There were a lot of very, very dumb choices made regarding Venom comics in the 00s but my absolute least favorite has to be how my boy Toxin was treated. He got a shitty story for an introduction and then a halfway decent limited series with a shitty villain but a lot of potential, and then they just killed Pat off and gave Toxin to Eddie to become Venom 2.0.
Pat was actually a pretty interesting host (seeing as how he wasn’t a villain or a guy who hated Spider-Man for fucking once), and his dynamic with the Toxin symbiote was very different from the Eddie/Venom, Flash/Venom, and Cletus/Carnage relationships. In their miniseries, Pat and Toxin struggled a lot, especially since Pat was a grown man with a strong moral compass and Toxin was basically the Klyntar equivalent of a kid or teenager. Their relationship seemed to be more of a father/son or older brother/younger brother nature than partners or lovers with equal say, and this could’ve been juxtaposed with Toxin’s lack of a relationship with Venom and Carnage (as a lot of times Toxin seemed to actually be upset about his heritage unlike Carnage). Pat also had a living family, which was a big part of his internal conflict as well as his issues with Toxin, and the miniseries implied that future stories would have had to deal with the fallout of them revealing their identity to Pat’s wife Gina.
Anyways, there were a bunch of paths the writers could’ve taken the original Toxin-host duo, but noooo, instead Pat and his family had to be killed off-screen so that Eddie could be a Venom villain for some reason. Personally I don’t think Toxin has been interesting since then.
NOT TO MENTION that Pat as Toxin looked like this:
Whereas Eddie as Toxin looked like this:
And sorry but I think dumbasses Pat and Toxin trying to emulate Spider-Man because Spider-Man was one of two costumed peeps that didn’t try to kill them when they first bonded is infinitely better (and funnier) than Eddie!Toxin looking like a shitty Scream redesign because “non-Venom symbiote villain go brrrrr.”