johntfs

Black Muslims are very much a thing. Killmonger is very smart and very skilled. We can assume he was able to infiltrate the 10 Rings because of that. If he doesn't save Tony, he can still use the evidence against Stane to give Tony's friends/family justice for Tony's death and maybe get in an with them that way. Saving Tony was basically an opportunity for Killmonger. If it didn't pan out maybe there'd be different opportunities later. Tony Stark is probably one of the most famous people in the world. His biography is likely also well known - like the fact that he tragically lost his parents in a car accident. "I also lost my dad in a senseless tragedy" is a way for Killmonger to get closer to Tony. In the Black Panther movie we're told things about Killmonger. One thing this version of "What If?" did was show how he was a smart, manipulative bastard instead of just telling us about it. As for T'Chaka, maybe it was guilt or just a non-reaction reaction. Sure Wakanda isn't Afghanistan, but Killmonger is still a smart, manipulative bastard who is very much wired into and familiar with the various power player within the US military-industrial-intelligence complex and figure he knows with buttons to push with them to get the results he wants.

1. As noted below the Ten Rings had multiple ethnic group and in our real world we had John Walker as American Taliban. Also, personally saving the billionaire mid-attack nets more gratitude than making a phone call to Army security. 2. "Why yes, Mr. Stark. My father was killed by his brother, who is the King of Wakanda and I am a member of that royal family with a huge grudge against the king. And figure everything I do here in your company will be service to that grudge." You can why "Gangs really suck" makes for the better answer there, right? 3. In the afterlife he did. There's no indication he did anything about the guilt he felt while he was alive, though. And I think Erik Stephen's mother went and died in prison but I could be wrong. 4. In the real world where we all live the USA spent not quite 20 years in what country after invading it because it was harboring Osama and al-Quaeda?

Elvis and some renegade undead Skrulls could have been behind everything, but the easiest explanation is that Killmonger found evidence of the plot to kidnap/kill Tony and decided that the gratitude of a billionaire arms manufacturer would be very much worth having. And once he saved Tony, he found other evidence that implicated Stane.

I think we should give considerably weight to what the Ancient One said. For the universe to survive Dormammu, Stephen Strange needed to be the Sorcerer Supreme. In our universe that was accomplish by the damage to his hands. But why? Because the loss of his ability to do surgery, to be Doctor Stephen Strange, exploded the foundation of Strange's life and sent him spiraling into despair and desperation. Strange needed to arrive at the Ancient One's door desperate and broken, with no other place to go. And that's what happened in the main MCU. Here things were a little different. Here, Strange saw he was pushing Christine away and presumably decided to work on that, to work on their relationship so they could stay together. So, if he crashes and loses his surgeon's skill... it'll be tough, but with Christine's love and support he'll get through it. Maybe end up teaching at a medical school. Maybe meet with Tony Stark to get some new robot hands. What he won't do is launch a crazed, desperate search into every more weird. esoteric treatments that lead him to the Ancient One in a state of mind that would allow for him to become the new Sorcerer Supreme. So, since he was happy and fulfilled with Christine, she had to die. But she didn't necessarily have to stay dead. If Strange had pursued a course of trying bring her back to life, that would have been okay. I mean, yeah, it could also lead to some creepy, fucked up stuff (Christine as a vampire or Frankenstein monster or zombie-thing), but it probably wouldn't have destroyed the universe. The point is that Strange wasn't attempting to bring Christine back to life, he was trying to undo her death. If Christine doesn't die, then Strange doesn't become the Sorcerer Supreme then Dormammu eats the universe. So, yeah, Christine's death really was kind of a "load-bearing wall" of the universal house. When Strange destroyed/undid that wall, the house/universe collapsed.

One of the big points of "What If?" is "What if shit went really, really wrong in this story you remember?" So, yeah, it's going to be dark more often than not. Besides, this episode is set up for a "happy" ending. Thanos will murder Peter, T'Challa and Cape Scott, get the Mind Stone and snap everyone except himself cure of the zombie curse so he'll have plenty of people to eat.

That "do-over desire" seemed like a two-way street to me. Based on "The Winter Soldier" It seemed more like Peggy led a "good enough" life but she still always carried a "Steve Rogers sized" hole in her heart, just like Steve had "Peggy-sized" hole in his own heart. Steve going back to her at the end of Endgame wasn't so much about him deciding that he deserved to be happy. It was him deciding that both he and Peggy deserved to be happy. If Peggy had described her post-Steve marriage as "the best thing ever" Steve wouldn't have done what he did because he did love Peggy and did want her to be happy. Bringing it back to this episode, if this Dr. Strange had gone for some heavy-duty grief counseling, managed to process Christine's death in a more healthy, less universe-destroying way and maybe ended up being with somebody else, that doesn't somehow make it a good thing that Christine got killed in the first.

Sure, but it's an "entitled dickdom" with which we can empathize. Over in the MCU TV thread on Something Awful, a couple of people have chimed in how this was a hard episode to watch because they'd lost people (a wife and a fiance). And one of them noted that:

Because that just makes him an entitled dick. And the end consequence is Dormammu eats the universe, the end. The thing here is that this Dr. Strange, was, in many ways, a better person than Strange Prime. He opened his heart to another person, Christine, whom he loved. However, in the movie, Strange lost his hands (or at least his ability to do surgery) . Because of that he lost his sense of self. He had to absorb the idea that some things couldn't be fixed. That he couldn't fix them. He became Doctor Strange, Sorcerer Supreme, taking up the skills of magic to replace his skills as a surgeon. That didn't happen here. Here, Strange lost Christine and he simply augmented his amazing skills as a surgeon with his amazing skills as a sorcerer. He never had to accept the idea that some things couldn't be fixed. So he kept "fixing" Christine's death until he broke/destroyed the universe.

Sharon's "pre-villain" role was to be Steve's contact/helper-monkey and a Carter girl he wanted to bone now that Peggy was too old and gross for that sort of thing. Her getting to be a villain with her own agenda is in fact way more interesting than that. As for Betty, it was a little difficult to believe Liz Tyler as her being in a relationship with Mark Ruffalo's Banner (though I had no trouble seeing her with Edward Nortan's Banner). That said, Liv Tyler would make for an interesting ex for Ruffalo's Banner in the upcoming She-Hulk series. Just lots of: Betty: You dumped me for your superspy supermodel team-mate, you big green asshole. How did you think I'd take it?

Even if she believed absolutely that this was one of Loki's schemes, it doesn't change the fact that Thor was murdered by a human. Plus he was murdered by a human with specialized technology. Recall how Odin treated Jane in Thor 2. That's probably the default attitude Asgardians have toward humans. They didn't (and won't) have Thor going "No, no they're much different" in this universe.

The humans helped find Thor's killer who was another human who had killed Thor out of thoughtless spite. Thor was the beloved crown prince of Asgard. He'd been getting away with stuff for years because he was the beloved prince of Asgard. And one of these fucking upjumped monkeys killed him as a tangent pursuing vengeance against people completely unrelated to Thor. In the first Thor movie Sif and the Warriors three tried to stand against the Destroyer to protect people Thor cared about. They did that because Thor cared about those people and they (Sif and the 3) cared about Thor. Not so here. Here, Earth is the place whose people murdered Thor. Plus it's a place rife with weird technology and powers - an obvious threat to the peace of the nine realms.

In point of fact they did not cheat. It was established in the actual MCU universe that Iron Man 2, Hulk and Thor happened very close together - within the same week. There's even a tie-in comic called, wait for it, "Fury's Big Week" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fury's_Big_Week

With Shatner playing Denny Crane, damn right:

Wasn't that the one where the Winter Soldier almost killed Black Widow? Lake Bell makes me happy because she's awesome as Poison Ivy in Harley Quinn. Also with her showing up and James Spader having appeared as Ultron, it gives me hope that we'll get more Boston Legal peeps into the MCU. God-dammit Disney! Give us William Shatner as MCU Denny Crane already!

This is all fan-wank but maybe in this reality Hank went so far as to keep Hope out of his company just in case she tried to replicate his work. So, she joined SHIELD - in part because she knew he'd hate it (recall per the Ant-Man movie that Hank and Hope had a pretty bad relationship). Pym probably demanded that Fury reject Hope and Fury told him to fuck off. Eventually she got killed as an agent of SHIELD. By who/what? It doesn't really matter. Hank Pym, who was always probably one bad day from going supervillain after his wife disappeared into Quantum Hell (while on a SHIELD-requested mission), finally had the really bad day of his daughter dying. So, he re-dedicated his life to wreaking vengeance on the organization and people. Due respect to the previous poster, but I didn't need or want The Watcher to pop in with exposition/flashback about Hope. What we got worked fine. I probably should have enabled CC because for a minute I kept think that Black Widow was yelling "It's all about Hulk!" and I couldn't for the life of me figure out how it was about Hulk. Because it wasn't.

Michael Douglas, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner, Clark Gregg, Mark Ruffalo, Jaime Alexander and Tom Hiddleston. I don't think the problem was expense. Maybe ScarJo just didn't want to voice a cartoon or there was a schedule conflict or something.

I don't think she saw Luz arrive initially. Five just saw the door Eda was using to get her human garage and decided to take a chance. She saw Luz and recognized her as a human, but that was it, I think.

I don't know. Tom Hardy-style Bane is pretty fun in Harley Quinn. Meanwhile, Yondu didn't go straight. It's more that due to T'Challa, the Ravagers are more like the bunch from Leverage than just asshole criminals.

As a guy who lives not that far from Nathan Bedford Forrest State Park, that's sometimes not entirely true...

They're in the universe where T'Challa became Star-Lord. Beyond that we really don't know. Maybe the Collector grabbed the shield while Cap was in the ice. Perhaps Ragnorak came early to Asgard which is why the Collector also had Hera's helmet and Thor's hammer.

Unless that inspires Thanos to take on a heroic quest... for the Infinity Stones so the "screwing" can be undone...

In the actual real world that we live in, Leonardo DiVinci designed airplanes and helicopters centuries before they could be built. I have no problem believing that Howard Stark had already designed something like the Iron Man suit. The problem was that there was no way to power it with 1940s technology. But with the Tesseract it would work. And figure Steve got to stay because Steve volunteered to test the thing for Stark. And the brass agreed because if it worked, great. If it killed Steve they were out a 90 pound asthmatic who couldn't fight instead of a soldier who could.

Well, of course they're not a full departure. The point of these stories are "What If... this other stuff happened to these characters you're fans of?" Not "What If these characters you're fans of died or left the story and you watched new characters that you don't know or care about. There's a genre of historical/fantasy/science-fiction called alternate history. And it's very much like this. Harry Turtledove's How Few Remains posits a South victorious in the Civil War and now a second war between North and South (allied with Britain and France). In that novel's case the turning point was "What if Lee's battle plan for Antietam had not been lost by his courier and recovered by Northern soldiers? (which is what happened in the actual battle)" People like myself who read those stories want to read about the alternate paths those historical figures might have taken, not have them be replaced by authorial creations occupying the same basic roles.

I think you're really supposed to be getting Lovecraft vibes Of course her squeeing is "out of character." She's not the same character. She's had different stuff happen to her. Steve Rogers was sickly, small, thin and weak - a 90 pound asthmatic. The Super-Soldier Serum pushed him into near-maximum human physical potential in all categories. Peggy Carter, on the other hand, was already very well trained and probably in as good a physical shape as a woman of her body size and structure could be. So the SSS pushed her all the into being a full-on superhuman. Figure when Carter fought Nazis, she relied on speed, cunning and cleverness. After the SSS she gets to cut loose. Also, note that while Steve-Cap does a lot of acrobatics/shield trick-shots and the like, Captain Carter is just straight-up killing the shit out of the Nazis in a fairly "no-nonsense" manner, squee or no squee.

I took Luz's look more as "Oh no! Hooty's, stupid cheesy bullshit is going to ruin my chance with Amity!" Luz wasn't annoyed. She was terrified. We don't know many details about her life on Earth but we can infer a few things. For her school projects Luz did big, involved productions which frequently involved live animals and insects. Luz was 14 when the show started, so even by then she'd probably had a few crushes on people. Luz probably tried to act on them with some big, cheesy involved production that either scared them away or made her a school-wide laughing stock. The only person Luz seems attached to from Earth is her mother. She doesn't mention friends, teachers or anyone else. Aside from missing her mother the main reason Luz cited for wanting to re-open the portal was "that's how books like this always end." It was only after coming to the Boiling Isles that Luz has formed strong personal connections and friendships with others. More on point with Amity, this is the first time Luz has had a crush on someone who seems to return her feelings so Luz is desperate not to screw it up. Luz can't see Amity getting sadder and more bummed at Luz destroying the cheesy Tunnel of Love because she's lost in her head recalling other cheesy stuff she did that blew up in her face. Luz was so determined not to make her same mistakes that she made all new ones. Fortunately it still worked out. For my part I liked seeing Luz this way. A lot of the times Luz has come off as a little "too good." Here she felt more like an actual teenager, self-conscious "tunnel vision" and all. It made Luz feel more real to me and if anything made her even more lovable.