because someone will sleep with you for it. Not because someone will choose you for it. You do it because you are Spider-Man.
If Peter Parker has taught us anything, it’s that doing the right thing has never guaranteed him the reward he wanted. If Peter were any other guy who felt jaded after being rejected, he could have decided that MJ was no longer his problem. He could have told her to find her own way home. He could have let his hurt feelings dictate how he treated her. But he doesn’t. He swings her home because he is Spider-Man. He doesn’t do it because MJ has suddenly changed her mind, and he doesn’t do it because he thinks she owes him something. He does it because helping people is who Peter Parker is, even when those people have hurt him.
And I think that is an important point when we talk about rejection. Rejection is tough for anyone to process. Nobody likes hearing that someone they care about doesn’t feel the same way. It can hurt your pride, your confidence, and sometimes even the way you see yourself. But what you do with that rejection says a lot about who you are. You are allowed to be hurt. You are allowed to be disappointed. You are allowed to need time to process it. What you are not entitled to do is allow your hurt to override someone else’s no.
Because at the end of the day, consent and autonomy cannot become an endless debate simply because one person doesn’t like the answer they received. A “no” does not become negotiable because you believe you have good intentions. It does not become less valid because you have done nice things for someone. It does not become something that another person has to debate with you until you finally feel satisfied with their reasoning. Most importantly, someone should never be responsible for giving up their own autonomy just to protect another person’s feelings.
That is why I think the reaction to MJ’s rejection is worth looking at beyond just the Spider-Man fandom. When a woman says no, and the immediate response is to call her a bitch, an idiot, ungrateful, insane, or any other name meant to punish her for that decision, we should probably pay attention to what that says about us. Especially when the underlying argument becomes that she should have said yes because of everything the man has done for her.
That mindset is dangerous. Not because every person who dislikes MJ is automatically a misogynist, and not because every criticism of her character is inherently sexist. People are allowed to dislike fictional characters. People are allowed to disagree with the writing. People are allowed to think Peter and MJ should be together. But there is a difference between saying, “I don’t like this writing choice,” and treating a woman as morally defective because she exercised her right to say no.
And that distinction becomes even more important when we take the conversation outside of fiction. The reaction to MJ’s rejection should make us think about the growing normalization of misogyny online, particularly the hostility that can emerge when women establish boundaries that men don’t like. Because if we cannot accept a fictional woman’s “no” without immediately demanding an explanation, assigning blame, or insulting her for it, what does that say about the way we understand rejection in real life?
Men deserve to talk about loneliness. Men deserve compassion when they experience rejection. Men deserve spaces where they can openly discuss the difficulties of dating, intimacy, friendship, and connection. But none of that should come at the expense of women’s autonomy. A man’s loneliness cannot become a woman’s obligation. A man’s disappointment cannot become a woman’s punishment. And a man’s kindness cannot become a receipt that he pulls out when he wants to collect what he believes he is owed.
Peter Parker understands something that a lot of the audience watching him apparently doesn’t. Sometimes you do the right thing and still don’t get what you want. Sometimes you love someone, and they don’t love you back. Sometimes you save someone, and they still say no. And sometimes, despite how much that “no” hurts, the most heroic thing you can do is accept it.
Because Peter doesn’t stop being Spider-Man just because MJ doesn’t love him. If anything, the way he responds to her rejection is part of what makes him Spider-Man in the first place.
MJ gets to say no. Peter gets to be hurt. And neither of those things makes either of them the villain.
Maybe that is what growing up looks like. Learning that love is something someone freely gives you, not something you earn through good deeds. Learning that rejection is painful without being an injustice. And learning that being a good man is not about eventually being rewarded with a woman’s affection.
Sometimes, you just do the right thing.
And that’s enough.
‘Cause with great power comes great responsibility.‘