Discussions over who the strongest character is in the MCU and pretty much any other fictional world tends to be something that fans will eat up in a hurry since they want to know who can beat up who, which character can top another character, and who’s at the top of the heap. The MCU has been notorious for this in recent years since the arrival of Captain Marvel, and even before that when the MCU got started. The characters that people remembered being insanely strong in the comics had been stripped of a good bit of their power, or at least some of them had, as Thor and a few others felt a bit underpowered despite their feats of strength and the abilities they’d been given. But when other heroes were given the ability to take on and in some cases take out characters that were above their class, it became a bit hard to deal with. Captain Marvel was one of those that many people found difficult to dub as ‘the strongest Avenger’. Some would claim that this is because she’s a woman, but the truth is that the character in the comics might have earned the distinction of being tough and fully capable, but her emergence into the MCU was tough to deal with when it came to a lot of people.
The point however is that there will always be a stronger character to come along, since there have only ever been a couple of gold standards in the comics, and one of those is Superman without any doubt. Too often it happens that writers will find a way to keep the heroes in any story from falling prey to a lesser attack, or will give them an obscure weakness that makes no sense to the story. For instance, one of Superman’s main weaknesses, his aversion to kryptonite, relied heavily on exposure to a rock that had come from his homeworld, meaning that initially there wasn’t anything that could touch him, since bullets bounced off and even a nuclear warhead wasn’t much of an issue since he could catch it and toss the weapon out into space. For a while it didn’t look like anything except an abundance of kryptonite could take Superman down. But as the years passed, things changed.
This is one area where Marvel tends to have one up on DC, since DC has a bevy of super-powered individuals, and they do explore their characters fairly well. But when it comes to diversity in the strengths and weakness department, Marvel has created stronger and stronger characters, but they’ve balanced them out with various ways that have made the ‘strongest character’ trope matter a little less. Sure, plenty of people are still going to worry their pretty little heads about it, but the fact is that as both franchises have moved forward, things have evolved in a way that makes even Superman pale by comparison now and then as stronger and more efficient characters have been on the rise for years. The evolution of the comics is necessary, but kind of like diversity, it has to be taken in a direction that feels natural and organic, since suddenly revealing heroes that are immensely strong and could help solve one problem or another becomes an issue that many people have noticed over the years.
One of the most noticeable groups of today would be The Eternals since no matter what they were like in the comics, their appearance in the MCU and their goals have changed a bit. While they weren’t meant to meddle in the affairs of mankind, save to advance the species, this hypocritical way of life still altered and shaped, and helped, and harmed, humanity in a lot of ways, and the fact is that the Eternals had the nerve to blame humans for harnessing the A-bomb when Phastos was the one that delivered the knowledge to them. For all their strength and knowledge, the Eternals were shown to be no better than many characters. But this is how balancing insanely strong characters out is done, since for all their insane physical strength and the abilities they’re given, bringing them back down to earth in some manner is necessary to make the point that there will always be a stronger character, but there’s a way to keep them from eclipsing those that came before them.
A throwdown between some of the characters in the MCU would be great to see how things might turn out, but it’s easy to think that this won’t happen since the MCU might tease the idea of showing who’s the strongest, but they probably won’t take things that far unless it’s profitable to do so. In the meantime, stronger characters will always come along from time to time, and the manner in which they’re balanced out in the overall franchise will be interesting to see.
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