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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Are there many multiverse specific villains?
The Inheritors from Spider-Verse, the Anti-Monitor from DC Comics, Kang the Conquerer in some versions (since he time-travels a lot, his stories tend ton involve Multiverse). I am sure others can be found by looking around a bit.
Also, no offense intended, but while I agree that villains are an important element of the story and should be well fleshed out (heck, I am one of the first to criticize the MCU for its lackluster villains), I find your "villain guy" stand... flawed. Again, while villains are cool and I do love seeing their elaborate relationships with heroes, in the end the story is about the hero, and at the end of the day the villain is here to get his ass kicked at the end. There's a reason my favourite villainous moments tend to be their Villainous Breakdowns.
As for the Multiverse itself.... I got mixed feelings about it. I like the idea conceptually, as I'm a sucker for the idea of exploring universes with different approaches of the character, but I feel a lot of What If? tend to just use them as an excuse to kill off or turn evil character they wouldn't usually be allowed to. I tend to like alternate universes more when they just give us alternate takes on characters with different adventures that we can care about on the same level rather than worry about them being killed off later for shock value.
Edited by Theokal3 on May 9th 2019 at 10:23:51 AM
Multiverses introduce a problem similar to Opening a Can of Clones, wherein there are no permanent consequences to any characters because they can simply bring in replacements from other universes.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"![]()
Thing is, I can't FORCE myself to be more interested in the heroes than the villains. Like, for people who like heroes it's natural to love them. No effort required. It doesn't come naturally to me. There are certain main characters in certain shows or films or books that I adore. And when I find one I generally sing their praises.
But in the vast majority of cases, especially for super heroes, the pathos of a hero's journey doesn't resonate with me nearly as much as it does others.
As an example of something I watched recently. I cried while watching Rurouni Kenshin twice. Both of those times it was caused by a villain scene. I really like the cast of Kenshin, but I still wasn't as invested in them as I was with the show's best villains.
Edited by GNinja on May 9th 2019 at 8:29:48 AM
Kaze ni Nare!Why would the alt universe person want to leave their own universe to come live with people that are socially uncanny valley?
Forever liveblogging the Avengers![]()
Ask Gamora and Thanos in Endgame.
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Everyone appreciates media in their own way. In most heroic stories, the character focus is on the protagonists, but the driver of the plot is the antagonists. Thus, we have the trope Villains Act, Heroes React. This can lead to people feeling that the villains are more interesting than the heroes, but unless you are actively rooting for the villain to win, the heroes are the people we are generally stuck with for the duration of the franchise.
The MCU has done a great job of sidestepping this problem by giving us dynamic, flawed, evolving heroes: characters that we root for because we identify with their struggles and/or want to see them succeed because of who and what they are. The few recurring villains (Loki, and Thanos to some extent) are interesting because they have their own flaws, struggles, and/or quests. (This is, incidentally, why Thor and Thor: The Dark World are regarded poorly by some: the hero is not as dynamic as the heroes of other films. In turn, this is why Thor: Ragnarok is seen as the best film of that series despite having an equally generic villain.)
All of the above is how Marvel managed to pull off Civil War, in which the heroes are both protagonists and antagonists, yet we root for all of them. However, the driver of the conflict is still a villain (Zemo and, by proxy, Bucky).
Edited by Fighteer on May 9th 2019 at 4:48:16 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"In fairness Gamora ran off to unknown places rather than hang out with future weirdos
And Thanos was going to destroy the universe so it wasn’t like he was planning on hanging out with people either
Forever liveblogging the Avengers
Which universe, though? According to the way multiverse theory seems to work in the MCU, Thanos would only have destroyed the version of the universe that he time-jumped into (meaning ours). The one he left would have been fine; indeed, it would have branched off into a version where he mysteriously vanishes and never gets the Stones. Since he left that timeline, even restoring the Power and Soul Stones to it wouldn't change the fact that he's gone... I think.
This is why multiverse theory is so weird. Are there sixteen million-plus alternate realities in which Thanos wins, permanently? It takes away a little bit of the cheer if so. Or, are those just possible realities that never come to pass? When the Avengers take the Stones from their timeline (whether they return them or not), do the alternate futures thus created persist into Thanos winning and not being ultimately defeated? Does returning the stones collapse the alternate futures back into the main timeline? Are the timelines recursive, with the Avengers in each going back in time and creating new branches, ad infinitum? My head hurts.
Edited by Fighteer on May 9th 2019 at 4:58:22 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"He destroyed both quantum tunnels so he would have destroyed the main MCU universe slash timeline. And also wouldn’t have been able to go back anyway
Presumably, unless something happened to split the timeline, those realities won’t have come about
Edited by Bocaj on May 9th 2019 at 4:56:13 AM
Forever liveblogging the AvengersDoes the Thanos-disappeared-from-2014 timeline even exist anymore? What I took away from the Ancient One's exposition dump was that only removal of the Infinity Stones themselves can create alternate timelines, as they govern the flow of time.
Which would mean that the only persisting alternate timeline created by their time travel would be one where Loki escaped with the Tesseract in 2012, and all the others folded back into the main timeline once Steve returned the Stones to their rightful places.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!I want to see the deleted scene where Steve holds Jane Foster down and forcibly re-injects an Infinity Gem into her spine. I think we're already putting more thought into this alternate timeline thing than the Russos did.
I appreciate Endgame calling out Back to the Future for its time mechanics being garbage, but Endgame's time mechanics are also garbage.
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.I mean, nothing saying that the Infinity Stones need to be in the exact same situation they were left in, they just need to be there. So it's entirely possible he just popped into Asgard, handed the Aether and Mjolnir to a very confused Thor, and disappeared. They already changed that particular timeline anyways, nothing saying they need to maintain integrity anymore.
If they weren't trying to preserve integrity, there wouldn't be a point in returning the Gems in the first place. When the Ancient One demonstrated to Bruce that the timelines would branch apart if he took the Gems, his idea was that returning the Gems would keep the timelines together. The whole purpose of returning the Gems is to preserve the original flow of history.
Which. Uh. Doesn't. Work? Given everything else that they do to each timeline.
Also since changing the past doesn't change the future, nothing's stopping Cap from popping over to Vormir and snatching Black Widow from her fatal drop. But of course, that doesn't happen.
Point is, I don't think there was a lot of thought put into restoring the timelines beyond "And then it worked, the end." The intent is that Steve's journey fixed all the timelines and that's just the end of it. Everything else is just plot holes.
Edited by TobiasDrake on May 9th 2019 at 3:40:37 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.It’s worth noting that in Endgame we’re dealing with alternate timelines, not alternate universes.
Time will tell whether Mysterio’s multiverse has anything to do with Endgame’s timeline creating shenanigans, provided he’s not lying, but the way it’s explained it probably shouldn’t for consistency’s sake.
I think the mistake is looking at it as already forming an alternate timeline as soon as they arrive. As long as they don't tamper with the Infinity Stones, for all intents and purposes they're not in a "real" world, just an open sandbox where they can hypothetically fuck around however they want and everything will snap back to normal once they leave. It doesn't become a persistent, real timeline until they take an Infinity Stone, and returning the Stones to their proper place keeps everything running along smoothly. Taking anything else back to the present, such as Mjolnir, spare Pym Particles, or Thanos, is for all intents and purposes comparable to cloning an object.
Amusingly, this means that despite Banner's promise to return the Time Stone, the 2012 Ancient One's timeline branched out anyway due to Loki escaping with an entirely different Stone in the same Time Heist.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!![]()
That depends on whether "taking the Stones" means displacing them from the time period entirely, or just moving them at all. If it's the latter, then 2012 Lokiverse still exists (and probably relates to the TV series). Of course, the latter should be impossible to fix unless Steve can somehow put the stone back exactly where it was down to the very Planck length, but I assume we're not meant to think about that too hard.
Edited by Anomalocaris20 on May 9th 2019 at 5:59:03 AM
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!The Ancient One's concern was that Dormammu would yeet her reality, assuming the no-longer existent time (and space) stone(s) did it first. Cap coming back to return the stones nullifies said concerns. Loki escaping with the space stone in that world line may change where some of history there goes, but it has nothing to do with what she was concerned about.
If simply displacing the stones' location within their universe caused problems, the entire universe would've gone up in a giant ball of chaos the time Odin decided to stick one on Earth, or all the times it got moved around on Earth, or the time Peter took the Power Stone from its little containment chamber. Or literally every measurable increment of time during IW. The idea that simply moving the stones would cause things to fall apart on a structural level is just insane.
Edited by TheAirman on May 9th 2019 at 5:07:10 AM
PSN ID: FateSeraph | Switch friendcode: SW-0145-8835-0610 Congratulations! She/TheyAccording to the Russos:
A: Nope, not a time loop. Both Ancinet One and Hulk were right. You can't change the future by simply going back to past. But it's possible to create a different alternate future. It's not butterfly effect. Every decision you made in the past could potentially create a new timeline. For example, the old Cap at the end movie, he lived his married life in a different universe from the main one. He had to make another jump back to the main universe at the end to give the shield to Sam.
Edited by Gaon on May 9th 2019 at 3:04:49 AM
"All you Fascists bound to lose."Right. They're doing the "every change you make in the past creates a new branch of the timeline" version, in which case all of those jumps do exactly that, regardless of whether they return the things they take. The Ancient One is talking about the Infinity Stones and their protection of reality, not about multiverse theory.
Edited by Fighteer on May 9th 2019 at 6:09:32 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
