Infinity Stones
Infinity Stones | |
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Marvel Cinematic Universe element | |
First appearance |
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Based on | Infinity Gems by Marvel Comics |
Adapted by |
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Genre | Superhero fiction |
In-universe information | |
Owners |
The Infinity Stones are fictional items in the
The Stones, with the exception of the Soul Stone, made their debuts in films leading up to
Thanos sets out to collect all six Stones in order to use them to wipe out half of all life in the universe, believing that his plan will save it from extinction. In 2018, Thanos accomplishes his goal and snaps his fingers while wearing the Infinity Gauntlet containing the Stones, causing the Blip. Thanos eventually uses the Stones again to destroy them and five years later, the surviving Avengers form a plan to go back in time to collect the Stones from other time periods in order to undo Thanos' snap. After defeating Thanos and undoing his actions from 2018, Steve Rogers / Captain America returns the Stones to the exact moments in time that the Avengers collected them from.
Despite being destroyed, the Stones make appearances in the
Fictional history
The stories of the Stones in the MCU take place in the
Ability | Color | Infinity/Nano Gauntlet location | Object | First appearance | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Space Stone
|
Create portals to teleport[1] | Blue | Middle finger | Tesseract
|
Thor |
Mind Stone
|
Control minds, enhance the user's intelligence, and create new life[1] | Yellow | Back of hand | Loki's scepter (previously) 's forehead
Vision |
The Avengers |
Reality Stone
|
Alter reality[1] | Red | Ring finger | Aether | Thor: The Dark World |
Power Stone
|
Manipulate energy; increased strength[1] | Purple | Index finger | Orb | Guardians of the Galaxy
|
Time Stone
|
Control and manipulate time[1] | Green | Thumb | Eye of Agamotto | Doctor Strange |
Soul Stone
|
Manipulate the soul and essence of a person[2] | Orange | Little finger | — | Avengers: Infinity War |
Creation
In 2014, the
Events before Infinity War
Space Stone
In 1942, the
Dr.
In 2012, Fury shows the Tesseract to Dr.
Mind Stone
The Stone is originally housed in a
Reality Stone
Eons ago,
Power Stone
Housed in the Orb hidden on the planet
Time Stone
In 2016, Dr.
Soul Stone
An object that has the ability to manipulate the soul and essence of a person,[2] control life and death, and contains a pocket dimension called the Soul World.[24] At some time in the past, Thanos tasks Gamora to find the Soul Stone, as there is little record of its existence compared to the other Infinity Stones. Gamora finds a map leading to where it was hidden: in a shrine on the planet Vormir, but chooses to destroy the map and not tell Thanos, only telling Nebula of it and swearing her to secrecy.[5]
The Blip
Thanos begins his quest to collect all six Stones by decimating Xandar to obtain the Power Stone. He then tracks down the Space Stone and intercepts the Asgardian ship on its way to Earth after the destruction of Asgard.
Thanos' four children split up, with two looking to collect the Time Stone from Strange and the other two going after Vision for the Mind Stone. In New York,
While his children are on Earth, Thanos acquires the Aether from the Collector on
Maw gets sucked out of an airlock and his ship takes Stark, Strange, and Parker to
Thanos' remaining children arrive in Wakanda where Shuri is unable to complete the removal of the Mind Stone from Vision's head before she is attacked by Glaive. Thanos arrives looking to get the Stone himself, using some of the Stones against the Avengers and Wakandans trying to fight him off. As a result of the Stone still being in Vision's head, Wanda is forced to destroy Vision and the Stone to try to prevent Thanos from getting it, only for Thanos to use the Time Stone to repair them both and collect the latter. Thanos uses all of the Stones to initiate the Blip, where he is briefly transported into the Soul World and encounters a vision of a young Gamora.[28] He then teleports away with the Space Stone to the Garden. Thanos uses the Stones to destroy them to prevent further use in the future.[5][29][30]
Time heist
After
Rogers, Stark, Lang, and Banner travel to an alternate 2012, where the Space, Mind, and Time Stones are all located. Stark and Lang attempt to steal the alternate 2012 Tesseract, but the 2012 Hulk accidentally knocks Stark down and the 2012 Tesseract is taken by the 2012 Loki, who uses it to open a wormhole and escape. Rogers retrieves the scepter containing the Mind Stone, using it to render his alternate 2012 self unconscious after he mistook him for a disguised Loki. Banner speaks with the
Thor and Rocket travel back to Asgard in an alternate 2013 to extract the Aether from Jane Foster. James Rhodes and Nebula travel back to Morag in an alternate 2014, subduing the alternate 2014 Peter Quill before taking the 2014 Power Stone in its Orb. Romanoff and Clint Barton travel to Vormir in an alternate 2014, where each attempts to sacrifice themselves to allow the other to return with the Stone, ultimately ending with Romanoff sacrificing herself.[29]
All of the Stones are brought back to the present day where Stark creates a Nano Gauntlet to house the Stones, which Banner uses to undo the Blip. An alternate 2014 Thanos brings his army to the future, destroying the compound, but is ultimately defeated when Stark sacrifices himself to disintegrate Thanos and his army with the Stones in the Nano Gauntlet. After Stark's funeral, Rogers returns all of the past Stones to the points in time that they were collected from.[29]
Aftermath
Three weeks after Thanos' snap is undone, a still grieving Wanda Maximoff uses her connection with the Mind Stone to reanimate a fake Vision. Later on,
Alternate versions
Other versions of the Stones are depicted in the alternate realities of the MCU multiverse.
Loki
An alternate 2012 Loki, who escaped during the Avengers attempt to collect all the Infinity Stones to undo Thanos' actions
What If...?
In an
As one universe suffers from a quantum zombie outbreak, Vision discovers that his Mind Stone can be used to cure the infected. However, it is unable to cure the infected Maximoff, due to her powers coming from the Stone, prompting Vision to initially try and feed other survivors to Maximoff to keep her calm until he can properly cure her.[38] When other heroes find him, Vision accepts that his actions are wrong and he gives the Stone to the surviving heroes to take to Wakanda, sacrificing himself out of guilt. However, a zombified Thanos arrives in Wakanda, possessing the other five Infinity Stones in his Gauntlet.[39]
In another scenario, Thanos once again arrives on Earth with five Stones, only to discover that
In
Infinity Gauntlet
The Infinity Gauntlet is a left handed metal
In Endgame, after Thanos erases half of all life in the universe and destroys them, the Gauntlet becomes permanently bound to his swollen arm, which is later severed by Thor. Five years later, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and Rocket use
Background and development
The Infinity Stones played a big role in the
Differences from the comics
In the comics, Thanos is motivated to retrieve and use the
In the comics, the gems had other rules, and simply being in possession of one wasn't good enough. Each gem was powered by mastering a primordial force characterized by one of the other gems. For example, mastering the Power Gem was dependent on the user's mastery of the mind, while mastery of the soul correlated with the power of the Mind Gem.[55] The colors of the stones were originally different in the comics. They were purple for Space, yellow for Reality, red for Power, blue for Mind, orange for Time, and green for Soul.[56] The stone colors were updated in the Marvel Legacy series to match the film versions.[57] In the MCU, the Time Stone is housed in the Eye of Agamotto and the Space Stone is housed in the Tesseract. However, the Marvel Comics versions of these two stones have no connections to these relics.[58][59]
Reception and popular culture
The existence of the Infinity Stones in the MCU has been described as the "one driving force that unifies all the robot-alien-hero fighting" by
Charles Pulliam-Moore of Gizmodo thought that the Soul Stone was the least interesting Stone because unlike the others, it was never given a chance to show why it can be formidable on its own like the other Stones had a chance to do in previous MCU films. However, during the Infinity War directors commentary, they confirmed that the Stone has some of the elements of its comic counterpart including "conjuring the spiritual representations of the dead on another plane of existence".[61]
At
The Snap and the Blip entered the popular lexicon as a metaphor for the idea of unilaterally bringing into being one's desired goals through one's force of will alone. In a November 30, 2023, article for
"But Musk, who told Sorkin that he believed data to be more valuable than gold, remains committed to the idea that owning X means owning the chief information exchange for all of this planet's 8 billion citizens. He thinks he can Thanos Snap wars and recessions into being merely by posting a recycled Pepe the Frog meme from 2016 on there. There is no reasoning with someone who is so megalomaniacal and so, SO stupid."[65]
Scientific analysis and accuracy
A 2018 article in Extreme Mechanics Letters proposed that Thanos would have needed "a minimum grip strength of over 40,000 tons, which is approximately 750,000 times that of a typical man", to break the Tesseract depicted in the film, presuming that the object was an "all-carbon nano-tesseract or hypercube projected into 3D space".[66] A study published in 2020 focused on the ability to control matter as Thanos does while using the Stones. The researchers found that on a macroscopic level, someone would need a large amount of energy to control matter, similarly to the Stones. However, microscopicly scientists can mimic Thanos' control of matter at the colloidal level. The researchers were able to make billions of colloidal particles with changeable responsiveness, patchiness, shapes, and sizes by manipulating them using triggers, including temperature, pH, and light.[67]
Notes
- ^ The main MCU universe was established to be Earth-616 in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022).
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- S2CID 139519200.
- ISSN 2588-7637.
External links
- Infinity Stones on Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki, an external wiki
- Infinity Stones on Marvel Database, a Marvel Comics wiki