actual endgame thoughts, now

[gladdecease]

I had a list in my head, who I thought was dying or otherwise getting out of the game, based on contracts and upcoming projects and story arcs. It went a bit like

1. Steve
2. Natasha
3. Tony
4. Bruce??

Steve and Natasha had been ready and willing to die for the cause since AOU, so I was pretty sure that was how they'd go out. Tony, I was hoping for a disqualifying injury or something - heart damage, maybe, that'd be thematic. Bruce, I didn't know how - his ability to die at all is still kind of in question - but he felt like a character they'd failed to build a set of movies around, so he might as well die here.

I didn't expect Gamora back.

(Immediately after, I was kind of salty about how GotG Vol 3 is going to have to devote screen time to retreading the Gamora learns to be vulnerable and express love stuff, but as I was explaining my thoughts to the friend I saw Endgame with, I said, "Oh, no, it's worse than that, they're gonna have to spend most of the movie finding her before they can get to reestablishing relationshi - wait, uh, that's essentially Spock's arc in Star Trek III and IV. Huh. Okay, that might work." So... we'll see about that.)

I didn't expect Tony to die.

Once I saw Madison, I wondered - but they'd pulled a reversal on that trope with Clint back in AOU, so I wasn't sure if it was gonna happen until it was already happening. I'm still not sure how I feel about it - sure, canon had long since established that Tony couldn't retire and mean it, not so long as there were problems he and his suit could fix, but... I wanted his rest to be rest, not death.

Contrariwise, I was highly okay with Steve's rest being death! And I'm not comfortable with what happened instead! At all!! (As I said to my friend in the theater: Captain America let 9/11 happen!!) It makes the time travel/fragmenting timelines thing even more confusing for me. And also the salt I already extracted in my previous post/reaction fic.

(Oh wait, here's some more salt:

• a line that didn't fit with Bucky's resignation in that fic: "Yeah, Steve was willing to die for me. He was willing to die for anyone - or, hell, everyone. I never thought Carter was any different, but... I guess her, he was willing to live for."
• I sure am glad I never finished watching Agent Carter, because there's no way any of that is canon anymore! Peggy tearfully vowing to move on as she destroys the last vial of Steve's blood was moving as hell but it's definitely either undone or undermined by later events so fuck me for daring to care about any of that I guess!!!

Fuck!)

But it's fully in character, the same way Tony's only real retirement being death is fully in character - the same way Natasha is almost eager to die to restore the other half of all living things. And to be fair, 50% of the universe probably outweighs all the red that'd been in her ledger.

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Highlights

• Steve is worthy! Almost worth it for Thor's "I knew it!" alone, but the subsequent fight scene was highly satisfying.
• Equally satisfying: Sam's voice in Steve's ear, then Dr. Strange's portals appearing, then T'Challa and Shuri and Okoye walking through, then every single possible supporting player arriving, and then: "Avengers... assemble."
• Thor dual-wielding was also good; ditto "here, you take the smaller one." A strong Ragnarok Thor vibe there.
• Carol being so dangerous that every cannon on 2014 Thanos's ship redirected to fire at her and it did nothing. She blew through that ship like a hot knife through butter.
• 2014 Gamora and Nebula and 2014 Nebula!! Sisters struggling to trust but reaching out and wanting it all the while! (The mirrored moment of Gamora literally reaching out to Nebula is so good.
• Rescue!! (fucking finally)
• Carol's timeskip haircut is very good.
• the tiniest sliver of brucenat got me like ;~;
• Wanda vs 2014 Thanos; at first he doesn't know who she is and Does Not Care, but then he has to order All The Missiles fired at her to get away. Very nice.
  • TBH the one disappointing thing about Thor killing present day Thanos off is that Wanda doesn't get to do this to him. He would know why he was getting this beating - and probably be cool with it, TBH.
  • (I was hoping she'd get inside his head and tear that up too but that part of her power-set appears to have been fully abandoned at this point!!)
• All those good good callbacks:
  • "I am Iron Man."
  • You already know the "don't do anything stupid"/"how can I" moment caused me real physical pain.
  • The elevator scene that you think is gonna rehash the CATWS elevator fight scene was amazing, Steve's gall in that moment was almost beyond belief.
  • The Proof That Tony Stark Has a Heart arc reactor in the wreath, I c a n n o t.
  • Madison wants to eat cheeseburgers. ;~;

I didn't put it together myself, but Harley (the child from IM3) was the other gangly teen at the funeral! Talk about your unexpected cameos.

(also unexpected: Stan Lee ;~;)

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Less than high-lights

Your First Canon Gay is a one-scene civilian character/director cameo?? Whose canon queerness is limited to pronoun usage??? That shit is going to get subtitled and dubbed out in every g d foreign country where Marvel claims to be 'concerned' queerness will 'impact sales'. What a half-assed move.

This movie is very long, but I promise you were allowed to give Nebula more than two seconds to deal with her complicated emotions RE: Thanos Being Dead before gently shutting the eyes of his corpse head!! P l e a s e ! ! !

The girl power!!1 moment felt very... self-important? Like, ooh, look, here's every single girl left alive! Watch them kick ass! Except one of those girls was Mantis and... I love my anxious antennaed empath alien girl, but her straight-up fighting ability is awfully limited. Including her in this lineup made it seem like they had to include everyone because the actual number of women fighters was so small - or that the only purpose for the scene was to have every woman on screen at once. Either way: jarring, took me out of the story for a moment.

The Peters both come off poorly - Quill a caricature of an insecure moron, essentially the same treatment he got in IW; Parker a lost little lamb babbling about how great it is to see everybody. (Tangent: did everybody at his school get snapped? Five years is nbd to most of the supporting casts for these movies, but Peter is a teenager and five years can be the difference between 'being in high school' and 'graduated college'.)

(Related: accounting for the snap is going to be a hell of a problem bureaucratically. Ages! Taxes? Property ownership?? Did the snap fix all the houses/cars/cities that got rundown with no people in them? Ugh, what a headache.)

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Thoughts with no moral value placed on them

At one point I said to my friend if Nebula wasn't a networked device we wouldn't be having this problem! and I stand by that assertion, for all that it gave us the more satisfying end for Thanos (no self-satisfied inevitable-victory death for 2014 you!) and unfridged Gamora (sort of).

Clint and Natasha doing a tearful goodbye and forehead-press in the sunset right before fighting each other for the right to die to save his family the universe his family* was very on brand.

*A plot point I predicted the first time I saw his Grief Haircut in promo images, btw, though following up the haircut with a rampage against all organized crime that survived the snap was... unexpected.

Vision? is? where????
> my friend suggested "in the pilot episode of the Vision/Wanda show, which I guess makes sense

Loki???
> I guess Also Waiting Until His Show's Pilot To Reappear.
> I'm annoyed that it's 2012 Loki; I found the Ragnarok (or even The Dark World) version far more bearable.

The alternate history that springs from the 2012 mission must have had a very interesting CATWS experience. Steve, primed to see Buckys alive around every corner; Rumlow, expecting Steve to join with him after the HYDRA split! They probably wouldn't even orchestrate an elevator fight scene!!
> alternately, somebody whispers 'hail hydra' in Steve's ear at some pre-CATWS point and he just! wrecks their shit!!!
>> actually this would probably go Real Bad for Bucky, Let's Not

Still mad no one who would have recognized Red Skull got to see - and then punch the face of - Red Skull!!! You should not have Nazis on screen unless they're going to get punched!!!!!

ugh, I just thought about the rules of time travel established by the Sorcerer Supreme and how they mean Steve staying behind should've created a branch timeline rather than allow him to show up old in the new canon timeline and

1. the only way he could've stayed in this timeline is if he did absolutely nothing meaningful ever with his life, which actively distresses me
2. now I'm mad about time travel! again!!
3. f u c k m e ! ! !

Comments

apologies for the length; I'm still figuring out where I stand on a lot of these thoughts

[gladdecease]

Yeah, having slept on it I think a predestination paradox is what's intended here. I don't like it - I think it's cruel to use Peggy's dementia as a workaround, old Steve must've straight up stole the identity of a guy who was at that HYDRA camp, and I struggle to make it fit with the time travel concepts Bruce and the Ancient One (whose name I'd completely forgotten, thank you for that) established* - but I've accepted it.

...I don't think that necessarily means anything re: Gamora, though. I can't see a way for Steve to return the stones that undoes 2012 Loki escaping with the Tessaract/the 2014 double Nebula situation. Those branch timelines aren't going to be Dormammu-endtimes levels of different from the main timeline, but I don't think any action by Steve can bring them sufficiently back in line that the timelines become essentially identical. (Well... maybe the Loki one. Depends what he does with the Tessaract? But this also seems the simplest way to get him alive for his Disney+ show, so who knows.)

...all of which was to say, the 2014 Gamora is from a branch where Thanos never acquired the soul stone, so she wasn't exchanged for it. Bruce was trying to restore a Natasha from within the main timeline, so it failed; I think if he'd tried to pull, say, Natasha from the 2012 branch over he could've done it, but then that timeline would've been Natasha-less and deeply impacted. (The 2014 branch is already Thanos/Nebula/etc.-less, so being Gamora-less does not make it any less changed.)

As to where Gamora ended up at movie's end? She's the deadliest woman in the galaxy, there looked to be some spaceships among the massive Avengers line-up, for which many magic portals to alien worlds must've been opened after the fighting was over. I think she found a way.

*I'd taken Bruce's insistence that time travel doesn't work like the movies to imply a timeline fork situation, wherein the act of traveling backwards creates a new timeline, to whose future you ultimately return, thus avoiding the grandfather paradox by having your grandfather remain alive in your original timeline.

That seemed to hold true with Nebula - killing her 2014 self didn't make her vanish - but then the presence of old Steve (who, if this logic holds, should've disappeared into a new timeline) complicates things.

The visual produced by Bruce returning the stone to the Ancient One suggests that sufficiently similar timelines will collapse back together, which is where I get my "Steve does nothing meaningful ever" conclusion. (There's a debate to be had about what 'sufficiently similar' means on a galactic scale, but given how little we know about the details of Steve's actions during that last bout of travel it's not a debate I'm interested in.)

And I suppose I take your point that there could've been other planes, other threats the main characters didn't have to face because old Steve was there in the background. I also need to acknowledge that Steve was pretty dang old in 2001. Also also, real world events are tied up in a lot of messy feelings that make them hard to use in fiction.

So, limiting the scope to MCU-only events... assuming that it is a classic predestination paradox, and all events we saw in the movies up to this point already took into account the presence of old Steve, either there were so many things going on that were So Big Only Secret Cap Can Save Us that he had no time to rout out HYDRA, his most hated foe, from within his wife's spy agency, or prevent his lifelong best friend from being brainwashed and tortured for decades... or he decided that allowing these events to go as he'd experienced them was acceptable, because without those events he never would've ended up where he wanted to be.

I'm skeptical about the likelihood of the first, and I don't quite like the Steve that would make that second call.

(I also don't think that second call is... true? For all that Bucky could fight nearly on Steve's level in CATWS, he's relegated to Good With A Gun after that, so his presence in Infinity War isn't needed. You need SHIELD gone for Civil War to happen, but I don't think IW needed CW to happen. Do we need CW for Black Panther to happen? We need T'Chaka dead, but I think that's all. Do we need BP to happen for IW to end as it does? Eh, I guess so.)