May "Mayday" Parker | Spider-Girl!

〈 PLAYER INFO 〉
NAME: July
AGE: Over 18.
JOURNAL: julyflame
IM / EMAIL: JulyFlame@gmail.com
PLURK: JulyFlame
RETURNING: N/A

〈 CHARACTER INFO 〉
CHARACTER NAME: May “Mayday” Parker, AKA Spider-Girl
CHARACTER AGE: 16
SERIES: Amazing Spider-Girl
CHRONOLOGY: After Issue 30, before the beginning of Spectacular Spider-Girl
CLASS: Hero!
HOUSING: Anywhere is good, but with Normie Osborn would be even better!

BACKGROUND: Mayday at Wikipedia
And at the Marvel Wikia!
Earth-982 at the Marvel Wikia

Years ago, superheroes began to appear in large numbers. The Fantastic Four formed. Spider-Man showed up. The X-Men began to do their thing. The Avengers got together.

For Earth-982, the MC2 universe, all of these things happened fifteen years earlier, and with one big change that set the MC2 universe on its own different spin: Peter and Mary Jane Parker’s daughter wasn’t stillborn, and was eventually returned to them.

For May “Mayday” Parker, after she was returned to her parents, she had a very normal life, where living in a world of superheroes and superpowered people was normal, until she finally came into her powers in the middle of a high school basketball game. The timing was eventful because on that night, she was not only approached by a new Green Goblin demanding her father, but she also discovered her father had been Spider-Man. With this knowledge, filled in further by her mother, she grabbed one of the costumes in the attic, and a pair of webshooters and managed to save the day and prevent her parents from being killed by Normie Osborn, just in the nick of time.

After that, the daughter of the original Spider-Man found life becoming complicated, fast. Mayday soon found herself fulfilling her heritage as the daughter of Spider-Man, becoming Spider-Girl. Despite many arguments with her parents and multiple groundings May repeatedly insisted on donning her webs, and early on in her career as Spider-Girl managed to impress the new group of Avengers enough to become their first reserve member, even as she was repeatedly pestered and antagonized by the mysterious Darkdevil (the son of her father’s clone Ben Reilly, who suffers from the unique combination of spider powers, and a combo partial possession by the soul of Matt Murdock and Zarathos).

She also managed to do something her father never succeeded at: gain the respect and recognition of J Jonah Jameson, and thus that of the Daily Bugle, largely in thanks to her interference at the trial of Wilson Fisk, to prevent the Kingpin from being assassinated by Kaine (Peter Parker’s evil clone, not that May knows), which set her on her own, slightly different path from the usual spandex variety.

Despite being a newcomer to the superhero game, May made big splashes fairly quickly in her career; in the first year of it all, she successfully redeemed Normie Obsorn in an effort to end the Goblin-Spider war for good, helped the supervillain Raptor- Brenda Drago- turn over a new leaf, set Kaine down a path of redemption, and even forgave the woman who kidnapped her in the first place, along with recreating the New Warriors, and taking part against the spread of two gang wars. She fought against Apox, the Omega Skrull, in a fight that took out the top floors of the Fantastic Five’s building, and held her own against Seth, one of Thor’s former villains, long enough for the superheroes he had trapped to be able to escape the death trap he had stuck them in; something that gained her the respect of nearly all the other heroes, including Nova, who had resolutely treated her as an inexperienced upstart from the beginning.

May’s involvement in one gang war also took her into territory most superheroes avoided; she became involved with the villainous Black Tarantula during his own attempt at getting involved in it, all due to Canis, a crime lord who was determined to take over from Wilson Fisk, by murdering Fisk and any other crime lords Canis thought would get in his way. It gained her resources, but it also put her into the position of owing him favors- until they reached a point in time where a fight was inevitable, and Black Tarantula decided to surrender himself to Spider-Girl.

The cult Order of the Goblin made to play a larger role in May’s life. One Elan DeJunae appeared, claiming she was Normie’s wife, and made several plays at bringing Normie to the Order’s side as their rightful leader- dunking him in a chemical modified from the original Goblin serum, and then finding and acquiring the Venom symbiote, which she forcibly merged with Normie at his engagement party to Brenda. Normie was able to eventually fight off the symbiote, and kept the symbiote, even after an encounter with the Avengers, until the gathering of Scriers (foreseen by Kaine as leading to her death) results in the Hobgoblin Roderick Kingsley returning to New York, incapacitating most of the New Warriors- and a mass battle with the Scriers which led to Normie having the symbiote bond temporarily with May to prevent her from dying from fatal wounds- it lasts until the Hobgoblin kills the symbiote and is defeated and the Scriers disappear, and May temporarily hanging up her webs, though Kingsley isn’t successfully captured.

May couldn’t resist it for long, and the Hobgoblin soon returned, as did the Carnage symbiote, which temporarily took over one of May’s classmates and her baby brother; leading to her brother temporarily losing his hearing. This also appeared to result in the appearance of Benjy’s own spider powers. The Black Tarantula returned as well, to keep an eye on the assets he considered his own in New York (which may or may not have involved a certain webstunner…).

However, while honeymooning, Normie discovered something- in a lab in Europe, there was a second May Parker in a status tube. During the brief time that Norman Osborn and the Order of the Goblin had May in their possession, Norman cloned May, and not only that, had genetically engineered one of the babies with symbiote DNA, before one of them was returned to the Parkers. The new May escaped, completely sure that she was the real May, and that Mayday was the clone who had stolen her rightful life. Elan and her father, who had orchestrated the whole matter, also helped put Norman Osborn’s consciousness into Peter Parker’s body, resulting in an all out fight with the aid of many of her friends and allies, with the hybrid May eventually joining Norman’s side to create the Goblin God.

Mayday was, eventually, able to convince the other May that they could coexist, and was with the help of the other May able to remove the evil influence of Norman Osborn on her father, and save the day, but without either May finding out which one was the clone and which was the original; the only sure knowledge being which girl was the hybrid stored away, and which girl was returned to the Parkers. (Eventually, in the next series of canon, the other May becomes known as April, but Mayday doesn’t know that, yet.)

Because of this, Mayday is now in a position where while she is the most confident in being Spider-Girl as she’s ever been, but when it comes to being May Parker she’s far less sure, especially with the inability for either of them to confirm who is the original. It isn’t aided, either, in tthat despite the fact that Peter went through much the same during his days as Spider-Man, and that that its results- Kaine and Darkdevil- are very much active participants and strong influences in Mayday’s life, she doesn’t know, and thus doesn’t have anything to back herself on as far as clone issues go. The only thing she’s absolutely sure of is that it is a Spider-Girl world she lives in.

PERSONALITY:

May’s personality is a mix of that of both her parents, and she’s a Parker through and through. This means, in short, that in her day to day life, much like her mother before her, and nothing like Peter whatsoever, she’s been the Girl Next Door to many of the boys she knows at school, and ever popular (something aided by her being one of Midtown High’s star players on the girls’ basketball team) and always friendly, not avoiding making friends with someone because of who they are.

She’s secure in her femininity, heavily enjoying fashion and clothes shopping, something she gets from Mary Jane (even if her and her mom’s ideas of what’s fashionable or wearable doesn’t often coincide- after all, she does steal her dad’s clothes from time to time), and has a boy-problem that goes both ways; for as often as she crushes or gets interested in someone, someone else also gets interested in her (talk about a tangled web of relationships!).

However, her academic interests (taking an interest in science, like Peter) mean that her popularity is genuine, and not just a construct decided by what social circle she hangs out with- her main circle of friends in Forest Hills is evenly cut between the jocks and ‘popular’ kids and those considered the nerds and even occasional social outcasts. If someone’s willing to make overtures of being friendly to her in return, she has no problem with calling them a friend back, no matter who they are.

At first glance, between that and the confidence that she carries herself with (the sort of thing borne of having weirdly high self esteem for a Parker) she seems nothing like her dad, but it’s both under the mask and at her core that it becomes apparent just how much like him she is.

Being Peter Parker’s daughter, she was raised from the get-go being told “with great power there must also come great responsibility” and really took it to heart, to the point that that is why she is Spider-Girl, and why she keeps returning to her webs, time and time again. Spider-Man was a superhero because Peter found out that with inaction, comes grave consequences. Spider-Girl is a superhero because May figured that with action, comes the ability to prevent bad things in the first place. With the ability to help people who need it out, she can’t just stand to the side and let people get hurt when she can make a difference, even when it causes problems in her personal life, resulting in her getting grounded multiple times, unintentionally ostracizing her friends. The importance of responsibility- to herself and others- is what makes her realize that she has to give up basketball, something she really loves, because it isn’t a responsible use of her powers to be playing against normal people, but it also causes her to try to make a difference out of costume by volunteering at an abused women’s shelter, which results in some of her friends also joining in at volunteering at the shelter despite the fact that it isn’t easy or fun.

She’s also, unlike her father, an optimist to the core. She believes that people, if given the chance, can change, and is willing to give them that chance if she thinks it is what they need to make a change for the better. May is responsible throughout the course of her series for the redemption of several villains, either directly (like in the case of Brenda Drago, Normie Osborn, and Kaine) or indirectly (the response team of ‘reforming’ criminals that Kaine ends up leading). It’s this optimism that leads her to declare on multiple occasions “Nobody dies on my watch”, and trying to talk people out of what they’re trying to do instead of immediately resorting to superhero-styled violence.

At times this optimism is also outright naivety- her willingness to give others a second chance has been used against her, to the point that she had a severe reaction of temporarily swinging in the other direction due to the actions of two supervillains who she gave a second chance (only for them to quickly disabuse her of the notion that they were willing to change). That particular willingness hasn’t disappeared entirely, and is the reason she sometimes ends up making choices that in another light, would be considered pragmatic- for May, they’re often her giving people chances that nearly everyone else wouldn’t. She’s still young and figuring that particular balance out.

Between that optimism and her occasionally super-charged view of having a personal responsibility to do right, May’s at a stage in her life where her choices often have her breaking rules and orders set by someone else- whether it’s her parents, Mainframe of the Avengers, or the government official officially in charge of Kaine’s little team. For the majority of the time that she doesn’t feel pressed to ignore an order or break a rule, she’s a great team player, but the moment that she feels she has to do something, she breaks away with little compunction, albeit plenty of guilt. While she’s not the same sort of solo act that her dad was, it probably won’t be until she’s older and there’s more time and experience behind her that she’ll be able to pull off being a full-time member of any sort of superhero team without repeatedly getting called into question for breaking orders (either by having the maturity and experience to know when to not, or by becoming the person that makes those calls in the first place without making others feel like she took it too far).

Even with that optimism and stunning confidence and self esteem, however, she still falls prey to the ol’ Parker guilt, thinking every mess-up or minor screw up when something doesn’t go the way she wanted to, whether she was involved or not, is on her shoulders, enough to make her go into a funk.

May is also stubborn, and while it often feeds into determination, it tends to put her into situations which could have otherwise been avoided or ends up with her butting heads with her parents, and others, and tends to be a point of contention when she decides she is obligated to do something or otherwise makes her mind up; while she usually manages to pull through, it’s also ended with her swinging head first into trouble well out of her skill level.

Her commitment to her webs, and intent on being a ‘friendly neighborhood Spider-Girl’ is one of a kind- she submits to four AM wake-ups to train with her dad to be allowed to go out in costume, even while getting even more training from her ‘uncle’ Phil Urich again because she doesn’t want to break that commitment either. She also ends up training with Elektra, for a short while, the primary reason being to make sure that she can actually be sure to hold her own in a fight While she prides herself on working on a local level, May takes that ‘local’ level to absurd ends, getting mask-deep in the middle of an all-city crime war started so that one crime lord can become the Kingpin of crime, in order to prevent people from getting injured in the crossfire, and even taking on a cosmic-powered Skrull. Twice. She frequently ends up in the middle of fights against foes that are so out of the average spider-person’s league that even Peter at his prime would think on it a few times (before swinging in anyway), despite not being a superhero for very long.

While she still quips, it’s not for the same reasons as Peter; for Spider-Man, they were about boosting Spidey’s confidence at the same time they distracted and annoyed his foe, causing the bad guy’s confidence to tumble at the same time. For Spider-Girl, though, her confidence is already (usually) there; she uses them for distraction, the same as Peter, but hers don’t have the same sarcastic bite, more focusing on trying to figure out what’s going on and why, but once things become extremely serious, she drops it, preferring to focus on what’s happening, getting her head into the action.

POWER:

Spider-Powers: May inherited her spider-powers from her father, Peter Parker, which means she has, like him, the proportional strength, speed, stamina, and agility of a spider. However, it’s not an exact 100% match. Her strength tops out at around lifting 5 tons, and she can’t jump nearly as high, but she’s much more agile and flexible in comparison. Her spider-sense is also far more sensitive and precise, able to not only detect danger but also help her pinpoint weak spots, and her ability to stick to walls is somewhat different as well: instead of being a natural at it like Peter, May has to concentrate, but can also use it to repel things away from her and make other people stick to the same surface she’s touching.

FINAL NOTES: May will also have her trusty backpack along with, which holds her Spider-costume and webshooters. Also a couple of her textbooks. The backpack and costume is handy, the textbooks not so much.