Fruitless speculation!!!
Mar. 12th, 2012 03:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficI suppose the smart money on an Avengers 2 villain is Thanos. No offense, but I've always seen the guy as a poor man's Darkseid. And I've always believed that Darkseid is pretty boring without the Fourth World to back him up. He's like Sauron without Middle-Earth that way (thank you for proving my point, Geoff Johns' first arc of Justice League). Thanos is Darkseid in a continuity where the Fourth World doesn't exist. No Big Barda, just... Starfox, the Date Rape Avenger. No, he doesn't avenge date rape, he's an Avenger with the power of Date Rape. Is it any wonder the guy who came up with him went on to write Death of the New Gods?
Tl;dr Thanos no thank you. But then you've got Kang the Conqueror. He's an arch-villain akin to Thanos, but with a bit more going on there. With time travel, you could get in some pretty awesome stories--sending Cap back to the 1940s for some pathos, letting Bruce Banner meet his evil future self, the Maestro--I'm sure I'm forgetting some cool future canon that would fall under the Avengers banner. Plus, going by his take in Avengers: EMH, you could have him trying to prevent some future catastrophe. With Kang defeated, Iron Man would become obsessed with trying to stop the same catastrophe, and create the SHRA.
Now, maybe Hulk soured the waters for superhero psychodrama, but here's where you bring in Ant-Man. You have all the ingredients there for some great drama: an innocent young woman drawn into tragedy, a noble, peaceful hero with mental problems, the robot he uploads his personality into... all the stuff Shakespeare would use. You can't tell me there's no drama in an unstable superhero seeing his neurosis writ large in a robotic son. But a story like that wouldn't leave much room for the other Avengers, so it's best kept to its own Wasp/Ant-Man/Ultron film.
Then Avengers 3 rolls around. Say Ant-Man's retired in disgrace, while Wasp and/or Vision have joined the Avengers. Tony is going on about registration--or possibly the other way around, with Steve supporting the status quo and the more libertarian cinematic Tony saying no way. Things take a turn for the worse and the superheroes, including a bunch of "second wave" heroes who aren't in the Avengers, split up. Two acts of superhero-on-superhero violence, then it turns out that a not-dead Ultron has been manipulating the entire conflict; say, using the Vision on the anti-reg side and infecting Tony's Extremis systems on the pro-reg side (I'm assuming Tony will "upgrade" himself at some point in the endless sequels). Ultron destroys Slorenia, a la Avengers Unlimited, and starts Program: Take Over The World.
So, huge third act of both sides teaming up to take on Ultron and his robot army, with the fall-out from the (resolved) conflict coloring future movies. Plus, keeping Ultron as a third act surprise keeps him from getting stale. And it leaves room for Vision/Wanda (c'mon, you gotta have Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch in an Avengers sequel somewhere).
Tl;dr Thanos no thank you. But then you've got Kang the Conqueror. He's an arch-villain akin to Thanos, but with a bit more going on there. With time travel, you could get in some pretty awesome stories--sending Cap back to the 1940s for some pathos, letting Bruce Banner meet his evil future self, the Maestro--I'm sure I'm forgetting some cool future canon that would fall under the Avengers banner. Plus, going by his take in Avengers: EMH, you could have him trying to prevent some future catastrophe. With Kang defeated, Iron Man would become obsessed with trying to stop the same catastrophe, and create the SHRA.
Now, maybe Hulk soured the waters for superhero psychodrama, but here's where you bring in Ant-Man. You have all the ingredients there for some great drama: an innocent young woman drawn into tragedy, a noble, peaceful hero with mental problems, the robot he uploads his personality into... all the stuff Shakespeare would use. You can't tell me there's no drama in an unstable superhero seeing his neurosis writ large in a robotic son. But a story like that wouldn't leave much room for the other Avengers, so it's best kept to its own Wasp/Ant-Man/Ultron film.
Then Avengers 3 rolls around. Say Ant-Man's retired in disgrace, while Wasp and/or Vision have joined the Avengers. Tony is going on about registration--or possibly the other way around, with Steve supporting the status quo and the more libertarian cinematic Tony saying no way. Things take a turn for the worse and the superheroes, including a bunch of "second wave" heroes who aren't in the Avengers, split up. Two acts of superhero-on-superhero violence, then it turns out that a not-dead Ultron has been manipulating the entire conflict; say, using the Vision on the anti-reg side and infecting Tony's Extremis systems on the pro-reg side (I'm assuming Tony will "upgrade" himself at some point in the endless sequels). Ultron destroys Slorenia, a la Avengers Unlimited, and starts Program: Take Over The World.
So, huge third act of both sides teaming up to take on Ultron and his robot army, with the fall-out from the (resolved) conflict coloring future movies. Plus, keeping Ultron as a third act surprise keeps him from getting stale. And it leaves room for Vision/Wanda (c'mon, you gotta have Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch in an Avengers sequel somewhere).
