I have a very special relationship to the movie “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania”. It came out early in 2023, and those of you who read my posts may remember me mentioning that on a late February date in that year, in the middle of the night, I fled from my house as it burned to the ground, killing my mother and destroying everything I owned, notably including a near-complete physical copy of SOTM all the way through OblivAeon (I don’t think I had the Void Guard or Stuntman/Benchmark, but that was all I lacked). The afternoon of that day, I had almost decided to go to a movie theater to see that film, which famously underperformed compared to previous MCU films and led to a lot of Disney Marvel projects being scaled back. But none of that poor performance was related in any way to my opinion.
In the wake of literally my entire life going up in smoke, I had a long standing policy to avoid spending my limited funds on things I had previously owned and loved, intending instead to very judiciously take up new hobbies I’d never touched in my old life. This was why, having previously been obsessed with Sentinels to an extent few short of Lynkfox and maybe Spiff could have bragged of, I went two full years without owning it or playing it or even really reading the forum about it (to the point that GTG was shuttered for three months before I learned this had occurred, that now being three more months ago). It was also the reason why, having never seen the movie in my old life, I decided it would be probably the first purchase I would ever make of a digital film to replace my old DVD collection (maybe second after Galaxy Quest, I’m a little unsure on the order). I think I rented Quantumania first, but if so I happily then paid the purchase price before the rental expired. I LOVED the film, it is still way up there among my 10 or 20 favorite superhero movies, and 30 or 50 favorite movies period. So I’ve watched it numerous times, I’ve geeked out about it several times, I know it very well, and I just keep loving it more with every viewing.
That said, it’s a film with significant flaws, and one in particular bugs the crap out of me. Kang the Conqueror is the villain of the movie, and certainly there’s no question that he’s a bad guy, as he has personally killed more alternate universe Avengers than he can count, and also subjugated various tribes of Quantum Realm denizens, we don’t get super a lot of detail about that part, but those are more or less people and he definitely kills them sometimes, okay sure. But multiple murderer and mass murderer aren’t bad enough for this bad guy; in typical Sci-fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale fashion, Kang has to have genocide on his supervillain rap sheet. And we see him blowing up villages, but what Janet Van Dyne tells us, because the movie doesn’t have a great way to show it, is that he’s wiped out “entire timelines, gone as if they never existed.” Or, to borrow a term from a letter written in the Oblivaeon podcast episode, “Chronocide.”
Now hold on. A thing that neither the Marvel Cinematic Universe, nor the Sentinel Comics Universe has ever really spelled out, is: what exactly determines when a new timeline comes into being? Let’s say that on a particular day, a young Daniel Montgomery, still working his way through business school, who hasn’t yet told his baby girl Maia a bedtime story on a stormy night, he goes to a deli on Monday the Tenth of June, and he orders a salami sandwich. Then, due to a ripple effect caused by Chrono-Ranger blipping into 1883 Silver Gulch and shooting Doc Tusser, somehow that results in Daniel changing his mind at the last second, and ordering a pastrami sandwich instead. Did Chrono-Ranger just create an entire new universe? If CR then goes back to 1882 and kills Tusser with a Terrible Tech Strike, making his 1883 trip now unnecessary, and reverts Daniel to choosing salami, is the pastrami universe destroyed? Did CR just murder Pastrami Wraith? I really don’t think he did.
The way I figure it, if you kill a person and parallel universes don’t exist at all, then you’ve definitely done something very bad, which I might analogize to destroying the only copy of a book which hasn’t yet been published. That’s an unquestionable offense against nearly any sensible definition of morality anyone could propose. Let’s call that a unit of measure for evil, 1 murderion. You killed the one version of a person who exists, that was the only one, it’s definitely evil and you’re a murderer. So say you’re in the salami timeline, and you move forward about 30 years from Daniel’s salami sandwich, and you kill the Wraith, you’re now a murderer with 1 murderion. You then go back in time, create the pastrami timeline, go forward thirty years again, and murder Pastrami Wraith as well. Are you now at 2 murderions? I don’t think you are. I think it’s like 1.01 murderions at worst; sure, you experienced murdering twice, but the number of actual meaningful deaths you’ve caused, while clearly more than 1, seems well short of 2.
Returning to the book analogy, if you just grab one copy of “the Joy of Cooking” or “Linux for Dummies” off a bookstore shelf, and burn that, you’re not murdering that entire book. You’ve destroyed a single copy of a mass produced thing, that’s totally legal to do as long as you paid for it first, that’s entirely what mass production is for. So can you mass-produce universes? Is it still murder to kill a few people if you always first create a new universe where you didn’t? And, back on the original point, can it reasonably be called genocide or chronocide if nothing is being lost which was not first created for that exact purpose? Or even if the creation is unintentional? I’m not saying I definitely know the answer, but I think it’s clearly questionable. I think the murderion values of these actions cannot be calculated without having definite answers about how finite of a resource that infinite multiverse is; if it truly is infinite, we might as well just let singular OblivAeon have his fun and destroy infinity universes, since we’ll still have infinity others left. For the stakes of the OA battle to mean anything, the multiverse must be finite in some way, and then the evil value of particular destruction acts can be measured in terms of how much has actually been lost. If it takes a certain amount of chronal energy expenditure to cause a timeline to split, then we can start working out just how many resources OblivAeon is destroying, how many La Commodora destroyed to thwart him, and the relative murderion counts of both entities.
I have further thoughts about how to potentially answer some of those questions, and others related to the event which I think are still unclear. But we’ll come back to those thoughts another time.