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Recent issues of Defenders indicate that the team organized by Doctor Strange played a crucial role in the creation of Marvel’s darkest gods.
WARNING: The following contains major spoilers for recent issues of Defenders, available now from Marvel Comics.
In Al Ewing and Javier Rodriguez’s run on Defenders, Doctor Strange took the team on a journey through the previous incarnations of the Marvel Universe to stop the time-traveling scientist Carlo Zota from undoing all of reality. Throughout their odyssey, the team witnessed the natural progression of fallen cosmos that led to the Eighth and current iteration of reality, with each incarnation introducing a distinct element that would become a core facet of the Marvel Universe, including magic, science, and the concepts of good and evil.
In Defenders #4 (by Erwing, Rodriquez, and VC’s Joe Caramagna), the team finally managed to corner Zota within the Third Cosmos, where the embodiments of life and death, Lifebringer One and the Anti-All, battled one another for dominance over the newly-formed multiverse. While Lifebringer One served as the Marvel Universe’s first hero, the Anti-All was the living embodiment of darkness and death, and the Defenders’ role in its destruction makes them inadvertently responsible for the existence of the dark gods that spawned from the Anti-All’s remains, including the Symbiote god Knull.
Taking on the form of a massive eldritch dragon, the Anti-All was the embodiment of oblivion itself. Driven by the instinctual desire to consume and destroy the burgeoning multiverse, the Anti-All was locked in a never-ending battle with Lifebringer One, the embodiment of creation and existence. Although the Anti-All wasn’t necessarily an evil entity (as the concept of evil wouldn’t exist until the birth of the Fourth Cosmos), its desire to destroy all made it an existential threat to the young multiverse. During the battle against Zota, the Defenders’ use of technology and magic inadvertently created a paradox that weakened Lifebringer One, and the Anti-All began to overpower its counterpart. Realizing that this would destroy the multiverse, Zota sacrificed himself to restore Lifebringer One’s strength with the Eternity Mask, allowing the first hero to slay its sibling and ensure that life became the dominant force in the multiverse.
While the defeat of the Anti-All ensured that history played out the way it was intended, its death would have disastrous consequences for the cosmos that would follow the Third. After it was slain, fragments of the Anti-All’s shattered essence would be scattered across the multiverse, where they would take root as a substance known as “the living abyss.” Over time, the living abyss would spawn a host of beings who would go on to become some of the most powerful and dangerous entities in the Marvel Universe.
The most infamous of these entities is Knull, who would use the living abyss to create the Symbiotes who then waged war against the entire universe. However, the living abyss also spawned other nightmarish entities, including Amatsu-Mikaboshi and the Røkkva, each of whom went on to become some of the most infamous figures within Shinto and Norse mythology.
While the Defenders didn’t actively play a role in creating any of the dark gods that would emerge from the living abyss, their actions, as well as those of Zota, would inadvertently play a role in their eventual creation. Although the existence of the five cosmos that proceeded the Third prove that Lifebringer One was destined to defeat the Anti-All in combat, the interference of Zota and the Defenders drastically changed the nature of the battle, forcing Lifebringer one to resort to extreme measures that resulted in the Anti-All’s shattering. While the Anti-All’s demise might have always ended with the same results, it’s just as likely that the Defenders’ actions altered what would have been a clean death by shining sword into the messy dismemberment that seeded the multiverse with the living abyss.
While the Anti-All and the Røkkva were mindless entities serving a cosmic function, Knull and Amatsu-Mikaboshi were cunning masterminds who actively chose to commit genocide on a galactic scale. Their actions resulted in the death of entire civilizations, and whether they intended to or not, the Defenders and Zota played a crucial role in bringing the universe’s darkest gods to life.
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