The (un)Subtle Genius of Across the Spider-Verse

This review made me realize that part of the reason why Gwen was so willing to believe Miguel was that if he was right, then her Peter was cosmically fated to die and therefore she didn't need to feel guilty about how he did

I love how, by the end, Gwen also broke a canon event. Her dad quit being a cop, so Cpt Stacy won't die, breaking the canon.

Hobie is the first positively-portrayed anarchist character I've ever seen in popular media. He's just so fucking cool and 100% my favorite character in the whole movie, who stole the whole show the instant he showed up. And that's wild, because Jess' introduction was literally "hey, look at this lady, she's the coolest person on the planet" before she manages to kneecap herself by being a jerk. I just need way more Hobie, and second the demand for just Hobie and Gwen being buds and chilling in Hobie's punk universe.

I didn't think that anything could top the "heroic defining moment" better than the first movie's leap of faith sequence, but Across the Spiderverse did it with Miles outnumbered and overwhelmed on a train speeding to the moon, and the line: "Nah, Imma gonna do my own thing...!"

Hobie is so chaotic he literally shifts between being animated on 1s, 2s, and 3s. That's dedication

Such a great movie the only bad thing is that it ended. People are not tired of superhero movies, they are tired or bad ones

I love how Peni had like only 1 line and a few seconds of screen-time in the new movie and yet the internet absolutely lost their shit over that one scene

Ok so I saw the movie earlier today and I have some analysis about Hobie that I'm sure someone has done already but I want to write it out myself. Spoilers ahead Ok so Hobie was all set to betray Miguel the moment he realized that Miles might be in trouble. The first thing to tell us this is that Hobie actively congratulates Miles when he stopped the cannon event from happening. Presumably every Spider-person who the event isn't for gets an alert when one is about to happen to keep them from interfering, this includes Hobie. He knows Miles just broke the rules in a major way and he's estatic about it. If I remember right, he's the only person who actually congratulates him on the rescue (Other than Pavitr of course). Next, when Miguel orders all of them to come to the Spider-Lobby (I don't think it had an official name and if it did I forgot it) Hobie puts his arm around Miles then says "I don't follow orders and neither does he". I initially read this as Hobie trying to keep Miles safe from Miguel, in a "We'll run right now if we have to kind of way" but the more I think about it, I don't think this is the case. I think Hobie believed that Miles knew he was breaking a cannon event and that's why he tacked on "and neither does he" at the end. Once Hobie realizes that Miles is ecstatic to go to the Spider-Lobby, he starts to second guess himself. He asks Gwen how much Miles knows, discovers he knows basically nothing and on the spot switches to talking Miles out of joining. Telling him to make his own watch and that he wouldn't like being in this group. When Miles asks why Hobie is even there, he's says he's there to look out for his drummer. What he doesn't say is that he's doing that by trying to help Miles. Through this whole conversation, he is stealing bits and pieces of equipment from the lab, and it's implied he uses those pieces later on to make a new watch for Gwen to use. From at least that point, probably earlier, he knows that Miles isn't going to sit quietly while his dad dies, and Gwen is eventually going to want to help him. Which is why he delivers the watch to Gwen instead of trying to go straight to Miles. Later on, when Miles is getting angry about all the other Spider-People telling him to let his dad die, Hobie eggs him on. This is not just something he does impulsively. He realized early on when Miles talked about his parents that all he needed was a few nudges to go against Miguel's system. When Miles started showing signs of discontent, he decided to pick that moment to egg him on because that was the most effective time to. Then, Miles gets trapped in the energy prison. Hobie helps him get out of it, but the way this is done is genius. He holds up his hands and mouths "palms". To everyone else this would look like he was trying to just calm Miles down. If they just see his hands, it looks like a "calm down" gesture, if they read his lips, "calm" and "palm" are pronounced similarly enough that seeing him mouth one word, they'd assume in that instance he's saying "calm" as in "calm down". This in turn does two things: It gives Miles the element of surprise, and it doesn't make it look like Hobie helped. Those two things give both of them time, Miles get a few stunned seconds of a head start, and nobody chases or tracks down Hobie meaning he has time to make the new watches. He even throws away his current watch because he knows it can be tracked and Miguel might go after him after realizing he didn't help try to catch Miles. Basically Hobie is an incredibly intelligent character and they were able to demonstrate this really well in the short amount of time he actually got on screen.

The animation and score made the Spot a legit cosmic horror and I can't get over that

Can I just say how much I love The Spot as a villain? He's granted nigh-unparalleled cosmic power, the ability to see and go anywhere in creation, and he's just... a petty asshole. He tries to break into an ATM. He's pissy about how being a henchman was a bad career path, and about how Miles chucked a bagel at his head once. He whines about Miles not taking him seriously. And his end goal is just... petty vengeance. He's the ultimate anti-Spiderman. With Great Power comes Great Petulance.

It's criminal to leave out that, during the entire chase scene, Peter B. Parker is the ONLY one that actually keeps up with Miles because he's the only one actually willing to listen to him and talk things out. And while Gwen certainly cares about Miles, she can't fully commit to hearing him out because she herself is too conflicted about her own situation, leaving it to Peter, the grown up, that already got over himself enough to actually CARE about Miles' pain, no strings attached.

What really gets me when George Stacy admits he quit the force is that it really breathes life into him, he’s not just a character with a tragic fate ahead of him, he’s his own person who makes his own decisions. The same way I love the detail that Rio is bad at giving speeches and is prone to oversharing while giving one, isn’t that so cool that all these characters feel like real people with real choices and real traits? Furthermore, the movie has a very strong subtext about generational trauma, as many films the past few years have, lol. Miles looks at this older generation of spider people, who as you so eloquently put it, are trying to marry their suffering and trauma to their purpose, to the point wherein it seems impossible to disconnect the two. Miles literally says “nah, imma do it my own way”, which is such a beautiful thing to hear, a kid looking at his elders and seeing them for who they are and knowing that he can become something different, maybe even something better. We don’t have to suffer to find purpose, we can do good without having bad be done to us. I could also just go on about the racial aspect, Rio tearfully talking to Miles about how in some places people won’t protect him the way his family does, and how he can’t allow those people to tell him he doesn’t belong, and how he takes that with him regardless of whether it’s about being Afro-Latino or it’s about being Spider-Man, but I don’t want to clog your comments with an essay, so I’ll just end it off with a thank you for such an awesome video.

The Intervention Scene is so goddamn excellent. The fact that you can tell that the writing staff is just as frustrated with comic book stories, but especially Spider-Man stories and the turns they keep taking feels me with so much vindication. It got across (at least) 3 powerful messages to writers in such a short time: - You don't need status quo's and strict adherence to established canon to make a good, memorable story. - Being a hero may mean dealing with the fact that you cannot save everyone, but *that is no excuse to refuse to try save anyone*. - And for the love of GOD let your heroes feel a sense of levity for being heroes.

I love the detail of Spot being drawn like a sketch doll at first and then a full on doodle abomination later

During the scene after Gwen went home, the shadows that the raindrops running down the window cast on the walls made it look like the paint of the world was dripping. That little detail almost gave me a heart attack because I love attention to animation detail.

21:00 It's never touched on in the movie, but I feel like Hobie worked with Miguel, not because he didn't object to Miguel's ideas, but because he knew exactly how messed up the whole Spider Society is as a concept and stuck around to keep an eye on them. Dude's all about rebelling against Authoritarianism and Miguel's extreme adherence to 'canon' is just another shade of it, and the minute he saw that Miles was the one that could start undoing it, he does what he can to motivate him and ducks out when the rest of the Society try to stop him.

Yeah Miguel basically did just accidentally create a Spider-Cult that appeals to all Spider-People because of all the patterns of tragedy. A sort of psychological vent for the stress and tragedy of Spider-Man. I think there's also shades of Generational Trauma involved.

I adore the subtle nuance of The Spot so much. He, like Miles in the eyes of the Spider Society, starts off as somewhat of a joke, someone who’s “not worthy of standing among the greats”. But both of them have an immense amount of potential and become powerful threats to their opps in their own ways. They’re following the same arc, just, The Spot’s is the evil version of Miles’. What’s even cooler to me than that alone tho, is that the only Spider-Man The Spot cares about getting respect from is Miles. It feels like even more of a dunk on everyone who refuses to consider Miles as Spider-Man. The Spot is about to go from a random villain-of-the-week to a villain so huge that he’s putting reality itself in jeopardy across all universes, and yet, the only Spider-Man he cares about is Miles. He even knows of the existence of Blonde Peter, the first Spider-Man in his verse, and yet he still calls Miles Spider-Man, not any other kind of derivative title that implies he’s not an original. The strongest villain in Spider-Versal history respects Miles as Spider-Man, and I’m sure the way Miles responds in BTSV will force everyone else (his side of the screen, anyway) to do the same. It’s just so freaking cool to me and I’m so excited to see where The Spot’s character and dynamic with Miles goes in the next movie.

As both an artist and a horror fan, I absolutely adore the design of the Spot, as well as the writing behind him. At the beginning of the movie he's total comic relief and his design plays into that; his torso is a bit too short and his limbs are a bit too long, giving him an awkward sort of look that enhances the comedy. But then when the writing starts to take him more seriously as a genuinely terrifying threat, the traits that made him awkward like the too-long limbs start contributing to the horror and the feeling of Wrongness about him and starts becoming genuinely disturbing! Absolute top tier villain design and writing imo.

I like the metatext that while Miguel may be correct in a big picture sense, all of the other Spider-People (except for Miles) are ignoring the core principle of what it means to be Spider-Man: If you can help, you should help. Or "With great power, there must also come great responsibility". And Miles truly embodying it, and saying that that's more important to Spider-Man's character than his life being defined by tragedy...would make most comic writers want to tear themselves in half like Rumpelstiltskin.