jumpingjacktrash:

copperbadge:

I was thinking about Venom this morning before breakfast, like you do, and I keep coming back to how baffled I am that Venom, and apparently everyone else in Eddie’s life, thinks he’s a loser. 

I sort of get why, in a Hollywood way, they might. He’s in a bad situation for most of the movie outside of the fact that he has an alien up his ass. But Eddie was a successful journalist with a significant viewership, engaged to a lawyer, an attractive man with a nice house; he’s clearly intelligent and well-educated. And yes, he does a stupid thing and betrays his fiancee’s trust and gets her fired, and she (quite rightly) dumps him. And he ends up living in a shitty apartment without career prospects because a rich guy fucked him over, eating crap food, trying to hustle work, and giving money he can’t afford to people who have an even shittier situation than him. 

But the movie seems to equate poverty with loserdom, because Eddie is still the intelligent, educated, fundamentally decent person who believes in justice that he was before he fucked up. He’s just an intelligent, educated, fundamentally decent, justice-loving guy who fucked up once and now has no money. 

And I realized, Eddie isn’t a loser.

Eddie is a Millennial. 

#there is a certain equation of poverty and joblessness with loserdom that was embraced by some of gen-X#i think that may have influenced the idea of eddie as a loser

yeah, that is definitely a thing we did. we were getting called losers for being poor, and slackers for being disenfranchised, and we embraced it. we were like, “yes, we are losers, because we LOST. the world is a competition, and it’s not fair, and the big guys cheat, and so we lost. so what? what are you gonna do about it?”

we embraced those words as an antidote to shame. because we were being shamed for being victims of an unfair system, and we chose to say, no, we’re victims because you victimized us. we’re poor because you robbed us. we’re disenfranchised because you shut us out.

so i can absolutely see gen-x writers calling eddie a loser, because yeah, he lost. somebody wiped the floor with him. seeing a loser come back and win – or even find a better game – is really uplifting, in my book.