The guys on Tumblr decided to torture themselves by asking me to blabber more about Symbiote related topics, so who am I to say no?
Some people actually asked who the Anti-Venom is and how he came to be which is actually a legitimate question since this character had a weirdly short and rushed history in Marvel comics, despite popping up in more mainstream media (like the Ultimate Spider-man cartoon or the Edge of Time videogame). You'll get what i mean, it gets pretty dumb pretty fast. The timing of this couldn't be better since Anti-Venom also ties in with a major character from the Ps4 Spider-man game from Insomniac Games. You'll see what i mean later.
As mentioned before, Eddie Brock became the new boyfriend of the Venom symbiote, making Venom an official thing. But who's Eddie in the comics? Eddie Brock was a journalist working for the Daily Globe and while working there there was a serial killer called the "Sin-Eater" who was killing a bunch of people. Someone contacted Eddie and started telling him that he was the Sin-Eater, giving him a bunch of evidence to prove it and asked Eddie to publish that stuff on the paper he was working for so people could know his story. Eddie became extremely famous because of this story, to the point where the police started pressuring him to release the identity of the killer. Eddie eventually gave in and helped the police to arrest the guy but unfortunately for him that idiot wasn't the real killer: he was just a rando who lived right next to the real one and just wanted attention. This came to light when Spider-man caught the real Sin-Eater, starting a chain of events that almost literally brought Eddie's life to the shitter: his career and credibility were ruined and he couldn't get a decent job anymore, his wife decided to get a divorce and he eventually also found out that he had a specific type of cancer that would eventually end up killing him. During this period he started to make Spidet the symbol of his ruined life, blaming him for every bad thing that was happening to him.
This situation also created a crisis of faith in Eddie (he was a pretty religious boy up to that point and this entire deal made him start to question everything), to the point where he eventually decided to go to a church nearby to ask for forgiveness before killing himself. "Fortunately" for him, that was the church where Spidey thought he killed the symbiote in, and before Eddie could kill himself the symbiote attached to him. They were immediately a good match, especially since both of them had a huge hateboner for good ol' Spidey. And this Venom was created.
For a while they were pretty content with each other, except for the fact that the symbiote was an indecisive bitch, showing multiple times that if the chance of getting back with Peter was on the table, it would jump on it immediately. The duo tried multiple times to kill Spidey and eventually also had a separate miniseries where they decided to become heroes (or more like anti-heroes) on their own in San Francisco, after a truce with Spidey.
That didn't last unfortunately. During the years the symbiote became more intelligent and malicious. Eddie costantly tried to keep himself and the symbiote at bay to be sure they wouldn't kill people who didn't deserve it (in fact Venom never actively ate someone's brain, they only ate a piece of someone once and it was because the symbiote was going berserk), but holding the symbiote's instinct became progressively harder to do, to the point where Brock was now stuck in an abusive relationship with it where the symbiote was in control. Eventually the Symbiote tried to leave Eddie to die of cancer so it could permanently bond with Spidey again, but that plan failed and the symbiote APPARENTLY lost an unborn child because it was stuck with Eddie's sick and weak body again. After that there's the official breakup.
Knowing that the symbiote would just find a new host anyway, Eddie decided to auction it to a bunch of supervillains and gangsters so he could use the money received for charity. IT'S A SUPER GOOD PLAN THAT TOTALLY WON'T BACKFIRE TRUST ME. For really real. The fact that this plan was inspired by the fact that Eddie just finished watching Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ is also another clue on how well thought out this plan was.
Because of the auction the Symbiote got stuck for a couple of issues with Angelo Fortunato, one of the 2 candidates for the title "Worst Venom Host ever" (the second one comes way later on). The symbiote dropped the boy from the top of a building when he realized how shit Angelo was and he left to find a better host. Because of the amount of people Angelo killed in his first and only outing as Venom, Eddie had a crisis of coscience and tried to kill himself for real, seemingly succeding. Or at least that's what everyone thought for a bunch of years.
The symbiote eventually found Mac Gargan, who most of you probably know more as "The Scorpion" and the two officially became the second Venom. Mac Gargan's Venom is one of the worst iterations of the character, mostly because it has zero personality and it's a walking stereotype of bad clichès commonly associated with Venom. It offers nothing except being a beefy jobber for the Thunderbolts, a team of supervillains that officially worked under direct control of the government to hunt and/or kill superheroes who did not accept the Superhero Registration Act (this stuff happens around the time the absolute mess that is the Civil War comics was happening, that shit was bad and stupid for everyone involved). Anyway, it feels like i'm losing myself in a weird unrelated tangent right? Unfortunately all this bullshit is kinda necessary because now i can tackle directly what the fuck is up with Anti-Venom.
You might recognize Mr.Negative as "that asian mobster with superpowers" from the new Spider-man videogame. Well in the comics he's... That asian mobster with superpowers. Honestly, the game did a much better job with this character. But yeah like in the game his civilian persona was a prominent political figure in New York and to hammer down even more how much of a cool guy he was to the public he built a homeless shelter where he secretly used his powers to cure any illness the hobos might have. Guess who was a regular at the shelter? Beside Aunt May wo worked there i mean.
MOTHERFUCKING EDDIE! He's alive and he's actually getting better! And it's all thanks to Mr.Negative's confusing powers! One thing both of them don't know tho', is that those powers are also mutating what remains of the symbiote inside Eddie's organism.
The symbiote remains fuse with Eddie's white cells and when the symbiote comes into contact with him again the white cells mutate even further, creating the stupidly named Anti-Venom.
Anti-Venom is NOT an actual symbiote and it doesn't have a mind of its own. Eddie has complete control over this bullshit and it shares all the powers Venom has, plus the fact that it can literally cure anything (even cure superheroes and villains of their powers) and it can burn symbiotes just by touching them.
Anti-Venom had a miniseries where he teams up with the Punisher but after a while it was clear that the character was way too overpowered and no one at Marvel really knew what the fuck to do with him, so they decided to remove the Anti-Venom powers from Brock during Spider-Island.
Spider-Island was an event where an obscure Spidey villain from the early 2000s comes back and decides to infect the entire population of New York with a virus that would give them Spidey's powers but also eventually turn them into monstrous spider-human mutant abominations. Eddie sacrificed his Anti-Venom powers to cure the entire population from this spider virus, and went back to being regular old Eddie Brock once again.
As said before Anti-Venom appeared in a bunch of other stuff during the years but i'm not that familiar with most of those iterations. The character got decently popular despite its really short history, to the point where he actually came back during 2018. Sort of. Kinda. And for a very short amount of time again.
But that's an overly long post for another time.