The TRUTH Behind DC's Most Infamous Villain

come on I've got to be getting close to the solution carry the one wait no no that's it I've got it finally and the answer it all comes down to is no no no that can't be right I must have made a mistake this impressive work for deficient singularity naively seeking answers to questions its primitive mind can scarcely comprehend get out of my head I know what you are the same could be said for every creature of creation and the deepest recesses of their being I am the hole at the center of all things the first scion of Morningstar the revelation beast that consumes mind and soul alike when you cry out in your dreams it is Darkseid that you see hello I'm Tyler this is the imaginary axis and guys I get it the term God is totally overused these days especially when it comes to villains I mean it can reference aliens ghosts science experiments power levels kind of impressive magic users it really doesn't matter just because you can do a few things the average guy can't I'm supposed to treat you like a deity ass and without a standard classification gods get their butts kicked all the time it's a pretty far cry from the majesty horror and wonder of explaining away a reality changing phenomenon that you can't comprehend or control but it's also at least part of the reason that some people are convinced darkside resident Big Bad of the DC Universe might just be a lot of talk I mean have you ever listened to one of his speeches Darkseid is the new God Darkseid is might above all Darkseid is the tiger force at the core of all things Darkseid is getting his teeth kicked in by Superman for the 11th time in a row please every would-be Conqueror sings from the same hymn sheet just calling yourself a god isn't enough to make you an actual threat at least that's what I thought but after years of reading DC Comics and nearly half a century of this power-mad cosmic menacing the Justice League I started to notice some interesting details about the nature of Darkseid's existence a collection of out of place quirks that by themselves could probably be dismissed as a few eccentric writers executive mismanagement the natural inconsistency of comics but together they began to form a pattern a pattern that wind followed led me down a rabbit hole so deep I kid you not I have never seen anything like it in all of comics a closer look at Darkseid starts to reveal a labyrinth of unsolved mysteries arguments about avatars and true forms that consume online fan sites writer interviews characters vaguely implying there's more to him than meets the eye strange facts about his history that seem to appear and disappear at random and a single undeniable truth about the root cause of every conflict that's ever plagued the DC Universe if I'm right about what I found then that dark cloud of mystery looming just out of focus beyond Darkseid contains a secret so mind wrenchingly drunk on evil and power that it redefines the modern idea of a god and I'm not exaggerating so what do I mean well if you were to just read comics casually Matt random more to follow your favorite stories there's a pretty good chance you'd never see anything off about Darkseid he's the tyrannical dictator of a dystopian nightmare world called apocalypse constantly in search of power he often finds himself in conflict with the neighboring planet New Genesis he exchanged sons with their leader at one point as a kind of customary peace offering since both armies and their commanders are roughly equivalent in power but the problem is that everybody recognizes this treaty is just a formality the moment Darkseid finds a power source that can tip the scales he'll tip them and then the rest of the universe shortly after enter the anti-life equation some sort of vaguely understood formula that once completed can force people into subjugation under Darkseid for mysterious reasons unknown to even him key portions of the equation keep cropping up on earth so Darkseid developed a habit of invading the planet the Justice League developed a habit of stopping him and you've got comics aliens heroes Universal genocide and math it's honestly a pretty standard set up there's a whole backstory about how Darkseid and his species rose power after the old gods died making them the new gods but like I mentioned before the word God is kind of overplayed these days you're totally justified in only seeing him as a really powerful alien with typical supervillain delusions of grandeur but he's not and viewing him like that does a major disservice to the secret lore hidden beneath darkside story lore that I'm willing to bet will surprise and fascinate you even if you think you already know what I'm going to talk about but in order to understand all that first we have to take a trip back to when everything began the 1970s it was a good decade the first home video game released Disney World became a thing the u.s. president was not a crook or something like that and comic book legend Jack the King Kirby left Marvel Comics to work for DC for those of you unfamiliar with the name this was a really big deal at the time Jack Kirby was and is one of the biggest names in all of comic books world-renowned co-creator of the Marvel Universe artist and plotter to Stan Lee's writing and editing so his presence at DC was a game changer and as you might have guessed Darkseid was his next big idea Jack wanted to create a group of DC characters with cosmic significance a type of modern-day myth blending religion and mysticism with science fiction modern culture and advanced technology looking at some of his earliest work with the characters we can actually see the scattered pieces of a few storylines he never got a chance to finish for example according to a divine prophecy the conflict between apocalypse and new Genesis was supposed to finally end in a brutal fight to the death between Darkseid and his son Orion remember the one he traded to his arch nemesis and a momentary bid for peace yeah smart move there big guy the anti-life equation was constantly teased but relatively little concrete information was ever given about it the new gods were also specifically located outside the multiverse set aside from DC's usual adventures in a realm beyond time and space for only Jack to work on it and their planets were so massive in size that later authors would go in to claim they dwarfed galaxies if you were to take the earth and drop it into New Genesis it would barely displace the waters of a small lake but perhaps the most important plot point to take note of is exactly how powerful Jack intended these characters to be like take this guy for example Magn are relatively inconsequential only appears in four stories as far as I can tell one was a reprint and he was dead in the other two but he can casually punch with the combined force of 100 galaxies flying at your face this sort of thing was standard fare for the new guys they were real larger-than-life characters it might be common enough for alien races to be depicted as stronger faster and smarter than the average human but these guys took it to the next level and Darkseid towered above nearly every single one of them fast enough to surprise Superman having the edge up in combat and occasionally moving with so much speed that Clark couldn't even see him remember these aren't ordinary eyes were talking about Darkseid can cross the entire universe in seconds at worst he moves fights and reacts all at about the same speed when he needs to and he can think even faster Darkseid is a super genius master strategist inventor and battle tactician with millennia of experience and war and combat training it's difficult to find a defeat of his that didn't turn out to be part of his plan he's outsmarted DC's finest on more than a few occasions he's unlocked the secrets of mind matter and soul built machines that toy with celestial bodies like pawns later stories would depict Darkseid trying to enter the source in a bid for ultimate power if you've never heard of the source before it's basically this infinite sea of energy that transcends all things and spun every reality into being since the beginning of time nothing has been able to find a way around the pan-dimensional barrier that guards it at the edge of existence unless they were a hair short of omnipotent or the source wanted them inside a set for dark-sided but of course most notably of all Jack Kirby's original version of Darkseid could go toe-to-toe with Superman and win sometimes this was back in the day when Superman was known for punching out sentient universes that ticked him off he could break down fortresses that sat comfortably at the center of the big bang raced to the edge of the multiverse in minutes and produce enough energy to collapse dozens of timelines by going all-out but Darkseid Darkseid was a challenge just to show you what I'm talking about there was one story that centered around Darkseid waking up from his supposedly final defeat after nearly 1,000 years of laying dormant needless to say his power had dipped off quite a bit during that time so he made it his mission to recharge his batteries by stealing three of the most powerful weapons in the universe and draining drei then when that didn't satisfy him he straight-up picked a fight with two different super villains known for endangering entire timelines stole all of their power and still ultimately realized he was a lot weaker than back before the old 1000-year nabbed this overwhelming strength of his was in part drawn from a special cosmic force unique to Darkseid known as the Omega effect we'll talk about that later but it was also partially due to him just being a new god Jack Kirby made him tough some of the toughest in the DC multiverse and it was clearly no accident that a veteran of the field cooked up a group of characters capable of challenging even the strongest superheroes but that's exactly where the problem started fast-forward a few years to the company-wide event comic called crisis on Infinite Earths DC executives had grown tired with everybody being confused about which characters belong to where in their massive shared multiverse backstories were becoming convoluted continuity errors were popping up everywhere Superman had too many powers for any sane person to remember them all and potential customers were starting to get intimidated I mean I can't even enjoy a good Batman comic without knowing how he's doing with Commissioner Gordon at the time which requires reading that dr. fate crossover from several years ago which can only be properly understood if I know about Batman's depth to a suicidal wizard on earth - and the established multiversal cosmology from flash 123 Superman meets he-man or that time Hitler summoned Captain Marvel across the multiverse to help him defeat the British DC needed a reboot a big reboot across all their titles that would drop every last intellectual property into a single universe with one cohesive timeline starting from the beginning so in 1985 all the storylines they were running wrapped up a little early for readers to meet the diabolical anti-monitor a new multiverse shattering menace bent upon the Omni Seidel destruction of absolutely everything a threat so great that every hero and villain across all of DC's history would have to band together to save existence itself and they did kind of the crossover of a lifetime ended in a lot of deaths a lot of changes and an infinite number of universes being completely erased from the cosmos save for one the universe that would come to be known as DC's single definitive reality but what does all this have to do with Darkseid well remember earlier when I explained that apocalypse and New Genesis exist outside of the traditional multiverse by all accounts the have been completely unaffected by this massive reality spanning crisis in fact leader series like the Orion solo run and darkside war would paint the New Gods involvement as something like passive observers to the whole thing they could remember the multiverse and everything that happened in it but they didn't do much to prevent its destruction or to remind everybody that infinite universes once existed in the minds of everyone else there simply never was a multiverse after the anti-monitor was defeated and reality shifted back to normal the memories of those affected by the crisis just shifted with it only one universe had ever existed unless you were a new God who watched the whole thing go down from a safe distance really observant readers might even remember a short line of dialogue near the climax of the crisis that implied the new gods had somehow managed to cloak their extra Universal planets from the anti-monitor during his rampage so you can call me Mike the TV because company-wide reboot or not no matter how you look at this problem the new gods had no reason to be affected by the crisis which kind of makes this next part really weird Superman fighting Darkseid post 85 Superman might have been hit hardest by the reboot taking a colossal dive in power after the crisis changed reality he went from toppling universes and timelines to toppling mountains and while he would eventually start working his way back up the ladder it doesn't make a lot of sense to see him fighting evenly with Darkseid it's so soon after a fall like that especially if this dark side was confirmed to be the same person who fought Superman's much stronger form it gets weirder later DC events would bring back the multiverse through alternate timelines possible futures new ways of manipulating space etc and sometimes Darkseid would appear in those realities to a different Darkseid someone with completely separate thoughts experiences and even looks from the original while every official DC statement continued to claim that only one Darkseid existed and he sat outside the multiverse plenty of comics would reference this fact - but sometimes apocalypse and it's dictators seem to just be out in deep space somewhere these apparent contradictions weren't unique to him either they also affected the rest of the New Gods just as chaotically one day they would easily be able to craft entire universes in their hands and the next they need to paint themselves yellow if they to beat the Green Lantern Corps in this story darkside can survive a bomb meant to destroy existence itself without a scratch and didn't this one doomsday nearly beats him to death with a few punches these issues went on for about 23 years and as far as I can tell they were all completely unintentional some writers obviously didn't realize that Darkseid and his species weren't supposed to be rebooted like nearly everyone else was as evidenced by DC's never-ending attempts to retcon the problem away o Darkseid was a lot weaker than he was supposed to be last comic maybe that's because he wasn't really Darkseid it was one of his minions in disguise or maybe it was an avatar a clone he created under his own power to do dirty work for him the new gods actually went through so many different rewrites and retcons that DC made fun of it themselves ouch but see none of these answers ever seemed to quite solve all the problems these two for example only focused on Darkseid and completely forgot that every other new god was suffering from the exact same plot hole and okay even if we assume that every new God sends out avatars to run errands for them while only existing in one form outside the multiverse how do you explain stories where apocalypse just straight-up overthrows Darkseid or dark sides been dead for ages and there's a power vacuum where New Genesis is reduced to ashes are the planets using avatars too and whatever happened to that divine prophecy that Jack Kirby talked about characters were always acting like the battle between Darkseid and Orion was fated to happen and neither of them could die until it finally occurred how does that fit in all this why can dark side sometimes bend reality control life and death seem to deleted timelines when those powers come in handy more often the new gods were occasionally treated like necessary aspects of existence that could call meetings with other celestial forces but they were also treated like ordinary aliens just as frequently which was it what does it all mean there were just too many questions and even in the world of comic books mysteries like this have an expiration date they can only exist for so long it and only become so convoluted before they attract the attention of someone willing to provide fans with all the pieces they need to finally finish the puzzle imaginary friends this is Final Crisis our last stop on honestly a pretty complicated trip for understanding a single bad guy sure there were a few detours along the way but I think you'll find that every last one of them was necessary to uncover the full picture of exactly what's going on here because you see a lot of stuff happens in Final Crisis it was heralded both as a celebration of DC's contradictions and an attempt to sort of knit them all together so they make more sense the new gods of course were the main focus of the whole event especially Darkseid and in my opinion the lead writer Grant Morrison does an excellent job of clearing it all up for us but it takes some focus and a lot of digging he is a crafty guy anyway the story more or less opens up in the fallout of Darkseid finally obtaining the complete anti-life equation we learned through dialogue that he used his newfound power to wage war against New Genesis but the results ended up being more catastrophic than even he could have predicted nearly every single God died in the struggle this ultimately led to our long awaited cosmic showdown between Darkseid and Orion but just as dear old dad was on the ropes an unseen sniper into the battle early out of nowhere by shooting Orion dead with a radion bullet toxic to the new dominance Orion's fading body fell to earth landing in Metropolis and with the last drill obstacle to his empire taking care of Darkseid slowly but surely began his latest and greatest attempt at multiversal conquest yeah heck of a way to start a finale right well full disclosure the actual comic itself isn't near as linear as I probably just made it out to be a lot of details don't get revealed until later in the narrative and there was a pretty infamous amount of hassle with scheduling and communication among a lot of writers and higher-ups so the tie-ins to this book don't always fit the final product quite right either exactly what counts as canon and where each of in fits in the timeline is clear enough if you read like everything but just understand that what you're hearing is a condensed version of the story so the Justice League starts investigating exactly how a Ryan died and who managed to kill him while prophets of Darkseid start preparing for his oncoming invasion by essentially building small armies and establishing underground brainwashing facilities the first real sign that something has gone wrong is probably when a Darkseid worshipper actually manages to capture and kill the Martian Manhunter a founding member of the Justice League it was a really shocking scene for a lot of readers the Manhunter was one of DC's most powerful in righteous heroes killed off like a background character with a flaming spear through his chest and a crowd of smiling supervillains and it didn't stop there either throughout the entire first half of this series we basically see every one of DC's heavy hitters systematically taken off the table from dark sides unholy arrival Batman is beaten and kidnapped by an agent of apocalypse Wonder Woman becomes patient zero for a deadly artificial virus both flashes get stuck in a race through time against death itself one Green Lantern is nearly killed while another is put on trial for attempted murder and even Superman is confined to the hospital when a group of villains bombed The Daily Planet putting Lois Lane in critical she was so bad that Superman was barely keeping her alive with a steady stream of infrared vision but while the heroes were reeling from their sudden shift on the food chain a lot of weird stuff was happening in the background - we kept getting evidence that Darkseid and his minions were already invading earth somehow as if they jumped into the bodies of regular mortals and we're parading them around like puppets it's a strange idea for sure but once metropolis detective Dan Turpin starts claiming he can feel someone in his head it becomes clear that there's more to the New Gods than we've ever considered turns out that most of the major masterminds embarrassing the heroes are actually Darkseid's disciple God's resurrected from the war and possessing different characters Brett Morrison explained in supplemental material that this was all Darkseid's doing and early comics established that he could recreate his followers from memory alone but they aren't really full incarnations of the new gods more like aspects of dark sides will given form Darkseid himself is the only new God actually trying to manifest on earth and he's doing it through Dan Turpin he tried to do it through a mob boss but he couldn't fully incarnate because the process requires corrupting a noble soul and once Dan finally gives in a space itself cracks open the sky starts raining blood time crumbles around dark sides new body like a cheap sheet of tin foil and the entire multiverse starts spiraling toward oblivion in a massive singularity that is Darkseid so what does all that mean well believe it or not it's not total nonsense and it actually answers more questions than it raises starting with the bullet that killed a run see during the Justice League's investigation they found the bullet not far from where Orion's body had landed which kind of makes sense if you were shot in space you'd just keep moving along the bullets path until you either landed somewhere or acted upon by another force Newton's first law but what doesn't make sense is that the bullet they found had been buried in the concrete for at least 50 years which basically means one of three things either one somebody else fired a completely unrelated hyper-advanced God killing bullet in this exact same spot over fifty years ago two orion was killed fifty years ago or three the bullet had somehow traveled through time Batman having compiled extraordinary amounts of information on the new gods as any good detective should opted for option three posing that a god weapon could feasibly fire something in the future launch its projectile backwards through the present kill Orion a few days ago and keep the bullet going for 50 years until it ran out of momentum but that would require the new gods to exist in some greater form of reality than we do they'd literally need a higher dimensional gun and a nonlinear perception of time but here's the big twist he was right it's a magic bullet literally an all-purpose God killing projectile that can be loaded and fired over and over again from any gun ever invented essence of bullet the new gods are incredibly powerful living ideas from the kind of platonic archetypal world now imagine a god bullet fired backwards through time to wind up embedded 50 years deep in the concrete's past we live in a very simple world the first dimension is length the second dimension is width the third dimension is depth and the fourth dimension is time but that's when you realize that Darkseid has very specifically always existed beyond time beyond space all the new gods have time deforms in their presence weeks smash in today's space starts to collapse Darkseid comes from a world beyond our simple four dimensions a higher reality speculated to exist in theoretical physics through string theory and all of its variants and in this story Grant Morrison is finally acknowledging that treating the new gods like what they should be when taken to the logical conclusion from here where he no longer exists Orion cannot see me as all time becomes one time the time has come to strike take a the person who saved dark side in the battle against Orion was Darkseid himself but the fight damaged him so severely that he fell onto the multiverse that's why it's collapsing the same way a two dimensional universe would collapse if you fell through a flat plane of existence every other time we've seen Darkseid it's been a mere three dimensional fragment of his infinitely larger hole explaining the inconsistencies the changes in power level all the nonsensical abilities how there can only be one of him when there appears to be infinite it was a Ryan's destiny to fall and final battle splintered like light through a prism and an infinite number of deaths and on the way he wounded you beyond repair didn't he a rotten carcass of a God crawling into the sewer to die the truth is that the real complete Darkseid the one who lives beyond space and time is bigger heavier and more powerful than the entire multiverse itself so after he was bested in battle before he was finished off for good he positioned his fall to land on top of everything one last spit in the face to the endless realities of heroes who would never let him have control he wanted them to know that he could have destroyed them at any time and he'd used the anti-life equation to finally rule existence for a brief moment before collapsing it all into an endless pit at the center of creation erasing absolutely everything below with his last breath and this depiction is consistent with Grant Morrison's work in case any of you were wondering I'm not speculating here he's made it very clear through a dozen interviews that Darkseid and the new gods all come from a higher dimension and we've just been experiencing their projections into our reality in fact they're even hints to this all throughout Final Crisis references to string theory quantum mechanics and higher dimensional concepts as Darkseid breaks through to the material world it's an idea grant likes to play with a lot in comics a recurring theme if you will in more Estonian cosmology existing in a higher dimension gives you godlike authority over the dimensions below near omnipotence you have more than volume you have hyper volume you have more than mass you have hyper mass you are infinitely more powerful than the creatures in the dimensions below you because they exist relative to gods like drawings exist relative to humans and DC's map of the multiverse reflects this to explicitly placing Darkseid and the new gods several dimensional layers above our average comic book universe they're like Lovecraftian gestalt entities that transcend and intersect our reality at innumerable points but all that being said this still doesn't address everything what exactly does it mean to be a new god what kinds of abilities are afforded to these immense pan-dimensional deities and how do they interact with our world what about all those times our 3-dimensional heroes actually traveled to apocalypse are these all the same place what does it mean for the DC multiverse and how can any of the Justice League even hope to defeat someone with trends infinite more power than all of existence combined yeah you thought I was done talking about Darkseid I haven't even started we've only just begun to scratch the surface of exactly what he is why he is and how it completely changes everything you thought you knew about DC Comics but by the time we're finished I'll have successfully traced every last act of cruelty in the multiverse back to this single twisted cosmic terror and possibly an even greater threat lurking behind the scenes but all that and more we'll have to wait until next time on the imaginary axis the script was getting long enough as is so I've decided I'm splitting it in half that being said part two will drop about one month from now so I'll see you guys then thanks for being patient with me and sticking around to watch I know I'm not as consistently active as a lot of other creators but it's not because I don't want to be and I try to make up for it when I can by really getting my A game when it is time to release a video so anyway if you don't want to be left out by the time Part 2 comes around you really should hit the subscribe button and turn on notifications so YouTube doesn't skip over you aside from that I really appreciate the support as always so just thanks for watching to the end so your friends about me if you get the chance and I'll see you next time have a fantastic day

Channel: The Imaginary Axis

Views: 1,515,944

Keywords: darkseid, justice league, dc, dc universe, superman, new gods, true form, avatar, how powerful is darkseid, how strong is darkseid, who is darkseid, what is darkseid, darkseid is, orion, steppenwolf, jla, jack kirby, grant morrison, multiverse

Id: 9iEWTHzzCVg

Length: 26min 37sec (1597 seconds)

Published: Sat May 18 2019