So it’s recently come to my attention that not everyone in the world has actually watched The Old Guard (WHO KNEW?!) so I’m going to try and do some info dumps about the world, the general canon and Andy’s history, personality, powers etc. This will ... probably get kinda lengthy.
Also: MAJOR MAJOR SPOILERS FOR COMICS & MOVIE.
The first thing you need to know is that for the main part, the history and the world that TOG takes place in is the exact same one as the real history of the world. It’s set in modern day, though the plot points stretch back to 7k+ years ago. It’s also important to note that there is a lot of historical inaccuracies and some things in canon that conflict themselves so it’s best to just take it all with a grain of salt and just go with what works best for your particular preferences etc.
The main difference between reality and TOG is that in TOG there are a very minute like .00000000002% of the population that are immortals. Now, it’s important to note that these people can die but they resurrect pretty close to immediately after they die no matter the amount of damage done. Now it can take some time to fully heal or reform, depending on how extensive the trauma (being blown to bits or burned etc. will take longer to fix but there’s no amount of damage that we know of that can actually keep them dead).
There are times when, for reasons unknown to the characters in character (or to us as readers of the comics / viewers of the movie etc) that the immortality just stops. There’ll just be a time that they suffer injuries that just don’t heal, and they die. There doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to this, be it age, number of times they’ve died, whatever. Now, I have my own entirely headcanon and personal preference based theory which you can find HERE but it’s totally just a random idea that I had that I liked to explain the loss of Andy’s immortality in the movie (that doesn’t happen in the comics) and lets me say that she regains her immortality post canon so that I can nudge things back in the direction of the comics for post movie plots and so on.
Andy is, as far as we know, and as far as she knows, the oldest (human) immortal, coming in at around 7,000 years old. She was born into a tribe, the Scythia (hence what she’s generally called: Andromache the Scythian). A nomadic warrior tribe that I headcanon to be a matriarchy, Andy was betrayed by the ‘queen mother’ when she was sixteen and killed in battle because the leader feared that Andy posed a danger to her continuing rule. This person was practically a mother to Andy and it was a horrific betrayal. What was almost as shocking to Andy was the fact that she got back up again after being literally stabbed in the back and killed.
In the vein of trying to thwart prophecies making them happen, Andy killed the matriarch and took her placce ruling the tribe, eventually becoming a God King to her people and ruling over them for hundreds of years until her loneliness absolutely overwhelmed her and one day she just vanished.
At some point after this, she began to dream of a woman, feeling a pull towards this stranger that she couldn’t begin to explain. After dozens, maybe hundreds of years, she managed to track down the woman in question (Noriko in the comics, Quynh in the movie) and realized that they’d been dreaming of each other. (In the comics she meets Lykon before Quynh/Noriko, whom she had also been dreaming of).
Now, the connection between these immortals isn’t explained in canon, and for a long time, Andy, Lykon, Noriko (and eventually Joe, Nicky, Book) thought they were the only ones but there is a scene in the second set of comics that implies that there are other ‘packs’ of immortals. I headcanon that it’s a ‘like calls to like’ / kind of Sense8 simpatico type thing - like minded souls drawn to each other, which is why Andy and the others didn’t know about the other immortals, but again, that’s just entirely my thoughts on the matter.
Lykon is the first to succumb to the loss of immortality, a short couple hundreds years after he and Andy find each other. He dies on a battlefield, one that he and Quynh/Noriko and Andy fought on like a hundred/thousand before, champions for the abused etc. Skip forward a couple hundred years again and enter Joe & Nicky, a Knight and a Muslim warrior who kill each other on the battlefield only to both wake up and spend (an unspecified amount of time) hunting and killing each other before eventually Andy & Quynh/Noriko find them. In time, Joe & Nicky realize that they love each other. (Important to note that Quynh/Noriko and Andy were also lovers). In the movie, when the first major surge of witch hunts began, Quynh/Noriko and Andy go to help the women that stood accused, only to be captured and accused of witchcraft themselves. After being hung, drowned, burned at the stake and coming back to life every time, the witch hunters settled on locking Quynh into an iron coffin and dropping her into the ocean. (In the comics, Noriko is lost at sea during a massive storm that had thrown their ship entirely off course with Andy having no clue where they actually were at the time.)
Joe & Nicky arrive in time to rescue Andy, but Noriko is already gone and despite spending decades tracking down every person even remotely involved in the so called ‘investigation’ into the women’s inquisition and punishment, Andy wasn’t able to find anything about where Quynh could be.
Cue angst & depression & guilt for ages after.
The trio still steps in over the following decades, trying to help prevent the worst of atrocities, but Andy quickly begins to spiral into an, at best apathetic, at worst, entirely distant and withdrawn mindset and steadily begins to lose hope that they’re actually making any difference at all.
Skip ahead a century or two and enter Book; a Russian conscript who had been forced into the fight after being convicted of forgery. Hung for desertion, Book spend days dying over and over again as he hung there, unable to attempt an escape until the troops finally packed up and moved on. He and Andy, Nicky and Joe meet up and Book kinda reluctantly joins their little group. It’s revealed that Book dreams, still, of Noriko/Quynh and while he can’t tell where hse is, dreams of her still dying, drowning on the floor of the ocean over and over and over like she had been for the last hundred or two years.
Book returns at some point to his mortal family which ended in disaster when his last remaining son was dying of cancer, cursing and screaming at Book for ‘choosing not to save him’ by making him immortal too, even though it’s something Book had no ability to transfer or make happen. Between his nightmares, losing his son and a number of other factors, Book decides he wants to end it all but no matter what he tries, doesn’t die and stay dead.
Eventually he’s approached by a pharmaceutical company that has figured out what he is and wants to run tests on him to see if they can unlock his healing / immortality for other people. Merrick’s company works in league with an ex CIA agent whose wife died of a horrific terminal disease who hopes that they can find a way to keep anyone else from dying if they don’t have to. Initially it was just supposed to be him, but he’d set up a display to stream for proof of what he was / they were and the corp decided they wanted all of the immortals. Book ends up betraying the team, and he and the others end up locked up and tested on / killed / experimented on etc.
There’s another character introduced in the meantime, the first new immortals in centuries, an American soldier named Niles. There’s a lot more that goes on here, but the main point is that in the movie, Andy stops healing from her wounds shortly after she tracks down Nile and is put into incredible amounts of danger when Merrick (the leader of the pharmaceutical company) captures Andy, Joe, Book, Nicky. Book is devastated, Nicky and Joe are furious, Andy’s just tired.
Eventually, Andy and the others break free with Niles’ help, destroy the lab they were originally held in etc and set out to try and hunt down any other proof, lab results, anything that Merrick got his hands on during the tests.
The group meets and settles on a hundred year exile for Booker (which I think is one of the stupidest things - like, the man’s clearly desperate and depressed and lonely and mentally unstable so by all means let’s isolate him for a fully century) and at the end of the movie we see him stumbling home to his apartment six months later to find Quynh standing in his apartment, pouring and drinking a glass of water which is a whole power move considering how many millions of times she died by drowning.
In the comics, Quynh/Noriko was driven entirely mad and to the point of wanting vengeance against Andy for abandoning her and spends a while gaslighting Andy and torturing her physically and emotionally and what not until she manages to isolate Andy from the other immortals and scoops in to ‘rescue’ Andy. IDK what they’re going to adapt this to in the second movie,
Again, via the link posted above, my Andy slowly begins to regain her immortality (again, IDK what they’re going to do with the next movie).
Uhhhh yeah. So I .. think that’s the majority of what you need to know for canon info about Andy. THIS is also an important PSA regarding my Andy’s history & her longest lasting relationship that has nothing to do with canon at all but that is part of Andy’s bg in every verse, even if it never comes into play.
