If Eddie no longer looked like Venom, the other solution would have been to make Venom look more like Tom Hardy–but good luck getting that past the existing fanbase. To mention limiting your casting options to a much smaller pool).Ĭasting Tom Hardy was inarguably the right call. Generation of fans not to question why a professional journalist wouldīe jacked enough to dwarf Captain America, film adds a layer of realismĪnd audience expectations that would make that a much harder sell (not While comic book writers of the 80’s may have been able to convince a ⬥ Venom and She-Venom, actual size comparison. Of course, when the guy you’ve cast as Eddie has the physique of Tom Hardy rather than, say, He-Man, the logic of why Venom looks so huge falls apart. (Why Eddie and Anne should be such wildly different sized humans is a whoooole other topic, but best left in the Don’t Get Me Started pile for now.) So, in the comics at least, there’s some internal consistency explaining why He-Venom and She-Venom should look so very different. You can see the same trends at work with the Life Foundation Five and various other examples. Whereas when completely-normal-human-woman Anne Weying first bonds with the Venom symbiote in Sinner Takes All, we get a much slimmer She-Venom. So when Spider-man was wearing the symbiote the result was (by design) literally just Spider-man-but-in-black:īut Venom’s next host did not have the muscularly-lean body of Peter Parker, he had the jacked-up muscle-mountain that was Eddie Brock’s – and the result is the Venom we all know and love. Since the symbiote’s introduction back in ‘84, precious little about the species has remained consistent through the many writers and retcons, but one detail that Marvel was – mostly – consistent on back in the early days is that the shape a symbiote takes depends a lot on the body of its host. But one is still the basis for the other, so we’re going to start waayyy back at the beginning. They aren’t the same character, don’t have the same history, and their biology doesn’t follow the same rules. But mostly, it’s the perfect jumping-off point for a whole lot of rambling about visual shorthands and how symbiote morphology has been handled in the comics over the years, which apparently I had a whole essay’s worth of thoughts on. Why? Well, that requires a bit of backing up and some more context. So it was a little surprising to find that this was one I was mostly willing to shrug off. Few issues in genre film stick in my craw like the double standards applied to male and female bodies (ask me my thoughts on the likes of Wonder Woman or Gamora at your peril). I mean, the sexual dimorphism on display here is, uh… pretty extreme. So, back when Venom was still in cinemas, I saw it with a friend who (like me) enjoyed it mightily – though said friend did roll her eyes pretty hard at the She-Venom scene, because of course the female!Venom has to be skinny and sexy. Some musings on symbiote morphology (AKA when size does matter)
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