WARNING: The following article contains spoilers for Infinity Wars #5 by Gerry Duggan, Mike Deodato Jr., Frank Martin and Cory Petit, in stores now.
At the start of Marvel's latest cosmic event, the daughter of Thanos, Gamora, collected all six Infinity Stones and collapsed all of reality in on itself. As a result, every two characters in the Marvel Universe were merged into a single new entity, populating an entirely new universe with its own fleshed-out history. Captain America and Doctor Strange were warped into the Soldier Supreme, Iron Man and Thor into the Iron Hammer, and so on and so forth.
For the past few months, Infinity Wars tie-in issues have focused on these Infinity Warps characters, showing us their altered origin stories, and the reality's new, warped mythos. Of course, most readers assume that once the Infinity Wars event reaches its conclusion, these characters will once again be split back into two distinct characters, restoring everything back to order. However, Infinity Wars #5 hints that that may not exactly be the case.
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Currently, the entire Infinity Warps reality is housed in the Soul Stone, with every hero, both warped and those who have been un-warped by Loki, fighting the all-consuming creature known as Devondra. As the fight between heroes and monster rages on, Adam Warlock meets the Soldier Supreme, promising him that they will soon manage to undo Gamora's reality-altering actions and separate him back into Captain America and Doctor Strange.
The problem is, the Soldier Supreme isn't interested. As he explains, he has lived an entire life as himself, and therefore doesn't want to simply be reverted back into these two characters, essentially being erased out of existence. "I do not consent to being unmade!" he exclaims, making the matter of simply putting everything back to normal a little more complicated.
Suddenly, undoing the Infinity Warps reality has become a moral issue. Simply unmerging the characters back to their regular selves means essentially killing an entire universe. But Adam Warlock may have the answer; theoretically, if Devondra is defeated and cast out of Soul World, the Infinity Warps reality could be allowed to live on as a bubble reality in the Soul Gem. But for that to happen, they need to defeat Devondra, and they need the power of all of the Infinity Stones.
To summarize, Infinity Wars #5 just introduced the idea that the Infinity Warps reality may yet live on. This means it wouldn't simply be a throwaway alternate reality that's gone almost as suddenly as it arrived. Instead, the time, energy and detail that went into the various Infinity Warps tie-in books may be more important than we realized. At first, they seemed like fun, yet ultimately unimportant chapters, but now, they just might become the chronicles of a new Marvel Universe.
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