Imagine being Spider-Gwen and showing up at this Spider-Verse meetup and 90% of the people there are alternate versions of your dead best friend. They’re all grown, too—as the person he would have grown to become if things were different, if he’d had the chance to grow up. You’re surrounded by ghosts of him. Ghosts of who he could have been.
And then you realize that every single one of them looks at you like you’re the ghost.
Every single one of their Gwens died.
In every other universe—in every other universe—you died. You are dead, everywhere, everywhere but here.
You only lived in yours because your Peter died instead.
one of the reasons why “what if people went on a road trip and it was weird” is one of the oldest story types is that a lot of sense of personhood has been, historically, tied to place. the weird road trip says “what if we went somewhere else, where no one knows us, and tried out being a different person”.
Odysseus, the famous liar, goes on a weird road trip & over the course of it becomes several different people, and then comes home & is all those people as well as himself, wearing the echoes of those other people
huge shoutout to the guy at the bar who said “i like your dress maam” and when i was like. i’m a man but thank you! he was like “oh shit i like your dress homie” i love you forever
