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DATS Rant: The Ultimate Spider-Man Is a Masterpiece

Hot take: The Ultimate Spider-Man is the most thematically cohesive Spider-Man show I’ve seen.

All the Youtubers who rag on this show always point to individual scenes and lines as dumb and claim that the show has bad writing because of them. Frankly, I’ve found myself despising the writing on several shows that have a lot of good scenes the fandom goes wild over because the show’s theming is broken or outright missing. coughMiraculouscough

The thing about theming is that it can really work to enforce what your story is about. If your themes don’t work, vanish or aren’t even a consideration, your story is thin. Many current stories struggle with theming, by which I mean things seem to happen without reason. I’m not talking about just kids’ media either, adult shows also seem to have events strung together more just to be shocking instead of in order to say something.

It’s actually pretty easy to do a show-wide theme like family, friendship, the horrors of war or how broken people often have broken relationships. You just need to bring it up every now and again. The problem seems to be story arcs with themes. This is because having a theme in a story means building events up to a certain conclusion that supports said theme. It means predictability and there seems to be a weird allergy for that going on.

The theming in The Ultimate Spider-Man is actually very visible in its handling of the Venom arc. Youtubers with no concept of theming don’t understand why Harry Osborn becomes Venom. Here’s the thing: Harry’s relationships with both Peter and his dad begin deteriorating as soon as Spider-Man shows up. It’s also without him knowing it, in the case of Peter. “Venom” means “poison”. Spider-Man poisons Harry’s relationships with his dad and Peter. It’s poetic.

This is why it’s important that Peter starts off disliking his new teammates. They’re often literally getting between him and Harry, just like Peter’s duty as Spider-Man is figuratively between them, pushing them apart.

This is also why Harry becomes Anti-Venom as part of the arc that leads up to Peter revealing his secret identity to Harry. “Anti-Venom” is basically another word for a counter-poison. Their relationship is being healed, the poison is being countered. Fittingly, the story where Harry becomes Anti-Venom is also the one where Norman Osborn gets redeemed.

Harry becomes the Anti-Spider-Man, then he becomes Venom, then he becomes Anti-Venom and then he becomes Harry again. That’s an arc, those are themes. This show is good.

Video version

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