#sun-spider

Just sayin-

Charlotte has ehlers-danlos syndrome and uses crutches and a wheel chair.

Day 123

First off, I love the look of the whole run, almost everyone in it has been done super well and I'm looking forward to it releasing next month. It looks awesome! What I do not love, however, is that the inclusion of Sun-Spider seems to be a massive hate magnet. So I'm going to go through every major argument I've seen as to why she shouldn't have been included and systematically debunk them, because this whole situation reeks of subtle or subconscious ableism and it's pissing me off.

(A disclaimer: While we are physically disabled, we do not have the same conditions as this character, so we can only speak secondhand in that area based on people we know IRL and how she's represented in the comics and movies themselves. If we've gotten anything wrong, please correct us!)

But wait, who is Sun-Spider?

Charlotte "Charlie" Webber (Earth-20023) is a character created by Dayn Broder, a freelance writer, comic editor, and designer. For those who may not remember, in the wake of Into The Spider-Verse releasing, there was a huge amount of fanworks created of "Spider-Sonas", or fan-created Spider designs, and capitalizing on the hype, Marvel ran a contest for fans to design Spiders that would become official characters in the comics. The most well-known winner of that contest was Sun-Spider, who would go on to appear in the Spider-Verse comics and eventually during the chase scene in Across The Spider-Verse.

The most prominent aspect of Webber's character is her disability; she has hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, resulting in her having increased flexibility, more easily dislocated joints, reduced stamina, chronic pain, and requiring mobility aids. She uses her crutches to fight, as well as having integrated her web-shooters into them rather than wearing them on her wrists, and like her creator, she is an ambulatory wheelchair user in day-to-day civilian life. She is also notably queer, with her debut comic revealing her sapphic crush on her friend Aster, who at the time she did not know was also a superhero named Histamina.

While she's never been a massively popular character, and to my knowledge hasn't reappeared in the comics since the "End of the Spider-Verse" event in 2023, she's absolutely one of the coolest characters in the entire Spider-Man mythos in my opinion, and it was amazing to see her appear in the movie (even being voiced by a fellow wheelchair user, that being comedian and double lower leg amputee Danielle Perez), and now in Lego form as a result.

Now, onto the complaints.

Let's start from the least egregious and work our way up, shall we?

Legitimate Critiques

"Her legs and hat should've been more detailed for accuracy."

Yeah, fair. I don't really care that much, but this is the one complaint I've seen that I don't disagree with at all, I just don't see it as a deal breaker in any sense.

"Where's her wheelchair?"

I wish she had it too, but given it's based on the movie and not the comics, I can understand why. They can't exactly include an entire build for her mechanized spider-wheelchair in a minifig blind box, and giving her a normal civilian wheelchair instead like the comics would get complaints of copping out in that regard. Would be nice to have, but there's a wheelchair piece in comic-accurate colors you can get for about $2 on the secondary market, or you can make it a challenge and build your own spider-chair!

Fair but Misguided Opinions

"She should've been replaced with Peni, Noir, or Spider-Ham!"

Look, we want an official Peni minifig as badly as anyone, we have a Peni fictive in our system and her being the only one from the ITSV main cast who has nothing is annoying, especially since she's an obvious choice for a mech set or similar. But this is an Across The Spider-Verse minifig run, not a Spider-Verse minifig run, and for better or worse, the three of them were barely in the movie.

Plus, Noir and Ham already have minifigs, they're a bit on the pricey side but you can get your hands on them if you really want.

"She should've been replaced with Jessica Drew, Ben Reilly, or Spot!"

I think they probably should've been in the list too, maybe expanding to the old CMF 18-fig runs instead of 12 to accommodate it, with maybe the exception of Spot since he's pretty hard to add more detail to and is already in a few sets, but Sun-Spider really isn't the prime character to replace here, for the reasons mentioned in the next point.

That's a You Problem, Buddy

"She was barely in the movie, I don't even remember her."

This is the one that really starts to piss me off a little. She had multiple speaking lines during the chase scene, and even got a good hit in on Miles, whereas the run also includes:

Web-Slinger, who had fewer speaking lines and basically only got webbed in the face and his horse stolen.

Spider-Wolf, who appears for less than five seconds in one scene with no speaking lines, and his only contribution is getting his lunge stopped dead by Miles slamming Web-Slinger's hat in his face.

Cyborg Spider-Woman, who at least appears in several scenes but still has a total screentime of roughly five seconds, no speaking lines, and does nothing but look intimidating and get her face stepped on by Miles. She apparently had a larger role in the trailers but it was cut, and the controversy about her action figure had a bigger impact on the movie than her appearance in it did.

Sun-Spider's part is small in the scale of the whole movie, absolutely, and if you weren't paying close attention I can see how you might lose track of it in all the chaos of a movie absolutely overloaded with references and cameos. But for that to be the main complaint about her inclusion in this blind box run, when three other characters in the same run have even less of a presence in the movie than she did, but seemingly everyone remembers them and at most thinks they were probably too minor to be great choices, is just weird.

Especially in light of the next point, it starts to feel a little bit loaded, even - you remember the cowboy who was there for under a minute and did nothing useful, you remember the werewolf and the cyborg who were on screen for less than five seconds each, but you don't remember the girl in the mecha-spider wheelchair who had more screentime than any of them and actually managed to crack Miles across the face with one of her crutches, while making a crutch pun? If it were one or two people I would get it, but with the amount of people claiming no recollection of her, it starts to feel like maybe some of those memories are a bit selective.

And of course, the big one... (Unabashedly ableist/queerphobic nonsense I won't repeat)

The amount of people I've seen cracking wise about DEI, bitching about a disabled Spider existing, and so on, are just dumb. I'm not even going to dignify this shit by debunking it, it debunks itself.

“Sun-Spider (Horny Ver.) ” 2023-08-18

Finishing up some of the doodles that was done as part of the discussion of the subject on 4chan. On some of these I am running out steam a little. I think the original discussion was when the comic came out, later on I found out that the movie had much better designs. Although from what little i had glance from the comic she came across as an entitled little shit head that’s treat people like shit.