Β Because Iβve never seen this spelt out or said out loud, Iβm gonna voice my pet take that Taylor Hebert reads like an examinationΒ of the Spider-Man Archetype.Β
Seriously, there are a shitload of parallels, from powers, to personality, to life circumstances.Β
superpeople with a bug motif (duh)
fifteen-year-old scrawny, Gangly, Nerdy, glasses-wearing brunettes from blue-collar liberal backgrounds with grossly judgmental running commentary on everyone around them
Β relentlessly bullied by their more popular peers, with their costumed identity acting as a release valve where they get to be powerful
Are mourning the death of a beloved, idealized parental figure that they posthumously outsource a lot of their moral reasoning toΒ
Are keeping their livingΒ parental figure in the dark about their costumed career toΒ βprotectβ them (and because said parental figure finds their costumed alter ego objectionable
constantly mistaken for or smeared as malevolent criminals despite their good intentions
conducting themselves in a deeply creepyΒ and borderline inhuman manner, (itβs pretty normalized now, but Spider-Man had extremelyΒ unsettling locomotion when he debuted! He was a creepy thing to see on a wall at night!)
motivated in large part by a singleΒ βcome-to-jesusβ moment where they realized the costs of using their powers self-indulgently (Uncle Ben and Dinah)
possessed by enormous Atlas complexes, routinely breaking their own backs to save people who hate and fear them
street-level βfriendly neighborhoodβ heroes, focusing on protecting and servicing a specific localityΒ
fighters with a style built around predicative, extrasensory battlefield awareness, using wits, webs, and on-the-fly deduction of weaknesses to hit well above their weight.
For Taylor and Peter, the bullying is presented as the pre-power status quo. For Peter, this fades into the background as his costumed life picks up and as he segues into adult life; for Taylor, it irrevocably fucks up her headstateΒ from the word go and colors how she engages with literally every situation she encounters. Spider-Man is hounded as a criminal because of bad luck and bad marketing; Skitter is hounded as a criminal because sheβs actually a criminal, Β with a lot of her genuinely well-intentioned actions parsing as warlordism and cult-of-personality-building to a reasonable outside observer (because, you know, they are.) Spider-Man hides his life from Aunt May out of a sort of groundless fear sheβd stop loving him; Taylor hides her double life because her surviving parent has genuine and reasonableΒ ideological objectionsΒ to her lifestyle. And, because Worm lets the consequences of the superheroic lifestyle play out without reboots or resets, Taylorβs Atlas Complex takes all of two years to utterly destroy her as a person, which, lets face it, is what would very likelyΒ happen to Spidey if there werenβt a metanarrative mandate to keep him alive for further adventures.
Thereβs too many parallels for this not to be intentional. Itβs not as clean a line to draw as what the story does with Armsmaster (what if Batmanβs prep time just wasnβt enough to keep him competitive) or Jack Slash (What if Jokerβs metanarrative immunity was a codified power)Β or Scion (what if Superman was an alienΒ alien) but I do like to pitch Taylor asΒ βPeter Parker if the story let him be as fucked up as his traumatic life circumstances indicate he should be.β
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