#this applies to punkflower too

[hadesoftheabyss]

"We need more gay ships that include people of color!"

The Spiderverse Fandom: does that

"Actually no, don't do that. In fact stop touching people of color and forcing themselves into gay ships!"

[punkeropercyjackson]

What i hate about anti Punkflower points is literally all of them also apply to Ghostflower but nobody has a problem with them then.'The age difference is weird!'It's two years and they're both minors and in the comics Gwen was older than Miles too and in the movies she actually emphasized their age difference in regards to romance,even if it was a joke.'Hobie is a mentor to Miles!'So was Gwen in Itsv.'They're brothers-coded!'Miles and Gwen have multiple parallels to explicitly platonic pairs from other media,like Aang and Zuko and Dipper and Wendy but also nobody even called Miles and Hobie brotherly in the production or in promo stuff.'Not everything HAS to be about romance!'Atsv was deadass called 'a love story between Miles and Gwen' when it was announced and most Punkflower shippers turn Gwen and Miles into platonic m/f rep specifically to avoid amatonormavity.And i'm not even anti Ghostflower,i just think Punkflower is a better ship and i'm willing to respect the reverse opinion even if i disagree but y'all don't spare Punkflower stans the same grace yet expect it from us and get pissy when we don't let you walk all over us over fucking Spiderverse ships.Punkflower means a lot to black queer Spidey fans and y'all on some nonblack entitlement issues treating us like this isn't our franchise to begin with or like you're owed a Ghostflower endgame over well-written black characters and using being unable to use google to make yourself feel morally superior for it

[sugarygxodness]

i know hobie age discourse is annoying and frustrating. i've been watching from the sidelines ever since atsv came out and tiktok is being absolutely insufferable about it. i've also seen the plethora of arguments from both sides about it. but i wanted to put in my two cents about hobie's age because it has been yelling for attention inside my heart and i need an outlet for it desperately.

so here is my official warning. ⚠️ if you don't want anything to do with the hobie age discourse, please ignore this post ⚠️ (i doubt anyone is going to see this post anyway)

first of all, i ship punkflower. i respect chaipunk as well, though i do not ship it. when i was watching atsv, it never occured to me that hobie would be older than the spidergang by any more than 2 years. so it boggles my mind that people left their theatre thinking hobie was any older than 19 years old??

second, as i've mentioned, i have seen the plethora of arguments coming from both sides. i have heard (incessantly) about the director talking about early concept hobie being 19/20 years old. i always always take early concepts with a grain of salt because that is what they are - early concepts. from the conception of the spiderverse trilogy, a lot of stuff can change. we know that even though early concept hobie was 19/20 years old, his age is now "up for interpretation". all of us were not in the writing room when they came up with hobie. none of us can say for sure what hobie's age is. so let's leave it at that - hobie's age is up for interpretation. i have also seen people talking about hobie being bitten at 16 years old in the comics and in the movies he says he has been spiderman for 3 years. quick maths - that makes hobie 19? well, maybe. it is also important to note that movie adaptations of comics very often leave out or change information. they do this all the time. they even did it with miles. in the comics, miles morales gets bitten at the age of 13. but in the movies, miles get bitten when he was a freshman in visions academy, 15 years old. if they changed that fact about miles from the comics to the movie adaptation, who's to say they did not do the exact same thing to hobie or any other character? using comic book canon to apply to movie canon is always iffy. across the mcu, there are many many comic details that get changed or left out for the movies. this is just something i want everyone to keep in mind.

third, this is my main point. i'm going to talk about hobie's age from a storytelling point of view. keep in mind, i am not a writer. i do not have any experience writing or making original characters. i just like overanalysing creative aspects of media that i consume and i also briefly studied literature in school. if there is anything you would like to counter about my upcoming argument or add to it, i would love to see it.

from a storytelling point of view, hobie being old than 18 years old makes absolutely NO sense. if we look at miles' conflict during atsv, his whole thing is that he feels betrayed by the adults in his life because all of them view him as this incapable clueless kid who needs to be protected. his parents, while being unaware of his identitiy as spiderman, are too protective of him and doubt everything that he does. while they eventually start to accept the idea of letting their child grow up, they only start doing so when miles is already stuck in another universe. the adults in the spider society betray miles too. miles, upon meeting more spiderpeople, probably thought that they would understand him more than his own parents could. however, the adults in spider society still look down on him and treat him like a child. this is especially evident in peter b, who constantly emphasises that miles "doesn't know any better". miles is 16 (in atsv) and while that IS technically a child, those rules don't really apply to spiderpeople. after all, though he is technically a child, he watched his uncle aaron die right in front of his eyes, he saved the multiverse, and he saves brooklyn from crime every single day. as unfortunate as it is, miles has had to grow up a lot faster than the average kid. miles views himself as an extremely capable spiderman, but it feels like nobody else agrees with him. that is miles' conflict throughout atsv.

so it makes no sense that miles feels constantly betrayed by the adults in his life, yet one of the members of the spidergang that he is surrounded with in atsv is an adult? the whole point is that he feels he cannot depend on the adults in the spider society, so therefore it makes sense that his closest allies (gwen, pav, hobie) would be teenagers. making hobie an adult completely throws this theme out of balance.

furthermore, i hear people say hobie holds a mentor role in miles' life. i disagree. peter b held a mentor role in itsv. this was when miles was newly bitten, had no idea how to use his new powers, and had just lost the only other spiderman he knew. in atsv, miles has grown very well into his role as spiderman. he developed his own spiderman techniques, learned how to use his venom shock and invisibility in an effective way, and successfully saves brooklyn from crime every day. this miles does not need a mentor. this miles feels betrayed by the people he thought he could trust. this miles needs allies. that is what hobie is to miles in atsv.

to me, the r/s between hobie and miles in atsv is very reminiscent of the r/s between a new transfer student in highschool and an upperclassman. imagine this - miles just moved to a new unfamiliar environment and is a transfer student in a highschool where he knows nobody. hobie spots him, somehow decides to help him out, and gives him the ultimate tour of the school. not the proper "this is the gymnasium, we hold our pep rallies here" tour that the student council body would give miles. nah, his tour is more like "this is the best place to smoke weed without getting caught. this bathroom is almost exclusively for hooking up. this teacher once called me out for plagiarism, so he sucks." then he pats miles on the shoulder and tells him that he's got his back. if anyone tried to give him shit, hobie will not hesitate to make their lives hell. this is how i interpret hobie and miles' r/s in atsv. he is not a mentor!!! miles is capable enough to be spiderman without a mentor!!!

lastly, this isn't exactly my place to talk about it, but i have heard a lot of black people talk about how a lot of people place harmful stereotyping and adultification on hobie. and the infuriating tendency for people to be against poc ships rather than white ships. and that is A LOT of food for thought. that's all :)

i ended up writing a lot more than i thought i would. clearly i care too much. oh well atsv brainrot era go brrr

[watcher0033]

Great take on the Hobbie Age discourse!!!

Honestly it should be like this instead of some moral posturing that strip off the agency and personalities of the characters and casually throwing out heavy-loaded words like a huge stick picked out from the ground and waving it around as if it couldn’t poke somebody’s eye out and be an all around kill joy about it.

Ugh.

Not to mention there’s multiple sources who have said Hobie’s 15 (Phil Lord), 19-20 (some of the animation crew), and his canonical comic age is 16-17. And apparently PunkFlower already has a cult following SINCE their comic era so there’s that too.

On the other hand, I can’t help but laugh at the meta-comedic aspect of it all that of everyone, even his own creators, trying to put a label on a character who has claimed his dislike for said labels and doesn’t believe in consistency.

Da Powarh, Ser.

Cannot be contained, refuses to be contained. 🫡

Meta-humor aside, I completely agree with your essay there. I think the age discourse happened not just because of shipping reasons but also for the fact that he looked ambiguously older but still have more prominent bonds with the teenage-Spiders that the Adults— which should already be telling, c’mon.

But there’s also the fact that harsh experiences ages a person. Grief, stress, and depression affects people physically and not just mentally. Like, just look at Miles-42 with his harsher facial lines and overall “mature” look compared to our Miles. Look at the world he’s living in, the grief that he’s surely carrying about his father’s death.

We describe him as a darker version of Miles but we did not uniformly conclude that he’s older than him, or that he’s a more troubled adult version of himself now, did we?

Apply that same logic to Hobie with his surely troubled background of young teen vigilantism and political activism and the effects it had on him over the years, and that’s the chai honestly.

Thing is Hobie's age could add to the tragedy of his story because every spiderman story where the spiderhero is a teenager and has to risk their life to keep thousands or millions of people safe because of an incompetent safety system and capitalist greed is tragic. Why should a high schooler bear the responsibility of what hundreds of grown adults should be doing, and why does a high schooler need to be the one to clean up their messes and mistakes? And then that high schooler will have grown adults trying to kill them, entire police forces trying to arrest them, news media smearing their name, strangers always trying to take pictures or expose their identity, and always always always the uncertainty of family acceptance at the end of it all.

So with Hobie (bear in mind i don't know much about him) if he's really 16-17 in Across the Spiderverse, that means he's already been through a lot of the same shit that nearly every other spidey had to go through but at a younger age probably (and that Gwen was able to avoid and that Miles is trying to prevent). I didn't get the sense that he'd just come from a massive tragedy when we saw him in the movie. If he's had a police chief close to him die or be killed (by him maybe, idk) that's a lot for a kid to go through. Every other spidey offering advice to Miles was an adult. I'm not saying their Uncle Bens or Police Chief Scenarios weren't as bad, but they don't have the same freshness with it, you know? It's been years, maybe even decades.

Versus if he's on the older side, like 19 to 20, there's been more time to process, i think. More hindsight, more growth, which might give Hobie the best idea out of all of them of what Miles is about to go through because it hasn't been too long, but it's still fresh enough on his mind that he's got a semi-healed rawness that others might not (plus him being anti establishment/the "fuck canon" character would also make him want to help miles).