something something one of the themes part of atsv being parents having to learn to let go of their kids and accepting that they are people with their own ideas and dreams and ideals + miguel at the end when miles escapes and is frustrated because he won’t listen because “this is how it is, this is how the story goes”, because when do teenagers ever listen when you tell them no?
actually going tgo put this in a reblog because i'm totally normal and sane and not unhinged at all after staying up til 4am ranting about miguel with a good mutual.
this is gonna get Long so imma put it under the cut.
(from the tags of my reblog but tidied up:)
something i've been thinking about is that rio & jeff and george are parents of teens (miles & gwen) whereas miguel + peter b. had/have young children (i gauged that miguel's daughter is roughly 10ish years old). and while young kids absolutely have their own ideas and should be supported, they're at an age where support & guidance is prioritised over independence. this isn't to say that young children shouldn't be encouraged to develop independence - they should. but young children are just children, whereas teens are undergoing a transition from childhood (& dependence) to adulthood (& in[ter]dependence). where young children are more easily guided, disciplined and managed, teens are more likely to question authority [figures] in their lives, since they are finding (or rather, redefining) their place in the world.
note that rio & jess + george (eventually) allow their kids the freedom and space they need to explore their identities. rio with her speech to miles, and george actually quitting the force to prioritise gwen. in contrast, miguel & peter b. (the latter to a lesser extent) haven't really experienced that questioning / nuance in parenting yet, which you see in their more authoritative approach / imposing their beliefs on the spideyteens; "this is for your own good" and "you have no idea what you're doing".
now, i wanna go back to the point about young children needing more support & guidance + being less prone to "acting out" and questioning their parents. this is important. because there are a lot of things about the way miguel handles himself, and the way he treats children that play into OP's point.
lets sidetrack for a moment and talk about child abuse & parents who were raised in abusive situations. i'm not going to go too deep into this, but i want to touch on the debate about using corporal / physical punishment to discipline [young] children; older generations being like "i turned out fine" and believing it's an appropriate way to discipline children vs their children growing up with the trauma of such discipline. and these children, in turn, staying away from such forms of punishment or repeating the cycle with their own children.
miguel tries to be the former - and for a time, he is! he demonstrates that he's familiar with managing children; allowed mayday to crawl all over him and is gentle with her (i've seen posts joking about how he holds mayday like a hamburger but ... that's literally how you pick up a child. that's the way i, as a childcare worker in training, have picked up babies to hold them or put them in a chair). he's gentle with miles (when he's first explaining "canon events" to him) and with gwen. atsv demonstrates that miguel is knowledgeable about how to handle young children ... because he was a parent to a young child.
however. something else that the movie calls attention to is miguel's refusal to deal with his trauma, and that he struggles (or responds aggressively) when his authority is questioned. miguel is a study in how adults, who were raised in abusive situations, can perpetuate that same abuse onto the younger generation[s] despite meaning well. he's gentle and empathetic towards miles, and it's only when miles rebels against miguel's strongly held beliefs that miguel turns on him, and says some absolutely cruel things. miguel gives gwen a place in the lobby, and only when she acts against his wishes — when shes questions his authority, and more importantly, his ethics, that he sends her back to her universe. both scenes are hard hitting because anyone raised in abusive homes is intimately familiar with the expression and posture miguel takes — especially in that shot where he looms over gwen before sending her back. as long as you obey me, i will love you. you didn't obey me, now i have to punish you.
miguel has experienced immense trauma, and consequently has a desperate desire for control. he's resigned to Destiny and Fate of "canon", has turned the whole theme of "friendly neighbourhood spiderman" into an institution that punishes anyone or thing that contradicts his sense of "right" or "belonging". all the while refusing to consider that his theory about "canon" may be flawed (despite the fact that it doesn't seem that his conviction is grounded in hard evidence) because doing so would force him to relive / re-expose himself to the trauma of loosing the happy life he tried to build. which, speaking of ...
it's very interesting to me that atsv draws parallels between kingpin and miguel with regards to the way they treat their family. kingpin looses his family because of his own mistakes but refuses to acknowledge his fault in the situation. instead he pins the blame of spiderman, then figuratively and literally burns the world to get his family back. miguel replaces his dead alternate self, without the consent or knowledge of his daughter, and the world is destroyed because of it. both kingpin and miguel stripped their family of agency in the choices they made.
but where kingpin is acting out of entitlement and refusal to take accountability for any of his mistakes, miguel's flaws and mistakes are put into perspective when you acknowledge that he is very obviously struggling with recent and past trauma, especially that which stems from an abusive childhood. and it's really clear that miguel and miles are positioned as foils for each other in that respect - the former perpetuating the cycle of abuse he experienced, which the latter who grew up in a happy, loving and supportive family is more resilient to trauma (and more open to dealing with it).
... kinda went on a tangent here but. OP raised a really good point and i think there's a lot about miguel's character that ties all these threads together.
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