#spider-man: life story

[ropes3amthoughts]

I know people are just joking when they say stuff like “Mithrun is an old grandpa he doesn’t know he can’t say those words anymore he doesn’t know they don’t have any book tokens anymore” because of these extras below:

and whatever but like it honestly drives me kind of crazy. Like can we look at this for a second.

He was the lord of the dungeon for five years. Then he was being rehabilitated for TWENTY YEARS. That’s not super long for elves, that’s like four years for us, but that’s still a long time. And then he was the captain for another fourteen years, but he didn’t have any desire other than getting revenge on the demon.

Mithrun hasn’t really been properly socialized for a total of FORTY YEARS, which is like eight years for elves. He was totally shut off from the world, then he was rehabilitated, and then he was with the Canaries on a onetrack mindset to go after the demon. Mithrun was doing bad, he was recovering, and then he was better enough to be the captain of the Canaries again, but he was still not “better.” In all that time, the world didn’t wait for him when he was at his low point. It didn’t wait for him when he was spending all that time recovering. And by the time it’s near the end of the story where these comics take place he’s just been so far detached from the world. Like he’s most likely never tried to go buy a book token after becoming a dungeon lord. He’s most likely never talked to people and learned the new slang of the time, he’s never been caught up which words are good versus outdated. Mithrun is technically better enough to be captain, he’s better enough to have reintegrated into society, but he’s not quite adjusted yet. He’s been out for so many years suffering under the hands of the demon and scraping his way through recovery and trying to work to get to the demon that by the time he’s stopped and done stuff like gift exchanges or whatever many aspects of the world are vastly different from what he remembers. I think that’s a lot like a lot of people in real life too who have similar experiences. People in mental health centers or hospitals who spends even just months recovering can miss out on so much.

Does this make any sense? It’s kind of late so I don’t really know what I’m saying and I’m probably repeating myself but like Mithrun was at a low point and then he was recovering for so long!!!! And then when he’s reintegrated back into the world it’s changed without him!!!! He’s not some racist old man!!! The world just kept on turning when he was struggling and how is he even supposed to deal with that? Like he doesn’t have much desire but everybody is so upset with him for not knowing things like outdated terms or using cash because he didn’t know there were no more book tokens and he just can’t have known that because he literally wasn’t in a state to keep up with all of the stuff like that and now everything is different and maybe he doesn’t care because he has no desire to but like aghhhhhhhhhhhh sob sob sniffle oughhhhh 😭😭😭😭 Mithrun 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭 imagine I’m shaking him back and forth that’s how I feel right now oughhhhh

[artbyblastweave]

The earlier Grue post has reminded me of an observation I had a while ago but never got around to hammering out- basically no superheroes actually featured in a parahumans story maintain a secret identity in the classic bifurcated sense. There's anonymity, sure, and as seen in the Dauntless interlude there are cover stories that their neighbors hear about their day job, but with the exception of pointed edge cases like Alexandria and Brandish, the professionalization of heroism is near total. None of these people are juggling a day job. Examples of the classic dual identity situation are actually slightly more common among the villains- Purity has a day job as an interior decorator, and Kaiser and Coil are in charge of their respective companies- but of course all of those are kinda "set-your-own-hours" kinds of situations. Kaiser's got people and Coil's literally got a power custom made to grease the wheels on two-timing in that way. The majority are full-time gangsters or mercenaries. Taylor's pre-Leviathan juggling of school and supervillainy is actually the main example of anyone trying to do it and the course that ultimately takes is instructional as to why she's the only one. Taylor mentions that people joke about her iterant teacher Mr. Quinlan secretly being a cape, but a lot of the book is spent quietly putting the torch to the idea that that kind of balance is tenable. Like at a minimum people would notice that you're running off all the time, there's a whole shell-game played with pulling random kids out of class at Arcadia to obfuscate which ones are actually the superheroes.

[ungrateful-sneeze]

Flash trying to catch Peter out in a lie: “so, how did you meet Tony Stark and become his intern then?”

Peter: “It all started one morning. I got up to go to school when my aunt called for me. She said she hates me and was jealous of how petite and pretty I was so she sold me for drug money.

I groaned and threw my hair into a messy bun. No one understands me, I’m not like other girls. Then, walking downstairs, I met my new owner. It was Tony Stark. His brown orbs met mine-“

Flash: “ok please stfu”

[pandadrake]

*Over the Alchemax building's intercom* “ I’ve come to make an announcement. Tyler Stone’s a bitch-ass mothershocker. He hit on my shocking fiancé. That’s right, he-“

O’hara Migu from the manga, with his ATSV movie design. I was looking for in-character things for him to do while I was learning how to draw his weird face, and I ended up with a typical interaction between Miguel and his boss at Alchemax.

I actually own an old physical copy of an issue from the original comic run from the 1992. It's the one where he's running around butt-naked and wants to die, then hang-glides off a roof and attacks a robot cowboy. I also realized recently that I can read the rest of the comics, because the internet exists and I don't have to hunt down physical copies of anything anymore. It has been hilarious to find out Miguel is as rude and bitchy in his comics as he is in the movie. 

Comic Miguel's FutureReddit threads be like:

"My boss keeps anglicizing my name and hitting on my fiancé. Where should I hide the body?"

Also, I really appreciate the multiple artists in the 1992 run deciding to make Tyler Stone ugly as fuck for no reason.

[milimeters-morales]

ATSV Miles: swinging through the city is great but i hate getting hit by drones and birds

Comic Miles: and the missiles, so irritating lol

ATSV Miles: ????

[cultofstan]

Pics of Doctor Octopus from Spider-Man Life Story

[soranatus]

Spider-Man: Life Story (2019) #3, Cover Art By Chip Zdarsky

[daisyachain]

Restorative or Transformative?: Homoerotic Subtext, The Closet, and Ciphers in Pop Culture. The nature of commercial art is that it’s sometimes bad and inconsistent. Notably it’s also misogynistic. One way in which audiences try to reconcile massive plot holes or gaps in character motivation is by reading secrets or hidden information into a plot.

Commonly, male characters are interpreted as closeted gay or bisexual to reconcile the absence of women from commercial narratives with the generally stunted and poorly-written male characters that form the focus on said texts. This reading has become especially common among a non-heterosexual milieu. Rather than transforming the original text into some radically different new form, this closeted interpretation seeks to make the original text stand on its own as a story rather than a Swiss cheese of dumb writing decisions.

This interpretation only works for a specific type of pop, usually genre fiction. Any story in which tortured male leads eschew women in favour of male-male bonds (because female characters are constantly killed off, written sparsely, or written out, because the production team keeps casting their male buddies, because actors demand to keep having scenes with their bros, whatever) can become a sounder structure if you put one of them in a closet.

The gay interpretation is the natural consequence of shoddy misogynistic writing from ventures like Supernatural, Naruto, all the biggest hits. It’s also the natural consequence of more benignly misogynistic writing like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or The Lord of the Rings, where women aren’t necessarily rejected but are simply absent from the worlds of the protagonists. When the emotional crux of the story falls on male-male interactions, this reads as romantic because society at large priorities (definitively heterosexual) romance as the pinnacle of human connection. Two forces are in conflict, the primacy of heterosexuality (read as: romance) and the primacy of men.

Anyway. All that is to say that the typical gay or bisexual reading of male characters in pop fiction comes from a very real place. But, in some places, that’s the default interpretation. Angst, insecurity, secrets, double lives, fatigue, disappointment, restrained passion, stunted personal growth, anyone living in the closet can tell you that it impacts and defines your whole life to know that you live in a way fundamentally incompatible with The Proper Way that life is structured around down to tax law and superstore prices (which assume a heterosexual nuclear family unit). Characters in fiction also tend to have personal problems because that makes them interesting and tasty.

If you’ve grown up on stories with the specific type of misogyny that can be papered over with a closeted interpretation of the male leads, carrying this interpretation over to any male character will make sense more often than not. Even a bit of angst or insecurity? Well of course that makes sense if a character is closeted.

Except that’s hurt a normal part of fiction, and sometimes the closeted interpretation takes away from the point of a character. If a male character is on another axis of marginalization, the closeted interpretation imposed by the slash reading community downplays or trivializes the effects of that marginalization in the plot by overwriting it with another type of marginalization. Alternately, sometimes a character’s heterosexuality is a part of the story. There are some sorts of critiques or investigations of misogyny or masculinity that don’t work if the character has an ‘opt out’ of the cisheteropatriarchal perspective. Not that gay/bisexual men aren’t except from misogyny, but misogyny masculinity and heterosexuality are so tightly linked that it sort of defeats the point if you interpret that character outside of heterosexuality.

All that is to say—the closet interpretation is a quick and easy spice to apply to the weaker parts of action-adventure genre fiction to make it taste better. It draws from a large enough sample of art that it’s pretty widely applicable. Because of that, it’s part of some people’s [my] default interpretation package just because the semi-dull macho show at least gets less dull if you imagine there’s a reason for there to be no girls besides simple hatred. That then forms its own problem where the interpretation that works with your average genre work gets then blanket-applied to all genre works and obscures the places where the closet interpretation doesn’t fix the work, and actually makes it less interesting.

[jtexplorer]

[phoenixcatch7]

Okay but like Peter Parker reincarnated as dick grayson angst

[tokruta]

A follow-up to my Miguel as Miguel Rivera's great-grandson post:

Just thinking about one of the Spiders from either the later half of the 20th century or the early 21st century playing some Ernesto de la Cruz music and Miguel bolts his ass down the hall to rip the device apart and then he storms away with no explanation.

Everyone now knows he hates Ernesto de la Cruz, but no one knows why. So people come up with wild theories, anything from de la Cruz being a time-traveling musical villain in his dimension to Miguel having a failed music career and being jealous of "the greatest musician ever". Those whose dimensions are after de la Cruz got exposed stay quiet bc the theories are funnier than just assuming Miguel really hates this specific murderous fraud from well over a century ago.

Meanwhile, Miguel just stomps his way back to his hidey hole and plays his bisabuelo's music (especially his covers of Hector's songs) loudly to calm down. Then he calls him and they talk about their hatred of Ernesto de la Cruz 🥰, he loves talking shit with his 100-year-old bisabuelo lol

[stars-on-fyre]

So I just watched Across the Spiderverse

[maroonmused]

going through the research stations again in msm1 and while i really loved graham phillips’ performance in msm2, hearing scott porter again feels like a gut punch. “you know what bud…” i love him what the fuck. just one cutscene of him actually onscreen please god i would love to know what his harry felt like as a fully realized character bc the snippets leave a lot to be desired + scott’s performance as corrupted barry allen in suicide squad ktjl was one of the only redeeming parts of that game and makes my brain spin with possibilities for his venom

i almost feel like he really is more in line with the essence of john bubniak peter while the msm2 iteration of peter makes sense with graham. do you get it. do you get me

[ropes3amthoughts]

Pieces:

You’re trudging through a forest, a place of life. You, on the other hand, are empty. The forest is a beauty that can only be put into words that man will never know, that man can only try and fail to express. A place of trees, dirt, rocks, sticks, leaves, bugs, rabbits, squirrels, wolves, the wind, flowers, deer, trash, a million colors, scents, dew, spider webs, rivers, yourself, and even more things that you can’t think of even as you stand right in one and take in every aspect of the forest with all of your senses. You feel the grainy dirt in between your toes, itchy grass tickling your ankles, the gentle breeze holding onto you carefully, the scent of several plants invading your nostrils, the sounds of animals of all shapes and sizes, the sight of every little thing around you, it’s so vivid to the point you can taste the trees and the dirt and the wind and the rivers, and you think deeply of all which you cannot process. You are aware of the endless expanse of colors which your simple eyes cannot see, you are aware of the sounds your dull ears cannot pick up, you’re aware of all the feelings sights and sounds that escape you, you’re aware you cannot actually taste the area around you and that only lives within the realm of your mind. You do your best, with your limited body, to take in every piece of the environment around you, yet you still feel empty inside. The life around you has not inspired life to stir up inside you as you had hoped. With your hopes shattered like a twig, brushed aside like a leaf in your path, you decide you have no more reason to be there.

You start to head towards the exit, except really there is no exit since every edge of the forest is its exit and entrance. You head towards the way you came from, in reality. Even with all the observing your surroundings, you can’t tell if you’ve passed these areas or not. Maybe if you just keep walking you’ll end up out of the woods somehow. As you walk, you trip on a root and slam into the ground. Your resounding thud spooks several animals and your face ends up covered in dirt. You spend more time groveling at what happened than picking yourself up.

As you peel yourself off the floor, you see it. A humongous black wolf with a terrifying stature sitting not too far from you, watching. It’s superior to you, its presence dominates yours, its shadow swallows up yours. A beast. It strikes terror into your heart at first glance, but then you think some more. You think things like why is it here and why is it alone. It stands up slowly, as not to startle you, and while it seems like a nice gesture, its gaze makes you feel as if it has other intentions. It freezes, body tense like it’s going to pounce, and in a panic you bolt up and try to turn and run away. Even with your sudden movement, it doesn’t miss.

You let out a bloodcurdling scream as it lands on your left leg, crushing it with its weight and piercing it with its claws. It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts. You fall again, having one of your legs restrained. You’re terrified. Your heart is pounding like never before, you have goosebumps all over your skin, you feel a dread like never before, yet you think: I want to live.

You squirm, trying to somehow pull your leg to safety. The wolf simply responds by applying more pressure, its claws worming their way deeper into your flesh and becoming slick with your blood. You cry out again and look desperately for anything to help you. You grab a small rock, turn to face the wolf, and you bash at its paw as hard as you can. Over and over and over as many hits as you can. The wolf also despises the discomfort of pain, so it too retaliates. It bites your right arm, the arm connected to the hand that held the rock, and it bites it clean off with a sickening crunch. Clean off is a wild exaggeration, your flesh and bone is torn and chipped in the most nonsensically of patterns. Your torn arm looks somewhat akin to a work of art, nothing clean, symmetrical, or meaningful about it, it is nature.

The pain doesn’t hit you at first. You can only stare in shock at your arm, missing from the elbow and down. Your sight isn’t able to process what it sees, but your ears can clearly hear the ongoing wet squelching and the crunching. Then something in you clicks and you feel it. Your arm is missing and it’s hell. You scream again, but you quickly stop screaming because your throat burns from all the screaming it’s done, but it doesn’t burn a fraction as much as where your right arm was. You try to cry but you end up wheezing and gasping. The fiery determination in you burns out. It hurts too much to live. You’ve made your peace with death now.

After you think that, time becomes much too slow. You keep thinking, this is it, this is when I die, but the wolf is too busy feasting on your arm to put you out of your misery. You had flopped down in defeat what felt like ages ago, but was probably only half a second. You sigh shakily, ready for this breath to be your last, but it isn’t. The wolf then starts to tear into your left leg. Your head feels fuzzy, your body feels numb. You suddenly feel so warm, it’s your blood puddling underneath you, like a blanket tucking you into your grave. Maybe you’re dead now.

It feels like you’re dead, you think, given the pain and the blood and the dizziness. You start to think of this time when you were a kid and you were riding your bike on the sidewalk without training wheels for the first time and you could do it just fine but then you start to think about how you don’t have your training wheels and you get nervous and you tip over and you scrape your leg and you cried and your mom had told you to be more careful and gave you a bandaid. If you’re reminiscing your whole life as the myth goes, why would you remember such a stupid and insignificant memory? Surely, you should think of all your greatest achievements. Or your loved ones. Also, probably your unfinished business, your regrets. You think again, and you think of when you’re ten and you’re doing chores and you have to wash the dishes and when you’re washing this big glass cup it slips out of your hands and it shatters into a million pieces on the floor and you cry and your mom tells you it’s ok because accidents happen. Another random stupid one. Why are you even seeing these? You’re a kid and you ask a boy in your class to borrow his crayon and he asks you what you’re drawing and you say you don’t know and he says cool and he hands you the crayon and you add some scribbles into your mess of a drawing and he says it’s the best drawing he’s ever seen even though it wasn’t all that special. It’s a stupid memory but it makes you feel happy, thinking of that silly naive childish joy. Maybe that’s why the point of these are, to reminisce the little things that made up your whole life.

You’re you from a few mornings ago and you’re trying to brush your hair and it’s all tangled up. You’re you from last week when you went to that sandwich shop and the sandwich was pretty good, not the best you ever had, but it was good enough you’d consider going back again someday. You’re you from a month ago who’s staying up all night writing that essay you forgot about. These mundane things you’d taken for granted mean the world to you now. These little pieces of your life are lovely. Your memory preserves these slivers of your life, they’re truly your greatest treasure. Maybe that’s what life is, living it just to live, living it to enjoy the little things, living it to overcome the things in your way so you can keep on doing the other things that make living living, living it to experience all that you can, living it to be satisfied with the mundane, living it to entomb the best bits in your mind. Life is all the little pieces you make it up out of, your life is every little moment, thought, and feeling. You can see it now. How could you ever be empty of life if you are it, if every little bit of your life makes you up, if every moment you live is your life, if all of you is life? You see the words man can never comprehend and you understand their feelings and you taste their colors. You are not at peace, but at joy. This life is more gorgeous than you could have ever thought. How wonderful this thing is you have built.

You would laugh to express your bliss, your transcendence of mortality and therefore the knowledge that comes from beyond, but you are silenced by the wolf snapping your neck with its strong jaws. Your ideas about your pieces of life have been scattered as the pieces of your body have been scattered. A billion pieces of your life; like fine grains of sand, lost to the ruthless gaping maw of the ocean.

[dirtytransmasc]

ok ok ok, to whom this may concern, pretty please point me in the direction of any and all Margo lore because I need, not want, need to understand every feasible aspect of her life, right now.

like, is she a hero in her home dimension? how does that work if she's a VR avatar? did she develop her own VR/Avatar system? how does her avatar work in general? how/why did Miguel/some spider from HQ recruit her (going back to the whole 'was she a hero in her home dimension' thing)? how does she function at HQ, cause she seems to have a different role than other spiders, is she tech only or does she go on missions too?

I need to know how she works, I need to know about her home universe, I need to know how she exists as a spiderwoman, I think she's so cool and I want to know everything about her.