BunBun299 wrote:There's more evidence for the AvP movies fitting into the main Aliens timeline than their is Prometheus and Covenant. Like Lance Henriksen appearing in AvP as the guy whom the Bishop android would eventually be based on.
Prometheus and Covenant are just a hot mess.
Evidence from the AVP movies doesn't matter, since it's basically just using a the movies as evidence for themselves, and would be part of what's being thrown out. Evidence from within the non-AVP movies might mean something, but not evidence from within the AvP movies themselves.
But also those very things, like the involvement of Weyland (the whole circumstances surrounding such, including aliens being on Earth long before the original movies, and the all asinine stuff about the Predators) are just painful fanfic-grade lore autocannibalism. Those are movies written by and for thirteen year olds. They are internally consistent, but they make the lore simpler and stupider.
Prometheus's stupidity lies mostly in it's characters. Dumbasses that behave entirely according to writer fiat rather than any kind of consistent or believable logic. This sucks, but it doesn't have to effect the lore or any other movie. It's quarantine-able simply by writing the characters better in any sequels (Covenant totally fumbles that ball, from what I've heard, but that too is quarantine-able from the lore).
The lore concepts are half fine/good. On the one hand the link between humanity and the engineers is trite AF, and making the Space Jockeys look like just big humans is taking something that was cool and memorable BECAUSE it was alien and exotic, and retconning it to be mundane. On the other hand, I can live with this if it's used to sufficiently creative and interesting ends going forward.
Which brings me to the gripping hand: I love the whole black goo thing, and the idea of the alien as just an iterative product of that real threat, rather than an actual species. It opens so many doors for the franchise and its universe. Previous to this, the alien had become too nailed down: we knew what it is and how it works too well for it to have the same power anymore. Further sequels using that premise have nowhere to go except to repeat the same motions/stories over and over with progressively stupider protagonists, becoming essentially just another Jason Voorhees style series.
But this makes the alien more varied, more unpredictable now. It can change, and and there can be other horrifying products of the black goo that play by unfamiliar rules. And not only is it not inconsistent with previous films, it actually implies explanations for inconsistencies already present in those films. The alien now has a built-in mechanism for keeping things fresh and, well alien. It's like Doctor Who's regeneration lore mechanic, but for body horror space monsters!
...But then Covenant deliberately screws that up, by making them not an iteration of black goo mutation, but a solidified product of David's genetic engineering. So now they're back to being a defined species with fixed, predictable rules that
we were already thoroughly familiar with again. The golden, franchise saving idea that made Prometheus worth keeping around despite all its frustrating jackassery, and they deliberately threw it away so they could have their safe, familiar, predictable, Jason Voorheese monster back. So now there really is no reason to keep Prometheus.
So I guess in my headcannon, the black goo is still a thing: the Aliens are a constantly mutating macro-virus rather than a species, and the payload that facehuggers inject into their victims is a cocktail of genetic fuckery rather than an egg. BUT the space jockeys are still strange creatures that who knows what they really look like, and the Nostromo crew are still the first humans to ever see either. Plenty of human have seen Predators, but almost none have either lived to tell, or have any physical evidence to show. And the alien skull Danny Glover saw in that predator spaceship was just a one-off monster that one pred had the glory of encountering (just as weird and rare to them as to us, they just have a different reaction), not a traditional game or training animal.
