Gamergaters are rallying behind the new ‘Spider-Man’ for all the wrong reasons

It isn’t until Peter, the man who failed to take the monster down, steps in and insists that Miles is also Spider-Man, that the teenager has a chance to swing off to safety. The whole ordeal, it turns out, is caught on camera by a group of pedestrians and quickly uploaded to the internet.

In a moment that’s seemingly meant to address the both the real-world and fictional conversations around Miles’s existence, a vlogger gushing online about how great it is that New York has a “black Spider-Man.”

“Is he African American? Is he Indian? Hispanic” I don’t know,” the woman admits. “But is is def color. So exciting!”

Though Miles understand the vlogger’s excitement, he bristles at being reduced down to his race and the erasure of his Hispanic heritage.

The thing you have to realize about Miles is that, originally, he’s from a world where Peter Parker’s long-since been dead. He’s never been the “new” Spider-Man in the sense that his solo series makes him out to be. This is just what his job is.

Reconciling that fact with the fact that he’s living in a different timeline where Parker is still alive is definitely interesting, but it requires a fair amount of careful and nuanced storytelling, not a one-off, tense interaction with a cop.

As writer J.A. Micheline pointed out on Twitter, though, there’s something off about Bendis (a white man) writing Miles (an Afro-Puerto Rican teenager) expressing his desires not to be defined by his race.

Micheline makes an important point. For every Gamergater that reads Miles Morales as being the latest attack in a SJW crusade against political incorrectness, there are people who identify with Miles specifically because they read him as as person of color like themselves.

Last summer, when it was first announced that Miles would be joining the mainstream Marvel universe, Bendis described seeing his four-year-old adopted daughter (who is black) connect with Miles in a toy store.

“I started crying in the middle of the aisle,” Bendis told New York Daily News. “I realized my kids are going to grow up in a world that has a multi-racial Spider-Man, and an African American Captain America and a female Thor.”

When you can literally see yourself reflected in the face or skin of a superhero it makes forming a connection to their story that much easier.

Once you get into that story, though, and that character casually brushes off the identity that bonded you with little to no introspection? That connection’s lost. In its place is a new space for bigots to claim the character for themselves and alienate any and everyone who might not fit the definition of a “traditional” comic book fan.