This Tumblr has since 2012 been collecting things from the #parksborn and #harryosborn tags! With commentary, sometimes. Meta - Fanart Gifsets - Graphics Fanfic - Which universe are you after?
It’s June shout out to that part of Spider-Man 3 (2007) where Peter, while trying to invalidate the idea that Harry might have been romantically connecting with MJ specifically because Peter was being a bad partner, tells Harry MJ doesn’t know what he is. Not who. Not any wording that would make sense. What.
i LOVED your spideytorch post, and youve opened my eyes, Johnny Storm is asexual you are so right. what are your thoughts on parksborn?
Wah, thank you. God, maybe if I just keep alluding to it I can sway people without ever actually compiling my case....
Parksborn's here! But you're the third person to request it, so whatever, I'll elaborate. Let's talk about parksborn. This is gonna be entirely stream of consciousness.
So it's Spider-Man, and Peter Parker is the main character and ergo the center of the universe. Everybody else feels like a complete person with their own offscreen story, but they're in this story to orbit him and make him shine brighter and sharper and get lit up in return. Almost everybody is a warped mirror of him. Flash, JJJ, Harry, MJ, and to an extent May are some of his strongest foils because they're aware of this on a meta level and have intense love-hate relationships with it. And Harry is the least equipped to deal with it. Like, structurally.
The way Harry is crafted is that there's a pool with one copy of each character trait in it, and him and Peter have to split them up. So Peter has looks and brains and charisma and a loving home life, and Harry has money and an alive parent who resents him for lacking all those other things and wants to join a son-swapping program. Peter is an innately kind of lousy person with a lot of agency he focuses on trying extremely hard to do good, and Harry is a decent, reliable guy who gets systematically broken down by forces outside of his control until he feels cornered into supervillainy. Sometimes there's the impression that he has a choice in the matter, but when you consider tragedy as a genre and how it navigates people into bad outcomes using their own neutral traits, he really doesn't. He actually makes the choice, repeatedly, to do the best he can, and he always fails. There was only one "usually wins the day" in the bag of traits even though these characters want to be on the same side winning the same day.
Being Harry Osborn is an inescapable hell because Peter Parker exists - out of universe because that's how he's constructed, and in-universe because Harry can't escape the repercussions of his father's feud with Peter and the choices the two of them have made because of it, the way that Norman initiating conflict ropes Peter into perpetuating it. It would be incorrigible for Peter not to oppose Norman, but him doing so doesn't net Harry anything except to turn a pervasive, quiet unhappiness into an explosive one. The game is rigged so that Peter can never balance this harm out. Neither of them can. Nothing can.
This conflict makes Harry's life unbearable. It kills Harry's best friend and his dad and then it takes him down too before he's 30, and he sees it coming the entire time.
So anyway the triumph here is that Harry, with fierce deliberation, loves Peter anyway.
And nobody asked but in the linked response I was mostly thinking about this poem:
Hiii so i just found out about the unused scene in TASM 2 about harry and peter meeting at richards funeral, it sounds like an insanely cute scene but ive only heard about it in passing in an interview?? Would you happen to know anything about this scene, maybe a screenplay leak or something? Idk its just driving me crazy and i want to indulge in its potential, thanks in advance 🥹🙏
omg I had never heard of that! I did some digging and someone very kindly archived all of the ASM2 deleted scenes, including some Harry and Peter ones-
-but there's nothing in there about them meeting at Richard's funeral unfortunately.
I DID find this note that Kevin Feige sent to Sony when ASM2 was being made:
ive been thinking a lot lately abut the parallels in the raimi movies regarding how peter and harry react to grief
especially how peter acts like it's unforgivable for harry to go after him based on a misunderstanding when peter quite literally does the exact same thing. i know that they retconned it in the third movie and revealed the real killer was sandman, but peter still killed a guy based off a misunderstanding based on what he saw
i know this is surface-level analysis but it just makes me sad
The fact that the one meme image of Peter crying is about Harry’s death makes me happy because technically that’s a Parksborn related image that is used frequently.