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The problem with “anchor being”, “canon event” and “sacred timeline” is that they’re all metaphors for editorial mandate being presented as in-universe metaphysics
That kinda ruins my immersion, why introduce a concept that only makes sense if you view the entire in-universe world as nothing but fiction, looking from outside in. Kind of a lazy excuse for explaining anything if you ask me. _"It had to happen because it had to"_ wow really?
@@Haispawner There's no reason it can't make sense in universe too. The "it had to happen" line makes sense in universe. HWR decided the Avengers should time travel, and Loki should not have left with the tesseract. I wonder if the Thanos-less timeline got pruned too.
The anchor being concept works enough for Deadpool as a meta-jab at how the X-Men movies over-relied on Wolverine. So long as they limit its impact to this movie, we shouldn't have any future issues.
Yeah; because it also introduces a lot of weird... meta holes(?). Like, obviously Wolverine won't exist forever (and didn't exist before he was born) so... what was the anchor outside of his, say, few hundred year life, for a universe that's billions of years old. And if the decay of not having an anchor is measured on the order of 'life times of a universe as we know it', it's... a non issue outside of the TVA being buttholes about it which, like... considering they prune entire timelines already, why would they bother having a universe decay naturally or not juse prune something to get rid of it if it's a problem?
See I thought it was more of a dig at the whole comic book industry - many universes in the comic multiverse exist only to tell a particular story for a particular character, once that story is told, the universe "ends"
I honestly took the entire "Anchor Being" concept as a meta joke about how once Wolverine died, no one wanted to see another X-MEN movie. Without him the world (the franchise) would just end. No continuation to anyone's story. In that way, I thought it was hilarious and I doubt it will come up ever again.
Yeah this was a stupid video to make. Your comment is the correct interpretation. Theyre basically making fun of fox that they focused on only one character above all the rest.
@@sjhwbs Pillar of Garbage constantly has terrible takes like this in between something mildly interesting that 20 other people have already said. It was an obvious 4th wall jab: "these universes only exist to serve 1 character" as if that doesn't perfectly describe all the movies/comics besides "The Sacred Timeline" of Earth-616. "The Void" was explicitly filled with 20th Century Fox objects and characters. It was the dumpster for all the franchises that died (or never were in Gambit's case). No reason to believe it was anything more than that.
That's exactly what the anchor beings are - the most important talked about character - the beloved one. Also, the timelines are meta for FRANCHISES. The void is full of all the discarded characters and stuff from discarded/forgotten franchises...
The problem with the multiverse is that either only one universe matters, or a handful. The problem with anchor beings is that only one person matters, or a handful.
here is the thing tho : if only one unvierse matters , then no universe matters ... You can take the body of a dead dr. strange from another universe , you can send a problem caracter to another universe , you can have a bad guy jump in ... the story stops being a story and becomes a math equation with calculus to determine how stuff actually works and how your actions may influence everything else , or you just don't care because this is your life , it may get snuffed out now so why bother ? you either write everything everywhere all at once (everything matters) or rick and morty (nothing matters) , and like you can't make every movie like this , so you just have to write some limitation around it : if the story becomes meta , you have to make the stakes meta : like everyone was sad at the end of infinity wars , and endgame was hype , however when the antagonist around wich those movies revolved around gets used as a stepping stone to make every single villain matter the most , you kinda become passive about everything really : dr. strange made it so thanos got killed in such a trivial way it makes infinity war and endgame feel , well ... hollow ... there was no challenge all along when you could have just done that ... endgame itself feels like an artificial movie now , because you just know they could take an iron man from the timeline in wich he lived , or a captain american from the timeline in wich he came back ... nobody can die now , every threat can be matched , and everything is just a slob of action figures clashing ... if the plot is meta , then why not make the stakes meta as well ? this is the exact same thing every multiverse did : you care about miles because he is a black spiderman , it's about somenthing outside his story , the popularity of spiderman and the knowledge that black kids would have loved a black spiderman ... same for the multiverse spiderpepole , there is nothing about spiders that allows them to get into other dimensions , it's just that spiderman is popular so he gets the multiverse ... so yeah make the stakes meta , if there is a mismatch in the size of the stakes vs story you end up with either an action figures smashing against each other , or a story about jesus fighting the mob ...
I think that, even within the story of Deadpool & Wolverine, they get rid of the idea of anchor beings. Because the universe begins to fix itself, despite Logan being dead. The TVA got it wrong. Ultimately, I felt like the concept was 1) a meta look at the Fox movies, and 2) a limited understanding of how the multiverse works from the TVA. If it comes back in any major way, I'd be surprised.
It doesn’t even work well as a metaphor for the Fox universe, and the fact that at the end they’re just like “oh i guess the problem resolved itself and nobody got hurt” really seemed like they had no idea what to with their own concept since it seems they wanted to keep the Fox universe for some reason
@@every_spider-man_ever I think there’s a real messiness to the concept (which doesn’t feel suuper intentional and, alongside some other parts of the film, I expect we can chalk up to the writers’ strike) that means I can neither _rule out_ your take being the answer or get on board with it. Does newLogan take on the anchor being role because of him being practically the same guy as the old one? Is it to do with channeling the time ripper? Or, yeah, are the TVA more widely wrong with the ‘anchor being’ concept & misinterpreting the drama? I think that last one’s absolutely a possibility and a valid interpretation, but I don’t see any reason in the film to prioritise it above the other possibilities. For me, Re: the meta lens, I don’t doubt this is part of it from an IRL perspective, but that doesn’t do anything to make it less or more real within the MCU.
@@PillarofGarbage In the comics, all universes need a Spider-Man to connect them to the multiverse. Maybe that's where they got the Anchor Being idea from in-universe?
@@PillarofGarbage Oh yeah, I agree that in-world it's very messy and that they don't make it clear why things change at the end. But yeah, on that meta level, I feel like the quick brushing away of concept is the equivalent of "don't think about this too much, it's not important". But I guess we shall see.
I think it will come back, as a device to tell the end of our current marvel cinematic universe, as was it's purpose in this movie, the characters that kept this universe alive will die off or sacrifice themselves to allow the start of something new.
In this movie it was just a jab at how FOX bungled the X-Men so badly that they had to keep going back to Jackman because they failed to make the audience care about non-Jackman characters. I hope other Studios learn from that to NOT make 1 character the core of everything when it's supposed to be an ensemble
I strongly disliked that the MCU's Earth was 616. It had already been established that it was Earth 19999, and was even called such in Across the Spider-Verse.
I don't like anchor beings, canon events, and anything else that restricts the opportunities a multiverse provides. Introducing the multiverse was an opportunity to present us with limitless opportunities, the fun of it was that the possibilities were endless.
True. Tho "anchor beings" & "canon events" do make sense just in those films. Anchor being is about how with Logans's death the Foxverse just felt apart & I really think Miguel in ATSV will be proven wrong about "canon events".
Considering cannon events are enforced by the villen in that movie with little evidence something else's didn't cause the problem that ended it. Unless its shown to be real in future movies, i don't think its a real issue.
I 100% agree with this take because I was thinking the same thing after the movie. Like with the infinity of the multiverse it means that there was 100% of a chance that an entire universe, worlds, galaxies, families - were destroyed because its anchor being (idk, a hedgehog) died in 1872. Obviously the concept itself isn't bad, but when stacked with the other multiverse rules like nexus events, incursions, absolute points, canon events, it just makes universes more fragile than dry spaghetti and makes you think what the point of a band of heroes courageously saving their universe, just for a guy to take a dump two centimeters from where it was supposed to go and have the entire timeline erased from history. Remember, infinite multiverse means that it has happened and will continue to happen infinite times
I think it can be salvaged. You could easily change the narrative to “Paradox was lying, the timeline was collapsing because he sent so many people to the void.” Would be an interesting route to take the multiverse
I get the feeling that both Paradox & TVA might be like Miguel from ATSV where they missinterpret something about the multiverse and think it’s an arbitrary rule about the multiverse because much like canon event, anchor being doesn’t really make sense. Like, if a universe stay alive because of one person… how was that universe before said person was even born ? In the case of Wolverine, he wasn’t alive since the bing bang so he couldn’t have been the anchor being for the entire lifetime of that universe. Really it’s possible that the true reason that universe started to collapsed could be something related to Secret War 2015 where multiple universes collapsed to one another, and both Paradox & TVA interpreted it differently to what it actually is.
Universes are called branches by he TVA because they branch off at some point. Wolverine branched a new universe during Days of Future Past. Everything that came before already came before in other universes, this is just the part where everything changes and from then till his death the branch has a reason to be. This would also mean that pruning has no reason to be, because branches will die anyway.
Sorry to necro this, but I'd like to point out that we never saw how the Fox Universe used to be like before Wolverine. X-Men Origins Wolverine is the furthest past of that world that we saw. So in a sense, that universe was cemented with Wolverine (or rather, when little Jimmy discovered his abilities). And after Logan that film universe literally stopped existing (for obvious meta reasons of course). Anyway, the point being is that universe existed before Wolverine with the sole purpose of bringing Wolverine to life. All events that took place before Wolverine (whatever they were) eventually purposefully converged in the timeline where X-Men Origins wolverine and all the other movies took place. And when he died and his journey ended, apparently there was no point for that universe anymore. Even though there were plenty of stories to tell, about other X-Men or even about Laura, they simply weren't relevant enough, unfortunately. People didn't care for Dark Phoenix or New Mutants, Gifted and Legion were cancelled, Deadpool was lucky to be popular enough to keep going but I doubt we'll ever see other X-Men of the past. So even if by the end of the movie Deadpool "saved" Earth-10005, it doesn't really matter since it will only be developed solely around Deadpool. So ironically, Deadpool became the new Anchor Being in the meta-sense because without him there will be no point in making anything else in Earth-10005.
I think how anchor beings will work going forward will be similar to how the Molecule Man functioned in the events leading up to Hickman’s Secret Wars. Doom is going through the multiverse killing them, causing the early deaths of universes, leading to more incursions, which will ultimately lead to the creation of Battleworld. He may have even stolen one of their bodies, which could be why he looks like Tony Stark.
@@markmerk1296 I don’t love this as the way we’re introduced to Doom but otherwise yeah I think that’s the absolutely the most interesting thing that could be done with this concept
@@PillarofGarbage This commenter is pointing out that the whole Anchor concept is taken from Secret Wars (2015), something you would have known and been able to mention in the video, if you'd read the comic.
@@garrett2439 I've read the comic, obviously. Molecule Man's anchor role is very clearly something that works differently to whatever the MCU's setting up here.
Honestly the Spiderverse movies did the multiverse stuff the best. Having the characters glitch out if they're in another universe is a cool and logical rule that adds real stakes. I don't know if this is canon to either the MCU or any other Marvel project, but one multiversal rule that I really like is what I call the Multiverse Magnet: if Person A of Universe A and Person B of Universe B switch places, they start attracting their own universe to the place they currently are- so A in UB starts attracting UA, and viceversa. Of course, if it's just two people, this attraction is really slow, and it would take thousands of years for anything really bad to happen: however, if too many people from too many different universe hang out in the same spot, that's when shit really starts to get messy.
That idea came from that Stephen King series "Castle Rock" before the Spiderverse movies: That if someone from another reality stays in one they're not from they're a living "disruption" that messes everything up.
@@ShadowSonic2 The Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony (1980-1990) has a similar concept - a science fiction and a fantasy world overlap geographically, allowing individuals to move between them, though only if they have no living counterpart in the other frame. Across the series, a recurring concern is preserving balance between the frames so that they don't face a catastrophic natural rebalancing. One set of complications arises from a counterpart pair managing to exchange places with each other (despite that normally being impossible) which establishes a long-term imbalance, requiring heroic measures to abate.
Maybe it would have been better if instead of Anchor Beings, it was Paradox deciding that after all the important beings in a universe die, monitoring that world is just a waste of the TVA's resources and it would be more efficient to get rid of it.
I'm not a Deadpool fan, but the multiverse is a relatively old trope in comics. In the movies it provides an easy "reset" button for switching actors and dealing with the fact that people age/die... or the fact that knew tony stark as a "Vietnam" guy but now he's a "Gulf War" guy...it just provides an easy continuity fix.
While I've always held the opinion that you should treat every sequel and every other tie in entry in a series/franchise as a non-canon / alternative reality story, having it literally written in a meta fourth-wall breaking sense feels wrong. Like the writers are basically saying "yeah all of these movies only exist as movies, they aren't real people at all so there's no real point in connecting with them"
Why are people assuming every universe must have an anchor being? Disregarding the fact that it is just obviously a joke, they mentioned this universe has an anchor being. They didn't mention every universe has them...
@@matti.8465 why would it be something all universes have? We've seen some universes are even animated, assuming they all follow exactly the same rules is silly
Why would a timeline slowly disappear for the TVA when they sit outside of time, like Wolverine dying just happened "recently"? It always happened for the entire existence of that timeline. That's the whole point of sitting outside of time.
You are spot on about how Marvel Studios is going about this. The Loki show's S1 (2021) did quite well in establishing why only one timeline had been allowed to exist by 'He Who Remains' and how the events of the show result in the creation of the multiverse. However, Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) and D&W (2024), rather than show us how the multiverse works, cared more about getting the audience to appreciate characters and their actors who didn't quite get their due in their day (i.e. Garfield and the 3rd act cameos in D&W).The MCU seems like it is done with creating anything new and memorable for now. With Majors' Kang now replaced with RDJ's Doom, I can't imagine what kind of future the MCU is planning for itself after having everybody fight along with everybody in Avengers: Doomsday (2026) and Secret Wars (2027). Where can the stories even possibly expand beyond the multiverse?
As someone who hates multiverses in stories, I hope they use Anchor Beings to end it, establishing that the Main Timeline doesn't have them and thats why its the only one that matters in the long run.
For those saying the "anchor being" is just a meta commentary so it doesn't need to make sense: I ask why? It can be meta as well as make sense. Wouldn't a simple fix be that Paradox was only keeping deadpool's universe from being destroyed because he liked watching wolverine and then when Logan died he just wasn't interested in watching that universe anymore so he would let it die and even speed up it's death? This way you don't need the stupid anchor being rule nor the consequences of introducing a concept like that. Deadpool can still try to save his universe from paradox by bringing another wolverine in. Paradox could say he doesn't care about this wolverine because he is a different wolverine that he hasn't been watching and hasn't been invested in. The logan he cared about is dead and gone so what does it matter? This is even more meta.
why it has to be wolverine then? why it can be someone more and i mean MORE important than him like xavier, reed richards, flanking richards, galactus, princess lilandra, odin, the living tribunal, thanos, apocalipse, the phoenix force, mephisto, dr strange, america chavez, silver surfer, and every other powerfull or smartest or even cosmic character in the hole marvel universe that is more important than a 200 years old boomer that can't even beat dr ocutopus
There's a concept called "Wolverine Publicity" in the comics industry, which was basically "Put Wolverine on the cover of a comic and it will sell". This was so common that there was a comic with Wolverine on the cover with a small box stating that Wolverine didn't actually appear in the comic, and there was another here Wolverine appeared on the cover but was only in the comic for a two panel gag. Wolverine was basically what sold Marvel's various comics, and putting him in was an attempt to drum up sales. "Anchor Beings" are a meta-joke at the comics industry as a whole. Wolverine was the "Anchor Being" of Marvel comics, his presence meant to drum up sales as a last attempt to save a dying comic series or hero or reignite interest in an arc that might be going on for too long. He was on just about every Marvel comic in the 90s and 2000s. Then, ironically, there was a shift, and the "Anchor Being" of Marvel comics has become Deadpool from the 2010s on. Basically, the existence of the Anchor Being is meant to be a meta in-joke about how, if you removed Wolverine from Marvel comics in the 90s and 2000s, the company likely would have completely collapsed because nothing else drew in the readers like a Wolverine cameo, just like how now Deadpool fills that role. It's a commentary on how vital a single character is on the maintenance of an entire fictional universe filled with hundreds of characters, and how unfair it is that if that one character is gone, that entire fictional universe effectively dies because no one is paying attention anymore when the "Cool" character is gone.
The thing that really gets me worked up about the concept is the fact that it gives Logan too much importance in a story about a guy just trying to get by and do something heroic before he passes. It takes the weight of his actions and puts them on a higher pedestal than necessary.
Holy shit could you be any more media illiterate, I’m sorry but I haven’t even seen the movie yet but I knew from the second I first heard about this plot point that it was a meta jab at Fox’s over reliance on Wolverine for the X-men movies.
I can’t see my own reply,but since I feel like I was way to aggressive I will simply write another one since I can’t edit my first one. I’m pretty sure it was a meta jab at Fox over relying on wolverine. I may be wrong but Ochams razor and all that.
@@jaxonhumphreys671 but the thing is, the plot point is played completely straight. If they really wanted to make that joke, it would have been shown that Paradox was wrong or lying
@@TheLeftistOwl well I haven’t seen the movie, what I neglected to put in my rewritten comment was that I thought it was so obviously a meta jab that it wouldn’t have been taken seriously. I still think this is the case but the movie must have not done a good job with it. I honestly don’t think it will come back in a future movie but again I haven’t seen this one yet so maybe I’m wrong.
My headcanon is the anchor being is just whoever created that branch in the timeline tree. Remember that Logan had created that Fox timeline at the end of Days of Future Past.
I went further with that idea and decided that the timeline doesn't die, it just converges back to another one. The thing that made that universe unique stopped, and so eventually it just becomes the same as a different timeline.
@@FreshFalcon I think it's more like he didn't think the universe where Logan died was worth keeping around, and he wanted to kill it sooner than necessary.
He didn't want Wolverine ? He wanted just Deadpool to be his pawn. He blabbered out that timeline Deadpool was from is going to get yeeted and deleted because of Wolverine's death so Deadpool ditched whatever he wanted in order to find and fix his Wolverine-less timeline.
It's telling that most of us assumed anchor beings were a joke because it's so stupid. You know your lore is in a flop era if no one even wants to engage with the premise anymore outside of going, "Please, let it be a joke." The MCU truly has a gift for making cool characters boring as tar.
Yeah, spider-totems are kind of similar, except for the fact that the universe doesn’t die with them. But the spider-totem concept sucks too, just because it’s in the comics doesn’t mean it’s good or worth adaptating
@@emiliano108 kinda invalidates the rest of the marvel universes characters and seems like a cheap gimmicky method to try and elevate spiderman above his station out of sheer baised favoritism. Especially in a universe where you have far more powerful and capable heroes like dr strange, thor, silver surger, sentry, hulk, beyonder, the living tribunal etc. This is why i prefer powerhouse heroes, low level ones like spider man just wreak too much of "Have sympathy for me because my life sucks since im soo weak".
I do see a few ways it could go well, but more that could go poorly. This being introduced as Fantastic Four are coming into play gives me an outside fan-fic-y hope. One of the assertions of Marvel 1602 is that Reed Richards is SO smart, he's capable, if isolated long enough with nothing to do but think, of determining that he exists in a world that operates on narrative laws rather than physical ones. Between Loki being the new god of continuity, Deadpool's 4th wall breaking becoming MCU canon, and Reed Richards coming into play, it's possible that they may be selling us the anchor being concept in order to subvert it later. Imagine the entire MCU uniting in rebellion against the idea that they only get to exist if they prostrate themselves to the whims of an aging demographic that just wants them to show up, say The Line, and wear The Right Colors. They could absolutely fumble this horribly, rushing to try to immitate the gravity of Spiderverse's meta-critique and DCing all over themselves. But I'm going to enjoy the idea for a while before it get's shot out of canon.
I mean that could happen literally right now, the universe is so unstable it's at threat of collapsing at any moment, or at least our end is, it's just kinda how things are.
I feel confident that you're right about it being something that will be memory holed. Mostly because what the ending implies to me could either be: 1. Paradox was lying, he is a ridiculous antagonist who wanted to make a pet project going around pruning Timelines to satisfy whatever sadistic, impotent urge he cultivated working at the TVA. 2. It's like Power Levels in DBZ: at first it seems super important. This is a hurdle that must be overcome or else you are fucked. But eventually it's just like "Eh, it doesn't actually matter. Anyone could have been the anchor being because it was always bullshit, and there was no need to worry after all.
The narrowing of these universes seems great for anyone that is not heavily invested in marvel, It looks far less confusing and more people can maybe understand more. Literally anything could happen before this and it just seems like easy writing.
Consider this: anchor beings is a major plot point going forward and the story is about making sure the multiverse no longer needs them. Maybe Doctor Doom is an anchor being, so the heroes need to find a way to rewrite the rules of the multiverse so they can kill doom without destroying an entire universe
Every time they’ve introduced something like anchor beings, or absolute points, or even canon events in across the spider-verse I’ve absolutely hated it. I understand that the comics and movies don’t exist in the same canon and the construction of their multiverses are allowed to be different but they are also definitely worse and stupid
Yeah, agree. I think it only works when it’s something caused by the characters themselves and not some kind of “chosen one” prophecy for every universe. Loki handled well with the TVA following He Who Remains’ orders and Spider-Verse seems to imply that Miguel is wrong about canon events
@@defineyour100-njstadl25 i think that’s definitely the direction they’re going but i just hate how explicit they decided to make the fanservice and meta commentary in across the spider-verse, especially when the first film did that sort of stuff much better
Oh I forgot about the canon events. That was an even bigger mess. They were just way too specific to make sense. Did Spider-Punk have a close cop friend? Did the T-Rex?
The whole idea that the multiverse as shown in the MCU is 'a different canon' than the comics, when the whole point of the comics' multiverse is to accomodate for that sort of thing, was already insanely bad. To me it's still all just one multiverse, the MCU is still just Earth-199999, and the movie characters who claim that it's Earth-616 are simply mistaken. Or I guess it could become an Earth-616C, just like they renamed the universe the dead-beat Peter Parker from Spider-Verse comes from to Earth-616B, so it wouldn't contradict the comics multiverse.
Something I feel you’re missing here is Paradox said after an anchor being dies it takes thousands of years before the timeline actually dies out. The only reason it’s even relevant here is because Paradox wants to speed things up and kill it himself instead of it happening naturally. It’s really not that big of an issue normally because that’s a long time
Ngl, I think the MCU's attempt to tie Deadpool into the larger canon is kinda shite. Loved the movie, but ultimately, Deadpool works like Mad Max Fury Road: it's carried not by a good plot, but by character interaction and good action scenes. Deadpool & Wolverine works well as an R-rated action comedy and a love letter to the heroes that were or never got to be, but trying to advance a meta plot is kinda stupid conceptually.
The whole movie was a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for the Fox movies and how Wolverine was the basis for all the X-Men movies. Kinda like how the MCU has sucked since Iron Man and Cap America were retired. In universe it makes absolutely no sense, however.
I took the multi-verse aspect of Deadpool to be about the Fox property itself. Disney wanted to use the characters without it being jarring, so they placed them in another universe and merged.
Personally I think the anchor being stuff is more of a meta thing for fox universe because frankly let’s face facts fox was more obsessive with wolverine then anyone else at least in my opinion.
Saw this movie yesterday. It was okay. Had fun with parts of it, but both my husband and I felt like it's purpose was making mega marvel fans geek out more than anything else. It was fun seeing the actors play off of each other, but the story (and character work imo) holding it all together left a lot to be desired.
Anchor beings, nexus beings, variants, canon events--the way they've all been used so far has been limiting the scope of stories. Whether the point was meant to be expansion initially, in practice the focus has been on the mere act of crossing over, the novelty of having multiple versions of the same characters existing in the same movie rather than, you know, having movies set in those universes and then crossing over when it was organic and interesting to do so. Loki wasn't about exploring other Loki stories, it was about showing our Loki interacting with other Lokis. Multiverse of Madness wasn't about the possibilities of other universes, it was about our Dr. Strange interacting with these other universes, mostly as jokes. Even Spiderverse, despite showing us a couple of fully fleshed out universes (Miles never enters Gwen's universe, so it exists strictly for the sake of Gwen's story and not Miles' story, unlike, say, Mumbattan), falls prey to this to an extent, with many of the universes (or at least their representatives) being nothing more than jokes (Lego Spiderman, parchment Vulture, video game characters, live action Prowler (played by Donald Glover--an admittedly clever callback to a scene from the first(?) Amazing Spiderman movie, where he played unseen Miles' uncle). What little worked for me in No Way Home (and it wasn't much, I turned against that movie hard by the thirty minute mark and it never completely won me back) was that the various characters that were brought to the MCU Spiderman's universe had been in their own movies previously and mostly were consistent with those movies. At times, No Way Home felt like a collective sequel to all of the Spiderman movies, with some of the characters getting some much needed closure--though a bit cheesy, seeing Andrew Garfield rescue MJ felt legitimately cathartic for the character, and the banter between the various Spidermen throughout the second half of the movie was pretty well done. Whether intended or not, bringing these characters back canonized those movies within the MCU, a kind of retrograde expansion, I guess. It doesn't look like the X-Men or Fantastic Four movies are going to get the same respect (probably for the best, in some instances).
It's true that the whole "anchor being" idea was ment to be a meta joke. And unless we'll get more details on the concept in future projects, here's how I personally think it works. In the beginning of the movie, Wade asked Paradox how long will it take for his universe to die, now that Logan is gone. Paradox told him that it'll take thousands of years. So, I guess that the way it works is that a universe is born to tell the story of a particular being. But a universe can't just start "in the middle of the story", when the anchor being exists. So it's starts just like any other universe. From the dawn of time, until the anchor being is born and goes through his story. and when he eventually dies, so is his universe. But since it takes so long for the universe to actually end, it's unnoticeable. We as viewers are only focusing on the important stuff, i.e. the anchor being's story. Now, if you think that it's kinda ridiculous how an entire universe exists just for this one specific being then.. yeah, that's the point. This is where the meta joke part comes into play. When Logan died and Hugh Jackman retired from playing the character, the Fox universe started loosing relevancy. And then, when Disney bought Fox.. here comes Paradox (Disney), and offers Deadpool (the last popular and relevant franchise left in Fox) to join the MCU.
I might be interpreting it wrong and im sure someone will tell me if so but the concept of an anchor being didnt make sense to me. In the tva, time works differently. They can view the timeline of any universe and i took it that time isnt linear, everything happens all at once. Thats how they can go to any point in time in a given universe. Thats how they can view clips from a past event, or a future event. So from the start of the universe, everything has happened and is simultaneously happening at the same time. So from the initial concept, the anchor being has already died and is still alive, if that makes sense? So every universe is doomed from the beginning if there is an anchor being that eventually goes on to die? I assume there are very few beings that are truely immortal? So this made things like paradox saying usually it takes thousands of years for the universe to die to confuse me. Why is there a tangible timeframe on a universe dieing? Everything that has happened and will happen in that universe has already happened? Again, i could be dead wrong and am misinterpreting, please correct me if so
I don't like the concept of Anchor Beings because it leaves so many questions. For instance, if Anchor Beings are vital for a timeline to exist, how can a timeline even start before an Anchor Being is born? If they had said that a timeline ends if there isn't an Anchor Being dies before their time and so there isn't a replacement, that at least would make a bit of sense. But how it is now, if I didn't considering Deadpool and Wolverine as a movie just to enjoy and not think too hard on, I'd be shaking my fists at the sky.
I disagree, I think Anchors just plot that shown fox era of marvel heroes that gone after logan death and tva finding Deadpool to try to make him important on Mcu
Its definitely meant to be a meta joke about hugh carrying the franchise on his back. But i do agree that canonizing it was less than ideal. Now they either have to retcon it, or make the same argument about the main mcu now that rdj is gone. Further jokes aside, i think they should have revealed that it was literally just made up by paradox as an excuse to kill wade's timeline. Like, the rest of the TVA gets there and is like "anchor being? Wtf is that?" And then wolverine stuck around cause he had nothing to go back to anyway.
because at least with spiderverse they showcase the stakes and problems of an uncompleted canon event could but even then they tried to deconstruct it beeing implaying that a canon event not necesary means suffering a loss but open a gateway so the main character can get a different result without beeing a friggin martyr like johnatan kent and it won't have a clear answer until the next film. Here is like "you like x-men 97? well f*ck that show, they didn't use wolverine right. He should be on the back ground he should be always in the at the center! the x-men are nothing without him! in fact we will destroy this universe unless wolverine is back! so go and watch our film and buy our toys our we will kill you favorite characters!!"
I know it’s irrelevant, but I feel you should’ve corrected the record on who “created” the Spider-Verse concept. John Semper’s TAS from the 90s had its finale with the Spider Wars (essentially the same general premise) first and Mark Hoffmeier is a credited writer for both Shattered Dimensions and TAS. Very nitpicky of me, I know but I feel the need to bring it up because it’s an uncomfortable subject for Slott and Marvel and they’d rather not talk about it.
I kinda missed the point of you brining this up because you simplified for the sake of brevity to make your overall point, but it bothers me Slott rather quietly take credit for a concept that wasn’t original or unique to him.
I think by anchor beings they are really just talking about the audiences attention and money. Once Logan died we stopped caring about everyone else in that universe and it did essentially die. Now i think the anchor brings can change since no one is immortal and the TVA just lied to Deadpool about that part. Without these popular characters these universe's will die. Because the funding to create then will dry up when these universes stop making money
The whole idea of the anchor being is a metaphor of how Fox's X-Men movies struggled and died off after Hugh left the franchise in Logan, and he was their golden boy so without him nobody felt there was a reason to see the movies anymore. That's why it works for Deadpool and Wolverine. Because the whole movie is an allegory of Disney's acquisition of Fox and all their franchises dying because they didn't make enough money. You can't do that with any other MCU movie because despite failed products and most of the opinions on their movies coming from grifters nowadays, the MCU is still doing relatively well with diamonds in the rough like Loki, Moon Knight, Eternals (I like it at least), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. You can't use the same thing for someone like Iron Man for example since anchor beings were made as a metaphor for Hugh's Wolverine no longer being there since he was the last of the original cast to stick around besides Patrick Stewart, and the MCU still has a few phase 1 and 2 characters left that can pop up anytime, while Fox couldn't because they slowly died when Logan did
As a mechanic, I do find it odd. Meta or not, unless each Anchor Being is immortal, all timelines are doomed. Which I don't think they were going for, but I also can't see how they wouldn't have thought of it. All that said, I don't think the Anchor Being concept is *inherently* locked to nostalgia stunt casting; nothing would stop them from establishing brand-new universes with Anchor Being characters who haven't yet appeared in film, or that are wholly original characters. And presumably most universes have anchor beings we never see or learn about. But I do agree that the more it comes up in the movies, the more of a logistical mess it will be come. What are the odds that the most important people in every universe are about the same age, living on parallel versions of the same planet, in more or less the same timeframe? That is definitely making the multiverse feel smaller.
Oh yeah, to be clear, I’m not trying to suggest the MCU will only ever use anchor beings for nostalgia characters - just that the nostalgia factor explains the _deployment_ of the concept.
I kinda get adding Anchor Beings as a way to add stakes in a sea of infinite possibilities. But we already have Incursions, those serve the purpose to keep the Multiverse in check without making it feel like “this is the wolverine universe and if he dies everyone dies “
while expanding the multiverse has been the goal for a while, anchor helps lead the story towards incursions, battle worlds, and Secret Wars multiverse collapse before getting to the point of a full reboot
I had a similar impression when Multiverse of madness tells us that all dreams are just experiences of the Multiverse. That closes off way too many stories to just thoughtlessly throw it out there.
I understand some people in the comments saying that they just exist in Deadpool and Wolverine, but I also remember hearing rumors about one of the upcoming movies having a major focus on anchor beings and being another excuse for more cameos, which I really don’t want.
I just assumed that most timelines have multiple overlapping anchor beings but once in a while you get unlucky and you lose an anchorbeing while there aren't any alternatives... mostly I assumed it was to serve the story they wanted to tell.
I think you're right, but isn't it also a possibility that the concept of universes being backdrops for bankable characters is an intentional self-criticism? If they are indeed going the Hickman route, it could be an interesting way to go. The anchors fail to save their multiverse and in the newly reformed one the concept no longer applies, leaving the path forward feeling "bigger" than ever before.
In all fairness, multiverses and time travel always present the same critiques as you had for anchor beings. It expands the potential for story telling, sure but it also creates a significantly silly contrivance to retcon an entire series of plot lines like we are going to see with the rewrite of the future Avengers films to drop the buildup of Kang in favor of the hastily cobbled together Doom plotline.
@@PillarofGarbage Including an introduction that’s mostly recap and stating the premise of the video without actually touching on it is generous, but even then, starting a minute long sponsor segment 90 seconds into the video might arguably worse, like a midroll ad except my UA-cam Premium subscription doesn’t block it out and it lasts longer than most UA-cam ads I remember. Edit: For the record I did enjoy and agree with the video, but my criticisms of how creators handle sponsor spots is entirely separate of that and should not be taken as an indicator of my general opinion on any creator or their content.
You can mark the exact point where the multiverse concept died along with Kang due to thr failure that was Ant mam and the wasp Quantumania that movie didn't meat expectations and Marvel was already planning to write Kang out then.
Something that contextualizes the "Anchor Beings" is the topic of "Creative Copyrights" all these stories have a source, but these writers and artists at some point in the system were given absolute control, absolute rights to create so long as it's unique to them alone. sequels had to be approved by creative licensing, lose the license and the related works are sealed off or erased until it's rediscovered or recreated without copyright infringement. at some point even if unintended, a creator will recreate a character, but all it takes is some legal documents saying "can't do this" or "cannot references that" and suddenly the expansive world building just shrank, alot.
One thing that bugs me from Endgame and the notion that each universe needs its infinity stones so you need to return them, is that the main universe that we are still continuing the MCU in had all of its infinity stones destroyed by Thanos after the snap. So can this one just continue fine without them?
The worst part about this "anchor being" concept is that it means every effort to save the world in the mainline MCU is pointless, because it's pretty undeniable its anchor being was Tony Stark. Oh, and don't forget "canon events" from Across the Spider-Verse in the ever-expanding list of rules-governing-the-multiverse-that-all-apply-at-all-times-yet-only-the-new-one-introduced-in-this-story-matters-to-this-story. (Yes, the Spider-Verse movies are a part of the MCU multiverse, albeit distantly connected - at one point Miguel makes a pretty blatant reference to the events of No Way Home.)
the thing about anchor beings is that in Deadpool and wolverine it's not meant to be a serious rule for a multiverse spanning MCU, it's a meta commentary it's a parody of the MCU's perception of it's acquired IPs. Paradox is an exec going "wolverine was the most popular character in that universe, now that he's dead we don't wanna keep making movies in it, but if you want we can take Deadpool and drop him in 616" it's a joke, and the movie runs with it as a serious premise and for Deadpool and Wolverine it WORKS since it's a story that's supposed to be a love letter to marvel's previous attempts, to it's dead movies but, in being set in the MCU it suddenly makes it a rule that the entire multiverse needs to run with it, ironically encouraging the very behavior it's mocking.... now it's just a rule the MCU needs to work with for ever
Anchor beings in my eyes are the franchisees characters. When that series gets canceled, the character dies, or any reason that makes the media any less popular/end then it affects the entire “universe” The reason wolverines Logan was the anchor being is because that’s genuinely what he was for xmen, fox, and all those characters to us from 2000-2016. Him leaving fox may not have been the last nail, but they lost one of their biggest hitters and they slowly started to die out. Fox stopped making movies. So Deadpool’s universe was dying, but after the events of the movie he secures their place in the multiverse. Fox may have died, but now disney/the TVa is hosting them, when they start having stories that become more popular the stronger their branch gets.
When I first watched Deadpool and Wolverine, when they said an anchor being is an entity that's so vital that if they die the universe starts to die slowly over time I thought that being was going to be Galactus cause if he dies the universe dies
For everyone talking about how 'Anchor Beings' was a thing just for Deadpool & Wolverine... Feige in an interview said he's glad people are using the term, regarding the future of the MCU
Even just on a surface level, Anchor Beings are just dumb. One random person carries an entire universe on their back? Why? Why is it Wolverine in this universe? Who held the universe together before Wolverine was born? What happened to that guy? It brings up so many questions and none of the answers make the story better. If anything, any possible dumb answers just lead to more dumb questions.
You have to understand we create these universes. They don't exist until someone creates a character and writes a world around them. If this character isn't popular or dies then that universe slowly dies because it's become unpopular and is no longer making the company money.
@@Shawn-zt3gv That's definitely a good interpretation, possibly even an implied one, even if it's not textual. But it does make the hand of the author really heavy. Would make more sense for Deadpool as a meta character though. I don't think Wolverine's ever broken the 4th wall.
@@Shawn-zt3gv oh shut up and accept that this shit only exist because the man behind the curtain demanded that his favorite puppet show wasn't axed from the picture
I feel like a good way to tell a good multiverse story is to tell it widely with risks involved with the audience. It is a cosmic gamble after all, so rather than dwelling and living with a select few groups of people, The most popular ones, dwell with unknown characters and up and coming actors. If Deadpool and Wolverine outlines how the over-centrality of characters had caused the collapse of the Fox Universe, both literally and figurative through Meta-explanations- Surely the opposite would be true. Heck, they've already explored that in the same movie, in the character of Gambit who doesn't even have a movie attached to him and has no voice within the universe and multiverse at all. Less for a few cameos regarding his existence. If Deadpool and Wolverine is a turning point for Marvel, than Gambit in the opposite spirit is the new starting point.
I think that, as good as the stories were, anything that happens in 'What If?" isn't considered 'Canon'. That probably goes for anything Marvel that is on Disney+ (just like Star Wars before it, Movie Canon > TV Canon > Book Canon). But now we have parts of TV Canon that have 'graduated' to Movie Canon, causing confusion (Wanda turning to Evil thanks to the last few moments of the last episode of WandaVision, the TVA still around even though Loki 'solved' the problem of proliferating Universes). All that being said, this is a Deadpool movie, so I can always see them coming up with whatever they want, and then Marvel just saying "Well, that's on Deadpool Earth, which doesn't follow ANY Universal Rules for some reason". 😅
two things (having read the comments, I'm basically just cosigning what everyone else said) : 1. Its not that deep. B-15 closure aside, the movie constantly asserts that nothing within it mattered aside from whatever could be used to facilitate its actual story 2. Its too early to tell what effect Anchor beings have on future movies, and probably not as much effect as you're implying.
I 100% believe that the entire film is a METAphor about Disney's acquisition of Fox, Fox's failures with its Marvel characters, and the question about what will happen now. I do not think Marvel intends to do ANYTHING with anchor beings, or that it will change the MCU in any way at all. Outside of metaphor, the concept entirely falls apart.
I believe the point of this, is to make things simpler in the long run. IMO they are going to reduce the number of universes to a single one before long. The multiverse saga, is to bring all those other stories and external films/characters into a shared narrative and eventually resolve everything, bring things into a single storyline. It will most likely be a mini-reboot, they can recast things like iron man but keep newer actors who wish to stay on.
I honestly liked it as a metaphor for Deadpool's Fox universe rather than a full MCU wide plot point. I mean, deadpool breaks the 4th wall so it would make sense if this was just deadpool writing himself a silky adventure
I don't think the concept works particularly well as a universal constant, but they _nailed it_ with the decision to use it for a Deadpool movie. Taking how we perceive comic book worlds far too literally and pasting the result directly into the narrative is classic Deadpool.
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@@EEEEEEEE True to your name, I see.
Don't put sponsored content in the middle of the video.
@@Gnarfledarf Fr, hell the actual video hadn’t even started yet. Briefly mentioning a sponsor at the beginning or middle is one thing but putting the whole sponsor spot before any of the actual content is silly especially when users pay to not get ads while still support creators.
The problem with “anchor being”, “canon event” and “sacred timeline” is that they’re all metaphors for editorial mandate being presented as in-universe metaphysics
That kinda ruins my immersion, why introduce a concept that only makes sense if you view the entire in-universe world as nothing but fiction, looking from outside in.
Kind of a lazy excuse for explaining anything if you ask me. _"It had to happen because it had to"_ wow really?
@@Haispawner There's no reason it can't make sense in universe too.
The "it had to happen" line makes sense in universe. HWR decided the Avengers should time travel, and Loki should not have left with the tesseract. I wonder if the Thanos-less timeline got pruned too.
Is that a problem? I'd say that's what the point of it is, if it isn't that, it doesn't exist.
@@Haispawner I agree except canon is events
it's clear what they are going for with anchor being. it's just tthe ddeapool writers sayying the mcu has been going ddown hill since tonyy died.
The anchor being concept works enough for Deadpool as a meta-jab at how the X-Men movies over-relied on Wolverine. So long as they limit its impact to this movie, we shouldn't have any future issues.
Dunno, I can see it being used further to bring RDJ back as Dr. Doom... but hopefully not.
Why didn't it make a meta jab at the mcu then for relying on Iron man as well?
Yeah; because it also introduces a lot of weird... meta holes(?). Like, obviously Wolverine won't exist forever (and didn't exist before he was born) so... what was the anchor outside of his, say, few hundred year life, for a universe that's billions of years old. And if the decay of not having an anchor is measured on the order of 'life times of a universe as we know it', it's... a non issue outside of the TVA being buttholes about it which, like... considering they prune entire timelines already, why would they bother having a universe decay naturally or not juse prune something to get rid of it if it's a problem?
Feige literally gave the idea to the writers and in interviews he evaded questions regarding this, something tells me we will see this concept again
See I thought it was more of a dig at the whole comic book industry - many universes in the comic multiverse exist only to tell a particular story for a particular character, once that story is told, the universe "ends"
I honestly took the entire "Anchor Being" concept as a meta joke about how once Wolverine died, no one wanted to see another X-MEN movie. Without him the world (the franchise) would just end. No continuation to anyone's story. In that way, I thought it was hilarious and I doubt it will come up ever again.
Hopefully because the MCU won't be as dumb as FOX was and make the X-Men be all about 1 character above others
Yeah this was a stupid video to make. Your comment is the correct interpretation. Theyre basically making fun of fox that they focused on only one character above all the rest.
@@sjhwbs Pillar of Garbage constantly has terrible takes like this in between something mildly interesting that 20 other people have already said.
It was an obvious 4th wall jab: "these universes only exist to serve 1 character" as if that doesn't perfectly describe all the movies/comics besides "The Sacred Timeline" of Earth-616.
"The Void" was explicitly filled with 20th Century Fox objects and characters. It was the dumpster for all the franchises that died (or never were in Gambit's case). No reason to believe it was anything more than that.
The thing is it’s a major part of the X-Men comics
That's exactly what the anchor beings are - the most important talked about character - the beloved one. Also, the timelines are meta for FRANCHISES. The void is full of all the discarded characters and stuff from discarded/forgotten franchises...
The problem with the multiverse is that either only one universe matters, or a handful. The problem with anchor beings is that only one person matters, or a handful.
Just like the real world; where only I matter.
@@phillipblanc4846 real
here is the thing tho : if only one unvierse matters , then no universe matters ...
You can take the body of a dead dr. strange from another universe , you can send a problem caracter to another universe , you can have a bad guy jump in ...
the story stops being a story and becomes a math equation with calculus to determine how stuff actually works and how your actions may influence everything else , or you just don't care because this is your life , it may get snuffed out now so why bother ?
you either write everything everywhere all at once (everything matters) or rick and morty (nothing matters) ,
and like you can't make every movie like this , so you just have to write some limitation around it :
if the story becomes meta , you have to make the stakes meta :
like everyone was sad at the end of infinity wars , and endgame was hype ,
however when the antagonist around wich those movies revolved around gets used as a stepping stone to make every single villain matter the most ,
you kinda become passive about everything really :
dr. strange made it so thanos got killed in such a trivial way it makes infinity war and endgame feel , well ... hollow ...
there was no challenge all along when you could have just done that ...
endgame itself feels like an artificial movie now , because you just know they could take an iron man from the timeline in wich he lived , or a captain american from the timeline in wich he came back ...
nobody can die now , every threat can be matched , and everything is just a slob of action figures clashing ...
if the plot is meta , then why not make the stakes meta as well ?
this is the exact same thing every multiverse did :
you care about miles because he is a black spiderman , it's about somenthing outside his story ,
the popularity of spiderman and the knowledge that black kids would have loved a black spiderman ...
same for the multiverse spiderpepole , there is nothing about spiders that allows them to get into other dimensions , it's just that spiderman is popular so he gets the multiverse ...
so yeah make the stakes meta , if there is a mismatch in the size of the stakes vs story you end up with either an action figures smashing against each other ,
or a story about jesus fighting the mob ...
Though every universe usually has a version of that character (Spider-Man for example)
@@phillipblanc4846 chat i think we have an anchor being 💀🔥🗣
I don’t expect Anchor Beings to be a concept that’s ever relevant past Deadpool & Wolverine.
Remember "fixed points in time" from that one episode of What If?
Neither does anybody else until I brought it up lol
@@MilkyWayGrump I thought it was a Doctor Who reference.
@@MilkyWayGrump It was in X-Men 97
Honestly I heard rumours it goes into Secret Wars and Doomsday
They brought it up in x men 97@MilkyWayGrump
I think that, even within the story of Deadpool & Wolverine, they get rid of the idea of anchor beings. Because the universe begins to fix itself, despite Logan being dead. The TVA got it wrong. Ultimately, I felt like the concept was 1) a meta look at the Fox movies, and 2) a limited understanding of how the multiverse works from the TVA. If it comes back in any major way, I'd be surprised.
It doesn’t even work well as a metaphor for the Fox universe, and the fact that at the end they’re just like “oh i guess the problem resolved itself and nobody got hurt” really seemed like they had no idea what to with their own concept since it seems they wanted to keep the Fox universe for some reason
@@every_spider-man_ever I think there’s a real messiness to the concept (which doesn’t feel suuper intentional and, alongside some other parts of the film, I expect we can chalk up to the writers’ strike) that means I can neither _rule out_ your take being the answer or get on board with it. Does newLogan take on the anchor being role because of him being practically the same guy as the old one? Is it to do with channeling the time ripper? Or, yeah, are the TVA more widely wrong with the ‘anchor being’ concept & misinterpreting the drama? I think that last one’s absolutely a possibility and a valid interpretation, but I don’t see any reason in the film to prioritise it above the other possibilities.
For me, Re: the meta lens, I don’t doubt this is part of it from an IRL perspective, but that doesn’t do anything to make it less or more real within the MCU.
@@PillarofGarbage In the comics, all universes need a Spider-Man to connect them to the multiverse. Maybe that's where they got the Anchor Being idea from in-universe?
@@PillarofGarbage Oh yeah, I agree that in-world it's very messy and that they don't make it clear why things change at the end. But yeah, on that meta level, I feel like the quick brushing away of concept is the equivalent of "don't think about this too much, it's not important". But I guess we shall see.
I think it will come back, as a device to tell the end of our current marvel cinematic universe, as was it's purpose in this movie, the characters that kept this universe alive will die off or sacrifice themselves to allow the start of something new.
In this movie it was just a jab at how FOX bungled the X-Men so badly that they had to keep going back to Jackman because they failed to make the audience care about non-Jackman characters.
I hope other Studios learn from that to NOT make 1 character the core of everything when it's supposed to be an ensemble
The Bungled the MCU too
@@Christian_Ada1Nah. The MCU’s pretty decent overall still. 2023 basically sucked for everything at the box office that wasn’t Barbenheimer.
like dc and warner bros will ever learn that while they keep pandering to batman fanboys
I really don’t think I’d take an idea introduced in a Deadpool movie that seriously
Yeah it's just a joke/excuse to bring Wolverine back.
I think the “anchor being” was just a metacommentary on how Hugh Jackman was the main guy of the fox universe. Idk, excited to watch the video though!
That’s pretty much what it was
Based on the leaked plot for Kang dynasty it was going to be a big thing who knows if that will continue
@@Isaacisaperson4677Is there any legit source for that leak? I've seen it bandied about and I don't believe it's legit
@@ZachBobBob I've been taking it with a grain of salt but it wouldn't surprise me if it's true
I agreed with that
I strongly disliked that the MCU's Earth was 616. It had already been established that it was Earth 19999, and was even called such in Across the Spider-Verse.
Right?!?! Omfg thank you. I feel so alone in my dislike. Earth-616 has always been the main line of the comics, what's the point in changing that 😭
MCU really said we'll be giving you the same white boys since 2008 and we'll never stop😭
I don't like anchor beings, canon events, and anything else that restricts the opportunities a multiverse provides. Introducing the multiverse was an opportunity to present us with limitless opportunities, the fun of it was that the possibilities were endless.
True. Tho "anchor beings" & "canon events" do make sense just in those films. Anchor being is about how with Logans's death the Foxverse just felt apart & I really think Miguel in ATSV will be proven wrong about "canon events".
You’d think Marvel would have learned that from ”Rick and Morty”, considering how many creatives they keep poaching from that show
Canon events were pretty clearly not meant to be taken seriously.
Considering cannon events are enforced by the villen in that movie with little evidence something else's didn't cause the problem that ended it. Unless its shown to be real in future movies, i don't think its a real issue.
So you’re an objectifist.
I 100% agree with this take because I was thinking the same thing after the movie. Like with the infinity of the multiverse it means that there was 100% of a chance that an entire universe, worlds, galaxies, families - were destroyed because its anchor being (idk, a hedgehog) died in 1872. Obviously the concept itself isn't bad, but when stacked with the other multiverse rules like nexus events, incursions, absolute points, canon events, it just makes universes more fragile than dry spaghetti and makes you think what the point of a band of heroes courageously saving their universe, just for a guy to take a dump two centimeters from where it was supposed to go and have the entire timeline erased from history. Remember, infinite multiverse means that it has happened and will continue to happen infinite times
That last statement isn't necessarily true
I think it can be salvaged. You could easily change the narrative to “Paradox was lying, the timeline was collapsing because he sent so many people to the void.” Would be an interesting route to take the multiverse
Deadpool and Wolverine just enjoyed their very enthusiastic walk together and asked their enemies if their health plans were apparently great.
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"I was out for a walk, minding my own busines."
"Bullshit!"
"WHAT! I was!"
"And what exactly were you doing whilst 'minding your own business'."
I get the feeling that both Paradox & TVA might be like Miguel from ATSV where they missinterpret something about the multiverse and think it’s an arbitrary rule about the multiverse because much like canon event, anchor being doesn’t really make sense.
Like, if a universe stay alive because of one person… how was that universe before said person was even born ?
In the case of Wolverine, he wasn’t alive since the bing bang so he couldn’t have been the anchor being for the entire lifetime of that universe.
Really it’s possible that the true reason that universe started to collapsed could be something related to Secret War 2015 where multiple universes collapsed to one another, and both Paradox & TVA interpreted it differently to what it actually is.
Universes are called branches by he TVA because they branch off at some point. Wolverine branched a new universe during Days of Future Past. Everything that came before already came before in other universes, this is just the part where everything changes and from then till his death the branch has a reason to be.
This would also mean that pruning has no reason to be, because branches will die anyway.
Sorry to necro this, but I'd like to point out that we never saw how the Fox Universe used to be like before Wolverine. X-Men Origins Wolverine is the furthest past of that world that we saw. So in a sense, that universe was cemented with Wolverine (or rather, when little Jimmy discovered his abilities). And after Logan that film universe literally stopped existing (for obvious meta reasons of course).
Anyway, the point being is that universe existed before Wolverine with the sole purpose of bringing Wolverine to life. All events that took place before Wolverine (whatever they were) eventually purposefully converged in the timeline where X-Men Origins wolverine and all the other movies took place. And when he died and his journey ended, apparently there was no point for that universe anymore. Even though there were plenty of stories to tell, about other X-Men or even about Laura, they simply weren't relevant enough, unfortunately. People didn't care for Dark Phoenix or New Mutants, Gifted and Legion were cancelled, Deadpool was lucky to be popular enough to keep going but I doubt we'll ever see other X-Men of the past. So even if by the end of the movie Deadpool "saved" Earth-10005, it doesn't really matter since it will only be developed solely around Deadpool. So ironically, Deadpool became the new Anchor Being in the meta-sense because without him there will be no point in making anything else in Earth-10005.
I think how anchor beings will work going forward will be similar to how the Molecule Man functioned in the events leading up to Hickman’s Secret Wars. Doom is going through the multiverse killing them, causing the early deaths of universes, leading to more incursions, which will ultimately lead to the creation of Battleworld. He may have even stolen one of their bodies, which could be why he looks like Tony Stark.
@@markmerk1296 I don’t love this as the way we’re introduced to Doom but otherwise yeah I think that’s the absolutely the most interesting thing that could be done with this concept
@@PillarofGarbage This commenter is pointing out that the whole Anchor concept is taken from Secret Wars (2015), something you would have known and been able to mention in the video, if you'd read the comic.
@@garrett2439 I've read the comic, obviously. Molecule Man's anchor role is very clearly something that works differently to whatever the MCU's setting up here.
Honestly the Spiderverse movies did the multiverse stuff the best. Having the characters glitch out if they're in another universe is a cool and logical rule that adds real stakes.
I don't know if this is canon to either the MCU or any other Marvel project, but one multiversal rule that I really like is what I call the Multiverse Magnet: if Person A of Universe A and Person B of Universe B switch places, they start attracting their own universe to the place they currently are- so A in UB starts attracting UA, and viceversa. Of course, if it's just two people, this attraction is really slow, and it would take thousands of years for anything really bad to happen: however, if too many people from too many different universe hang out in the same spot, that's when shit really starts to get messy.
That idea came from that Stephen King series "Castle Rock" before the Spiderverse movies: That if someone from another reality stays in one they're not from they're a living "disruption" that messes everything up.
@@ShadowSonic2 The Apprentice Adept series by Piers Anthony (1980-1990) has a similar concept - a science fiction and a fantasy world overlap geographically, allowing individuals to move between them, though only if they have no living counterpart in the other frame. Across the series, a recurring concern is preserving balance between the frames so that they don't face a catastrophic natural rebalancing. One set of complications arises from a counterpart pair managing to exchange places with each other (despite that normally being impossible) which establishes a long-term imbalance, requiring heroic measures to abate.
Maybe it would have been better if instead of Anchor Beings, it was Paradox deciding that after all the important beings in a universe die, monitoring that world is just a waste of the TVA's resources and it would be more efficient to get rid of it.
I'm not a Deadpool fan, but the multiverse is a relatively old trope in comics. In the movies it provides an easy "reset" button for switching actors and dealing with the fact that people age/die... or the fact that knew tony stark as a "Vietnam" guy but now he's a "Gulf War" guy...it just provides an easy continuity fix.
Did, uh, did you watch the video? Because he talks about the multiverse being an old trope... a lot...
While I've always held the opinion that you should treat every sequel and every other tie in entry in a series/franchise as a non-canon / alternative reality story, having it literally written in a meta fourth-wall breaking sense feels wrong. Like the writers are basically saying "yeah all of these movies only exist as movies, they aren't real people at all so there's no real point in connecting with them"
Why are people assuming every universe must have an anchor being?
Disregarding the fact that it is just obviously a joke, they mentioned this universe has an anchor being. They didn't mention every universe has them...
Why would it be something some universes have and some don't. Maybe the sacred timeline wouldn't have anchor beings, but what about the others?
@@matti.8465 why would it be something all universes have? We've seen some universes are even animated, assuming they all follow exactly the same rules is silly
You cannot use actual lore developments as jokes...
@@PlatinumAltaria a) you can
B) you shouldn't take jokes as plot development
Cool idea except Kevin Feige went on to put his foot in his mouth and say the sacred timeline has an anchor being who is still alive.
Why would a timeline slowly disappear for the TVA when they sit outside of time, like Wolverine dying just happened "recently"? It always happened for the entire existence of that timeline. That's the whole point of sitting outside of time.
Almost like Paradox may have been bullshitting even more than we thought…
Deadpool 3 wasnt actually good. But the chemistry between ryan and hugh carried the movie
You are spot on about how Marvel Studios is going about this. The Loki show's S1 (2021) did quite well in establishing why only one timeline had been allowed to exist by 'He Who Remains' and how the events of the show result in the creation of the multiverse. However, Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) and D&W (2024), rather than show us how the multiverse works, cared more about getting the audience to appreciate characters and their actors who didn't quite get their due in their day (i.e. Garfield and the 3rd act cameos in D&W).The MCU seems like it is done with creating anything new and memorable for now. With Majors' Kang now replaced with RDJ's Doom, I can't imagine what kind of future the MCU is planning for itself after having everybody fight along with everybody in Avengers: Doomsday (2026) and Secret Wars (2027). Where can the stories even possibly expand beyond the multiverse?
Anytime they tried anything new the audience got mad, that's why
As someone who hates multiverses in stories, I hope they use Anchor Beings to end it, establishing that the Main Timeline doesn't have them and thats why its the only one that matters in the long run.
For those saying the "anchor being" is just a meta commentary so it doesn't need to make sense: I ask why? It can be meta as well as make sense.
Wouldn't a simple fix be that Paradox was only keeping deadpool's universe from being destroyed because he liked watching wolverine and then when Logan died he just wasn't interested in watching that universe anymore so he would let it die and even speed up it's death? This way you don't need the stupid anchor being rule nor the consequences of introducing a concept like that.
Deadpool can still try to save his universe from paradox by bringing another wolverine in. Paradox could say he doesn't care about this wolverine because he is a different wolverine that he hasn't been watching and hasn't been invested in. The logan he cared about is dead and gone so what does it matter? This is even more meta.
why it has to be wolverine then? why it can be someone more and i mean MORE important than him like xavier, reed richards, flanking richards, galactus, princess lilandra, odin, the living tribunal, thanos, apocalipse, the phoenix force, mephisto, dr strange, america chavez, silver surfer, and every other powerfull or smartest or even cosmic character in the hole marvel universe that is more important than a 200 years old boomer that can't even beat dr ocutopus
@@motor4X4kombatbecause Fox over relied on wolverine, if they didn’t use wolverine it would no longer be meta
@@jaxonhumphreys671 and?
There's a concept called "Wolverine Publicity" in the comics industry, which was basically "Put Wolverine on the cover of a comic and it will sell". This was so common that there was a comic with Wolverine on the cover with a small box stating that Wolverine didn't actually appear in the comic, and there was another here Wolverine appeared on the cover but was only in the comic for a two panel gag. Wolverine was basically what sold Marvel's various comics, and putting him in was an attempt to drum up sales.
"Anchor Beings" are a meta-joke at the comics industry as a whole. Wolverine was the "Anchor Being" of Marvel comics, his presence meant to drum up sales as a last attempt to save a dying comic series or hero or reignite interest in an arc that might be going on for too long. He was on just about every Marvel comic in the 90s and 2000s. Then, ironically, there was a shift, and the "Anchor Being" of Marvel comics has become Deadpool from the 2010s on.
Basically, the existence of the Anchor Being is meant to be a meta in-joke about how, if you removed Wolverine from Marvel comics in the 90s and 2000s, the company likely would have completely collapsed because nothing else drew in the readers like a Wolverine cameo, just like how now Deadpool fills that role. It's a commentary on how vital a single character is on the maintenance of an entire fictional universe filled with hundreds of characters, and how unfair it is that if that one character is gone, that entire fictional universe effectively dies because no one is paying attention anymore when the "Cool" character is gone.
The thing that really gets me worked up about the concept is the fact that it gives Logan too much importance in a story about a guy just trying to get by and do something heroic before he passes. It takes the weight of his actions and puts them on a higher pedestal than necessary.
Holy shit could you be any more media illiterate, I’m sorry but I haven’t even seen the movie yet but I knew from the second I first heard about this plot point that it was a meta jab at Fox’s over reliance on Wolverine for the X-men movies.
I can’t see my own reply,but since I feel like I was way to aggressive I will simply write another one since I can’t edit my first one.
I’m pretty sure it was a meta jab at Fox over relying on wolverine. I may be wrong but Ochams razor and all that.
@@jaxonhumphreys671 but the thing is, the plot point is played completely straight. If they really wanted to make that joke, it would have been shown that Paradox was wrong or lying
@@TheLeftistOwl well I haven’t seen the movie, what I neglected to put in my rewritten comment was that I thought it was so obviously a meta jab that it wouldn’t have been taken seriously. I still think this is the case but the movie must have not done a good job with it. I honestly don’t think it will come back in a future movie but again I haven’t seen this one yet so maybe I’m wrong.
My headcanon is the anchor being is just whoever created that branch in the timeline tree. Remember that Logan had created that Fox timeline at the end of Days of Future Past.
I went further with that idea and decided that the timeline doesn't die, it just converges back to another one. The thing that made that universe unique stopped, and so eventually it just becomes the same as a different timeline.
I don't think they ever said every timeline has an anchor being
I feel like Paradox just made that up because he really wanted Wolverine.
Or do you mean Deadpool? Cause they could've gotten a different wolverine from another universe without having for the whole anchor being concept
Would be great if the movie even hinted at that.
@@FreshFalcon I think it's more like he didn't think the universe where Logan died was worth keeping around, and he wanted to kill it sooner than necessary.
He didn't want Wolverine ? He wanted just Deadpool to be his pawn. He blabbered out that timeline Deadpool was from is going to get yeeted and deleted because of Wolverine's death so Deadpool ditched whatever he wanted in order to find and fix his Wolverine-less timeline.
It's telling that most of us assumed anchor beings were a joke because it's so stupid. You know your lore is in a flop era if no one even wants to engage with the premise anymore outside of going, "Please, let it be a joke." The MCU truly has a gift for making cool characters boring as tar.
"lore" as a concept is overrated
Aren't Spider-Men always the anchor being for comics? Isn't that the entire reason for the web connections
Yeah, spider-totems are kind of similar, except for the fact that the universe doesn’t die with them. But the spider-totem concept sucks too, just because it’s in the comics doesn’t mean it’s good or worth adaptating
Yes. That was good though.
@@emiliano108 kinda invalidates the rest of the marvel universes characters and seems like a cheap gimmicky method to try and elevate spiderman above his station out of sheer baised favoritism. Especially in a universe where you have far more powerful and capable heroes like dr strange, thor, silver surger, sentry, hulk, beyonder, the living tribunal etc. This is why i prefer powerhouse heroes, low level ones like spider man just wreak too much of "Have sympathy for me because my life sucks since im soo weak".
Okay but now I really want to see you upload an in-depth analysis video on the writing behind Skibidi Toilet
I do see a few ways it could go well, but more that could go poorly.
This being introduced as Fantastic Four are coming into play gives me an outside fan-fic-y hope. One of the assertions of Marvel 1602 is that Reed Richards is SO smart, he's capable, if isolated long enough with nothing to do but think, of determining that he exists in a world that operates on narrative laws rather than physical ones. Between Loki being the new god of continuity, Deadpool's 4th wall breaking becoming MCU canon, and Reed Richards coming into play, it's possible that they may be selling us the anchor being concept in order to subvert it later. Imagine the entire MCU uniting in rebellion against the idea that they only get to exist if they prostrate themselves to the whims of an aging demographic that just wants them to show up, say The Line, and wear The Right Colors. They could absolutely fumble this horribly, rushing to try to immitate the gravity of Spiderverse's meta-critique and DCing all over themselves. But I'm going to enjoy the idea for a while before it get's shot out of canon.
The fact that DC gave jimmy olson and Lois lane there own comics means anybody can be a main character
Multiverse stories are just the author’s personal fanfic
It would suck if someone you didn’t know dying would destroy your universe but other than that I don’t care I think it’s fine
Aren't you always fine with the mcu. They can do no wrong it seems
@@nalday2534 ??? my nibba i haven't been to a mcu movie in the cinema since love and thunder (i think)
@@nalday2534 ??? i havent seen a mcu movie Before this one since love and thunder at least the newer ones
I mean that could happen literally right now, the universe is so unstable it's at threat of collapsing at any moment, or at least our end is, it's just kinda how things are.
@@TiredMoonRabbitExplain
I feel confident that you're right about it being something that will be memory holed. Mostly because what the ending implies to me could either be:
1. Paradox was lying, he is a ridiculous antagonist who wanted to make a pet project going around pruning Timelines to satisfy whatever sadistic, impotent urge he cultivated working at the TVA.
2. It's like Power Levels in DBZ: at first it seems super important. This is a hurdle that must be overcome or else you are fucked. But eventually it's just like "Eh, it doesn't actually matter. Anyone could have been the anchor being because it was always bullshit, and there was no need to worry after all.
The narrowing of these universes seems great for anyone that is not heavily invested in marvel, It looks far less confusing and more people can maybe understand more. Literally anything could happen before this and it just seems like easy writing.
Consider this: anchor beings is a major plot point going forward and the story is about making sure the multiverse no longer needs them. Maybe Doctor Doom is an anchor being, so the heroes need to find a way to rewrite the rules of the multiverse so they can kill doom without destroying an entire universe
Every time they’ve introduced something like anchor beings, or absolute points, or even canon events in across the spider-verse I’ve absolutely hated it. I understand that the comics and movies don’t exist in the same canon and the construction of their multiverses are allowed to be different but they are also definitely worse and stupid
Yeah, agree. I think it only works when it’s something caused by the characters themselves and not some kind of “chosen one” prophecy for every universe. Loki handled well with the TVA following He Who Remains’ orders and Spider-Verse seems to imply that Miguel is wrong about canon events
The whole thing with Canon events in the Spider-verse movies is that they don't actually have to happen.
@@defineyour100-njstadl25 i think that’s definitely the direction they’re going but i just hate how explicit they decided to make the fanservice and meta commentary in across the spider-verse, especially when the first film did that sort of stuff much better
Oh I forgot about the canon events. That was an even bigger mess. They were just way too specific to make sense. Did Spider-Punk have a close cop friend? Did the T-Rex?
The whole idea that the multiverse as shown in the MCU is 'a different canon' than the comics, when the whole point of the comics' multiverse is to accomodate for that sort of thing, was already insanely bad. To me it's still all just one multiverse, the MCU is still just Earth-199999, and the movie characters who claim that it's Earth-616 are simply mistaken. Or I guess it could become an Earth-616C, just like they renamed the universe the dead-beat Peter Parker from Spider-Verse comes from to Earth-616B, so it wouldn't contradict the comics multiverse.
Something I feel you’re missing here is Paradox said after an anchor being dies it takes thousands of years before the timeline actually dies out. The only reason it’s even relevant here is because Paradox wants to speed things up and kill it himself instead of it happening naturally. It’s really not that big of an issue normally because that’s a long time
I was convinced paradox was just bullshitting with that concept and simply wanted to destroy deadpool's universe. Im very sad that its a real thing.
Ngl, I think the MCU's attempt to tie Deadpool into the larger canon is kinda shite.
Loved the movie, but ultimately, Deadpool works like Mad Max Fury Road: it's carried not by a good plot, but by character interaction and good action scenes.
Deadpool & Wolverine works well as an R-rated action comedy and a love letter to the heroes that were or never got to be, but trying to advance a meta plot is kinda stupid conceptually.
Honestly I feel like there's a correlation between the anchor beings and Great Man Theory. I'm reminded somewhat of your Andor video on the subject.
The whole movie was a tongue-in-cheek metaphor for the Fox movies and how Wolverine was the basis for all the X-Men movies. Kinda like how the MCU has sucked since Iron Man and Cap America were retired.
In universe it makes absolutely no sense, however.
I took the multi-verse aspect of Deadpool to be about the Fox property itself. Disney wanted to use the characters without it being jarring, so they placed them in another universe and merged.
Disney executives cannot help but jam up their Infinite Money Printing Machines with hare-brained nonsense that literally no one asked for.
No one asked for the MCU to begin with, "No one asked for this" is a silly complaint
Personally I think the anchor being stuff is more of a meta thing for fox universe because frankly let’s face facts fox was more obsessive with wolverine then anyone else at least in my opinion.
Saw this movie yesterday. It was okay. Had fun with parts of it, but both my husband and I felt like it's purpose was making mega marvel fans geek out more than anything else. It was fun seeing the actors play off of each other, but the story (and character work imo) holding it all together left a lot to be desired.
ok but what if anchor beings have big oily abs pillar, did you consider the oily ab factor
that’s actually not oil it’s pure multiversal nexus fluid actually
Anchor beings, nexus beings, variants, canon events--the way they've all been used so far has been limiting the scope of stories. Whether the point was meant to be expansion initially, in practice the focus has been on the mere act of crossing over, the novelty of having multiple versions of the same characters existing in the same movie rather than, you know, having movies set in those universes and then crossing over when it was organic and interesting to do so. Loki wasn't about exploring other Loki stories, it was about showing our Loki interacting with other Lokis. Multiverse of Madness wasn't about the possibilities of other universes, it was about our Dr. Strange interacting with these other universes, mostly as jokes. Even Spiderverse, despite showing us a couple of fully fleshed out universes (Miles never enters Gwen's universe, so it exists strictly for the sake of Gwen's story and not Miles' story, unlike, say, Mumbattan), falls prey to this to an extent, with many of the universes (or at least their representatives) being nothing more than jokes (Lego Spiderman, parchment Vulture, video game characters, live action Prowler (played by Donald Glover--an admittedly clever callback to a scene from the first(?) Amazing Spiderman movie, where he played unseen Miles' uncle). What little worked for me in No Way Home (and it wasn't much, I turned against that movie hard by the thirty minute mark and it never completely won me back) was that the various characters that were brought to the MCU Spiderman's universe had been in their own movies previously and mostly were consistent with those movies. At times, No Way Home felt like a collective sequel to all of the Spiderman movies, with some of the characters getting some much needed closure--though a bit cheesy, seeing Andrew Garfield rescue MJ felt legitimately cathartic for the character, and the banter between the various Spidermen throughout the second half of the movie was pretty well done. Whether intended or not, bringing these characters back canonized those movies within the MCU, a kind of retrograde expansion, I guess. It doesn't look like the X-Men or Fantastic Four movies are going to get the same respect (probably for the best, in some instances).
i know it's not mcu, but I had the same feeling when Across the Spiderverse introduced canon events.
It's true that the whole "anchor being" idea was ment to be a meta joke. And unless we'll get more details on the concept in future projects, here's how I personally think it works.
In the beginning of the movie, Wade asked Paradox how long will it take for his universe to die, now that Logan is gone.
Paradox told him that it'll take thousands of years.
So, I guess that the way it works is that a universe is born to tell the story of a particular being. But a universe can't just start "in the middle of the story", when the anchor being exists. So it's starts just like any other universe. From the dawn of time, until the anchor being is born and goes through his story. and when he eventually dies, so is his universe.
But since it takes so long for the universe to actually end, it's unnoticeable.
We as viewers are only focusing on the important stuff, i.e. the anchor being's story.
Now, if you think that it's kinda ridiculous how an entire universe exists just for this one specific being then.. yeah, that's the point.
This is where the meta joke part comes into play.
When Logan died and Hugh Jackman retired from playing the character, the Fox universe started loosing relevancy.
And then, when Disney bought Fox.. here comes Paradox (Disney), and offers Deadpool (the last popular and relevant franchise left in Fox) to join the MCU.
Fun Fact: Logan died in 2029. The movie is set in 2024
I might be interpreting it wrong and im sure someone will tell me if so but the concept of an anchor being didnt make sense to me.
In the tva, time works differently. They can view the timeline of any universe and i took it that time isnt linear, everything happens all at once. Thats how they can go to any point in time in a given universe. Thats how they can view clips from a past event, or a future event. So from the start of the universe, everything has happened and is simultaneously happening at the same time. So from the initial concept, the anchor being has already died and is still alive, if that makes sense? So every universe is doomed from the beginning if there is an anchor being that eventually goes on to die? I assume there are very few beings that are truely immortal? So this made things like paradox saying usually it takes thousands of years for the universe to die to confuse me. Why is there a tangible timeframe on a universe dieing? Everything that has happened and will happen in that universe has already happened?
Again, i could be dead wrong and am misinterpreting, please correct me if so
“What is the point of the multiverse”
Money!
I don't like the concept of Anchor Beings because it leaves so many questions. For instance, if Anchor Beings are vital for a timeline to exist, how can a timeline even start before an Anchor Being is born? If they had said that a timeline ends if there isn't an Anchor Being dies before their time and so there isn't a replacement, that at least would make a bit of sense. But how it is now, if I didn't considering Deadpool and Wolverine as a movie just to enjoy and not think too hard on, I'd be shaking my fists at the sky.
The story starts with the anchor everything before is backstory
I disagree, I think Anchors just plot that shown fox era of marvel heroes that gone after logan death and tva finding Deadpool to try to make him important on Mcu
Its definitely meant to be a meta joke about hugh carrying the franchise on his back. But i do agree that canonizing it was less than ideal. Now they either have to retcon it, or make the same argument about the main mcu now that rdj is gone. Further jokes aside, i think they should have revealed that it was literally just made up by paradox as an excuse to kill wade's timeline. Like, the rest of the TVA gets there and is like "anchor being? Wtf is that?" And then wolverine stuck around cause he had nothing to go back to anyway.
Nobody had any problem with it in spiderverse
because at least with spiderverse they showcase the stakes and problems of an uncompleted canon event could but even then they tried to deconstruct it beeing implaying that a canon event not necesary means suffering a loss but open a gateway so the main character can get a different result without beeing a friggin martyr like johnatan kent and it won't have a clear answer until the next film.
Here is like "you like x-men 97? well f*ck that show, they didn't use wolverine right. He should be on the back ground he should be always in the at the center! the x-men are nothing without him! in fact we will destroy this universe unless wolverine is back! so go and watch our film and buy our toys our we will kill you favorite characters!!"
I know it’s irrelevant, but I feel you should’ve corrected the record on who “created” the Spider-Verse concept. John Semper’s TAS from the 90s had its finale with the Spider Wars (essentially the same general premise) first and Mark Hoffmeier is a credited writer for both Shattered Dimensions and TAS. Very nitpicky of me, I know but I feel the need to bring it up because it’s an uncomfortable subject for Slott and Marvel and they’d rather not talk about it.
I kinda missed the point of you brining this up because you simplified for the sake of brevity to make your overall point, but it bothers me Slott rather quietly take credit for a concept that wasn’t original or unique to him.
I think by anchor beings they are really just talking about the audiences attention and money. Once Logan died we stopped caring about everyone else in that universe and it did essentially die. Now i think the anchor brings can change since no one is immortal and the TVA just lied to Deadpool about that part. Without these popular characters these universe's will die. Because the funding to create then will dry up when these universes stop making money
The whole idea of the anchor being is a metaphor of how Fox's X-Men movies struggled and died off after Hugh left the franchise in Logan, and he was their golden boy so without him nobody felt there was a reason to see the movies anymore. That's why it works for Deadpool and Wolverine. Because the whole movie is an allegory of Disney's acquisition of Fox and all their franchises dying because they didn't make enough money. You can't do that with any other MCU movie because despite failed products and most of the opinions on their movies coming from grifters nowadays, the MCU is still doing relatively well with diamonds in the rough like Loki, Moon Knight, Eternals (I like it at least), Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3. You can't use the same thing for someone like Iron Man for example since anchor beings were made as a metaphor for Hugh's Wolverine no longer being there since he was the last of the original cast to stick around besides Patrick Stewart, and the MCU still has a few phase 1 and 2 characters left that can pop up anytime, while Fox couldn't because they slowly died when Logan did
As a mechanic, I do find it odd. Meta or not, unless each Anchor Being is immortal, all timelines are doomed. Which I don't think they were going for, but I also can't see how they wouldn't have thought of it. All that said, I don't think the Anchor Being concept is *inherently* locked to nostalgia stunt casting; nothing would stop them from establishing brand-new universes with Anchor Being characters who haven't yet appeared in film, or that are wholly original characters. And presumably most universes have anchor beings we never see or learn about. But I do agree that the more it comes up in the movies, the more of a logistical mess it will be come. What are the odds that the most important people in every universe are about the same age, living on parallel versions of the same planet, in more or less the same timeframe? That is definitely making the multiverse feel smaller.
Oh yeah, to be clear, I’m not trying to suggest the MCU will only ever use anchor beings for nostalgia characters - just that the nostalgia factor explains the _deployment_ of the concept.
@@PillarofGarbage Absolutely
I kinda get adding Anchor Beings as a way to add stakes in a sea of infinite possibilities. But we already have Incursions, those serve the purpose to keep the Multiverse in check without making it feel like “this is the wolverine universe and if he dies everyone dies “
while expanding the multiverse has been the goal for a while, anchor helps lead the story towards incursions, battle worlds, and Secret Wars multiverse collapse before getting to the point of a full reboot
9:50 THE PROPHECY
@@TSDTalks22 little do they know….
I had a similar impression when Multiverse of madness tells us that all dreams are just experiences of the Multiverse. That closes off way too many stories to just thoughtlessly throw it out there.
Just because one guy said they were dreams doesn't make it 100% true
I understand some people in the comments saying that they just exist in Deadpool and Wolverine, but I also remember hearing rumors about one of the upcoming movies having a major focus on anchor beings and being another excuse for more cameos, which I really don’t want.
The idea of Anchor seems weird. I mean everyone life is supposed to end. So does that mean all timelines end?
I just assumed that most timelines have multiple overlapping anchor beings but once in a while you get unlucky and you lose an anchorbeing while there aren't any alternatives... mostly I assumed it was to serve the story they wanted to tell.
How to tell me you haven't read Secret Wars (2015) without telling me you haven't read Secret Wars (2015).
I think you're right, but isn't it also a possibility that the concept of universes being backdrops for bankable characters is an intentional self-criticism? If they are indeed going the Hickman route, it could be an interesting way to go. The anchors fail to save their multiverse and in the newly reformed one the concept no longer applies, leaving the path forward feeling "bigger" than ever before.
It was just an excuse/meta joke for Deadpool bringing Wolverine. It's best not to think too deep on it. They clearly didn't.
In all fairness, multiverses and time travel always present the same critiques as you had for anchor beings. It expands the potential for story telling, sure but it also creates a significantly silly contrivance to retcon an entire series of plot lines like we are going to see with the rewrite of the future Avengers films to drop the buildup of Kang in favor of the hastily cobbled together Doom plotline.
i just took the anchor being idea as metahumor for that specific movie
The video starting two and a half minutes in is crazy.
I mean, sure, if you’re ignoring the first 90 seconds
@@PillarofGarbage Including an introduction that’s mostly recap and stating the premise of the video without actually touching on it is generous, but even then, starting a minute long sponsor segment 90 seconds into the video might arguably worse, like a midroll ad except my UA-cam Premium subscription doesn’t block it out and it lasts longer than most UA-cam ads I remember.
Edit: For the record I did enjoy and agree with the video, but my criticisms of how creators handle sponsor spots is entirely separate of that and should not be taken as an indicator of my general opinion on any creator or their content.
Watched an interview with Shawn Levy and he confirmed they were Feige's brilliant idea
You can mark the exact point where the multiverse concept died along with Kang due to thr failure that was Ant mam and the wasp Quantumania that movie didn't meat expectations and Marvel was already planning to write Kang out then.
Anchor beings make the world "smaller." This is the most concise and clear condemnation of the world building.
You see this as it constricting, but I see it as expanding to encompass, connect, and renew.
Something that contextualizes the "Anchor Beings" is the topic of "Creative Copyrights" all these stories have a source, but these writers and artists at some point in the system were given absolute control, absolute rights to create so long as it's unique to them alone.
sequels had to be approved by creative licensing, lose the license and the related works are sealed off or erased until it's rediscovered or recreated without copyright infringement.
at some point even if unintended, a creator will recreate a character, but all it takes is some legal documents saying "can't do this" or "cannot references that" and suddenly the expansive world building just shrank, alot.
One thing that bugs me from Endgame and the notion that each universe needs its infinity stones so you need to return them, is that the main universe that we are still continuing the MCU in had all of its infinity stones destroyed by Thanos after the snap. So can this one just continue fine without them?
The worst part about this "anchor being" concept is that it means every effort to save the world in the mainline MCU is pointless, because it's pretty undeniable its anchor being was Tony Stark.
Oh, and don't forget "canon events" from Across the Spider-Verse in the ever-expanding list of rules-governing-the-multiverse-that-all-apply-at-all-times-yet-only-the-new-one-introduced-in-this-story-matters-to-this-story. (Yes, the Spider-Verse movies are a part of the MCU multiverse, albeit distantly connected - at one point Miguel makes a pretty blatant reference to the events of No Way Home.)
Note, they never said in the movie that every universe has an anchor being. Only that some do, including Deadpool's.
it's established in the movie (spiderverse ofc) that canon events are bullshit
i hope they retcon it with a clarification that an anchor being is still allowed to die but only at a specific time and logan died too early
the thing about anchor beings is that in Deadpool and wolverine it's not meant to be a serious rule for a multiverse spanning MCU, it's a meta commentary
it's a parody of the MCU's perception of it's acquired IPs.
Paradox is an exec going "wolverine was the most popular character in that universe, now that he's dead we don't wanna keep making movies in it, but if you want we can take Deadpool and drop him in 616"
it's a joke, and the movie runs with it as a serious premise and for Deadpool and Wolverine it WORKS since it's a story that's supposed to be a love letter to marvel's previous attempts, to it's dead movies
but, in being set in the MCU it suddenly makes it a rule that the entire multiverse needs to run with it, ironically encouraging the very behavior it's mocking.... now it's just a rule the MCU needs to work with for ever
Anchor beings in my eyes are the franchisees characters.
When that series gets canceled, the character dies, or any reason that makes the media any less popular/end then it affects the entire “universe”
The reason wolverines Logan was the anchor being is because that’s genuinely what he was for xmen, fox, and all those characters to us from 2000-2016. Him leaving fox may not have been the last nail, but they lost one of their biggest hitters and they slowly started to die out.
Fox stopped making movies. So Deadpool’s universe was dying, but after the events of the movie he secures their place in the multiverse. Fox may have died, but now disney/the TVa is hosting them, when they start having stories that become more popular the stronger their branch gets.
When I first watched Deadpool and Wolverine, when they said an anchor being is an entity that's so vital that if they die the universe starts to die slowly over time I thought that being was going to be Galactus cause if he dies the universe dies
For everyone talking about how 'Anchor Beings' was a thing just for Deadpool & Wolverine... Feige in an interview said he's glad people are using the term, regarding the future of the MCU
Even just on a surface level, Anchor Beings are just dumb. One random person carries an entire universe on their back? Why? Why is it Wolverine in this universe? Who held the universe together before Wolverine was born? What happened to that guy? It brings up so many questions and none of the answers make the story better. If anything, any possible dumb answers just lead to more dumb questions.
You have to understand we create these universes. They don't exist until someone creates a character and writes a world around them. If this character isn't popular or dies then that universe slowly dies because it's become unpopular and is no longer making the company money.
@@Shawn-zt3gv That's definitely a good interpretation, possibly even an implied one, even if it's not textual. But it does make the hand of the author really heavy. Would make more sense for Deadpool as a meta character though. I don't think Wolverine's ever broken the 4th wall.
@@Shawn-zt3gv oh shut up and accept that this shit only exist because the man behind the curtain demanded that his favorite puppet show wasn't axed from the picture
@@motor4X4kombat I really don't know what you're talking about
I feel like a good way to tell a good multiverse story is to tell it widely with risks involved with the audience. It is a cosmic gamble after all, so rather than dwelling and living with a select few groups of people, The most popular ones, dwell with unknown characters and up and coming actors.
If Deadpool and Wolverine outlines how the over-centrality of characters had caused the collapse of the Fox Universe, both literally and figurative through Meta-explanations- Surely the opposite would be true. Heck, they've already explored that in the same movie, in the character of Gambit who doesn't even have a movie attached to him and has no voice within the universe and multiverse at all. Less for a few cameos regarding his existence.
If Deadpool and Wolverine is a turning point for Marvel, than Gambit in the opposite spirit is the new starting point.
I think that, as good as the stories were, anything that happens in 'What If?" isn't considered 'Canon'.
That probably goes for anything Marvel that is on Disney+ (just like Star Wars before it, Movie Canon > TV Canon > Book Canon).
But now we have parts of TV Canon that have 'graduated' to Movie Canon, causing confusion (Wanda turning to Evil thanks to the last few moments of the last episode of WandaVision, the TVA still around even though Loki 'solved' the problem of proliferating Universes).
All that being said, this is a Deadpool movie, so I can always see them coming up with whatever they want, and then Marvel just saying "Well, that's on Deadpool Earth, which doesn't follow ANY Universal Rules for some reason". 😅
two things (having read the comments, I'm basically just cosigning what everyone else said) :
1. Its not that deep. B-15 closure aside, the movie constantly asserts that nothing within it mattered aside from whatever could be used to facilitate its actual story
2. Its too early to tell what effect Anchor beings have on future movies, and probably not as much effect as you're implying.
I 100% believe that the entire film is a METAphor about Disney's acquisition of Fox, Fox's failures with its Marvel characters, and the question about what will happen now. I do not think Marvel intends to do ANYTHING with anchor beings, or that it will change the MCU in any way at all. Outside of metaphor, the concept entirely falls apart.
I believe the point of this, is to make things simpler in the long run. IMO they are going to reduce the number of universes to a single one before long. The multiverse saga, is to bring all those other stories and external films/characters into a shared narrative and eventually resolve everything, bring things into a single storyline.
It will most likely be a mini-reboot, they can recast things like iron man but keep newer actors who wish to stay on.
I honestly liked it as a metaphor for Deadpool's Fox universe rather than a full MCU wide plot point. I mean, deadpool breaks the 4th wall so it would make sense if this was just deadpool writing himself a silky adventure
I don't think the concept works particularly well as a universal constant, but they _nailed it_ with the decision to use it for a Deadpool movie. Taking how we perceive comic book worlds far too literally and pasting the result directly into the narrative is classic Deadpool.