Avengers vs Eternals Just Changed Everything You Know About a Major Hero
While getting information from the Avengers' Celestial base, the Eternals throw into question every aspect of one of Marvel's oldest superheroes.
Warning: contains spoilers for Eternals #10!
As the Avengers and Eternals move towards Marvel's next promised conflict Judgment Day, one of Earth's Mightiest Heroes was just totally redefined by the ages-old, godlike beings. This twist occurs in Eternals #10, from Kieron Gillen and Esad Ribic.
After Thanos kidnaps one of their own, the Eternals seek to get revenge and rescue Phastos, deciding their mission will require Celestial guidance. However, there's only one Celestial currently on Earth. The problem is, it's dead, and the current base of operations for the Avengers. Sersi makes an appointment with her old Avengers teammates as a ruse to allow the other Eternals access to communicate with 'Avengers Mountain,' but Tony Stark is understandably wary and suspicious of the Eternals' motives after their last misadventure. Thankfully, Sersi's meeting is with a different Avengers hero.
After infiltrating the Avengers' base, several Eternals seek to gain some information on who they are up against in the current Avengers roster. This information is displayed in the book as a data page provided by the Great Machine, aka the planet Earth. Since this knowledge is being communicated by the planet's consciousness, it's an interesting and meta way to communicate the information. While all the Avengers get strange summaries communicating the Eternals' unique perspective on the heroes, one entry includes a genuine revelation. At the bottom of the list of Avengers is Namor the Sub-Mariner. One of Marvel's first heroes - later retconned to be a mutant - Namor is described as an 'Atlantean,' 'Mutant,' 'King,' with each word in quotes.
These quotation marks indicate that the titles by which Namor is known are in some way inaccurate. The fact that Namor technically isn't a king has already been proved true, as his former kingdom of Atlantis recently rejected his leadership after a period of chaos, leading him to join the Avengers in an effort to seek redemption. However, as far as fans know, Namor is indeed both an Atlantean and a genetic mutant. Apparently, the planet knows differently. Thor's religious title of "All-Father," is treated in the same way, but here it's clear that while the Eternals may not accept the grandiose term, they do recognize that the information it communicates is accurate.
Namor is famously the child of an Atlantean and a human, while modern stories have defined him as a mutant (a status which saw him fight alongside the X-Men for a time.) Now, major questions have to be asked about these facts, as it appears Eternals #10 just swept away everything fans thought they knew about one of Marvel's oldest characters.
How this will be expanded upon has yet to be seen, but it's certainly an interesting annotation to Namor's history, suggesting his renewed membership on the Avengers will be something of a reinvention for the character, and raising the possibility that the upcoming Judgment Day conflict with the Eternals may include some major revelations about Atlantis' Avenging Son.