#whiteface

Chanel Love Hildegard Gajowa, named for the fashion brand, for Courtney Love of Hole, and for the founder of German scientific natural history Hildegard of Bingen OSB (also an abbess later canonized by the Catholic Church), is a Spider-Person from Earth-46296. Her story takes place in modern-day Chicago, Illinois in 2027 and, like all dimensions in the Spiderverse, has unique central aesthetic themes— namely eco-punk and whimsigoth. The story in itself is based around various different radical environmental philosophies as well as collectivist anarchism.

Chanel was born February 29, 2008 to Piotr Gajowy, a half-Polish half-Pokagon biophysicist at the Fantastic Four corporation, and Maryam Jeyn Wahdan, a Palestinian actress and fashion model. Because they were both very inexperienced and Mariam Jeyn has an “ironic” sense of humor, she thought it would be kind of funny to name her child after a brand she’s modeled for. That was thankfully not repeated with their other children.

When Chanel was 7, her younger brother Jack was born, and her parents wanted her to have a part in naming him so they gave her a small list of options. She ended up choosing Jean-Louis (or Jack), an option chosen to make reference to her father’s favorite author, Jean-Louis “Jack” Kerouac. When she was 16, she had enough of a brain for her parents to trust her to name the second baby, so he was christened Arne after Arne Næss, who founded deep ecology.

That same year, while combing through Busse Woods near one of OSCORP’s (all caps so that there are some linguistic differences between her universe and others) badly-maintained nuclear facilities, Chanel discovered and was promptly bitten by a short-wing kite spider that the corporation had been testing their highly experimental symbiote species on. The spider was released into the wild so the symbiote’s behaviors in nature could be documented but it almost immediately disappeared.

Chanel found it.

When the spider bit her, the amount of toxic and even radioactive chemicals that had been used on it to stabilize the symbiote’s presence in the body sent her into organ failure, at which point the RIOT (for “Review, Interview, Observation, Test”, a framework used in data collection) symbiote realized a human body could serve it extremely well and it entered her body to stabilize her organs. And it did! And she lived! Not without neurological consequences, but she lived! And though she did develop schizophrenia, at the very least her spider sense can help her differentiate between real threats and hallucinated ones.

Rapidly succeeding her conversion into a symbiote host, Chanel discovered she had superpowers and immediately decided they had to be used for good. So she became Whiteface, named for the goth-style face that the RIOT symbiote gave her in her suit. After she failed the first few times she tried to save people, including a savage beating from Scorpion, a militaristic pharmaceutical CEO, she entered her first manic episode as a result of her newly-acquired BPD and she quit. For the total span of a month before her moods swung back into something resembling stability and she realized that she couldn’t just give up on people!

A year in she met the Prowler, Hobie Brown, an antihero on the opposing side of her at-the-time highly legalistic approach to heroism. According to Hobie, the only way to fight the power was to do it without abiding by its laws, and Chanel— being both autistic and a participant in the highly regimented, rule-defined discipline of fencing— argued that laws exist for a reason. Hobie, though he respected her as a person, fundamentally disagreed. His latest mission was to go to work under OSCORP at one of their nuclear facilities and eventually feed critical information about their noncompliance with employee and environmental safety to local newspapers.

It didn’t go as planned.

Hobie began to fall ill, then eventually developed leukemia as a result of extreme radiation exposure. Chanel was, of course, devastated and her entire life became being a superhero, working up to graduate into college, and being at his side. The cancer worked fast and he died within the year. Then when Chanel tried to demand justice, OSCORP informed her that his family had “received compensation” (been bribed into silence) and didn’t want their trauma to be plastered all over local newspapers.

That was when she realized that Hobie was right.

The law is not constructed to benefit the people. It is constructed to benefit buyers, and the richer you are, the more you can get away with. When she graduated high school and began attending the University of Chicago to pursue her degree in wildlife ecology, she determined that she would take up the Prowler’s position in the overall criminal ecosystem of Chicago and fight back by any and all means necessary because under the law, the house always wins. And if the house continues to win they will destroy her city and eventually the world.

So now she’s an anticapitalist and hard-line activist both in the mask and out of it! She’s my baby and I love writing about her so I hope that this was at least kind of decent.