YMMV / Dark Web

• Ass Pull: What's shown in Hellions starting from Madelyne Pryor being killed in issue #4 up to being resurrected in #18, emphasized Alex Summers being her sole advocate and implied her resurrection getting repeatedly refused because of Jean Grey and then granted in the end due to Emma Frost supporting it despite Grey. The Dark Web reveal that Grey advocated from the start for Pryor being resurrected on Krakoa all along comes entirely out of the blue.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The would-be superhero demon Rek-Rap was initially scorned for his goofy appearance and being a blatant substitute for Venom, but quickly became one of the best-received parts of the event due to being utterly hilarious and from out of left field, while also being genuinely moved by Spider-Man's example to do good.
• Heartwarming Moments: While mostly Played for Laughs due to how wacky he is, Rek-Rap gets to return the favor for Spider-Man rescuing him by helping him battle the Insidious Six, then standing up to the newly-crowned King Chasm when he slaps Peter away, even though Chasm is larger and more powerful than he is. Not only does Rek-Rap get to fight alongside his new idol, but he proves how dedicated he is to Spider-Man's ideals as well.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A Fanfic that someone wrote and posted in the late 1990's or early 2000's posited Madelyne Pryor approaching Jean Grey and requesting only that Grey share memories of Nathan/Cable that Pryor didn't experience, which Grey grants and this gesture makes peace between them.
• Moment of Awesome: While Bedlam was initially criticized by the Venom fanbase, seeing him do his best Doomslayer impression on the demons of Limbo in the Dark Web: Finale was met with approval, with even his detractors calling it an improvement over his appearances in the main Venom series.
• Moral Event Horizon: Chasm crosses it by stealing Eddie's memories to revert him into his Venom persona, taking away years of growth and causing him to relapse into the same bloodlust and rage he worked so hard to overcome. This is even crueler on Ben's part since he had his own memories wiped, yet caused the same thing to happen to Eddie with zero remorse or hesitation.
• Narm:
  • In issues 16 and 17 of Amazing Spider-Man, Peter is made to live out his personal Hell in Limbo until he relents to Chasm's demands to eat the fruit that will allow Ben to claim his soul. Said personal Hell? Working in the Daily Bugle, with demons filling in for the staff while threatening Jonah and Robbie. It's so benign compared to many of Spidey's other tragic fates that it ends up looking more absurd than anything else.
  • Ben's King Chasm form where he sprouts horns, wings and bulks up significantly. While it's meant to be intimidating demonic transformation, it ends up looking goofy. Most readers viewed it as a downgrade from the base Chasm look which, while controversial, was generally agreed to be a good design.
• Tear Jerker: Everything that happened to Eddie Brock over the course of the event. He teams up with Madelyne Pryor when she promises to help him, not knowing who she is or what she wants... only to be Mind Raped by Chasm on her orders to return him to his bloodthirsty supervillain persona. He then gets his butt kicked by Spider-Man and Synch, who figure that something is wrong with him but are too preoccupied with the demonic invasion and indifferent (respectively) to help him. He then has a mental breakdown upon realizing he doesn't have the Venom symbiote, kickstarting his transformation into Bedlam. Running into his son, who is bonded to the Venom symbiote, he attacks Dylan not remembering who he is—with Dylan assuming that Bedlam is fresh off having impaled him through the heart, which hasn't happened from Eddie's perspective yet. Bedlam gets his eye gouged out and hand chopped off, and only survives due to Ms. Marvel and Madelyne intervening. While Madelyne does apologize for messing with his memories, Bedlam is unceremoniously portalled into the depths of Limbo by Chasm.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Prior to her transformation into Hallows' Eve, Janine expressed feelings of helplessness over not being directly involved in Ben's campaign against Peter, and she was expected to be a major player in the event given how hyped-up she was by Marvel. However, Janine barely participated in the action up until the final issues, remaining on the sidelines while Ben, Maddie, and even Eddie Brock (who wanted nothing to do with their plan to begin with) took center stage as antagonists. The most she did before those issues was steal a Cerebro drive that Maddie never needed in the first place.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Both of the main villains of the crossover are given sympathetic motives in being unwanted clones that have both been subject to many years of mistreatment from the universe and just wanting to take back the memories they feel were stolen from them, but they end up both draining their sympathy extremely quick in opposite directions.
  • Madelyne Pryor, the Goblin Queen, starts with a vague but grandiose goal, wanting the X-Men (and Jean Grey in particular) to pay for stealing her happy life. She uses Chasm, Hallows' Eve, a brainwashed Venom, and the legions of Limbo to serve as distractions so that she can retrieve a Cerebro unit hidden in the X-Men's treehouse. Does she want it to expand her powers and make her an unstoppable force? No, she was only seeking the memories of Cable's childhood that were once given to Jean. This winds up rendering the story's conflict pointless once Jean Grey and the X-Men are able to talk Madelyne down, and Jean shares the memories with her - with the only caveat being that Madelyne stop her invasion. The subsequent attempt of the narrative to paint Madelyne's actions in a sympathetic light, and her sudden Heel–Face Turn, not only flies in the face of decades of needless antagonism towards the X-Men on her part, but also fails to recognize the sheer scale of collateral damage her plan caused, particularly for Eddie Brock who was blackmailed into participation just to find his son again. From here, joining the X-Men in stopping the invasion of Limbo could be interpreted either as wanting to make amends for her constant needless antagonism of the X-Men or deciding that Ben and Janine have fulfilled their purpose as distractions and thus no longer worth helping. In the end, Madelyne is reestablished as the Queen of Limbo, back on good relations with the X-Men, and even allowed to keep the new portal to Limbo open as a new embassy by effectively blackmailing the US into doing so. All in all, when you consider the amount of help she gave Chasm and Hallows' Eve, how she and Chasm share responsibility in turning Eddie Brock into Bedlam, and the amount of deaths caused on Christmas Eve by the demons of Limbo, many fans think the X-Men were far too lenient with how they handled her, especially since Madelyne Pryor effectively got everything she wanted from her plan and more.
  • Chasm begins with the understandable goal of capturing Spider-Man to forcibly steal his memories back, even starting with extra sympathy points for the accident that turned him into Chasm and his stay in Limbo causing him to suffer nightmares and hallucinations, painting him as not evil for its own sake but someone who is extremely mentally ill and in need of help but pushed to extremes due to paranoia and no longer being able to trust anyone save those who he feels have suffered like he has i.e. Madelyne Pryor and Janine. However, once Chasm actually springs into action, the reader begins to find it impossible to retain their sympathies because his own plans and motives become impossible to follow. Between his first major plan to use the invasion of Limbo to draw Spider-Man into a fight for revenge and to make him give up his memories, being sidetracked to beat down the reformed Norman Osborn as revenge for killing him and antagonize members of Spider-Man's supporting cast, his second major plan to use demons to psychologically torment Peter Parker through an over-the-top reenactment of his life working at the Daily Bugle into eating a demon fruit to give up his soul, his third major plan to transform random demons into Limbo-themed versions of Spier-Man's rogue's gallery to prolong his torment along with enhancing the chaos of the demon invasion, and his final off-the-cuff plan to simply take over Limbo with Hallows' Eve and destroy New York City as its new king, it becomes impossible for readers to keep track of what he's even trying to accomplish, let alone whether he still wants his memories back or if he just wants to torment Spider-Man. If it were the former goal, not only has he been shown using magic to steal memories before with Madelyne Pryor's help, fans have pointed out that the X-Men (with Peter's permission) could easily have pacified Chasm by offering to copy Peter's portion of Ben's missing memories into him like they did to help Madelyne. If it were the latter, then Peter himself points out that Chasm not only did not need to involve anyone else in their quarrel, but that all of his attempts to torture Peter are a massive waste of time due to hinging on a fundamental misunderstanding of Peter Parker/Spider-Man's nature as the Determinator. It really doesn't help that the story itself comments through Spider-Man and Madelyne that Chasm's frayed sanity and obsession with Spider-Man mean none of his plans ever had any internal logic behind them beyond making Peter Parker and New York City as a whole suffer. On a lesser scale, compared to Madelyne Pryor, Hallows' Eve, and the brainwashed Venom, Chasm still carries Ben's/Peter's tendency to joke and quip in all but the most serious situations, making it ambiguous whether the reader is meant to take Chasm's angst and gallows humor regarding his losses at face value or to laugh along with the dark humor and over-the-top hamminess he engages in with abundance during the story. In essence, the narrative's attempts to establish Chasm as Eviler than Thou compared to Madelyne Pryor, along with his general Sanity Slippage, makes Chasm impossible to root for due to falling into Stupid Evil territory right at the start and never stopping. Even Chasm's ultimate fate is confused on whether the reader is meant to pity or scorn Chasm, as he's made to take the entirety of the blame for planning the invasion of Limbo, left imprisoned and alone in the new embassy in comfortable surroundings as a small concession on Madelyne's part for involving him in all of this, before the story seemingly tries to slam the door shut on any remaining sympathy points by showing Chasm giving Madelyne and Peter's offers to help him the silent treatment in favor of angrily brooding over his losses. Overall, readers are left confused on whether to consider the narrative is asking them to consider Ben a sympathetic victim of circumstance due to his clear mental illness and being an ignorant pawn in someone else's conflict until he was discarded, or an irredeemable monster due to his gleeful slide down into Stupid Evil once cut loose by Madelyne and unrepentant nature. Many can't even decide if Ben would even go to such extreme measures in the first place were he not crazy-town banana-pants for the sake of having a final villain.
  • To a lesser degree, the X-Men and Spider-Man themselves have been called out by the readers for their seeming initial lack of sympathy for Madelyne and Chasm's plights and shared history between them, although it's eventually subverted by the X-Men taking the time to talk to Madelyne and help her instead of just beating her down and Spider-Man making it clear that he ultimately wants to help Ben, but his priorities lie with stopping Chasm from destroying New York first before he can do that.
• The Woobie: Eddie Brock. After his memories were stolen by Chasm after the latter went back on his deal to help find Dylan, he forgot him altogether and ended up falling back into his vengeance-obsessed Venom phase, being pitted against Spider-Man (whom he had become close friends with since Absolute Carnage), and learning his mind was tampered with after being used as a distraction for Ben and Madelyne's scheme. Although he did find Dylan after all, it was only after he transformed into Bedlam in his despair, and he was forced to fight his own son after being mistaken for the Bedlam who stabbed him.