WI: Pop Culture in a world without 9/11?

realistically, they'd probably set it in one of Marvel's fictional countries that they would legally be able to use at the time and just retrofitted to their purposes, assuming the same film-rights sell-off from OTL still happened. after all, it wasn't "just any" terrorists that abducted Tony in the movie, it was the Ten Rings, also from the comics

Honestly, this leaves either Sin-Cong/Siancong or Madripoor then. Sin-Cong would be too much like Vietnam for it to work really well. Like, it'd be a bit too obvious and it might kinda make it harder to make it be taken seriously. Madripoor meanwhile works better and could stand as this sort of counterpart to Hong Kong and Singapore. Heck, would work well being this secret base of operations that would allow the Ten Rings to function as a global syndicate and wanting to go after Tony's weapons!
 
Honestly, this leaves either Sin-Cong/Siancong or Madripoor then. Sin-Cong would be too much like Vietnam for it to work really well. Like, it'd be a bit too obvious and it might kinda make it harder to make it be taken seriously. Madripoor meanwhile works better and could stand as this sort of counterpart to Hong Kong and Singapore. Heck, would work well being this secret base of operations that would allow the Ten Rings to function as a global syndicate and wanting to go after Tony's weapons!
i would've mentioned Siancong, but i'm not sure it was even a thing in any of the comics at the time (for those unaware, "the Siancong War" is how Marvel eventually reconciled the 'Nam-era origins of alot of their characters with the floating timeline of the main continuity) and i couldn't think of any Middle Eastern ones off the top of my head, whereas for DC Comics i can immediately name Bialya and Qurac. the one other good option in my mind, Genosha, might've been off-limits since it's intrinsically linked to the X-Men, which Marvel Studios wouldn't have had the film rights to at the time, and Latveria is absolutely NOT a good fit for that kind of story.
 
i would've mentioned Siancong, but i'm not sure it was even a thing in any of the comics at the time (for those unaware, "the Siancong War" is how Marvel eventually reconciled the 'Nam-era origins of alot of their characters with the floating timeline of the main continuity) and i couldn't think of any Middle Eastern ones off the top of my head, whereas for DC Comics i can immediately name Bialya and Qurac. the one other good option in my mind, Genosha, might've been off-limits since it's intrinsically linked to the X-Men, which Marvel Studios wouldn't have had the film rights to at the time, and Latveria is absolutely NOT a good fit for that kind of story.
I think Siancong was first mentioned in like the 1960s, so we're good there. Meanwhile, the thread does say without 9/11, so Middle East doesn't get as big a focus. That said, I'd say Madripor would work, or at least a counterpart of it given its association with the mutants by disqualify it.
 
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