I’m only caught up to the show, so please limit your responses if you can, but I had a question that kept picking at me.
Why is our Mark so good while in most other universe’s Mark turns evil and helps his father? Is it because of some kind of tenent Debby or his friends instilled in him? Or is it more just a reality of our Mark’s ideals with no specific reason behind it.
Any theories?
We really don’t know what variables changed to make our Mark variant… so variant.
We do know that Mark got his powers quite later than expected. In the Atom Eve special, it seems Omni-Mann was expecting Mark to already have powers by the time he was six or seven.
I suspect this may have been the big difference. If Mark got his powers even just five years earlier, he’d have far less human socialization, no young adult relationships, and have far more time to be indoctrinated. It’s no big deal for Omni-Man to wait out an extra decade given his lifespan, but a late-bloomer Mark is a Mark who gets extra time to appreciate the world of humans and human relationships.
I think thats it. You cannot indoctrinate someone properly about being a supreme race if the person doesnt have that power yet. If Mark had his powers earlier, Nolan would have gone on missions with him and shown him how fragile humans are compared to them and that it is no issue when some die. That way Mark would have become more numb to the violence. He also could say stuff like “on Viltrume, that would never have happend. We have the technology to save those people anf our people are far superior so it wouldnt have happend in the first place”.
Also, the younger you are, the easier it is to influence someone.
I can see how getting his powers earlier could allow for his father more control in guiding his son. When he got his powers at 18 he was already a man at this point. He had values and morals, which isnt something you can easily just break down.
Our Mark is different because our Omni-Man is different. He didn’t do a good job of indoctrinating him and enjoyed his life on earth a bit too much. So I guess the credit for that goes to our Debbie who did a better job of humanizing Omni-Man than other Debbies.
Agreed, Nolan learned a lot of humanity and love from Debbie.
I think his powers developing so late has something to do with it. If his powers manifest at a younger age, Nolan starts indoctrinating him sooner and begins raising him as a Viltrumite before he succumbs to and begins to enjoy his Earth life.
- His powers matured later.
- Nolan didn’t tell him about the true Viltrum until later and raised him as a human for his whole life.
- Debbie is the voice of empathy and humanity for Nolan’s conscience.
My theory is that Seance Dog taught him a lot of valuable lessons
cause he’s main character the other marks aren’t 😊
Getting his powers later, better relationships, small things happening at the right time.
Really though it’s because main Mark is just a good person and it’s why he’s a hero and who we follow the story of.
(have only seen the show) I think its
- He gets his powers as a kid in other timelines, and is indoctrinated early on by Nolan
- If there ARE other good Marks, Omniman kills them
There’s lots of explanations here, but the comics offer an actual explanation later on.
Of course this is quite spoilery, so I’ll tag it for anyone else that doesn’t mind spoilers. Don’t read if you are only a show viewer.
From issue #104:
![Angstrom talking to Eve] How do you think that happens – Mark turning to the dark side? !<
!A lot of it was just backwards dimensions, good was bad, that kind of thing, and then a bunch of them were related to his father and the Viltrumites… they took a different tactic - didn’t allow him to grow up on Earth before they took over etc.!<
!But a lot of them, way more than I would have expected, have to do with you [Eve]. You were hurt or were killed… and he just snapped.!<
I think it was a ton of things going “wrong” in That Moment when Nolan approached him.
Mark got rocked by Hail Mary, watched his dad murder The Immortal (who Mark probably thought was a really cool guy as a kid) while he screamed that Omni-man murdered the Guardians, and then had his mother referred to as a pet. That last one was probably a huge kicker, TBH.
Remove any of those, and Mark is probably in a good enough state of mind to follow Nolan. We see that at least one Mark appears to have had basically the same journey as ours and joined Nolan. So while everything leading up to it was part, it was likely that the way things played out in Nolan’s confession was the breaking point for our Mark.
Robot still is in his original deformed body (I hope that gets explained, he says his childhood was like a horror movie, so what were his parents like?), so there were other things that happened probably.
I do wonder how many is most. I mean that implies at least 51% but there is a lot of wiggle room in that.