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troperville

This is a "Wild Mass Guess" entry, where we pull out all the sanity stops on theorizing. The regular entry on this topic is elsewhere. Please see this programme note.

Wanted

The Comic:

Its all a lie?

An old, dying supervillain has suffered his last defeat. In his last moments, he begins to hallucinate of a world where he did win. Or perhaps a hero took pity on his enemy and trapped him forever in an endless dream.

Everything in the comic is all true.

Think about it. Isn't it all horrifically plausible? Why the world's in such a crappy state, the truth behind all those "Disappearances" and "Unsolved" crimes? Ever walk down the street and see someone who looks JUST LIKE a character? What if it's because they are? If super powered beings like the ones in comic books existed, it would be childsplay for them to use their godlike powers to make us forget they ever did. And the ultimate sick joke, Mark Millar who is in on the whole thing as is every comic writer, was hired to print a comic about how comic characters were real and running the world, just to make it seem all the more ludicrous. He even comes right out and says it: Who even reads comics any more? He creates a story that makes the theory of real life super villains running the world impossible to believe and all but states, in story, that that's the whole POINT of the story. It would make so much sense. How did Lee, Kirby, Miller, Brubaker get the idea for all these strange and bizarre characters? They got them STRAIGHT FROM THE CHARACTERS THEMSELVES.

Why no, that is merely a silly paranoia. (He knows too much, get a mindwipe ready!)
Gets weird when you consider the idea for the comic came from what Mark Millar heard from his father (the superheroes don't exist because supervillains killed them all).
- Older brother, not father I think.

Wesley has no powers, he just got really, really lucky.

As Larry Niven once said, there has to be someone at the extreme end of a probability curve.

The movie "Wanted" is a sick joke made by the Fraternity, who are real.

It's a twisted joke made by Wesley, now one of the arch-villains of the world. To further tease us, he's made a movie which is warped to be nothing like what reality is, much like what Professor Solomon Seltzer did along with the other arch-villains.

The comic takes place in the same world as Kick-Ass

Dave flat-out asks where all the superheroes are and why no one has ever done what he has before...and even he and Hit-Girl both hang up the tights by the end. Maybe the Fraternity's control is stretched so thin by present day that even though they're able to squelch him and Hit-Girl, they aren't able to keep the new rise of the superheroes under wraps once Kick-Ass accidentally gets the ball rolling?

And possibly Dave is that kid whose parents get killed by Mister Rictus. They wipe his memory, but he gets... fractious, buys a wetsuit and a set of clubs, and is away with himself.

The comic takes place in the same universe as "Nemesis"

Before the events of the comic, they villains had an alien supercomputer being, an extradimensional imp, a large cadre of time-traveling super Nazis, the world's smartest man, and some of the world's smartest psychopaths. By the end of it, the Fraternity has... what, the Lgion of Substitute Villains? They can't maintain control to the same degree they had. Meanwhile, the criminal underworld has been bucking against their level of power. The absence of athe big fish at the top if the food chain leads to one lucky sociopathic son-of-a-gun to bootstrap his way up to World's Most Wanted.

The comic takes place in an alternate version of the Marvel Universe and The DCU.

Throughout the comic, numerous paralells to Marvel and DC comic books are made. For example, many of The Fraternity's members are Expies of villains from either continuity: The Emperor is obviously The Mandarin, Fuckwit is supposed to be Bizzarro, Johnny Two-Dicks is The Ventriloquist, Mister Rictus is The Joker, and so on. Additionally, several Fraternity agents bear an uncanny resemblance to The Headsman, Darkseid, Reverse Flash, and Venom. When the Professor shows Wesley his secret, it's obviously supposed to be Superman's cape, and someone who is implied to be Superman himself is seen confined to a wheelchair. If that's not enough, the comic also makes reference to seven-dimensional imps, level nine intelligences, and the two actors Rictus killed are more or less outright named as Batman and Robin (especially considering how he taunts them as they die).

As an aside, this Troper also beleives that Wesley is the alternate universe's Deadpool. They both break the fourth wall, have similar senses of humor, identical fighting styles and weapon abilities, and even share the same fundamental character design.
- Some are a cross between both Marvel and DC, though. Wesley's dad is analogous to Bullseye and Deadshot. Emperor is also partly based on Ra's Al Ghul (refers to the Batman analogue as the detective). Frightener looks somewhat similar to Marvel's Carnage, but his name and the fact Rictus' team are mostly made up of Batman villain analogues could mean he's a Scarecrow analogue.

The Kid gets revenge.

What if Rictus was right and the kid he orphaned did train himself up for revenge? But chose to take out the Fraternity once he learned his revenge was denied...and then expose the entire Fraternity and bring back superheroes? Personally I'd pay Millar to write a sequel where something similar happens...or if Hit Girl chose to take out the Fraternity for some reason, either way both stories are ones that'd be great in my opinion.

Superfolks is the past of Wanted

When I read the book I realized that the setting of it seemed a lot like the setting of Wanted.

The Fraternity is fucked.

I realized (thanks to the Nemesis WMG above) that the Fraternity's strength has been severely reduced, due to the fact that Rictus and the Future might have killed everyone in the Professor's gang except Wesley and Fox, and even if there are any survivors around there probably are very few. Then there's the fact that the groups led by Rictus and the Future might have been completely exterminated or at least mostly destroyed. Leaving only Adam One and the Emperor with intact groups...and not able to assert the authority they once had over the Earth, plus they might not be able to cover things up as easy...then of course there's the fact of the kid Rictus orphaned, if he was right and that kid did train up to defeat him (thus making him their version of Terry McGinnis) he might find out about the Fraternity as he tries to find Rictus, and if he found out about the superheroes who were still alive, or the cape that the Professor kept...the superheroes might return and once that happens...the Fraternity would have to start running again. Alternatively...

The Fraternity will be destroyed in a Retcon.

Consider this, in 2011 the DCU got rebooted and the following year Marvel updated their titles (but not continuity) now since the Fraternity is a mix of both the DC and Marvel universes, perhaps some plan enacted by the Batman expy before he died or some higher force causes their warp to be undone...and then a modernized version of their past comes into existence. I don't really know what it's be like but I'm pretty sure Wesley would survive since he is their version of Deadpool and all.

The Xenomorphs actually exist in Wanted.

Since all the supervillains and heroes are analogues of DC and Marvel supervillains (or like in the Avian and the Emperor's case, merged into one), and X-Men villains the Brood are known as Xenomorph expies, it stands to reason the genuine articles actually exist there.

The Movie:

The only reason why the Fraternity's names apeared on the loom is because Sloan was not killed.

Sloan was clearly at least potentially corrupt. An uncorrupt man who's name came up would either kill himself or just ignore it. Thus the loom was trying to get rid of him before he went corrupt of his own accord. Because he did not die and sent the Fraternity on bogus missions the loom tried to get rid of them too.

That assumes the Fraternity's names actually appeared. Is there any reason for Sloan not to have forged termination records for the whole organization, in case of just such an eventuality? It's a win-win. Either they're loyal to the code, and kill themselves, or are disloyal and join him.
- This struck me as well, so we know that Sloan has been making up names from the Loom and here look bunch of orders for you all to die! ... Really? ... Really Really?

Sloan's name coming up on the loom was a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The names that come up are for people who haven't yet done anything wrong, but will. When Sloan's name came up, he hadn't done anything wrong, but since he was the only one to see it, he ignored it and started breaking the code. If his name hadn't ever come up, he would have remained loyal to the code, and the entire plot of the movie wouldn't have happened.

The world of Wanted is the much depleted Creation from Exalted.

The loom of fate is the self same loom as from Exalted, only rather stripped down. That self evidently stupid explanation about adrenaline is because the Fraternity refuse to believe that they are capable of magic. They are most likely the much weakened but still functional exaltations of the Five-Score Fellowship (Sidereals). Note the thematic similarity in the names, both are unified groups. If this is true then the real reason they go after some of these people may be to stop them exalting and unleashing dangerous magic rather than because they did anything bad.

The world of Wanted is The World of Darkness.

Related to the above. Before they realised that it sucked all of the potential drama from Exalted for some players by showing what would happen millennia later the official line was that Exalted was the prequel to World of Darkness. Now they sort of just fail to mention it. It this is true then The Fraternity spend some of their time vampire hunting, among other things.

The Old World of Darkness, specifically. The Fraternity are in fact just a face organization for the Euthanatos. Curving bullets are an application of the Entropy sphere.

The loom has no magical properties.

In the entire movie we're presented with exactly two examples of targets that deserve death: Fox's father's killer, and Sloan himself. Both could easily have been faked, and the names come from people with strong motives to lie. So there's no evidence that the loom was ever selecting the correct targets. All of the targets could easily have been selected by the Fraternity leaders themselves, for either good or bad reasons.

Expanding on this: there was never such a thing as the Fraternity. Sloan simply fed the assassins a story about a thousand-year-old secret order in the hopes that a few of them would believe it and work for him. The loom probably misses thousands of stitches a day- he just selects scraps of cloth which, coincedentally, bare the names of people he wants dead. Sloan's own name coming up was just a result of him getting careless with the other scraps.

At the end of the movie, Wesley doesn't kill Sloan.

Why? I don't know. But it does the bullet rewind thing, and instead of firing it he breaks the fourth wall. Throwing a Take That at the audience was important enough for him to cause some kind of time travel paradox, and later he's gunned down by Sloan because he forgot to take the shot.

Sloan only manages to kill Wesley because Wesley used himself as bait to line up the kill shot on Sloan for The Mother-Fucking Decoy!

The bullet curve is telekinesis.

They have to concentrate and drop into some altered state of consciousness, each of which are often prerequisites for using psychic abilities. It makes more sense than curving the bullets by anything but a ridiculously high-tech individually guided bullet RC system, and it's the only explanation this troper can think of for how the fly's wings got shot off without obliterating the wings or splattering the fly. The adrenal gland stuff was pure BS, it was really the pineal gland. Or something.

Jossed by, well, canon. It's pretty obtuse, but it's there. Sloan tells Wesley that, while concentrating in their altered state, they can exploit a natural part of how guns work that, simply, no one else knows about because everyone is too dead-set into the "bullets fly straight out of the gun" mentality.
- That's not a Joss; it's not mutually exclusive with the above WMG, and it contains no real explanation for how they curve the bullets in violation of the laws of physics. It could be that are telekinetic but are not aware of it, and their "explanation" which actually explains nothing is just the way to rationalize a seeming impossibility.

The movie is happening on Wesley's head.

(Theory was, believe it or not, on the Other Wiki

)

The body of Wanted can be interpreted as occurring only in Wesley Gibson's imagination, an escape from his dull, mundane, depressing life. Think Fight Club. The clues are:

Before his new life takes over, he's on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The ATM is talking to him; clearly not everything we are seeing is real.
His new life takes place in the same locations as his old, mundane one: The room over the railroad tracks from his apartment, the train he takes to work, even, near the end, in his office.
His new life still includes the same people as his old one: His boss, girlfriend, and best friend, keep re-appearing. He re-visits his apartment (to collect a gun), he sees his girlfriend with shopping bags from the room over the tracks, and in the final shot the bullet goes past those three people.
Much of the action is not realistic, it's fantasy action.
On his first assignment, he rides past the office where his target is, on the roof of the train. In the very next scene he rides past the same office, this time in the train, in a seat on his own. The first scene could be the fantasy, the second reality.
By the end of the film he is broke and back in his office at work. Then the fantasy kicks in again.
In the closing scene the fourth wall is broken, and the fantasy Wesley Gibson addresses the audience directly.

This may also be true of the comic.

Wanted is set in an alternate version of the DCU.

Its kind of hinted to be. The villains are all Captain Ersatz of DC villains and none of the heroes are ever named. Seltzer and Wesley are looking at a red cape from an angle we cant see meaning there might be a superman logo on the other side. In parallel 2 Wesley is fighting a character who looks very like Superman but we only see him from behind. The actors who used to be superheroes; One is in a wheelchair, obviousely meant to be Christopher Reeve who played Superman.