#but I like how he says white beard is his father and he renounces his own dad

[algumaideia]

He is the son of Gol D Roger???????

I really did not expect that

NO 😭

[theundeadnightmare]

Lego Ninjago: A Song of Ice and Fire

*ੈ✩‧₊˚

Note: I know that characters in specific houses have specific features, and I have tried to match my picks as accurately as possible look wise. However, I mainly selected specific Ninjago characters to be in specific GOT houses based off of MOSTLY personality, however I have taken looks into account. If anyone has any constructive criticism based off of my picks let me know!!! Also like this being a childrens lego show the characters look a little goofy and are intended to be more appealing to children and fit into the niche of the show (Skylor and Chen I’m looking at you) so bare with me and my picks :)

Another note: The dragons that are listed are NOT the actual dragons from the show, I just stole dragon names because I am not creative LMAO, lwk the only exception to this is Belarion LMAOO

one more small note: im lwk staying w the canon of game of thrones and ninjago but also not. im trying to create a story that accurately accounts for everyones roles in ninjago and how the characters themselves fit into game of thrones. im creating my own plot while also taking bits and pieces from the others, ALSO at this point Dorne is independent of Targaryen rule, maintaining newfound peace :)

*ੈ✩‧₊˚

Characters and Houses:

House Targaryen, The House of the Dragon:

༶•┈┈⛧┈♛ “Fire and Blood.”

༶•┈┈⛧┈♛ “I will take what is mine. With fire and blood I will take it.”

The legendary House Targaryen, the House of the Dragon. One of the only remaining houses of the great city of Valyria, Targaryens rule Westeros, seated atop their great Iron Throne.

ೃ⁀➷ The First Master

A legendary Targaryen warrior who led his house and House Velayron in the conquest of the Six Kingdoms. With his three dragons, ‘god like’ fortitude, and the Velayron navy on his side, The First Master conquered Westeros and made it in his own image.

First to sit on the Iron Throne, and the first Targaryen king of Westeros, he earned himself the nickname of ‘The First Master’ because of his westerosie conquest. His title so legendary, his name has been forgotten among the people.

Though there are many dragonriders and warriors in the Targaryen line, there are few dreamers. The First Master was one of those few, having dreams of his conquest and other prophecies, including one involving the legendary house of the dragon.

The First Master was given twin boys, Wu and Garmadon Targaryen.

ೃ⁀➷ Wu Targaryen

Wu Targaryen, First of his name, Son of the fabled ‘First Master’, Twin brother to Garmadon Targaryen King of the Six Kingdoms, Uncle to Prince Lloyd Targaryen, Hand of the King, Rider of Viserion.

‘Wu the Wise’, ‘Son of the Conqueror’, ‘Child of Conquest’.

Age: 57 (though his renowned beard makes him look ancient, lloyd says).

Wu inherited his fathers more artistic side, indulging heavily in his studies, mastering his High Valyrian, and gaining a love for his people. As a child he was more outgoing, constantly at his father’s hip in small council meetings. Eventually, Wu grew into a soft spoken humble man, his passion for the ruling and his people expressed more in teaching than anything else.

The first of two eggs were placed in Wu’s cradle, the egg hatched into the great dragon Viserion, who would become Wu’s lifelong companion.

Wu is the rider of the dragon Viserion, a large but swift dragon, of sliver-white scales and gold accents, offspring of his fathers largest and most formidable dragon.

As him and Garmadon came of age, and his fathers health took a rapid decline, the whispers of who would succeed the Iron Throne grew louder and louder. Wu had an interest in leading the people, but it was was nothing compared to his brother’s ambition to rule and sit on the Iron Throne. Wu renounced his claim, and let his brother reside on the Iron Throne.

Out of love and gratitude for his brother, Garmadon named Wu his hand, a duty he humbly fulfilled. As the years went by, and Garmadons rule went on, Wu’s concern grew larger and larger for not only his brother but the people of Westeros. Garmadon was slowly starting to become crueler and vile within his rule, and Wu started to question if giving up his seat on the throne was truly the right choice.

ೃ⁀➷ Garmadon Targaryen

Garmadon Targaryen, First of his name, King of the Six Kingdoms, the Rhoynar, the Andals, and the First Men. First of his name, Son of the ‘First Master’, Husband of the late Queen Misako Targaryen (formally Arryn), Father of Prince Lloyd Targaryen, Twin brother to the Hand of the King Wu Targaryen, Rider of Belarion.

‘Son of the Conqueror’, ‘Son of Conquest’, ‘Garmadon the cruel’, ‘The Mad King’, ‘The Targaryen Abomination’, ‘The Black Dragon’.

Age; 57 (though madness has made him look far older).

Though Garmadon shared his brothers passion with his studies, he was a timid child, often found hiding behind his father and watching from afar. But, as he grew, Garmadon became more confident, and dangerously arrogant. He watched his brother excell and the deadily snake of envy wrapped around his heart. He wanted the eyes of the people, he wanted the adoration, he wanted to shape the six kingdoms in his own image, Garmadon wanted to be king.

The second of two dragon eggs was placed in Garmadons cradle, while Wu’s hatched strong and healthy, Garmadons hatched weak and frail. The dragon that hatched out of the babes egg was mutated and amalgamated, a dragon of pure black whose eyes would not open. The dragon died just hours after it was born, and that was the first and only time ‘The First Master’ was seen praying in the sept.

Since Garmadon did not have a dragon whom he was born with, he was left to stake his claim on the many dragons that thrived within the Targaryen line. Garmadon claimed the oldest of his fathers three dragons, and the most formidable, Belarion.

After their fathers inveitable passing, there were questions on just which brother would sit on the Iron Throne. Wu, sensing his brothers drive and ambition for the crown, stepped asied and renounced his claim to the throne. Just weeks before Garmadon was to be crowned, he took the hand of the Lady Misako Arryn, a childhood companion of the brothers Targaryen.

It took longer than expected for the mighty king to be granted an heir, but soon enough Misako bore him a son, Lloyd Targaryen.

ೃ⁀➷ Lloyd Targaryen

Lloyd Targaryen, First of his name, Prince of the Six Kingdoms and Dragonstone, Son of the late Queen Misako Targaryen and King Garmadon Targaryen, Nephew to Hand of the King Wu Targaryen, Cousin of the Lady Pixal Velayron, and heir to the Iron Throne.

No (currently) owned titles

Age: 16, close to his 17th nameday.

Lloyd was odd babe, he came out of his mother silent, with his pupils observing the world around him. What was most odd, was those pupils that scanned the nursey in which he was born. The typical pure-blood Targaryen has eyes of violet emphasized by their white skin and even whiter eye lashes. If the babe is not pure blood, typically they inherit the eyes of the non-targaryen, Lloyd was special. The prince was born with two different colour eyes, one violet, and one green.

An egg of the great dragon Belarion was placed in his crib, expected to hatch and grow along with the Targaryen babe. Lloyds egg never hatched, and rests in his chambers to this day.

Much to both his uncle and his fathers dismay Lloyd never claimed a dragon, never showing any interest in riding dragons, more so in reading about them.

When Lloyd was young, only about three or four, Misako mysteriously disappeared from her bedchambers, the empty bed discovered by the king himself. He searched for his queen desperately, the search going on for 7 days and 7 nights, only to turn up nothing. This drove the king mad with grief, isolating himself from his son, leaving him in the hands of his teachers, handmaidens, and his brother.

When Lloyd was young, he desperately wanted to follow in his ancestors footsteps. His stories taught him of mighty conquers, merciless Valyrian warriors, and dragonriders who rained fire and blood on their enemies. He wanted to be a powerful king, one of little mercy who rained fire on anyone who dared defy him, just like his father. He was merciless with his pranks, and was often misbehaving.

As the prince grew, he matured out of his pranks and mischief, Lloyd grew more mild-mannered and calm. With the guidence of his uncle, Lloyd started to pave his path and decide who he truly wanted to be.

House Martell, The Rulers of Dorne:

*₊°。 ❀ “Unbowed, Unbent, Unbroken.”

❀。• *₊°。 ❀ “Girl or boy we fight our battles, but the gods let us choose our weapons.”

The House Martell, residing in Sunspear and ruling Dorne. They rule the Dornish with beauty, strength, and pride.

ೃ⁀➷ Ray Martell

Ray Martell, Second of his name, ‘The Lost King’ of Dorne, Husband to the late Queen Maya Martell, Father of Kai and Nya Martell, Former ruler of Dorne.

‘The Fire Serpant’, ‘The Lost King’, ‘Master of the Smith’.

Age: 35 at the time of his disappearance.

Ray was a strong and peaceful ruler, bringing security to Dorne while not bending the knee. He often met with the hand of the Targaryen king, creating a long lasting friendship between him and Wu and peace between Dorne and the Six Kingdoms.

He met Maya on his travels to Essos with his father. After meeting with a prominent lord of Qarth, the lord suggested he meet his daughter Maya while he discussed business with Rays father. Ray and Maya met, their love blossoming even after Ray departed from Essos. After MOUNTAINS of letters, Ray brought Maya to Dorne and they were to be wed. Not long after their marriage, Ray was crowned king of Dorne and Maya bore him a son, Kai.

Ray parented his son how he ruled Dorne, with paitence, an iron fist, and love. Ray was close with his son, and they grew closer after his daughter Nya was born.

Mysteriously, just four years after his daughter was born, Ray went missing along with his wife Maya while on a trip with their children. Their wereabouts have long since been unknown, and the country of Dorne still mourns their lost king and queen.

ೃ⁀➷ Maya Martell

Maya Martell, First of her Name, ‘The Lost Queen’ of Dorne, Wife to the late King Ray of Dorne, Mother of Kai and Nya Martell, Former Ruler of Dorne.

‘The Lost Queen’, ‘Mother of the Sun’, ‘Forgien Mother of Dorne’.

Age: 32 at the time of her dissaperance

Maya was born in Qarth, and raised as a lady of the developing city. Her parents amassed much wealth from the city, and became prominent as they contributed heavily to Qarths development.

Though she was educated as all noble woman are, Maya was also educated in the art of the blade, becoming skilled at just a young age.

After Mayas marriage to Ray, she became a queen beloved by all the people of Dorne, often socializing and giving back to her people.

Maya doted on her children, showering them with love and wisdom, littering Kai’s early memories with adoration.

ೃ⁀➷ Kai Martell

Kai Martell, First of his name, King of Dorne, Son of the late King Ray Martell and late Queen Maya Martell, Brother to the Princess and Harbour Master Nya Martell.

‘The Master of Fire’, ‘The Sun of Dorne’, ‘Dragon of Sunspear’.

Age: 22

Kai took the throne of Dorne at only the age of seven, relying on the council of those around him to rule his people for many years. While he grew and learned the ways of a ruler, he protected and nurtured his sister Nya. While raising his sister, Kai aspired to rule like his father, with a bit more flare.

He earned the nickname ‘Master of Fire’, for his sheer fascination and obsession with fire. Kai has trained in ever martial art that uses fire possible, and always decorates his halls and celebrations with grand displays of fire.

Kai often spends his time in Sunspears renowned water gardens, pondering over scrolls, offical papers, his fathers journals, while soaking and tanning his already dark olive skin.

If not in the gardens he trains. He trains until his hair is damp with sweat, he trains until his knuckles bleed, he trains until his muscles scream, he trains until his sister barges into the courtyard begging him to put his weapon down. Kai burns with a passionate fire as bright as the sun, a passion to protect. He burns to protect his kingdom, to protect his people, and protect the only family he has left.

ೃ⁀➷ Nya Martell

Nya Martell, First of her Name, Princess of Dorne, Harbour Master of Dorne, Sister to the King of Dorne Kai Martell, Daughter of the late King and Queen Ray and Maya Martell.

‘Master of the Harbour’, ‘Water Lilly’.

Age: 19

Nya has always seen her brother on the throne, she has little to no memory of her parents, and her brother has always been the sun lighting her path. Nya would never admit this out loud, but her brother has always been her hero and she would do anything to help him make sure their country succeeds. Though she idolizes her brother and follows his shoeprint throughout the sand, her blade leaves it’s own trail in the sand behind them. Together her and Kai rule Dorne as one, water and fire together.

The princess has always had a temper, one that matched that of her brother, and as she grew Nya learned to direct that temper into her work. Nya was always a bright child, with a skill in creation she excelled in furthering Dornes navy by building and creating new and better ships. As well as this she also excelled in the trade of her country with other kingdoms, these skills and her creations earning her the title of Harbour Master.

As well as Kai, Nya trains and she studies. She trains from dawn to dusk, she studies from dawn to dusk, she spends her time negotiating with lords, she signs papers, reads scrolls, but this is not enough. She is always finding more ways to serve her country and her brother, sometimes with ink, sometimes with a hammer, and sometimes with a blade.

House Stark, The Warden of the North

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ “Winter is Coming.”

*ੈ✩‧₊˚ “When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone wolf dies but the pack survives.”

House Stark is a house of honor, never breaking an oath and protecting the world from the horrors beyond the wall. Starks are loyal, strong, and unwavering.

ೃ⁀➷ Lou Stark

Lou Stark, First of his Name, Lord of Winterfell, Warden of the North, Husband to the late Lady Lilly Stark, Father of Cole Stark Heir to Winterfell.

‘The Wolf of Song and Dance’.

Age: 53

Lou Stark is the current lord of Winterfell, a lord who has maintained the traditional peace and honor of Winterfell. He is as lord of tradition, hell bent on keeping the Northen traditions burning bright. Before the death of his lady wife, Lou was outspoken and often held feasts for the lords of the North, serenading his fellow lords with his voice and music talent. When Lilly fell ill, Lou became secluded, often posted at her bedside singing hymns or reading legends. After her passing, Winterfell held little feasts and even littler forgien company, and the responsibility of lord started to weigh heavy on his son and heir, Cole Stark.

Now, though he still performs his duties, the lord is often not found outside of Winterfell. He slowly indulges more and more in his musical pleasures, and less in his duties of lordship. His son currently stands in his wake, performing most external duties for the Warden of the North.

ೃ⁀➷ Cole Stark

Cole Stark, First of his Name, Heir to Winterfell, Son of Lord Lou Stark and the late Lady Lilly Stark.

‘The Wolf of Shadow’, ‘Sword of the Godswood’.

Age: 23

Cole Stark is a man of loyalty and honor. These are some of the most affirmed qualities of his great house, and he strives to live by them. All his life Cole has heard stories of The Wall, The Nights Watch, what lies beyond the wall, and The Godswood. His mother would sit with him, under the Godswood or in his bed and tell him great stories of the north. These stories only fulled Coles passion for the north.

Soft-spoken and observant, Cole was always renowned for his sharp eye and equally sharp wit which earned him a reputation among his fathers lords which sat at his table. Everyone always thought Cole fit to rule, a fine man who would make a great Lord of Winterfell, but being the Lord of Winterfell was not as much Coles dream as it was of the lords around him.

Since he was young, Cole dreamed of being a member of the Nights Watch. The Nights Watch guards The Wall, protecting the north and the rest of the world from the horrors that live beyond. It is known amongst the Starks that serving as a man of The Nights Watch is a great honor, a honor Cole has dreamed of since his mother told him his first story of the men who wear black. But, since he’s the only and oldest son of the Lord of Winterfell, his true duty is too Winterfell. Though as Lou slowly starts to relinquish his duties - Cole takes them on with grace - he yearns more and more to serve on The Wall.

House Baratheon, Paramount of the Stormlands

*ೃ༄ “Ours is the Fury.”

*ೃ༄ “We march to victory or we march to defeat. But we go forward, only forward.”

House Baratheon is a house of pride, the paramount of the Stormlands and one of the great houses of the six kingdoms. The lords are prideful, and often have mercual tempers.

ೃ⁀➷ Jay Baratheon

Jay Baratheon, First of his name, Lord of Storm’s End, ‘Son’ of the Lord Ed and the Lady Eddna Baratheon.

‘Son of the Storm’.

Age: 21

Jay is the current lord of Storm’s End, ruling his house and the stormlands catious of the sword at his throat. Jay avoids the Targaryens that rule his country as much as possible, while still being loyal to them and following their rule, he secretly detests the cruel king that sits atop the throne. But, he keeps his detest deep within, aware of the power that could have his head on a spike.

Though he is cautious and often anxious, Jay is known to be excentric and energized, his words often laced with a joke or witty sarcasm. This attitude of his makes it so people don’t always take him seriously, lords often laughing and brushing off his suggestions at his table.

His parents always taught him to be creative as they were, giving him little trinkets or blacksmith creations to fix and make his own. This creativity still carries on into adulthood, Jay often finds himself fixing or creating things to soothe his anxiety, or take his mind off the rolling smoke from the dragons fire.

House Velaryon, Children of the Sea

༊*·˚ “The Old, The True, The Brave.”

༊*·˚ “To elude a storm you can either sail into it, or around it. But you must never await its coming.”

ೃ⁀➷ Cyrus Velayron

Cyrus Velayron, First of his name, Lord of Driftmark, Master of Ships, Father of Pixal Velaryon.

‘Bastard of Driftmark.’, ‘Lord of the Invalids’, ‘Sea legs’.

Age: 50

Cyrus was a bastard of the former lord of Driftmark, a child conceived at sea and born with non-working legs. He had four valid siblings, conceived by the lord and his lady wife, but all the lords valid children died. He was sought out by his highborn father, and named heir of Driftmark.

As an apology for his legs, the gods blessed him with a genuis mind, Cyrus used his genuis to advance the Velayron fleet and make his ships second to none. The Velayron fleet was already Westeroses most powerful, but with Cyrus’s advancements, no other ships compare.

As a sign of good will, and recognition of the relationship between the two last standing Valyrian houses, Cyrus was betrothed to a cousin of Garmadon. Soon after their marriage, the gods gifted Cyrus a daughter.

ೃ⁀➷ Pixal Velaryon

Pixal Velaryon, First of her name, Heir to Driftmark, Daughter of Lord Cyrus Velayron, Cousin to the Prince Lloyd Targaryen, Rider of Moondancer.

‘Gift from the Gods’, ‘Daughter of the Dragon’.

Age: 22

Pixal was born under a full moon, and blessed with the looks of a true Velayron. Her mother died in childbirth, leaving her to be held in the arms of her grieving father. Since then Cyrus has dotted on her endlessly, always showering his daughter with gifts and stories of his endless travels.

When she was young, days after her ninth name day, Pixal snuck out of Driftmarks castle towards it’s dragon pit. She dreamt of a dragon, the colour of lavender littered with black markings like that of a tigers, waiting for her in the pit. Pixal creeped past the dragonkeepers, stalking through the caves and there it was, the dragon from her dream. That was the night she claimed Moondancer, since then Pixal has become one of the most skilled and formidable dragon riders in Westeros.

To almost everyone she knows, Pixal barely speaks. Observant with a sharp eye, she prefers to see rather than speak. When she does she is sharp and straightforward, using the knowledge she’s consumed to her advantage. Pixal tries to consume as much knowledge as possible, on any subject possible. Instead of asking her father for jewels or dresses (though she does like to be preened and look good), she asks for scrolls, books, and the newest inventions of far away lords. Many say she’s been blessed with the mind of her father, and with the dreams of a Valyrian.

The Faceless Men.

˚ · . “A man has no name.”

˚ · . “Valar Dohaeris. All men must serve. Faceless men most of all.”

ೃ⁀➷ Zane Julien

A man is called Zane Julien, nothing more nothing less.

Age: ?

Zane is apart of the faceless men, taken in by one of them when he was a baby. Not much is known about this strange man, his loyalties, or how his appearance keeps changing.

ੈ✩‧₊˚

Here is the Game of Thrones Ninjago au!! If anyone would like moodboards or if any of you have any questions about any side characters let me know!! I’ll start posting chapters of this story soon, this took me like two days so chapters will come out at a slow pace!

game of thrones ninjago au…i am….thinking…

[ask-de-writer]

GREEN VELVET : Classical Fantasy : Part 5

GREEN VELVET

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

24116 words

© 2018 by Glen Ten-Eyck

Cover art by @wind-the-mama-cat

Written 2003

All rights reserved.

Reproduction in any form, physical, electronic or digital is prohibited without the express written consent of the author or proper copyright holder.

Express permission is granted for all sorts of fan activity, whether music, written or art.  Fair use of characters and settings in fan works, whether art or written, is encouraged, provided that proper credit is given for their origin. Reblogging on Tumblr is allowed.

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

New to the story?  Part 1 is here!

~~ ~~ ~~ ~~

Turning to me, he asked, “Might I have permission to speak freely to you, Lord Caer Dunn?  I wish you to know where I stand without offense, though you may not like what you hear.”

“Speak then,” I replied.  “If you are the Queen’s true man, your opinion will make no enemy of me.”

“I shall be blunt.  I do not like you.  You are a Mortal.”

“I expected as much.  I heard what you told Queen Organe.  You have good reason for your hate. Bear in mind that mortals are each different, as are your own kind. Speak on,” I said quietly.

“I understand what you mean but my heart does not feel it,” he said, brow furrowed in thought.  “I oppose your presence at Organe’s Court and if asked, I will say so.  I opposed Thomas, too.  His loss has brought so much pain to my Queen that I may have been wrong.  I was wrong not to go to Her at once and let Her undo the geas and find the traitors before their plot was carried through.  I am not sorry for my opposition, only for Her Majesty’s agony.  Am I clear?”

“Perfectly,” I acknowledged.  “While you may be opposed to me, I am only against your opinion, not yourself.  In the matter of our Queen, we are perfectly aligned.  This also I will say.  From what I have seen of you, in any combat, including the courtly, I will not fear from you a foul blow.  If you dissemble, you do it too well for me.”

“Our Queen?” he looked startled at the thought.  “I did not know that you had sworn yourself to her service.”

“He has not,” said Organe’s deep, yet still feminine voice.  “All that he has done, at my mere request, without proof that I was royalty, was renounce utterly his lands, his title, his father, his brothers and all else that he held dear.  I used no sorcery to influence what he did in any whit.  That is more than pledge enough for me.  Can you think of a more sincere one?”

Once again, his thick thatch of black hair almost met his eyebrows as he concentrated.  “Majesty, of freely given oaths, I cannot.  Only sorcery could bind more strongly.”  He thought again for a few moments and Organe gave him time, turning an eye to me, quietly warning me to silence also.  “I have said, and I repeat, I am opposed to him, as a Mortal, being in your Court.  If you are determined that he have a place, then swear him to you in full Court and install him in the place that you think fit.  Be sure that all are witness, so that none may gainsay your intent.  If he is willing, enforce the oath by your magic.”

“You are well aware that I do not like to do that, especially to folk that I have grown to trust,” she replied sharply.

I spoke incredulously, “You mean that you have no hostages to bind your Court?”

Both of her green eyes stared at me, horns aimed at me like drawn arrows along her deadly muzzle, ears laid flat along her neck.  “I have had such in the past,” she said distastefully.  “I prefer free will.”

“Naytheless, I think that I see a way to smoke out your disloyal plotters without harm to your principles or your true subjects,” I returned excitedly.

Both she and Braxon regarded me with wide eyed interest, her ears spread wide, “Tell me, then what might do this!”

“Do all as you have planned. Use the occasion of Earl Desmarche’s demotion to announce that, a moon hence, all the Court, to maintain their lands and titles, must swear binding fealty to you, that they never have nor ever will willingly work against your known will,” I looked for approval.  I did not see it.  Organe’s ears were laid almost flat back.

It was Braxon who spoke their mutual disfavor.  “You have just heard her say that she will not bind her subjects in this fashion.  Some Courts do.  We have beaten all of them in battle for the reason of their Oaths limiting their scope of action.  Free will is better.  Our Queen acts with restraint because She can be terrible.”

“I understand that.  Her subjects will not be bound in any whit, nor will she have told any falsehood about the Oath of Fealty.”

Her head was tilted to one side, ears spread in curiosity, “How, then?”

“Only one small part of the Oath will actually be bound by magic, and that voluntarily.  Have them swear that they are your loyal vassals who will never act against your known will and who never have willingly acted against your expressed will.  Only that last bit will be bound and, as it affects only past action, it cannot affect their freedom.  The moon hence is for those who will, to come forth to you, asking such forgiveness as is possible.  The others will find ‘pressing business on their estates’ or other reasons to flee, thereby revealing themselves,” I explained earnestly.

Braxon and the dragon looked at each other, nodding slowly.  Stroking his short, neatly trimmed beard, the Earl said grudgingly, “It will work, my Queen.  It will work.  With your permission, I can attend to the details.”  Her huge head nodded, eyes shutting to hard slits.  He continued.  “Trust me on this, My Queen, the first thing to do is leave your left hand seat formally unfilled.”  He gestured at me as though he could not bring himself to speak my name.  “Let him remain there for the time being.  Find a pretext to move Mechan one place further to your right.”

Puzzled, she said, “I do not understand, move Mechan?  Why?”

Braxon managed to get out, “If you do it, you will come to understand...” before he fell in a gasping fit apparently unable to breathe.  Instantly, I was by his side, lowering him onto one of the large cushions that dotted the room.  I was trying to get him air as you would for a drowned swimmer, to no avail.

“It is the geas!” I heard from behind me.  “It is strangling him!”

“Can you break it?” I cried still laboring.

“Only at the cost of losing My proof of its maker!” she answered, torn.  “If this were any but Braxon... Move aside,” she added heavily, her voice small again.  I did.  The Organe that I first had met, came and stood over him.  She exhaled toward him.  This time, it was dragon fire or appeared to be, blue-white, streaked with yellow, jetting from her mouth, something that you might see in the hottest part of a forge.  Nothing of Braxon or the cushion was harmed in the least.  Something within him burned back at her mightily, black, red, flickering orange flame was twining up her blast, trying to reach her.  Tendrils of the black flame, bolstered by the rest, leapt up towards her eyes and nose.  Less than inches from her face, it failed and withered away to nothing.  Clearly exhausted, she flopped into a chair, discouraged.

“He is saved, but all that I had hoped to learn is gone, even the memory of what the geas was protecting is vanished with it.”

“Your Majesty, I am in much pain, yet feel as though some direful thing is lifted from me,” croaked Braxon.  “I can barely move.”

To be CONTINUED

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[aion-rsa]

Avengers: Endgame - Complete Marvel Easter Eggs and MCU Reference Guide

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Avengers: Endgame is packed with Marvel Comics easter eggs and MCU callbacks. We're tracking 'em all down.

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This article consists of nothing but massive Avengers: Endgame spoilers. You’ve been warned. We have a completely spoiler free review right here.

Avengers: Endgame is the culmination of 11 years of Marvel Cinematic Universe storytelling. That’s a whopping 22 MCU movies, each of which has been packed with deep lore from the pages of Marvel Comics. That makes for plenty of Marvel Easter eggs that can be hunted down by fans and scholars. And as of right now, it's exclusively streaming on Disney+.

But Avengers: Endgame is the first of these films not concerned with setting up sequels or even introducing new characters. Instead, it’s a celebration of all that has come before, and a genuine conclusion for the 22 movie saga. It also owes as much of a debt to Marvel’s big screen history as it does to the comics. In general, the MCU is a veritable feast of fan service for Marvel fans of all eras, but it also now boasts a sprawling continuity of its own that is impressive enough that it can spend as much time (or more) calling back to its previous entries as it does the comics.

Watch your Marvel favorites with a FREE TRIAL of Disney+, on us, right here!

Here’s how this works. We’re trying to find every single Marvel and MCU reference packed into Avengers: Endgame. But there’s no way we caught ‘em all, right? That’s where you come in. If you spotted something we didn’t, let us know in the comments or on Twitter, and if it checks out, we’ll update this and give you a shout.

Now, Avengers...assemble!

WHEN DOES AVENGERS: ENDGAME TAKE PLACE?

Avengers: Endgame takes place 21 days after the conclusion of Avengers: Infinity War (making it 23 days since Thanos first arrived on Earth). An additional day goes by before Carol Danvers rescues Tony Stark and the whole team has their meetup at Avengers HQ. Of course, then we jump five years into the future...

That five year time jump likely won’t mean much for long. With no new Marvel movies (other than Spider-Man: Far From Home, which picks up right after the conclusion of Endgame) until 2020, the real world will catch up to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in no time. Keep in mind, Infinity War took place in 2018, which means the opening of Endgame also takes place in 2018, so that five year time jump is really a four year jump in “our” time. Marvel currently has movies scheduled through 2022 (and of course there will be more) so by the time the next phase happens, we'll be all caught up.

Whew. Anyway, on to the rest...

IRON MAN

We’re kicking things off with Tony Stark because, well, after 11 years, 22 movies, and one heroic, heartbreaking death scene, he deserves it.

- It is cute but not necessarily significant that Tony introduces himself to his father as “Howard Potts.”

- Mungo Jerry was an early ‘70s rock band best known for their hit “In the Summertime.” You can definitely see a little Tony Stark facial hair happening in this pic. That's Community's Yvette Nicole Brown complaining about Tony's hippie beard. Maybe if Thor had been at Camp Lehigh she would have thought more Bee Gees.

- Howard Stark reveals that Tony’s mother was considering naming Tony “Alphonso” instead of “Anthony.” Al Stark doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it?

read more - Which Avengers: Endgame Deaths are Permanent?

Morgan H. Stark

As promised in Infinity War, Tony and Pepper have had a child, and Tony named her after an eccentric cousin of his. The elder Morgan Stark has never appeared in the MCU, but first showed his face in Tales of Suspense #68, back in Iron Man’s early days in 1965. It’s...not a super important story.

- Young Morgan is fond of cheeseburgers. We learned that Tony had cravings for them in the first Iron Man movie shortly after he returned from captivity.

Pepper Potts

- The blue/purple tint to Pepper’s Iron Man armor helmet (and later the armor itself) is a nod to how she appeared as “Rescue” on the Iron Man: Animated Adventures series. If you've never seen it, you can find it on Disney+.

Howard Stark and the Agent Carter Connections

- It’s rare to see the television arm of the MCU acknowledged on the big screen, so it’s nice to see Agent Carter’s James D’arcy return as Jarvis, however briefly. Between this and seeing Peggy Carter doing her business as director of SHIELD, this is as close as we’re going to get to a proper Agent Carter reunion.

- That’s latter-day Howard Stark John Slattery here, rather than First Avenger/Agent Carter Howard Stark, Dominic Cooper.

read more - Avengers: Endgame Spoilers, Questions, and Theories

- When we first see Howard Stark in this movie, he is looking for that rat bastard Arnim Zola, who didn’t upload his consciousness to a computer until 1972 (something we see play out in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie that also gets plenty of love in Endgame).

The Death of Tony Stark

It appears that right before Tony says “I...am...Iron Man” a nod both to the famed Black Sabbath lyric and his final words from the first film, he seems to be staring off, likely hinting that he is experiencing the kind of cosmic awareness that the Infinity Gauntlet always brings with it, and that is made famous in so many Jim Starlin Marvel comics.

Who is at Tony Stark’s Funeral?

- In attendance at Tony Stark’s funeral you can find all the surviving Avengers, plus a few special guests, including Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill, Marissa Tomei’s May Parker, William Hurt’s Thaddeus Ross, and Ty Simpkins’ Harley Keener from the immensely underrated Iron Man 3.

- The floating funeral bouquet contains Tony’s first arc reactor, the one that Pepper customized to read: “Proof that Tony Stark has a heart.”

We examined the significance of Tony Stark's funeral (and its attendees) right here.

CAPTAIN AMERICA

- We finally get to hear Cap declare the famed “Avengers Assemble!” battlecry, something which we were teased with in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

- Cap’s shield getting shattered in battle with Thanos is a moment right out of the original Infinity Gauntlet comic. It didn’t stop Steve there, either.

- Cap swears multiple times in this movie, something he has been reluctant to do in the past. Can you blame him? Of course, that doesn’t make him any less worthy to wield Mjolnir when the time comes, an event that has been teased since Avengers: Age of Ultron. And goddamn it might just be the single most triumphant moment in MCU history.

- Cap has hoisted Mjolnir on a few occasions in the comics, making him one of the few Marvel characters who have been canonically deemed worthy (not even a few dirty words can change that). The most notable time was during the Fear Itself event, which allowed Cap to use the hammer for maximum world-defending effect.

- Endgame also leans heavily on the entire trilogy of Captain America movies, with their events getting direct references, but also driving smaller moments in the film. For example, Tony and Steve’s trip back to 1970 is one of many things that helps heal the rift between the pair from Captain America: Civil War. But more directly…

The First Avenger

- We hear the main theme from Captain America: The First Avenger when Tony returns Steve’s shield to him.

- The location of New Asgard is Tonsberg, the same Norwegian village from The First Avenger where the Tesseract had been hidden from prying eyes by Odin worshippers until that Nazi douchebag the Red Skull came along and swiped it. You can see why Thor chose this location.

- Steve and Tony go to Camp Lehigh to find the Tesseract in 1970. Camp Lehigh is where Steve first trained to become a super soldier, and was his stateside base of operations during the war. It’s a Marvel Universe landmark that dates all the way back to Captain America Comics #1 in 1940.

read more - Complete Guide to Marvel Easter Eggs in Captain America: The First Avenger

- Interestingly enough, Steve’s phony uniform is emblazoned with the name “Roscoe.” This might be a reach, but in the wake of the original “Secret Empire” (not the Nazi Cap one) story from the comics (in the 1970s) by Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema, when Cap temporarily renounced his red, white, and blue costume, the Falcon took on a junior partner by the name of Roscoe Simons to take Cap’s place. It...it didn’t end well for young Roscoe. But Cap wearing Roscoe’s uniform here (yeah, I know, first name/last name...whatever) is a nice reversal of Roscoe wearing Cap’s in the comics.

- “Don’t do anything stupid until I get back/You’re taking all the stupid with you” is a wonderful Steve/Bucky exchange from The First Avenger.

- When Steve is fighting himself, he says to...himself... “I can do this all day,” which is, of course, Steve’s mantra that he first says in The First Avenger and then repeats in Civil War.

The Winter Soldier

- Two of the key dickbags showing up to run cleanup in the aftermath of the Avengers are Jasper Sitwell and Crossbones. Of course, we get a nice nod to that amazing elevator fight scene from Captain America: The Winter Soldier at one point.

- Steve saying “Hail Hydra” is more than just another fun nod to The Winter Soldier. In 2016 Marvel took a considerable amount of shit for the infamous “Nazi Cap” story, Secret Empire, where thanks to some cosmic cube (that’s the Tesseract to you MCU fans) related shenanigans, Cap’s history was temporarily rewritten so he was a Hydra agent.

- Getting Robert Redford to return as Alexander Pierce is an impressive feat on its own.

Sam Wilson, The Falcon, and the New Captain America

- Following Thanos’ snap, Steve seemingly becomes a grief and trauma counselor, which was Sam’s job when we first met him in The Winter Soldier.

- When Falcon makes his big return he says “on your left” which is another nice nod to The Winter Soldier when we first met him and he first met Steve. It shouldn’t be a surprise that TWS looms large in this movie, as it’s the one that put the Russos on the MCU map.

read more - Avengers: Endgame Ending Explained

- Sam Wilson has spent time in the comics as Captain America. Cap has a habit of handing off the shield from time to time. The first real time was to John Walker, although Steve had no say in choosing him. Then there was the time Bucky spent as Cap (and he did an excellent job). The thing is, Cap didn’t really get a say there, either, as he was quite dead at the time.

But Sam is the only guy to wield the shield who was actually given Cap’s blessing right out of the gate, and rightfully so. Coincidentally, it happened at a time in the comics when Steve had also been “aged up” to his “actual” elderly state, much like what we see at the conclusion of Endgame. He also gets a ridiculously cool costume out of the deal...

- The fact that The Falcon and Winter Soldier are slated for a team-up series on Disney+ indicates that it’s going to take some time for him to get used to the idea of being the man with the shield, and don’t be surprised if that series deals almost entirely with the buildup to Sam finally deciding to accept the responsibility and wear the red, white, and blue. It's interesting (and a little concerning) how little Steve and Bucky interact in this movie, though.

The Final Fate of Steve Rogers

- Cap’s quest to return the stones leaves the door open to a series of Captain America movies in different time periods. Maybe. Probably not. Don’t hold your breath. Still, there's always a chance that Steve Rogers (even if he isn't Captain America anymore) can still be a part of the MCU in some capacity.

It's also worth noting that the Russo Brothers say that Cap created an alternate timeline by doing this, and figure since they directed the damn movie, they would know.

- Elderly Steve appears to be wearing the same tan jacket that pre-super soldier serum Steve wore in Captain America: The First Avenger. It fits again.

- The song playing as Steve and Peggy dance is “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” a 1945 hit with lyrics that are really, really appropriate. This appears to be the version with Kitty Kallen on vocals with the Harry James band.

Set all your worries about paradoxes aside and just enjoy the moment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go weep for a bit.

We wrote more about the implications all of this might have for Agent Carter continuity right here.

THOR

- This is our first look at “alternate” versions of Thor in the MCU, although Jason Aaron’s spectacular run as writer in recent years has treated us to younger and far older versions of the character. None have this particular version of Thor’s particular traits or hangups, but there is some precedent for time-slid, weird Thors in Marvel Comics.

- The movie makes a valiant attempt to redeem the generally unloved Thor: The Dark World, with Thor and Rocket sneaking around in the background of recognizable scenes, plenty of references to the Dark Elves and Jane Foster’s predicament, and the touching reunion between Thor and Frigga (other than her “eat a salad” crack...Jesus, mom!) shortly before her death.

read more - Complete Guide to Marvel Easter Eggs in Thor: Ragnarok

- Aside from New Asgard’s connection to The First Avenger, the idea of Asgard having a place in Midgard really stems from J. Michael Straczynski and Olivier Coipel’s time as creative team on the God of Thunder, where Asgard spent some time hovering 12 feet off the ground near Broxton, Oklahoma.

- Thor turning New Asgard over to Valkyrie isn’t a thing from the comics, but it does feel very much like a set-up for future Valkyrie adventures in the MCU proper.

- So, based on assorted time travel weirdness and Loki making his escape during The Avengers portion of the time heist, does this mean that Loki can once again be alive in MCU continuity? It would seem that way. This would certainly help clear things up for the Disney+ Loki series that Tom Hiddleston is set to star in. Though it's been reported that the Loki series might follow Loki as he interferes with moments throughout history. We went into more detail about whether Loki is now alive again in the MCU right here.

- When Rocket goes to collect drunk Thor, Korg, voiced by Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi is hanging out playing video games and wearing a pineapple-covered Hawaian shirt that he has busted through with his rock shoulders. It is probably a reference to the excellent possible romphim (that’s a romper for men - get it?) Taika wore to SDCC while promoting Thor. It could just be a coincidence because Taikia loves pineapples and insisted his character wear a pineapple shirt. Either way, rad casualwear for Korg.

HULK

- Bruce Banner says he started thinking about the Hulk as “a cure” rather than as “a disease” which is why he is able to be the “best of both worlds,” Banner’s smarts and sensitivity paired with Hulk’s raw power. He said he spent "18 months in a gamma lab" to merge the two halves of himself. That isn't exactly how it went down in the comics, but it's reasonable comic book logic.

read more: Hulk Movies Marvel Should Make

- There’s plenty of precedent for “smart Hulk” in the comics, as well. Perhaps the pinnacle of “smart Hulk” stories came, coincidentally enough, during the era that brought us the original Infinity Gauntlet story, the early 1990s. That Hulk was rather fond of stretchy, tracksuit-lookin’ monochrome outfits, too. There’s a whole stretch of Incredible Hulk written by Peter David that you should check out if “smart Hulk” is your thing.

- Amusingly, Banner turning his Hulk into a positive role model, complete with spouting platitudes like “listen to your mother,” feels like the 1980s persona of legendary wrestler Hulk Hogan. Of course, Hulk Hogan turned out to be a total asshole in real life, but whatever.

THANOS

Thanos retreats to Planet 0259-S, which is the world we glimpsed at the conclusion of Infinity War. There’s no additional Marvel Comics connection to that planetary designation, BUT…

...apparently Thanos referred to it as “the Garden.” In the Thanos Quest series that led up to the original Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos had to claim the Time Gem from an Elder of the Universe known as “The Gardener” who had created his own “garden” on the Blue Area of the Moon (home to the Inhumans...of whom we shall never speak again after that dreadful TV series). Anyway, all of that seems like a bit of a reach, as Thanos sees himself as a god and “the garden” is his own personal eden, but hey, whatever.

read more - What's Next for the MCU After Avengers: Endgame?

- “I am inevitable.” I can’t recall any instances of Thanos uttering these specific words in the comics, but he sure says stuff like it all the time, sometimes referring to himself in the third person like the jerk he is.

- The constant references to killing baby Thanos are far more than just the old "killing baby Hitler" thought experiment, as that's more or less the plot of the current Cosmic Ghost Rider series from Marvel Comics.

DOCTOR STRANGE

- At one point, Tony and Natasha are talking about Doctor Strange, and Pepper misidentifies his address as Sullivan St, which Tony corrects to the correct (and close by) Bleecker St. For you Marvel obsessives, Strange’s sanctum is located at 177A Bleecker St in NYC’s West Village. Don’t try to find it, as it’s well hidden by assorted mystic spells. Cool neighborhood, though. Amusingly, Tony also dismisses Strange as a “Bleecker St. magician” as if Stephen is some hippie who wanders around the Village doing card tricks for tourists and not the frakkin' Sorcerer Supreme.

read more: Everything You Need to Know About Doctor Strange 2

HAWKEYE

- Fans who felt shortchanged by the lack of Hawkeye in Infinity War get plenty to work with this time around. Indeed, the filmmakers find Clint’s journey so essential to Endgame that they used his “snap” moment as a “pre-credits” scene, the first of its kind in Marvel Studios history. Here, we see Nathaniel Pietro Barton (so named for the fallen Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron), Lila Barton, and Laura Barton all vanish into dust.

- Clint even tells young Lila, “great job, Hawkeye.” Clint will definitely be teaching more archery in the near future, as Disney+ has a Hawkeye TV series planned, where Mr. Barton will pass on his mantle to Kate Bishop. We have more info on Kate Bishop here.

- Clint’s midlife crisis/revenge spree brings him a new costume. In the New Avengers comics, he was known as Ronin in this garb, and the reasoning behind it was completely different. We wrote more about the history of Ronin right here.

- The man we see him fighting is Akihiko, played by Hiroyuki Sanada, making his first (and last) MCU appearance. In the comics, Akihiko led the Shogun Reapers, an armored science division of the Yakuza. He appeared in the recent (and very cool) Nick Fury comic book series by James Robinson and ACO.

- In the pages of Marvel Comics, Clint’s mother’s name was indeed Edith.

BLACK WIDOW

- When Natasha goes to Vormir, the Red Skull calls her “daughter of Ivan,” a detail about her own history that even Natasha didn’t know. Which is so sad.  

- “We’re a long way from Budapest” Hawkeye cracks to Natasha when they’re flying the Milano, a reference to a conversation they had in the first Avengers film. We’re never going to learn what happened there, are we?

- Natasha’s heroic death here mirrors Gamora’s in Infinity War. But her death now all but guarantees that the upcoming Black Widow solo movie will be a prequel of some kind.

- Steve and Natasha’s friendship, which was a foundational part of The Winter Soldier, is still strong here. She has been urging him to “get a life” since The Winter Soldier when she was constantly trying to set him up, although it appears that in the time since Infinity War she has lost any semblance of a life of her own.

read more - How Avengers: Endgame Prioritizes Emotional Strength Over Physical Power

- Anybody else notice that Natasha cuts her bread in a manner that Nick Fury would not approve of?

SPIDER-MAN

- The hug between Peter and Tony is a reversal of that funny moment in Spider-Man: Homecoming when Peter thinks he’s getting a hug in the car and...most certainly is not. This hug, however, is one of the purest, most touching moments in MCU history.

- We also get to see the hideous Iron Spider armor in all its “glory.” Hopefully for the final time.

- While the age difference is too great for this to ever be a thing in the MCU, Peter Parker did indeed date Carol Danvers (briefly) during her Ms. Marvel days in the comics.

CAPTAIN MARVEL

- In the aftermath of the snap, Carol Danvers cut her hair short to her iconic ‘do with what was a rather unfortunate wig, since this was filmed before her solo movie. It was controversial when she got it in the comics insofar as some fanboys hate it any time she doesn’t have long hair. Expect those who ship ValCap to love it. It’s anyone’s bet when in the timeline any possible future Captain Marvel movies may be set and therefore what hair she’ll have. The similarity to Annette Benning’s Mar-Vell hair is probably no accident, too.

We wrote much more about the significance of Captain Marvel's haircut right here.

- Rocket razzing her about the short hair is perfect, because Carol spent some time with the Guardians of the Galaxy in the comics, much of which they spent teasing each other. Once Carol was in charge of the space station Alpha Flight (which incidentally was the kind of global shield Tony laments at his cabin that they should have built - it didn’t work because Nazi Cap was the one who orchestrated it) Rocket steals a bunch of stuff from her fancy space station.

- Carol spends much of the movie in outer space doing...outer space stuff? She’s quick to remind that there are other planets in the universe, which is true, but it does seem like a very long errand for some medicine to heal Tony, at the expense of getting to see their great comics chemistry. Space is usually where Carol goes when things get heavy and she always does help people - maybe a future movie will give her more time with whoever is still an Avenger and then they can call her out for running away.

read more: Complete Guide to Captain Marvel Easter Eggs

Judging by glowy appearances and the end of Captain Marvel, it seems we’re getting the Binary version of Captain Marvel without having to deal with the torture or the white hole business, which is convenient when it comes to a souped-up powerset with no emotional fallout too early in her story.

- Carol's costume during the finale looks slightly more like the Mar-Vell version of the suit, with a nod to her Ms. Marvel sash, as well.

ANT-MAN

- The five year time jump aging Cassie Lang up to her teenage years bodes well for the prospects of some kind of Young Avengers property down the road, as Cassie has taken on the superheroic identities of “Stinger” (when small) and “Stature” (when giant) in the comics.

- Visible on young Hank Pym’s desk in 1970 is a vintage, comic book accurate Ant-Man helmet. Presumably a prototype.

WANDA AND VISION

- Vision isn’t really mentioned in the final third of the film, although he is alluded to when Wanda absolutely loses her shit with "you took everything from me." In the comics, Wanda has been known to go off the deep end from time to time, and the intensity on display in this movie certainly feels like it could lead to something like that down the road.

Since Vision requires the mind stone to exist with free will (as established in Age of Ultron), when Cap goes back into the Quantum realm, does he return the mind stone to its rightful place and bring Vision back to life? Does that make the upcoming Disney+ series WandaVision a prequel?

- At Tony’s funeral, Hawkeye tells Wanda he wishes he could let Natasha know it worked. “She knows,” Wanda tells him. “They both do.” She is seemingly talking about Vision here.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

- Rocket Raccoon is wearing his classic costume from the comics for most of the movie, which is a little more swashbuckling and old-school sci-fi than what we’ve come to know from the movies. We have some more info on the weird-ass history of Rocket Raccoon in Marvel Comics right here.

- Tony misidentifies Rocket as “Ratchet” at one point, and somebody needs to make an appropriate “Ratchet Raccoon” meme/parody ASAP.

- The Asgardians of the Galaxy are absolutely a thing in the comics, albeit with a different lineup to what we have here. However, that lineup is profoundly different than what we’re going to get here, as it consists of Valkyrie (who is remaining in New Asgard in the MCU), Thunderstrike (the replacement Thor from the ‘90s), Angela, Throg (yes, the Frog Thor), the Executioner, and Kid Loki. Don’t expect to see most of these characters ever show up in the MCU.

read more - What Avengers: Endgame Means for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

- Nebula does indeed briefly pick up the Infinity Gauntlet here, and for a moment it felt like we were going to get that classic moment from the Infinity Gauntlet comic, where Nebula becomes a god and Thanos is forced to work with the heroes to put shit right.

- Witnessing the events of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 (notably Peter Quill’s dancing antics) from the perspective of people who don’t get to hear the soundtrack is a wonderful storytelling trick.

Does this mean that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is going to be about trying to rescue Gamora? Is it possible her story actually did end in Infinity War? The idea of having to deal with a less well-developed Gamora in Guardians 3 seems somewhat less than appealing, but perhaps its best to just trust the MCU vision. Maybe.

We wrote much more about what happened to Gamora in Endgame right here.

THE STAN LEE CAMEO

Stan Lee is driving a car with a “‘nuff said” bumper sticker. That was, of course, one of the many, many catchphrases that he often signed off the Stan’s Soapbox column with. Also, the um...the license plate says 420. We wrote much more about what seems like an otherwise minor Stan Lee cameo and its implications for the wider MCU right here. “Hey man, make love not war!”

read more - The Best Stan Lee Comics Stories

TIME TRAVEL

- There are, of course, plenty of references to the Back to the Future trilogy throughout Endgame, from “no betting on sporting events” to the crack about not losing Scott in the 1950s. No need to lay them all out here, right?

- Rhodey suggests killing Baby Thanos, a reference to the much-discussed ethical question: if you have the ability to travel through time, should you go back and kill Baby Hitler?

- There doesn’t seem to be any wider MCU or Marvel Comics significance to the April 7, 1970 date when Tony and Steve make their journey back to Camp Lehigh, but if anyone has any info that I don’t, please let us know.

read more: Complete Guide to Marvel Movies Streaming on Disney+

- Tony references three bits of physics logic when discussing the difficulties of time travel. The Planck Scale is (ummm...forgive the mangling of this) an attempt to reconcile issues of relativity with problems of absolute measurements of things like units of measure in relation to time.

“The Deutsche Proposition” appears to refer to David Deutsche, a quantum physicist who has done some work with multiversal theory. If anyone can explain this to me, ummm...please do.

I’m not going to even attempt to pretend to understand what the EPR Paradox’s relation to Endgame and this movie’s time travel laws might be, however, given that it appears to be vaguely related to quantum entanglement/”spooky action at a distance” which um...I dunno, if two characters in the MCU have ever been entangled at the quantum level it sure would seem to be Steve and Peggy, wouldn’t it? Anyway, crying again...

We tried to explain all of the Avengers: Endgame time travel rules right here.

MUSIC

In addition to boasting what might be Alan Silvestri’s best, most evocative work in the MCU, Endgame features a surprising number of deep cut needledrops, the kind you might normally associate with Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

It’s a bold move to use Traffic’s mournful “Mr. Fantasy” to kick things off, with lines like “do anything take us out of this gloom” that seem particularly appropriate for the way things open for our heroes (and everyone else). Later, they digs deep into The Kinks catalogue to bust out “Supersonic Rocket Ship” during their trip to New Asgard. With lyrics like “My supersonic ship's at your disposal/If you feel so inclined/We're gonna travel faster than light” that are appropriately sci-fi, but also “Nobody needs to be out of sight/Nobody's gonna travel second class/There'll be equality/And no suppression of minorities” it seems like it anticipated the internet’s army of babies who constantly scream about how Marvel and Star Wars are “suddenly” mixing politics with their grand epics. Lol at those clowns forever.

MISCELLANEOUS COOL STUFF

- All of the women of the MCU coming to back up Carol Danvers is not just a great moment in its own right, but feels like a little nod to A-Force, G. Willow Wilson and Marguerite Bennett’s all woman Avengers team. While there isn’t a ton of crossover between the comic book lineup and the one we see on screen here...who cares? It’s still awesome. Maybe there’s still hope for the #WomenofMarvel poker games Carol Danvers has in the comics (yes she really calls them that).

- Howard the Duck is apparently visible during the final battle, just to the right (our right, not her right) of Wasp when she shows up. Keep an eye out! Howard rules. He should run for President again.

- During the group therapy session, Steve is talking to none other than Joe Russo, one half of the Russo Brothers directing team. Joe is playing the MCU’s first canonically gay character on the big screen for Marvel (there have been a handful on TV), it seems. That...that can’t be right, can it?

- One of the other members of that therapy group? None other than Jim Starlin, the creator of Thanos!

- There are not one, but two shout outs to the New York Mets in this movie. The first is, of course, the flyover of a deserted Citi Field. Of course, that could basically be Citi Field during any number of Mets Septembers when the team has been mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. The other is, of course, Joe Russo’s anecdote during the group therapy scene. I point these out because Peter Parker is canonically a Mets fan, both in the comics and in the MCU, and also because even though it is never actually stated, we can pretty much assume that Steve Rogers is a Mets fan by default, as he would have been rooting for their spiritual fathers (and similarly Steve Rogers-esque perpetual underdogs), the Brooklyn Dodgers, back before he went into the ice in the '40s. In fact, it was a Brooklyn Dodgers game playing on the radio when Steve woke up at the end of The First Avenger.

The main theme from Captain America: The First Avenger plays when Tony gives Steve his shield back, which makes for one final (albeit roundabout) New York Mets connection. When beloved Mets third baseman and team captain David Wright retired in 2018, he left the field for the final time to that very piece of music. David’s nickname for most of his career? “Captain America.”

- The security guard watching over the warehouse where Scott Lang’s van is being stored is reading a collection of JG Ballard short stories called Terminal Beach. One of the stories contained in that volume? A little number called “End-Game.” We’re sure it is as uplifting and bouncy as the rest of Mr. Ballard’s catalogue. Oh, and the security guard in question? That's Community's Ken Jeong.

- The earthquake under the sea, “we handle it by not handling it.” On the one hand, this a perfectly normal bit of pragmatism. On the other, you have to wonder if maybe, just maybe, this is a hint at the existence of Namor, the Sub-Mariner. Assuming he does indeed exist in the MCU (and to be clear, there are some confusing rights issues surrounding the character, Marvel Studios, and Universal), he’s the kind of character who would be able to concern himself with this. Probably not, as Endgame is admirably focused on the here and now of its characters and the MCU, but it would be Easter egg malpractice not to at least mention it here.

- Vormir is described as “the center of celestial existence.” This could be a coincidence, but the Celestials are ancient, godlike cosmic beings who are central to the mythology of Jack Kirby’s Eternals, who coincidentally are set to get an MCU movie of their own soon enough. Two Celestials have already appeared in the MCU, Knowhere, from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1, is the severed head of a Celestial, and later in the movie you can see Eson the Searcher on a monitor screen. 

- Rhodey’s worries that skeletons on spikes are gonna start jumping out is, of course, a generalized reference to the kinds of shenanigans that Henry Jones, Jr. gets up to in the Indiana Jones trilogy. What, there was a fourth one? Never heard of it. Anyway, during this scene, while the score certainly isn’t quoting from any of John Williams’ iconic themes from those films, it does kind of do an appropriately adventurous swell there.

DOES AVENGERS: ENDGAME HAVE A POST-CREDITS SCENE?

No. Instead, we get the pre-credits scene with the Barton family becoming “dust in the wind” (that musical cue would have been far too on-the-nose). But if you listen very carefully, as the music in the end credits fade out, you can hear a faint clanging...the sound of Tony Stark forging the Mark I armor in the cave from the very first MCU movie in 2008. We wrote a little bit more about the significance of this right here.

“I’m fine. Totally fine.” - Tony Stark, speaking for all of us.

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Nov 12, 2019

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Welcome to the land that no country wants | Jack Shenker

The long read: In 2014, an American dad claimed a tiny parcel of African land to make his daughter a princess. But Jack Shenker had got there first and learned that states and borders are volatile and delicate things

Bir Tawil is the last truly unclaimed land on earth: a tiny sliver of Africa ruled by no state, inhabited by no permanent residents and governed by no laws. To get there, you have two choices.

The first is to fly to the Sudanese capital Khartoum, charter a jeep, and follow the Shendi road hundreds of miles up to Abu Hamed, a settlement that dates back to the ancient kingdom of Kush. Today it serves as the regions final permanent human outpost before the vast Nubian desert, twice the size of mainland Britain and almost completely barren, begins unfolding to the north.

There are some artisanal gold miners in the desert, conjuring specks of hope out of the ground, a few armed gangs, which often prey upon the prospectors, and a small number of military units who carry out patrols in the area and attempt, with limited success, to keep the peace. You need to drive past all of them, out to the point where the occasional scattered shrub or palm tree has long since disappeared and given way to a seemingly endless, flat horizon of sand and rock out to the point where there are no longer any landmarks by which to measure the passing of your journey.

Out here, dry winds often blow in from the Arabian peninsula, whipping up sheets of dust that plunge visibility down to near-zero. After a day like this, then a night, and then another day, you will finally cross into Bir Tawil, an 800-square-mile cartographical oddity nestled within the border that separates Egypt and Sudan. Both nations have renounced any claim to it, and no other government has any jurisdiction over it.

The second option is to approach from Egypt, setting off from the countrys southernmost city of Aswan, down through the arid expanse that lies between Lake Nasser to the west and the Red Sea to the east. Much of it has been declared a restricted zone by the Egyptian army, and no one can get near the border without first obtaining their permission.

In June 2014, a 38-year-old farmer from Virginia named Jeremiah Heaton did exactly that. After obtaining the necessary paperwork from the Egyptian military authorities, he started out on a treacherous 14-hour expedition through remote canyons and jagged mountains, eventually wending his way into the no mans land of Bir Tawil and triumphantly planting a flag.

Heatons six-year-old daughter, Emily, had once asked her father if she could ever be a real princess; after discovering the existence of Bir Tawil on the internet, his birthday present to her that year was to trek there and turn her wish into a reality. So be it proclaimed, Heaton wrote on his Facebook page, that Bir Tawil shall be forever known as the Kingdom of North Sudan. The Kingdom is established as a sovereign monarchy with myself as the head of state; with Emily becoming an actual princess.

Heatons social media posts were picked up by a local paper in Virginia, the Bristol Herald-Courier, and quickly became the stuff of feel-good clickbait around the world. CNN, Time, Newsweek and hundreds of other global media outlets pounced on the story. Heaton responded by launching a global crowdfunding appeal aimed at securing $250,000 in an effort at getting his new state up and running.

Heaton knew his actions would provoke awe, mirth and confusion, and that many would question his sanity. But what he was not prepared for was an angry backlash by observers who regarded him not as a devoted father or a heroic pioneer but rather as a 21st-century imperialist. After all, the portrayal of land as unclaimed or undeveloped was central to centuries of ruthless conquest. The same callous, dehumanising logic that has been used to legitimise European colonialism not just in Africa but in the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere is on full display here, noted one commentator. Are white people still allowed to do this kind of stuff? asked another.

Any new idea thats this big and bold always meets with some sort of ridicule, or is questioned in terms of its legitimacy, Heaton told me last year over the telephone. In his version of the story, Heatons conquest of Bir Tawil was not about colonialism, but rather familial love and ambitious dreams: apart from making Emily royalty, he hopes to turn his newly founded nation which lies within one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet and contains no fixed population, no coastline, no surface water and no arable soil into a cutting-edge agriculture and technology research hub that will ultimately benefit all humanity.

After all, Heaton reasoned, no country wanted this forgotten corner of the world, and no individual before him had ever laid claim to it. What harm was to be caused by some wellintentioned, starry-eyed eccentric completing such a challenge, and why should it not be him?

Jeremiah Heaton makes his claim to Bir Tawil in 2014. Photograph: Facebook

There were two problems with Heatons argument. First, territories and borders can be delicate and volatile things, and tampering with them is rarely without unforeseen consequences. As Heaton learned from the public response to his self-declared kingdom, there is no neutral or harmless way to claim a state, no matter how far away from anywhere else it appears to be. Second, Heaton was not the first well-intentioned, starry-eyed eccentric to travel all the way to Bir Tawil and plant a flag. Someone else got there first, and that someone was me.

Like all great adventure stories, this one began with lukewarm beer and the internet. It was the summer of 2010, and the days in Cairo where I was living and working as a journalist were long and hot. My friend Omars balcony provided a shaded refuge filled with wicker chairs and reliably stable wireless broadband. It was up there, midway through a muggy evenings web pottering, that we first encountered Bir Tawil.

Omar was an Egyptian-British filmmaker armed with a battery of finely tuned Werner Herzog impressions and a crisp black beard that I was secretly quite jealous of. The pair of us knew nothing beyond a single fact, gleaned from a blog devoted to arcane maps: barely 500 miles away from where we sat, there apparently existed a patch of land over which no country on earth asserted any sovereignty. Within five minutes I had booked the flights. Omar opened two more beers.

Places beyond the scope of everyday authority have always fired the imagination. They appear to offer us an escape when all you can see of somewhere is its outlines, it is easy to start fantasising about the void within. No mans lands are our El Dorados, says Noam Leshem, a Durham University geographer who recently travelled 6,000 miles through a series of so-called dead spaces, from the former frontlines of the Balkans war to the UN buffer zone in Cyprus, along with his colleague Alasdair Pinkerton of Royal Holloway. The pair intended to conclude their journey at Bir Tawil, but never made it. There is something alluring about a place beyond the control of the state, Leshem adds, and also something highly deceptive. In reality, nowhere is unplugged from the complex political and historical dynamics of the world around it, and as Omar and I were to discover no visitors can hope to short-circuit them.

Six months later, in January 2011, we touched down at Khartoum International airport with a pair of sleeping bags, five energy bars, and an embarrassingly small stock of knowledge about our final destination. To an extent, the ignorance was deliberate. For one thing, we planned to shoot a film about our travels, and Omar had persuaded me the secret to good film-making was to begin work utterly unprepared. Omar according to Omar was a cinematic auteur; the kind of maverick who could breeze into a desolate wasteland with no vehicle, no route, and no contacts and produce an award-winning documentary from the mayhem. One does not lumber an auteur, he explained, with printed itineraries, booked accommodation or emergency phone numbers. Mindful of my own aspirations to auteurism, this reasoning struck me as convincing.

There was something else, too, that made us refrain from proper planning. As the date of our departure for Sudan drew closer, Omar and I had taken to discussing our plans for Bir Tawil in increasingly grandiose terms. Deep down, I think, we both knew that the notion of claiming the territory and harnessing it for some grand ideological cause was preposterous. But what if it wasnt? What if our own little tabula rasa could be the start of something bigger, transforming a forgotten relic of colonial map-making into a progressive force that would defeat contemporary injustices across the world?

The mechanics of how this might actually work remained a little hazy. Yet just occasionally, at more contemplative junctures, it did occur to us that in the process of planting a flag in Bir Tawil as part of some ill-defined critique of arbitrary borders and imperial violence, there was a risk we could appear to the untrained eye very similar to the imperialists who had perpetrated such violence in the first place. It was a resemblance we were keen to avoid. Undertaking this journey in a state of deep ignorance, we told ourselves, would help mitigate against pomposity. Without any basic knowledge, we would be forced to travel as humble innocents, relying solely on guidance from the communities we passed through.

As the two of us cleared customs, we broke into smiles and congratulated each other. The auteurs had landed, and what is more they had Important Things To Say about borders and states and sovereignty and empires. We set off in search of some local currency, and warmed to our theme. By the time we found an ATM, we were referring to Bir Tawil as so much more than a conceptual exposition. Under our benevolent stewardship, we assured each other, it could surely become some sort of launchpad for radical new ideas, a haven for subversives all over the planet.

It was at that point that the auteurs realised their bank cards did not work in Sudan, and that there were no international money transfer services they could use to wire themselves some cash.

This setback represented the first consequence of our failure to do any preparatory research. The nagging sense that our maverick approach to reaching Bir Tawil may not have been the wisest way forward gained momentum with consequence number two, which was that to solve the money problem we had to persuade a friend of a friend of a friend of an Egyptian business acquaintance to do an illicit currency trade for us on the outskirts of Khartoum. Consequence number three namely that, given our lack of knowledge about where we could and could not legally film in the capital, after a few days we inadvertently attracted the attention of an undercover state security agent while carrying around $2,000 worth of used Sudanese banknotes in an old rucksack, and were arrested transformed suspicion into certainty.

The route to Bir Tawil

On the date Omar and I were incarcerated, millions of citizens in South Sudan were heading to the polls to decide between continued unity with the north or secession and a new, independent state of their own. We sat silently in a nondescript office block just off Gamaa Avenue the citys main diplomatic thoroughfare while a group of men in black suits and dark sunglasses scrolled through files on Omars video camera. Armed soldiers, unsmiling, stood guard at the door. Through the rooms single window, open but barred, the sound of nearby traffic could be heard. The images on the screen depicted me and Omar gadding about town on the days following our arrival; me and Omar unfurling huge rolls of yellowing paper at the governments survey department; me and Omar scrawling indecipherable patterns on sheets of paper in an effort to design the new Bir Tawili flag; me and Omar squabbling over fabric colours at the Omdurman market where we had gone to stitch together the aforementioned flag. With each new picture, a man who appeared to be the senior officer raised his eyes to meet ours, shook his head, and sighed.

In an attempt to lighten the mood, I pointed out to Omar how apposite it was that at the very moment in which votes were being cast in the south, possibly redrawing the regions borders for ever, we had been placed under lock and key in a military intelligence unit almost a thousand miles to the north for attempting to do the same. Omar, concerned about the fate of both his camera and the contents of the rucksack, declined to respond. I predicted that in the not too distant future, when we had made it to Bir Tawil, we would look back on this moment and laugh. Omar glared.

In the end, our captivity lasted under an hour. The senior officer concluded, perceptively, that, whatever we were attempting to do, we were far too incompetent to do it properly, or to cause too much trouble along the way. Upon our release, we set about obtaining a jeep that could take us to Bir Tawil. Every reputable travel agent we approached turned us down point-blank, citing the prevalence of bandit attacks in the desert. Thankfully, we were able to locate a disreputable travel agent, a large man with a taste for loud polo shirts who went by the name of Obai. Obai was actually not a travel agent at all, but rather a big-game hunter with a lucrative sideline in ambiguously licensed pick-up trucks. In exchange for most of our used banknotes, he offered to provide us with a jeep, a satellite phone, two tanks of water, and his nephew Gedo, who happened to be looking for work as a driver. In the absence of any alternative offers, we gratefully accepted.

Unlike Obai, who was a font of swashbuckling anecdotes and improbable tales of derring-do, Gedo turned out to be a more taciturn soul. He was a civil engineer who had previously done construction work on the colossal Merowe dam in northern Sudan, Africas largest hydropower project. On the day of our departure, he turned up wearing a baseball cap with Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics emblazoned across the front, and carrying a loaded gun. As we waved goodbye to Obai and began weaving our way through the capitals rush hour traffic, Omar and I set about explaining to Gedo the intricacies of our plan to transform Bir Tawil into an open-source state that would disrupt existing patterns of global power and privilege no mean feat, given that we didnt understand any of the intricacies ourselves. Gedo responded to this as he responded to everything: with a sage nod and a deliberate stroke of his stubble.

Im here to protect you, he told us solemnly, as we swung north on to the highway and left Khartoum behind us. Also, Ive never been on a holiday before, and this one sounds fun.

Bir Tawils unusual status wedged between the borders of two countries and yet claimed by neither is a byproduct of colonial machinations in north-east Africa, during an era of British control over Egypt and Egyptian influence on Sudan.

In 1899, government representatives from London and Cairo the latter nominally independent, but in reality the servants of a British protectorate put pen to paper on an agreement which established the shared dominion of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The treaty specified that, following 18 years of intense fighting between Egyptian and British forces on the one side and Mahdist rebels in Sudan on the other, Sudan would now become a British colony in all but name. Its northern border with Egypt was to run along the 22nd parallel, cutting a straight line through the Nubian desert right out to the ocean.

Three years later, however, another document was drawn up by the British. This one noted that a mountain named Bartazuga, just south of the 22nd parallel, was home to the nomadic Ababda tribe, which was considered to have stronger links with Egypt than Sudan. The document stipulated that henceforth this area should be administered by Egypt. Meanwhile, a much-larger triangle of land north of the 22nd parallel, named Halaib, abutting the Red Sea, was assigned to the Beja people who are largely based in Sudan for grazing, and thus now came under Sudans jurisdiction. And that was that, for the next few decades at least. World wars came and went, regimes rose and fell, and those imaginary lines in the sand gathered dust in bureaucratic archives, of little concern to anyone on the ground.

Disputes only started in earnest when Sudan finally achieved independence in 1956. The new postcolonial government in Khartoum immediately declared that its national borders matched the tweaked boundaries stipulated in the second proclamation, making the Halaib triangle Sudanese. Egypt demurred, insisting that the latter document was concerned only with areas of temporary administrative jurisdiction and that sovereignty had been established in the earlier treaty. Under this logic, the real border stayed straight and the Halaib triangle remained Egyptian.

By the early 1990s, when a Canadian oil firm signalled its intention to begin exploration in Halaib and the prospect of substantial mineral wealth being found in the region gained momentum, the disagreement was no longer academic. Egypt sent military forces to reclaim Halaib from Sudan, and despite fierce protests from Khartoum which still considers Halaib to be Sudanese and even tried to organise voting there during the 2010 Sudanese general election it has remained under Cairos control ever since.

Our world is littered with contested borders. The geographers Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen refer to the dashed lines on atlases as the scars of history. Compared with other divisions between countries that seem so solid and timeless when scored on a map, these squiggles enclaves, misshapen lumps and odd protrusions are a reminder of how messy and malleable the process of drawing up borders has always been.

What makes this particular border conflict unique, though, is not the tussle over the Halaib triangle itself, but rather the impact it has had on the smaller patch of land just south of the 22nd parallel around Bartazuga mountain, the area known as Bir Tawil.

Egypt and Sudans rival claims on Halaib both rest on documents that appear to assign responsibility for Bir Tawil to the other country. As a result, neither wants to assert any sovereignty over Bir Tawil, for to do so would be to renounce their rights to the larger and more lucrative territory. On Egyptian maps, Bir Tawil is shown as belonging to Sudan. On Sudanese maps, it appears as part of Egypt. In practice, Bir Tawil is widely believed to have the legal status of terra nullius nobodys land and there is nothing else quite like it on the planet.

Omar and I were not, it must be acknowledged, the first to discover this anomaly. If the internet is to be believed, Bir Tawil has in fact been claimed many times over by keyboard emperors whose virtual principalities and warring microstates exist only online. The Kingdom of the State of Bir Tawil boasts a national anthem by the late British jazz musician Acker Bilk. The Emirate of Bir Tawil traces its claim over the territory to, among other sources, the Quran, the British monarchy, the 1933 Montevideo Convention and the 1856 US Guano Islands Act. There is a Grand Dukedom of Bir Tawil, an Empire of Bir Tawil, a United Arab Republic of Bir Tawil and a United Lunar Emirate of Bir Tawil. The last of these has a homepage featuring a citizen application form, several self-help mantras, and stock photos of people doing yoga in a park.

From our rarefied vantage point at the back of Obais Toyota Hilux, it was easy to look down with disdain upon these cyber-squatting chancers. None of them had ever actually set foot in Bir Tawil, rendering their claims to sovereignty worthless. Few had truly grappled with Bir Tawils complex backstory, or of the bloodshed it was built upon (tens of thousands of Sudanese fighters and civilians died as a result of the Egyptian and British military assaults that ended in the establishment of Sudans northern borders and thus, ultimately, the creation of Bir Tawil). Granted, Omar and I knew little of the backstory either, but at least we had actually got to Sudan and were making, by our own estimation, a decent fist of finding out. We ate our energy bars, listened attentively to tales of Gedos love life, and scanned the road for clues. The first arrived nearly 200 miles north-east of Khartoum, about a third of the way up towards Bir Tawil, when we came across a city of iron and fire oozing kerosene into the desert. This was Atbara: home of Sudans railway system, and the engine room of its modern-day creation story.

Until very recently, the long history of Sudan has not been one of a single country or people: many different tribes, religions and political factions have competed for power and resources, across territories and borders that bear no relation to those marking out the states limits today. A lack of rigid, recognisable boundaries was used to help justify Europes violent scramble to occupy and annex land throughout Africa in the 19th century. Often, the first step taken by western colonisers was to map and border the territory they were seizing. Charting of land was usually a prelude to military invasion and resource extraction; during the British conquest of Sudan, Atbara was crucial to both.

Sudans contemporary railway system began life as a battering ram for the British to attack Khartoum. Trains carried not only weapons and troops but everyday provisions too, specified by Winston Churchill as the letters, newspapers, sausages, jam, whisky, soda water, and cigarettes which enable the Briton to conquer the world without discomfort. Atbara was the site where key rail lines intersected, and its importance grew rapidly after Londons grip on Sudan had been formalised in the 1899 Anglo-Egyptian treaty.

Everything that mattered, from cotton to gum, came through here, as did all the rolling stock needed to move and export it, Mohamed Ederes, a local railway storekeeper, told us. He walked us through his warehouse, down corridors stacked high with box after box of metal train parts and past giant leather-bound catalogues stuffed with handwritten notes. From here, he declared proudly, you reached the world.

Atbaras colonial origins are still etched into its modern-day layout. One half of the town, originally the preserve of expatriates, is low-rise and leafy; on the other side of the tracks, where native workers were made to live, accommodation is denser and taller. But just as Atbara was a vehicle for colonialism, so too was it the place in which a distinct sense of Sudanese nationhood began to develop.

As Sudans economy grew in the early 20th century, so did the railway industry, bringing thousands of migrant workers from disparate social and ethnic groups to the city. By the second world war, Atbara was famous not only for its carriage depots and loading sidings, but also for the nationalist literature and labour militancy of those who worked within them. Poets as well as workers leaders emerged out of the nascent trade union movement in the late 1940s, which held devastating strikes and helped shake the foundations of British rule. The same train lines that had once borne Churchills sausages and soda water were now deployed to deliver workers solidarity packages all over the country, during industrial action that ultimately brought the colonial economy to a halt. Within a decade, Sudan secured independence.

The next morning, as we drove on, Gedo grew quieter and the signs of human habitation became sparser. At Karima, a small town 150 miles further north, we came across a fleet of abandoned Nile steamers stranded on the river bank; below stairs there were metal plaques bearing the name of shipwrights from Portsmouth, Southampton and Glasgow, each companys handiwork now succumbing slowly to the elements. We clambered through cobwebbed cabins and across rotting sun decks, and then decided to scale the nearby Jebel Barkal Holy Mountain in Arabic where eagles tracked us warily from the sky. Omar maintained a running commentary on our progress, delivered as a flawless Herzog parody, and it proved so painful for all in earshot that the eagles began to dive-bomb us. We set off running, taking refuge among the mountains scattered ruins.

Jebel Barkal was once believed to be the home of Amun, king of gods and god of wind. Fragments of Amuns temple are still visible at the base of the cliffs. Over the past few millennia, Jebel Barkal has been the outermost limit of Egypts Pharaonic kingdoms, the centre of an autonomous Nubian region, and a vassal province of an empire headquartered thousands of miles away in Constantinople. In the modern era of defined borders and seemingly stable nation states, Bir Tawil seems an impossible anomaly. But standing over the jagged crevices of Jebel Barkal, looking out across a region that had been passed between so many different rulers, and formed part of so many different arrangements of power over land, our endpoint started to feel more familiar.

Abandoned Nile steamers stranded on the river bank at Karima. Photograph: Omar Robert Hamilton

The following evening we camped at Abu Hamed, on the very edge of the desert. Beyond the ramshackle cafeterias that have sprung up to serve the artisanal gold-mining community sending shisha smoke and the noise of Egyptian soap operas spiralling up into the night Omar and I saw the outlines of large agricultural reclamation projects, silhouetted in the distance against a starry sky. Since 2008, when global food prices spiked, there has been a boom in what critics call land-grabbing: international investors and sovereign wealth funds snapping up leases on massive tracts of African territory in order to intensify the production of crops for export, and bringing such territory under the control of European, Asian and Gulf nations in the process. Arable land was the first to be targeted, but increasingly desert areas are also being fenced off and sold. Near Abu Hamed, Saudi Arabian companies have been greening the sand blanketing it in soil and water in an effort to make it fertile with worrying consequences for both the environment and local communities, some of whom have long asserted customary rights over the area.

It was not so long ago that the prophets of globalisation proclaimed the impending decline of the nation-state and the rise of a borderless world one modelled on the frictionless transactions of international finance, which pay no heed to state boundaries.

A resurgent populist nationalism and the refugee crisis that has stoked its flames has exposed such claims as premature, and investors depend more than ever on national governments to open up new terrains for speculation and accumulation, and to discipline citizens who dare to stand in the way. But there is no doubt that we now live in a world where the power of capital has profoundly disrupted old ideas about political authority inside national boundaries. All over the planet, the institutions that impact our lives most directly banks, buses, hospitals, schools, farms can now be sold off to the highest bidder and governed by the whims of a transnational financial elite. Where national borders once enclosed populations capable of practising collective sovereignty over their own resources, in the 21st century they look more and more like containers for an inventory of private assets, each waiting to be spliced, diced and traded around the world.

It was at Abu Hamed, while lying awake at night in a sleeping bag, nestled into a shallow depression in the sand, that I realised the closer we were getting to our destination, the more I understood what was so beguiling about it. Now that Bir Tawil was in sight, it had started to appear less like an aberration and more like a question: is there anything natural about how borders and power function in the world today?

In the end, there was no fanfare. On a hazy Tuesday afternoon, 40 hours since we left the road at Abu Hamed, 13 days since we touched down in Khartoum, and six months since the dotted lines of Bir Tawil first appeared before our eyes, Omar gave a shout from the back of the jeep. I checked our GPS coordinates on the satellite phone, and cross-referenced them with the map. Gedo, on being informed that we were now in Bir Tawil and outside of any countrys dominion, promptly took out his gun and fired off a volley of shots. We traipsed up a small hillock and wedged our somewhat forlorn flag into the rocks a yellow desert fox, set against a black circle and bordered by triangles of green and red then sat and gazed out at the horizon, tracing the rise and fall of distant mountains and following the curves of sunken valleys as they criss-crossed each other like veins through the sand. The sky and the ground both looked massive, and unending, and the warm stones around us crumbled in our hands. After a couple of hours, Gedo said that it was getting late, so we climbed back into the jeep and began the long journey home.

Well before our journey had ever begun, we had hoped albeit not particularly fervently that we could do something with it, something that mattered; that by striking out for a place this nebulous we could find a shortcut to social justice, two days drive from the nearest tap or telephone. In 800 square miles of desert, we thought that we could exploit the outlines of the bordered world in order to subvert it.

Jeremiah Heaton, beyond the kingdom for a princess schmaltz and the forthcoming Disney adaptation (he has sold film rights to his story for an undisclosed fee) seems albeit from an almost diametrically opposite philosophical outlook to be convinced of something similar. For him, the fantasy is a libertarian one, offering freedom not from the iniquities of capitalism but from the government interference that inhibits it. Just as we did, he wants to take advantage of a quirk in the system to defy it. When I spoke to Heaton, he told me with genuine enthusiasm that his country (not yet recognised by any other state or international body) would offer the worlds great innovators a place to develop their products unencumbered by taxes and regulation, a place where private enterprise faces no socially prescribed borders of its own. Big companies, he assured me, were scrambling to join his vision.

Jack Shenkers makeshift flag planted in Bir Tawil Photograph: Omar Robert Hamilton

You would be surprised at the outreach that has occurred from the corporate level to me directly, Heaton insisted during our conversation. Its not been an issue of me having to go out and sell myself on this idea. A lot of these large corporations, they see market opportunities in what Im doing. He painted a picture of Bir Tawil one day playing host to daring scientific research, ground-breaking food-production facilities and alternative banking systems that work for the benefit of customers rather than CEOs. I asked him if he understood why some people found his plans, and the assumptions they rested on, highly dubious.

Theres that saying: if you were king for a day, what would you do differently? he replied. Think about that question yourself and apply it to your own country. Thats what Im doing, but on a much bigger scale. This is not colonialism; Im an individual, not a country, I havent taken land that belongs to any other country, and Im not extracting resources other than sunshine and sand. I am just one human being, trying to improve the condition of other human beings. I have the purest intentions in the world to make this planet a better place, and to try and criticise that just because Im a white person sitting on land in the middle of the Nubian desert He trailed off, and was silent for a moment. Well, he concluded, its really juvenile.

But if, by some miracle, Heaton ever did gain global recognition as the legitimate leader of an independent Bir Tawili state, would his pitch to corporations base yourself here to avoid paying taxes and escape the manacles of democratic oversight actually do anything to improve the condition of other human beings? Part of the allure of unclaimed spaces is their radical potential to offer a blank canvas but as Omar and I belatedly realised, nothing, and nowhere, starts from scratch. Any utopia founded on the basis of a concept terra nullius that has wreaked immense historical destruction, is built on rotten foundations.

In truth, no place is a dead zone, stopped in time and ripe for private capture least of all Bir Tawil, which translates as long well in Arabic and was clearly the site of considerable human activity in the past. Although it lacks any permanent dwellings today, this section of desert is still used by members of the Ababda and Bisharin tribes who carry goods, graze crops and make camp within the sands. (Not the least of our failures was that we did not manage to speak to any of the peoples who had passed through Bir Tawil before we arrived.) Their ties to the area may be based on traditional rather than written claims but Bir Tawil is not any more a no mans land than the territory once known as British East Africa, where terra nullius was repeatedly invoked in the early 20th century by both chartered companies andthe Britishgovernment that supported them to justify the appropriation of territory from indigenous people. I cannot admit that wandering tribes have a right to keep other and superior races out of large tracts, exclaimed the British commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, at the time, merely because they have acquired the habit of straggling over far more land than they can utilise.

Bir Tawil is no terra nullius. But no mans lands or at least ambiguous spaces, where boundaries take odd turns and sovereignty gets scrambled are real and exist among us every day. Some endure at airports, and inside immigration detention centres, and in the pockets of economic deprivation where states have abandoned any responsibility for their citizens. Others no mans lands are carried around by refugees who are yet to be granted asylum, regardless of where they may be having fled failed states or countries which would deny them the rights of citizenship, they occupy a world of legal confusion at best, and outright exclusion at worst.

Perhaps that is why, as we switched off the camera and left Bir Tawil behind us, Omar and I felt a little let down. Or perhaps we shared a sense of anticlimax because we were faintly aware of something rumbling back home in Cairo, where millions of people were about to launch an epic fight against political and economic exclusion not by withdrawing to a no mans land but by confronting state authority head-on, in the streets. A week after our return to Egypt, the country erupted in revolution.

Borders are fluid things; they help define our identities, and yet so often we use our identities to push up against borders and redraw them. For now the boundaries that divide nation states remain, but their purpose is changing and the relationship they have to our own lives, and our own rights, is growing increasingly unstable. If Bir Tawil the preeminent ambiguous space is anything to those who live far from it, it is perhaps a reminder that no particular configuration of power and governance is immutable. As we drove silently, and semi-contentedly, back past the gold-foragers, and the ramshackle cafeteria, and the heavy machinery of the Saudi farm installations Gedo at the wheel, Omar asleep and me staring out at nothing I grasped what I had failed to grasp on that lazy night of beer drinking on Omars balcony. The last truly unclaimed land on earth is really an injunction: not for us to seek out the mythical territory where we can hide from the things that anger us, but to channel that anger instead towards reclaiming territory we already call our own.

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Source: http://allofbeer.com/welcome-to-the-land-that-no-country-wants-jack-shenker/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2019/04/09/welcome-to-the-land-that-no-country-wants-jack-shenker/

[adambstingus]

Welcome to the land that no country wants | Jack Shenker

The long read: In 2014, an American dad claimed a tiny parcel of African land to make his daughter a princess. But Jack Shenker had got there first and learned that states and borders are volatile and delicate things

Bir Tawil is the last truly unclaimed land on earth: a tiny sliver of Africa ruled by no state, inhabited by no permanent residents and governed by no laws. To get there, you have two choices.

The first is to fly to the Sudanese capital Khartoum, charter a jeep, and follow the Shendi road hundreds of miles up to Abu Hamed, a settlement that dates back to the ancient kingdom of Kush. Today it serves as the regions final permanent human outpost before the vast Nubian desert, twice the size of mainland Britain and almost completely barren, begins unfolding to the north.

There are some artisanal gold miners in the desert, conjuring specks of hope out of the ground, a few armed gangs, which often prey upon the prospectors, and a small number of military units who carry out patrols in the area and attempt, with limited success, to keep the peace. You need to drive past all of them, out to the point where the occasional scattered shrub or palm tree has long since disappeared and given way to a seemingly endless, flat horizon of sand and rock out to the point where there are no longer any landmarks by which to measure the passing of your journey.

Out here, dry winds often blow in from the Arabian peninsula, whipping up sheets of dust that plunge visibility down to near-zero. After a day like this, then a night, and then another day, you will finally cross into Bir Tawil, an 800-square-mile cartographical oddity nestled within the border that separates Egypt and Sudan. Both nations have renounced any claim to it, and no other government has any jurisdiction over it.

The second option is to approach from Egypt, setting off from the countrys southernmost city of Aswan, down through the arid expanse that lies between Lake Nasser to the west and the Red Sea to the east. Much of it has been declared a restricted zone by the Egyptian army, and no one can get near the border without first obtaining their permission.

In June 2014, a 38-year-old farmer from Virginia named Jeremiah Heaton did exactly that. After obtaining the necessary paperwork from the Egyptian military authorities, he started out on a treacherous 14-hour expedition through remote canyons and jagged mountains, eventually wending his way into the no mans land of Bir Tawil and triumphantly planting a flag.

Heatons six-year-old daughter, Emily, had once asked her father if she could ever be a real princess; after discovering the existence of Bir Tawil on the internet, his birthday present to her that year was to trek there and turn her wish into a reality. So be it proclaimed, Heaton wrote on his Facebook page, that Bir Tawil shall be forever known as the Kingdom of North Sudan. The Kingdom is established as a sovereign monarchy with myself as the head of state; with Emily becoming an actual princess.

Heatons social media posts were picked up by a local paper in Virginia, the Bristol Herald-Courier, and quickly became the stuff of feel-good clickbait around the world. CNN, Time, Newsweek and hundreds of other global media outlets pounced on the story. Heaton responded by launching a global crowdfunding appeal aimed at securing $250,000 in an effort at getting his new state up and running.

Heaton knew his actions would provoke awe, mirth and confusion, and that many would question his sanity. But what he was not prepared for was an angry backlash by observers who regarded him not as a devoted father or a heroic pioneer but rather as a 21st-century imperialist. After all, the portrayal of land as unclaimed or undeveloped was central to centuries of ruthless conquest. The same callous, dehumanising logic that has been used to legitimise European colonialism not just in Africa but in the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere is on full display here, noted one commentator. Are white people still allowed to do this kind of stuff? asked another.

Any new idea thats this big and bold always meets with some sort of ridicule, or is questioned in terms of its legitimacy, Heaton told me last year over the telephone. In his version of the story, Heatons conquest of Bir Tawil was not about colonialism, but rather familial love and ambitious dreams: apart from making Emily royalty, he hopes to turn his newly founded nation which lies within one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet and contains no fixed population, no coastline, no surface water and no arable soil into a cutting-edge agriculture and technology research hub that will ultimately benefit all humanity.

After all, Heaton reasoned, no country wanted this forgotten corner of the world, and no individual before him had ever laid claim to it. What harm was to be caused by some wellintentioned, starry-eyed eccentric completing such a challenge, and why should it not be him?

Jeremiah Heaton makes his claim to Bir Tawil in 2014. Photograph: Facebook

There were two problems with Heatons argument. First, territories and borders can be delicate and volatile things, and tampering with them is rarely without unforeseen consequences. As Heaton learned from the public response to his self-declared kingdom, there is no neutral or harmless way to claim a state, no matter how far away from anywhere else it appears to be. Second, Heaton was not the first well-intentioned, starry-eyed eccentric to travel all the way to Bir Tawil and plant a flag. Someone else got there first, and that someone was me.

Like all great adventure stories, this one began with lukewarm beer and the internet. It was the summer of 2010, and the days in Cairo where I was living and working as a journalist were long and hot. My friend Omars balcony provided a shaded refuge filled with wicker chairs and reliably stable wireless broadband. It was up there, midway through a muggy evenings web pottering, that we first encountered Bir Tawil.

Omar was an Egyptian-British filmmaker armed with a battery of finely tuned Werner Herzog impressions and a crisp black beard that I was secretly quite jealous of. The pair of us knew nothing beyond a single fact, gleaned from a blog devoted to arcane maps: barely 500 miles away from where we sat, there apparently existed a patch of land over which no country on earth asserted any sovereignty. Within five minutes I had booked the flights. Omar opened two more beers.

Places beyond the scope of everyday authority have always fired the imagination. They appear to offer us an escape when all you can see of somewhere is its outlines, it is easy to start fantasising about the void within. No mans lands are our El Dorados, says Noam Leshem, a Durham University geographer who recently travelled 6,000 miles through a series of so-called dead spaces, from the former frontlines of the Balkans war to the UN buffer zone in Cyprus, along with his colleague Alasdair Pinkerton of Royal Holloway. The pair intended to conclude their journey at Bir Tawil, but never made it. There is something alluring about a place beyond the control of the state, Leshem adds, and also something highly deceptive. In reality, nowhere is unplugged from the complex political and historical dynamics of the world around it, and as Omar and I were to discover no visitors can hope to short-circuit them.

Six months later, in January 2011, we touched down at Khartoum International airport with a pair of sleeping bags, five energy bars, and an embarrassingly small stock of knowledge about our final destination. To an extent, the ignorance was deliberate. For one thing, we planned to shoot a film about our travels, and Omar had persuaded me the secret to good film-making was to begin work utterly unprepared. Omar according to Omar was a cinematic auteur; the kind of maverick who could breeze into a desolate wasteland with no vehicle, no route, and no contacts and produce an award-winning documentary from the mayhem. One does not lumber an auteur, he explained, with printed itineraries, booked accommodation or emergency phone numbers. Mindful of my own aspirations to auteurism, this reasoning struck me as convincing.

There was something else, too, that made us refrain from proper planning. As the date of our departure for Sudan drew closer, Omar and I had taken to discussing our plans for Bir Tawil in increasingly grandiose terms. Deep down, I think, we both knew that the notion of claiming the territory and harnessing it for some grand ideological cause was preposterous. But what if it wasnt? What if our own little tabula rasa could be the start of something bigger, transforming a forgotten relic of colonial map-making into a progressive force that would defeat contemporary injustices across the world?

The mechanics of how this might actually work remained a little hazy. Yet just occasionally, at more contemplative junctures, it did occur to us that in the process of planting a flag in Bir Tawil as part of some ill-defined critique of arbitrary borders and imperial violence, there was a risk we could appear to the untrained eye very similar to the imperialists who had perpetrated such violence in the first place. It was a resemblance we were keen to avoid. Undertaking this journey in a state of deep ignorance, we told ourselves, would help mitigate against pomposity. Without any basic knowledge, we would be forced to travel as humble innocents, relying solely on guidance from the communities we passed through.

As the two of us cleared customs, we broke into smiles and congratulated each other. The auteurs had landed, and what is more they had Important Things To Say about borders and states and sovereignty and empires. We set off in search of some local currency, and warmed to our theme. By the time we found an ATM, we were referring to Bir Tawil as so much more than a conceptual exposition. Under our benevolent stewardship, we assured each other, it could surely become some sort of launchpad for radical new ideas, a haven for subversives all over the planet.

It was at that point that the auteurs realised their bank cards did not work in Sudan, and that there were no international money transfer services they could use to wire themselves some cash.

This setback represented the first consequence of our failure to do any preparatory research. The nagging sense that our maverick approach to reaching Bir Tawil may not have been the wisest way forward gained momentum with consequence number two, which was that to solve the money problem we had to persuade a friend of a friend of a friend of an Egyptian business acquaintance to do an illicit currency trade for us on the outskirts of Khartoum. Consequence number three namely that, given our lack of knowledge about where we could and could not legally film in the capital, after a few days we inadvertently attracted the attention of an undercover state security agent while carrying around $2,000 worth of used Sudanese banknotes in an old rucksack, and were arrested transformed suspicion into certainty.

The route to Bir Tawil

On the date Omar and I were incarcerated, millions of citizens in South Sudan were heading to the polls to decide between continued unity with the north or secession and a new, independent state of their own. We sat silently in a nondescript office block just off Gamaa Avenue the citys main diplomatic thoroughfare while a group of men in black suits and dark sunglasses scrolled through files on Omars video camera. Armed soldiers, unsmiling, stood guard at the door. Through the rooms single window, open but barred, the sound of nearby traffic could be heard. The images on the screen depicted me and Omar gadding about town on the days following our arrival; me and Omar unfurling huge rolls of yellowing paper at the governments survey department; me and Omar scrawling indecipherable patterns on sheets of paper in an effort to design the new Bir Tawili flag; me and Omar squabbling over fabric colours at the Omdurman market where we had gone to stitch together the aforementioned flag. With each new picture, a man who appeared to be the senior officer raised his eyes to meet ours, shook his head, and sighed.

In an attempt to lighten the mood, I pointed out to Omar how apposite it was that at the very moment in which votes were being cast in the south, possibly redrawing the regions borders for ever, we had been placed under lock and key in a military intelligence unit almost a thousand miles to the north for attempting to do the same. Omar, concerned about the fate of both his camera and the contents of the rucksack, declined to respond. I predicted that in the not too distant future, when we had made it to Bir Tawil, we would look back on this moment and laugh. Omar glared.

In the end, our captivity lasted under an hour. The senior officer concluded, perceptively, that, whatever we were attempting to do, we were far too incompetent to do it properly, or to cause too much trouble along the way. Upon our release, we set about obtaining a jeep that could take us to Bir Tawil. Every reputable travel agent we approached turned us down point-blank, citing the prevalence of bandit attacks in the desert. Thankfully, we were able to locate a disreputable travel agent, a large man with a taste for loud polo shirts who went by the name of Obai. Obai was actually not a travel agent at all, but rather a big-game hunter with a lucrative sideline in ambiguously licensed pick-up trucks. In exchange for most of our used banknotes, he offered to provide us with a jeep, a satellite phone, two tanks of water, and his nephew Gedo, who happened to be looking for work as a driver. In the absence of any alternative offers, we gratefully accepted.

Unlike Obai, who was a font of swashbuckling anecdotes and improbable tales of derring-do, Gedo turned out to be a more taciturn soul. He was a civil engineer who had previously done construction work on the colossal Merowe dam in northern Sudan, Africas largest hydropower project. On the day of our departure, he turned up wearing a baseball cap with Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics emblazoned across the front, and carrying a loaded gun. As we waved goodbye to Obai and began weaving our way through the capitals rush hour traffic, Omar and I set about explaining to Gedo the intricacies of our plan to transform Bir Tawil into an open-source state that would disrupt existing patterns of global power and privilege no mean feat, given that we didnt understand any of the intricacies ourselves. Gedo responded to this as he responded to everything: with a sage nod and a deliberate stroke of his stubble.

Im here to protect you, he told us solemnly, as we swung north on to the highway and left Khartoum behind us. Also, Ive never been on a holiday before, and this one sounds fun.

Bir Tawils unusual status wedged between the borders of two countries and yet claimed by neither is a byproduct of colonial machinations in north-east Africa, during an era of British control over Egypt and Egyptian influence on Sudan.

In 1899, government representatives from London and Cairo the latter nominally independent, but in reality the servants of a British protectorate put pen to paper on an agreement which established the shared dominion of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The treaty specified that, following 18 years of intense fighting between Egyptian and British forces on the one side and Mahdist rebels in Sudan on the other, Sudan would now become a British colony in all but name. Its northern border with Egypt was to run along the 22nd parallel, cutting a straight line through the Nubian desert right out to the ocean.

Three years later, however, another document was drawn up by the British. This one noted that a mountain named Bartazuga, just south of the 22nd parallel, was home to the nomadic Ababda tribe, which was considered to have stronger links with Egypt than Sudan. The document stipulated that henceforth this area should be administered by Egypt. Meanwhile, a much-larger triangle of land north of the 22nd parallel, named Halaib, abutting the Red Sea, was assigned to the Beja people who are largely based in Sudan for grazing, and thus now came under Sudans jurisdiction. And that was that, for the next few decades at least. World wars came and went, regimes rose and fell, and those imaginary lines in the sand gathered dust in bureaucratic archives, of little concern to anyone on the ground.

Disputes only started in earnest when Sudan finally achieved independence in 1956. The new postcolonial government in Khartoum immediately declared that its national borders matched the tweaked boundaries stipulated in the second proclamation, making the Halaib triangle Sudanese. Egypt demurred, insisting that the latter document was concerned only with areas of temporary administrative jurisdiction and that sovereignty had been established in the earlier treaty. Under this logic, the real border stayed straight and the Halaib triangle remained Egyptian.

By the early 1990s, when a Canadian oil firm signalled its intention to begin exploration in Halaib and the prospect of substantial mineral wealth being found in the region gained momentum, the disagreement was no longer academic. Egypt sent military forces to reclaim Halaib from Sudan, and despite fierce protests from Khartoum which still considers Halaib to be Sudanese and even tried to organise voting there during the 2010 Sudanese general election it has remained under Cairos control ever since.

Our world is littered with contested borders. The geographers Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen refer to the dashed lines on atlases as the scars of history. Compared with other divisions between countries that seem so solid and timeless when scored on a map, these squiggles enclaves, misshapen lumps and odd protrusions are a reminder of how messy and malleable the process of drawing up borders has always been.

What makes this particular border conflict unique, though, is not the tussle over the Halaib triangle itself, but rather the impact it has had on the smaller patch of land just south of the 22nd parallel around Bartazuga mountain, the area known as Bir Tawil.

Egypt and Sudans rival claims on Halaib both rest on documents that appear to assign responsibility for Bir Tawil to the other country. As a result, neither wants to assert any sovereignty over Bir Tawil, for to do so would be to renounce their rights to the larger and more lucrative territory. On Egyptian maps, Bir Tawil is shown as belonging to Sudan. On Sudanese maps, it appears as part of Egypt. In practice, Bir Tawil is widely believed to have the legal status of terra nullius nobodys land and there is nothing else quite like it on the planet.

Omar and I were not, it must be acknowledged, the first to discover this anomaly. If the internet is to be believed, Bir Tawil has in fact been claimed many times over by keyboard emperors whose virtual principalities and warring microstates exist only online. The Kingdom of the State of Bir Tawil boasts a national anthem by the late British jazz musician Acker Bilk. The Emirate of Bir Tawil traces its claim over the territory to, among other sources, the Quran, the British monarchy, the 1933 Montevideo Convention and the 1856 US Guano Islands Act. There is a Grand Dukedom of Bir Tawil, an Empire of Bir Tawil, a United Arab Republic of Bir Tawil and a United Lunar Emirate of Bir Tawil. The last of these has a homepage featuring a citizen application form, several self-help mantras, and stock photos of people doing yoga in a park.

From our rarefied vantage point at the back of Obais Toyota Hilux, it was easy to look down with disdain upon these cyber-squatting chancers. None of them had ever actually set foot in Bir Tawil, rendering their claims to sovereignty worthless. Few had truly grappled with Bir Tawils complex backstory, or of the bloodshed it was built upon (tens of thousands of Sudanese fighters and civilians died as a result of the Egyptian and British military assaults that ended in the establishment of Sudans northern borders and thus, ultimately, the creation of Bir Tawil). Granted, Omar and I knew little of the backstory either, but at least we had actually got to Sudan and were making, by our own estimation, a decent fist of finding out. We ate our energy bars, listened attentively to tales of Gedos love life, and scanned the road for clues. The first arrived nearly 200 miles north-east of Khartoum, about a third of the way up towards Bir Tawil, when we came across a city of iron and fire oozing kerosene into the desert. This was Atbara: home of Sudans railway system, and the engine room of its modern-day creation story.

Until very recently, the long history of Sudan has not been one of a single country or people: many different tribes, religions and political factions have competed for power and resources, across territories and borders that bear no relation to those marking out the states limits today. A lack of rigid, recognisable boundaries was used to help justify Europes violent scramble to occupy and annex land throughout Africa in the 19th century. Often, the first step taken by western colonisers was to map and border the territory they were seizing. Charting of land was usually a prelude to military invasion and resource extraction; during the British conquest of Sudan, Atbara was crucial to both.

Sudans contemporary railway system began life as a battering ram for the British to attack Khartoum. Trains carried not only weapons and troops but everyday provisions too, specified by Winston Churchill as the letters, newspapers, sausages, jam, whisky, soda water, and cigarettes which enable the Briton to conquer the world without discomfort. Atbara was the site where key rail lines intersected, and its importance grew rapidly after Londons grip on Sudan had been formalised in the 1899 Anglo-Egyptian treaty.

Everything that mattered, from cotton to gum, came through here, as did all the rolling stock needed to move and export it, Mohamed Ederes, a local railway storekeeper, told us. He walked us through his warehouse, down corridors stacked high with box after box of metal train parts and past giant leather-bound catalogues stuffed with handwritten notes. From here, he declared proudly, you reached the world.

Atbaras colonial origins are still etched into its modern-day layout. One half of the town, originally the preserve of expatriates, is low-rise and leafy; on the other side of the tracks, where native workers were made to live, accommodation is denser and taller. But just as Atbara was a vehicle for colonialism, so too was it the place in which a distinct sense of Sudanese nationhood began to develop.

As Sudans economy grew in the early 20th century, so did the railway industry, bringing thousands of migrant workers from disparate social and ethnic groups to the city. By the second world war, Atbara was famous not only for its carriage depots and loading sidings, but also for the nationalist literature and labour militancy of those who worked within them. Poets as well as workers leaders emerged out of the nascent trade union movement in the late 1940s, which held devastating strikes and helped shake the foundations of British rule. The same train lines that had once borne Churchills sausages and soda water were now deployed to deliver workers solidarity packages all over the country, during industrial action that ultimately brought the colonial economy to a halt. Within a decade, Sudan secured independence.

The next morning, as we drove on, Gedo grew quieter and the signs of human habitation became sparser. At Karima, a small town 150 miles further north, we came across a fleet of abandoned Nile steamers stranded on the river bank; below stairs there were metal plaques bearing the name of shipwrights from Portsmouth, Southampton and Glasgow, each companys handiwork now succumbing slowly to the elements. We clambered through cobwebbed cabins and across rotting sun decks, and then decided to scale the nearby Jebel Barkal Holy Mountain in Arabic where eagles tracked us warily from the sky. Omar maintained a running commentary on our progress, delivered as a flawless Herzog parody, and it proved so painful for all in earshot that the eagles began to dive-bomb us. We set off running, taking refuge among the mountains scattered ruins.

Jebel Barkal was once believed to be the home of Amun, king of gods and god of wind. Fragments of Amuns temple are still visible at the base of the cliffs. Over the past few millennia, Jebel Barkal has been the outermost limit of Egypts Pharaonic kingdoms, the centre of an autonomous Nubian region, and a vassal province of an empire headquartered thousands of miles away in Constantinople. In the modern era of defined borders and seemingly stable nation states, Bir Tawil seems an impossible anomaly. But standing over the jagged crevices of Jebel Barkal, looking out across a region that had been passed between so many different rulers, and formed part of so many different arrangements of power over land, our endpoint started to feel more familiar.

Abandoned Nile steamers stranded on the river bank at Karima. Photograph: Omar Robert Hamilton

The following evening we camped at Abu Hamed, on the very edge of the desert. Beyond the ramshackle cafeterias that have sprung up to serve the artisanal gold-mining community sending shisha smoke and the noise of Egyptian soap operas spiralling up into the night Omar and I saw the outlines of large agricultural reclamation projects, silhouetted in the distance against a starry sky. Since 2008, when global food prices spiked, there has been a boom in what critics call land-grabbing: international investors and sovereign wealth funds snapping up leases on massive tracts of African territory in order to intensify the production of crops for export, and bringing such territory under the control of European, Asian and Gulf nations in the process. Arable land was the first to be targeted, but increasingly desert areas are also being fenced off and sold. Near Abu Hamed, Saudi Arabian companies have been greening the sand blanketing it in soil and water in an effort to make it fertile with worrying consequences for both the environment and local communities, some of whom have long asserted customary rights over the area.

It was not so long ago that the prophets of globalisation proclaimed the impending decline of the nation-state and the rise of a borderless world one modelled on the frictionless transactions of international finance, which pay no heed to state boundaries.

A resurgent populist nationalism and the refugee crisis that has stoked its flames has exposed such claims as premature, and investors depend more than ever on national governments to open up new terrains for speculation and accumulation, and to discipline citizens who dare to stand in the way. But there is no doubt that we now live in a world where the power of capital has profoundly disrupted old ideas about political authority inside national boundaries. All over the planet, the institutions that impact our lives most directly banks, buses, hospitals, schools, farms can now be sold off to the highest bidder and governed by the whims of a transnational financial elite. Where national borders once enclosed populations capable of practising collective sovereignty over their own resources, in the 21st century they look more and more like containers for an inventory of private assets, each waiting to be spliced, diced and traded around the world.

It was at Abu Hamed, while lying awake at night in a sleeping bag, nestled into a shallow depression in the sand, that I realised the closer we were getting to our destination, the more I understood what was so beguiling about it. Now that Bir Tawil was in sight, it had started to appear less like an aberration and more like a question: is there anything natural about how borders and power function in the world today?

In the end, there was no fanfare. On a hazy Tuesday afternoon, 40 hours since we left the road at Abu Hamed, 13 days since we touched down in Khartoum, and six months since the dotted lines of Bir Tawil first appeared before our eyes, Omar gave a shout from the back of the jeep. I checked our GPS coordinates on the satellite phone, and cross-referenced them with the map. Gedo, on being informed that we were now in Bir Tawil and outside of any countrys dominion, promptly took out his gun and fired off a volley of shots. We traipsed up a small hillock and wedged our somewhat forlorn flag into the rocks a yellow desert fox, set against a black circle and bordered by triangles of green and red then sat and gazed out at the horizon, tracing the rise and fall of distant mountains and following the curves of sunken valleys as they criss-crossed each other like veins through the sand. The sky and the ground both looked massive, and unending, and the warm stones around us crumbled in our hands. After a couple of hours, Gedo said that it was getting late, so we climbed back into the jeep and began the long journey home.

Well before our journey had ever begun, we had hoped albeit not particularly fervently that we could do something with it, something that mattered; that by striking out for a place this nebulous we could find a shortcut to social justice, two days drive from the nearest tap or telephone. In 800 square miles of desert, we thought that we could exploit the outlines of the bordered world in order to subvert it.

Jeremiah Heaton, beyond the kingdom for a princess schmaltz and the forthcoming Disney adaptation (he has sold film rights to his story for an undisclosed fee) seems albeit from an almost diametrically opposite philosophical outlook to be convinced of something similar. For him, the fantasy is a libertarian one, offering freedom not from the iniquities of capitalism but from the government interference that inhibits it. Just as we did, he wants to take advantage of a quirk in the system to defy it. When I spoke to Heaton, he told me with genuine enthusiasm that his country (not yet recognised by any other state or international body) would offer the worlds great innovators a place to develop their products unencumbered by taxes and regulation, a place where private enterprise faces no socially prescribed borders of its own. Big companies, he assured me, were scrambling to join his vision.

Jack Shenkers makeshift flag planted in Bir Tawil Photograph: Omar Robert Hamilton

You would be surprised at the outreach that has occurred from the corporate level to me directly, Heaton insisted during our conversation. Its not been an issue of me having to go out and sell myself on this idea. A lot of these large corporations, they see market opportunities in what Im doing. He painted a picture of Bir Tawil one day playing host to daring scientific research, ground-breaking food-production facilities and alternative banking systems that work for the benefit of customers rather than CEOs. I asked him if he understood why some people found his plans, and the assumptions they rested on, highly dubious.

Theres that saying: if you were king for a day, what would you do differently? he replied. Think about that question yourself and apply it to your own country. Thats what Im doing, but on a much bigger scale. This is not colonialism; Im an individual, not a country, I havent taken land that belongs to any other country, and Im not extracting resources other than sunshine and sand. I am just one human being, trying to improve the condition of other human beings. I have the purest intentions in the world to make this planet a better place, and to try and criticise that just because Im a white person sitting on land in the middle of the Nubian desert He trailed off, and was silent for a moment. Well, he concluded, its really juvenile.

But if, by some miracle, Heaton ever did gain global recognition as the legitimate leader of an independent Bir Tawili state, would his pitch to corporations base yourself here to avoid paying taxes and escape the manacles of democratic oversight actually do anything to improve the condition of other human beings? Part of the allure of unclaimed spaces is their radical potential to offer a blank canvas but as Omar and I belatedly realised, nothing, and nowhere, starts from scratch. Any utopia founded on the basis of a concept terra nullius that has wreaked immense historical destruction, is built on rotten foundations.

In truth, no place is a dead zone, stopped in time and ripe for private capture least of all Bir Tawil, which translates as long well in Arabic and was clearly the site of considerable human activity in the past. Although it lacks any permanent dwellings today, this section of desert is still used by members of the Ababda and Bisharin tribes who carry goods, graze crops and make camp within the sands. (Not the least of our failures was that we did not manage to speak to any of the peoples who had passed through Bir Tawil before we arrived.) Their ties to the area may be based on traditional rather than written claims but Bir Tawil is not any more a no mans land than the territory once known as British East Africa, where terra nullius was repeatedly invoked in the early 20th century by both chartered companies andthe Britishgovernment that supported them to justify the appropriation of territory from indigenous people. I cannot admit that wandering tribes have a right to keep other and superior races out of large tracts, exclaimed the British commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, at the time, merely because they have acquired the habit of straggling over far more land than they can utilise.

Bir Tawil is no terra nullius. But no mans lands or at least ambiguous spaces, where boundaries take odd turns and sovereignty gets scrambled are real and exist among us every day. Some endure at airports, and inside immigration detention centres, and in the pockets of economic deprivation where states have abandoned any responsibility for their citizens. Others no mans lands are carried around by refugees who are yet to be granted asylum, regardless of where they may be having fled failed states or countries which would deny them the rights of citizenship, they occupy a world of legal confusion at best, and outright exclusion at worst.

Perhaps that is why, as we switched off the camera and left Bir Tawil behind us, Omar and I felt a little let down. Or perhaps we shared a sense of anticlimax because we were faintly aware of something rumbling back home in Cairo, where millions of people were about to launch an epic fight against political and economic exclusion not by withdrawing to a no mans land but by confronting state authority head-on, in the streets. A week after our return to Egypt, the country erupted in revolution.

Borders are fluid things; they help define our identities, and yet so often we use our identities to push up against borders and redraw them. For now the boundaries that divide nation states remain, but their purpose is changing and the relationship they have to our own lives, and our own rights, is growing increasingly unstable. If Bir Tawil the preeminent ambiguous space is anything to those who live far from it, it is perhaps a reminder that no particular configuration of power and governance is immutable. As we drove silently, and semi-contentedly, back past the gold-foragers, and the ramshackle cafeteria, and the heavy machinery of the Saudi farm installations Gedo at the wheel, Omar asleep and me staring out at nothing I grasped what I had failed to grasp on that lazy night of beer drinking on Omars balcony. The last truly unclaimed land on earth is really an injunction: not for us to seek out the mythical territory where we can hide from the things that anger us, but to channel that anger instead towards reclaiming territory we already call our own.

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/welcome-to-the-land-that-no-country-wants-jack-shenker/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/184057060162

[allofbeercom]

Welcome to the land that no country wants | Jack Shenker

The long read: In 2014, an American dad claimed a tiny parcel of African land to make his daughter a princess. But Jack Shenker had got there first and learned that states and borders are volatile and delicate things

Bir Tawil is the last truly unclaimed land on earth: a tiny sliver of Africa ruled by no state, inhabited by no permanent residents and governed by no laws. To get there, you have two choices.

The first is to fly to the Sudanese capital Khartoum, charter a jeep, and follow the Shendi road hundreds of miles up to Abu Hamed, a settlement that dates back to the ancient kingdom of Kush. Today it serves as the regions final permanent human outpost before the vast Nubian desert, twice the size of mainland Britain and almost completely barren, begins unfolding to the north.

There are some artisanal gold miners in the desert, conjuring specks of hope out of the ground, a few armed gangs, which often prey upon the prospectors, and a small number of military units who carry out patrols in the area and attempt, with limited success, to keep the peace. You need to drive past all of them, out to the point where the occasional scattered shrub or palm tree has long since disappeared and given way to a seemingly endless, flat horizon of sand and rock out to the point where there are no longer any landmarks by which to measure the passing of your journey.

Out here, dry winds often blow in from the Arabian peninsula, whipping up sheets of dust that plunge visibility down to near-zero. After a day like this, then a night, and then another day, you will finally cross into Bir Tawil, an 800-square-mile cartographical oddity nestled within the border that separates Egypt and Sudan. Both nations have renounced any claim to it, and no other government has any jurisdiction over it.

The second option is to approach from Egypt, setting off from the countrys southernmost city of Aswan, down through the arid expanse that lies between Lake Nasser to the west and the Red Sea to the east. Much of it has been declared a restricted zone by the Egyptian army, and no one can get near the border without first obtaining their permission.

In June 2014, a 38-year-old farmer from Virginia named Jeremiah Heaton did exactly that. After obtaining the necessary paperwork from the Egyptian military authorities, he started out on a treacherous 14-hour expedition through remote canyons and jagged mountains, eventually wending his way into the no mans land of Bir Tawil and triumphantly planting a flag.

Heatons six-year-old daughter, Emily, had once asked her father if she could ever be a real princess; after discovering the existence of Bir Tawil on the internet, his birthday present to her that year was to trek there and turn her wish into a reality. So be it proclaimed, Heaton wrote on his Facebook page, that Bir Tawil shall be forever known as the Kingdom of North Sudan. The Kingdom is established as a sovereign monarchy with myself as the head of state; with Emily becoming an actual princess.

Heatons social media posts were picked up by a local paper in Virginia, the Bristol Herald-Courier, and quickly became the stuff of feel-good clickbait around the world. CNN, Time, Newsweek and hundreds of other global media outlets pounced on the story. Heaton responded by launching a global crowdfunding appeal aimed at securing $250,000 in an effort at getting his new state up and running.

Heaton knew his actions would provoke awe, mirth and confusion, and that many would question his sanity. But what he was not prepared for was an angry backlash by observers who regarded him not as a devoted father or a heroic pioneer but rather as a 21st-century imperialist. After all, the portrayal of land as unclaimed or undeveloped was central to centuries of ruthless conquest. The same callous, dehumanising logic that has been used to legitimise European colonialism not just in Africa but in the Americas, Australia, and elsewhere is on full display here, noted one commentator. Are white people still allowed to do this kind of stuff? asked another.

Any new idea thats this big and bold always meets with some sort of ridicule, or is questioned in terms of its legitimacy, Heaton told me last year over the telephone. In his version of the story, Heatons conquest of Bir Tawil was not about colonialism, but rather familial love and ambitious dreams: apart from making Emily royalty, he hopes to turn his newly founded nation which lies within one of the most inhospitable regions on the planet and contains no fixed population, no coastline, no surface water and no arable soil into a cutting-edge agriculture and technology research hub that will ultimately benefit all humanity.

After all, Heaton reasoned, no country wanted this forgotten corner of the world, and no individual before him had ever laid claim to it. What harm was to be caused by some wellintentioned, starry-eyed eccentric completing such a challenge, and why should it not be him?

Jeremiah Heaton makes his claim to Bir Tawil in 2014. Photograph: Facebook

There were two problems with Heatons argument. First, territories and borders can be delicate and volatile things, and tampering with them is rarely without unforeseen consequences. As Heaton learned from the public response to his self-declared kingdom, there is no neutral or harmless way to claim a state, no matter how far away from anywhere else it appears to be. Second, Heaton was not the first well-intentioned, starry-eyed eccentric to travel all the way to Bir Tawil and plant a flag. Someone else got there first, and that someone was me.

Like all great adventure stories, this one began with lukewarm beer and the internet. It was the summer of 2010, and the days in Cairo where I was living and working as a journalist were long and hot. My friend Omars balcony provided a shaded refuge filled with wicker chairs and reliably stable wireless broadband. It was up there, midway through a muggy evenings web pottering, that we first encountered Bir Tawil.

Omar was an Egyptian-British filmmaker armed with a battery of finely tuned Werner Herzog impressions and a crisp black beard that I was secretly quite jealous of. The pair of us knew nothing beyond a single fact, gleaned from a blog devoted to arcane maps: barely 500 miles away from where we sat, there apparently existed a patch of land over which no country on earth asserted any sovereignty. Within five minutes I had booked the flights. Omar opened two more beers.

Places beyond the scope of everyday authority have always fired the imagination. They appear to offer us an escape when all you can see of somewhere is its outlines, it is easy to start fantasising about the void within. No mans lands are our El Dorados, says Noam Leshem, a Durham University geographer who recently travelled 6,000 miles through a series of so-called dead spaces, from the former frontlines of the Balkans war to the UN buffer zone in Cyprus, along with his colleague Alasdair Pinkerton of Royal Holloway. The pair intended to conclude their journey at Bir Tawil, but never made it. There is something alluring about a place beyond the control of the state, Leshem adds, and also something highly deceptive. In reality, nowhere is unplugged from the complex political and historical dynamics of the world around it, and as Omar and I were to discover no visitors can hope to short-circuit them.

Six months later, in January 2011, we touched down at Khartoum International airport with a pair of sleeping bags, five energy bars, and an embarrassingly small stock of knowledge about our final destination. To an extent, the ignorance was deliberate. For one thing, we planned to shoot a film about our travels, and Omar had persuaded me the secret to good film-making was to begin work utterly unprepared. Omar according to Omar was a cinematic auteur; the kind of maverick who could breeze into a desolate wasteland with no vehicle, no route, and no contacts and produce an award-winning documentary from the mayhem. One does not lumber an auteur, he explained, with printed itineraries, booked accommodation or emergency phone numbers. Mindful of my own aspirations to auteurism, this reasoning struck me as convincing.

There was something else, too, that made us refrain from proper planning. As the date of our departure for Sudan drew closer, Omar and I had taken to discussing our plans for Bir Tawil in increasingly grandiose terms. Deep down, I think, we both knew that the notion of claiming the territory and harnessing it for some grand ideological cause was preposterous. But what if it wasnt? What if our own little tabula rasa could be the start of something bigger, transforming a forgotten relic of colonial map-making into a progressive force that would defeat contemporary injustices across the world?

The mechanics of how this might actually work remained a little hazy. Yet just occasionally, at more contemplative junctures, it did occur to us that in the process of planting a flag in Bir Tawil as part of some ill-defined critique of arbitrary borders and imperial violence, there was a risk we could appear to the untrained eye very similar to the imperialists who had perpetrated such violence in the first place. It was a resemblance we were keen to avoid. Undertaking this journey in a state of deep ignorance, we told ourselves, would help mitigate against pomposity. Without any basic knowledge, we would be forced to travel as humble innocents, relying solely on guidance from the communities we passed through.

As the two of us cleared customs, we broke into smiles and congratulated each other. The auteurs had landed, and what is more they had Important Things To Say about borders and states and sovereignty and empires. We set off in search of some local currency, and warmed to our theme. By the time we found an ATM, we were referring to Bir Tawil as so much more than a conceptual exposition. Under our benevolent stewardship, we assured each other, it could surely become some sort of launchpad for radical new ideas, a haven for subversives all over the planet.

It was at that point that the auteurs realised their bank cards did not work in Sudan, and that there were no international money transfer services they could use to wire themselves some cash.

This setback represented the first consequence of our failure to do any preparatory research. The nagging sense that our maverick approach to reaching Bir Tawil may not have been the wisest way forward gained momentum with consequence number two, which was that to solve the money problem we had to persuade a friend of a friend of a friend of an Egyptian business acquaintance to do an illicit currency trade for us on the outskirts of Khartoum. Consequence number three namely that, given our lack of knowledge about where we could and could not legally film in the capital, after a few days we inadvertently attracted the attention of an undercover state security agent while carrying around $2,000 worth of used Sudanese banknotes in an old rucksack, and were arrested transformed suspicion into certainty.

The route to Bir Tawil

On the date Omar and I were incarcerated, millions of citizens in South Sudan were heading to the polls to decide between continued unity with the north or secession and a new, independent state of their own. We sat silently in a nondescript office block just off Gamaa Avenue the citys main diplomatic thoroughfare while a group of men in black suits and dark sunglasses scrolled through files on Omars video camera. Armed soldiers, unsmiling, stood guard at the door. Through the rooms single window, open but barred, the sound of nearby traffic could be heard. The images on the screen depicted me and Omar gadding about town on the days following our arrival; me and Omar unfurling huge rolls of yellowing paper at the governments survey department; me and Omar scrawling indecipherable patterns on sheets of paper in an effort to design the new Bir Tawili flag; me and Omar squabbling over fabric colours at the Omdurman market where we had gone to stitch together the aforementioned flag. With each new picture, a man who appeared to be the senior officer raised his eyes to meet ours, shook his head, and sighed.

In an attempt to lighten the mood, I pointed out to Omar how apposite it was that at the very moment in which votes were being cast in the south, possibly redrawing the regions borders for ever, we had been placed under lock and key in a military intelligence unit almost a thousand miles to the north for attempting to do the same. Omar, concerned about the fate of both his camera and the contents of the rucksack, declined to respond. I predicted that in the not too distant future, when we had made it to Bir Tawil, we would look back on this moment and laugh. Omar glared.

In the end, our captivity lasted under an hour. The senior officer concluded, perceptively, that, whatever we were attempting to do, we were far too incompetent to do it properly, or to cause too much trouble along the way. Upon our release, we set about obtaining a jeep that could take us to Bir Tawil. Every reputable travel agent we approached turned us down point-blank, citing the prevalence of bandit attacks in the desert. Thankfully, we were able to locate a disreputable travel agent, a large man with a taste for loud polo shirts who went by the name of Obai. Obai was actually not a travel agent at all, but rather a big-game hunter with a lucrative sideline in ambiguously licensed pick-up trucks. In exchange for most of our used banknotes, he offered to provide us with a jeep, a satellite phone, two tanks of water, and his nephew Gedo, who happened to be looking for work as a driver. In the absence of any alternative offers, we gratefully accepted.

Unlike Obai, who was a font of swashbuckling anecdotes and improbable tales of derring-do, Gedo turned out to be a more taciturn soul. He was a civil engineer who had previously done construction work on the colossal Merowe dam in northern Sudan, Africas largest hydropower project. On the day of our departure, he turned up wearing a baseball cap with Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics emblazoned across the front, and carrying a loaded gun. As we waved goodbye to Obai and began weaving our way through the capitals rush hour traffic, Omar and I set about explaining to Gedo the intricacies of our plan to transform Bir Tawil into an open-source state that would disrupt existing patterns of global power and privilege no mean feat, given that we didnt understand any of the intricacies ourselves. Gedo responded to this as he responded to everything: with a sage nod and a deliberate stroke of his stubble.

Im here to protect you, he told us solemnly, as we swung north on to the highway and left Khartoum behind us. Also, Ive never been on a holiday before, and this one sounds fun.

Bir Tawils unusual status wedged between the borders of two countries and yet claimed by neither is a byproduct of colonial machinations in north-east Africa, during an era of British control over Egypt and Egyptian influence on Sudan.

In 1899, government representatives from London and Cairo the latter nominally independent, but in reality the servants of a British protectorate put pen to paper on an agreement which established the shared dominion of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The treaty specified that, following 18 years of intense fighting between Egyptian and British forces on the one side and Mahdist rebels in Sudan on the other, Sudan would now become a British colony in all but name. Its northern border with Egypt was to run along the 22nd parallel, cutting a straight line through the Nubian desert right out to the ocean.

Three years later, however, another document was drawn up by the British. This one noted that a mountain named Bartazuga, just south of the 22nd parallel, was home to the nomadic Ababda tribe, which was considered to have stronger links with Egypt than Sudan. The document stipulated that henceforth this area should be administered by Egypt. Meanwhile, a much-larger triangle of land north of the 22nd parallel, named Halaib, abutting the Red Sea, was assigned to the Beja people who are largely based in Sudan for grazing, and thus now came under Sudans jurisdiction. And that was that, for the next few decades at least. World wars came and went, regimes rose and fell, and those imaginary lines in the sand gathered dust in bureaucratic archives, of little concern to anyone on the ground.

Disputes only started in earnest when Sudan finally achieved independence in 1956. The new postcolonial government in Khartoum immediately declared that its national borders matched the tweaked boundaries stipulated in the second proclamation, making the Halaib triangle Sudanese. Egypt demurred, insisting that the latter document was concerned only with areas of temporary administrative jurisdiction and that sovereignty had been established in the earlier treaty. Under this logic, the real border stayed straight and the Halaib triangle remained Egyptian.

By the early 1990s, when a Canadian oil firm signalled its intention to begin exploration in Halaib and the prospect of substantial mineral wealth being found in the region gained momentum, the disagreement was no longer academic. Egypt sent military forces to reclaim Halaib from Sudan, and despite fierce protests from Khartoum which still considers Halaib to be Sudanese and even tried to organise voting there during the 2010 Sudanese general election it has remained under Cairos control ever since.

Our world is littered with contested borders. The geographers Alexander Diener and Joshua Hagen refer to the dashed lines on atlases as the scars of history. Compared with other divisions between countries that seem so solid and timeless when scored on a map, these squiggles enclaves, misshapen lumps and odd protrusions are a reminder of how messy and malleable the process of drawing up borders has always been.

What makes this particular border conflict unique, though, is not the tussle over the Halaib triangle itself, but rather the impact it has had on the smaller patch of land just south of the 22nd parallel around Bartazuga mountain, the area known as Bir Tawil.

Egypt and Sudans rival claims on Halaib both rest on documents that appear to assign responsibility for Bir Tawil to the other country. As a result, neither wants to assert any sovereignty over Bir Tawil, for to do so would be to renounce their rights to the larger and more lucrative territory. On Egyptian maps, Bir Tawil is shown as belonging to Sudan. On Sudanese maps, it appears as part of Egypt. In practice, Bir Tawil is widely believed to have the legal status of terra nullius nobodys land and there is nothing else quite like it on the planet.

Omar and I were not, it must be acknowledged, the first to discover this anomaly. If the internet is to be believed, Bir Tawil has in fact been claimed many times over by keyboard emperors whose virtual principalities and warring microstates exist only online. The Kingdom of the State of Bir Tawil boasts a national anthem by the late British jazz musician Acker Bilk. The Emirate of Bir Tawil traces its claim over the territory to, among other sources, the Quran, the British monarchy, the 1933 Montevideo Convention and the 1856 US Guano Islands Act. There is a Grand Dukedom of Bir Tawil, an Empire of Bir Tawil, a United Arab Republic of Bir Tawil and a United Lunar Emirate of Bir Tawil. The last of these has a homepage featuring a citizen application form, several self-help mantras, and stock photos of people doing yoga in a park.

From our rarefied vantage point at the back of Obais Toyota Hilux, it was easy to look down with disdain upon these cyber-squatting chancers. None of them had ever actually set foot in Bir Tawil, rendering their claims to sovereignty worthless. Few had truly grappled with Bir Tawils complex backstory, or of the bloodshed it was built upon (tens of thousands of Sudanese fighters and civilians died as a result of the Egyptian and British military assaults that ended in the establishment of Sudans northern borders and thus, ultimately, the creation of Bir Tawil). Granted, Omar and I knew little of the backstory either, but at least we had actually got to Sudan and were making, by our own estimation, a decent fist of finding out. We ate our energy bars, listened attentively to tales of Gedos love life, and scanned the road for clues. The first arrived nearly 200 miles north-east of Khartoum, about a third of the way up towards Bir Tawil, when we came across a city of iron and fire oozing kerosene into the desert. This was Atbara: home of Sudans railway system, and the engine room of its modern-day creation story.

Until very recently, the long history of Sudan has not been one of a single country or people: many different tribes, religions and political factions have competed for power and resources, across territories and borders that bear no relation to those marking out the states limits today. A lack of rigid, recognisable boundaries was used to help justify Europes violent scramble to occupy and annex land throughout Africa in the 19th century. Often, the first step taken by western colonisers was to map and border the territory they were seizing. Charting of land was usually a prelude to military invasion and resource extraction; during the British conquest of Sudan, Atbara was crucial to both.

Sudans contemporary railway system began life as a battering ram for the British to attack Khartoum. Trains carried not only weapons and troops but everyday provisions too, specified by Winston Churchill as the letters, newspapers, sausages, jam, whisky, soda water, and cigarettes which enable the Briton to conquer the world without discomfort. Atbara was the site where key rail lines intersected, and its importance grew rapidly after Londons grip on Sudan had been formalised in the 1899 Anglo-Egyptian treaty.

Everything that mattered, from cotton to gum, came through here, as did all the rolling stock needed to move and export it, Mohamed Ederes, a local railway storekeeper, told us. He walked us through his warehouse, down corridors stacked high with box after box of metal train parts and past giant leather-bound catalogues stuffed with handwritten notes. From here, he declared proudly, you reached the world.

Atbaras colonial origins are still etched into its modern-day layout. One half of the town, originally the preserve of expatriates, is low-rise and leafy; on the other side of the tracks, where native workers were made to live, accommodation is denser and taller. But just as Atbara was a vehicle for colonialism, so too was it the place in which a distinct sense of Sudanese nationhood began to develop.

As Sudans economy grew in the early 20th century, so did the railway industry, bringing thousands of migrant workers from disparate social and ethnic groups to the city. By the second world war, Atbara was famous not only for its carriage depots and loading sidings, but also for the nationalist literature and labour militancy of those who worked within them. Poets as well as workers leaders emerged out of the nascent trade union movement in the late 1940s, which held devastating strikes and helped shake the foundations of British rule. The same train lines that had once borne Churchills sausages and soda water were now deployed to deliver workers solidarity packages all over the country, during industrial action that ultimately brought the colonial economy to a halt. Within a decade, Sudan secured independence.

The next morning, as we drove on, Gedo grew quieter and the signs of human habitation became sparser. At Karima, a small town 150 miles further north, we came across a fleet of abandoned Nile steamers stranded on the river bank; below stairs there were metal plaques bearing the name of shipwrights from Portsmouth, Southampton and Glasgow, each companys handiwork now succumbing slowly to the elements. We clambered through cobwebbed cabins and across rotting sun decks, and then decided to scale the nearby Jebel Barkal Holy Mountain in Arabic where eagles tracked us warily from the sky. Omar maintained a running commentary on our progress, delivered as a flawless Herzog parody, and it proved so painful for all in earshot that the eagles began to dive-bomb us. We set off running, taking refuge among the mountains scattered ruins.

Jebel Barkal was once believed to be the home of Amun, king of gods and god of wind. Fragments of Amuns temple are still visible at the base of the cliffs. Over the past few millennia, Jebel Barkal has been the outermost limit of Egypts Pharaonic kingdoms, the centre of an autonomous Nubian region, and a vassal province of an empire headquartered thousands of miles away in Constantinople. In the modern era of defined borders and seemingly stable nation states, Bir Tawil seems an impossible anomaly. But standing over the jagged crevices of Jebel Barkal, looking out across a region that had been passed between so many different rulers, and formed part of so many different arrangements of power over land, our endpoint started to feel more familiar.

Abandoned Nile steamers stranded on the river bank at Karima. Photograph: Omar Robert Hamilton

The following evening we camped at Abu Hamed, on the very edge of the desert. Beyond the ramshackle cafeterias that have sprung up to serve the artisanal gold-mining community sending shisha smoke and the noise of Egyptian soap operas spiralling up into the night Omar and I saw the outlines of large agricultural reclamation projects, silhouetted in the distance against a starry sky. Since 2008, when global food prices spiked, there has been a boom in what critics call land-grabbing: international investors and sovereign wealth funds snapping up leases on massive tracts of African territory in order to intensify the production of crops for export, and bringing such territory under the control of European, Asian and Gulf nations in the process. Arable land was the first to be targeted, but increasingly desert areas are also being fenced off and sold. Near Abu Hamed, Saudi Arabian companies have been greening the sand blanketing it in soil and water in an effort to make it fertile with worrying consequences for both the environment and local communities, some of whom have long asserted customary rights over the area.

It was not so long ago that the prophets of globalisation proclaimed the impending decline of the nation-state and the rise of a borderless world one modelled on the frictionless transactions of international finance, which pay no heed to state boundaries.

A resurgent populist nationalism and the refugee crisis that has stoked its flames has exposed such claims as premature, and investors depend more than ever on national governments to open up new terrains for speculation and accumulation, and to discipline citizens who dare to stand in the way. But there is no doubt that we now live in a world where the power of capital has profoundly disrupted old ideas about political authority inside national boundaries. All over the planet, the institutions that impact our lives most directly banks, buses, hospitals, schools, farms can now be sold off to the highest bidder and governed by the whims of a transnational financial elite. Where national borders once enclosed populations capable of practising collective sovereignty over their own resources, in the 21st century they look more and more like containers for an inventory of private assets, each waiting to be spliced, diced and traded around the world.

It was at Abu Hamed, while lying awake at night in a sleeping bag, nestled into a shallow depression in the sand, that I realised the closer we were getting to our destination, the more I understood what was so beguiling about it. Now that Bir Tawil was in sight, it had started to appear less like an aberration and more like a question: is there anything natural about how borders and power function in the world today?

In the end, there was no fanfare. On a hazy Tuesday afternoon, 40 hours since we left the road at Abu Hamed, 13 days since we touched down in Khartoum, and six months since the dotted lines of Bir Tawil first appeared before our eyes, Omar gave a shout from the back of the jeep. I checked our GPS coordinates on the satellite phone, and cross-referenced them with the map. Gedo, on being informed that we were now in Bir Tawil and outside of any countrys dominion, promptly took out his gun and fired off a volley of shots. We traipsed up a small hillock and wedged our somewhat forlorn flag into the rocks a yellow desert fox, set against a black circle and bordered by triangles of green and red then sat and gazed out at the horizon, tracing the rise and fall of distant mountains and following the curves of sunken valleys as they criss-crossed each other like veins through the sand. The sky and the ground both looked massive, and unending, and the warm stones around us crumbled in our hands. After a couple of hours, Gedo said that it was getting late, so we climbed back into the jeep and began the long journey home.

Well before our journey had ever begun, we had hoped albeit not particularly fervently that we could do something with it, something that mattered; that by striking out for a place this nebulous we could find a shortcut to social justice, two days drive from the nearest tap or telephone. In 800 square miles of desert, we thought that we could exploit the outlines of the bordered world in order to subvert it.

Jeremiah Heaton, beyond the kingdom for a princess schmaltz and the forthcoming Disney adaptation (he has sold film rights to his story for an undisclosed fee) seems albeit from an almost diametrically opposite philosophical outlook to be convinced of something similar. For him, the fantasy is a libertarian one, offering freedom not from the iniquities of capitalism but from the government interference that inhibits it. Just as we did, he wants to take advantage of a quirk in the system to defy it. When I spoke to Heaton, he told me with genuine enthusiasm that his country (not yet recognised by any other state or international body) would offer the worlds great innovators a place to develop their products unencumbered by taxes and regulation, a place where private enterprise faces no socially prescribed borders of its own. Big companies, he assured me, were scrambling to join his vision.

Jack Shenkers makeshift flag planted in Bir Tawil Photograph: Omar Robert Hamilton

You would be surprised at the outreach that has occurred from the corporate level to me directly, Heaton insisted during our conversation. Its not been an issue of me having to go out and sell myself on this idea. A lot of these large corporations, they see market opportunities in what Im doing. He painted a picture of Bir Tawil one day playing host to daring scientific research, ground-breaking food-production facilities and alternative banking systems that work for the benefit of customers rather than CEOs. I asked him if he understood why some people found his plans, and the assumptions they rested on, highly dubious.

Theres that saying: if you were king for a day, what would you do differently? he replied. Think about that question yourself and apply it to your own country. Thats what Im doing, but on a much bigger scale. This is not colonialism; Im an individual, not a country, I havent taken land that belongs to any other country, and Im not extracting resources other than sunshine and sand. I am just one human being, trying to improve the condition of other human beings. I have the purest intentions in the world to make this planet a better place, and to try and criticise that just because Im a white person sitting on land in the middle of the Nubian desert He trailed off, and was silent for a moment. Well, he concluded, its really juvenile.

But if, by some miracle, Heaton ever did gain global recognition as the legitimate leader of an independent Bir Tawili state, would his pitch to corporations base yourself here to avoid paying taxes and escape the manacles of democratic oversight actually do anything to improve the condition of other human beings? Part of the allure of unclaimed spaces is their radical potential to offer a blank canvas but as Omar and I belatedly realised, nothing, and nowhere, starts from scratch. Any utopia founded on the basis of a concept terra nullius that has wreaked immense historical destruction, is built on rotten foundations.

In truth, no place is a dead zone, stopped in time and ripe for private capture least of all Bir Tawil, which translates as long well in Arabic and was clearly the site of considerable human activity in the past. Although it lacks any permanent dwellings today, this section of desert is still used by members of the Ababda and Bisharin tribes who carry goods, graze crops and make camp within the sands. (Not the least of our failures was that we did not manage to speak to any of the peoples who had passed through Bir Tawil before we arrived.) Their ties to the area may be based on traditional rather than written claims but Bir Tawil is not any more a no mans land than the territory once known as British East Africa, where terra nullius was repeatedly invoked in the early 20th century by both chartered companies andthe Britishgovernment that supported them to justify the appropriation of territory from indigenous people. I cannot admit that wandering tribes have a right to keep other and superior races out of large tracts, exclaimed the British commissioner, Sir Charles Eliot, at the time, merely because they have acquired the habit of straggling over far more land than they can utilise.

Bir Tawil is no terra nullius. But no mans lands or at least ambiguous spaces, where boundaries take odd turns and sovereignty gets scrambled are real and exist among us every day. Some endure at airports, and inside immigration detention centres, and in the pockets of economic deprivation where states have abandoned any responsibility for their citizens. Others no mans lands are carried around by refugees who are yet to be granted asylum, regardless of where they may be having fled failed states or countries which would deny them the rights of citizenship, they occupy a world of legal confusion at best, and outright exclusion at worst.

Perhaps that is why, as we switched off the camera and left Bir Tawil behind us, Omar and I felt a little let down. Or perhaps we shared a sense of anticlimax because we were faintly aware of something rumbling back home in Cairo, where millions of people were about to launch an epic fight against political and economic exclusion not by withdrawing to a no mans land but by confronting state authority head-on, in the streets. A week after our return to Egypt, the country erupted in revolution.

Borders are fluid things; they help define our identities, and yet so often we use our identities to push up against borders and redraw them. For now the boundaries that divide nation states remain, but their purpose is changing and the relationship they have to our own lives, and our own rights, is growing increasingly unstable. If Bir Tawil the preeminent ambiguous space is anything to those who live far from it, it is perhaps a reminder that no particular configuration of power and governance is immutable. As we drove silently, and semi-contentedly, back past the gold-foragers, and the ramshackle cafeteria, and the heavy machinery of the Saudi farm installations Gedo at the wheel, Omar asleep and me staring out at nothing I grasped what I had failed to grasp on that lazy night of beer drinking on Omars balcony. The last truly unclaimed land on earth is really an injunction: not for us to seek out the mythical territory where we can hide from the things that anger us, but to channel that anger instead towards reclaiming territory we already call our own.

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from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/welcome-to-the-land-that-no-country-wants-jack-shenker/

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"With every death comes honor. With honor, redemption." Voiced by: Paul Nakauchi (English), Dan Osorio (Latin American Spanish), Miguel Ángel Montero (European Spanish), Shuhei Sakaguchi (Japanese), Lionel Tua (French), Reginaldo Primo (Brazilian Portuguese), Lorenzo Scattorin (Italian), Bernd Vollbrecht (German), Hanshin (Korean), Kang Dian-Hong (Taiwanese Chinese), Liú Běichén (Mandarin Chinese), Krzysztof Cybiński (Polish), Ilya Isayev (Russian) The Shimada family was established centuries ago, a clan of assassins whose power grew over the years, enabling them to build a vast criminal empire that profited from lucrative trade in arms and illegal substances. As the eldest son of the family's head, Hanzo was bound by duty to succeed his father and rule the Shimada empire. From a young age, he was trained for that responsibility, displaying a natural aptitude for leadership and possessing an innate understanding of strategy and tactics. He also excelled in more practical areas: he was a prodigy in martial arts, swordplay, and bowmanship. Upon the death of his father, the clan elders instructed Hanzo to straighten out his wayward younger brother so that he, too, might help rule the Shimada empire. When his brother refused, Hanzo was forced to kill him. This act broke Hanzo's heart and drove him to reject his father's legacy, ultimately leading him to abandon the clan and all that he had worked so hard to attain. Now, Hanzo travels the world, perfecting his skills as a warrior, attempting to restore his honor and put the ghosts of his past to rest. Once a year, he snuck into his old home, which now sends assassins to kill him for his desertion. His goal was mostly to honor the spirit of his brother. Until one day, he was assaulted in the same place by a mysterious Cyber Ninja that lectured him about his actions, or rather, his inaction towards the changing world. The lecture turned into a fierce battle and, to Hanzo's shock, the ninja revealed himself as Genji, saved from death by Overwatch. Genji forgives him, but Hanzo becomes furious after realizing that Genji's survival rendered the Redemption Quest to honor him meaningless, and calls Genji foolish to still believe in childish ideals from fairy tales. Even so, Genji's words left him conflicted about the future and his feelings for his brother. Hanzo is a Defensive character who can sneak into an enemy's holdout and silently kill them before moving on to his next target. Eschewing the favored weapons of his time, his weapon is the Storm Bow, a mechanical bow that can fire all sorts of mechanical, or mundane, arrows at enemies. He has the ability to Wall Climb, which lets him climb up a vertical surface. His first ability is Sonic Arrow. Hanzo fires at arrow at the location that releases a pulse of sound, signaling to him whether or not nearby enemies are beyond the wall or nearby. His second ability, Scatter Arrow, fires an arrow that ricochets off walls and objects, enabling him to strike at angles and hit multiple targets. His ultimate, Dragonstrike, takes off the guise of stealth and summons a pair of Spirit Dragons that travel forward from his location, killing any enemies in its path. Animal Motifs: Besides the obvious dragon, Hanzo has several Legendary skins that give him a wolf-based look instead; he wears wolf pelts on his head and shoulders, and his ultimate ability replaces the Spirit Dragons with howling wolves. On a symbolic level, dragons in some Asian cultures represent prosperity, strength, and good fortune and are typically benevolent creatures, but because the dragon is the family icon of the Shimada clan's criminal empire, the Western depiction of dragons being creatures of evil applies as well. Wolves, on the other hand, represent freedom as well as family and community, but they also symbolize a lack of trust in others and/or yourself - despite having had broken away from his family after nearly killing Genji, Hanzo still feels a lingering sense of loyalty and duty, and much of his inner conflict stems from his choice of either following his clan's footsteps or forgive himself and pursue the heroic path like Genji did. The Atoner: He seeks to regain his honor for both killing his brother and for being a part of a criminal clan that would force him to do such a thing. Arrogant Kung-Fu Guy: He's quite cocky and contemptuous towards his enemies, and openly gloats about his skills in combat. Awesome Anachronistic Apparel: His outfit is based on feudal Japanese ninja clothing with modern touches such as futuristic boots and a waist pack. Doesn't stop it from looking awesome. Badass Beard: He has a small one along with a Badass Mustache. Badass Boast: Gives one to Genji in Dragons, mistaking him for an assassin: Hanzo: You are not the first assassin sent to kill me. And you will not be the last. Beard of Sorrow: The mustache and small beard he has now? He didn't start growing it until after he was forced to kill his younger brother Genji. Becoming the Costume: Hanzo's Okami and Lone Wolf skins change a large number of lines, replacing his dragon motif with a wolf one. For example, when launching his Sonic Arrow, instead of saying "Marked by the dragon," he'll say "The wolf marks its prey." His Ultimate line changes from "Let the dragon consume you!"/"Ryū ga waga teki o kurau!" to "The wolf hunts for his prey!"/"Ōkami yo, waga teki o kurae!" Additionally, the projectile itself becomes two wolves instead of dragons, changing the roar sound to howling, and if it gets any kills, Hanzo says "The wolf is sated" instead of "The dragon is sated." Berserk Button: Genji. As if being forced to kill him wasn't enough to leave Hanzo a remorseful wreck, he now finds out that his brother is alive and well and is willing to forgive him for an act that caused him to abandon his family and spend his entire life on an ultimately-pointless redemption quest for something he began to view as irredeemable. Mentioning Genji or bringing up the fact that the two are similar will result in Hanzo furiously and spitefully denying him. Bottomless Magazines: While played straight in the game itself, in the animated short "Dragons" he runs out of arrows during his fight with Genji and has to pick them up from where he fired them. Bring It: One of his taunts is a classic "Come and get me" gesture. Cain and Abel: After their father's death, tensions rose between him and his brother Genji until he was forced by the clan elders to kill him. Even after his brother shows up alive again, Hanzo has very conflicted feelings about him, despite Genji forgiving him. Genji: "It is not too late to change your course, brother." Hanzo: "You may call yourself my brother, but you are not the Genji I knew." Charged Attack: His Storm Bow is Hold-type; simply tapping the fire button fires a very weak arrow, but holding it down for full power allows it to One-Hit Kill non-tanks with a headshot. Dark is Not Evil: Despite wearing mostly black, having an evil looking scowl most of the time, and is not the White Sheep of his criminal empire family, he's far from evil himself; having performed a Heel–Face Turn after (almost) murdering Genji. Death Seeker: Implied: he tells Genji to kill him in Dragons and Genji replies that he will not grant him the death he wishes for. There's also his Halloween "R.I.P." victory pose, where unlike everybody else who is bursting from out of their graves, Hanzo seems perfectly content staying put.◊ Decomposite Character: He and his brother were originally one cyber ninja in concept. The character however was too unfocused in design due to being crammed with too many ninja weapons and gimmicks. Rather than scrap the idea though, the character was made into two brothers. Hanzo inherited the clothes, bow usage, and name the original character had. Defector from Decadence: He left his family and the criminal empire he could have ruled since it cost him his brother. Downplayed as a few of his quotes imply he regret having left the Yakuza lifestyle. Difficult but Awesome: He's rated 3 stars for a reason. He's difficult in that his arrows require draw time and are projectiles instead of hitscan-based which also avert No "Arc" in "Archery", meaning actually hitting a target requires consistent aim and prediction, not helped by the lack of a scope making it more difficult to aim precisely. His kit is entirely based around dealing burst damage and getting picks, and if he fails to do so, he might be considered The Millstone by his team. His Dragonstrike ultimate is also difficult to use effectively, as while it has huge damage and AoE, it's a Painfully Slow Projectile that can be easily avoided through experience, meaning you'll have to get crafty to use it properly. He's awesome in that his arrows' lack of a scope prevents him from suffering tunnel vision, he requires virtually no reloading, he has one of the only abilities in the game that can provide team-wide vision, and his potential mid-to-long-range damage output is absolutely absurd. A well-trained Hanzo can easily shut down enemy teams before they can touch the objective. Don't You Dare Pity Me!: In every interaction where Genji shows Hanzo sympathy or tries to give him a speech, Hanzo lashes out and insults Genji. Drowning My Sorrows: The Halloween update reveals his canteen is always full of sake. And it's one of the biggest canteens among the cast members who have them. Presumably it's to dull the constant guilt and regret he feels. Due to the Dead: It's revealed in "Dragons" that every year he returns to Hanamura, his former home, to pay tribute to his dead younger brother Genji. Until he learns Genji is not dead as previously thought. The Dutiful Son: While he has renounced his family ties after being forced to kill Genji, pre-match dialogue implies that he on some level regrets his decision and wants to make his family great again, yet it is implied that he has some clear standards on how to do it, such as when he turns down Widowmaker's offer to join Talon in exchange for his family's restoration. And part of the reason why Hanzo resents Genji is because of the latter's refusal to toe the line, resulting in their fated battle and causing everything to fall apart. And now that brother is revealed to be still alive, all of that grief and the journey to atone for his sins had been completely for nothing. Fingerless Gloves: Of a sort. He wears a special archery glove note on his right hand that covers everything except his ring finger and pinky. Foolish Sibling, Responsible Sibling: The dutiful, responsible older brother of the foolish, hedonistic Genji, back when both of them were living in Hanamura and their scuffle that led to Genji's cybernetic transformation didn't happen yet. Glass Cannon: Can deal high damage with his arrows and ultimate ability, however, he has mediocre health and no mobility-boosting abilities other than wall-climbing. Gameplay and Story Segregation: In-game, Hanzo can only shoot his arrows straight, even if they will eventually fall to gravity. In the Dragons animated short, his arrows can make a sideway arc, shoot to the side, and the arrow takes a turn to straight in front of Hanzo. Hazy Feel Turn: Hanzo did not leave the life of a criminal behind, seeing as he still carries out assassinations. He did, however, leave the Shimada clan behind, and, even if he express regret at doing it, refuses to associate with outright villainous groups like Talon. Heroic B.S.O.D.: Upon learning in the end of "Dragons" that Genji is still alive (albeit as a cyborg) and has forgiven him for nearly killing him on the orders of their clan elders, Hanzo's response is to continue burning incense as tribute to his brother like nothing happened as if he's in complete denial. It's suggested that his hostile banter with Genji during gameplay may have stemmed from this. Heroes Prefer Swords: Averted. He was trained in the use of one, but after he was forced to kill Genji, he swore never to pick up another blade, instead using a bow and arrow. Hitbox Dissonance: The Hero. Hanzo's arrow hitbox is roughly twice as wide as the actual character model, and just hitting in the upper portion of that giant hitbox counts as a headshot. I Did What I Had to Do: He considers his act of killing Genji as something he had to do in order to placate his clan's elders and restore order to his already broken family, but it's clear that he deeply regrets it. Important Haircut: He used to have much longer hair in his twenties, and in "Reflections" (which takes place after "Dragons") he sports an undercut. Improbable Aiming Skills: A good chunk of what he does with his arrows in "Dragons", most notably the part where he shoots an arrow which curves to hit and destroy a cellphone when a) he's grappling someone at the same time, b) the cellphone is moving and c) from where he shoots, Hanzo couldn't possibly see the point where his arrow lands. Improbable Use of a Weapon: He's shown to be quite versatile with his bow in "Dragons," using it as a melee weapon in several instances. In fact, in his fight against Genji, he actually finds more success this way than through firing arrows. Instant Awesome, Just Add Dragons: His ultimate summons two Spirit Dragons that go through walls and kills everything in their path. Jerkass Façade: Usually his default persona is The Atoner. But, he's usually very nasty to Genji even after what he did, for ill-defined reasons. Mage Marksman: Uses Trick Arrows to fight, and then there's the whole "shooting out two spirit dragons" thing. Master Swordsman: Word of God says he's actually a master swordsman who's probably even better than his brother. However because of what happened with Genji, Hanzo put down the sword for good and picked up the bow instead. His old sword can still be found displayed in the Hanamura dojo with a chipped blade. Meaningful Name: His name alludes to Hattori Hanzo, one of the most famous Real Life samurai.* Mr. Fanservice: Half-shirtless, with a very extensive dragon tattoo. My God, What Have I Done?: Seemingly killing his brother Genji broke his heart and caused him to leave the clan to atone for what he had done. My Greatest Failure: The day he was forced to kill his little brother by his clan's elders was this for Hanzo. It's one of the main reasons he became The Atoner. Nice Job Fixing It, Villain!: When he (apparently) murdered his own brother to appease the clan elders and prevent the families dissolution, he instead accidentally turned Genji into the hero who would single-handedly dismantle the clan and leave it a pale husk of its former self. Ninja: Since the Shimada Clan was a family of ninjas before becoming Yakuza, Hanzo was trained as a ninja himself. Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: His Halloween skin basically makes him into a Zombie Ninja. No "Arc" in "Archery": Averted! Unlike every other primary weapon in the game other than Torbjörn's, all of Hanzo's arrows are affected by gravity, including those spawning from his Scatter Arrow. Judging how to aim at a distance based on this arc is one of the reasons aiming with him can be quite tough. Not So Different: From Genji, at least in the eyes of Zenyatta. Zenyatta: I sense within you the same rage that once consumed your brother. Hanzo: We are nothing alike! Not So Stoic: His in-game lines are pretty chill and monotonous, but mentioning his younger brother (as seen in the "Dragons" short) makes him rash and angry. Perpetual Frowner: With good reason, admittedly. Pinball Projectile: Scatter Arrow causes Hanzo's arrow to explode into several more upon hitting a surface, each of which retain a normal arrow's general damage. An easy strategy for taking out squishy targets is to aim one right at their feet, so multiple arrows explode from under them. Or just have some really, really lucky geometry working for you. Power Tattoo: In the animated short "Dragons", his dragon tattoo glows as he unleashes his Dragonstrike. In fact the spirit dragons seem to appear from the tattoo before being unleashed through the arrow he fires. Redemption Rejection: Self-invoked example. He simply won't forgive himself for what he did to Genji and refused to redeem himself with Overwatch even after Genji explicitly forgave him with a You Are Better Than You Think You Are speech at the end of "Dragons". Sibling Rivalry: Despite wishing to atone for nearly killing Genji, Hanzo still prides himself on honor and looks down upon his brother for his hedonistic lifestyle even after he had become a cyborg and mellowed out. This conversation before a match begins says it all. Hanzo: You will never amount to anything! Genji: We shall see...brother. Silly Rabbit, Idealism Is for Kids!: To Genji in Dragons: Hanzo: Real life is not like the stories our father told us! You are a fool for believing it so! Summon Magic: He summons two giant spirit dragons to kill anything in their path. No explanation for this magic is offered, except that only a Shimada can control these dragons. Tattooed Crook: Has a dragon tattoo on his left arm and was formerly the heir of a powerful Yakuza clan. The Straight and Arrow Path: In a world with guns and rockets and robot suits and teleporters, Hanzo uses a humble bow. A technologically enhanced bow, but a bow nonetheless. Thicker Than Water: Hanzo is a firm believer of traditional family loyalty and that honor lies in family loyalty, which was why he's The Dutiful Son who didn't seem to mind much about how the criminal activities of the clan are not good deeds, they're still his family, and while he left the clan in shame, he still held some regrets that he somehow wanted to return to his family. This is also why he's rather cross at Genji for his actions to shut down the Shimada clan, he cannot see honor in betraying one's own family even if it was for the greater good or common morality. Trademark Favorite Food: Ramen, just like his brother. Thankfully for Hanzo, he's still able to enjoy it as he's still full human. Trick Arrow: His Scatter Shot explodes when it hits a wall, releasing ricocheting arrows that bounce off walls and hit foes. He also has Sonic Arrow, which alerts him to nearby enemies. Additionally, in Dragons his normal arrows are apparently electric and homing. Walking Shirtless Scene: He wears a kimono, but the left side is not on his body, showing off his left pec, left side of his torso, and an impressive arm-length dragon tattoo. Wall Crawl: Thanks to his Wall Climb ability. White Sheep: Became this to his clan after he defected out of guilt for killing his little brother on the clan elders' orders. Yakuza: Former heir to the Shimada Clan's criminal empire and still has the tattoo to prove it.

[aion-rsa]

Avengers: Endgame - Complete Marvel Easter Eggs and MCU Reference Guide

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Avengers: Endgame is packed with Marvel Comics easter eggs and MCU callbacks. We're tracking 'em all down.

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This article consists of nothing but massive Avengers: Endgame spoilers. You’ve been warned. We have a completely spoiler free review right here.

Avengers: Endgame is the culmination of 11 years of Marvel Cinematic Universe storytelling. That’s a whopping 22 MCU movies, each of which has been packed with deep lore from the pages of Marvel Comics. That makes for plenty of Marvel Easter eggs that can be hunted down by fans and scholars.

But Avengers: Endgame is the first of these films not concerned with setting up sequels or even introducing new characters. Instead, it’s a celebration of all that has come before, and a genuine conclusion for the 22 movie saga. It also owes as much of a debt to Marvel’s big screen history as it does to the comics. In general, the MCU is a veritable feast of fan service for Marvel fans of all eras, but it also now boasts a sprawling continuity of its own that is impressive enough that it can spend as much time (or more) calling back to its previous entries as it does the comics.

Here’s how this works. We’re trying to find every single Marvel and MCU reference packed into Avengers: Endgame. But there’s no way we caught ‘em all right out of the gate. That’s where you come in. If you spotted something we didn’t, let us know in the comments or on Twitter, and if it checks out, we’ll update this and give you a shout.

Now, Avengers...assemble!

WHEN DOES AVENGERS: ENDGAME TAKE PLACE?

Avengers: Endgame takes place 21 days after the conclusion of Avengers: Infinity War (making it 23 days since Thanos first arrived on Earth). An additional day goes by before Carol Danvers rescues Tony Stark and the whole team has their meetup at Avengers HQ. Of course, then we jump five years into the future...

That five year time jump likely won’t mean much for long. With no new Marvel movies (other than Spider-Man: Far From Home, which picks up minutes after the conclusion of Endgame) until 2020, the real world will catch up to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in no time. Keep in mind, Infinity War took place in 2018, which means the opening of Endgame also takes place in 2018, so that five year time jump is really a four year jump in “our” time. Marvel currently has movies scheduled through 2022 (and of course there will be more) so by the time the next phase happens, we'll be all caught up.

Whew. Anyway, on to the rest...

IRON MAN

We’re kicking things off with Tony Stark because, well, after 11 years, 22 movies, and one heroic, heartbreaking death scene, he deserves it.

- It is cute but not necessarily significant that Tony introduces himself to his father as “Howard Potts.”

- Mungo Jerry was an early ‘70s rock band best known for their hit “In the Summertime.” You can definitely see a little Tony Stark facial hair happening in this pic. That's Community's Yvette Nicole Brown complaining about Tony's hippie beard. Maybe if Thor had been at Camp Lehigh she would have thought more Bee Gees.

- Howard Stark reveals that Tony’s mother was considering naming Tony “Alphonso” instead of “Anthony.” Al Stark doesn’t quite have the same ring, does it?

read more - Which Avengers: Endgame Deaths are Permanent?

Morgan H. Stark

As promised in Infinity War, Tony and Pepper have had a child, and Tony named her after an eccentric cousin of his. The elder Morgan Stark has never appeared in the MCU, but first showed his face in Tales of Suspense #68, back in Iron Man’s early days in 1965. It’s...not a super important story.

- Young Morgan is fond of cheeseburgers. We learned that Tony had cravings for them in the first Iron Man movie shortly after he returned from captivity.

Pepper Potts

- The blue/purple tint to Pepper’s Iron Man armor helmet (and later the armor itself) is a nod to how she appeared as “Rescue” on the Iron Man: Animated Adventures series.

Howard Stark and the Agent Carter Connections

- It’s rare to see the television arm of the MCU acknowledged on the big screen, so it’s nice to see Agent Carter’s James D’arcy return as Jarvis, however briefly. Between this and seeing Peggy Carter doing her business as director of SHIELD, this is as close as we’re going to get to a proper Agent Carter reunion.

- That’s latter-day Howard Stark John Slattery here, rather than First Avenger/Agent Carter Howard Stark Dominic Cooper.

read more - Avengers: Endgame Spoilers, Questions, and Theories

- When we first see Howard Stark in this movie, he is looking for that rat bastard Arnim Zola, who didn’t upload his consciousness to a computer until 1972 (something we see play out in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, a movie that also gets plenty of love in Endgame).

The Death of Tony Stark

It appears that right before Tony says “I...am...Iron Man” a nod both to the famed Black Sabbath lyric and his final words from the first film, he seems to be staring off, likely hinting that he is experiencing the kind of cosmic awareness that the Infinity Gauntlet always brings with it, and that is made famous in so many Jim Starlin Marvel comics.

Who is at Tony Stark’s Funeral?

- In attendance at Tony Stark’s funeral you can find all the surviving Avengers, plus a few special guests, including Cobie Smulders’ Maria Hill, Marissa Tomei’s May Parker, William Hurt’s Thaddeus Ross, and Ty Simpkins’ Harley Keener from the immensely underrated Iron Man 3.

- The floating funeral bouquet contains Tony’s first arc reactor, the one that Pepper customized to read: “Proof that Tony Stark has a heart.”

We examined the significance of Tony Stark's funeral (and its attendees) right here.

CAPTAIN AMERICA

- We finally get to hear Cap declare the famed “Avengers Assemble!” battlecry, something which we were teased with in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

- Cap’s shield getting shattered in battle with Thanos is a moment right out of the original Infinity Gauntlet comic. It didn’t stop Steve there, either.

- Cap swears multiple times in this movie, something he has been reluctant to do in the past. Can you blame him? Of course, that doesn’t make him any less worthy to wield Mjolnir when the time comes, an event that has been teased since Avengers: Age of Ultron. And goddamn it might just be the single most triumphant moment in MCU history.

- Cap has hoisted Mjolnir on a few occasions in the comics, making him one of the few Marvel characters who have been canonically deemed worthy (not even a few dirty words can change that). The most notable time was during the Fear Itself event, which allowed Cap to use the hammer for maximum world-defending effect.

- Endgame also leans heavily on the entire trilogy of Captain America movies, with their events getting direct references, but also driving smaller moments in the film. For example, Tony and Steve’s trip back to 1970 is one of many things that helps heal the rift between the pair from Captain America: Civil War. But more directly…

The First Avenger

- We hear the main theme from Captain America: The First Avenger when Tony returns Steve’s shield to him.

- The location of New Asgard is Tonsberg, the same Norwegian village from The First Avenger where the Tesseract had been hidden from prying eyes by Odin worshippers until that Nazi douchebag the Red Skull came along and swiped it. You can see why Thor chose this location.

- Steve and Tony go to Camp Lehigh to find the Tesseract in 1970. Camp Lehigh is where Steve first trained to become a super soldier, and was his stateside base of operations during the war. It’s a Marvel Universe landmark that dates all the way back to Captain America Comics #1 in 1940.

read more - Complete Guide to Marvel Easter Eggs in Captain America: The First Avenger

- Interestingly enough, Steve’s phony uniform is emblazoned with the name “Roscoe.” This might be a reach, but in the wake of the original “Secret Empire” (not the Nazi Cap one) story from the comics (in the 1970s) by Steve Englehart and Sal Buscema, when Cap temporarily renounced his red, white, and blue costume, the Falcon took on a junior partner by the name of Roscoe Simons to take Cap’s place. It...it didn’t end well for young Roscoe. But Cap wearing Roscoe’s uniform here (yeah, I know, first name/last name...whatever) is a nice reversal of Roscoe wearing Cap’s in the comics.

- “Don’t do anything stupid until I get back/You’re taking all the stupid with you” is a wonderful Steve/Bucky exchange from The First Avenger.

- When Steve is fighting himself, he says to...himself... “I can do this all day,” which is, of course, Steve’s mantra that he first says in The First Avenger and then repeats in Civil War.

The Winter Soldier

- Two of the key dickbags showing up to run cleanup in the aftermath of the Avengers are Jasper Sitwell and Crossbones. Of course, we get a nice nod to that amazing elevator fight scene from Captain America: The Winter Soldier at one point.

- Steve saying “Hail Hydra” is more than just another fun nod to The Winter Soldier. In 2016 Marvel took a considerable amount of shit for the infamous “Nazi Cap” story, Secret Empire, where thanks to some cosmic cube (that’s the Tesseract to you MCU fans) related shenanigans, Cap’s history was temporarily rewritten so he was a Hydra agent.

- Getting Robert Redford to return as Alexander Pierce is an impressive feat on its own.

Sam Wilson, The Falcon, and the New Captain America

- Following Thanos’ snap, Steve seemingly becomes a grief and trauma counselor, which was Sam’s job when we first met him in The Winter Soldier.

- When Falcon makes his big return he says “on your left” which is another nice nod to The Winter Soldier when we first met him and he first met Steve. It shouldn’t be a surprise that TWS looms large in this movie, as it’s the one that put the Russos on the MCU map.

read more - Avengers: Endgame Ending Explained

- Sam Wilson has spent time in the comics as Captain America. Cap has a habit of handing off the shield from time to time. The first real time was to John Walker, although Steve had no say in choosing him. Then there was the time Bucky spent as Cap (and he did an excellent job). The thing is, Cap didn’t really get a say there, either, as he was quite dead at the time.

But Sam is the only guy to wield the shield who was actually given Cap’s blessing right out of the gate, and rightfully so. Coincidentally, it happened at a time in the comics when Steve had also been “aged up” to his “actual” elderly state, much like what we see at the conclusion of Endgame. He also gets a ridiculously cool costume out of the deal...

- The fact that The Falcon and Winter Soldier are slated for a team-up series on Disney+ indicates that it’s going to take some time for him to get used to the idea of being the man with the shield, and don’t be surprised if that series deals almost entirely with the buildup to Sam finally deciding to accept the responsibility and wear the red, white, and blue. It's interesting (and a little concerning) how little Steve and Bucky interact in this movie, though.

The Final Fate of Steve Rogers

- Cap’s quest to return the stones leaves the door open to a series of Captain America movies in different time periods. Maybe. Probably not. Don’t hold your breath. Still, there's always a chance that Steve Rogers (even if he isn't Captain America anymore) can still be a part of the MCU in some capacity.

It's also worth noting that the Russo Brothers say that Cap created an alternate timeline by doing this, and figure since they directed the damn movie, they would know.

- Elderly Steve appears to be wearing the same tan jacket that pre-super soldier serum Steve wore in Captain America: The First Avenger. It fits again.

- The song playing as Steve and Peggy dance is “It’s Been a Long, Long Time” a 1945 hit with lyrics that are really, really appropriate. This appears to be the version with Kitty Kallen on vocals with the Harry James band.

Set all your worries about paradoxes aside and just enjoy the moment. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go weep for a bit.

We wrote more about the implications all of this might have for Agent Carter continuity right here.

THOR

- This is our first look at “alternate” versions of Thor in the MCU, although Jason Aaron’s spectacular run as writer in recent years has treated us to younger and far older versions of the character. None have this particular version of Thor’s particular traits or hangups, but there is some precedent for time-slid, weird Thors in Marvel Comics.

- The movie makes a valiant attempt to redeem the generally unloved Thor: The Dark World, with Thor and Rocket sneaking around in the background of recognizable scenes, plenty of references to the Dark Elves and Jane Foster’s predicament, and the touching reunion between Thor and Frigga (other than her “eat a salad” crack...Jesus, mom!) shortly before her death.

read more - Complete Guide to Marvel Easter Eggs in Thor: Ragnarok

- Aside from New Asgard’s connection to The First Avenger, the idea of Asgard having a place in Midgard really stems from J. Michael Straczynski and Olivier Coipel’s time as creative team on the God of Thunder, where Asgard spent some time hovering 12 feet off the ground near Broxton, Oklahoma.

- Thor turning New Asgard over to Valkyrie isn’t a thing from the comics, but it does feel very much like a set-up for future Valkyrie adventures in the MCU proper.

- So, based on assorted time travel weirdness and Loki making his escape during The Avengers portion of the time heist, does this mean that Loki can once again be alive in MCU continuity? It would seem that way. This would certainly help clear things up for the Disney+ Loki series that Tom Hiddleston is set to star in. Though it's been reported that the Loki series might follow Loki as he interferes with moments throughout history. We went into more detail about whether Loki is now alive again in the MCU right here.

- When Rocket goes to collect drunk Thor, Korg, voiced by Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi is hanging out playing video games and wearing a pineapple-covered Hawaian shirt that he has busted through with his rock shoulders. It is probably a reference to the excellent possible romphim (that’s a romper for men - get it?) Taika wore to SDCC while promoting Thor. It could just be a coincidence because Taikia loves pineapples and insisted his character wear a pineapple shirt. Either way, rad casualwear for Korg.

HULK

- Bruce Banner says he started thinking about the Hulk as “a cure” rather than as “a disease” which is why he is able to be the “best of both worlds,” Banner’s smarts and sensitivity paired with Hulk’s raw power. He said he spent "18 months in a gamma lab" to merge the two halves of himself. That isn't exactly how it went down in the comics, but it's reasonable comic book logic.

read more: Hulk Movies Marvel Should Make

- There’s plenty of precedent for “smart Hulk” in the comics, as well. Perhaps the pinnacle of “smart Hulk” stories came, coincidentally enough, during the era that brought us the original Infinity Gauntlet story, the early 1990s. That Hulk was rather fond of stretchy, tracksuit-lookin’ monochrome outfits, too. There’s a whole stretch of Incredible Hulk written by Peter David that you should check out if “smart Hulk” is your thing.

- Amusingly, Banner turning his Hulk into a positive role model, complete with spouting platitudes like “listen to your mother,” feels like the 1980s persona of legendary wrestler Hulk Hogan. Of course, Hulk Hogan turned out to be an asshole in real life, but whatever.

THANOS

Thanos retreats to Planet 0259-S, which is the world we glimpsed at the conclusion of Infinity War. There’s no additional Marvel Comics connection to that planetary designation, BUT…

...apparently Thanos referred to it as “the Garden.” In the Thanos Quest series that led up to the original Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos had to claim the Time Gem from an Elder of the Universe known as “The Gardener” who had created his own “garden” on the Blue Area of the Moon (home to the Inhumans...of whom we shall never speak again after that dreadful TV series). Anyway, all of that seems like a bit of a reach, as Thanos sees himself as a god and “the garden” is his own personal eden, but hey, whatever.

read more - What's Next for the MCU After Avengers: Endgame?

- “I am inevitable.” I can’t recall any instances of Thanos uttering these specific words in the comics, but he sure says stuff like it all the time, sometimes referring to himself in the third person like the jerk he is.

- The constant references to killing baby Thanos are far more than just the old "killing baby Hitler" thought experiment, as that's more or less the plot of the current Cosmic Ghost Rider series from Marvel Comics.

DOCTOR STRANGE

- At one point, Tony and Natasha are talking about Doctor Strange, and Pepper misidentifies his address as Sullivan St, which Tony corrects to the correct (and close by) Bleecker St. For you Marvel obsessives, Strange’s sanctum is located at 177A Bleecker St in NYC’s West Village. Don’t try to find it, as it’s well hidden by assorted mystic spells. Cool neighborhood, though. Amusingly, Tony also dismisses Strange as a “Bleecker St. magician” as if Stephen is some dude who wanders around the Village doing card tricks for tourists.

read more: Everything You Need to Know About Doctor Strange 2

HAWKEYE

- Fans who felt shortchanged by the lack of Hawkeye in Infinity War get plenty to work with this time around. Indeed, the filmmakers find Clint’s journey so essential to Endgame that they used his “snap” moment as a “pre-credits” scene, the first of its kind in Marvel Studios history. Here, we see Nathaniel Pietro Barton (so named for the fallen Quicksilver in Avengers: Age of Ultron), Lila Barton, and Laura Barton all vanish into dust.

- Clint even tells young Lila, “great job, Hawkeye.” Clint will definitely be teaching more archery in the near future, as Disney+ has a Hawkeye TV series planned, where Mr. Barton will pass on his mantle to Kate Bishop. We have more info on Kate Bishop here.

- Clint’s midlife crisis/revenge spree brings him a new costume. In the New Avengers comics, he was known as Ronin in this garb, and the reasoning behind it was completely different. We wrote more about the history of Ronin right here.

- The man we see him fighting is Akihiko, played by Hiroyuki Sanada, making his first (and last) MCU appearance. In the comics, Akihiko led the Shogun Reapers, an armored science division of the Yakuza. He appeared in the recent (and very cool) Nick Fury comic book series by James Robinson and ACO.

- In the pages of Marvel Comics, Clint’s mother’s name was indeed Edith.

BLACK WIDOW

- When Natasha goes to Vormir, the Red Skull calls her “daughter of Ivan,” a detail about her own history that even Natasha didn’t know. Which is so sad.  

- “We’re a long way from Budapest” Hawkeye cracks to Natasha when they’re flying the Milano, a reference to a conversation they had in the first Avengers film. We’re never going to learn what happened there, are we?

- Natasha’s heroic death here mirrors Gamora’s in Infinity War. But her death now all but guarantees that the upcoming Black Widow solo movie will be a prequel of some kind.

- Steve and Natasha’s friendship, which was a foundational part of The Winter Soldier, is still strong here. She has been urging him to “get a life” since The Winter Soldier when she was constantly trying to set him up, although it appears that in the time since Infinity War she has lost any semblance of a life of her own.

read more - How Avengers: Endgame Prioritizes Emotional Strength Over Physical Power

- Anybody else notice that Natasha cuts her bread in a manner that Nick Fury would not approve of?

SPIDER-MAN

- The hug between Peter and Tony is a reversal of that funny moment in Spider-Man: Homecoming when Peter thinks he’s getting a hug in the car and...most certainly is not. This hug, however, is one of the purest, most touching moments in MCU history.

- We also get to see the hideous Iron Spider armor in all its “glory.” Hopefully for the final time.

- While the age difference is too great for this to ever be a thing in the MCU, Peter Parker did indeed date Carol Danvers (briefly) during her Ms. Marvel days in the comics.

CAPTAIN MARVEL

- In the aftermath of the snap, Carol Danvers cut her hair short to her iconic ‘do with what was a rather unfortunate wig, since this was filmed before her solo movie. It was controversial when she got it in the comics insofar as some fanboys hate it any time she doesn’t have long hair. Expect those who ship ValCap to love it. It’s anyone’s bet when in the timeline any possible future Captain Marvel movies may be set and therefore what hair she’ll have. The similarity to Annette Benning’s Mar-Vell hair is probably no accident, too.

We wrote much more about the significance of Captain Marvel's haircut right here.

- Rocket razzing her about the short hair is perfect, because Carol spent some time with the Guardians of the Galaxy in the comics, much of which they spent teasing each other. Once Carol was in charge of the space station Alpha Flight (which incidentally was the kind of global shield Tony laments at his cabin that they should have built - it didn’t work because Nazi Cap was the one who orchestrated it) Rocket steals a bunch of stuff from her fancy space station.

- Carol spends much of the movie in outer space doing...outer space stuff? She’s quick to remind that there are other planets in the universe, which is true, but it does seem like a very long errand for some medicine to heal Tony, at the expense of getting to see their great comics chemistry. Space is usually where Carol goes when things get heavy and she always does help people - maybe a future movie will give her more time with whoever is still an Avenger and then they can call her out for running away.

read more: Complete Guide to Captain Marvel Easter Eggs

Judging by glowy appearances and the end of Captain Marvel, it seems we’re getting the Binary version of Captain Marvel without having to deal with the torture or the white hole business, which is convenient when it comes to a souped-up powerset with no emotional fallout too early in her story.

- Carol's costume during the finale looks slightly more like the Mar-Vell version of the suit, with a nod to her Ms. Marvel sash, as well.

ANT-MAN

- The five year time jump aging Cassie Lang up to her teenage years bodes well for the prospects of some kind of Young Avengers property down the road, as Cassie has taken on the superheroic identities of “Stinger” (when small) and “Stature” (when giant) in the comics.

- Visible on young Hank Pym’s desk in 1970 is a vintage, comic book accurate Ant-Man helmet. Presumably a prototype.

WANDA AND VISION

- Vision isn’t really mentioned in the final third of the film, although he is alluded to when Wanda absolutely loses her shit with "you took everything from me." In the comics, Wanda has been known to go off the deep end from time to time, and the intensity on display in this movie certainly feels like it could lead to something like that down the road.

Since Vision requires the mind stone to exist with free will (as established in Age of Ultron), when Cap goes back into the Quantum realm, does he return the mind stone to its rightful place and bring Vision back to life? Does that make the upcoming Disney+ series WandaVision a prequel?

- At Tony’s funeral, Hawkeye tells Wanda he wishes he could let Natasha know it worked. “She knows,” Wanda tells him. “They both do.” She is seemingly talking about Vision here.

GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

- Rocket Raccoon is wearing his classic costume from the comics for most of the movie, which is a little more swashbuckling and old-school sci-fi than what we’ve come to know from the movies. We have some more info on the weird-ass history of Rocket Raccoon in Marvel Comics right here.

- Tony misidentifies Rocket as “Ratchet” at one point, and somebody needs to make an appropriate “Ratchet Raccoon” meme/parody ASAP.

- The Asgardians of the Galaxy are absolutely a thing in the comics, albeit with a different lineup to what we have here. However, that lineup is profoundly different than what we’re going to get here, as it consists of Valkyrie (who is remaining in New Asgard in the MCU), Thunderstrike (the replacement Thor from the ‘90s), Angela, Throg (yes, the Frog Thor), the Executioner, and Kid Loki. Don’t expect to see most of these characters ever show up in the MCU.

read more - What Avengers: Endgame Means for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3

- Nebula does indeed briefly pick up the Infinity Gauntlet here, and for a moment it felt like we were going to get that classic moment from the Infinity Gauntlet comic, where Nebula becomes a god and Thanos is forced to work with the heroes to put shit right.

- Witnessing the events of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1 (notably Peter Quill’s dancing antics) from the perspective of people who don’t get to hear the soundtrack is a wonderful storytelling trick.

Does this mean that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is going to be about trying to rescue Gamora? Is it possible her story actually did end in Infinity War? The idea of having to deal with a less well-developed Gamora in Guardians 3 seems somewhat less than appealing, but perhaps its best to just trust the MCU vision. Maybe.

We wrote much more about what happened to Gamora in Endgame right here.

THE STAN LEE CAMEO

Stan Lee is driving a car with a “‘nuff said” bumper sticker. That was, of course, one of the many, many catchphrases that he often signed off the Stan’s Soapbox column with. Also, the um...the license plate says 420. We wrote much more about what seems like an otherwise minor Stan Lee cameo and its implications for the wider MCU right here. “Hey man, make love not war!”

read more - The Best Stan Lee Comics Stories

Either this or Spider-Man: Far From Home will end up being the final Stan Lee cameo. Say your goodbyes.

TIME TRAVEL

- There are, of course, plenty of references to the Back to the Future trilogy throughout Endgame, from “no betting on sporting events” to the crack about not losing Scott in the 1950s. No need to lay them all out here, right?

- Rhodey suggests killing Baby Thanos, a reference to the much-discussed ethical question: if you have the ability to travel through time, should you go back and kill Baby Hitler?

- There doesn’t seem to be any wider MCU or Marvel Comics significance to the April 7, 1970 date when Tony and Steve make their journey back to Camp Lehigh, but if anyone has any info that I don’t, please let us know.

- Tony references three bits of physics logic when discussing the difficulties of time travel. The Planck Scale is (ummm...forgive the mangling of this) an attempt to reconcile issues of relativity with problems of absolute measurements of things like units of measure in relation to time.

“The Deutsche Proposition” appears to refer to David Deutsche, a quantum physicist who has done some work with multiversal theory. If anyone can explain this to me, ummm...please do.

I’m not going to even attempt to pretend to understand what the EPR Paradox’s relation to Endgame and this movie’s time travel laws might be, however, given that it appears to be vaguely related to quantum entanglement/”spooky action at a distance” which um...I dunno, if two characters in the MCU have ever been entangled at the quantum level it sure would seem to be Steve and Peggy, wouldn’t it? Anyway, crying again...

We tried to explain all of the Avengers: Endgame time travel rules right here.

MUSIC

In addition to boasting what might be Alan Silvestri’s best, most evocative work in the MCU, Endgame features a surprising number of deep cut needledrops, the kind you might normally associate with Guardians of the Galaxy movies.

It’s a bold move to use Traffic’s mournful “Mr. Fantasy” to kick things off, with lines like “do anything take us out of this gloom” that seem particularly appropriate for the way things open for our heroes (and everyone else). Later, they digs deep into The Kinks catalogue to bust out “Supersonic Rocket Ship”  during their trip to New Asgard. With lyrics like “My supersonic ship's at your disposal/If you feel so inclined/We're gonna travel faster than light” that are appropriately sci-fi, but also “Nobody needs to be out of sight/Nobody's gonna travel second class/There'll be equality/And no suppression of minorities” it seems like it anticipated the internet’s army of babies who constantly scream about how Marvel and Star Wars are “suddenly” mixing politics with their grand epics. Lol at these clowns forever.

MISCELLANEOUS COOL STUFF

- All of the women of the MCU coming to back up Carol Danvers is not just a great moment in its own right, but feels like a little nod to A-Force, G. Willow Wilson and Marguerite Bennett’s all woman Avengers team. While there isn’t a ton of crossover between the comic book lineup and the one we see on screen here...who cares? It’s still awesome. Maybe there’s still hope for the #WomenofMarvel poker games Carol Danvers has in the comics (yes she really calls them that).

- Oh, and I'm seeing reports that Howard the Duck is visible during the final battle, just to the right (our right, not her right) of Wasp when she shows up. Keep an eye out! Howard rules. He should run for President again.

- During the group therapy session, Steve is talking to none other than Joe Russo, one half of the Russo Brothers directing team. Joe is playing the MCU’s first canonically gay character on the big screen for Marvel (there have been a handful on TV), it seems. That...that can’t be right, can it?

- One of the other members of that therapy group? None other than Jim Starlin, the creator of Thanos!

- There are not one, but two shout outs to the New York Mets in this movie. The first is, of course, the flyover of a deserted Citi Field. Of course, that could basically be Citi Field during any number of Mets Septembers when the team has been mathematically eliminated from playoff contention. The other is, of course, Joe Russo’s anecdote during the group therapy scene. I point these out because Peter Parker is canonically a Mets fan, both in the comics and in the MCU, and also because even though it is never actually stated, we can pretty much assume that Steve Rogers is a Mets fan by default, as he would have been rooting for their spiritual fathers (and similarly Steve Rogers-esque perpetual underdogs), the Brooklyn Dodgers, back before he went into the ice in the '40s. In fact, it was a Brooklyn Dodgers game playing on the radio when Steve woke up at the end of The First Avenger.

The main theme from Captain America: The First Avenger plays when Tony gives Steve his shield back, which makes for one final (albeit roundabout) New York Mets connection. When beloved Mets third baseman and team captain David Wright retired last year, he left the field for the final time to that very piece of music. David’s nickname for most of his career? “Captain America.”

- The security guard watching over the warehouse where Scott Lang’s van is being stored is reading a collection of JG Ballard short stories called Terminal Beach. One of the stories contained in that volume? A little number called “End-Game.” We’re sure it is as uplifting and bouncy as the rest of Mr. Ballard’s catalogue. Oh, and the security guard in question? That's Community's Ken Jeong.

- The earthquake under the sea, “we handle it by not handling it.” On the one hand, this a perfectly normal bit of pragmatism. On the other, you have to wonder if maybe, just maybe, this is a hint at the existence of Namor, the Sub-Mariner. Assuming he does indeed exist in the MCU (and to be clear, there are some confusing rights issues surrounding the character, Marvel Studios, and Universal), he’s the kind of character who would be able to concern himself with this. Probably not, as Endgame is admirably focused on the here and now of its characters and the MCU, but it would be Easter egg malpractice not to at least mention it here.

- Vormir is described as “the center of celestial existence.” This could be a coincidence, but the Celestials are ancient, godlike cosmic beings who are central to the mythology of Jack Kirby’s Eternals, who coincidentally are set to get an MCU movie of their own soon enough. Two Celestials have already appeared in the MCU, Knowhere, from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 1, is the severed head of a Celestial, and later in the movie you can see Eson the Searcher on a monitor screen. 

- Rhodey’s worries that skeletons on spikes are gonna start jumping out is, of course, a generalized reference to the kinds of shenanigans that Henry Jones, Jr. gets up to in the Indiana Jones trilogy. What, there was a fourth one? Never heard of it. Anyway, during this scene, while the score certainly isn’t quoting from any of John Williams’ iconic themes from those films, it does kind of do an appropriately adventurous swell there.

DOES AVENGERS: ENDGAME HAVE A POST-CREDITS SCENE?

No. Instead, we get the pre-credits scene with the Barton family becoming “dust in the wind” (that musical cue would have been far too on-the-nose). But if you listen very carefully, as the music in the end credits fade out, you can hear a faint clanging...the sound of Tony Stark forging the Mark I armor in the cave from the very first MCU movie in 2008. We wrote a little bit more about the significance of this right here.

“I’m fine. Totally fine.” - Tony Stark, speaking for all of us.

Spot something we missed? Let us know in the comments or hit us up on Twitter!

Mike Cecchini is the Editor in Chief of Den of Geek. You can read more of his work here. Follow him on Twitter @wayoutstuff.

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Feature

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Mike Cecchini Kayti Burt Delia Harrington

Jul 31, 2019

Marvel

Avengers: Endgame

Captain America

Iron Man

Thor

Captain Marvel

Thanos

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