Contains spoilers for The Eternals movie and comics.
Chloe Zhao’s Eternals, one of the latest offerings in the cosmic branch of the MCU, starts off with a fairly straightforward superhero premise: the Eternals, an immortal race of godlike, superpowered beings, are tasked with fighting the Deviants, a similar race of godlike, superpowered beings–except, you know, bad.
However, the movie has several twists and surprises, leading to one massive reveal in the mid-credits sequence: Thanos himself is supposedly an Eternal. But is this really true? Isn’t Thanos a Titan, as in from the planet Titan? If he’s actually an Eternal, why does he look so weird?
The answer, as usual, is that it’s complicated.
“Brother” Can Mean a Lot of Things
In Eternals’ mid-credit sequence, Makkari, Druig, and Thena are roaming the universe, trying to find other Eternals so that they can tell them the truth about the Celestials and the Emergences. They’re scratching their heads over a seeming lack of other Eternals when a portal opens and two people come out: a troll named Pip, and a handsome fellow who introduces himself as Starfox, AKA Eros.
Starfox (played by Harry Styles) explains that he himself is an Eternal–and, what’s more, he’s the brother of Thanos. Makkari, Druig, and Thena exchange a look, no doubt feeling as confused as the audience. (Perhaps one of the questions on their minds is, “why are we still talking about Thanos in phase four? Isn’t Kang the big bad now?” But I digress.)
Now, if Starfox is an Eternal, and Starfox is also Thanos’s brother, the answer would seem pretty straightforward: Thanos must be an Eternal himself. But wait! Marvel is full of sibling pairs, and their relationships are often more complex than you’d think.
Take, for example, Thor and Loki. Although they grew up together on Asgard, Thor is Odin and Frigga’s biological son, while Loki is adopted. Not only that, but Loki isn’t Asgardian at all. He’s a frost giant who was born abnormally small and subsequently abandoned, leading Odin to take him in and put a spell on him to make him look Asgardian. Thor and Loki consider themselves brothers, but they’re biologically two different races.
Another example is Gamora and Nebula. They’re both daughters of Thanos and, for all intents and purposes, they’re sisters, but they’re both adopted, with Gamora having been kidnapped from her homeworld to serve in Thanos’s army. So when Starfox calls himself “brother of Thanos,” we need to keep in mind that he might not necessarily mean biological brothers. There’s a huge variety of relationships, histories, and family dynamics that could lead him to use the word “brother” to describe Thanos. Just like in real life!
However, looking at the comics may shed some light on what exactly the MCU might be setting up.
What the Comics Say
When Sersi meets Arishem, he tells her that the Celestials created both the Eternals and the Deviants, with the Deviants having been a mistake. The Deviants can also be found in the original comics that the movie is based on, with one complicating factor: Eternals can have children, and those children can be born with Deviant DNA, resulting in something called “Deviant Syndrome.”
This means that, while most Eternals look human, Eternals with Deviant Syndrome look like Deviants. In the comics, Thanos and Eros are born on the Saturnian moon Titan to two Eternal parents, A’lars and Sui-San. Eros is born without the Deviant mutation, but Thanos is born with Deviant Syndrome. They’re biological brothers, but they look wildly different.
So, in the original comics, Thanos is an Eternal, full stop. But what about in the MCU?
Remember that while the stories in the MCU are heavily influenced by the comics, they’re not direct adaptations. The movies take a lot of liberties with characters and storylines in order to streamline decades of sprawling comics into a sequence of movies and shows that the average viewer can more or less follow sequentially.
What this means is … well, we’re actually not sure what it means yet. We might get at least a little more of an explanation next time we catch up with Starfox and the rest of the Eternals, but it’s hard to say how closely the movies will adhere to the original storylines, especially since the MCU Eternals are explicitly established to be artificial lifeforms, and we haven’t seen any evidence of them being able to give birth.
Thanos and Starfox may be biological brothers, or they may be adopted like Marvel’s other siblings. Thanos may be an Eternal, a Titan, a combination of both, or something else completely. We’ll have to wait and see!
(Featured image: Marvel Studios)
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