Canon Events Spider Verse
Canon Events is a concept from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (June 2023) referring to fixed tragedies every Spider-Man must experience or risk their universe collapsing. TikTok and Instagram users turned it into a joke framework for reframing personal bad luck, breakups, and cringe memories as unavoidable plot beats.
Overview
Canon Events is a meme built around a plot device from Sony's animated film Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, released June 2, 20231. In the movie, Spider-Man 2099 aka Miguel O'Hara tells Miles Morales that every Spider-Man across the multiverse has to live through certain fixed tragedies, dying uncle, dead police captain father, radioactive spider bite, or the whole universe unravels1.
Online, the phrase got yanked out of the film and applied to normal-person misery. Missing a bus, getting dumped, embarrassing texts at 3am, all of it reframed as a Canon Event you couldn't have skipped without collapsing your own timeline2. The joke usually lives on TikTok and Instagram Reels, often layered over the moody Miguel O'Hara theme from the movie's score2.
How It Spread
How to Use This Meme
The format is typically a short TikTok or Instagram Reel over the Miguel O'Hara theme, with on-screen text describing an embarrassing or painful memory reframed as a canon event that had to happen. Common conventions include the phrasing "realizing it was never [X], just a canon event" or "[thing you did] was a canon event bro," often paired with the Miguel O'Hara wall-crawling image on static posts2. Twitter versions tend to skip the sound and just tag a picture of an alternate Spider-Man with a question about what their canon event was2.