Board Thread:Questions and Answers/@comment-1894786-20160711053400/@comment-1894786-20160712230502

The Wikia Editor wrote: Edward Zachary Sunrose wrote: The Wikia Editor wrote: Uskok wrote: To conclude, those two stories are not set in the MCU (Earth-199999) but in some deviation of it, like all those Marvel's "What if...?" stories. We could call it Earth-200000 or whatever you want (I don't know how exactly all those universes get their designation numbers) but those stories are not part of the MCU. The numbers are generally assigned within handbooks. If a number has not yet been officially assigned then the marvel wiki uses a TRN (Temporary Reality Number), for example Earth-TRN001, Earth-TRN002, etc.

Hope this explanation helps. As for these stories, yeah, sounds like it contradicts the established canon. Yes, but we also have a few of the video games and the comics contradicting canon, don't we? Like the Iron Man game that features Whitney Frost and the tie-in comic that mentions her, despite her being alive about a century before those events would take place.

I'm not saying we should all take it as 100% canon to the MCU, but they should get their own pages, just like the other non-canon things. Video game and comic book tie-ins of movies always inhabit a rather grey area regarding canon. The general rule is that they are accepted as being within the same universe as long as there aren't too many contradictions. But isn't the only contradiction here that Coulson is known to be alive to the Avengers? And it's a comic and a novel, it should fit into that grey area perfectly.