The Void and the Multiversal War: Marvel's Two Best-Buried Concepts, Explained

Two of the MCU's biggest ideas have been fully established on screen and then left completely unaddressed. One is a war that supposedly reduced an infinite multiverse to a single timeline. The other is the place where everything that lost got thrown. Both are canon. Neither has been touched since 2024.

The Multiversal War, As Told by the Only Witness

The account comes from He Who Remains in Loki's season one finale, and it is worth stating precisely because almost every retelling online embellishes it.

1. In the 31st century, a scientist on Earth discovered the existence of parallel universes.
2. He made contact with variants of himself across those universes. Initially they shared knowledge and technology.
3. Some of those variants were not interested in sharing. They were interested in conquering, and they turned the discovery into an invasion route.
4. A war broke out between the variants that spread across realities and, in his framing, nearly ended everything that exists.
5. He found Alioth — a creature of pure destructive time — and weaponised it. Alioth consumed the other timelines.
6. He then isolated one timeline, built the TVA to police it, and pruned every deviation for eternity.

That is the entire canonical account of the war. It comes from an unreliable narrator who admits within the same scene that he manipulates, and it has never been corroborated by any other source in the franchise.

Everything the MCU knows about the war that shaped the multiverse comes from the man who won it, told to two people he intended to hand the throne to. That is not history. That is a victory speech.

The Void: What It Actually Is

The Void is where pruned things go. Not erased — relocated. Loki's fifth episode reveals that a reset charge does not destroy a branch; it transports whatever is caught in it to a place at the end of time, where Alioth roams and consumes anything that tries to leave.

What Deadpool & Wolverine Added

Deadpool & Wolverine took the Void from a plot device to a place with a population, and the choice of what to fill it with was pointed. It became a landfill of cancelled franchises: characters from films that did not get sequels, projects that were shelved, actors whose Marvel careers ended without an ending. Cassandra Nova rules it. Alioth is still there. Wade and Logan fight their way out.

The film is doing something sly. It made the Void mean, diegetically, exactly what it means commercially — the place where corporate acquisition sends the things it does not want. That is a joke that also happens to be the truest piece of world-building in the whole 2024 slate.

The Question Nobody Has Asked On Screen

If the TVA no longer prunes, and if Loki's ascension preserved the branches, then the Void has stopped receiving deliveries. But it has not been emptied. Everything and everyone dumped there over the TVA's entire operational history is still there, guarded by a creature that was created to end a war.

• It is the only known location containing survivors from realities that no longer exist anywhere else.
• It is the only place the MCU has established where beings from mutually incompatible continuities can coexist without an incursion.
• It has no established rules for time, which makes it the one setting where a story can use characters from any era without a chronology problem.
• It has already been used to reintroduce legacy actors once, successfully, in a film that grossed over a billion dollars.

Any one of those makes it a useful location for a film about heroes from three distinct universes. All four together make it conspicuous. We stress that Marvel has confirmed nothing about the Void appearing in Doomsday or Secret Wars, and no casting or marketing has pointed there.

Alioth, and Why It Is Still the Scariest Thing in the MCU

Alioth deserves its own paragraph because the franchise has quietly established it as the most powerful entity it has ever depicted and then dropped the subject. It is not a creature with a plan; it is described as a living tempest, an entropic force that existed before the TVA and consumed the timelines that lost the war. He Who Remains did not defeat it. He harnessed it — the difference matters.

In Loki's fifth episode, a group of variants briefly enchant it rather than fight it, which is the only method anyone has found that works. In Deadpool & Wolverine it is still roaming the Void, still functionally unopposable, still nobody's ally. A cosmology that contains a weapon capable of eating realities, currently unowned and unsupervised, is a cosmology with a very obvious third act available to it.

The Comics Version Is Bigger

On the page, the concept closest to the MCU's Multiversal War is the incursion cycle of Jonathan Hickman's New Avengers, which ends with two universes and then none — and with Doom salvaging the debris. The MCU's version is smaller and more personal: one man, his variants, and a monopoly. Whether Marvel scales it up to the comics version in 2027 is the central open question of the saga.

For how the war's outcome shaped the rules everyone lives under, see our Sacred Timeline explainer; for what the agency built to enforce it is doing now, see our TVA breakdown.