Iron Man taking the moral high ground on the dividing issue makes perfect sense. His decisions to do drastic things for well meaning reasons have catastrophically blown up in his face so taking a "good-over-law" approach is well in character for him.
However, after Stark Disassembled literally rebooted the character to a pre-Civil War state, Tony confirmed at the beginning of The Heroic Age that he stood by his actions (which were based on inaccurate math-based predictions) and would do it again.
So far the implication is Tony is having a mental breakdown because his best friend died.
As mentioned above Tony doesn't remember his actions from the first Civil War but was informed about them and as such has an outsiders look into how it went. He may have been willing to do it again but he also had to wake up to finding out how bad things had gotten as a result, making him a bit more mindful about how such things can turn out.
Also part of his problem was that he didn't trust the validity of the predictions. This becomes particularly valid in the Captain America issue that reveals that one of them was wrong. Not averted, not misread, just plain wrong. The woman arrested as a future participant in a HYDRA attack on the economy was not a HYDRA agent and no such plan existed.
Tony's stance in the comic might also be influenced by what happened in Force Works. Basically, Iron Man (under Immortus' influence) started a team that would use predictions of the future made by Scarlet Witch and stop problems before they happened. Tony might have been trying to avoid what he did in the past when he was controlled by Immortus.
Kamala going against her idol also makes perfect sense - not only being a superhero nerd would have her remember the first Civil War, she saw first-hand what a Well-Intentioned Extremist can do through the events in Pleasant Hill.
Her title continues its narrative's themes by having implications of profiling and subsequent community damage giving Kamala doubts.
It also continues the more general 'coming of age' theme of the title by having Kamala discover that her role-model has feet of clay.
Isn't Marvel Universe timeline... you know... fluid? I mean, between all possible timelines and all possible universes, how the heck can they tell what they're seeing is even going to happen in their timeline? In fact, it CAN'T happen because of the very premise - but you can't even tell it WOULD.
It's so fluid in fact that even the past is constantly changing. Carol was told this by Galactus in The Ultimates (2015) but she successfully convinced herself that that cannot be (the implication being that if she accepted it she would Go Mad from the Revelation).
Yes but this isn't the first time people have acted to avert predicted disasters. Time being fluid serves mainly to allow bad futures to be averted without causing time paradoxes and Ulysses' visions seem to be predicting most probable outcomes.
Tony tries getting through to Carol by asking her if she would accept being imprisoned if Ulysses had a vision saying she should be, only to get a Non-Answer. He recognizes that moral debates between heroes never end well and that the current conflict is much like the last Civil War because it is turning into a conflict of absolutes, where he lacked any awareness of a grey area between the two views, and is attempting to convince Carol that things aren't so black and white owing to his own experiences.
Carol leading the "Change the future" side fits continuity perfectly: she already did something like this in Ms. Marvel #5, back in the seventies. Back then, the prediction of doom came from her 7th sense, and she successfully fought to screw destiny in a similar way than in the modern crossover.
Logically if Ulysses' power truly works by extrapolating from the now, and Carol (and others) reacting to his prophecies becomes more and more common, so getting into the datapool he is using to predict, that would result in his predictions becoming more and more self fulfilling and so less and less reliable. Meaning Carol's pre-crime plans are doomed to fail.
It's only just occurred to me that Ulyssus is the living embodiment of Never Trust a Trailer. The problem with his powers is that they show him a glimpse of the future, with no context or how he got there, just that one scene. How many times have we incorrectly guessed at how a movie will go from a scene in a trailer, how many different theories have we made from these tiny glimpses, that the trailer do fit, even though the film is something else entirely? Not only do we have the self fulfilling prophecy issue, but it has that level of inaccuracy as it's origin.
The cover for issue #3 features a rampaging Hulk standing atop the dead bodies of the Avengers. The Hulk never appears in the issue, and nobody is killed but Banner. Hulk never appears because Hawkeye kills Banner before the Hulk could rampage. The cover was an averted future, where the Hulk did rampage and kill the Avengers.
Except Bruce was confirmed to be depowered. It was physically impossible for him to turn into the Hulk, let alone rampage. Amadeus Cho even references this by faking a rampage on the Triskellion, instead spelling out "Fooled You" as a middle finger to Carol and her side
It's ultimately revealed that this was Steve Rogers's fault.
The clarity of Ulysses' visions seems inconsistent the Spider-Woman tie-in makes it seem like he's somehow acquiring a timeframe for return they will come true. Am I missing something or how is he acquiring this information outside conveniently seeing notable landmarks?
How was Ulysses' vision about that woman being Hydra and bombing the place completely wrong? Was it another Stevil plant? His power is supposed to be diagnostic, meaning there has to be some grain of data that leads to the conclusion "a Hydra agent is transporting a bomb into a vital area with a briefcase" yet there's no connection whatsoever. Where did that come from? Why was this the only vision that's wholly wrong? Why isn't this used as an example of their reliability?
Every other team splits down the middle, but the Guardians are all solidly Team Carol, to such an extent that they don't even wait to hear the other side? I could maybe buy that for the rest of the team, but it's seriously out of character for Kitty Pryde and Ben Grimm. Moreover, the reason they all side with Carol is that they all know her because she spent some time working with them not so long ago, which is absolutely true. It's just that when she was Tony's replacement on the team, so it's not like they don't know him either.
As it turns out, nearly all of them except Star-Lord and MAYBE Kitty (she's shown looking doubtful) turn on Carol the moment they found out Thanos is on Earth and she didn't mention it to them. (Gamora openly attacks Carol.)
The Uprising Storm were dangerously close to spreading their brand of chaos to the Civil War were it not for Hercules and other heroic gods.
Frighteningly, someone has taken advantage of this: HYDRA Captain America, whose False Flag Operation is what sets things off.
So have the Hand, assisted by a resurrected Daniel Drumm, whom managed to take Banner's corpse for their undead army.
As well as Thanos who escaped from his cell at the Triskelion.
Long story short: Superhero Civil War = Field Day for Supervillains.
Everything about Ulysses. The horrifying visions he keeps getting are enough to drive an average person insane, let alone one recently transformed into an Inhuman. And we don't even know that we have seen every vision he's had. What if something much bigger is at hand and in order to deal with it, he's seen that things have to take the current course... meaning Rhodey was always supposed to die?
America Chavez shows Captain Marvel a reality where Ulysses got his powers earlier. Doctor Doom kidnapped him, mass produced him, and took predictive justice to its logicalconclusion.
When the heroes go to confront Bruce Banner, the appearance of all of them causes him to get stressed out. This is later worsened when Beast hacks into his systems and discovers that he has been injecting himself with dead Gamma cells to keep the Hulk at bay. This stresses out Bruce even more, and the whole situation ends with Hawkeye killing Bruce with a special arrow Bruce designed to kill him, should he ever turn back into the Hulk. The horror? All the evidence points to Bruce not hulking out. While he gets called out for not letting the other heroes help him with his experiments, the fact that he hasn't hulked out in almost a year seems to indicate that they were working. Later, at Clint's trial, he explains that, although he took his shot from a far-away tree, his eyesight is extremely good, and he could see Bruce's eyes flickering green. We immediately cut to an up-close panel of Bruce's face - his eyes are brown. Bruce Banner likely died for no other reason than his friend's paranoia.
How about the possibility that they may have gotten the wrong Hulk, with both Cho and Jennifer around. It looks like Carol actually considers this when she confronts Cho with an army, and he trolls her over it. Still, it's a scary thought.
Other heroes have always been distrusting of Bruce even when he was the Hulk so it makes sense why he wouldn't tell them. After all, they rarely let him explain himself.
Captain America: Steve Rogers #5 reveals something even worse: the entire incident, including the vision, was a False Flag Operation staged by the HYDRA Captain America to hide the fact he is HYDRA from being exposed by Ulysses, when they sent Bruce the data on Gamma radiation he was using. In other words, HYDRA exploited the nature of Ulysses' visions to get the heroes to kill the Hulk for them, all the while protecting HYDRA Cap's true nature.
The blast that Vision shot at Kitty Pryde during the battle in Issue #5 was strong enough to blow up the Guardian's ship. So, what would have happened if she hadn't phased through it?
The sole reason that Tony survived his final fight with Carol was due to experiments that he had done on himself. Think about it for a minute. Without his actions, Carol would have killed him.
Meanwhile, she did almost kill him...and is seen as a big time hero. That is messed up and speaks to the mindset of the citizens in the Marvel Universe. This also brings the treatment of the X-Men and mutants in genera, as well as the events of Dark Reign, into a new and even more disturbing light...
This makes Kamala's What the Hell, Hero? in the first issue of Champions (2016) even more poignant - this is not how heroes are supposed to be. At all.
Ascended Fridge Horror: The epilogue to the story has Steve Rogers talking to Tony's comatose body about all of the things that he planned for the world and taunts him by saying that he wishes he could wake up to stop him from putting mutants and Inhumans into internment camps, destroying the superheroes and taking over the White House with help from the Chitauri army. Basically, Tony and Carol's war was the best thing to happen to Steve!
