How I'd fix Kang as the proper successor to Thanos
So, as we know, Kang has been replaced with Doom because people seemingly didn't care about him like they did about Thanos. His motivation was very basic and unexplored, Majors stained him with his issues, and he also got defeated by the Ant-family. And out of all variants that coukd have been defeated by Ant-Man it was the main "Conqueror" variant. So he also seemed pretty weak compared to Thanos who solo'd Hulk and the main trio in Endgame.
How would I do it to make him much more interesting and connected to our heroes prior to The Kang Dynasty:
More variants as main villains in Phase 4-5: Pretty simple - let Immortus be the creator of Darkhold, thus be indirect influencer of Wanda prior to Multiverse of Madness. High Evolutionary can also be a Kang variant that was allowed to exist on Sacred Timeline by HWR because he helped him win the multiversal war. Thus direct connection to Rocket and The Guardians. Not every single film needs to be about Kang, but he should have been used more to have established presence and connection to our heroes.
The Conqueror is defeated at a cost: Quantumania's ending should have had atleast one major death, best case would be Hank sacrificing himself to destroy Kang's chair while the rest of the family stalls him in direct fight, which leaves everyone scarred. Kang gets sucked into his machine and is seemingly gone. Worth to note that he shares a bit more information with Scott and Janet about his past and motivations, he especially focuses on connecting to them through missing their loved ones. He does offer Scott more time with Cassie and it is an honest deal because deep inside that's what he would want for himself and his loved one - Ravonna.
F4 connection - He Who Remains would be a direct descendant of Pedro's Reed Richards, which would tie him to their universe and explain TVA's retrofuturistic look. TVA would also be based on Reeds notes and concepts he had for creating a theoretical multiversal observatory.
Kang's backstory and The Kang Dynasty: Now the most important part of making Nathaniel more of an attractive threat is to establish his backstory and motivation and since we have infinite number of Kangs as fodder it ain't as simple as it was with Thanos. But we can start by establishing just a select group of Kangs that the story will revolve around - The Council (Immortus, Centurion, Ramma-tut) and the two most powerful variants - HWR and Conqueror.
Now is that still too many Kangs to care about? Worry not, even tho the Council are the villains of The Kang Dynasty, Kang The Conqueror is the main villain of the saga and HWR the protagonist with Loki.
When I was figuring out how to present his backstory I thought that it would actually be the right time for Avengers 5 to have a completly different structure to Infinity War, because even tho another take on that formula would work it would not be able to measure up to its predecesor because it's simply not something new and daring. I also like the idea of different Kangs each being a metaphor for our dreams and ambitions and what we would do were we given the ultimate power to reach them.
So my idea of The Kang Dynasty would be to turn the expectations on their head and make it into a Kang film first and Avengers film second. The film would start with narration from Kang, about hopes and dreams and how they lead to ambition, and how ambition leads to power and power corrupts. The film would start in a flashback, showcasing Nathaniel Richards in a retrofuturistic New York, as he lives his ordinary life. It's obvious through his happy go lucky attitude that this is He Who Remains variant. He is a scientist who owns The Baxter building but works there with his peers as an ordinary man. He is respected, has banter with collegues and no one knows he's the owner because he simply likes to fit in and be on equal level with people around him.
His apartment is cozy and well set, but it doesn't look as luxorious as it could. He has an adopted stray cat he calls Miss Minutes with her own cute backstory. It seems that even tho he has an outgoing nerdish personality he's still a loner in his personal life, because he has a high intellect and it is hard for him to bond with more simple minded people, even collegues. Even so he remains positive, modest and happy.
Now we cut dramatically to present day and we are thrown into middle of the chaos as The Avengers deal with a massive invasion. The audience is disoriented and we are putting pieces together through bits of dialogues. The Council is invading Earth and the heroes are dealing with it. The overall split between the flashbacks and the main story is 50/50. We eventually get to see Nathaniel meet Ravonna who's named differently (let's say Victoria or something) and they instantly click as she becomes freshly hired. We see them flirt and even handle serious and very sophisticated topics, they are both nerds and Victoria shows Nathaniel new things and perspective on life he was missing, which makes him a bit more serious and wary. They start dating and since they both like sci-fi stories and books she introduces him to DnD, from which they get their eventual nicknames - Kang and Ravonna Renslayer, based on the fictional characters from their campaign, with He Who Remains being the nickname of their mutual friend who's their Dungeon Master.
Their happy relationship hits a dead end eventually when Ravonna is diagnosed with a genetic disease they don't have a cure for. Nathaniel gets serious and works hard to find the cure. He fails and she dies because he ran out of time. It breaks him so much that he becomes bitter and loses himself for several months. Eventually he gains a spark of hope as he reads through Reed's notes on multiversal travel.
He builds a new technology from his ancestor's concepts and decides to use it to travel back in time to find the cure and save Ravonna before death takes her. He succeeds, but as if fate had it willed something else takes her life again.
This is Kang's canon event and Ravonna is the Nexus being, not in powers, but because she's the direct catalyst that leads to Kang's variants. There are infinite Nathaniels in the multiverse, with different backgrounds and ambitions, some noble, some self-serving, but only those who fall in love with Ravonna and lose her become Kang - their obsession with cheating fate leads them on path to conquer the multiverse. Nathaniel adopts their names from their DnD as a symbolic reminder of their bond and ultimately all Kangs start off with desperate need to save her but then all their individual obsessions and dreams take over based on their backgrounds and personalities.
Some want to control the multiverse only to solve general problems like Thanos, some want to rewrite everything into a universe they'd like to have, some want to protect the multiverse from themselves, etc. HWR's ultimate goal is to somehow defeat his canon event through manipulation of the multiverse so he can save Ravonna. But as he himself admits, the more power he had, the more he was becoming corrupt by it and was abusing it for things he would otherwise not chase, which turned a very similar variant of him into Kang The Conqueror.
While HWR eventually snapped from his powerlust, Conqueror from a very similar universe indulged in it and wanted Ravonna back at all cost. HWR won the multiversal war and created TVA to quickly cut down the multiverse to its one perfect form that will allow only him (and High Evolutionary) to exist. But how did he obtain Ravonna if without her death Kangs cannot exist and it's a canon event? He found a loophole. If they both exist in a universe then she will die no matter what because a Kang must be formed from that event. But what if he removes Nathaniel of that universe before the canon event triggers? In that case the canon event doesn't trigger and Ravonna survives.
For that he chose our Earth, replaced our future Kang and took Ravonna from us as his partner to lead TVA together. The problem is that Ravonna knew that this is f'd up and she's basically at his mercy and although she loved a version of him, this was an abusive relationship and prison. It turned her from her wobbly self into the cynical and tyranical version of her we see in TVA.
As HWR ruled The Sacred Timeline it dawned on him how horrible it was for Ravonna and all the beings who knew what's up, so he erased their memories and became the person we know from today, isolated from everyone, back to being a loner and an observer of his perfect universe.
Kang The Conqueror is pretty much HWR at his worst, still looking for a way to have Ravonna back, ready to subjugate the entire universe for his love. HWR's narration and flashbacks of his backstory are all being told to Loki before the end of S2 time-wise, and the rest of the film is pretty much about reflection of our heroes as they face someone they can relate to - Shuri didn't have enough time to cure her brother and panders if she would do the same thing as Nathaniel if she had the chance, same goes for Thor, Bruce, Spidey, everyone who ever lost someone or wanted the world to be better.. what would they do if they had the power to reach it?
Loki is desperate to save the multiverse from Incursions and utter collapse Kangs are causing, so when he senses a powerful being with a promise of ending them all and restoring peace HWR had, he pulls them from end of time, which brings back Kang The Conqueror who steals Loki's powers to juice himself up and then beats The Council. Loki hoped he would turn into HWR to return things ATLEAST back to where they were before he replaced him, but Conqueror has a different idea - ruin the multiverse and with it all its deterministic rules to create Battleworld, his utopia frozen in time where he can finally find peace with Ravonna, untouched by the canon event. He achieves that goal and becomes The Beyonder for Secret Wars.
How would I do it to make him much more interesting and connected to our heroes prior to The Kang Dynasty:
More variants as main villains in Phase 4-5: Pretty simple - let Immortus be the creator of Darkhold, thus be indirect influencer of Wanda prior to Multiverse of Madness. High Evolutionary can also be a Kang variant that was allowed to exist on Sacred Timeline by HWR because he helped him win the multiversal war. Thus direct connection to Rocket and The Guardians. Not every single film needs to be about Kang, but he should have been used more to have established presence and connection to our heroes.
The Conqueror is defeated at a cost: Quantumania's ending should have had atleast one major death, best case would be Hank sacrificing himself to destroy Kang's chair while the rest of the family stalls him in direct fight, which leaves everyone scarred. Kang gets sucked into his machine and is seemingly gone. Worth to note that he shares a bit more information with Scott and Janet about his past and motivations, he especially focuses on connecting to them through missing their loved ones. He does offer Scott more time with Cassie and it is an honest deal because deep inside that's what he would want for himself and his loved one - Ravonna.
F4 connection - He Who Remains would be a direct descendant of Pedro's Reed Richards, which would tie him to their universe and explain TVA's retrofuturistic look. TVA would also be based on Reeds notes and concepts he had for creating a theoretical multiversal observatory.
Kang's backstory and The Kang Dynasty: Now the most important part of making Nathaniel more of an attractive threat is to establish his backstory and motivation and since we have infinite number of Kangs as fodder it ain't as simple as it was with Thanos. But we can start by establishing just a select group of Kangs that the story will revolve around - The Council (Immortus, Centurion, Ramma-tut) and the two most powerful variants - HWR and Conqueror.
Now is that still too many Kangs to care about? Worry not, even tho the Council are the villains of The Kang Dynasty, Kang The Conqueror is the main villain of the saga and HWR the protagonist with Loki.
When I was figuring out how to present his backstory I thought that it would actually be the right time for Avengers 5 to have a completly different structure to Infinity War, because even tho another take on that formula would work it would not be able to measure up to its predecesor because it's simply not something new and daring. I also like the idea of different Kangs each being a metaphor for our dreams and ambitions and what we would do were we given the ultimate power to reach them.
So my idea of The Kang Dynasty would be to turn the expectations on their head and make it into a Kang film first and Avengers film second. The film would start with narration from Kang, about hopes and dreams and how they lead to ambition, and how ambition leads to power and power corrupts. The film would start in a flashback, showcasing Nathaniel Richards in a retrofuturistic New York, as he lives his ordinary life. It's obvious through his happy go lucky attitude that this is He Who Remains variant. He is a scientist who owns The Baxter building but works there with his peers as an ordinary man. He is respected, has banter with collegues and no one knows he's the owner because he simply likes to fit in and be on equal level with people around him.
His apartment is cozy and well set, but it doesn't look as luxorious as it could. He has an adopted stray cat he calls Miss Minutes with her own cute backstory. It seems that even tho he has an outgoing nerdish personality he's still a loner in his personal life, because he has a high intellect and it is hard for him to bond with more simple minded people, even collegues. Even so he remains positive, modest and happy.
Now we cut dramatically to present day and we are thrown into middle of the chaos as The Avengers deal with a massive invasion. The audience is disoriented and we are putting pieces together through bits of dialogues. The Council is invading Earth and the heroes are dealing with it. The overall split between the flashbacks and the main story is 50/50. We eventually get to see Nathaniel meet Ravonna who's named differently (let's say Victoria or something) and they instantly click as she becomes freshly hired. We see them flirt and even handle serious and very sophisticated topics, they are both nerds and Victoria shows Nathaniel new things and perspective on life he was missing, which makes him a bit more serious and wary. They start dating and since they both like sci-fi stories and books she introduces him to DnD, from which they get their eventual nicknames - Kang and Ravonna Renslayer, based on the fictional characters from their campaign, with He Who Remains being the nickname of their mutual friend who's their Dungeon Master.
Their happy relationship hits a dead end eventually when Ravonna is diagnosed with a genetic disease they don't have a cure for. Nathaniel gets serious and works hard to find the cure. He fails and she dies because he ran out of time. It breaks him so much that he becomes bitter and loses himself for several months. Eventually he gains a spark of hope as he reads through Reed's notes on multiversal travel.
He builds a new technology from his ancestor's concepts and decides to use it to travel back in time to find the cure and save Ravonna before death takes her. He succeeds, but as if fate had it willed something else takes her life again.
This is Kang's canon event and Ravonna is the Nexus being, not in powers, but because she's the direct catalyst that leads to Kang's variants. There are infinite Nathaniels in the multiverse, with different backgrounds and ambitions, some noble, some self-serving, but only those who fall in love with Ravonna and lose her become Kang - their obsession with cheating fate leads them on path to conquer the multiverse. Nathaniel adopts their names from their DnD as a symbolic reminder of their bond and ultimately all Kangs start off with desperate need to save her but then all their individual obsessions and dreams take over based on their backgrounds and personalities.
Some want to control the multiverse only to solve general problems like Thanos, some want to rewrite everything into a universe they'd like to have, some want to protect the multiverse from themselves, etc. HWR's ultimate goal is to somehow defeat his canon event through manipulation of the multiverse so he can save Ravonna. But as he himself admits, the more power he had, the more he was becoming corrupt by it and was abusing it for things he would otherwise not chase, which turned a very similar variant of him into Kang The Conqueror.
While HWR eventually snapped from his powerlust, Conqueror from a very similar universe indulged in it and wanted Ravonna back at all cost. HWR won the multiversal war and created TVA to quickly cut down the multiverse to its one perfect form that will allow only him (and High Evolutionary) to exist. But how did he obtain Ravonna if without her death Kangs cannot exist and it's a canon event? He found a loophole. If they both exist in a universe then she will die no matter what because a Kang must be formed from that event. But what if he removes Nathaniel of that universe before the canon event triggers? In that case the canon event doesn't trigger and Ravonna survives.
For that he chose our Earth, replaced our future Kang and took Ravonna from us as his partner to lead TVA together. The problem is that Ravonna knew that this is f'd up and she's basically at his mercy and although she loved a version of him, this was an abusive relationship and prison. It turned her from her wobbly self into the cynical and tyranical version of her we see in TVA.
As HWR ruled The Sacred Timeline it dawned on him how horrible it was for Ravonna and all the beings who knew what's up, so he erased their memories and became the person we know from today, isolated from everyone, back to being a loner and an observer of his perfect universe.
Kang The Conqueror is pretty much HWR at his worst, still looking for a way to have Ravonna back, ready to subjugate the entire universe for his love. HWR's narration and flashbacks of his backstory are all being told to Loki before the end of S2 time-wise, and the rest of the film is pretty much about reflection of our heroes as they face someone they can relate to - Shuri didn't have enough time to cure her brother and panders if she would do the same thing as Nathaniel if she had the chance, same goes for Thor, Bruce, Spidey, everyone who ever lost someone or wanted the world to be better.. what would they do if they had the power to reach it?
Loki is desperate to save the multiverse from Incursions and utter collapse Kangs are causing, so when he senses a powerful being with a promise of ending them all and restoring peace HWR had, he pulls them from end of time, which brings back Kang The Conqueror who steals Loki's powers to juice himself up and then beats The Council. Loki hoped he would turn into HWR to return things ATLEAST back to where they were before he replaced him, but Conqueror has a different idea - ruin the multiverse and with it all its deterministic rules to create Battleworld, his utopia frozen in time where he can finally find peace with Ravonna, untouched by the canon event. He achieves that goal and becomes The Beyonder for Secret Wars.
Commentaires
honestly i cutshot using online tool but its too advance for me to understand but i too honestly hate when marvel scrap idea of kang he is great villen