rebel Avengers idea pt 1 - the ultimates except they’re the masters of evil
i was thinking the other day about the fundamental origin of the Ultimates as a state-sponsored superhero team ostensibily meant to protect against super threats but (as Thor feared, and his reason for never joining the team in an official capacity) inevitably being used to further America’s interests and cripple rival nations or completely destablize regions for America’s benefit under the pretense of world peace, and like: this is a good story concept and a great show of American imperialism at work, but something feels wrong for the Marvel heroes to actually participate in this, and it got to mingling with my desire for the Avengers, X-Men and other teams to be outcasts battling against a corrupt status quo, and I had an idea:
what if the Avengers form as a response to a state-sponsored team of villains or morally ambiguous figures, determined to shut down this blatant abuse of power even as it sends them into the fringes of society, evading the suspicision and paranoia of the very world they’re fighting to protect.
It would probably be best to divide this into several parts so firstly I’d like to open up our villain squad. possibly we could call them the Ultimates too, for lack of a better name. if anyone wants a better name for them I’m open to that.
the premise is that they form after the initial reports of heroes coming back to the world, amid the outing of mutants and Inhumans in hostile populations. there’s a LOT of stuff going on; massive chunks of New Mexico have become awash in green energies that turn people and animals into monsters and cursing them with waking nightmares, as thunderstorms crash in a straight line from Norway to the US like the footsteps of a giant. Something BIG is coming up, and ostensibly, the Ultimates have been formed from superhumans of good public perception to combat a threat.
That they are villains, nationalists, black ops without conscience, and worse, hold a good position for being the monsters of the coming era, is not readily apparent. Lacking sufficient inspiration, I focused on some of the big names; for the most part it's lacking in the gender diversity department, so I'm working with the idea that the team is a bunch of rotating cells, each one corresponding to reinvented Marvel villains.
The primary actors in the hypothetical story build are as follows, serving as contrasts to the true superheroes of the coming age:
U. S. Agent: Captain America was America’s biggest international icon for decades; the first modern superhero, and the first stable super soldier (at least, known to the public, amid accusions from the Bradley family); his sudden loss was a severe blow to national pride, though not as much as the carefully hidden truths that he was sincerely something of an antiestablishment rebel and loose cannon that preferred the codename ‘Nomad’ and resented his more popular name. The US has been trying ever since to recreate him; a super soldier, the envy of militaries, and most importantly, a personification of jingoism. They’ve gotten close enough with John Walker, the U.S. Agent. The most stable successor to Captain America on the books (though there’s stories about the Bradley family, with talk of mutants born with powers uncannily similar to Captain America, and a disappearing super-genius remembered only as the Falcon), and a genuine superhuman with seemingly limitless potential in all physical and mental capabilities, he’s also a shameless nationalist with a hair-trigger temper and a gleeful jingoist mentality in ensuring American dominance. Of the team, he’s the one most onboard with their actual goals, which are closely linked to Hydra cells secured at high levels of authority. Whether or not he’s actually a Hydra agent is unclear. He’s certainly envious of the original Captain America’s influence, as he lacks his charisma or strategic prowess; much as he wishes otherwise, he’s not the leader of this team even if he is an icon of it, and he resents that he’s always going to be a poor replacement for the real Cap.
Iron Patriot: Norman Osborne is the true leader of this team, as well as its principle funder. He knows it, and loves rubbing it in. He loves being an icon; his son has posters of him in his national-colored power armor (that, nasty rumors suggest, he stole from troubled and notoriously unstable rival Tony Stark, who disappeared not long before Osborne’s rise), and he enjoys the visual of being a hero even as he uses his position to destabilize his rivals and establish power over the world. He’s doing his best to hide that his attempts to refine his own super soldier serum have gone... badly wrong. He’s getting bolder, more maniacal; another part of himself thinks that he can just kill anyone in his way, remove anything that stands in his path, and take such sadistic pleasure in it. Rumors suggest he’s taking another identity, off the books, to perpetrate his increasingly more demented goals, and this aspect is growing to be something he can’t hold back.
Killmonger: making heroes of people who do terrible things is not new, for the American people. Killmonger is one such man; this Wakandan-born and American-raised soldier is an incredibly successful black ops operative who has gained a flair for destabilizing countries, devastating anyone in his way, and at the same time, earning a lot of praise for his openly progressive ideas of universal freedom, pan-African unity, and an end to colonization. At the same time, its unclear how much of that is something he actually believes, or if its a useful cover to gain allies as he works towards his own vengeance. Certainly, he's a super-soldier in his own right, but its all covered up in secrets. The truth of the matter is, no one knows how he got his powers. There's no records of any experiments, and his manifestations of power produce a reaction in people but don't respond to mechanical instruments. They should be impossible. No one wants to bring up the word 'mystical'. At the same time, he's a ludicrously charismatic man who's become something of the team's face, and its building up internal strife with US Agent (who resents his position and, Killmonger suspects, has bigoted motives) and Iron Patriot, who's something of a control freak and can't stand ANYONE having any kind of influence.
He also spent sometime in an obscure South African nation called Wakanda. It's not entirely clear what happened there, except that a mercenary named Ulysses Klaue was involved, and afterwards, Killmonger manifested his powers. Some of a particularly superstitious bent insist that Killmonger's name is very literal; that he's becoming something else drawing the power of the people he's killed, harvesting them like a conquering king dominating a land.
Ultron: He's a mystery. No one really knows where this wondrous self-aware robot actually came from; he's referred to both Tony Stark, the Pym foundation, and a number of other luminaries being involved, at least according to his records, but he has no idea what the truth is, and he's kind of resentful about it. But then he resents a lot; pretty much from his first awareness he's been pulled into working in this team, and he's begun to suspect they don't view him as a person, but a tool with interactive ability. He's an incredibly powerful figure, virtually indestructible, with unmatched prowess over information-based warfare, so they've done their best to work with him. But its increasingly clear that those in power view him as a machine to be commanded, not an asset to be persuaded. Everything irritates him; his team's constant infighting, the inconsistencies in their mission statement versus what they are actually doing, and the team being dispatched after mutant neighborhoods in secrets. The irrationality, the pettiness frustrates him, and soon enough, he may judge everyone around him as an objectively flawed creature.
Perhaps, he may consider, its the humans themselves that are the problem. That aside, he's not exactly short of friends; Killmonger, at least, genuinely treats him as a person and a friend, but he's not sure if it is genuine, or just Killmonger maintaining a useful ally. He doesn't much care; he would rather be respected than merely used, even if it's ruthlessly pragmatic.
Loki: Who's that in the mirror? Who's that person they see, reflected through windows, grinning or scowling like a caged wolf? Who's speaking, snarling like a snake right out of the corner of their eye?
Sometimes it's a man, with Nordic features and fire-red hair, mouth all scarred like it had been sewn up and slashed open. Sometimes its a woman, with black hair and a beautifully haughty expression. Sometimes it's a capering gremlin, or something worse and indefinable, but its all the same person, and that person is stuck.
Something has him stuck here. Something is using him. Drawing his, or her, or their, power for other purposes. They don't want to be here. Something has gone wrong; terribly, terribly wrong.
They look at the faces of people who never see them, except for instances here and there, and they see the image of a red skull on others.
This is not an age where people want to think about gods, or magic. But that's fine. They can use that.
Abomination: Something BAD happened in New Mexico. Years ago, or maybe not so long ago. Time feels bent, but something bad happened there. People remember a bomb going off, or something like a bomb. It could been a weapon of mass destruction, tested and gone awry. It might have been the first transformation of something unimaginably powerful; a super soldier more monster than man. And other people saw the explosion, and swear it looked like a green door opening up in the sky. Emil Blonsky (Russian soldier of great renown, and sent to various militaries as a sort of mercenary asset) was there. He won't talk about what happen.
He doesn't need to. It's written in what he has become.
Blonsky looks like an ordinary man. A quiet man, very serious, with a tendency towards a nasty sense of humor. Or he used to. But, he says, there was something else walking that desert. A hulking, unstoppable monster; a promise of limitless power, and oh, they wanted to catch it so badly. They deployed machines and men, and nothing ever even slowed it down. So they built a shell, from its blood and cultured from its recovered cells, imbued with the eldritch power flooding from the event that had made it.
A living suit of something like powered armor, the equal of the monster. Blonsky had always hated how he could never live up to his real ambitions; his desire for power, for endless battles, and that he just wanted to cut loose and never take the blame for it. The idea was simple; take the shell, and use it however he pleased. Take it off, and he would be free to be without the blame.
He took to it a little too well. The first few uses of it were glorious and freeing, with a sick sense of shame as the bodies and destruction were found, and shifting into satisfaciton as no one realized it had been him. Not long after that, though, the suit wouldn't come off. Now, Blonsky and the suit have merged into a single thing, a horrific monster that those who know him best say represents what he is on the inside. He doesn't like being called the Abomination; on papers, his name is A-Bomb, a truly tacky but national approved flex. But some other part of him wants to BE the monster everyone should be afraid of.
Emma Frost: Technically speaking not actually a member of the team (to her distaste, as she is the only prominent woman visible in marketing and attributes this to the preferences of the project's primary advocate, Director Johann Smith), but in practice she participates in the battle as, supposedly, an agent of SHIELD. Her powers have an unclear origin; she can transform her body into living diamond, granting her near invulnerability and immense strength, combined with her keen intelligence she's a very competent combatant, though she prefers managing people as a rule. She's even distasteful of violence, viewing it as a necessity only brutes like Blonsky would relish. She's got a lot of secrets, and keeps her distance from the team outside of an authoritarian 'good cop' to contrast Director Smith's more uncompromising attitude.
One of those secrets is that she is a mutant. Another is that she's associated with various old money groups funding the project; in exchange, they are allowed to send the team to perform missions for them, and Frost's true purpose is to make sure this relationship is maintained, and that the individual members don't go astray. Their primary purpose is as public icons, as well as weapons. Frost claims that she has few concerns about the team destabilizing and targeting mutant populations, that her true loyalty is to society as a whole. In truth, she's growing increasingly more disturbed by it, and convinced her associates have far more dire motives than she had been lead to believe. She has been discreetly rescuing some of the children left homeless or orphaned by these attacks, and gathering them to a hidden home where she intends to instruct them herself, potentially as her own assets, or as atonement for what she's done. It could be both, or she could be lying even to herself about her ultimate intentions. Her biggest secret is that she's a telepath; a closely controlled power that terrifies those in government, and she knows that if it was made common knowledge, trumped up charges would be placed for her arrest and... disappearance.
