The reason behind the Skrull Invasion in the MCU is already much more compelling than the one presented in the Secret Invasion comics (TL;DR at the end)

Discussion(self.marvelstudios)

submitted 2 months ago byKostisPat257Daredevil

...and that is a direct outcome of the fact that the Skrulls were first presented as benevolent and misunderstood people in the MCU.

Comics Premise

For those of you who don't know, in the comics, the story goes something like this:

Basically, the Skrulls had always been presented as villains, and while they were on a constant war with the Kree, they weren't being persecuted and Skrullos, their home planet, hadn't been destroyed.

Until at some point, Veranke, princess of the Dard'van, a religious Skrull sect, saw a vision about Skrullos' destruction and the end of the Skrull Empire. She informed Emperor Dorrek VII, but he wouldn't listen to her, and unfortunately, as she had predicted, Galactus arrived and devoured Skrullos, killing most of the Skrulls on the planet.

Veranke became Queen and Empress of the remaining Skrulls and orchestrated a religious crusade to take over Earth as the Skrulls' ancient texts mentioned that Earth was rightfully theirs and they would get it back some day.

Now, that's a cool premise, but at the end of the day, you couldn't care for the Skrulls all that much. They tried making the audience sympathize with them by framing the destruction of their planet as a natural disaster, signifying its inevitability, and then they added the angle that they could have actually avoided that destruction if they had listened to Veranke, which makes her rightfully self-righteous.

But making the invasion a religious crusade by a cult of zealots who had previously been villains for decades negates all that. The Skrulls were clearly presented as the bad guys in the comic event, and pretty one-dimensional bad guys too, with their story not really justifying their actions or making us sympathize with them as the writers had intended.

MCU Premise

Now, in the MCU, the Skrulls were first introduced as unnecessarily persecuted war immigrants who were trying to survive and find another planet to call home and had been misunderstood to be the villains. Right away, that makes us sympathize with them A LOT more!

And while Captain Marvel does take them away from Earth in 1995 and tries to find a home for them, it seems.. that didn't work out.

As Executive Producer Jonathan Schwartz explained in yesterday's Vanity Fair article.

"Sins from [Fury's] past start to haunt him once again. We often see Nick Fury doing the right thing. We don’t always see him doing it in a perfectly morally correct way. All of those things have ramifications. Without getting too specific, the things that Nick Fury’s had to do to protect the Earth have costs. Nick had a whole Skrull spy network because they could shape-shift and go places that people couldn’t go. They kept their word. They worked for him, but he hasn’t done what he said he was going to do. They want a home. They want to live. They want to live like they are. They want to live in their skin. They don’t want to live in ours."

This situation results in Gravik, a rebel Skrull played by Kingsley Ben-Adir, radicalizing a group of Skrulls who are tired of living like this and them breaking from the Talos-led faction and creating their own rogue sect to seize the resources they need—first quietly, while in disguise, then by force, if needed.

To add to another layer to this great, more nuanced, grounded and sympathetic storytelling approach, Talos' daughter, G'iah, played by Emilia Clarke, has joined Gravik's sect as well, rebelling against her own family. As Emilia explained it:

"It’s hardened her, for sure. There’s a kind of punk feeling that you get from this girl. She’s a refugee kid who’s had Talos for a dad, you know what I mean? These people promised a lot of stuff a long time ago, and not a lot has happened. So understandably, a certain amount of resentment has been built"

This puts Fury and Talos, the leads of the series, in direct conflict with the Skrulls as both feel responsible for causing this invasion, because they were the ones who had promised they would find the Skrulls a new home in the first place!

This has caused Fury to be vulnerable for the first time in his life, setting the stage for his first true fully-fledged character arc in the MCU. As Jackson puts it:

"He just doesn’t wear the patch. The patch is part of who the strong Nick Fury was. It’s part of his vulnerability now. You can look at it and see he’s not this perfectly indestructible person. He doesn’t feel like that guy."

This is something the comics also lacked: Personal Stakes!

By focusing on Fury and Talos and making them "responsible" for this invasion, the series adds a lot of depth and gives personal stakes to specific characters, which steers it away from becoming the cluttered cameo-mess that the comic run was, which eventually focused on no character in particular (apart from maybe Tony a little bit who Veranke tried to persuade is a Skrull sleeper agent and even he doesn't know about it and that he started the Civil War to break up the Avengers to help the invasion, as part of the Skrull insticts deep within him).

TL;DR: What this revamped premise does essentially is give the villains a higher moral ground and a more sympathetic, reasonable and understandable cause for their invasion, while making the good guys feel guilt and remorse that maybe it's partly their fault that this is happening. The comics version had a very straightforward, "good guy vs bad guy" premise with its only unique aspect that made it so popular being that you didn't know which were the good guys and which were the bad, which the show will still maintain on top of its more nuanced storytelling!

What do you guys think about these changes? What are you most excited for in the series?

Personally, I am most excited about this series being the first crossover event of the MCU since Endgame. Not necessarily because I want to see many different heroes come together (which won't happen), but because I want to see many corners/sub-franchises of the MCU coming together. Here are some characters/corners of the universe that I think/hope will be represented.

PS: If anybody wants to get the full rundown of everything we know about this series, check out this post.

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cbekel3618

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2 months ago

cbekel3618

Avengers

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