the spiderverse movies, especially across the spiderverse, are perfect stories to analyze through a metafictional lens (for context: metafiction is when a story deliberately draws the audience's attention to its status as a story)
it's almost inevitable for a spider-man story set in a multiverse to build commentary on what it means to be a spider-man story. itsv certainly does it, but atsv doubles down on it tenfold.
throughout all of the film we see characters imposing a narrative on miles, telling him not only what to do but also how to present and even think about himself and his place in the world. they want him to distort his story, make it palatable, to conform to the beats and tropes everyone expects from him both as miles morales and as spider-man.
his guidance counselor wants him to be poster boy for the stereotypical american dream "poor child of immigrants pulls himself up by his bootstraps to become a great scientist" narrative
miguel insists on subjecting every single spider-person to the same traumatic tropes— sorry, "canon events" that (according to his algorithm) define the very nature of a spider-man story. he's like the comics authority of this spider-verse. any divergence miles attempts from the standardized narratives that are thrust upon him is heavily policed and disciplined
both the counselor and miguel are essentially saying the same thing: being who miles is is about sacrifice, and it's about suffering. to prevent that suffering or to acknowledge its absence means erasing his identity respectively as an afrolatino young man and as a superhero
and he is having none of it. this is not a spider-man narrative, this is his spider-man narrative. he's not going to reduce himself to fit into a nice cookie cutter generic marketable version of his own life
and in his literal main character moment he graduates from guy who is doomed by the narrative to Guy Who Dooms The Narrative. he's taken control of his own story. bet in the next movie he's gonna make the whole canon theory unravel. bet he's gonna break canon so hard it explodes.
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