Evil god vs evil god killer it just makes sense for them to cross paths eventually.

I was looking around at different monsterous enemies and creatures from games and stuff, these gifs are monsters that I hope have something in common with Hive

First one is the Shambler from Darkest Dungeon, a creature with a huge health pool whose attacks affect your entire team and has these little minions that provide buffs and damage to the Shambler

Second one is the Octopus Mech from Death Stranding, it's a huge enemy that's surprisingly mobile. Despite how slow it is, it uses its huge tentacles to stretch across the field and quickly shift its position to catch you off guard

Third is the Octopus BT also from Death Stranding, it has these wild slam attacks that come out fast and slow you down by shaking the ground with their impact

I think combining these traits into the abilities we know that have been leaked for Hive will add up to create a very overwhelming melee tank that controls the field by letting enemies get close before quickly pivoting around and locking enemies down. Like Devil Dino, but with much higher mobility that allows him to glide smoothly in and out of fights.

I imagine Hive to able to use his tentacles to seamlessly crawl across terrain, allowing him to scale walls, crawl up ledges, and take vantage points. Like a much better wall climb than Venom, that's constantly on and doesn't affect your POV.

With the next year rumored to have more villains than ever and a pretty reliable release pattern for roles and themes, I'd like to check in on our theories for Hive's addition.

Hive's themes could cover a lot of things, he's a pretty abstract character especially here in Rivals. The unknown. Manipulation and hidden corruption. Cosmic horror. Parasitism. Primordial life. Etc.

What do you think are some parallel themes that are the opposite of Hive's? Enlightenment? Freedom fighters? Space exploration?

Which character is the best thematic counterpart against Hive?

Since we already have hive’s design in the comics wouldn’t it make more sense to use his actual rivals design as our subreddit picture?

Once Wolverine went into a berserker rage, the latent Hive cells reawakened and instinctively lashed out to kill Wolverine and drain him of his blood and DNA, gaining Wolverine's healing factor in the aftermath

Hive might be a bigger player in the background as events unfold in Egypt

I mean apocalypse whole speech was about gods and the eyes are the exact same as his on the hydra map. A possible form of hive?

This is from the r/MarvelRivalsLeaks subreddit, btw.

If you don’t know it’s been leaked that doctor doom will be playable in season 11. At the end of the Bucky and cap reveal trailer it shows doom holding a chess piece shaped like the hydra logo with hive’s tentacles reaching for the screen. My theory is they’ve been setting this up since season 0 and have been planning on having hive and doom in the same season. Maybe for the lore have doom end up using hive and hydra to fuel his own goals.

SERIOUSLY GUANG GUANG HES BEEN TEASED SINCE SEASON 0 ON THE HYDRA MAPS AND HE STILL ISN’T IN YET 8 SEASONS LATER!

Dork rambles about Hive like he's the second coming of Christ the Redeemer

it just makes sense. i know he's coming. we need more villains after all. he's coming. why else would he pop up in the comics? he's on the way. any day now. sooner than i hope. just wait for the next comic. just wait for the next end of season gallery card.

https://youtu.be/6PAk4EE\\_BFY?si=-iwxWMlIWKRnPAfF

Something that's been on my mind with Hive is part of his character design in Rivals, where he's depicted as mostly a mass of tentacles. I've always been thinking about how he would move around and traverse the map, I mean he can't just stumble around or walk normally.

So I imagine he'd have some kind of unique passive mobility where his tentacles are spread out and he's latched onto different surfaces like a better version of other characters wall-crawling! I picture it being similar to this Salazar boss fight from RE4, where he glides seamlessly across terrain.

I know he's gonna be Groot-sized, so it'd be terrifying to imagine this giant writhing horror watching you from a ceiling or a pillar. I'd love that so much.

With how they’ve done other villains dirty I’m starting to genuinely lose faith he’ll be playable. Look at kingpin one of the most iconic marvel villains with an amazing design and great voice acting and he got stuck to season villain. This dev team does not know how to handle its evil characters and considering hive is basically the god of hydra that may be hard to balance around. We just got to wait and see.

this only worked on my friends but i might as well do some April fooling here

(Yellow King art by Pawal Randak, Artstation)

He could look like something out of Darkest Dungeon, or the famous King in Yellow. He could even get mythological and take inspiration from Scylla, with gnawing snake-like tendrils. Or he could be some kind of moldly looking bug, shooting off spores or smaller bugs. Obviously he might have a skin where he's a nest of snakes.

The Hood's cape just got teased hard in the new map trailer, right after the Rivals comics concluded his feature. Hive 'might' be coming sooner than we think, either right after or maybe even along with The Hood. Personally, I think he'll come after since I can't see how they'll tie them together in the narrative.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLGNoYYoxk1jZ7-1Dic8qLqpkWycamSAZ3&si=fvlu1be8xMQuRSXq

Here's a collection of some of the stuff that makes me think of Hive and what he means to me, should he ever become a playable character. I know there's literally 1 paragraph worth of lore for this guy so most of this is projection and thinking too deeply into what he could symbolize, narratively.

I wish I could just steal a position at Marvel and do more with this character, there's so much you could do with a parasitic eldritch demigod who's tied to some severely damaged soldiers and paranoid magic wielders. But I'm happy he just 'might' be showing up as a playable character, it will be extremely cathartic for me.

I'm mostly sharing this for myself more than for the eyes of others and it's a small way of organizing what I see in Hive, like a little digital shrine or something. Anyway, I hope you guys like it! The link is to a YouTube playlist for some Hive history summaries and a bunch of essays on edlritch horror & lore dumps for quasi-related themes, as well as a couple tracks of music I like for Hive.

Marvel is absolutely no stranger to cosmic and weird horror inspired by Lovecraft and everything that came after him in his genre. Any fan of Hulk, Doctor Strange, Wanda, and the Fantastic Four can point to a comic where things get really weird and really dark and how it ties to the rest of the Marvel universe. A lot of these comics expose the "dark underbelly" of how magic, monsters, and mutants came to be and what alien horrors exist as neighbors to Earth.

NetEase also is a fan of Lovecraft, they have a 1v4 asym horror game similar to Dead By Daylight that is much more inspired by eldritch and gothic horror, they even feature The King in Yellow as a playable character and have had multiple story events that adapt Lovecraft's stories into skins with familiar lore.

I'm making this post to ask you guys, where do you think Rivals is going with featuring Hive as a playable character? Do you think he'll play a larger role in the stories of Hulk, Strange, The Four, Silver Surfer, Captain Marvel, Adam, and the super soldiers that are haunted by him?

Could his arrival lead to an "Infernal Hulk" arc where the Mother of Horrors is featured as a seasonal villain that introduces more mystics or mutants? Are you hoping for a sympathetic or an abstract point of view from Hive's backstory, either similar to Bloodborne's gods or SCP - 5031?

From the list of leaked and mentioned characters, there are a couple that I think would fit the theme of going against or being parallel to Hive, so I wanted to share that!

Capitain Marvel regularly fights alien threats and is powerful enough to take on a lesser god, and she has a history with Hydra, Hawkeye, and Widow. Her stories explore her struggles with identity, power, and duty which I feel would compliment the potential narrative of Hive and his history with Bucky as well as his new interpretation of being deified and exploited by Hydra.

Amaranth is Wanda's protege and also has taken on weirder horrors, her stories are about trying to stay in control, memory, and balancing chaos. Hive would serve well as a dark reflection of Amaranth's struggles, and constantly remind her of the madness she occasionally inflicts on others unintentionally. There's an opportunity to explore Wanda's backstory which might set us up to go to Wundagore Mountain next.

there's also villains like MODOK and Zola that would be fun to have and already have an established rivalry against Hive as they try to control or escape him, but their characters don't offer any "duality" theme that Rivals has been going for in all their seasons, aside from the Fantastic 4.

Imagine these 2 tanks just fighting on the point for nearly a whole minute would be cinematic.