Black Cat

For a while now I've been wondering why the current MJ doesn't captivate me or make me root for her as much as Gwen and Mary Jane. And in questioning myself, I understood the reason: Zendaya's character and the Peter/MJ couple have no development whatsoever. The impression I got is that the writers relied on the fact that Zendaya would be playing the character and didn't think about developing her, since Zendaya is a friendly person (I think she must be the only celebrity I've never seen being attacked by haters).

We've had three current Spider-Man movies, and even with those three films, the character remains a big enigma to me. We know she liked Peter before he became Spider-Man and before he became interested in her (I thought that part was cool, and it would have been great if it had been well executed). We know she likes to draw people in crisis and doesn't like to go to historical places built by slaves. And that for some reason she's quite skeptical and always ready to expect the worst. While in Tobey Maguire's and Andrew Garfield's films we knew things about their romantic partners (we know their dreams, their personalities, and what their family relationships are like, and we see development in the couple), we have none of that with the current MJ and Peter Parker.

For example, we didn't even know that the girl also wanted to go to MIT and what course she wanted to take. (Whereas we know that Mary Jane wants to be a great actress and Gwen wants to be a scientist.)

We end the first movie with Peter still liking Liz and not even being friends (and not seeming to like much) with MJ, and we start the second movie with the character madly in love. (It wasn't believable at all and made me feel like a lot was missing)

So I end up pointing out that in my opinion the screenwriters got complacent with the fact that fans were shipping Tom and Zendaya and thought they didn't need to work on the lead couple since the actors already had so many people rooting for them.