#anti endgame

[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.

[imposterogers]

endgame is so funny to me bc they were like ‘a ten year culmination! a proper sendoff to the avengers! the perfect ending!’ and then it proceeded to give the og avengers the actual worst possible endings. thor spends five years locked in a shack and then leaves his people to become a space pirate, despite asgard being his number one concern. tony spent five years out of the public eye, did very little inventing, and then dies. bruce (who hates the spotlight) became a celebrity and has a “catch phrase”. natasha’s found family abandoned her for five years and then she dies at the bottom of a cliff. clint became a ruthless killer with no morality, killing hundreds of people. steve spends five years doing nothing except mourning someone who died of old age, then chooses a white picket fence instead of the picket line. like HELLO? 

[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

[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.

[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 ❤️

[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.

[buckymilf]

friendly reminder that steve rogers was a victim of bad writing and weird self insert coming from creepy writers, he would never chose to abandon bucky and his found family, he would never chose to live in the past for no woman.

[srdonix]

“So godly weapons, huh?”

“Guess so..”

[musette22]

I had a conversation with my friend the other day about our mutual hatred for Steve's arc in Endgame and we came up with the idea that if Steve had to go to the past to see someone, he would have gone to see his mother. He wouldn't have been allowed in a TB ward when she was sick so he goes now to see her and to reassure her that somewhere in the future her son is safe, healthy and happy. He's able to properly say goodbye to his mother this time and he comes back to the future to be with Bucky

Oh my god, I legitimately LOVE this. Yes 🥺 This would have been so incredibly beautiful and perfect and satisfying, and such a fantastic way to circle back to Steve's past in his last movie. I can't believe they had Tony go back to visit his folks twice, sort of, and they didn't even bring Sarah into the MCU at all, even though she's the single most important influence in Steve's life and one of the main reasons Captain America even exists in the first place. I will forever be bitter about that, especially now that you've suggested this alternative EG plotline and I have to live with the knowledge of what we could have had 💔 I would have given anything so see Steve and Sarah interact in the MCU 🥺 Ahhh well, good thing I don't accept EG as canon anyway, so I guess this new and improved arc for Steve is basically as real as EG if (if not more, seeing as it makes about a 1000% more sense!)

Thanks for sharing these thoughts with us, lovely ❤️

[six-demon-bag]

🎶 hello darkness my old friend 🎶

[misguidedandperplexed]

Fic writers, if you're worried that the way you're writing your characters is out of character, remember that the MCU did the ultimate OOC move when they had the guy who said this:

and this:

leave his BFF — who he'd lost for five years and only just got back, and who was that someone with the most shared life experience — and other friends and found family to go back to the past to live that white picket fence life.

[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]

Steve "I won't stop until all of HYDRA is dead or captured" Rogers skipping off into the sunset to marry the woman who knowingly held open the door for Nazis to infiltrate SHIELD is like. Possibly one of the worst decisions ever made ever.

[luna-rainbow]

One of the tragedies of Steve’s character assassination is that neither Sam nor Bucky were allowed to mourn his absence. Unlike with Nat, where Yelena and Clint were able to lay bare their grief during Hawkeye. Nominally, Steve went to lead “the life he wanted”, and the narrative was afraid to open the can of worms around how uncharacteristically irresponsible that was. Hence neither Sam nor Bucky could discuss his loss, nor could they voice their own negative emotions around his absence. Not only were they not allowed anger, but they were also deprived of grief and bewilderment and regret. There was a Steve-shaped hole in TFATWS, and as much as the narrative tried to pretend it didn’t exist, the story was warped by its unshakeable presence.

[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.

[5ummit]

Stucky used to be my comfort ship.

I used to think Steve and Bucky cared for each other so deeply and tragically that their love – even if only viewed as platonic – could not be denied by anyone. Not after Steve spent THREE whole movies, the entire Cap trilogy, proving how much Bucky meant to him over and over and over. Steve was willing to fight for him and die for him in every single movie. I used to think that even if Marvel gave Steve another love interest, even if he died in Endgame, it wouldn’t change or negate how devoted they were to each other. That they would still be friends “til the end of the line.”

Little did I know what awaited me in Endgame was a fate worse than death.

Steve left and in doing so rewrote everything we thought we knew about him and his relationship with Bucky. About who Steve is as a character entirely. It wasn’t just that he abandoned his supposed best friend, who he had been chasing and obsessing over for years. Who was there for him and looked after him ever since they were children. If Steve had left the Bucky he used to know in the 1940s for some love interest and a life without him, it would still be pretty out of character, but I would eventually get over it. 1940s!Bucky was confident, happy, and had family and friends who cared about him. Endgame!Bucky is not that Bucky.

Endgame!Bucky is broken and lost and just now learning how to be a person again. Endgame!Bucky has no friends and no family. Endgame!Bucky just spent the last 70 years of his life going from one fight to another, being brainwashed and tortured and manipulated and abused. Endgame!Bucky is clinging by a thread to the one and only thing he knows and values in this world: Steve.

This is the Bucky that Steve chose to leave.

If Steve was any kind of friend at all – if Steve was truly a hero and the morally upstanding person he’s portrayed as, a person worthy of wielding Mjolnir – he would know these things about Bucky, his best friend since childhood, and at the very least, would refuse to leave his side until Bucky had some sort of support network and seemed well-adjusted enough to handle it. But he doesn’t. Even in their farewell scene when Bucky (looking like a kicked puppy) says to him “I’m gonna miss you” Steve won’t even echo the sentiment. He just says “it’s gonna be okay,” as if he’s aware of the pain Bucky must be in and essentially tells him, “don’t worry, you’ll get over it.” And I’m not even going to get into the terrible way Steve treated his other best friend, Sam, by keeping him completely in the dark about his plans for absolutely no reason and abandoning him as well.

Marvel didn’t just make Steve act out of character in Endgame in an effort to no-homo him and create a ~surprise twist~. They didn’t just make him a bit selfish and a bad friend. They straight up made him a villain, and I will never ever forgive them for it.