Thread:Spencerz/@comment-16461120-20151128004137/@comment-26100657-20151202031116

Instead of the Red Room academy setup we saw in the movie, with many girls being trained to be Black Widows, the Red Room is a school for assassins (not all Black Widows) that Natasha was put in as a twelve year old. Ivan Somodorov (who is similar to Ivan Petrovich Bezukhov (Earth-616)), took special interest in Romanoff and trained her personally before granting her the title of Black Widow (abusing her, submitting her to electric shocks and experiments, etc). It kind of feels like a mashup of her two semi-interchangeable backstories from Earth-616 that are always getting retconned. Also, it just occured to me that Stohl most likely wrote the book without having seen Age of Ultron, since the book only came out in October and AOU came out in May. (Books aren't published until about six months after they are submitted in their finished form, and even if she saw the movie before submitting the book, it would have been right before she submitted it, so there would have been no point in rerouting the entire plot to fit continuity and having to go through the entire editing process again.)