NOTE: I originally wrote this as a fedi post right after I saw the movie seven months ago. I don’t remember all the specifics now.
tl:dr; fuck miguel, miles morales says map rights
so… i just watched across the spider-verse
on its own it’s a great movie
but i started seeing it as a metaphor for the map experience almost immediately, i’ve never seen us so clearly on a movie screen
obviously the creators didn’t do it on purpose but it works amazingly well anyway.
and with that in mind its one of the most emotional movies i’ve ever seen and i wanna talk about it.
SPOILERS AHEAD, LOTS OF MENTIONS OF BIGOTRY
1. GWEN AND THE INTOLERANT PARENTS
so the movie starts out with gwen. her dad’s a cop, and he’s hunting her down (in her spider-girl identity) cause she “murdered” peter parker (it didn’t really happen that way but he saw her with his body and jumped to conclusions). she has to hear him call her a murderer and she can’t defend herself. the stress is getting to her at school, at home.
eventually he traps her and she reveals her identity because he wouldn’t arrest his own daughter, he’d listen to her.
but he doesn’t. he tries to turn his own daughter over to the courts over something he doesn’t fully understand. and then he acts like SHE’S betraying HIM by lying to him, when SHE HAD TO LIE.
sound familiar yet?
2. MILES AND THE SO-CLOSE PARENTS
so then we cut to miles. miles’s double life is affecting his school and his relationship with his family. they know he’s lying to them and he’s drifting away from them (his worst grade is in spanish, his mom’s language).
he’s willing to work very hard to live his best life (in other words, to figure out how to cross dimensions to see gwen again). but his life goals sound insane to everyone else.
eventually he’s grounded after showing up VERY late to an important family event and acting like it’s no big deal, cause HE knows he had a good reason to be gone (he was fighting a villain) but he can’t explain to his parents why he hurt them.
he tries to tell his mom the truth twice but he can’t get the words out.
gwen’s experience is probably worse, but miles hit me harder cause that’s where i am with my family. my parents love me. they want the best for me. they know i’m hiding something big from them. i can’t tell the truth. i get in moods i can’t explain to them, i feel stressed in my own home, i have to lie about my relationships.
so miles runs away with gwen. at this point gwen ran away from her dad months ago and now she’s part of a huge interdimensional team of spider-men. she has great friends and a cool older mentor figure.
and THIS is where the movie goes from just being a queer movie to being specifically a map movie for me.
3. THE SPIDER-HYPOCRITES
because it’s a group of social outcasts who have to lie to other people, but not to each other. they’ve shared so many experiences and they’re a big happy community.
the spider-men are the larger queer community.
but they didn’t want miles. miles had to sneak in. and at first he thinks it’s cause he’s not experienced enough (in other words, not queer enough), but then why is some other guy with 6 months of “easy” experience in? why are there literally HUNDREDS of them when he finally gets to their base?
it turns out the reason is because miles is one of their TARGETS. the spider that bit him is the only one who came from a different universe than his own, so the universe it came from never had a spider-man and now it’s full of crime. also, his own universe’s spider-man died saving him.
miles was a different kind of queer just by circumstance. and peter a made his own choice to give his life to miles, doing the thing he had always done. but all the spider-men care about is in their eyes, his existence caused a lot of suffering, even though none of that was ACTUALLY HIS FAULT. so they want him gone.
they also blame him for the main villain of the movie: the Spot.
4. THE STRAIGHTS AREN’T OKAY
the spot starts out as a loser villain who blames miles for “creating” him when he destroyed the supercollider at the end of the last movie. but he becomes an extremely powerful, cosmic being who threatens all universes in his quest to destroy miles’s life. he’s also the one who brought miles’s spider to their world in the first place.
but even though the SPOT’S trying to kill MILES, and miles didn’t even “create” him on purpose, and it’s definitely not miles’s fault the spot’s killing so many people…
because the spot’s targeting miles, the spider-men blame him for everything the spot does.
the spot’s black hole-like powers consume everything. a punk rock spider-man said it was a metaphor for capitalism and i thought it was a throwaway joke, but maybe it’s not that far from the truth.
i think the spot is wider society’s queerphobia, and there’s two sides to him. on the one hand, it’s immensely powerful, it can be anywhere at any time and while it might look human at first, it’s more of an idea than a person. but at the same time he also IS a person who legitimately got screwed and hurt, but he blames it on all the wrong people. instead of blaming fate, or the villains of the last movie who built and misused the supercollider in the first place, he blames miles. the easy, visible, socially acceptable target.
it targets miles and tries to ruin his life cause he’s a pedophile, but the spider-men see it as a threat to all queer people because it’s using miles as an excuse to attack them and even other people too. but instead of blaming the queerphobes, they blame miles for being the target. bigotry’s based on emotion, not logic. it’s the bigot’s problem, no one else’s. but the spider-men somehow think if only miles hadn’t been there, nothing like this would ever have happened.
again, sound familiar?
and so the oh-so-heroic outcasts hunt the heroic outcast down. a younger outcast too, someone who needs their mentorship, not their betrayal.
5. MIGUEL
their leader is miguel. miguel seems like a cool guy when gwen meets him at the start of the movie, and he helps her fight a bad guy. he showed up at the end of the last movie in a meme too, so it’s not like he’s gonna be a super serious character or a villain, right?
but miguel is also a man who’s lost a lot over the years being spider-man. he’s mentally scarred, and now he’s the jaded “politico” gay who won’t let anything “threaten” his community and viciously cuts out anyone who might. he lets miles in at first, but just to keep an eye on him, not cause he wants to. and when miles won’t do exactly what he says, he shows who he really is.
why is he like this? because HE broke the rules in the past and disrupted the “canon” by doing a good thing like miles wants to do (both of them wanted to help their families). the universe he was in got wiped out after that. miguel’s 100% sure it’s related and it’s his fault. but if the spot can destroy a universe, why can’t something else? does he actually have any PROOF it’s his fault or is he just blaming himself for what someone else did to him cause he thinks good people never blame others?
this movie’s a two-parter and the second part isn’t out yet. the spot’s the main villain of the whole thing, but make no mistake, miguel’s the main villain of part 1.
he’s one of the most terrifying movie villains i’ve seen. he’s huge. his face is drawn like a baki character. his costume has blades on it. he hunts miles down relentlessly, pinning him to the ground so hard it breaks around him, tells him he’s not one of them and he’s their greatest threat. the tone in his voice and the look on his face, the determination and HATRED in the way he moves… he wants to kill miles. he doesn’t have to say it.
even when miles finally escapes him (just barely), he brings a team to hunt him down and literally cuts the fabric between dimensions.
of course, people are trying to justify miguel because “sacrifices must be made for the greater good”. try being one of the sacrifices against your will then tell me that again. if someone wants to give up everything that has to be their choice. it’s disgusting to make that choice for someone you don’t know and don’t understand.
almost all the “brave” spider-men blindly do what he says. but there are a few who want to protect miles. some take longer than others, some think they can save miles without directly disobeying miguel (they’re wrong).
the spider-men from the first movie know he’s a good person even if their community says he isn’t, because they actually know him. the punk rock spider-man IMMEDIATELY quits when they start hunting him down, just on principle, then joins the team coming to help him. a hologram spider-girl who was trying to stop him lets him escape at the last minute. and of course gwen won’t obey miguel.
not everyone does. gwen’s cool older mentor who brought her into the community? she abandons them both. even peter (miles’s mentor from the first movie) keeps trying to make everything be okay and it takes him AGES to realize, no, miles can’t make peace with a community that wants him in prison or dead, and miguel’s insane and won’t listen.
gwen’s punishment for helping miles? miguel sends her back to her own universe. back to the father who, last we saw, was trying to ARREST HER. and he knows that. he just doesn’t care, because that’s how people like him “help their community”: by beating down everyone who doesn’t fit their vision until the rest fall in line.
and so by trying to stop a huge threat to queer people, miguel becomes a smaller but still significant and personal threat to queer people himself.
6. IT WAS FATE
in the last big scene of the movie, miles gets sent to the universe his spider came from. his dad’s dead and his mom’s barely getting by, there’s crime all over his city because there’s no spider-man, and his own counterpart is one of the worst. the evil miles even tries to kill him!
miguel sees this as miles’s fault for “taking” the spider (again, miles didn't, he was just in the wrong place at the wrong time, but anything that threatens his ideal queer community must be a malicious and purposeful outsider). but another way to look at it is, if miles wasn’t spider-man, his whole world would be all wrong. his life’s how it’s supposed to be back home cause HE’S the way he’s supposed to be. if he let other people talk him out of who he really is or he suppressed himself, he wouldn’t be a good normal queer like miguel wants or straight like the spot wants. the stress would just turn him into a much worse person.
he couldn’t have been “normal” in any world.
the way i see it, he had to be a pedophile.
