Harry Styles! As heralded by his hobbit-looking attendant, Pip the Troll is playing Eros, aka Starfox, aka Thanos’ brother.
While his birth name is Eros, after the god of love, he sometimes goes by Starfox when he’s acting more ostentatiously as a superhero, so now you know that for better or worse this isn’t an unexpected bit of synergy with the Nintendo Cinematic Universe.
Does this mean that there are other kinds of Eternals entirely, ones that are unrelated but technically of the same “species”? Or is Eros throwing a whole wrench into everything that Arishem said about being the sole creator of each of the Eternals we see here? Marvel better clarify this for us next time, because we sure are lost.
As comics readers already know, Dane Whitman is the Marvel superhero known as the Black Knight, the possessor of the mystical Ebony Blade, which has been passed down through his family since the time of King Arthur.
Good spot! Marvel movies have occasionally alluded to DC movies and characters before, but Eternals is the first movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe to reference DC’s most famous characters by name.
And you have a character like Superman, for example, and the comics and also the brilliant filmmakers that have brought Superman to life in different movies, they are basically doing a modern interpretation of mythology.
As for Ikaris, a quasi-Superman who can fly and shoot beams from his eyes, Sprite apparently thought it would be a good gag to spread stories about his wings melting after he flew too close to the sun, and the story stuck.
Look, the great thing about this plot device is you can simply say: because Arishem made them that way.
Of course, to begin with, it doesn’t make much sense that their main language is English, considering the Eternals predate its development, but the same could be said for the Asgardians or Wakandans.
That naturally makes it tough to hold down a job or keep a relationship going, although Phastos at least seems to have filled his husband in on what the Eternals’ whole deal is.
As Phastos explains, wars produce technological advances, and technological advances allow the population to grow, all the way up to the point where there’s enough energy to fuel Tiamut’s emergence.
I imagine this less as a family family and more as an “I’m stuck with these people in a zombie apocalypse” family.
No telling exactly, but at least a few hundred years.
This ends up being one of the main reasons Arishem creates the Eternals: a new apex predator to take care of the Deviants after they had evolved beyond what Arishem intended.
We’re always happy to help explain things when we can, but when it comes to movies about flying demigods who shoot lasers from their eyes, sometimes it’s better to just roll with it.