Riffin' On Kang in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania *possible spoilers*

Potential spoilers...although mostly not. I'm going to try to avoid them entirely, much like I avoided editing any of this. This is moreso a character analysis...

Kang reflections- He “sees time differently”…but really the only definitive thing he sees is the end. There are several times throughout this movie where Kang offers characters a choice in moments you think that he wouldn’t…implying he has experimented with allowing people to have free will and He’s never fully satisfied by the results.

He is a conqueror- not a God. He is not beginningless but we don’t know his beginning other than it is intimately related to the multiverse and incursions. I’m thinking that the actions of the Avengers are somehow his cause/beginning.

The event horizon he is trying to avoid is the end of all universes. He hasn’t necessarily yet figured out how to successfully do this. If the actions of the heroes, like Scott Lang, do a better job of satisfying this end goal, they have the potential to defeat Kang where he opposes them. He is a sad character; all he sees is the event horizon that is the apocalypse and won’t stop trying to avoid it.

In this respect he is identical to Thanos. He has seemingly, if not outright, “unlimited” power at his fingertips, but he is bound in servitude to an ideology that sees a dark “inevitability” which ensures that he is obsessed in every “moment” of his life with preventing the end of all universes…by erasing “problematic” timelines. His system of reason is a slave system; It cuts him off from the very beings which surround him, as well as some sort of deeper truth at the heart of every potential reality which allows for peace/happiness.

Chances are high they need to Thanos this as he is so similar to Thanos. He has the means but not the visions, if we are going to create a framework…the heroes have the right visions, for the most part, and are yet to develop the means/tap into them.

The “vision” these heroes have will be inextricable from their personal lives. They will have the potential to defeat this enemy by being themselves. Destiny truly seems to favor them, even though we have been told the apocalypse is most definitely hurdling towards us if things are left undone. There is still an observable “natural order” visible in Ant-Man Quantomania that is not aligned with the narrative Kang the Conqueror has regarding what really is happening/what the future is. This is strong evidence that Kang’s vision of the end of all universes is at some level delusional, and he is some sort of pawn.

If we get out of this one, we use his powers to stop the incursions instead of using them to remove timelines to fix the root issue of the incursions. More development is needed here… we’d maybe have to turn towards what caused Kang in the first place.

The existential crisis really at play here is the notion that existence itself can be problematic. If we think of universe incursions in personal terms, the crisis is the notion that its somehow impossible to avoid seriously incurring upon the well-being of others as you live your own life. When it’s people we realize how silly such a notion seems because…y’know civilization has been successful.

I mention it because the last time I saw a Marvel movie, there was a surprise semi-protagonist… a teenage girl named “America”. Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness… the week that movie dropped, somebody working in the Supreme Court leaked a document to the media indicating that Justice Alito was preparing for the court to overturn Roe v. Wade…which they later did.

Thematically, this is what Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness was about at some level (not its deepest level, but they worked it in). They had been working on this film for so long, so many details about it hidden from the public, and the week it releases is the week a draft from the Supreme Court is illegally leaked? There was too much coincidence there…somehow they knew Roe V Wade was going to be overturned long, long before most of the public did, and they put it in a movie, and synchronized the release of the movie with the event? That’s just plain cool/exciting.

Never mind that the Illuminati was a real concept within Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness…

We’re seeing a lot of movies in the MCU now that are indirectly looking towards that which is outside of space and time… thematically, although it is buried, we’re exploring the bridge between the worlds, which is at one level simply…Woman…that which births life… that which makes something out of essentially nothing.

Which is the opposite of Kang. He takes things and tries to erase them as if they never were, so as to avoid a cataclysm that really only He and He alone has glimpsed.

"We are the dogs of Tijuana howling in the night. The world will not end in fire. It will not end in ice. It will end when we arrive."

What, Mr. Kang, will the vehicle be?