Black Panther Fans Are Confused About Namor's People And The Blip

The Blip was a huge event for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. With a single snap, Thanos (Josh Brolin) eliminated half of the life from the universe at the end of "Avengers: Infinity War," only for The Avengers to bring all the dead back after a five-year absence in "Avengers: Endgame." The Disney+ series "The Falcon and the Winter Soldier" dove headfirst into the finer points of the Blip, featuring a terrorist group called the Flag Smashers led by Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman). They represented the people who did not die in the Blip, yet found themselves in crisis with the dead returning to reclaim their old lives.

In an interview for "Marvel's The Falcon and The Winter Soldier Collector's Special," Kellyman described what it was like to make Morgenthau into less of a clear-cut villain due to her representing the displaced people after the events of the Blip. "Even though everything that she's doing is from a good place, her actions don't really follow that," Kellyman explained. "She begins trying to create change with more force and starts to deteriorate a little bit. So it was quite interesting to play that switch in her — where she's like, 'OK, I'm gonna leave a mark. This is my legacy' — rather than [the character just having] a Robin Hood kind of vibe, you know?" (via Marvel). So, even though Morgenthau does evil things, her motivations are less strictly immoral than in the comics, as there is something to be said for her cause.

Despite the Blip being a major event in the MCU that takes place over the course of five years, in the new movie "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," the famous event doesn't really come up, even when it should.

In "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever," the Wakandans make contact with the people of Talokan, an underwater nation that is a source of vibranium just like Wakanda. Led by Namor (Tenoch Huerta), the people of Talokan seek to wage war over one death, leaving some to wonder about what happened when half of Namor's people got blipped and why that didn't lead to Talokan revealing itself to the outside world. As Redditor u/pm_me_your_flactoid pointed out, "If Namor is ready to go to war over one person dying, what does he think happened during the blip? Even if he was one of the people blipped, did he just not believe everyone claiming that they disappeared for 5 years?" There are ways to explain away the discrepancy, but as some pointed out, the fact that no explanation was offered is their biggest problem with the situation.

Reddit user u/ajdragoon brought up a trend in the last few Marvel projects of moving away from acknowledging the Blip and the problems that it creates for the overall plot, which the user saw as a positive but saw some problems with. "Here's the problem tho: agreed that as a viewer I don't want the blip to dominate every piece of media," the user argued. "But they chose to write in a SEISMIC event that warrants it, so it feels very inconsistent that half the world vanishing and then returning has been resolved in only few years (if even)."

It's true that a whole new civilization being introduced would seem to warrant an explanation about what happened to them during this universe-wide crisis. But does the Reddit user have a point about the MCU moving away from the Blip?

There have been, at least in some projects, conscious efforts to avoid mentions of the Blip. In an interview with Lifehacker, "She-Hulk: Attorney at Law" head writer Jessica Gao said that her show specifically made a choice to ignore the landmark event. "So many shows and movies in the MCU have already kind of covered that and, you know, it's been talked about a lot that it just felt like, ok so many people have already covered that territory that we've accepted it," Gao explained. "We live in a world where that's already happened and people have already moved on."

The Verge argued that "Spider-Man: Far From Home," one of the first movies to come out after "Avengers: Endgame," succeeded largely because it ignored the Blip — it didn't fit into the rom-com tone of the movie, largely making the Blip the butt of a joke. As The Verge pointed out, "In short, every single person on the planet should be brutally disoriented and traumatized. The basic institutions of society would be thrown into chaos. Governments would fall, new religions would spring up. Earth would be unrecognizable."

While this did get touched on in "The Falcon and The Winter Soldier," Marvel was careful to keep that compartmentalized without any of the consequences of the Blip spilling over into something as lighthearted as "Spider-Man: Far From Home." So, it would seem, except in instances where Marvel specifically wants to address the Blip for plot purposes, they're mostly okay with ignoring it.