#sometimes u just gotta barf out a bunch of words

[softgrungeprophet]

it’s that time again. time for me to be annoyed/frustrated at the comics that came in the 20-teens that simultaneously responded directly to the 2000s, followed in the 2000s’ continuation, but completely glossed over and ignored the very serious topics that were brought up. and then we get the fucking 2018 run which does NEITHER and just seeks to make it worse for shock value without being even remotely thoughtful about anything it does! wow.

we could have had some really interesting growth for eddie and the symbiote’s relationship by honestly addressing things like eddie’s illness, hypocrisy as anti-venom, his status as a victim of abuse, and so on...

of course i know if i say “eddie is a victim” people will get hissy but like.... i’m not saying he’s an innocent blameless baby who was manipulated into being the weirdo he is... i’m just saying... he’s a victim of abuse. he’s been taken advantage of a lot. almost any help he’s received has required some kind of reciprocation.

he’s a shithead and he went off the deep-end after new ways to die because remender’s version of eddie fucking sucks, he’s smug and weird and violent, and also he’s been neglected and tortured and abused and experimented on and he needs therapy and blah blah blah

he’s also not some fuckin accidental drunk driver who was hit into thinking he’s innocent. that’s so fucking--jeez. everything about these retcons donny has been doing miss the point even more than the comics he says he loves so much. it’s wild. like i don’t like new ways to die OR new ways to live, remender’s run was okay but i hated the way he wrote eddie, marvel knights spider-man just sucks in general, the hunger 03 also sucks, but like they do feed into each other in a way that.... sort of makes sense....

i just wish there was a way any of the comics would have said, “hey look there are some ways in which eddie is a victim but there are also some ways in which he needs to take responsibility for his actions”

but that kind of nuanced take is impossible for the way these comics are put out and canceled and retconned and so on forever.. it’s so ... ugh.....

the hunger 03 sucks... it also influenced over a decades’ worth of Venom comics including costa’s in its own weird way.... and i just wish we could simultaneously be like, Yes the symbiote is not inherently evil or corrupting but Also it did abuse Eddie, and Yes Eddie has been treated poorly for a great deal of his life and Also is a motherfucker who needs to be held responsible for his actions.

Is this hypocritical to be like, “can we address the 2000s” while also saying “2018 run is not valid”

in my defense even the shitty 2000s were like a continuity and didn’t try to fully retcon every single aspect of venom lore that ever existed (tho it sure did plenty of retconning....) whereas the current run... is doing exactly that....

of course this goddamn run will probably also influence the following comics unless the next writers retcon the retcons or like, ignore it and it gets put into its own earth or something. idk. like no one really counts dark origin right? and that works cause it also had a negligible influence on the rest of the comics. but like, the bad hunger had a very lasting impact on the comics. so i guess we just hope that donny cates, despite currently selling super well, does not actually influence any of the comics that come after?

i don’t fuckin know. i just think it kind of sucks that like “eddie was abused” is something that gets used as either a “lol no that never happened and if you talk about it you hate the symbiote” or else an excuse to demonize the symbiote even after its own character growth arcs in the apparently supremely unpopular gotg and space knight stuff... lol

maybe if every fucking series from 2013 to 2016 (minus costa which is honestly more 2017) didn’t get canned we could have gotten more. like honestly, 2016′s Carnage--for all its flaws--seemed like it had something to say about Eddie as a character, about his flaws and so on, and I gotta wonder where that was going. It flat out says “Venom didn’t make Eddie Brock a bastard” so like? But then at the same time all of the symbiotes in that series were completely silent so? I don’t even know.

Cullen Bunn was clearly going somewhere too but I have no idea where other than “symbiote is alive but has trouble communicating” and “eddie is coming down from his murder spree as he realizes flash thompson is in fact helping people as agent venom”

the two fit together in a very strangely complementary way. sometimes i gotta wonder about a universe in which those two comics in particular ran concurrently to address venom, flash, toxin, and eddie’s many issues. but toxin’s probably gone... though in my heart they are with jubulile and her mom in south africa, learning what it’s like to be part of a loving family...

man. the resigned “Okay.” at the end of twav...... twav good imo.

anyway

i don’t even know what the point of this is. i’m all over the place in this post. it’s frustrating that donny has made it kinda impossible to bring up eddie’s victimhood without like... qualifying it to the ends of the earth to clarify that you don’t think he’s some kind of pure cinnamon roll who’s been dreadfully manipulated for 12 years....

I feel like I’m not making any sense!!! Words are hard.

I feel like I’ve kinda been avoiding writing about the symbiote though in part because it’s hard for me to balance that many characters and in part because of Donny’s stupid bullshit, which is dumb as fuck but I guess that’s what he wanted huh!!!! Need to read Lethal Protector to cleanse my palate but it’s taking forever to get it from the library because they only have one copy.

ugh

The symbiote is not an evil creature like he wants everyone to think... goddammit.... but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t carefully address both its and Eddie’s mistakes without fabricating new different mistakes to obscure the previous ones. Or whatever. Fuckin I don’t know lol the entirety of the continuity is just a bunch of bullshit. 80s-90s continuity largely separate from 2000-20...15ish continuity largely separate AGAIN from the 2016 continuity yet also directly tied to it, against completely separated from the 2018 continuity which is off saying “fuck you” to literally every venom writer to ever exist since Eddie’s conception, ironically including the guy who wrote the cursed hunger

What am I trying to say! I don’t know! i feel like a broken record. There’s a lot of empty space between Agent Venom and 2016 that was never filled! also between 2016 and 2018 lmfao.

Donny “everything went wrong and I’m not going to explain how other than ‘God’ and ‘Eddie lost his job cause screaming symbiote’“ Cates really pullin some shit. what do you mean eddie tends to work toward solving his own problems EVEN WHILE DYING. waid’s mini-story in NWTD showed that eddie, despite being sad and sick and exhausted was still like.... eddie, stubbornly searching out his own solutions and getting angry. ofc i’m not sure how well it succeeded at parts. the comics in those days were still pretty steeped in the weird symbiote hallucinations that it was never clear if they were meant to be caused by the symbiote or just eddie’s sick brain. like the Last Temptation. I have a love-hate relationship with those two issues... I think they’re pretty well-done but also something about them just rubs me the wrong way. 

Anyway back to Cates: it’s not like there wasn’t space for a spiral after FH or anything. You could have really dug into Eddie and the symbiote’s insecurities wrt family and parenting. but nah. let’s just make it so there’s a SECRET CHILD, and oh the pre-established sibling? we could have dug into her and made her a real character. but no, she doesn’t exist, women are either fake or dead or violated.

asshole.

but again like..... the 03 hunger, cursed and bad... like... it’s still workable. you can work with the corrupting forces, the addiction metaphor (on the SYMBIOTE’S part, with adrenaline) and the intense codependency, and still have them move on and into a healthier-by-comparison relationship.

but cates’ run is like... much harder to recover from if it has as lasting of an effect, because it leaves no part untouched, and goes beyond “normal” abuse into really weird unforgiveable territory... like the canon of that comic is the canon in which everything has been completely changed into something unrecognizable.

i joke about my AUs being unrecognizable because, visually at least, they WOULD be unrecognizable for most Venom fans, but the comics inform them as characters a lot in the stories i write in those AUs, from the 96 good hunger, to the 03 bad hunger, to space knight to venom inc, and so on. But donny cates really is out here essentially reverse-engineering retcons to justify his characterizations.

barely related: the way eddie was raised and the way he coped by overachieving and so on and so forth makes me think he would have--despite presumably gaining a great deal of confidence in college once out of his father’s home--been really vulnerable to being taken advantage of by like, other students or teachers, but idk how exactly to articulate what i mean like... uh... not even that he WAS taken advantage of but that his need for validation would have left him open to it... i guess??

that’s got pretty much nothing to do with this post though but kinda ties into what i’ve said before about how i think eddie was a withdrawn and isolated adolescent who only opened up in college. why i disagree with donny’s retcon for that reason in addition to other reasons--the way he’d been shown to be bullied as a kid in previous comics, as well as the lack of history of alcoholism, the clarification in lethal protector that carl wasn’t physical, so on and so forth.

again that’s not related to this post really... and it’s like, a good 50% headcanon, but it makes sense in my head as something that fits his history?? i guess?