Racing Turtles

“You're the original anomaly!”

Look y'all, this reveal means so much to me. So many times in movies these days there are big reveals for the audience’s benefit that mean absolutely nothing in the context of the story or to the characters in it. I’m talking the Thanos cameo in the Avengers’ stinger, I’m talking Benedict CumberKhan in Star Trek, I’m talking about every hackneyed “This character is actually this other character” when in universe nobody knows nor cares about their true identity.

But here? This reveal? This is a Big Reveal for us, Peter B Parker, and Miles, all on different levels. We and Peter both know Doc Ock is a portly dude, not a woman. We know the name Octavius… Otto Octavius. But when she says her name is Olivia Octavius we’re clued in to the fact that Doctor Octopus is a woman in this universe. And she has Peter captive.

Miles, if he was paying attention in science class earlier in the movie, would have known her name was Olivia Octavius, but that doesn’t mean anything to him, why would it? Liv has apparently been very good about keeping her supervillainy a secret. She’s in educational videos shown in high-schools. So to Miles, the reveal here is this scientist lady, who he knew enough about to know was the head scientist at Alchemax, is a supervillain. He gets the reveal a second or two after Peter.

And the movie? It was dropping hints the entire time, confident in our expectations blinding is to the truth. Olivia’s name was partially visible when Miles got to science class. Her glasses are octagonal. The lights in her lab are octagonal. We know she’s working with the Kingpin. Why wouldn’t she be a supervillain? Because she’s hot? Hell, Peter even says he needs to reexamine his internal biases. Maybe he was telling us that we should too.

It’s a reveal for us, and for our heroes. It means something, both in-universe and out. And that makes it infinitely better than other similar reveals.

Imagine you’re heading into a lab belonging to world famous children’s educator slash scientist Bill Nye’s place of work to help your midle-aged interdimensional dumb uncle-figure back to his own dimension only to lose track of him and find out that in His universe there’s a wanted criminal slash domestic terrorist named Beatrice Elizabeth Nye who tried to bone his aunt, and also Bill Nye is their cosmic parallel who is also, surprise! Secretly evil and has probably already boned his aunt

its so mortifying and frustrating that the crew of spiderverse were so overworked. by people who didnt understand the sheer work and effort that goes into all parts of the pipeline. but a new generation of artists are seeing the concept art, and going, “i want to do this too!” getting to see the release of so much behind the scenes work makes me want to do things like this. i aspire to this. but i dont want to have to deal with the death of creativity in the form of constant reworking. i couldn’t watch coworkers leave because of how stressful it becomes.

i hope the crew knows just how many artists walked into that theater, and then walked out going, “i want to make art as thoughtful as this. i want to make art as genuine as this. i want to make art with this much love in it. i want to do this too.”

hey as an entertainment industry burnout i am compelled to tell you this line of thinking is so dangerous. artists who have been destroyed by the work practices of the studios who employ them are not comforted by the fact that the product of their workplace abuse is inspiring younger less experienced artists to fall into the same trap. you know what passion gets you, as a professional artist? taken advantage of. imagine this: you’ve gotten your dream job. everyone you work with is so fantastically talented and inspiring. everyone is working together to make the best story they can. you pour your blood sweat and tears into your work. you would do anything to meet your deadlines. to do a good job. but there isn’t enough time. the budget is too small to maximize future profits so the crew is understaffed. you’re doing the work of two or maybe three artists. the studios demand rewrites. the writers (who weren’t allotted enough time to polish the story before the artists went into production) are making changes in an effort to make the story better. you start to lose steam. you feel like you’re not keeping up as well as everyone else. so maybe you stay a little late to meet a deadline. maybe you start working weekends. maybe you start working every weekend.

but it’s okay, because you love what you do. it’s your dream job. you love that you are part of something that changes lives. that makes art that will long outlast you. a job that surprises and delights people when you tell them what you do. You will do anything to keep doing the thing you love. you worked so hard to get there, and you will not fail yourself. OP, you already have this mindset. Look at what you said. “i couldn’t watch coworkers leave because of how stressful it becomes.” Catastrophic burnout is not something that happens to other people. It happens to everyone. It will happen to you. the entire system is set up against you, and you know it’s unfair, but you don’t know just how deep it goes, how insidious it really is. Not just from the system created by people without a creative bone in their body with more money than brains. But from the passion and energy surrounding you as you work with other artists. From the entire structure of society, where when you have a job you love, you’ll never work a day in your life. When the career that you would and did do anything for is the career that takes everything from you. Be careful. Be really fucking careful.

[ID: A short comic drawn sketchily in monochrome, with a couple of red accents. The first, small panel shows a news headline on a wall which reads "SPIDER-WOMAN SAVES DAY AGAIN!" followed by a much larger panel showing the rest of the wall it's attached to, which has been covered by a giant web that reads "I'M NONBINARY ASSHOLES", and then in smaller text "MY NAME IS WEAVER!" and "WE'VE BEEN OVER THIS". A small, wide panel reads "the next day:" and the final panel is of another news headline that reads "SPIDER-WOMAN SAYS SHE'S NONBINARY", with a spidersona/OC character below it shown from the back, with their head bowed and their hands up against the wall either side of the poster, shaking with frustration. End ID.]

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I think weaver's actual nemesis is their universe's equivalent of j jonah jameson, who is not actively malicious but IS extremely dense

SPIDER-MAN: ACROSS THE SPIDER-VERSE - Official Trailer (HD)

So like are we to assume at the end of Spiderverse Kingpin ruined every possible alternate iteration of his marriage

Quantum divorce

Venom #19, Mary Jane variant by Jee-Hyung Lee

Caught in a ham

no piece of lovingly-crafted spiderverse fan art could possibly convey how much i absolutely adored this movie, so have this instead

My piece from the Gallery Nucleus Into the Spider-Verse show, mixed media digital and gouache. “Miles the Artist”

Spider-Verse fanfiction idea I’ll never get around to writing:

Teacher: Congratulations, Miles. Your paper on multi-dimensional physics has attracted a TON of interest from our Science Mentorship partners. We’ve found you a really wonderful Science Mentor who’s going to be helping you prepare your Youth Science Innovators presentation this week.

Miles: Oh, wow, my parents are gonna be so proud.

Teacher: So, let me introduce you to Dr. Olivia Octavius. Thank you, doctor, for being part of this mentorship program.

Liv: It’s my pleasure, I’m just happy I can help inspire the science community of tomorrow.

Miles: … D:

Important additions:

- Liv is 100% legitimately invested in being a good Science Mentor. After all, today’s young scientists are tomorrow’s reality-warping coworkers.

- Miles’s paper was an edited version of his research on small, stable inter-dimensional portals, so he can hang out with Gwen/get multiverse help against major threats.

- Sometimes, Miles forgets to be scared or angry at Doc Ock and starts actually learning from her, except she inevitably proposes something super unethical and then unconvincingly adds “…theoretically, of course” and Miles starts planning how to counter whatever doom-bot she’s just come up with as Spider-Man.

- May Parker has been helping Miles with spider-gadgets and general science stuff after school. At some point, she and Liv have an angry shouting match over who gets science-custody of their science-nephew.

- Miles has to figure out how to turn down a very plush internship offer from Octavius at the end of the week. His parents insist he take it, he fails to come up with a good reason not to that doesn’t involve Spider-Man knowledge. His parents have Liv over for dinner, she speaks highly of their son and his bright future. The family loves her.

- When Liv eventually figures out his secret identity, she goes full punch-clock villain and keeps mentoring Miles while fighting Spider-Man’s attempts to stop her Bad Idea Science.

This is the best and also so good I love

one of my fav things about spider-verse was that we’re used to with like peter and gwen and the like when they get their powers they use them for personal gain at first before something bad happens that makes them learn the whole responsibility selflessness lessons and then they actively choose the hero route but in this miles was just immediately like ‘oh fuck I’m a superhero now oh fuck oh fuck oh shit I’m a superhero what do I do’ like he literally never even had a moment where he contemplated another path. he was worried he was gonna be terrible at it but he immediately accepted he had to save people with no prompting it was so cute 

And then shawarma after?

Oh my god, V in his little hat, while still holding onto Eddie is so precious

It frustrates me that critics/reviews have framed Peter B Parker’s unwillingness to have kids as being due to his arrested development psychologically. I keep seeing people say that he’s stuck in the glory days of his early superhero career and isn’t mentally capable of moving forward into the next chapter of his life, thus costing him his marriage with MJ.  But like? The guy’s an orphan who knew what it was like to grow up without parents. He also knew what it felt like to lose a parent figure as an adolescent. And now he has a side gig that has him basically putting his life on the line every night and putting the people he loves straight into harm’s way. Mary Jane is an adult who can choose whether or not she wants to be a part of that life, but their hypothetical child would have absolutely no choice whatsoever. 

So while he clearly didn’t handle it well with MJ and should have been more emotionally available and honest, I don’t blame the guy for being hesitant to bring a defenseless child into the path of people like Kingpin/Dock Ock/etc. And because I feel very protective of my “janky old broke hobo Spider-Man”, I don’t like that this part of his character is blamed on immaturity, rather than a reasonable fear. In this essay I will- 

in this essay you already did

Also Peter B Parker’s just generally a less successful(not necessarily less put-together) dude, with a more tenuous support network. His aunt May died early in his career as a hero, his attempts to make a living off being Spider-Man failed leaving him deep in debt, which in turn forced him to abandon his academic career, and his heroing(from what I dimly remember of the flashback sequence, so I could be wrong) seemed a tad more skin-of-the-teeth than Peter Parker’s was. MJ was basically his only connection to a non-hero life, he’d had a far rougher go of everything that Peter Parker did, and so it’d be totally natural for B Parker to be more anxious about things than his alternate, feel more overwhelmed and out-of-his-depth with life(particularly the non-hero side of it), and thus more hesitant to take a big step like starting a family, even without the added danger his being Spider-Man introduced to the people he loved. And, having lost May, too, the fear of losing MJ would be both more real and more powerful than what Peter Parker experienced making the same decision.

So yeah; definitely not a question of “immaturity” at all.

Slighty on-topic rant. Why does unwillingness to have kids for ANY number of good reasons always have to equate to immaturity? Child-rearing does not have to be the endgoal of adulthood/true indicator of success, and I think it’s a toxic and misguided part of our culture that needs to go. Even if someone wants to not have kids because want to focus on career, or don’t feel they can have the spoons to take care of a young immature human being, or they just don’t feel any drive to because there are plenty of humans already/environment, it needs to stop being looked down upon/shamed for.