It’s 2022 and we love our bad supes.
We’re obsessed. Whether it be the morally ambiguous and gloriously disgusting cultural phenomenon that is “The Boys”, or the equally depraved world of Invincible, we just can’t seem to get enough. Methinks a cultural backlash is a foot. We’ve been inundated with squeaky clean and morally just superhero content lately. The people are Marvel are churning out superhero movie after superhero movie with all favorite pearly white toothed celebrities who are always on the side of good. Sure things got a little complicated with Civil War or whatever, but you could argue that that was only because it was two fundamentally good factions of superheroes with both had a different idea for the future and worked it out by punching each other. And no one died. Superhero disagreements get heated, that’s for sure. But no one ever crosses a line. And of course they won’t, it’s Disney for crying out loud. The only lines they cross are their record breaking profit margins year after year.
Enter Invincible to change all of that.
In the first episode of Invincible, we see that world’s equivalent of the Justice League get horrifically murdered by the Superman of the Invincible Universe: Omni-man. So why did Omni-Man do it? He’s from a peaceful planet, right? A veritable utopia of moral uprightness where society flourishes and everybody is equal, yeah? Omni-Man just wants to see everyone get along, yeah?
Yeah, no.
Omni-Man’s planet Viltrum is a death world. The planet was engaged in a civil war to weed out any of its citizens who were deemed “weak.” And when I say “civil war” I mean “global battle royal.” Basically what happened is this: imagine if every single person on Earth was trying to kill every other person on Earth in order to make the human population stronger. The population of Viltrum was reduced by half (which honestly seems like an oversight) because the Viltrumites then started a mission to colonize the entire universe. Omni-Man is a trusted lieutenant in the Viltrumite military, and was one of the few commanding officers assigned to conquer planet Earth.
So why did Omni-Man kill The Guardians? Because they would have prevented him from accomplishing his mission. Omni-Man wants to be the most powerful being on Earth so Earth can be assimilated into the Viltrumite Empire.
Pretty fucked up, right? But that’s what we love to see these days.
(Featured Image: Amazon Prime Video)
