Glossary

Adamantium is described as an extremely strong metallic element, found in Celestials, and present as an alloy in Wolverine’s skeleton, Deadpool’s katanas, X-23’s claws and Lady Deathstrike’s nails. Reference works place it above vibranium: more indestructible.

It is the Fox films’ central object in the way vibranium is Wakanda’s. Logan’s claws are bone until a programme fuses the metal to him, and the operation is shown as torture rather than as an upgrade, which is the only reason the character works.

The arc reactor was originally designed by Howard Stark and Anton Vanko as part of an attempt to reproduce the Tesseract’s energy. Their sons each built it again independently. Tony Stark made two: a large industrial one to power the Stark Industries building, and a miniature one in his chest.

The small one starts as a magnet keeping shrapnel out of his heart and becomes the thing that powers the suit. It is the clearest object in these films: a weapons manufacturer’s son, keeping himself alive with his father’s unfinished idea.

Asgard is described as a small, flat planetary body and the home of the Asgardians, one of the Nine Realms. It is destroyed by Surtur.

That last sentence is unusual for this kind of story and it is the point of the third Thor film. Asgard is presented for two films as a golden place worth defending, and then the film asks what it was actually built on, and answers by letting it burn. What survives is a boat of refugees, and a line that says Asgard is not a place.

Show detailsWhere the survivors go

They settle in a fishing village in Norway, previously called Tonsberg, which is renamed New Asgard and is later recognised as a city-state. It is where Endgame finds Thor, and where Love and Thunder leaves Valkyrie doing paperwork.

The Rainbow Bridge runs from the centre of Asgard to its edge, connecting the royal palace to Himinbjorg, where the Bifrost is generated. Thor destroys it in 2011, and Heimdall later repairs it using the power of the Tesseract.

Its practical function in the films is transport between the Nine Realms, which is why the first Thor film can strand its lead on Earth simply by breaking it. The circular pattern it scorches into the ground is one of the few visual signatures these films reuse for twelve years without changing.

The Chitauri are an alien race created for the Ultimate Marvel comics in 2002, taking the role the Skrulls play in the main continuity. They were adapted for the films, and the film version was successful enough that it was written back into the comics.

In these films they are the invasion of The Avengers, and they matter mostly for what they leave behind. Their technology, scavenged from the streets afterwards, is what Adrian Toomes builds his flight suit and his business out of in Spider-Man: Homecoming. The Battle of New York is the event the next ten years of this catalogue keep referring back to.

The herb is a Wakandan plant enriched by exposure to vibranium, which gives it a glowing purple colour. It is taken in a ceremony by each new Black Panther and grants them enhanced abilities. It also allows the person who takes it to speak with the dead, on the Ancestral Plane.

That second property is what makes it more than a power source. Every Black Panther film uses it as a conversation with a parent, and the plot of the first turns on the fact that a new king can destroy the supply.

Minor spoiler

On becoming king, N’Jadaka orders the remaining stock burned. One is saved by Nakia and used to heal T’Challa. By the second film the herb is gone, which is why the succession there is a scientific problem rather than a ceremonial one.

Hydra starts as the science division of the Third Reich, run by a man who took an early and imperfect version of the super soldier serum. That would be enough for one film. What the story does instead is keep it alive, quietly, for seventy years, inside S.H.I.E.L.D.

The motto is the design brief. Reference works record it as “cut off one head, two more shall take its place”, which describes both the organisation’s structure and the reason it cannot be beaten by winning a fight.

Show detailsThe name

It is borrowed from the Lernaean Hydra of Greek myth, the creature that grew two heads for each one cut off. In the comics the organisation was taken over and turned into a neo-fascist crime syndicate by Baron Wolfgang von Strucker, who appears in these films as well.

Space, Mind, Reality, Power, Time and Soul. Six of them, one each, and any one is enough to make its holder the most dangerous thing in a solar system. The story spends ten years introducing them one at a time in films that appear to be about something else, which is why the audience is ahead of the characters for most of a decade.

Their function in the writing is to be the reason a villain would bother. Any one Stone is a weapon; all six together are a single decision, taken by one person, that nobody can appeal.

Show detailsCalled something else in the comics

They are based on the Infinity Gems of the comics, and the films rename them. Reference works describe the six as embodying and controlling essential aspects of existence, which is a larger claim than any single film makes about any single Stone.

Kamar-Taj is the headquarters of the Masters of the Mystic Arts, in Kathmandu, Nepal. Stephen Strange goes there looking for something that will fix his hands after a car accident, which is not what the place is for.

Its library is where most of the trouble in these films starts. It holds the Book of Cagliostro among many others, and both Doctor Strange films begin with somebody taking pages out of a book they were told to leave alone.

Until 2021 there was one reality and the story happened in it. After 2021 there are many, and the films start crossing between them.

What that buys the storytellers is a way to bring back characters from separate productions, to undo things without cheating, and to raise a threat that cannot be punched. What it costs the audience is certainty: once anything can be from somewhere else, “who is this” becomes a question the films have to keep answering.

Show detailsWhy it appeared when it did

It solves a practical problem as much as a narrative one. Different studios had been making films about the same characters for twenty years with no way to connect them, and this is the device that made those two decades usable.

The mutant premise is the oldest political idea in this material and the most direct. Nobody chooses it, nobody earns it, and it arrives in adolescence in front of an audience. Every X-Men film is built on the difference between that and the way other people in this catalogue acquire what they can do, which is by accident, purchase or ambition.

Reference works describe the trait as the X-gene, and the population as sometimes called the next stage of human evolution, a claim the material itself treats as contested rather than settled.

Show detailsA word that was contractually unavailable

For years the two studios splitting these characters agreed that neither would point at the other’s property. The films made by Marvel Studios could not use the word mutant or name Magneto; the Fox films could not call the same characters Avengers.

That is why some entries in this catalogue are careful about a word that other entries use freely.

Oscorp, or Oscorp Industries, is a multinational corporation founded by Norman Osborn. It first appeared in The Amazing Spider-Man number 37 in 1966.

It is the single most useful term for anyone watching the Sony Spider-Man films in any order, because it is the connective tissue. Norman Osborn runs it. Otto Octavius works on its behalf. Curt Connors is its head scientist. Max Dillon is its electrical engineer. Harry Osborn inherits it. Four different villains in two different film series all come out of the same building.

Phases are a publishing convention rather than something anyone inside the story would recognise. They tell you roughly when a film belongs and which other films were made around it, and they group into larger arcs.

They are useful for orientation and misleading for viewing order: a phase is not a self-contained story and starting at the beginning of one will not spare you the previous one.

Show detailsHow they nest

Reference material describes releases as grouped into Phases, with three phases making up a Saga. That is why you will see both words used about the same films, and why “Phase Four” and “the Multiverse Saga” overlap without meaning the same thing.

Pym particles are described as extradimensional subatomic particles that reduce or increase the distance between atoms, allowing whatever they are applied to to shrink or grow. Hank Pym created the formula. They appear as a liquid in vials, red for shrinking and blue for growing.

They are worth knowing because they are load bearing far outside the Ant-Man films. They are how the Avengers get to the Quantum Realm, which is how they get to 2012, which is how Endgame happens.

The Quantum Realm is what you reach if you keep shrinking past the point where shrinking should stop. Reference works describe it as a subatomic universe that exists outside space and time, reachable only through subatomic particles or through magic.

Two things in these films depend on it. Janet van Dyne went subatomic in 1987 and was stranded there for thirty years, which is the plot of two Ant-Man films. And time behaves differently inside it, which is the reason the Avengers can use it to reach 2012 in Endgame.

Show detailsIt is also somebody's address

The Council of Kang exiled Kang the Conqueror to the realm, which is where he is when the van Dyne family arrive. So the same place is a lost mother, a time machine and a prison, depending on which film you are watching.

S.H.I.E.L.D. is the machinery underneath the first several films. It has the budget, the aircraft, the files and the authority to walk into a private laboratory, and it uses all four constantly. The Avengers exist because a director of this agency decided they should, without asking permission from anyone he answered to.

The story then spends a film taking it apart. What looks like an over-powerful institution turns out to have been hollowed out from the inside for seventy years, which is a more interesting problem than the one the audience thought it was watching.

Show detailsWhat the letters stand for

The acronym has been expanded differently over the years. In the comics it originally stood for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage and Law-Enforcement Division. In the films and the live-action series it is Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

The Accords are the story’s answer to a question it had been avoiding for four films: who authorised any of this. A group of people with the ability to level a city has been deciding for itself where to go, and after Sokovia the United Nations proposes a panel that decides instead.

What makes the argument work is that both sides are right about something. One side has seen what happens when nobody is accountable. The other has seen what happens when the people signing the orders have an agenda, which they have, twice, in the previous two films.

Show detailsWhat the document actually does

Reference material describes the Accords as establishing a United Nations panel to oversee and control the team. Not to disband it, and not to punish it: to decide when it deploys.

That distinction is the whole disagreement. Nobody in the film objects to being answerable. The objection is to somebody else holding the decision about when to go.

The serum was developed by Doctor Abraham Erskine to enhance a human being to the peak of human capability. It was given to Johann Schmidt, who became the Red Skull, and to Steve Rogers, who became Captain America. After Erskine’s death, numerous other versions were made with varying degrees of success.

That last clause is the whole story. Hydra used a version on Bucky Barnes. Bruce Banner’s attempt to recreate it produced the Hulk. The Weapon Plus programme produced Emil Blonsky. John Walker takes a vial of it in a stairwell. Every one of those is a film or a series arguing about the same thing: the serum amplifies whoever takes it, and nobody has ever been able to agree on how to pick that person.

A symbiote is not a suit and not a possession. Reference works describe the bond as forming a single entity out of two, one that amplifies whatever the host already is and pushes at whatever they already want. That is why the same creature makes one host into a reluctant vigilante and another into a serial killer with better equipment.

The species has a name, Klyntar, which the films almost never use.

Show detailsWhere they appear

The first symbiote reaches cinema in Spider-Man 3, in the Raimi continuity. Venom becomes the lead of his own film in 2018, in a separate one. Carnage follows in 2021 and further symbiotes in 2024.

Three of those films are in three different universes, which makes the symbiote the piece of this material that has travelled furthest without a shared story carrying it.

Talokan is an underwater kingdom ruled by Namor and populated by the Talokanil. Its people were Yucatec, and they went under the water in the sixteenth century after a vibranium-enriched herb saved them from smallpox and made the surface unliveable for them.

It exists in this catalogue as the mirror of Wakanda: a second nation built on the same metal, which made the same decision to hide, and which has now watched the other one stop hiding.

The Avengers Initiative, originally called the Protector Initiative, is the plan to gather superheroes from various backgrounds, described as a group of remarkable people, to protect Earth. Nick Fury started it in the 1990s and renamed it after Carol Danvers’s call sign, Avenger.

It is the mechanism this whole catalogue is built on. In 2011 Fury sends Natasha Romanoff to assess Tony Stark for it, which is why she is in Iron Man 2. Every post-credits scene in the first phase is somebody being told the initiative exists.

The Nine Realms are the set of worlds the Thor films use as their map. Among them: Asgard; Jotunheim, an icy planet and the home of the Frost Giants, where Loki was born; Muspelheim, a fiery realm and the home of Surtur; Nidavellir, a disk built around a dying star where the Dwarves forge weapons; Svartalfheim, wreathed in permanent darkness and ruled by the Dark Elves; Niflheim, which contains the realm of the dead; and Midgard, which is another name for Earth.

Knowing that last one is enough for most purposes. When a character in these films says Midgard, they mean here.

It is the hinge of the whole first run. One antagonist succeeds completely, the story does not undo it before the credits, and the next film opens with everyone still living in the aftermath.

The five years matter more than the event. Films set afterwards keep meeting people who were gone and came back to a world that had moved on, and that gap is where most of the emotional consequences live.

Show detailsThe dates

Reference material places the erasure in 2018 within the story and the restoration five years later in 2023. That gap is why some characters visibly age between films and others do not.

It is first named on screen by Howard Stark, who describes it as stronger than steel, a third of the weight, and completely vibration absorbent. He has enough of it to make one shield and no more, which is the point of the scene: the metal is scarce because there is exactly one place on Earth it comes from.

That place is Wakanda, and everything the country is able to do rests on having a supply of it that nobody else knows about. The shield, the suits, the medicine and the trains are all the same fact seen from different angles.

Show detailsWhere it comes from

Reference works describe vibranium as mined only in Wakanda and associated with two characters above all others: Black Panther, whose suit is made of it, and Captain America, whose shield is an alloy of vibranium and steel.

A second form, called Anti-Metal, exists in the comics and does not appear in these films.

Wakanda’s whole position rests on a deception maintained across generations. The country sits on the world’s only significant supply of vibranium, has used it to build medicine and transport and defence that nothing else on the planet can match, and has hidden all of it behind a projection of subsistence farming.

The films treat the decision to hide as a live argument rather than settled wisdom. It kept Wakanda from being colonised. It also meant watching the rest of the continent be taken apart from behind a wall, which is the accusation that the story cannot answer.

Show detailsThe comics version has gone further

In the comics the country has at times been styled the Intergalactic Empire of Wakanda, with territory outside Earth. Nothing in these films goes there.

Celestials are the largest thing this material has. They predate the story, they operate on timescales that make the Infinity Stones look recent, and their interest in inhabited worlds is not hostility. It is process.

They are also the point where the films stop being about people who can punch harder than each other. A Celestial cannot be fought in the ordinary sense, so the films that involve them have to find something else for their characters to do, and what they usually find is a decision.

Show detailsWhere they appear

Reference works record Celestials in the live-action films Guardians of the Galaxy, Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder. They also note a change from the comics: the MCU turns Ego the Living Planet into an alleged Celestial, which he is not in the source material.

The Dark Dimension is described as timeless, and as an amalgamation of itself and every other dimension its ruler has absorbed. Its ruler is Dormammu, and Kaecilius contacts it in order to hand over the Earth.

Because there is no time inside it, Stephen Strange can bargain there by making a loop and dying in it repeatedly until the other party finds the arrangement tiresome. It is the only fight in these films won by being annoying on purpose.

The Deviants are the product of a series of experiments carried out by the Celestials, alongside the line that produced the Eternals. In the comics they are described as largely hostile and distrustful, of other species and of each other.

In Eternals they are the assignment. The Eternals are placed on Earth to remove them, which they do over several thousand years, and the film’s first turn is the discovery that the assignment was not what they were told.

An incursion is defined as a universe-ending event: the barriers between two universes erode, the universes collide, and one or both are destroyed. It is usually caused by travelling between universes, or by tampering with them.

This is the single most important term in the current run of films. It is the reason moving between universes is not a free adventure, and it is the bill attached to every multiverse story since. When a film shows you two skies at once, this is what it is showing you.

Knowhere is described as the enormous severed head of an ancient celestial being, used as an interdimensional crossroads and a scientific observatory. It appears in Thor: The Dark World, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers: Infinity War, the Holiday Special and Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3.

It is worth having in a glossary because it is the clearest example of what the cosmic side of this catalogue is doing. The mining town is inside the skull, the skull belongs to a Celestial, and nobody in the scene finds any of that remarkable.

The Kree arrive in the story as a warrior culture with a fleet, an artificial intelligence in charge, and an absolute certainty that they are the ones being attacked. They are introduced through the person of a soldier who believes all of that and turns out to have been given the wrong file.

They matter beyond their own films because they are the story’s first demonstration that an interstellar power can be simply wrong, at scale, for centuries, and still be winning.

Show detailsWhere they appear

Reference works record the Kree across the television series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and the films Guardians of the Galaxy, Captain Marvel and The Marvels. They are native to Hala, in the Large Magellanic Cloud.

The Mirror Dimension reflects the surroundings in different directions without affecting the real world, which is why sorcerers use it for training and for containing threats. It is the reason a chase through New York can bend a whole street sideways and leave the traffic beneath it untouched.

The Ancient One uses it during the Battle of New York. Stephen Strange uses it against Kaecilius, against Thanos, against Peter Parker, and against Wanda Maximoff, which is a fair summary of how his decade goes.

A nexus event is a significant moment where somebody deviates from their predetermined path on the Sacred Timeline, creating a new branching timeline.

It is the unit the Time Variance Authority works in. Every case they open is one of these, and the series is built on the discomfort of the idea: if there is a path you are supposed to be on, then somebody wrote it, and the agency that enforces it has never asked who.

Project Insight was a secret S.H.I.E.L.D. operation begun in response to the Battle of New York. Three advanced Helicarriers would patrol the Earth, using an algorithm to evaluate people’s behaviour, identify future threats and eliminate them with satellite-guided guns. It was led by Alexander Pierce.

It is the best premise these films have used, and the reason The Winter Soldier still reads well: the plan is pre-emptive killing at scale, and the argument the film has about it happens before anyone finds out who is really running it.

Pruning is the Time Variance Authority’s method of erasing branched timelines, objects or variants judged to be a threat to the Sacred Timeline. It is done with reset charges and time sticks.

The detail that matters is what it is not. Pruned targets are not destroyed: they are sent to the Void, at the end of time, where they are meant to be eaten by a creature called Alioth. The agency’s clean administrative verb has a place attached to it, and the series eventually goes there.

S.W.O.R.D. stands for Sentient World Observation and Response Department. In the comics it is a counterterrorism and intelligence agency dealing with extraterrestrial threats to world security, described as the space-based counterpart of S.H.I.E.L.D.

In these films it arrives with WandaVision, where it is the organisation parked outside the town with the anomaly, and where its acting director is doing something with Vision’s body that he has not told anyone about.

For most of the run there was one timeline and nobody said so, because nobody knew there was an alternative. This is the name given to it once the alternative turns up.

Calling it sacred is doing a lot of work: it frames the deletion of every other possible history as protection rather than as murder, which the series that introduces the term spends six episodes taking apart.

Show detailsWhat the sources actually say

The term appears in reference material about the series in quotation marks and without a definition, which is worth knowing. What is documented is what the organisation does, not a formal account of what the timeline is. That gap is in the material, not in this entry.

The Sentinels are mutant-hunting robots, usually depicted as the X-Men’s antagonists. On film they appear briefly in X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men: Apocalypse, and prominently in X-Men: Days of Future Past.

That film is the reason they matter here. The future half of it is a war the mutants have already lost, and the machines that won it were funded because one person was killed in 1973. The whole plot is an argument about where a policy starts.

The shapeshifting is the obvious thing about them and the least interesting. What the films actually do with the Skrulls is use them to make a point about who gets described as an invader: they are introduced through the eyes of the people who burned their planet, and the reversal is the whole structure of the film they first appear in.

Once you know, everything about their first scenes reads differently, which is the definition of a twist worth having.

Show detailsWhere they appear

Reference works place their MCU debut in Captain Marvel in 2019, and record later appearances in Spider-Man: Far from Home, the series WandaVision, What If…? and Secret Invasion, and the film The Marvels.

Ta Lo is a mystical realm inhabited by Chinese mythological creatures, among them a dragon known as the Great Protector, the fenghuang, the shishi, the hundun and the qilin. Thousands of years ago the Dweller-in-Darkness attacked it and was sealed away behind the Dark Gate by the people of Ta Lo and the Great Protector.

It is the place Xu Wenwu believes is holding his dead wife, and the voice he hears from behind the gate is the film’s whole trap.

The Raft is a maximum security prison designed to hold super-powered people, located underwater in the Atlantic Ocean, with Thaddeus Ross as its warden.

It exists in this catalogue for one scene. Sam Wilson, Wanda Maximoff, Clint Barton and Scott Lang are sent there for helping Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes evade capture, in violation of the Sokovia Accords. Civil War ends with half its heroes in cells built for them by the other half.

The Void, also called the Void at the End of Time, holds the remains of every alternate universe the Time Variance Authority pruned. It is patrolled by Alioth, a storm-shaped entity that consumes what arrives.

It is also the series being honest about its own premise. An agency that protects one timeline by deleting the others has to put the others somewhere, and the show goes and films it: a landfill of possible worlds, with the survivors living in the wreckage.

The Winter Soldier programme was a top secret Hydra project started by the Nazi scientist Arnim Zola in the 1940s. It took soldiers, brainwashed them, and enhanced them with a recreation of the super soldier serum, producing assassins who were kept in cryostasis between missions. Each had a set of codewords, recorded in a book, that could be used to activate him.

The book, and the words, are what Civil War turns on. They are also what The Falcon and the Winter Soldier has to undo, slowly, in a language Bucky Barnes does not get to choose.

Its people process the erasure of entire lives as paperwork, in an office with a queueing system. That tone is deliberate: the horror is not that they are cruel but that they are bored.

Understanding what they are for is the single most useful thing a newcomer can carry into the films that follow, because those films assume it.

Show detailsWhere the name comes from

It is usually shortened to three letters, and the material rarely expands it. The full name is stated in reference material as the Time Variance Authority.

Uru is described as a metal with magical properties, used by the Dwarves to forge Mjolnir, Stormbreaker and the Infinity Gauntlet. It is forged in the furnaces of Nidavellir because only the heat of a dying star is enough to melt it.

It is a small term that explains a large amount. It is why Thor’s hammer is not simply a hammer, why the same forge made the glove Thanos needs, and why a sequence in Infinity War consists of holding a star open by hand.

The word does a lot of work. It means the person is recognisably the same character, with the same name and often the same face, and that nothing they have done in their own life is shared with the version you know.

It is also an accusation. The organisation that coined it uses it to mean somebody who has stepped off the path they were supposed to be on, which is a crime in its system.

Show detailsA word with two owners

The audience uses it to mean an alternate version. The bureaucracy inside the story uses it to mean an offender. Both readings are live at once, and a lot of the tension in the series that introduces it comes from that gap.

Weapon X is a government genetic research project that turned willing and unwilling beings into living weapons for covert work. It captured mutants and experimented on them to enhance their abilities, and it also worked on ordinary humans.

The part that matters on film is the adamantium bonding process, written by Barry Windsor-Smith in 1991, in which the metal is fused to a skeleton. It is where Logan’s claws stop being bone, and both X-Men Origins: Wolverine and Deadpool are stories about people who came out of that building.