Board Thread:Administrative/@comment-24800939-20171122230252/@comment-61022-20171124032246

Anabelle's explanation is mostly correct. There is a bit more to it.

A lot of those What If realities are parallel worlds where certain events are different (IE: The Korvac example you used above)

A divergent reality is created by outside interference. This is typically done two ways: disruptive time travel or a reality warp.

Annabelle's Age of Apocalypse example a good one for time travel. A reality warp example would be the House of M reality warp, or (more recently) the reality warp used to reset the status quo after Secret Empire.

Time travel divergences are created when someone goes back in time and creates a significant change to history. In some cases, the change is so significant that it can temporarily or permanently overwrite the baseline reality. (The Age of Apocalypse is a good example of this, also the story in is another) However, "setting things right" usually restores the original reality. The divergent history doesn't cease to exist, it continues independently.

When Legion went back and time and accidentally killed his father he significantly altered history creating Earth-295 which replaced Earth-616. However, when Bishop went back and stopped him from doing so, it reinstated Earth-616, yet Earth-295 endured.

The reality warp scenario creates a divergence by means of altering reality to an extreme degree. The only way this alteration can be reversed is by altering reality again, restoring it to the status quo. However, which the status-quo reality endures, the altered one also continues on as a separate reality.

In the case of a lot of these What If? realities while their histories differ from that of similar realities, the "divergences" are not the cause of outside interference (time travel, reality warps etc) They merely exist parallel to the reality we know best.

One could assume that a lot of these realities are the same as Earth-616 until the difference in history (The Korvac story you mentioned above as an example) However, sometimes certain facts can come up later that could say otherwise. The best example of this is, the Fantastic Five story wherein Spider-Man joins the Fantastic Four during his first meeting with the group (deviating from ) From all appearances, it would seem that the difference between the two realities is that moment. However, much later in, the Doctor Doom from that reality mentions that the Thor of his world has red hair. Suggesting that there are more differences that just haven't been seen.

How we choose to deal with these things (when writing a character profile for example) we state that presumably the history of such-and-such mirrors that of their Earth-616 counterpart up to a certain point. Emphasis on presumably. That way if there are later revelations that reveal other, previously undisclosed changes, we can add those in easily.