Today I watched the movie Spiderman Brand New Day and here's something I noticed rewatching the Spider-Man films back to back, which is a thing I do more often than I'd like to admit: the suit changes, the actor changes, sometimes the city itself changes. But there's one thing that survives almost every reboot and every parallel timeline the multiverse throws at the guy, somewhere in the story, there's someone he's waiting for, or someone waiting on him.
That's not a coincidence, and it's not really about superheroes either. It's the actual engine under all the web-slinging. I want to pull that thread a little, because it says something true about love that has nothing to do with radioactive spiders.
The original trilogy: love that keeps almost happening
In the earliest live-action version, Peter and MJ spend the better part of three films circling each other. The timing is never right, one of them is always pulling away to protect the other, or protecting a secret, or just too scared to say the obvious thing out loud. By the time they finally land on the same page, near the very end, it doesn't feel sudden. It feels earned, the way things do when they've been delayed by everything except a lack of feeling.
The modern version: love that survives being erased
The most recent big-screen Peter (Tom) goes through something no earlier version had to face , a choice, made to protect MJ, that costs him her memory of him entirely. Every scene they shared, gone from her side of the story. He doesn't get a goodbye. He just has to watch her walk past him as a stranger and trust that what they had mattered anyway, even with no one left to remember it but him.
It's a strange kind of ending for a blockbuster to sit with. Most love stories resolve into "together" or "not together." This one resolves into something closer to: he loved her enough to disappear, and he's choosing to be okay with that.
"Too bad nobody told me that being a superhero is an impossible game to win, or that the ones closest to me would always suffer the most." - Spiderman
The multiverse version: same shape, different dimension
The animated films widen the lens even further. One universe's older, more tired Peter is going through a separation from his MJ, a marriage that didn't survive the weight of a double life. A different universe entirely follows a teenage Spider-person who keeps finding reasons to cross dimensions just to see one specific person, against every rule the multiverse has about that sort of thing.
Different ages, different outcomes, some of them genuinely sad. But the question underneath is always the same one: what do you actually do about the person you keep coming back to, when the timing, the danger, or the dimension itself is working against you?
Where this stops being about Spider-Man
I should be honest about why I'm writing this. I didn't sit down planning a Spider-Man essay for its own sake. I noticed, watching these films again, that what makes the Peter-and-MJ thread work across every single universe isn't the romance itself, it's the waiting and even Spiderman Brand New Day it's about waiting as MJ has no memories of them being together. Showing up without a guarantee. Staying away for someone's own good without any confirmation it'll ever be understood.
That's the exact spine of my own novel, Letters That Never Crossed Nainital with no multiverse, no suit, just two people and a flood. Aarav and Meera fall in love through letters in the 1970s, and for long stretches of the book neither of them knows whether the other has even received their last one. A flood disrupts the postal route between them. Letters get marked "hold" and simply sit there, undelivered, for decades. Decades later, a present-day post office worker named Jay finds the bundle and has to reconstruct, letter by letter, whether any of it ever actually reached its destination.
A few lines from the book that live in the same emotional territory
These are some of the passages readers have quoted back to me most since the book came out. I think they belong in conversation with the MJ storylines above the same idea, entirely different setting.
After a missed meeting neither of them could control:
"Next time, I'll wait. Even if you don't come." - from the book Letters that never crossed Nainital
On what love actually looks like once the drama wears off:
"Love did not announce itself anymore. It arrived the way routine does, without knocking, without asking whether it was welcome."
Decades later, explaining why he never fully let go:
"Not heroic. Just determined. I had decided that absence would not decide for us."
Meera, looking back at everything the years took from them:
"We forgot how slowly we once waited."
And the line I still think about the most — a cleaner at the post office, describing the letters that sat undelivered for decades, is told early in the book that the letters were forgotten. Near the very end, that sentence comes back, changed by exactly one word:
"Some letters were not lost. They were waiting."
That last one is the closest thing this book has to its own version of MJ walking past a Peter she can't remember, the idea that something can look lost, look forgotten, look completely over, and still just be waiting for the right moment to matter again.
Even in the movie when MJ knows the truth its because of a letter so, now you know the power of letters. If you want to know it's full extent Letters That Never Crossed Nainital is the choice you should look forward to.
Why this keeps working, universe after universe
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| Author Yash Gadade |
I don't think the endless "which universe's MJ was better" arguments online are really about the actresses or the scripts. I think they're proxy arguments about which kind of waiting hits closest to home for the person having them, the slow-burn kind, the erased-memory kind, the long-distance-across-dimensions kind. Almost everyone's lived some version of one of these, minus the mask.
That's probably the whole reason letter-based love stories keep finding readers, whether they're set in Queens or in a hill town in Uttarakhand. They're rarely about the grand gesture. They're about what someone's willing to do or wait for, when nothing dramatic is actually happening and nobody's promising them an outcome.
If that's a feeling you keep chasing across every universe, fictional or otherwise, here's the real story behind why I wrote this book, no radioactive spider, just a flood, a lake, and two people who never fully stopped waiting.
FAQs
Does MJ appear in every Spider-Man universe?
Not the exact same MJ — different films use different love interests (MJ in some, Gwen Stacy in others) — but some version of this central relationship, someone Peter keeps choosing across distance and difficulty, shows up in nearly every major adaptation.
What is the theme of love across the Spider-Verse films?
Across the animated Spider-Verse films and the wider Spider-Man multiverse, love is consistently shown surviving distance, secrecy, and circumstances the characters can't control, rather than being resolved by one big gesture.
Why do fans care so much about the Peter Parker and MJ relationship?
It recurs across nearly every version of the character because it centers on waiting, timing, and sacrifice instead of certainty, themes that land independently of the superhero plot around them.
What does this have to do with Letters That Never Crossed Nainital?
Letters That Never Crossed Nainital runs on the same core idea, minus the superheroes — Aarav and Meera keep choosing each other through letters despite distance, delay, and a flood that leaves them unsure whether their words ever arrived at all.
What is the most quoted line from Letters That Never Crossed Nainital?
"Next time, I'll wait. Even if you don't come" is the line readers quote most often, though the book's final callback line — "Some letters were not lost. They were waiting." — has become a close second among readers who finish it.
Where can I read Letters That Never Crossed Nainital?
It's available as an ebook. You can also add it on Goodreads to help other readers discover it.
Which version of this "waiting" story hit hardest for you — MJ's memory being erased, Peter B. Parker's marriage falling apart, or something with no spider involved at all? Tell me in the comments.
