YMMV / War of the Realms

• Angst? What Angst?: At the end of Issue 4 and the Spider-Man tie-in, Thor doesn't seem to show any reaction upon hearing the news that his parents are dead. Given they're not actually dead, and also that death is even cheaper in Thor than super hero comics in general, he might be just too used to this kind of thing happening.
• Arc Fatigue: Some readers have been tired of the constant build-up the story had been given since 2013. By then, a lot of fans just wish for Malekith to be taken out ASAP.
• Archive Panic: There are tons of tie-ins and mini-series, with just about every part of the franchise outside of X-Men ^note not counting the Uncanny X-Men tie-in featuring the New Mutants and Spider-Man ^note Miles Morales, however, appears in the Journey into Mystery tie-in having their main titles involved. Even Squirrel Girl, a series that has actively avoided being roped into these events (even Secret Wars (2015) barely touched them), is getting a (purposefully self-contained, for the regular readership's sake) tie-in.
  • In an interesting case, despite the huge scope and effectively being a return to Marvel involving everything into a big crossover, many fans are actually quite excited since it's a balls-to-the-wall slugfest between good and evil, with an epic scale missing in most storylines this size.
• Awesome Moments: Being set across all ten realms, and on a global scale in Earth's case, the series is littered with them, from Daredevil becoming the God Without Fear, wielding Heimdall's powers, to Loki carving his way out from inside his father with Heimdall's sword, which Daredevil ricocheted down Laufey's throat, to Spider-Man proving worthy of commanding the League of Realms by winning a battle without spilling any blood by showing some genuine kindness to a commander of the Angels of Heven who was a Punch-Clock Villain and whose lover had been allowed to be murdered by Malekith by the Queen of the Angels as Malekith wanted to know what killing an Angel felt like, to more or less everything that Thor does in the series. Edited highlights include slaughtering a literal mountain of Frost Giants with a broken hammer and one arm, gaining the wisdom required to end the war by spending days on Yggdrasil... which is now in the sun, returning to the battlefield with a global scale storm that can be heard across the realms, demonstrating his Guile Hero smarts by exploiting the inherent flaw in the definition of Malekith's spell that prevents any but Thor going to confront him at Stonehenge (he enlists his past self, future self, and Jane Foster wielding the Ultimate Mjolnir), and finally takes him out.
  • Notable is a spell by Doctor Strange causing almost all the heroes to be accidentally teleported away. Thus New York falls? No. Because it still has one last set of heroes to defend it: The Fantastic Four.
    Narration: Laufey the King of the Frost Giant is learning what Galactus learned before him. That New York City has all the giants it needs.
  • The Warrior Angels of Heven meet their match: The Dora Milaje.
    Okoye: There is no word for "grovel" in our language. But there are 23 different words for "fight." And you are about to hear them all. Welcome to Wakanda.
  • The Punisher, the last character one would expect to see amid a battle of gods and demons, not only holds his own but leads an entire elf army toting machine guns.
• Badass Decay: Odin, once the almighty and omnipotent All-Father of Asgard, gets unceremoniously axed by a group of generic Dark elf mooks. Justified since he's yet to fully recover from his battle with Mangog and lost most of his power, but still embarrassing nonetheless. Fortunately, he's shown to be alive and well by Issue 2.
• Catharsis Factor: By issue #6, it's absolutely satisfying to see Malekith get beaten the crap out of by the various Thors, having his own arm chopped off with the same axe he used to remove Thor's arm, and meets his end getting ripped to shreds by his own hounds. This is especially so after seeing him constantly get away with the horrible shit he had done over the years.
• Character Rerailment:
  • Champions #5 sees Cyclops starting to go down the path to becoming a responsible leader once again, after years of him being characterized as a ruthless Anti-Hero post-House of M.
  • A lot of fans were pleased with Cullen Bunn's portrayal of Eddie Brock in the Venom tie-in as a proactive but rage-driven antihero who is out to protect innocents, having gotten frustrated by Donny Cates' overly maudlin iteration of the character.
• Funny Moments: While the rest of the comic and the event as a whole are fairly morbid, War of the Realms Strikeforce: The Land of Giants brings a bit of levity. Spider-Man is given an Asgardian helmet by Logan that allows him to talk to animals, which he discovers when he suddenly understands his pegasus mount. Problem is, to anyone else it sounds like Spidey is just making animal noises. It then cuts to Iron Fist and Luke Cage sharing a bewildered glance.
  Spider-Man: Neigh. Neeeeeighh. Whinny. Neeeeeeigh. Neigh. Whinny. Neeeeeigh!
  Luke Cage: Seriously, what the @#&%?
  • Even better, it was complete luck that the helmet did anything; Logan admits shortly before this that he only picked it out for Spidey because it was the most ridiculous-looking helmet in the armory.
  • Hildegarde's reaction to Wakanda: "You knew this place existed, Sif! Yet we've been living in the Bronx?!"
    • Hildegarde is pretty priceless throughout the whole event. Her reaction to meeting Spider-Man for the first time: "Gods, what manner of Svartalfheim monster is this? We should kill it before it lays its eggs!"
  • Pretty much all of the Giant-Man tie-in series, in which Freya recruits Scott Lang (Ant-Man), Erik Josten (Atlas), Raz Malhotra (Giant-Man) and Tom Foster (Goliath) for an undercover mission to infiltrate the Frost Giants New Jotunheim and kill Ymir. As such they have to masquerade as Frost Giants and pretend to fit in. One early moment is their initial attempt to match the size of the Frost Giants, which are approximately 65 feet tall. Scott, Erik and Raz have no problem growing to this height. Tom initially can only grow 25 feet, leading to this exchange:
    Raz: Maybe we can pretend we’re traveling with a Frost Giant child?
    Scott: Yeah, you know- just three Frost Giant dads sightseeing with our one tiny son. I love it. Let’s go.
  • While calling on the realms to unite against Malekith, She-Hulk is sent to rally the Dwarves. However, at this point in time, She-Hulk is in a particularly savage incarnation of herself that is much closer to her cousin, especially in terms of eloquence. Her speech, in its entirety: "Big war. Dwarves follow Hulk. Dwarves smash!" The Dwarves, naturally, are on the brink of tears over such eloquent and inspiring words.
  • When Past Thor turns up for the final confrontation with Malekith, Old King Thor's immediate response is, "What, was the frog not available?" (Referencing Throg, the Frog of Thunder, who wields a teeny hammer made from a chip of Mjolnir, and has all the associated powers).
  • After the battle, Odin hugs all three Thors. Their combined expressions of utter bafflement are both a little depressing and absolutely hilarious.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Kamala Khan's reunion with Cyclops in Champions #5,^note The former member of the Champions was teen Cyclops, one of the time-displaced X-Men, who existed as an independent character to the adult Cyclops. He returned to the past in Extermination, but when he did so all the original adult X-men suddenly got the memories of their time-displaced teen selves. It is adult Cyclops who makes this reunion with Ms. Marvel, but he makes clear that he has all the memories and emotional links of the teen guy that used to be on the team. a major source of relief for her since things were going down the gutter prior to the invasion.
  • War Scrolls issue #2 reveals the origin behind Loki's iconic horned headwear. When he was a kid, Freyja told him of how many of Asgard's heroes all wore horns as a symbol of their heroism and encourages Loki to go on the path of becoming a hero himself. The issue then ends with a picture of Loki trying to wear Odin's helmet, with the rest of his adopted family smiling with him.
  • The same issue has Billy Kaplan wakeup to Teddy. Their apartment has a picture of the group selfie the Young Avengers all took, the one that has Young Loki on it. Loki set up a meeting with Billy Kaplan disguised as Kate Bishop. Like her, he says that being a Young Avenger was the best time of his life. After Billy confronts him with social media evidence that Kate is somewhere else he leaves to fight in the war, but agrees that being on the Young Avengers, in spite of Loki joining under false pretenses by stealing his younger self's life, attempting to drive Billy to suicide and steal his powers, was also the best time of his life.
  • The New Agents of Atlas issue #3 has the Agents and their reluctant partners put aside their differences during a Spam brunch.
• I Knew It!: Many fans had guessed correctly that Daredevil's strange starfield effect in the first teaser meant that he had Heimdall's former powers.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A number of readers are only interested in the event because of War of the Realms: Journey into Mystery, which is written by the McElroy Brothers and their father.
• Like You Would Really Do It: Odin and Loki’s deaths in Issue #1, and Valkyrie's in Issue #2. Because the two most killed off and resurrected figures in Thor’s franchise are going to be dead and gone forever. Surely enough the latter's case, Marvel announced a new Loki series spinning out of the event a week after issue #1 was released with a Valkyrie series being announced prior, while Odin returned in the 2nd issue of the series itself.
  • Except the new Valkyrie series is focused on Jane Foster, not Brunhilde.
• Memetic Badass: The day it was revealed that The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl had a tie-in to the story, many people had already invoked her legendary status, stating she would end the event in one issue. The creative team to the book had even joked that she could have stopped all of those other previous events if her title was used in them.
• Moral Event Horizon: Laufey finally crossed the line when he brutally kills Loki by biting him in half and eating him.
• Narm Charm: Behold the Iron All-father! And then read the comments under the image you see.
  reviewer: The Iron All-Father is the dumbest, most comic book thing ever. I absolutely love it.
• Nightmare Fuel: Even if you don't think that Loki is permanently dead, his apparent "death" in the first issue is disturbing: After saving his adoptive mother, Freya, from Laufey, Laufey grabs him and eats him in front of her. He isn't clean about it either. Even Ghost Rider is left wanting to puke.
  • And the Thor tie-in shows that Loki is still alive even as he's still inside Laufey's stomach, meaning that he's slowly being digested alive.
  • Speaking of the Thor tie-in in issue 12, the King Loki makes a return. Remember Gorr the God Butcher and how he was near-unstoppable? King Loki now has Gorr's powers up to eleven, and easily kills Ego the Living Planet.
• Shocking Moments: The series goes from nought to awesome in the blink of an eye, with moments such as Daredevil becoming the God Without Fear, inheriting Heimdall's sword and powers and going barefisted with giants; Thor being attacked by more or less every Frost Giant on Jotunheim and slaughtering every single one that comes at him, ending up standing on a literal mountain of corpses, sending rivers of blood flowing from the battle site; Thor's return to the battle with a global scale storm following him; and finally, Present Thor gaining the wisdom to defeat Malekith's armies after spending days on Yggdrasil... in the middle of the sun, exploiting the fact that Malekith's spell on Stonehenge allows only Thor to come and rescue Odin and Freyja by summoning his axe-wielding younger self, his King Thor self from the far future, and getting back-up in the form of Jane Foster wielding the Ultimate Mjolnir, which is disintegrating, but intact enough to wield for one last battle, while Malekith wields a magically supercharged Venom symbiote as his version of All-Black the Necrosword, backed up by a small army of Spider-Dark Elves and his Wild Hunt.
• Spoiled by the Format: Loki's death arguably lost some dramatic effect when Marvel announced a new series featuring the character a week after the first issue was released.
• Tearjerker: Loki's death in issue #1, with Freyja crying out in horror as she watched her adopted son get brutally murdered saving her. In War Scrolls issue #2, both Wiccan and Hulkling see his death on television, and proceed to mourn him as well.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • Sabretooth's Face–Heel Turn has made a quite a few fans cheesed off after enjoying his time as a hero.
  • Valkyrie's death has angered a few fans because they believe they're trying to kill her off and replace her with a variation of the Marvel Cinematic Universe incarnation. It got worse when it was announced that Jane Foster will replace Brunnhilde as the new Valkyrie and replaces Freyja as the new All-Mother in the new solo series, which doesn't even help that Jason Aaron is the co-writer with Al Ewing of said new solo since he's being accused by fans of using Jane as a Creator's Pet during his previous run with her.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Of all the tie-ins announced so far, most have at least some passing relation to Thor or Asgard in general (The Avengers, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Uncanny X-Men... even Venom has some connection due to Gorr the God Butcher's use of a symbiote weapon in God of Thunder). The announcement that The Punisher would not only be involved but get his own miniseries came as quite a shock, seeing as Frank Castle typically deals with street-level crime and has had little to no interaction with Thor and his supporting cast through his career.
  • War of the Realms: War Scrolls sees Daredevil step up to defend Hell's Kitchen from Malekith's forces. While Daredevil's inclusion in the story is somewhat odd given his history, it's the fact that Howard the Duck will have his own backup story depicting his POV of the battlefield that seems the most peculiar.
  • Nobody also expected the New Agents of Atlas who appeared in the Protectors storyline from Totally Awesome Hulk are gonna be appearing with Amadeus, Silk, and Shang-Chi joined by new additions such as Wave, Sword Master, Aero, Luna Snow and Crescent, with the latter two being Canon Immigrants from the Marvel Future Fight mobile game.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: After all the crap Freyja had pulled on Loki since Agent of Asgard, heck if you count Kid!Loki in the character's continuity since Gillen's Journey into Mystery, a lot of fans are rolling their eyes at her grief when Loki gets eaten by Laufey.