An official tie-in novel has revealed more Captain Marvel connections to Guardians of the Galaxy that may explain the movie's start point. Set in 1995, Captain Marvel is essentially a prequel story for the entire MCU. It features a never-before-seen adventure of the young Nick Fury and Phil Coulson, and it's believed Fury's encounter with Captain Marvel will serve as the inspiration for the Avengers Initiative.

But attention is particularly focused on the relationship between Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy. Both films feature the alien race known as the Kree, and Captain Marvel seems to be a back-door origin story for both Lee Pace's Ronan and Djimon Hounsou's Korath. More importantly, in terms of galactic politics in Captain Marvel, the Kree are at war with the Skrulls and the Xandarians; by the time of Guardians of the Galaxy, the Kree Empire is pursuing a controversial peace treaty with Xandar. The war between the Kree and Xandar had been going on for millennia, so what changed in that key, 20-year period? An official tie-in novel for Captain Marvel has just provided an answer.

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Steve Behling's Starforce on the Rise reveals that the Kree have been losing their wars. The Kree Empire has been battling on two fronts for thousands of years, but by the 1990s the Supreme Intelligence had realized they were overstretched. The Kree and the Xandarians were almost perfectly matched, neither side possessing a military advantage, meaning that the borders of Kree and Xandarian space hadn't changed for a long time. Meanwhile, the Skrulls were advancing into Kree space, successfully conquering worlds on the outskirts of the Kree Empire. The Supreme Intelligence realized it had to pursue a peace treaty with the Xandarians in order to free up resources to take on the Skrulls.

The Supreme Intelligence and the Nova Prime appear to have conducted secret talks, and decided to quietly work to maintain the balance of power between the two empires while they worked towards a peace treaty. In fact, in Starforce on the Rise the Nova Prime secretly ensures the plans of the latest Xandarian super-weapon are acquired by the Kree in order to prevent one side having a military advantage over the other. This kind of conspiracy would naturally be viewed as treason, and as a result the Supreme Intelligence and the Nova Prime kept their actions from any but a chosen few loyalists. On the Kree side, that included Starforce Commander Yon-Rogg and his elite Starforce unit; surprisingly, on the Xandarian side it included Nova Corps agent Rhomann Dey, played by John C. Reilly in Guardians of the Galaxy.

This fits perfectly with the events of Guardians of the Galaxy, explaining both why the Kree and Xandarian Empires ultimately signed a peace treaty some 20 years later, and why extremists like Ronan viewed the treaty as an act of treachery. The Kree have a cultural hatred of subterfuge, and if Ronan learned what the Supreme Intelligence had been doing all these years in Captain Marvel, he'd no doubt consider it a betrayal of everything the Kree hold dear.

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