@ElrianHJM Happy Survived the blip (For no Reason other then to give Tony another person to survive when he had almost his entire family survive it other then Peter P but I digressed) even though honesty he probably shouldn't have.

@IronWidowMaikuB I thought Headpool was going to be the Deadpool from X-Men Origins Wolverine's head, that would've been a pretty cool nod and made X-Men Origins Wolverine worth the suffering and not a totally terrible movie

^^ Ah yes, sorry, forgot, but anyway, having to deal with the disappearance of half the population is also a bit overwhelming :)

All I gotta know is if they say “Cancer” anytime in the movie…

@Corey0213 Actually the movie says otherwise. On TVA screen, every MCU branch is labelled "616.XX" (XX being the number). The FoX-Men timeline is "10005".

@Marvelus That was before this restructuring of the TVA. Earth 10005 is a branch. Paradox says so when he said they used to prune the branches when referring to Deadpools timeline. The TVA is no longer pruning branches of Loki’s tree. This movie doesn’t show it being separate from the Sacred Timeline. Also how would Cable’s time travel device be able to reach 616 if it weren’t connected through time? Why would they still call timelines 616.xxx? Also the What If games gave timeline designations and they’re not 616.XXX. There’s no reason 10005 isn’t a branch. The Void is a the end of time for the Sacred Timeline as seen in Loki. Why would disconnected universes share the same end of time that leads to the citadel at the end of time of the Sacred Timeline?

Apologies for the long comments.

It’s been a while since I’ve said anything on here, but I have some things to say about this movie.

My reaction to this movie was two-fold.

On the one hand, I was blown away by the cameos and some of the jokes.

But on the other, the story of this movie really wasn’t great at all and kind of gets on my nerves more and more the more I think about it.

PART ONE

Logan is Canon

When Logan came out, good as it was, I was always disappointed.

Days of Future Past ended with Wolverine saving the entire world from the sentinels.

Then Logan tells us that a mere six years later, all of the X-Men had died, which would be bad enough on it’s own, but the fact that it was because Charles Xavier had an involuntary seizure made it even worse.

Charles, a symbol of peace, diplomacy, and sanctuary, was the one responsible for killing everyone.

The man they should have been the most safe with was the greatest danger.

So I was actually pretty pissed off about that and Logan made for a pretty depressing ending to the X-Men saga.

However, people kept telling me “No, Logan’s not the same timeline. It’s off in its own universe.”

And indeed, on Marvel Comics Database, it listed the original X-Men timeline as 10005, the new Days of Future Past / Deadpool Timeline as TRT414, and the Logan timeline as “Earth-17315,” (and still says that, by the way).

However, according to this film, the movie Logan does indeed take place in the Deadpool Timeline — TRT414.

But then they also refer to TRT414 as “10005” which is itself a contradiction.

But never mind all that — if this is true that means I was right. Logan is in the same canon as Days of Future Past and Deadpool.

Which means Charles Xavier really did kill everyone after Logan did all that work to stop the Sentinels.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, this movie officially made Logan canon, which isn’t a great start.

Logan’s Bones

All of that aside, I was fascinated to see how they dealt with Logan.

I think Deadpool says something like, “You might be wondering how we’re going to honor Logan’s memory? We’re not.”

And it literally cuts to him digging up Logan’s grave — only to show that Logan is reduced to a skeleton.

I actually think this is brilliant and hilarious for several reasons:

1, They address the elephant in the room immediately.

Because everyone knows Wolverine died in the last movie. So the question is, are you going to just have him show up and hope no one notices? Or are you going to reference the death? (Due to the timeline, they actually could have had the real Logan show up but I’ll get to that later).

Showing Deadpool at the “X” grave is such a shameless way to embrace the ending of Logan.

2, Logan is still dead.

Even though Deadpool digs up the grave, Logan isn’t brought back to life.

Physical desecration notwithstanding, I think this was actually a tasteful way to do it.

Because “honoring Logan” has three potential connotations. It can mean physically respecting the body, or it can mean not retconning the ending, or it can mean not bringing Logan back in any capacity.

The film has already violated the third one, so it’s very clever for Deadpool to take the physical approach.

This allows the film to be self aware and poke fun at the notion of “desecrating Logan” (which is very on brand for Deadpool) without actually screwing up the ending, Palpatine-style.

3, the Action scene

It gives us a hilarious action scene where Deadpool himself uses the Wolverine claws.

And I liked the line about how he wouldn’t use any of his weapons — proceeds to use all of Logan’s bones.

I never thought I’d see bone nunchucks - but here we are.

Also, it keeps up the Deadpool tradition of starting the movie off with a shocking action sequence, before going back to show us the context.

However, I was genuinely nervous to learn James Mangold’s reaction to this.

Mangold is famously not fond of superhero movies and making Logan an ending was very much a statement.

This movie makes the exact opposite statement, and it’s the exact kind of movie Mangold hates.

In fact, I came across a recent comment he made about the multiverse in storytelling — but I’ll save that for another post because I have too many thoughts on that too.

Happy Hogan

When Wade applied for a job with Happy, I had a few questions.

First, how did he get to the MCU? It has to be Cables Time Machine, right? (I guess it can hop dimensions? I guess this was before he destroyed it?)

Second, why did he go to a different universe to find a job?

Third, how did he even know about the MCU in the first place?

I think this scene would have made more sense if it was a dream. Deadpool having a dream where he applied to be an Avenger and met Happy Hogan sounds very Deadpool.

Also, they give us a concrete date: March 14 2018. And the way Happy is acting, it seems like the writers agree that this date is Pre-Snap.

But they still didn’t have enough spine to come up with any concrete dates for the X-Men universe (more on that later).

But then, Wade has his birthday party…

@Corey0213 Nope. I get why you would get that conclusion, but what you say is not really evidence. The TVA labels MCU branches as "616.xxx" on their screen. FoX-Men is labelled on the screen as "10005" so it is not a branch based on that.

Since the Multiverse expanded, Earth-10005 was integrated into Loki's tree, but did not branch from the MCU.

PART TWO

Vanessa & Peter - a Deadpool 2 Rant Six Years in the Making

So after Days of Future Past came out, I was a little uneasy when I learned Deadpool 2 would include Cable, a villain from the future.

The X-Men saga already had one instance of Time Travel. Did we really need to convolute it with more?

However, after Logan happened, and I believed (correctly as it turns out) that it was the same continuity, I actually looked forward to Deadpool 2 as Cable changing the future meant it potentially erased Logan (and Xavier’s accidental massacre) from canon (they would never scrub it overtly, but simply creating a new timeline does mean that in theory, the events of Logan no longer have to happen now; it was open).

Regardless, the point is, I thought there’d be one instance of Time Travel. Cable goes back, one and done.

But then Deadpool 2 ended with that montage…

When they killed off Vanessa, I was pissed off, especially back in 2018 when I first watched it.

Recently, I rewatched it and appreciated it more as it made it more challenging and more meaningful when Wade found it in himself to care about Russell. He had nothing left to care about and yet he still cared about him.

Killing off Vanessa is a really crummy thing to do after we spent an entire movie watching Deadpool save her, but if you’re going to kill her off, then leveraging her death as a challenge for Wade’s selflessness is a pretty meaningful way to do it.

However, at the end of Deadpool 2, Nega Sonic and Yukio fix Cable’s Time Machine and Deadpool uses it a bunch of times.

He uses it to save Vanessa and then Peter.

Then he kills the 2009 Wade from Wolverine Origins and Ryan Reynolds while reading the Green Lantern script.

Now, those last two made it clear that the whole thing was just a fourth wall breaking joke.

This made it ambiguous as to whether or not Deadpool really saved Vanessa and Peter, or if it was just a fake non-canon joke or his imagination.

For six years, that remained ambiguous. It was Shrodinger’s End Credit’s Scene. If it had just been a joke, we wouldn’t have a problem.

But it wasn’t a joke.

Deadpool & Wolverine confirms, in canon, that Wade truly did save Vanessa and Peter.

On the surface, this may seem like a positive, since they’re alive, but this creates some of the biggest problems in the franchise.

Time to dust off my Deadpool 2 rant from 2018.

First of all, this creates a huge plot hole as the entire plot of Deadpool 2 happened as a result of Vanessa’s death.

Wade, grieving, spoke to Blind Al, who said, “You have to die a little before you can live a little.” This led to Deadpool blowing himself up (partially because he interpreted that literally, partially because he wanted an outlet for his pain, and partially because he wanted to “one up” Logan by dying in his movie twice).

The explosion drew the attention of Colossus, who dragged him to the X-Mansion and made him a trainee. And his first mission as a trainee was to investigate the crisis that turned out to be Russell.

None of that would have happened if Vanessa hadn’t died. So if Wade saves Vanessa, what does that do to the plot of Deadpool 2?

The film shows Wade saving Peter after Vanessa, but how would the Peter situation even be happening? If he had saved Peter before, that would be one thing.

In fact, if he had only saved Peter, that would make more sense as Peter’s survival doesn’t really mess up the rest of DP2.

But Wade literally spoke to Vanessa in the afterlife. Saving her life changes everything.

The biggest thing is Cable — if Vanessa doesn’t die, that means Wade would just be chilling with her while Cable arrives.

So, um, DID CABLE KILL RUSSELL?

Is Wade chilling and having a party while Russell’s corpse is being dragged to the morgue?

I mean maybe Colossus and Nega Sonic talked him down, but if Russell was taken to the Ice Box alone, then he’s toast.

But also, you’ve completely erased all that character development, with Russell, Cable, Wade, Domino, etc.

Now to be fair, I don’t necessarily judge the new writers for building on this. After all, it’s a sequel, so you have to either build on it or ignore it, and if they’d ignored it, then they'd be the ones who killed Vanessa.

However, it’s worth pointing out that the original writers were also involved with this movie — which means canonizing this was partly their decision — which means they may have intended for this to be canon all along.

It’s also worth mentioning that they do use Vanessa well. She has conversations with Wade about his life and how he wants to live it.

That’s all great stuff, but there’s never a moment where Vanessa talks to him about the fact that she died and he broke the universe to bring her back.

No conversation about grief or the fact that she’s practically a different person, or that his actions may have led to the deaths of new people who didn’t die previously (like Russell).

Anchor Being

It was interesting that Thor apparently is going to cry over Deadpool in the future.

I genuinely wonder if that’s something they’re planning in Avengers 5 or if they just threw that in there. Also, Adamantium Katanas was a cool touch.

Paradox then tells Deadpool that every universe has an “Anchor being” a person who’s so important that when they die, the entire timeline crumbles away.

Deadpool for a moment thinks it’s him, but it’s actually Logan.

So…I don’t even know where to begin here.

The whole premise of the Human TVA policing all of Time and Space was already very difficult to write. You have to account for aliens, vast expanses of time, etc.

Eternals emphasized just how absurd a Human TVA is, reminding us the universe has been around for billions of years and Earth is just the latest assignment for the Eternals in this eon.

But of course, it’s humans because Kang was human, so there is a through line there.

The whole idea of nexus events were bad enough — but at least those were rooted in some kind of reasoning.

Jim spills coffee when he wasn’t supposed to. Therefore, Jim is the Nexus Event.

But the idea that there’s one person in the whole universe, who, if they die, causes the universe to die?

That’s actually insane (and not in a good way).

If it was Arishem or Eternity, that would be one thing.

But the fact that it’s some arbitrary human?

Sure, Logan has powers. Sure, he did something heroic.

So did half the universe. You’re telling me there’s no one in WWII, or in the 31st century, or on Xandar who ever did anything heroic enough to make them the anchor being?

But Logan gets it because, what? He saved a handful of kids one day?

Who’s deciding who all these anchor beings are?

And why oh why may I ask have we never heard of this before?

Seems like anchor beings would be pretty relevant in Loki Season 1, 2, Doctor Strange, and even What If.

I mean, Kang’s contingency was to use the Temporal Loom to destroy all Timelines.

But if you wanted to, you could just kill all of the Anchor Beings and that would do the trick.

I do find it interesting that Paradox said the universes don’t crumble until a few thousand years after the anchor beings die.

Gee, thanks. How generous. I guess that's why Kang didn't bother.

First of all, having it be a mortal human instead of a central being like Arishem is so unbelievably arbitrary, I just couldn’t take it seriously.

Second of all, the fact that he’s someone who lived 13 billion years after the Big Bang - why then? Why wouldn’t it be someone at the end of time or something?

Third of all, they say if the anchor being is killed or dies, the universe gets destroyed - but most people die eventually anyway, so that means every universe is doomed to die T minus a few thousand years after their anchor being dies naturally, right?

Fourth of all, who’s the anchor being for the original Earth 10005? Cause Logan didn’t die until the new timeline he created in Days of Future Past. Those are supposed to be two different universes.

Fifth of all, who’s the anchor being of the Sacred Timeline? Is it Tony? Is the MCU just going to crumble away in a few thousand years? (Conveniently after Kang?) Or does the MCU even have one? Is it Kang?

The addition of the Anchor Being makes everything more precarious, more arbitrary, and more difficult to believe.

It felt almost like an attempt to pay homage to Logan. But at what cost?

I do like the acknowledgment that they don’t prune things anymore. Neat bit of continuity there.

Although, the detail that they have a “TVA Outpost” in TRT414 in 2024 is also nonsense. When did they set that up? Why would they have an outpost in a timeline that’s going to crumble?

Why would they have an outpost in a timeline period? Isn’t the whole point of the TEMPADS to be able to take them back and forth to the TVA?

Like, if it was hidden in a maximum security facility, that would be one thing but it’s literally in the subway, the most public place ever.

They offer for him to join the Sacred timeline. Can he not take his friends and girlfriend with him? I guess that would be too complicated.

However, I do appreciate how the “Anchor Being” thing is used as the reason why Deadpool digs up Logan. He’s been led to believe the only way to save his entire universe is to resurrect Logan.

I also like the line “Make it stop.” “Mangold tried” although it is a little weird to see other characters who aren’t Deadpool or She-Hulk break the fourth wall.

This leads me to the next problem…

Is Tony Stark the anchor being for the mcu