#and fuck every character having the exact same set of dated pop culture references to pull from get a life

[croik]

I think I just need to stop listening to Red Valley until it's all the way out and someone can confirm for me that there's meaningful forward movement on the plot. It's doing exactly what I'd hoped it wouldn't, and even for 20 min trapped in my commute, I just can't bring myself to care about what's going on. Who cares about these people! S2 ended in the future already - I want to know what's happening to THEM, not catch-up on a bunch of characters that are long dead and unlikeable. Bleh. Insert clever joke about putting it to sleep wake me up when it's over ha ha so cheeky.

[traincat]

What’s Peter’s natal chart look like?

An astrology ask! Fun! So the problem with doing a full natal chart for any long running comics character is, as with so many things, the sliding timescale. Even if we had a concrete everyone-agrees-upon canon birthday for Peter (which I don’t believe we do) his birth year would still slide as time went by and that would affect his chart. For Peter to have been a teenager in the early ‘60s like he was during his inception, he would’ve been born in the late ‘40s. However, we know Peter isn’t currently a 70-year-old man; he’s ~30. That would currently put his birth year in the late ‘80s, but it’ll move before long and soon Peter will be a ‘90s baby instead of a baby boomer. The outer planets are slow movers -- some of them can stay in the same sign for entire generations. One thing I think would be interesting to do, although it’s not what I’m gonna do today, would be to run a natal chart for the same comic book character through every decade of their publication history and to look at how the placement of the stars at the beginning of that decade corresponds to the shifts in their characterization or the events of their lives during that decade’s publication. So for example, to contrast the decade of Peter’s inception, the ‘60s, against his most commonly thought of “strongest decade”, the ‘80s, with what I believe is currently his weakest period of characterization to date, right now. 

There’s obviously then multiple ways to do a full natal chart for a character with this situation -- you can pick the birth year that suits your purposes best, whether it’s the year that character would have been born at their inception or the birth year that lines up with what their current age would be. I’m doing neither of those things -- my personal preferred way to do a full natal chart for a comic book character is to treat the date of their first published appearance as their birthday. This is, after all, the day they came out into the world, the first day anyone but their creator could meet them. That’s a birth, baby. So that makes Peter Parker’s “birthday” July 31, 1962. The cover date of Amazing Fantasy #15 is August, so I guess we could also go with August 1st, 1962, or August 10th, which I’ve also seen as the release date for Amazing Fantasy #15. I’m not gonna go down a google well trying to find the exact date and I think Peter feels like a July baby, so that’s what I’m doing. If someone knows better they can run their own. Now unfortunately for a completely accurate natal chart, we also need a birth time and a birth place as well as a birth date. You’re basically never going to get a birth time for a comic book character unless you find some canon detail where they go “and then I was born at exactly 7:37 PM” in some comic, but that’s okay -- a lot of people don’t know their exact time of birth either. We can still run charts for them. The formula I’ve been taught is to use 12 PM if the time is unknown, but the closer you can get for a real person, the better. You want the time of day, if not the hour, and if you can get the minute that’s the best. We’re gonna use 12 PM for Peter because he’s fictional, though. As for birth place, Peter’s lucky -- we’re going to use New York, New York both as the place of his creation, where Stan Lee and Steve Ditko came up with him, and as his most likely in-universe place of birth. So that gives us Peter appearing in the world at 12 PM on July 31st, 1962, in New York, New York. I usually use ASTROLABE to run full charts because they’re free and I like their formatting. Let’s go.

Here’s the breakdown we get from running that information: Peter would be Leo -- that’s his sun sign, which is what people mean when they refer to “their” sign -- with Libra rising and his moon also in Leo. This works for me -- I think Peter is without one single doubt a fire sign, and Leos are big flashy showoffs, which, look at that red and blue costume. Look at how he initially wanted to go into show biz. Look at how he’s remained in the spotlight of pop culture for decades. He’s a scene stealer, an attention grabber, the big ol’ MGM lion. A Libra rising would also make sense -- Peter’s got real charm and charisma, and Libras are famously charming. (And also good looking.) Your rising sign is how you’re perceived by others -- what they think when they look at you. Astrolabe describes this placement as “very attractive and popular, your charm helps you to get your own way and prevents others from getting angry with you” which like, does explain how the fuck Peter has friends. But with both moon and sun in Leo, that’s a very strong influence on him. (I’m a triple Scorpio, sun, moon, and rising, for example, which means when you look at me you think Scorpio and when I look inside myself I feel Scorpio and what am I actually? A fucking Scorpio.) Leo is a fixed sign -- there are three sign categories, and they are fixed, mutable, and cardinal. Fixed signs have a tendency to be stubborn and set in their ways, literally fixed, which -- everything about Peter.

Moving past the Big Three into the other planets, this lands us with a Peter with Mercury in Leo, Venus in Virgo, Mars in Gemini. These are all interesting; to simplify it, Mercury is how you think, Venus is how you love, and Mars is how you fight. So he’s also thinking like a Leo -- he’s got a big ego. He’s very “me me me” in his thought processes. Which, we know this is true for the character. He’s convinced he’s right and that his way is the best way. He’s stubborn and proud, and he doesn’t like being personally challenged on an intellectual level -- look at his interactions with Paul Stacy when he was in grad school. Astrolabe says Mercury in Leo “delights in being asked for your advice and counsel.” Peter is very much the person in his friend group that others go to for help and advice, so I would say this is true. I wouldn’t have necessarily put his Venus in Virgo myself -- Virgo is a hyper-critical sign, good at finding flaws, and Venus is how you love. However, the first line of Astrolabe’s description is I think an extremely good fit for how Peter loves: “You express your love and affection through selfless service to people or causes.” That’s love as devotion, and if you view Spider-Man as a love story not just between Peter and his romances but Peter and his city, that’s what he does. It’s selfless love and that’s what Spider-Man represents at his best. He’s always trying to fix, and he has a sense of service. Mars in Gemini is perfect. Gemini TALKS. It’s a sign commonly characterized by being hyper verbal, and Spider-Man is perhaps best known for his quips during fights. He’s got one vicious tongue. I’m personally very attached to the idea that Peter’s Mars is in Gemini, and it’s where I always tend to place it in my own estimations, even if I run a chart with a different date that places it elsewhere. My Mars is in Gemini and I know my own asshole argumentative tendencies when I see them in the wild. Astrolabe goes on to say, “You love to debate and argue, usually in a spirit of friendly disagreement. But watch out that you do not get too overly aggressive or antagonistic or others will be quick to take offense where none may have really been intended. You need to be in constant physical motion -- sports or daily exercise is a must for you if you are to feel fit and healthy.” I think this is all pretty spot on; we know that for Peter being Spider-Man isn’t only about the crimefighting -- he loves the physicality of it, which is a pretty good reflection of this sentiment.

Jupiter in Pisces: “You are at your best when you give of yourself and what you have -- try to avoid being a martyr about it, though. You're a true idealist, but you must learn not to be upset when life does not cooperate with the way you think things should be.” Again, that’s pretty accurate. Now though as we move through the outer planets we’re going to hit things that are generational instead of strictly personal. I think they still make for interesting character dissection, but everyone who was born around this time is going to have these things in their chart because the outer planets have much slower rotations. Saturn in Aquarius, Uranus in Leo, Neptune in Scorpio, Pluto in Virgo. One thing that’s interesting here is he’s pretty balanced in terms of the elements -- lot of fire, but also some earth, water, and air. The air influence is BIG, too, with his Rising, Mars, and Saturn, which makes sense -- Peter’s a literal aerialist.

Now if we wanted to go really in depth -- and I’m not going to because this is already long -- we would look at his chart on the whole, the placements of the planets within houses, conjunctions within planets, whether anything was retrograde, and then factor that into how we view his chart as a whole. But even just looking over the basics, I think this is a pretty good reflection and summation of who Peter Parker is as a person in his own universe and as a popular figure in the pop culture landscape.