Crisis of meaning, part 3: What lies beyond the Spider-Verse?

Unlike the TVA, the Spider-Society is obviously not worried, by definition, about “variants” as such. What they do police are “anomalies,” which we’re told means people who “wind up in the wrong dimension.” (Like variants, there’s a certain analogy to the idea of undocumented immigrants.) They’re also concerned, in a way very roughly corresponding to the TVA’s attention to “nexus events” in the Sacred Timeline, with multiversal “nodes” that they call “canon events”—a deeply meta term for the deeply meta observation that the lives of Spider-people across Spider-Verse storytelling tend to share recurring narrative patterns. One such pattern, noted in the first Spider-Verse movie, is a traumatic early loss of a loved one: Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben; Miles’s Uncle Aaron (Mahershala Ali); for Hailee Steinfeld’s Spider-Gwen, her best friend Peter Parker.

Not unlike the approved outcomes of nexus events in the Sacred Timeline narrative, canon events carry ostensible prescriptive force: They aren’t just patterns that do recur; as Miguel puts it, they’re “how the story is supposed to go”: repeating motifs in a grand design. But, just as nexus events can give rise to unsanctioned outcomes, the connections represented by canon events can be broken—typically, by anomalies, by persons displaced in the Spider-Verse.