Topic on User talk:DocColress

Hey, sorry to bother you, but while this isn't gonna be a super common thing anymore, I've got a potential CM I want to run by you.

So a couple of years back when I asked your opinion on the Punisher 2099/Spider-Man 2009 villain Kron Stone and got him written up, I also bought up the Spider-Man Noir incarnation of Norman Osborn. I didn't have a whole lot of information about the guy available so I never got around to really proposing him, but now that I've read both Spider-Man Noir series', I think good old Stormin' Normin' is worth looking at.

So in case you aren't familiar with it, Spider-Man Noir is an Elseworlds-style reimagining of Spider-Man as a gritty noir/pulp hero fighting corruption in Great Depression-era New York City. Like any good noir city, NYC is a hellhole of corruption, with the poor forced to live in awful conditions, slum lords and mobsters have scores of people in their pocket and are free to do as they wish (to a degree), and the cops are more than happpy to keep a blind eye to the corruption. One of the biggest guys keeping this veil of corruption over the city is, of course, Norman Osborn.

Known as The Goblin for reasons that become clearer later in the story, Norman is something of a free-lancing mobster, who does a lot of dirty work for his friends in high places: when rich and influential men want people rubbed out without drawing bad attention to themselves, Norman is the guy they go to. Backed up by an inner circle of carnies and former freak-show residents (Reimaginings of The Vulture, Kraven the Hunter, Chameleon, and The Enforcers), Norman has been responsible for countless deaths of innocents who pose a threat to New York's elite, one of which being Peter Parker's Uncle Ben, who along with Aunt May are a pair of social revolutionaries who are champions of the poor and downtrodden. Norman had the guy beaten and tortured by his enforcers, and had the Vulture eat him alive. We also know that he's behind twelve murders (that can factually be traced to him), and there's a sequence where he has an apartment building set on fire as a favor for its greedy insurance money-hungry landlord, which only killed one little girl, but put tons of people at risk for burning to death.

So after Fancy Dan, Montana, and Ox try to violently "persuade" Aunt May to stop rabble-rousing and almost brutalize Peter, he decides to properly take action against Osborn and his cronies. In an incident that involves the Enforcers messing with a weird spider idol that Osborn had shipped over and Peter has a trippy run-in with an ancient spider-god, he receives his spider powers and uses them to shut down Goblin-run establishments: mob hideouts, drug dens, whore houses...

This leads to Norman deciding that he's got to identify the spider and cover his tracks, starting by him having an associate named Ben Urich (The story's narrator and a friend of Peter's: he trades potential blackmail info for heroin) assassinated, and tries to go after anyone Ben was friendly with. This leads to him kidnapping speakeasy owner Felicia Hardy (whose establishment is called The Black Cat, ha ha) and good old J. Jonah Jameson, then sending the Vulture after Peter and Aunt May in order to rub them out. What results is a dead Vulture, Spider-Man saving JJ and Felicia from being fed alive to a tiger and the swarm of killer spiders respectively, and him having an alleyway throwdown with Osborn, who is revealed to be wearing a rubber mask that conceals a horrible skin condition that made Norman all green and scaly (hence his Goblin moniker). Here we find out that Norman grew up in a freak show, and he rants about how he's using his power as an underworld player to gain respect for himself. He gives Peter the option of killing him or dying at his hands, and when Peter refuses to kill him Norman attacks, only to be killed by a killer spider-possessed Kraven. And with his death, pretty much all of New York's corruption comes tumbling down. At least until CM's Doc Ock and Crime Master show up for the sequel series.

Anyway, he was bought up on TV Tropes but rejected due to his freak show upbringing being too valid of a Freudian Excuse. Where do you stand on it, I wonder? Because to be fair, it definitely sounded bad: freak shows were not... exactly humanitarian, with Norman growling about how kids would throw rocks at him and call him names. The Vulture was also a part of that same freak show, and he was treated so bad that he went from a normal if creepy guy to a cannibalistic psycho. He also refuses to be sent to jail due to "not wanting to be put in a cage again."

But it's pretty much the only thing I can see being mitigating for Noir!Osborn: He doesn't have any legitimately good traits (His relationship with his fellow carnies/enforcers is business-like with him acting snappish and outright threatening to them at times. He DOES try to have Felicia killed for killing Chameleon, but it's presented as a "You killed MY guy" moment as opposed to "You killed my buddy!" For what it's worth, the guy doesn't seem eaten up at all about Fancy Dan having been eaten by spiders and keeps said spiders as pets), and while he isn't a serial-killing Nazi like Noir!Ock or a Nazi bedfellow like Noir!Crime Master, he's still a powerful and influential criminal responsible for an untold amount of corruption and suffering so he's definitely heinous enough.

So where do you stand? Are his freak show origins juuuuust sympathetic enough to keep him from counting? Or do we have yet another purely evil Green Goblin on our hands?