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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
And would introduce Caiera to set up Skaar and Hiro-Kala.
This is true but it did lead to Fantastic Four and X-Men characters being demphasised even in projects they could be used in. Cartoons, Video Games, even the comics tried to push the Inhumans over X-Men, so as not to advertised live action movie made by other companies.
Wolverine is just so famous and popular he's usually an exception.
Swapping out an FF character for a Thor one makes "sense" from that point of view.
Edited by dcutter2 on May 30th 2022 at 12:10:02 PM
I'm not sure that would work, a prequel wouldn't have the same effect as by its nature Hulk can't lead the revolution to defeat the tyrant and become the hero. It would just be stuck on the first third of the story without being able to progress past that.
Huh on further thought, its a shame we never saw the Grandmaster gutted like a fish. At least with the Red King we get an actual confrontation with him and he gets a suitably horrific fate for all his atrocities (he gets infected by the spikes, and immolated alive by his robot guards).
Meanwhile the Grandmaster is all quirky and funny so Hulk and Thor can't just smash him into chunky salsa in the end.
Bill is a cosmic character like Surfer so it is pretty thematically appropriate a switch.
Edited by slimcoder on May 30th 2022 at 4:04:57 AM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."I figure the switch was so that Bill could be introduced during Korg’s backstory instead of having to introduce a completely separate guy
Forever liveblogging the AvengersProbably. The film came out in 2010. The MCU was still an unproven pipe dream when it was being produced. The big push to de-emphasize mutants wouldn't start until years later, and barely affected characters on the Fantastic Four side of things.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Thinking about it, it says a lot about a character depending how they react to meeting another character.
Like when Bill meets Hulk he sounds almost in awe, indicating that he is so legendary that even the Gods speak of him. You can tell Bill respects him even though Hulk's tales are probably not particularly positive.
On the far end of that you have the Guardians, most prominently shown in the Guardians game where they react to anyone new with derision and mocking. When the subject of Darkhawk came they care more about making fun of his name and not mentioning his association with the Fraternity of Raptors a group of infamous space pirates in power armor. Or when they first hear the Avengers name and Quill's immediate reaction is to make fun of the name.
Its fun to think about.
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."![]()
Not really. The utterly ridiculous part was the Elementals being an Earth-destroying threat when they're just monsters that he solos with no issue. The multiverse part of his story was pretty believable.
Although I do hate the 616 retcon. It was a cute nod to the fans that Beck was lying since he gave the wrong universe number. Now he just happened to randomly guess the correct number out of infinite possibilities. I understand ditching 199999 because that number sucks, but you coulda picked anything else.
regulation pigeonThey had to use 616 though. 616 has been codified for ever as Marvel's "main" Earth and it just doesn't make sense to not use it for the MCU's "main" Earth when it finally got to that point. If anything the implication that the MCU calls itself Earth-616 because Strange swiped it from another Earth and just rolled with it is kinda funny in its own way.
As for contrivences....eh, these things aren't nearly as planned out as people like to hype them up as and these kind of things will happen because of that. One of those things you gotta roll with or you get caught up in things like Endgame outright calling out half the Infinity Stones being in New York at the same time, lol.
Edited by Watchtower on May 31st 2022 at 10:23:27 AM
By that logic every continuity would have to be set on Earth 616, because every story is set in its own "main universe". And 616 isn't supposed be a signifier of importance, it's a deliberately unspecial number meant to imply that the universe of the main comic book continuity is just one place in the vast multiverse and has no more cosmically ingrained significance than any other world.
The significance of the number is debatable. Alan Moore and Dave Thorpe have both been independently credited with the creation of the number. Supposedly, Moore picked it at random because he thought it was stupid that DC numbers its main universe as "Earth-1" and then counts up from there. So he just pulled a three-digit number out of his ass since that seemed more realistic.
However, the number 616 isn't a random, meaningless number. It's the Number of the Beast, bearing great significance in Christian mythology. Or, one of; Theologists argue whether 616 or 666 is the Number of the Beast. But that's a weird number to have just made up at random.
According to the Dave Thorpe credit, 616 being the Number of the Beast was the intention. Supposedly, Thorpe didn't like writing superhero comics, so when he came up with the Marvel Universe's designation, he assigned it the Number of the Beast out of spite. And then it just stuck.
So Earth-616 is either a completely arbitrary number that means absolutely nothing, or it's a signifier of how much one writer despised working for Marvel.
Edited by TobiasDrake on May 31st 2022 at 9:30:22 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.![]()
Every continuity has its own numbering system, yes. That's been made clear a lot of times. Even the spider-verse comic used different numbers for the same universe a lot of times.
The issue really seems to be that people want a movie franchise to be beholden to a guidebook they had no input in making.
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I actually thought 616 came from the Fantastic Four's debut in June 1961.
Personally, if I were to simplify the MCU's designation, I'd call it Earth-528, for Iron Man 1's release on May 2, 2008.
Edited by lbssb on May 31st 2022 at 10:09:44 AM
Disney100 Marathon | DreamWorks MarathonIt’s funny that a number that was maybe a sweet dunk on marvel and DC caught on with readers
Marvel tried to change it to universe 8 after secret wars modern but nobody liked it, not even many of the writers
Forever liveblogging the AvengersIt always seemed to me that 616 was to show that the main universe, in the grand scheme of things, was not special, it was not among the first, but it was not among the last either, it was just one more.
That is, out-universe, 616 is special, because is the "main", but in-universe, 616 is just one universe of many.
Unlike DC, in which the land of the protagonists was literally "land 1"
Edited by JoLuRo075 on May 31st 2022 at 10:44:24 AM
However, the number 616 isn't a random, meaningless number. It's the Number of the Beast, bearing great significance in Christian mythology. […] That’s a weird number to have just made up at random.
Honestly if any person would think of the Number of the Beast first when asked to pick a random number, it’d be Moore.
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Yeah, Earth-616's significance comes from the fact that it is... basically the protagonist of Marvel universes. Not in-story the single most important world in the multiverse, but the one that the story has always been about and therefore the one that we all care about.
And reusing the 616 designation to signify the main world of other continuities is like if you wrote a successful story with a protagonist named Jerry and then you made a spin-off of that story and declared that the new protagonist also had to be called Jerry because Jerry is what main characters are called in this franchise.
Adaptation, not spinoff. It's like if you filmed a feature-film adaptation of the successful story you wrote, and then insisted that the main character of the movie has to be named Jerry because the guy in the story was called Jerry.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.Therein lies the problem. Under the multiversal framework established by Marvel nothing is actually an adaptation, but a spin-off. The Marvel Multiverse (much like its predecessor DC multiverse) is essentially a very unique, metafictional concept that stretches the maximum of superhero comics to a quantum mechanics level: everything is true. Everything's a spin-off of the Marvel Universe, including all the fanfics people have, including the objective reality we're living in now reading superhero comics.
It's a very fun, very rich concept (Grant Morrison's entire illustrous cape comic career was essentially playing with it in various ways), but it only works if you adhere to the premise, so having multiple "earth-616" running around breaks the spell a lot. However, the multiverse has a way of correcting itself (it's one of the reasons that the concept gets so much mileage) so I think it's only a matter of time before some comic book writer explains that there are multiple multiverses and thus multiple 616 verses in some storyline that will probably involve a clash of 616 verses.
Edited by Gaon on May 31st 2022 at 11:39:37 AM
"All you Fascists bound to lose."There was a pre-existing convention to give adaptations their own universe numbers. And since the universe numbers are a way of distinguishing when you have different variations on the same character, that was helpful. Spider-Man 1, The Amazing Spider Man, and Spider-Man: Homecoming, are all adaptations of Earth 616's Spider-Man, but if you were to declare that that means each of them is set on their own Earth 616 then when the Spider-Men meet in No Way Home we've got a bunch of variants of the same guy who all have the same multiverse number.
