This Valentine’s Day, T asked five writers to compose a love letter (of sorts) to an actor or fictional character who has been nominated — or, in one case, passed over — this year for the 91st Academy Awards. Here, the writer Victor LaValle, who most recently coedited the anthology “A People’s Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers” with John Joseph Adams, shares a letter to the fictional character Miles Morales of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which has been nominated this year for best animated feature.

Dear Miles,

My kids think you’re great, but I’m the one who loves you. I’m 47, my son is 7 and my daughter is 5, but at the end of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” I’m the only family member who sat there in tears. In the movie you look like a teenager, but in reality you’re barely 8 years old. Back in 2011 two folks at Marvel Comics — the artist Sara Pichelli and the writer Brian Michael Bendis — created you. In the sea of Caucasity that was (and still is) the comic book industry, you were long overdue. I know this is all a bit meta, but that history was rolling through my brain when the movie ended. Meanwhile my son and daughter were too busy pretending to turn invisible or web-sling across the Magic Johnson Theater lobby to notice. I watched them playing and thought about myself at their ages. I know, I know, nothing is duller than listening to an adult talk about how things were “back in the day.” I’m going to do it anyway so go ahead and pre-roll your eyes.

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I grew up loving Peter Parker, identifying with him. I’m a working-class kid from Queens; wasn’t raised in a “traditional family,” whatever the hell that means. But Peter Parker was the “boy next door” and I wasn’t. How did I know? Well, because in the world of comics — the only world that mattered to me then — a boy who looked like me never lived next door. Dennis the Menace (to use a reference you definitely don’t know) could barge into his neighbor’s home and television audiences found it endearing, cute. But a brown-skinned boy entering someone else’s home without knocking has never been adorable in America. (I guess Urkel used to do it in the ’90s, but look how much they had to neuter that boy in order to make such a thing palatable.)