Or okay you know what else I think of sometimes, with the whole “If Harry had had a good home life” and why Dumbledore needed him to not have a loving home in order to craft him into a weapon/martyr, is this: Dumbledore not even trying to stick his neck out for Sirius and not even questioning for a second him betraying James suddenly makes a lot more sense.
Because think about it: Dumbledore knows Sirius, he taught him for seven years and knew him afterwards in the Order. He's seen the love Sirius had for James, saw Sirius leave his own family and basically become a part of the Potter family and yet, to our knowledge, he doesn’t even raise a hand to help Sirius when he’s arrested, just allows him to get sent to Azkaban without a trial. Whereas Snape, SNAPE, who is a KNOWN Death Eater (and we can assume he’s done some terrible things to become a Death Eater, especially one in the Inner Circle), Snape not only gets trial but gets off with no jail time based on Dumbledore’s word alone.
Why?! Dumbledore sticking his neck out for Snape but not for Sirius doesn’t make sense unless you look at what Dumbledore needed. Dumbledore needed Snape as a spy, and really, his plans were far better suited if Sirius was locked up, guilty or not. Because you can bet that Sirius would never have taken Dumbledore’s ‘Harry needs to stay with the Dursley’s" nonsense, he would’ve fought tooth and nail to get rightful custody of Harry, and then what? Harry would’ve grown up in a loving environment, Harry would’ve had someone to fight for him–someone with REAL knowledge of the wizarding world and (presumably since he was raised as a Black) some type of political savvy, even. Think of that! Think of the fuss Sirius would’ve raised during the Chamber of Secrets debacle. Think of what Sirius would’ve done to Rita Skeeter for printing lies about his godson if he weren’t a wanted felon. And we all know that Sirius would’ve been loyal to Harry over Dumbledore, and that was a problem.
tl;dr: Dumbledore is a sketchy mofo and I hold him partially accountable for Sirius Black’s suffering, and like 95% accountable for Harry’s.
Into The Spiderverse took 100% of its critically acclaimed visuals from comic books and street art and while there are obvious in-universe reasons for this it can’t be ignored that BOTH of these are traditionally seen as “lowbrow” populist art forms, here celebrated for their inherent beauty, complexity and sociopolitical importance. In this essay I will-
Where’s the essay OP
Not a full essay but lemmie tell you. Spoilers below.
Why does Miles stop at a time-sensitive moment to paint one of Peter’s suits when he’d probably want to get going as quickly as possible? Three reasons.
One, on a character level Miles is about to go into the scariest endgame fight he’s been in the entire movie. Taking the time to make the costume his own, to take this little part of the old Spiderman’s legacy and probably get some encouraging words from Aunt May is important to pysch himself up enough to do this.
Two, suiting up for the first time is an important rite of passage in superhero comics. It represents the character deliberately taking on the role. Miles has been wearing a kid’s costume because he feels like a kid trying to take on the role of a hero. By putting on a real costume, his own costume that he designed, he is becoming his own hero.
Three, his costume is an extension of his art. He uses spray paint to alter it, and we see little drips and splatters in the costume’s design. Miles is a street artist and his spider-suit is a street artists’s creation.
Miles’s street art and his coming into his own as Spiderman are directly linked in the narrative in a way that’s too perfect to be accidental. His costume is made with spray paint.
He’s bitten while painting a mural. He uses his spider-powers to put a sticker where his dad can’t find it. Jefferson doesn’t like Spiderman’s methods or Miles’s art. But in the end, he’s willing to work with both. And street art is the shared history Aaron, Jefferson and Miles all have even if they ended up on three drastically different paths.
Miles paints murals, throws stickers up on street signs, etc, both as self-expression and an expression of love for his city. It’s that same love for his home that makes him Spiderman, the city’s protector. His vigilante heroism and his illegal art are expressions of exact same thing.
And comics! This movie loves the language of comics!
It loves the humor in seeing the words float in the air around the characters! It loves stylized human figures and kirby dots and dynamic transitions! It loves the way comics tell stories (note that every time a characters is narrating their backstory in Into The Spiderverse it switches to comic format, doing highly comic-specific things like having three characters telling their stories side by side.)
Miles reads Spiderman comics in-universe and they’re what helps him understand what’s happening. How many people who worked on this movie do you think read a comic at a formative age and saw themselves in it, in some way?
Of course, if I’m going to talk about the “language” of comics or the “language” of street art I can’t ignore the fact that these two art forms have influenced each other immensely over the years, joyfully borrowing from each other at every opportunity.
An underrated joke in Into the Spider-verse is when Miles tells Peter the head scientist is a woman and Peter goes, “Cool. Step 3: Reexamine my personal biases.”
hey im just gonna put it out there that im sure people made a ton of resolutions and they are already like, drowning b/c they tried to take on too much. goal setting things i learned from therapy:
goals should be smart – specific, measurable, accurate, realistic, and timely
but!! you should only try to make one big change at a time because likely, you already have a ton going on!
takes 21 days to build a habit! which is super cool because you could build 17 habits this year! but not all at once
big changes are most successful if you work on a series of small, incremental changes (last year i wanted to build a better morning routine. i broke that down into 7 things and i added them one at a time.)
success is measured as getting it right 80% of the time, not perfection. never perfection.
also, there’s a fancier word for this but the idea is to start with a baseline and add each day/week. spend three weeks just building that baseline habit. and then, after that, build on that baseline at a faster frequency in very small increments. want to write 7 days a week? start with one. build that habit. then add two. two weeks later, add 3. then add a day a week for each week thereafter.
maybe work on the timing of the goals and just focus on one area per quarter, or simplify and reduce the number of things you are trying to work on this year.
this is a lesson i am continually having to remind myself. i have a habits tracker in my bullet journal, and it’s so pretty! and it’s also mostly blank because i am trying to do TOO MANY THINGS. so i whited out about half of them and am feeling so much better about all of this.
