u/Whatifim80lol

I'm struggling to climb higher stages on Dark Phoenix because even a fully maxed out Black Widow (mythic newest uni, mighty rage, odins blessings on every slot of gear lol) isn't doing enough damage to clear in time. I'm at 23% Pierce. I've got maya as a lead and tried out a few different supports, with support ctps and newest uniforms.

Would Miles be worth building up to T4 without his Halloween uni? I just need a decent PVE agility character for this, very obnoxious lol.

Lots of people say some version of: "Insomniac Venom was a bland and worse version of Web of Shadows and the sumbiote invasion is morning and not very Venom-y."

But I think a lot of the subtler aspects of the writing get missed. Taking the story for what it was, instead of what people had hoped it would be, there's actually some cool themes and symbiote development in there.

The Venom symbiote seemed to be collecting the emotions of Peter and Harry, and we're shown a long sequence of how deeply ingrained in Peter's psyche the symbiote got and we gotta assume it did the same with Harry. Another poster earlier mentioned something about Peter corrupting the symbiote, and I think that's pretty close to the reading I got. So here goes.

Harry believes he and Peter together can save the world. Harry believes the symbiote is this amazing new part of himself and a cure for everything in his life. And then when Peter came to take the symbiote from him, Harry felt like his life and his reason for living were being taken away from him by the person he wanted to share it with. And this was important hope for him since he felt inadequate in his life because his dad liked peter better. Instead of dying in the same way his mom did (the mourning of whom is the only real remaining emotional connection between Harry and Norman), Harry gets to live on AND serve as a redemption for his mom's death in the eyes of his dad. Hell, if Harry's mom had access to the symbiote she could still be alive (in Harry's head). The symbiote knows all of this.

And we see with Peter that it has locked in on his repetitive Sisyphean struggle against endless threats to the city, often from the same goddamn people he refuses to kill but can't seem to save. The super-human restraint it must take to bottle up all the guilt and failures and personal struggles even in the heat of battle against an existential threat. And how important it actually is to him to be that way, how deeply he believes it's the right thing. The symbiote picks this up, too.

With Harry, the symbiote is a goddamn murder machine. But it's only after both Harry and Peter that the symbiote makes a concerted effort to multiply and 'cure' everyone by bonding with them and going hive mind. For an alien, that solves everything, doesn't it? No more illness, no more separation, no more need for reform or for killing.

There's a reading of the story where the alien manipulated everyone to reproduce itself and take over the world, but I don't think that's the story that we see. Instead we see a version of the symbiote that tries to probe the minds of its hosts to see what they truly desire, gets conflicting messages, and resolves on one of those classic "the AI run amok tries to end suffering by containing humanity" type stories. It makes the symbiote's actions so much more about distorting and healing our deep-seated pains and stresses through strength instead of vulnerability.

The best evidence for this reading is the fight with Scream/MJ. She yells all the shit she's been bottling up, says all the things MJ knows she should t be cause it would hurt Peter, but the symbiote knows is hurting her. And it's shit they honestly actually needed to air out, and the two of them at the end of the story seem stronger for having finally fought about it properly.

Bonus is the fight with Venom at the high school. Harry/Venom is rightfully angry because Peter is an existential threat to their cause but also they're both driven to get Peter to join them again. They both need him or everything they're doing feels pointless. Look at the difference in the Peter vs Venom and the Miles vs Venom fight. Jealously and basically just violence lol.

Is it a classic Venom story? Not one ripped from the comic books, no. But I still think it's a pretty damn good story for what it is. I think it's silly for people to reduce it to "alien wants to eat the world," personally.

(Too late to watch it now, but the YouTube original sci-fi series "Origin" was kinda neat. Flawed as hell, but >!in the end, the "evil alien parasite came to learn and value human emotional after experiencing multiple human brains.!<)

Nobody has reviewed it yet and time is ticking lol