Across The Spiderverse (2023) // Homecoming (2017)

tony calls both peter and harley ‘kid’ and happy only ever knows who he’s talking about because for harley he’ll say ‘the kid’ and for peter he’ll say ‘my kid.’ him and pepper have a bet on who out of the three will realise first

And I OOP 👀

bodyswap batfam but it’s pre-jason-reveal so he’s in someone like Tim’s body going wtf wtf wtf i’m robin again??? meanwhile Tim is in the middle of nowhere on a survival exercise or something going wtf wtf wtf this man is dead

the popular fan-theory/headcanon that each season of the show represents a year in Danny's life seems to have been confirmed as canon here.

so outrageously funny that grace starts monologuing in dirty dudes must die and jason is just standing there like "wtf is wrong with you"

Cadybear's Reviews- Murder at Homecoming

Welcome to the thirty-seventh official Cadybear's Reviews! Today I'll be talking about Murder at Homecoming, which I have ranked on the "Platinum Tier" at 9 stars out of a possible 10. My last and only playthrough of this was during September-December 2022.

This is definitely one of the better, if not the best release, of 2022, and it’s easily among my personal faves. 

A MC who is proactive and gets shit done, multiple LIs, highly compelling story. How can I not love that? All three of the LIs are amazing characters– and Tyler especially is just precious. I think he’s the first love interest I have ever adored nearly as much as I’ve adored Aiden. I miss when we had male LIs that are just so babygirl. 

The incorporation of mature topics and queer themes was especially excellent. MTFL, take notes! Because THIS is how you write a teen story that talks about queer sexuality and mature behaviors. Besides maybe BiBound I mean BloodBound, this is probably the first book in Choices where each LI has some degree of confirmed sexuality outside of their LI option status for the MC. 

One thing that’s especially notable is how Tyler will talk about how he used to think he was straight if you romance him as a male or enby MC. I normally don’t mind much when LIs in GOC stories are made with the “playersexual” style of writing, but these sort of little changes are a good show of effort and give Tyler more character.

But of course, it’s not without a handful of problems. 

Like COP (1), the story is incredibly linear and none of the clues or choices really affect your story. Sure, they give you a bit of extra background, but that’s about it. 

The only choices that really have any impact are the stuff related to the queer discussions, Tyler’s romance route, and how the options for how your MC can talk about their queer experience can change based on your MC’s gender and romance choices. Which is still highly praiseworthy, don’t get me wrong, but I’d have loved to see some variation in the other elements of the book too.

And as much as I did enjoy this MC and do consider them one of the more refreshing ones, they were also a bit too rigid and pre-set for me at times. I get that some MCs will need to have pre-set details about them, and to some degree that does apply to this MC, but it was a bit much at times. Like, there was especially no need to give them a default first AND last name. I do like the aspect of MC preferring to go by their middle name, but we still could have been allowed to change their first and last names too, to be honest. 

I found it really hard to feel for the loss of Perdita for this reason; the traumatic event backstory didn’t feel as well established, compared to that of ILITW and ACOR MCs. Though to be fair, I do remember there being a handful of premium scenes to see a memory with Perdita, and I do remember skipping all but two of them. 

But even then, I never felt she had quite as much importance as the writers clearly wanted her to have? Outside of being a motivator for MC to solve Gabbie’s case and allowing MC to connect with Donovan better. Maybe my opinion on this might change after I give it a replay, though. 

That being said, I’m actually fine with the story not telling us what really happened to Perdita, as much as I’d have loved a continuation for this book. MC not knowing what happened to Perdita is what motivated them to solve Gabbie’s case, and in that regard, the two cases kind of juxtapose one another. Whereas MC is able to get closure for Gabbie’s case, they don’t do that for Perdita’s case.

That makes the ending a little more nuanced in my opinion. Sometimes, we don’t always get closure for these kinds of things. While I’m still mixed on how well the story integrated Perdita, this message was handled decently and didn’t feel like it was in bad spirit. 

So if there were a continuation for this story, I wouldn’t mind it being centered around MC finding Perdita, motivated to work on that case more actively after their success with Gabbie’s case. But rather than having them solve the case, it can mostly center around them struggling between whether they should keep up that search, or leave it as a cold case and move on. 

Overall, definitely a higher-tier and very respectable story that definitely deserves a replay. 

Also it's still in progress but like, really great villain arc from The Spot.

He goes from just a grunt in an evil organization, gets cursed/sucky powers, turns to a life of crime and can't even get that right. Spiderman runs into him, stops him while not taking the fight too too seriously. But then he has to go do Miles Morales stuff, and Ganke doesn't call the cops to catch the guy, and he's back causing trouble again. But now he's a little wiser to the tricks that worked on him in round one. Threat level upgraded.

Miles fights him again, then he gets hoist by his own petard into the weird gap dimension, which is where he realizes he's got dimensional portals. Threat level upgraded.

Gwen is sent to Earth-1610 to clean up The Spot, but she takes her time with it to go see Miles, and by the time she gets to it, he's already on the dimension-hopping junket. Threat level upgraded.

Now he's facing three spiderpeople at once in Mumbattan and handling them, and he pulls a whole bunch of power juice out of that universe's collider. Threat level upgraded, and now he's a gainaxy crayon drawing and shit's entirely too real.

Honestly, it kinda mirrors the growth of a protagonist in a JRPG or shounen battle manga, where the evil org keeps sending stronger bosses out to hunt the main party down. Problem being that the bosses who get sent out are just barely beatable, and beating them helps the party level up and learn to control their powers.

The Spot is the personification of Miles' problems. Didn't follow through when he was small, and now he's a big effing problem.

I loved the different art styles for all the spidermen in the movie, but I was not expecting for the live action characters to appear in this movie

*Y/n crying in the background*

Peter: Are you crying because your mad or upset?..

Y/n: Would you stop fucking asking me, I don't know! I've been trying to kill that fucker for years and this old bitch comes in and just kills him!

*Peter just nods*

i just think it's interesting is all

One of my friends while we talking about spiderman: ATSV said "of course they make one of the black guys punk 😒" (she's not black btw) so I asked wtf she meant and she said "they always stereotype black people with the "darker/edgy aesthetic" HUH? Black people literally created the punk scene?? Also black people are part of the alt scene and seeing black alt rep on screen is probably amazing to see. Also, ONE OF THE GUYS WHO MADE SPIDER PUNK IS BLACK???? 😭

Rewatching Spiderman: Homecoming and seeing Childish Gambino say "I don't want any of those kind of weapons in that neighborhood, I got a nephew who lives there." Reminds me of the fact that he's the Prowler and he shows up in Across The Spiderverse as an anomaly that Hobie caught. Fucking amazing. This means that there's a Miles Morales in Tom Holland's universe!

🥲

This might be one of those "putting too much thought into some basic blue curtains" situations, but I've been thinking about it a lot. Enjoy the following sleep-deprived ramble (and continuing ramble in the tags)

I feel like the line "and if I finally break the rules, I will know of my world, I'm the ruler" means so much. We only ever hear it twice ("cool as I think I am," and "dirty dudes must die"), even though the first part ("If I can finally be cool I will know that I'm not a loser") is played numerous times, and has a LOT of importance placed on it. Dirty Dudes is obvious by explaining how Grace is falling to what she would consider satanism in the name of God, but I personally see the first usage as kind of meta. Peter is singing the song about him and Stephanie, right? Well, in the other two Hatchetfield musicals, there are both couples that slowly fall in love over the course of the runtime. And you know what? They all die at the end. Hatchetfield dies at the end. It's because the Lords didn't know the main characters personally, or else weren't asked, and they were on the bad guy's side.

The Lords in Black are very much the bad guys. They feed from people's wants and their desperation to reach fulfillment (filling the holes), and actively cause destruction to cause more want and desperation. So "breaking the rules" by making them join the good guys side, just for once, causes the nerds to be known and protected so long as they pay the price. And they do. And that's why Nerdy Prudes has a good-ish ending. The second final song "The Best of You," as weird as it is, is entirely focused on Pete and Steph, who broke the rules by not dying, and became the "Rulers," homecoming king and queen, as a result (I know it wasn't explicitly stated they were king and queen but it wasn't a plot point at all so let me pretend lol).

So basically if Grace Chastity weren't there, they would have failed and Hatchetfield would have died again.

EDIT while listening to the music again I found another half-sung form of the lyric in "cool as I think I am (reprise)" that mashes the two verses together ("If I can finally break the rules, I will know that you have to do it"). This still goes with my thought process though since it's literally during the point where the normal rules of the couple dying are broken. They are literally breaking the rule where they had to sacrifice themselves. Thanks Max thanks Grace you saved the world from a disaster you caused <3

the way miss mulberry survived npmd when max definitely couldve killed her for being a nerd, if god hates lesbians then why do we keep winning??