DEEP TIME

Enormous cosmic beings, effectively gods, who create life. Their reproduction is grotesque: a Celestial seed is planted in the core of a young planet, and when enough intelligent life accumulates on that planet, the energy of those lives hatches a new Celestial — destroying the planet in the process.

To ensure planets reach that population threshold, the Celestial Arishem manufactures synthetic beings called Eternals and dispatches them to protect emerging civilisations from predators called Deviants. The Eternals believe they're protecting people. They're farming them.

Earth's Eternals — Sersi, Ikaris, Thena, Ajak, Kingo, Sprite, Phastos, Makkari, Druig, Gilgamesh — arrived around 5000 BC and spent seven thousand years quietly influencing human history. Phastos gave humanity technology. Makkari and the others watched empires rise and fall, forbidden from interfering in human conflicts.

A dead Celestial's body also matters later: Eson the Searcher once used the Power Stone to destroy a planet. And crucially, the Celestial Tiamut — the one gestating inside Earth — is stopped mid-emergence in 2024, leaving a colossal frozen figure protruding from the Indian Ocean. That corpse becomes "Celestial Island," and it's made of adamantium. Remember that. It matters in 2025 and again for the X-Men.

Adamantium, since it starts here. It's a near-indestructible metal found only in Tiamut's body. In the X-Men films it's what's bonded to Wolverine's skeleton and claws. It becomes the central plot object of Captain America: Brave New World (film, 2025), and

Marvel putting a giant deposit of it into Earth-616's physical geography is deliberate groundwork for a Wolverine who originates here rather than being imported.

One more: Ego, a Celestial who took the form of a living planet, seeded thousands of worlds with his own biological matter, and fathered children across the galaxy hoping one would inherit his power. One of them is Peter Quill.

Roughly 5,000 years ago, Agamotto — the first Sorcerer Supreme — founded the mystic arts on Earth. Sorcerers draw power from other dimensions and defend Earth against extradimensional threats using three sanctums: New York, London, Hong Kong.

The Ancient One, a Celtic sorcerer, held the post for centuries, secretly extending her own life by drawing power from the Dark Dimension — the domain of the demon Dormammu — which is exactly the transgression she forbids her students.

The Nine Realms are connected by Yggdrasil, the world tree, navigable via the Bifröst. Asgard is the seat of a warrior civilisation.

Bor, Odin's father, defeated the Dark Elf Malekith around 2988 BC and hid the Reality Stone (the Aether) where it couldn't be found.

Odin and his firstborn, Hela, conquered the Nine Realms in a campaign of extraordinary brutality. When Odin decided to stop and rule peacefully, Hela refused. He imprisoned her, erased her from the official history, and rewrote Asgard's founding myth as one of peace. He then had two more children: Thor, and — adopted from the Frost Giants of Jotunheim after a war — Loki.

Thanos, meanwhile, is a Titan. His homeworld collapsed under overpopulation and resource exhaustion. He proposed killing half the population at random to save the rest; he was called a madman; the planet died anyway. He concluded he had been right, and spent the following centuries applying the solution elsewhere.

A vibranium meteorite struck Africa millennia ago. A warrior named Bashenga ingested a heart-shaped herb mutated by the metal, gained enhanced strength, and became the first Black Panther, uniting four of the five local tribes into Wakanda. The fifth, the Jabari, withdrew to the mountains.

Wakanda then hid. It presented to the world as a poor agrarian nation while building the most technologically advanced society on Earth, refusing to share vibranium or aid — a policy of isolation that becomes the central moral question of Black Panther.

In the 16th century, a Mesoamerican people fleeing Spanish colonisers and smallpox drank a potion made from a vibranium-touched plant. It let them breathe water. They founded an undersea civilisation, Talokan, and their leader — born mutated with winged ankles and near-immortality — became Namor, called K'uk'ulkan. He has spent five hundred years killing anyone who threatens his people's concealment.

Roughly a thousand years ago, Xu Wenwu found ten mystical rings of unknown origin that granted him immortality and immense power. He built the Ten Rings organisation, which quietly shaped world events for a millennium. In the 1990s he fell in love with Ying Li, guardian of the hidden realm of Ta Lo, set the rings aside, and had two children: Shang-Chi and Xialing. Li was murdered by Wenwu's enemies. He put the rings back on.

The Nova Corps are the military and police force of the Nova Empire, headquartered on the planet Xandar. They're a legitimate galactic government with the containment technology to hold an Infinity Stone safely — which is why the Guardians hand them the Power Stone in 2014 rather than keeping it. It is the responsible choice, and it goes badly.

The Kree are a militaristic blue-skinned empire ruled by an artificial intelligence, the Supreme Intelligence. The Skrulls are shapeshifters. The Kree drove the Skrulls from their homeworld and hunted the survivors across the galaxy for decades — the Kree framing them as terrorists, the Skrulls being, in fact, refugees.

The MCU reverses the comics' good-guy/bad-guy assignment here, which is the twist of Captain Marvel.