#marvel timelines

So I still find it amazing to look at the various fanfic archives out there and see the hundreds upon thousands of fanfics available for my reading pleasure and it stuns me because this never could have happened without the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

No, wait - I'm serious! Let me take you back to the 90's, when egroups and yahoo groups were still a thing, the latter half of the decade when the Pit of Voles (aka FFNet) was first starting out, and everyone had a free geocities website to post their stories on.

Marvel comics were AMAZING growing up but they were also completely FUCKED UP. There was NO continuity, even inside titles, and trying to write about a single character became it's own niche fanfic group within a niche fanfic.

You want to write a story about Rogue? Okay, which one? Pre-Carol Danvers Arc? Post Carol Danvers? The timeline where Rogue never met Carol? Evil Rogue from the multi-verse? The Rogue who joined the Brotherhood? Rogue who escaped the Brotherhood the moment she heard about it? Cartoon Rogue from the early 90's x-men cartoon that was supposedly based on the comics? Uncanny Rogue - who even though it was supposed to be linked with the X-Men Rogue, still had differences that later had to be explained away or retconned? Age of Apocalypse Rogue? Rogue who married Remy, or the Rogue who fucked Joseph? The Rogue who joined Excalibur briefly? Rogue from Mutant X where she absorbed Colossus's powers permanently? The Rogue who saved the world because she could absorb minds? The Rogue who COULD control her powers or the Rogue who couldn't?

It's a never-ending rabbit hole of just which version of the character you want to write about and then you have to decide the same thing for every other character you want to bring in, because the alternate worlds KEPT OVERLAPPING and there was no concrete timeline where you could say at this point in time, Spider-man was doing this - because even if Spidey showed up in the X-comics, it didn't necessarily match what he was doing in his own books AT THE SAME TIME which were presumed to have HAPPENED AT THE SAME TIME.

Because even if the x-men never showed up in his books to prove it happened, there would be little editor notes **** stating 'for more of this story, check out xbook #374674995' and ALL it's fellow crossovers and NO ONE could possibly follow it all unless they were wealthy and had more time on their hands then I have EVER had in my life. *pants for breath*

Even the Marvel editors and writers had NO IDEA what was going on in other books half the time. Titles and story lines were being thrown into the mix, written and then cancelled almost just as fast (damnit, I actually LIKED Maverick). Mini-series were written about characters that in same cases almost completely under-minded or re-wrote the actual history of certain characters (Jubilee, I'm looking at YOU. Did you or did you not live in a mall for a substantial length of time, or did you just visit the mall a lot like in the other timeline? Parents killed later in life or foster child from a young age? WHICH IS IT, DAMN IT SUNSHINE CHILD).

Fucking hell, don't even get me started on Longshot and the whole Mobius TV reality debacle and what the hell is Longshot or Shatterstar when two titles in the SAME universe claim TWO DIFFERENT THINGS. X-Force and Uncanny, I am extremely DISAPPOINT.

Characters were killed off and brought back due to popular demand and then killed off and brought back - and when even the writers couldn't justify the need to bring back Blink (and yet Jean Grey was allowed to continue as a reappearing zombie forever and ever amen), they wrote her into a NEW book of dimension hopping mutants that seriously took a sledgehammer to all the time lines.

Trying to write fanfic was ridiculous. There was some out there, definitely, but on obscure sites with no proper search engines and even then, if you weren't explicit in stating what what was going to happen, half your readers would leave comments like, 'but wait, Rogue wasn't with Bobby in this issue' and others would shout back 'Yes he WAS, you had to read X-men#A5D36 to see him there' and then a third faction would shout back, 'wait, you mean this isn't world 616? When did this happen?' And then the purists would log in with their take complete with references to every goddamn issue your fic could conceivably have taken place in complete with page numbers and why your work just wasn't goddamn PLAUSIBLE.

^ You heard me. A fanfic wasn't plausible. *pinches bridge of nose*

Then came the Spider-man movies. The first ones. Suddenly, there was a background, loosely based on what was agreed upon by fandom to be the actual history of Spider-man (god help me, shut UP fandom - I don't care if Uncle Ben was shot on the sidewalk, in the store, in the house, chasing after Peter, protecting Peter - the common theme is that he was SHOT and he DIED. There are no alternate comic-based realities where he was crushed by a meteor from space or slipped and fell through a manhole and discovered the TMNT living under his house. Which,based on how many realities Marvel had the comics world set up for, could actually be a thing that could have happened).

Suddenly people were writing fics and referencing the common themes from the movies and it was good. Glorious even. You had a base for things, something that could be searched for and checked with ease. People around the world had a common denominator.

More Marvel movies did the same thing. You can argue whether the movies were good or not (oh god, the first Hulk movie of the 2000's era looked like a man with green marshmallows for muscles. That clip of him running around the mine to gain momentum to jump made me think of nothing but green marshmallows being stirred in a sandy bowl of hot chocolate) but that fact remains that it finally gave people a rallying point on where and when to base fanfics for ease of understanding that didn't require reading back issue after back issue.

Then came the Avengers. My god, 2012 was when I really saw it. The archives exploded with Avengers fanfic and people being able to use the movie and all the movies leading up to it to write fanfic that had a consistent history. No more scrambling to find obscure back issues and scanlations to confirm whether or not something could have happened during this timeline at that date with THOSE particular heroes.

And if you want to extrapolate off that? Bring in the multi-verse's and the alternate timelines and the AOA and the House of M and the zombie universe, or let Deadpool hop his way through dimensions like a sarcastic murder-bunny of chaos? You could DO THAT because there was still a STARTING POINT that everyone knew about without needing 5,000 back issues and an assistant to navigate.

So yeah.... people can complain about the Marvel Cinematic World all they want. They can hate the writers because they did dumb shit to characters simply because they didn't like them (killing Tony Stark simply didn't happen in my world, fuck you Marvel), they can hate the story lines that came in the sequels. They can hate the CGI, the choice of actors, the ethnicity of the actors (OMG the DRAMA of making Kingpin black, fuck OFF PEOPLE, he's evil and power-mad and wants to kill DD and everyone he loves, who CARES WHAT HIS ETHNICITY OR COLOR IS), the loose ends that are still dangling waiting for future movies to explain - and I will not give a shit.

Because it gave us a way to have good fanfic about the Marvel universe for the first time. And as much as I despise many Marvel writers and fucking D*sn*y, I will be grateful to them for the starting point they gave the world. Because now I can read Peter Parker and Wade Wilson fanfics and there will always be a point tying those two worlds together that works and is easy to see and to reference.

Getting Tony and Bucky together to piss off Steve is just another bonus. :)