A Magical Menagerie

your parents are not your parents. the idyllic farming community that raised you is not your home. you’re a You-Don’t-Know-What from You-Don’t-Know-Where. all you know for sure is that you’re not human. 

so you can fly. so you can run fast. so you can lift cars. so what? why do you even have this power? what should you even do with it? 

your father said do what’s right, so that’s what you do. 

you stop a robbery. the man’s knife shatters against your skin and you see the same fear in his eyes that you saw in your father’s when you were twelve. you catch a falling child before it can hit the water. his mother looks at you like you’re a god. 

they love you, even though they don’t know you. the most powerful man in the world hates you because they love you. 

you wanted to write when you were younger. you wanted to tell stories that needed to be told. you never wanted to star in them. you never wanted super-geniuses and demi-goddesses looking to you for advice; like you have any idea how to handle threats to reality itself. you’re just a kid from smallville who’s trying to do the best he can with what he’s given. 

you try and get back to the farm as much as you can. it feels normal being back among the open wheat; where everyone smiles because you’re that nice Kent boy. 

when you were younger, you pretended to fly, hands out to your sides and running through the tall grass by the river. it doesn’t look as beautiful from on high; the details get lost and the colors of your hometown blur together from a mile above ground. 

His little fingers.. 

Like, in any other movie, you’d have a similar character whose live has become a mess, and they’re sad and kinda pathetic to look at, and when the time comes for them to step up, they just sorta…flop. They’re held back by everything, and they just become incompetent.

But Peter B is different. Yeah, he’s a sad, lonely, middle-aged man who cries in the shower while wearing a spandex suit…

But despite all that…he’s still shown to be extremely good at being Spider-Man.

He escapes from being tied up while still holding a casual conversation

He takes down Miles in less than 10 seconds.

He strolls along the side of a building like it’s nothing.

And when you think about it, over the course of the movie, he kicks a LOT of ass. He’s a badass super hero, despite his flaws.

You ever notice how, when he puts on the mask, his gut sorta disappears? That’s too big of a detail to be an oversight. That’s intentional. I mean, in-universe, it doesn’t make too much sense, but to us, it’s meant to show that it’s not holding him back from being a hero.

He’s not held down by everything. Yeah, he’s a jaded, depressed, mid-life crisis Spider-Man. But he’s still Spider-Man.