The Hunger is good. The Hunger is good because it’s set up as the archetypal grimdark nineties comic only to then thoroughly deconstruct itself and subvert audience expectations entirely.
most obviously, in eddie’s brooding about the inherent sickness of humanity and the hopelessness of existence being revealed as nothing more than the product of a chemical imbalance in his brain. there is nothing more delegitimising you can say about pseudo-philosophical anti-hero monologues than, no, actually, those guys are just depressed, and it sucks for them and everyone around them.
but also in his relationship to the symbiote, which is, at first, presented as cause, symptom, part of his “madness”. like, as sweetly as you can take it, the first time eddie refers to their “happy ending” is… creepy-coded. from his wide-eyed, manic, disheveled appearance to the seeming disconnect he’s experienced from humanity at large, and, specifically, from the heterosexual norm.
holding someone’s hand at the movies has overwhelmingly romantic connotations, and it was fully expected that these connotations would unsettle the average reader. i don’t want to simplify it down to Gay Scary but, you can, you basically can. everything about their relationship and the way it’s described is alien, foreign, weird. and neither of them is a lady. and eddie is broken enough to prefer this to more normal circumstances, is what you might take away from it.
but then- then, later- their affection is something that’s entirely validated. eddie’s decision to be soft, to help, to put down the badass weapons and call off the hyped up mind-meld fight in favour of just showing empathy to his symbiote, of understanding that it, too, was behaving in a way you can reasonably describe as “the kind of edgy that drives up sales” simply because it was suffering- that’s literally what saves the day. it’s lovingly rendered cuddles, not flamethrowers.
but it goes even further than that, because things come full circle with a second romantically charged scene and a second “happily ever after”, with eddie offering his other those heart-shaped chocolates, and it’s just… unambiguously adorable, that time. and defiantly fucking so.
from the beginning, everyone can agree that something’s wrong with venom. but in the nineties, with the kind of tone established, with the kind of grotesque imagery employed, you would think that eddie’s bleak view of the city and the symbiote’s brain-eating are what’s true, what’s the new status quo, and the attachment eddie has to his symbiote is what’s sick, what’ll be punished by the narrative. the misanthropy is what’s right, the deviancy is what’s wrong. what readers might expect to be broken and what actually has to be fixed are direct opposites. i owe my life to The Hunger.
A Force Sensitive Phasesixer 