Ponder o' yonder

Enough of this *spiderverses your room*

The male lead in the new transformer movie looks mad familiar yknow what I'm saying?

IM SO MAD I SPENT LIKE 20 MINUTES BOILING EGGS AND THEY STILL CAME OUT RAW

Me about drop entomology lore to my unsuspecting friends be like

Narrative analysis of Spiderman: Across the Spiderverse

Hot take: spiderman atsv is Gwen's movie

minor spoilers ahead!

So, from early in the movie we start with not Miles, but GWEN.

This threw me off. Where's miles? I paid to watch my boy. Why is there so much color, like a painting? And there's so much blur in the fight scenes? Why are we spending 15 minutes (i didn't count) on Gwen's backstory?

It's not like we don't know how Gwen's story goes. Gwen gets bit by a spider and couldn't save peter. We already know this. Why do they have to remind us about this again?

It was after watching the entire film i realized - this is a Mile's Morales profile story written from Gwen's pov.

For those unfamiliar with the term, a profile story is a piece of journalistic writing about a person of interest: celebrities, politicians or generally interesting people. You see these kind of writing in feature stories, or lifestyle news about Lin Manuel Miranda, Brad Pitt or this story about completing the Latin Dictionary. Profile stories aim to tell an interesting story, and as with any interesting story it starts of with a lede.

A lede (yes, that's the spelling) is equivalent to what authors call a story hook. You need something that attracts attention, something shocking, impactful or informative so your readers' read beyond your first paragraph. Spiderman across the Spiderverse however uses a first person lede - a hook that begins with the journalist's (in this case, Gwen Stacy's) personal experience with the topic. AND WE RARELY EVER USE THIS ONE BECAUSE IT'S STUPIDLY HARD TO PULL OFF!!!

Not only because it requires actual personal experience with the topic, but it also should be use ONLY when we have something of value to contribute to the story. Here's an example.

In this case, Gwen, who is literally Spiderman, Mile's Morales closest friend and a teenager who had to hide her identity from the world fits the criteria. She is beyond qualified to talk about Mile's story. And she does so with this: an psychological overview of what happened after Peter Parker's death, and how loosing him affected her relationships with people around her (her bandmates, her dad and herself).

Being a Spiderman is a sacrifice. You carry the world on your shoulders and balance between two vastly different identities, yet there's no one you can confide to. No one can ever know that you are Spiderman, and worst of all:

You cannot save everyone.

This flows into Miles' story. In order to become a Spiderman, he must choose between saving one person (his dad, who is doomed by the narrative) or the world.

He chooses the latter, of course.

Similarly, Gwen must make a choice to save the entire Spiderverse, or Miles himself. Throughout the movie, Gwen chooses to stay with the Spider Force. She chooses to meet Miles while on mission and she even actively chooses to not engage in a relationship with Miles, knowing it'll doom her own narrative (that all Spiderman partners will die). And in every scene where she takes the backseat, she is questioning herself and her own values - is it worth sacrificing everything to be Spiderman? She plays such an integral role in the movie itself that even movie ends with her forming her own band of Spiderman, choosing to save Miles despite it all.

Looking back, I think Spiderman across the Spiderverse has always been Gwen's movie from start to finish. It is her character struggles and growth to become a better person. And I think that's an interesting pov for not just Mile's profile story, but for anyone out there rewatching the movie as well

Needed to get this out of my chest.

Tw: body weight

Bro got so much rizz with his vespa istg