Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man is off to a very rough start.

So I watched the first two episodes of Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and I have this to say.....There is a serious amount of problems so far. It doesn't work as an adaptation of Spider-Man and it really crumbles with its story and characters. Let me break down several points.

First, the way Peter gets his powers is incredibly stupid. Dr. Strange and a symbiote creature pop out of a portal and fight each other around Midtown High. Something I really dislike is Peter running into a symbiote before he even becomes Spider-Man. It just doesn't feel right and takes away the mystery and tension for when he gets the black suit later on. But the worse part of this scene is the spider that bites Peter comes out of the portal and latches onto him once the fight is over. This is a very stupid change to Peter's origin and it doesn't have to be relevant to the story. Why not just keep it simple with Peter being bitten in a lab?

There's the fact that when Peter gets bitten, we have six month time jump to when he's fighting crime as Spider-Man. I know we've seen the origin so many times, but this transition is so awkward since there's a lack of context and development for why Peter is Spider-Man. It's made even worse since Uncle Ben already died before he even got his powers. Nothing is explained about how he died and we don't get any message of With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility. So we don't know why Peter decided to become Spider-Man and it just makes this version of the character dull. At least with MCU Peter, there's a little implication that he became a hero out of guilt for not preventing something bad when he first meets Tony.

Something I want to quickly touch on is Nico Minoru, who's Peter's best friend in this show. I guess she's the one character I might like in this show and she's a good friend to Peter. But here's a problem I have with her.....Why is Nico here? If you know the character, you'll know that she's one of the Runaways aka a super hero team completely separate from the Spider-Man mythos. I don't understand why she's in school with Peter and she honestly could've been any other character.

.....But there's something established in the first episode that makes me really uncomfortable and it affects how I view this show entirely. So there's a girl in school named Pearl and Peter wants to go out with her.....This is also when he tells Nico that Pearl was his babysitter and explained that he was 11 and she was 14......I don't know if anyone noticed how weird this is. Also Peter is 15 in this show, so the fact that this is a subplot going somewhere is really gross. I know it's a kinda a thing for teenagers to have a crush for someone outside their age group, but how Peter does it is really creepy and he gets butthurt over her having a boyfriend, which makes me dislike this version of Peter.

Now for the second episode, Peter is employed by Norman Osborn and he's put in a class of young scientists. This might just be me, I find it odd how Peter is just approached by Norman and gets a job of lifetime when he never gets that in stuff like the 90s cartoon even when he's friends with Harry as far as I know. Correct me if I'm wrong on that one. With him being recruited by Tony in the MCU, there's at least a reason for that since Tony needs a powerful non lethal weapon to take on Cap's team and Spider-Man is the perfect fit.

In the end of the episode, Peter gets called to Norman's office and everyone acts like he's about to get fired. But I knew just from how overdramatic they made it that Norman wants Peter for something else.....What really baffles me though is what exactly he calls Peter for.....It's that Norman shows Peter footage of him changing into his spider suit and Norman knows he's Spider-Man......What the actual fuck? This is a dangerously crazy way of establishing Peter and Norman's dynamic with each other and it's because Peter didn't check for cameras when he changes, which is beyond stupid. I know he's a rookie, but this is ridiculous and now this version of Norman discovered Spider-Man's identity before he even becomes Green Goblin.

And based on a trailer I saw afterwards, it seems Norman is gonna be Peter's mentor and give him a suit and I really hate this idea. Just makes both of these characters lame and it doesn't work as its own thing. So far this feels like MCU Spider-Man, but the changes aren't at least acceptable and there's nothing to make us root for the character. I know people complained about Iron Man being Peter's mentor, but I think that at least ended up as a solid father-son dynamic and it was only an issue in Far From Home with how Mysterio was tied to Tony and Peter being the next Tony Stark or whatever. Actually, I would even take some crazy story of Peter being trained by Batman and being a part of the Bat-Family over this. I'll see how the rest of the show goes, but I'm not confident it'll be good. Feel free to leave your thoughts in the comments.