#anti endgame

[musette22]

I would pay actual money to never have to see that awful endgame hug ever again. Everything about it is off and it makes me profoundly uncomfortable. Seriously get that rubbish away from me, it's got nothing to do with the real Stucky or the real Steve and that's a fact

[levelofyoureye]

lmao so i was just going through my camera roll and clearing some photos out, when i stumbled across this screenshot i took in january of 2020 and…

i’m in shock. i literally don’t know how i forgot this happened, like i was actually astounded when i found this. NEVER forget when steve rogers’ ending was so horrifically out-of character that SEBASTIAN STAN HIMSELF posted a screenshot to instagram of a tweet dogging on his ending. it’s been years and i still haven’t forgiven marvel. i don’t think i ever will.

[eddiesheep]

I love the theory that the elderly Steve at the end of Endgame was a skrull. Why? Because it would literally fix EVERITHING revolving Steve's ending, as well as major plot inconsistencies.

⤷ How come Steve was able to just... wait out at the same park that his past-self left for the past when it was clearly established that when you go back in time to change something, a new branch is created in the timeline, creating a completely new reality, therefore it would be impossible for old Steve to just wait at the same park to meet up with Sam and bucky? (it was literally the explanation they gave as to why they couldn't just go back in time and kill baby-Thanos lmao)

Because that wasn't the real Steve Rogers, it was a skrull pretending to be him.

⤷ Why would Steve ever want to go back to the past to live the rest of his life with a woman he barely knew when it was already established by Steve him-fucking-self that he was ready to move on?

Because he wouldn't. That wasn't the real Steve Rogers, it was a skrull pretending to be him!

⤷ How could Steve ever be capable of living his cute little domestic life, when logically, the past version of Bucky would still be out there at the same time as him? Being abused, brainwashed and tortured into becoming a cold-killing machine for HYDRA??

Because he couldn't. That wasn't the real Steve Rogers!

⤷ In what world would Steve ever be physically capable of, not only forgiving, but also living the rest of his life with Peggy Carter?? Peggy-fucking-Carter??? You know, the woman who knowingly hired and worked with NAZIS??

None! That wasn't the real Steve Rogers!

⤷ How come Steve would ever have the balls to leave Bucky- no! Not just any Bucky- THE James Buchanan Barnes, to fed for himself in a whole new world he has not yet had time to understand as well as Steve did, when he PROMISED him that it would always be them against the world? Till' the end of the fucking line?

Because he would never! That wasn't the real Steve Rogers!

See what I mean? That could transition into to such an interesting conflict too! Maybe (to tie in with a better version of Secret Invasion idk) it was part of the skrulls' plot! To take Captain America off the picture, and manipulate others into believing that Steve just left them out of his own volition, as a way to discourage anyone from looking for him. To make taking over the earth easier!

Gosh! The concept of skrulls has got to be one of the most interesting, most scary concepts the MCU has ever introduced, losing only to The Red Room.

And yet, just like The Red Room, the MCU fucked it all up. I hate it.

[morgangalaxy43]

I feel like the main 6 Avengers actually had really bad character development in Avengers Endgame because Clint didn’t really do anything, Bruce’s arc was skipped over, Natasha was killed off, Tony died even though it wasn’t necessary, Thor’s struggles where made into a joke and Steve left Bucky and all of his teammates to be with Peggy in past

A lot things that happened in Avengers Endgame felt more like character regressions instead of going forward

[legalandnotease]

You know what annoys me most about Endgame (well a lot of things do), but most of all?

The way that it completely ignores what Natasha did. How crucial her actions were to the ultimate victory. Instead they tried to make Endgame into Iron Man 4, and pretend Tony saved everyone singlehandedly. Yet the truth is the plan to reverse the snap would *never have worked* without Natasha's sacrifice.

They had to have all of the stones to snap everybody back- and they also had to have all the Stones to snap Thanos away. Even one missing, and not only would the Snapped have stayed dead, but Thanos would have won a second time.

In truth, it was Natasha who saved the universe and Natasha who ensured ultimate victory against Thanos. Anybody could have snapped Thanos away (it didn't have to be Tony), but few could have paid the ultimate price for the Soul Stone.

In fact: let's talk about the Soul Stone. It was the most difficult and costly of all the Stones to obtain. I read that some theories that the souls of the Snapped were contained in the Stone, and so it was the key to bringing everyne back.

Meaning that Stone was also the one which allowed Thanos and his army to be Snapped away.

So again, it all comes back to Natasha, and her choice on Vormir.

Yet she didn't even get a funeral. The movie just completely ignores her to give Tony all the credit and all the fuss when he actually did very little.

And had to be emotionally blackmailed and tricked to do even that. Natasha was willing every step of the way.

[imposterogers]

endgame is so funny bc they said “instead of respecting the og avengers what if we gave them endings that were equivalent to their own personal hells”

[lavenderpanic]

There is no universe in which Steve went back in time and, instead of freeing Bucky or Isaiah or exposing HYDRA, he chose to marry Peggy and live a quiet life and ignore everything he found out about in the 21st century

[ivysos2001]

Anyone who knows anything about Steve Rogers knows he’s the most stubborn person in the world (especially when it comes to people he cares about) so tbh I really can’t see a reality where he gets to vormir to return the soul stone and calmly accepts that his partner and closest friend of the last eleven years is dead and gone and moves on rather than getting there and doing something reckless and insane to try to get her back

[fizz-pop-thwip]

I like to imagine that the super soldier serum enhances dreams too like it gives the affected really vivid and realistic dreams.

In Steve's case this was just overwhelming because not only was he having crazy intense dreams but in a fresh new array of colour that he'd never experienced previous. And it's extra traumatic on top of all of that when he started having nightmares about his experiences on the field.

Imagine it in Bucky's case too like, Jesus. He would wake up screaming and not even remember why due to the shock therapy he'd been receiving stunting his memory so badly. And when he's finally escaped Hydra and his mind starts healing is when these dreams would affect him the worst. Because now he actually remembers them and how horrible they are and his waking up to screaming finally starts to make sense.

But there would be a nice side to it too.

Steve will always know when Bucky's had a dream about the 30s because Bucky will be stuck to his back, hugging him from behind like they used to back then. And Bucky will know Steve has had one when he wakes up and stretches his back in an arch with a groan as if he still has scoliosis.

All it takes is for Steve to take his first deep breath of the morning, in those big lungs that he never used to have, for him to realise where he is again. Bucky just had to feel the big body in his arms.

They'll both just sit in the moment whenever it occurs because of course they miss it, before the fighting, before the war and the hell they now know. But they still have each other, so they never really lost home. They have each other so they're okay.

[luna-rainbow]

On Steve Rogers, loss, and loneliness

Unlike some of the other characters, Steve's hurt isn't as plain to the eye. His demeanour is usually one of stoicism and optimism, and it is easy to forget that his story is steeped in loss and loneliness.

Steve's introduction highlighted how alone he was - an orphan, armed with a list of ailments, and hiding behind a newspaper to avoid small chat with other recruits. When rejected by the recruitment centre, Steve shrugs and heads to watch a movie - alone.

Steve is a loner, we are shown, and then just as abruptly - perhaps just like the way it had happened many years ago - Bucky crashes into Steve's world and hooks an arm around his shoulders and noisily talks about an expo and dispels all of Steve's melancholic air. Steve is a loner, except for Bucky.

But Bucky is now leaving to go to war.

Steve is used to being stoic, because there were no adults around him to spoil him. He is used to being buoyant, because Sarah taught him how to pick himself up and carry on. Steve is used facing the empty house and lonely silence -- except for Bucky, who filled his room with chatter, "We can put the couch cushions on the floor, like when we were kids."

So when we hear the anxious strain in his voice as he is informed by Bucky that he is leaving -- it also becomes plain that Steve is also used to loss, or the threat of loss shadowing him, everyday.

In his short life, he has already lost so much. He has lost his health (my thought is he was probably healthier in his early childhood until he caught scarlet fever, and then his health got a lot worse after that). He has lost his father, and all the security of having a family breadwinner. He has lost his mother - to long hours of work and eventually to the disease she was battling against.

What he dreads would happen, does happen. Life seems to have a way of chasing him down like that. Sarah gets sick, and his fear of coming home to find her gone...one day inevitably comes true.

At his darkest moment, Bucky squeezes his shoulder and promises, "You don't have to do it (alone). I'm with you to the end of the line."

It's just enough for Steve to square his shoulders and push on, as Sarah had always taught him to do. Deep inside - possibly buried so deep that he can barely put it into words, he knows that he pulled through because "Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky."

I'm going to pause here and emphasise how deeply lonely (and young) Steve was, and how, naturally, the only stable presence — ie Bucky — in his life, through periods of terrible grief and uncertainty, is going to be such a deep-rooted emotional foundation for him (regardless of how you ship).

When the draft does come for Bucky, it's not just Bucky who's unhappy, it's Steve who's also aghast. Suddenly, the possibility of losing his last bastion looms over him, and he remembers the fear and anxiety and the devastating grief of losing Sarah. But it is also a war that needs fighting - so he comes up with a solution: sign himself up. He can't keep Bucky from the war, but he wants to fight alongside him. Besides Bucky, what else does he have to lose?

"Men are laying down their lives, I have no right to do any less. That's what you don't understand, Bucky."

He says this angrily, because the words he can't say aloud are, "You are laying down your life, Bucky, and I might never see you again, and I can't go through all that again, not by myself."

When he hears about the 107th being captured, he has to go. He is saving Bucky, sure, but he is also saving himself, because the pillar, the lifebuoy, the harness that has kept him afloat all those years is Bucky, and he's terrified of sinking.

The serum makes him taller and more women pause to smile at him, but he is still incredibly alone. He sits alone during break, he draws alone in his book, he runs off alone and none of the USO girls even notices until it's his turn on stage.

But Bucky notices him immediately, and says, "I thought you were smaller," and, "Did it hurt?"

Steve doesn't really believe in miracles. His whole life feels like one bad luck after another, even if he forces one foot in front of another and keeps marching on. But maybe at that moment, he feels like Bucky is his miracle. Bucky, who always seems to notice when he's alone and pulls him into his social circle. Bucky, who had seen him lose his dad and Sarah and promised him the end of the line. Bucky, who he - and all the commanders - thought was dead, pulls through and gives him another promise - that he would follow the little guy back into war.

When Steve is finally thrust into the frontline, the losses keeps mounting, man after man are falling, condolence letter after letter is being written. And then towards the end of 1944, the tides seem to finally turn. German forces are waning, the Allied forces are advancing, and quietly, secretly, Steve dreams of home.

And that dream dies with Bucky.

"Honour the dignity of his choice," he is told, but he can't shake off the guilt.

He pushes himself forward, step by dragging step. Nazi Germany is falling. He is taking down Hydra with his own hands…and at the end, he buries them all in the ocean with himself.

His is sinking, but he isn’t afraid, because he is going where all the people who mattered are waiting.

And he is denied even that.

He opens his eyes to a world he doesn’t recognise. They tell him they had won the war.

But no one wants to speak with him about what was lost.

A folder of old photos, the museum of unmoving murals, the silent movies of a smile he would never see again.

He thought he had lost all there was to lose, but somehow life always seem to find something else to take.

What we see of off-duty Steve in the modern world is once again a figure of loneliness. He goes to the gym alone, he goes for a ride on the train alone, he sits at the cafe alone, he goes for runs alone, he goes to the museum alone.

Only during those solitary moments he could truly be Steve Rogers, instead of trying to meet everyone's expectations of Captain America. He is just shy of 27 years old, but suddenly, he can no longer lay claim to youth. Only a dream ago he was "just a kid from Brooklyn", and now he's an "old-fashioned" (as per Coulson) "older fellow" (as per Tony).

He's in the history books, he's on the television, he's in the classrooms; everyone knows of Captain America, but Steve Rogers is lost.

He had been willing to lose his life on the Valkyrie, but what he lost was every living connection and his own identity.

"Must have freaked you out, coming home after the whole defrosting thing," the friendly man says to him on their first meeting, but Sam only knows half of it.

The too soft bed and the too quiet room is one thing, the unshakeable nightmares another, but the worst of it is -- this isn't home.

He is marooned in a place that bears eerie resemblance to the world he knew, without being familiar.

Until the moment Bucky's mask comes off.

It's like the anchor dropping. He's now got a connection tethering him to this strange place, someone with "shared experience" that means he is no longer alone, and he is no longer a ghost forgotten by the seventy years of lost time.

"He doesn't know you."

"He will."

He has to believe that Bucky will, because Bucky is proof that Steve Rogers exists.

And once again, Bucky is his miracle. On the brink of killing them both, Bucky reels back from his brainwashing and hauls them both to safety.

Even if Bucky leaves after that, he's left behind something Steve hasn't had for a long time -- hope, and belonging.

"Family, stability. The guy who wanted all that went in the ice seventy-five years ago," he says to Tony as he prepares to meet the ragged team of enhanced people that is to become the Avengers. "I'm home."

Stoic and buoyant as he has always been, Steve sets to work building that home for himself. Gradually, we see Steve open up. He forms new connections and new friendships, he talks about his vulnerabilities with people he trusts, and he reclaims his own identity. He looks for Bucky, and waits until Bucky is ready to build that home for himself.

Until it is once again blown apart by the end of Infinity War - he loses not just Bucky, the anchor to his past, but the new family he has made apart from Natasha.

That's why it makes sense that Steve, not Tony, is the one working so hard to reverse the Snap. His family was 5 years ago, Tony's family is now. The people who rallied behind Steve and not Captain America, the people who followed him after he dropped the shield, the people with whom he no longer needed to be endlessly lonely and tirelessly stoic and who loved him for who Steve Rogers was, they all vanished in the Snap.

So even if there was only a small hope, Steve wants them back.

And that's why his decision to leave everything he had built, the sacrifices he had made to bring them back, in order to go into a life of incredibly loneliness and deception is still the dumbest narrative faux pas in the MCU.

[biwoop]

[atlas-on-earth]

just rewatched avengers endgame with my mother and i cried because of steve's ending (not in the way the writers intended) and my mother just looked at me with knowing in her eyes bc she knew i'd go nuclear. now in our house we call him the bad writing boogeyman.

[stuffedanimalsgalore]

I can not stand when people get mad at Steve for leaving Bucky bc no that was not Steve!!! He would never!!! That was the bad-writing man!!! Steve actually stayed ❤️

[lucidasidera]

You know, there is something deeply satisfying about your gay love story being so epic and romantic and obvious that the showrunners had to create a whole bunch of parallel universes to repurpose it beat for beat, over and over, in an attempt to sell their endgame hetero couple.

You can keep trying, MCU, but you know the shiny truth of it. Steve and Bucky were gloriously right together.

[stuckydrewx]

If I have to see one more person saying ‘Why did Steve leave Bucky’ I’m gonna go insaneeeee 😭😭😭😭 BAD WRITING OMFG WE’VE BEEN THROUGH THIS SO MANY TIMES HE WOULD NEVER LEAVE HIS FRIENDS THATS THE WHOLE POINT IT WAS BAD FUCKIN WRITING

[musette22]

Hey Minnie!

Anon here who asked about what it was like in the fandom back then, when everything still seemed possible. 😳

First I want to thank you for your long and honest reply.

And then want to ask you if you could recommend a few endgame fix-it stucky fics (preferably longer ones, but it isn't a must) . I mean considering the fandom reaction there have to be quite a few fix-it stories.

Thanks again for your thoughtful reply.

Hi honey! Aahh you're very welcome, of course 💗

Ohh, well I don't actually read many EG fix-its, as it happens. I prefer to just not think about that whole movie, and the same goes for Infinity War, really. For me, Steve and Bucky's canon story ended happily ever after, somewhere in Wakanda!

However, I have read a couple of amazing EG fix-its over the years, and I also know of a few I haven't yet read but that come highly recommended by others, so I'll include those too!

Spelling Out Desire by @between-a-ship-and-a-hard-place

the time that's slipping & i counted days i counted miles by @its-tortle

a question of worth by Deisderium

Forcing All These Hollow Hearts to Feel Again & (Not) For Keeps by @paper-storm

t'aimer sur les bords du lac by @burnin-brighter

Alternatively by @16woodsequ

And I also know that hitlikehammers has written several EG fix-its, which you can find here!

If anyone has any other recommendations for anon, please do feel free to add them! Hope you enjoy these and happy reading! 😘