Where is Namor?

[BrokenEye the True False Prophet]

So I remember back when I was playing the first Lego Marvel game, when the heroes suddenly find themselves underwater. I immediately thought to myself "Oh, this is probably where they're going to introduce Namor". It makes sense, after all. Namor is Marvel's highest profile, most recognizable underwater hero. The game has a prominent underwater section. 1+1=2. Instead, I got to the end of the cut scene and... Jean Gray shows up with a force field. Okay, that makes sense too. None of these other characters can breathe underwater, so having Namor there wouldn't really help them all that much, while having the force field does, and besides, the force field gives the level an interesting and unique game mechanic, so that's cool. And I just sort of accepted it.

Flash forward to this game. The heroes are headed to the underwater city of Lemuria to fight Attuma, who I had to look up, but is apparently a Namor villain. This time everyone has hammerspace breathing apparati, so keeping away the water is no longer a concern. "Aha!" says I, "Clearly this is where they're going to introduce Namor." So cut scene plays, and the heroes arrive in Lemuria only to find another hero already on the scene, and that hero is... Stingray? Who the heck is Stingray?

Okay, so apparently Marvel has a second underwater hero. Possibly more. It's cool that they're giving lower profile heroes a shot in the spotlight, but I'm starting to detect a pattern.

I want to be clear that I don't have any particular interest in Namor the Submariner. He's just another high profile Marvel hero that I'm familiar with. It's just that it seems like the LEGO Marvel games haven't so much simply failed to include him as they did with so many other heroes, but rather that they had actively avoided him, which strikes me as really weird. In fact, in retrospect, the whole Torg-Nado level (which features not only Attuma, but Torg the Abominable Snow King, who is also apparently a Namor villain) had been originally written as featuring Namor instead of Stingray but that by the final version he'd been replaced.

Am I reading too much into this, or are they actually avoiding Namor for some reason? And if they are, why? Is it, like, some sort of legal thing?

[GamerCritter]

There could be a number of reasons for this:

1. They wanted to dig into the obscure character roster and chose Stingray instead.
2. They wanted to make Lemuria a place run by a villain
3. The same reason that the FF and X-Men aren't in the game. Namor's film rights are with Universal, even though a movie has never been made, and the head of Marvel at the time this game was being made didn't want a Marvel game promoting characters they didn't fully own.