Deacon Steven Greydanus continues his look at the MCU:
It’s interesting to compare and contrast the TVA with the other Marvel multiverse-policing organization, revealed in last summer’s Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse: the Spider-Society. (A sequel to 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Across the Spider-Verse is the middle movie in a projected trilogy, with a cliffhanger ending to be resolved in part 3, Beyond the Spider-Verse, release date undetermined.)
As the name implies, the Spider-Society is made up of Spider-people from across the multiverse (thus combining a TVA vibe with a lowkey Council of Kangs vibe). Founded and led by a futuristic Spider-Man from 2099, Oscar Isaac’s Miguel O’Hara, the Spider-Society’s stated mission is protecting the integrity of those specific strands of the multiverse that concern the lives of spider-powered people: a “beautiful web of life and destiny” that Miguel inexplicably terms the “arachnohumanoid polymultiverse,” despite the fact that, as our young hero Miles Morales (Shameik Moore) points out, “Spider-Verse” was right there.
Unlike the TVA, the Spider-Society is obviously not worried, by definition, about “variants” as such. What they do police are “anomalies,” which we’re told means people who “wind up in the wrong dimension.” (Like variants, there’s a certain analogy to the idea of undocumented immigrants.) They’re also concerned, in a way very roughly corresponding to the TVA’s attention to “nexus events” in the Sacred Timeline, with multiversal “nodes” that they call “canon events”—a deeply meta term for the deeply meta observation that the lives of Spider-people across Spider-Verse storytelling tend to share recurring narrative patterns. One such pattern, noted in the first Spider-Verse movie, is a traumatic early loss of a loved one: Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben; Miles’s Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali); for Hailee Steinfeld’s Spider-Gwen, her best friend Peter Parker.
Not unlike the approved outcomes of nexus events in the Sacred Timeline narrative, canon events carry ostensible prescriptive force: They aren’t just patterns that do recur; as Miguel puts it, they’re “how the story is supposed to go”: repeating motifs in a grand design. But, just as nexus events can give rise to unsanctioned outcomes, the connections represented by canon events can be broken—typically, by anomalies, by persons displaced in the Spider-Verse.
“How the story is supposed to go”
At first it seems as if the Spider-Society’s interest in canon events unfolding the way they’re “supposed to” may be simply about getting the best overall results: a kind of cost-benefit analysis. For example, Uncle Ben’s murder is a tragedy, but without that defining experience of loss and regret (as Jake Johnson’s Peter B. Parker points out), most Peter Parker Spider-Man variants wouldn’t do what they do—so think of all the lives saved as a result of Uncle Ben’s murder! Perhaps the Spider-Verse knows what it’s doing, and everything happens for a reason, even if the omelet requires breaking a few eggs.
But no, it’s more than that.
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