#the irony of the WW2 in CA:TFA being more fictional than the vague ME conflict in IM1

[cowboyhorsegirl]

Why do you think the MCU made an ults adaptation instead of a 616 adaptation? I have some theories but lmk know what you think of this conundrum

This is such an interesting question!! I will preface this by saying that I haven't yet read a lot of Ults or 616, and a lot of what I've learned of canon has been gained through osmosis from other, much more knowledgeable people in the fandom (@sineala, I'd love to hear your take on this ask!). That being said though, I think the main reasons why the MCU was adapted primarily from Ults instead of from 616 was because:

Ults had less canon to work with than 616, so it's a bit easier to ascertain a linear narrative that hasn't been rewritten and retconned multiple times. (For example, in 616 Tony had originally helped found SHIELD; this was completely retconned later on.)

Ults isn't as fantastical as 616, or as we all say colloquially, Ults is the grittier, 'more realistic' version of events that happened in 616. This would be particularly beneficial for a live-action remake, where the commonly held industry thinking is that audiences don't have as high a capacity to suspend their disbelief as they might for animation or live theater. The realism of the medium would necessitate a more grounded comics canon to build off of.

Ults origin stories lend themselves to the strategic vision of MCU Phase 1 much better than 616 origins. I think this is most apparent with Steve's origin: in 616 he was discovered only by the Avengers whereas in Ults, Steve was found by SHIELD (though I believe some of the other Ultimates were also there). I imagine this version of events would be much easier to tweak so that each member of the MCU Avengers had their own separate movie establishing background and characterization before throwing them into a very busy ensemble cast.

I don't actually think that all of these reasons for choosing Ults as the main canon to base the MCU on ended up working in the MCU's favor though. Like, Iron Man 1 is clearly set within some sort of nebulous Middle Eastern conflict that the US is involved in, for a variety of reasons. This conflict would have been easily recognizable to American audiences in 2008: at the time, the US has been in war in Afghanistan since 2001 and in Iraq since 2003. You don't have to waste precious movie minutes establishing a war for Tony to be making weapons for when American audiences are already primed to fill in the blanks if you give them the implication of a war in the ME. The setup of a vague Middle Eastern war acts as cinematic shorthand to establish Tony Stark's background and character to a broad audience, and to the many who hadn't read any Iron Man or Avengers comics, this was their first introduction to Tony Stark's origin story. Additionally, the setting acts as a plausible 1:1 retelling of Tony's original introduction in 616 (elements such as Yinsen, the life-threatening shrapnel to his chest, and Tony inventing the Iron Man suit instead of building weaponry for the terrorists who had taken him captive are all taken directly from his 1960s origin story), revamped for 21st century moviegoers by changing the indeterminate Southeast Asian war from the 1960s comics to an indeterminate Middle Eastern war for the MCU.

However, you literally never see MCU movies dedicate themselves to this level of realism again, for good reason. Whatever cultural shorthand you draw on by placing Tony Stark's weapons-manufacturing backstory in the context of an actual real-life geopolitical conflict also comes with the baggage of all the Islamophobia, xenophobia, and imperialism that comes with that conflict. In Iron Man 1, the inciting incident that causes Tony to want to halt SI's weapons production is the fact that his weapons are being used by the terrorists to harm American soldiers. But what about all the hundreds of thousands of innocent Middle Eastern people your weapons harmed and killed Tony?? What about them, huh?! What about the instability that America has wrought in the region, Tony, backing up political capital with firepower that YOU provided to them??

Immediately, the MCU backs off of America's actual real-life military operations as a basis for their fictional world. I like to think that they did this because they realized that it's very difficult to make your billionaire weapons-manufacturer superhero sympathetic in a world where both billionaires and the American military are coming under more scrutiny by more people every day. I'll guess that the real reason has to do with the fact that those story elements made it much harder to sell international audiences on the franchise.

It's frustrating too, because to this day I would say that Iron Man 1 is one of the best MCU movies out there, but in my opinion, the reasons for this aren't that IM1 was the most realistic or the most plausible or the most grounded superhero movie. What drew me to the MCU in the first place was the emotional depth of the characters and the stories, a depth that I think is best exemplified in Tony Stark. As the MCU moved forward and began to (but never fully) shed it's commitment to realism, the movies started to lose their ability to tell emotionally-compelling stories with high stakes that actually leave you in suspense of the ending. The fatal flaw of the MCU is in believing that audiences don't have the capacity to accept emotionality in stories that aren't limited to the bounds of our reality, when the whole point of a superhero story is to challenge ourselves to imagine more fantastical worlds than our own.

#yanderefreud #signed sealed delivered #616 #1610 #mcu #meta #avengers #the irony of the WW2 in CA:TFA being more fictional than the vague ME conflict in IM1 #I suppose they did specify that it takes place in Afghanistan so there is that #i hope this at least answered your question! and probably several others that you did not even ask jfkdjsf #also to go back to your original question it is important to note that they do take a lot of inspo from 616! i feel like as the mcu goes on #it moves away from ults & towards 616 #but of course through the veneer of shittier & shittier CGI