One Moment in Time

Discuss chronologies for characters in the main "Marvel Universe"

Moderators: Col_Fury, michel, Arthur, Somebody, StrayLamb

Michael
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Re: One Moment in Time

Post by Michael »

Somebody wrote: Exactly. I even gave one possibility - the "Sentry option" - that involved no "reality-altering power" AT ALL, just healing Aunt May + a mindwipe combined with a big mental block that stops anyone recognising evidence that Peter & MJ were ever married, the same way people could look directly at a photo of the Sentry and only see a blank piece of paper while he was "forgotten".

[And, uh, that's part of the existing status quo anyway, with the "no deducing Spider-Man's secret ID" thing...]
In fact, this is LESS problematic than the Sentry mindwipe- the Sentry mindwipe raised the "What about the hundreds of thousands of people the Void killed?" question. Did those people's families and friends forget they existed? Did they think they died some other way? What happened to the bodies of the Void's victims? In Peter and MJ's case, there's no such complications.
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Re: One Moment in Time

Post by Starman »

Can't one just squeeze in "One Moment in Time" to right after the deal with Mephisto went through?
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Somebody
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Re: One Moment in Time

Post by Somebody »

Michael wrote:In fact, this is LESS problematic than the Sentry mindwipe- the Sentry mindwipe raised the "What about the hundreds of thousands of people the Void killed?" question. Did those people's families and friends forget they existed? Did they think they died some other way? What happened to the bodies of the Void's victims?
I imagine it'd be something like Amy and her lost parents in the last series of Doctor Who - they would never think about the "how", and if asked, they'd be vague. They "lost" them, painful subject, etc (when the Doctor put the pieces together and pressed the subject, and she realised she didn't actually remember, she started to panic. But an ongoing mindwipe like the Sentry might also suppress the line of questioning that leads to such a scenario, like how no-one questioned the "missing" issues of various magazines until RR started turning back into the Sentry/Void).

On the practicalities of bodies and so forth, I'd bet on a lot of people happening to decide on cremation that year...
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Re: One Moment in Time

Post by Leoparis »

But this happened a number of times already. The Kulan Gath story in X-Men 188-189. The fight against Kulan Gath happened, yet it was erased and we have two events of the man finding the medallion. In ASM 500 the dark dimension overcomes Earth and MJ dies, yet Spidey goes back in time and erases all this. You describe these events anyway with all their appearances.
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Re: One Moment in Time

Post by PunyBanner »

Having just read One Moment in Time, it's pretty clear Mephisto changed the past ie. the red bird that unlocks the car door for that Elektro thug which leads to him going after the cop which leads to Spider-Man intervening which leads to MJ and Peter never getting married. There is no reality altering. My theory is that every comic that takes place after the deal (and these flashbacks) is not Reality-616. It's a divergent timeline created because Mephisto changed the past, and isn't that what happens when someone changes the past? Everything is the same except they were never married, that's it. That is the difference with this new reality. No butterfly effect here. Reality-616 is no more. I guess we need a new numerical reality designation for the post "One More Day" stuff :D (you are all going to hate me now :( )
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Re: One Moment in Time

Post by Leoparis »

Of course there is a reality altering.

The references to the marriage are like references to Vietnam for Iron Man. The section of ASM Annual #21 that is overwritten is not different from the section of Uncanny X-Men that was overwritten when the X-Men vanquished Kulan Gath and similar adventures overwritten with time travel stories (the Zarrko future in the Thor Time-Twisters saga, the Spider-Man end of the world in ASM #500, etc, etc). None of these timeloops require erasing continuity nor bizarre theories abou erased timelines. Nobody ever made a fuss about such stories in the past.
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Re: One Moment in Time

Post by PunyBanner »

Nobody made a fuss because established canon was not erased like it is here. All these stories involved events being erased in the same storyline. OMIT is erasing something that happened 20 years ago.
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Re: One Moment in Time

Post by BobMM »

I'll take one crack at this, describing how I look at it, then I'll quietly lurk and watch the chronology experts try to hammer it out. :D

BOTH sequences of events are true and BOTH of them occurred in the 616 reality. Mephisto created a sort of timeline branch (616-B, if you will), then merged the two streams back together, grafting the differences resulting from 616-B back onto the mainstream reality. Peter simultaneously "did" and "did not" marry M.J. I would track both sets of events side by side, with a tilde or similar indicator to show that they are concurrent but different.
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