Hello and welcome to a new episode of Sad Nerd News with your host, This Asshole.
Today we’re going to give you a brief overview of the Infinity Gauntlet, the Stones, and where they are. Now, you can google a bunch of articles that can do similar things for you, but IMO more than half of them are written by walking locker room stench that think either a: you’re a neophyte idiot deserving of condescension or b: you remember individual panels from individual issues of Jim Starlin’s run on Silver Surfer and how they impact some bullshit or whatever, and I won’t treat you like that.
The golden gauntlet itself isn’t much on its own without the gems. It basically just proves Thanos has the tacky fashion sense of the Trump family, and depending on the writer, it may help control and focus the power of the stones itself. It’s a shiny briefcase. Fakes are also great conversation starters, if you’re the King of Asgard.
The Stones (or Gems) themselves are the main deal. There are six such gems, as agreed upon by most comics continuity, although there are the occasional references to a seventh gem. The commonly held comics canon suggests that all the gems are shards of what was left behind after the death of an infinitely powerful entity - possibly an avatar of the universe itself. Guardians of the Galaxy suggests something more vague during the scene with the Collector.
The following information may contain some comic book details, meaning what we see in May will likely be altered somewhat.
Space Gem: AKA, the Tesseract. Currently held by Loki and seen in the IW trailer, this gem was looked at by Red Skull and Howard Stark during earlier films as an infinite power source. It was also for a while conflated with a different Marvel artifact, the Cosmic Cube. In comics, the Space Gem is more than a fast teleport device. It gives the wielder total dominion over the very concept of space, in defiance of physics. It allows the user to be in many places at once, or to move the user or objects from location to location.
Mind Gem: Current location - Paul Bettany’s forehead, although based on the trailer, not for much longer. This gem influences psionic abilities such as telekinesis and even your own sense of self. It can, when fully empowered, join multiple minds together as one. In the MCU, we’ve seen it impact individual minds, persuading them towards goals they might not otherwise choose.
Reality Gem: Current location - Knowhere, the private collection of Taneleer Tivan, after the Dark Elf incursion of Asgard. Regarded in comics as the most potentially dangerous of the gems because it quite literally fucks up everything about reality as we know it if you screw around with it. It distorts, changes, and can even splinter the world around you. In the MCU, so far we’ve seen it cause dimensional curves and change matter, although it also showed the ability to merge with a mortal host. Under Malekith’s use, the Gem could have been used to cast the entire universe into darkness.
Power Gem: Current location - Xandar, under the watch of the Nova Corps. Used in the MCU as a force for raw destructive energy and a way for Ronan to literally power himself up to the fullest extent he could handle, the Power gem is, like all the rest, exactly that. It can turn anyone into something even more godlike, with irresistible physical strength. And it is also the universe’s greatest Energizer battery, capable of charging any device to full power, including that one Nokia you had in ‘97 that could never get full bars.
Time Gem: Current location - Doctor Strange’s sweet-ass neck bling. The MCU has presented this one pretty close to its comics counterpart, the stone allowing its user to manipulate time forwards, backwards, and loop it, but also allowing visions beyond time and space itself. Similar to the Space Gem, in comics it also allows the user to exist in every moment of time at once.
Soul Gem: Currently unknown, possibly Wakanda. How it will behave in the MCU when discovered is unknown to me. This is the one that weirds me out, though, because in comics this is the gem with arguably its OWN soul, making it at least semi-sentient. It hungers for souls, in fact, collecting them and trapping them in an internal dimension (a soulworld) of its own creation and under its total control.
There is SO MUCH random bullshit I can add onto this - what role Adam Warlock had in all this, the original wielders, how many people have rammed their fist into this fucking thing, making the Infinity Gauntlet into a dubious-smelling Salvation Army glove without a match (it’s a lot), but until the movie comes out, a lot of it is going to be weird nerd minutiae we do not need to get wound up about.
Adam Warlock has been teased, however, via Guardians of the Galaxy vol 2. However, it doesn’t look like he’s going to have a big role in the film at this time.
Here’s one piece of useful trivia to note, and something that may have an impact towards the mysterious and under-wraps next phases of the MCU: The Infinity Gems always have at least one consistent weakness. They are tied directly to the universe they exist in. A stone from the MCU (Marvel Earth-19999, to speak nerd), cannot impact the comic universe (Marvel Earth-616), much less any other iteration of the universe.
But both Doctor Strange and Ant-Man have left hints of a possible shift towards a multiverse, which opens the door to new ideas and editions of our popular heroes....