#endgame critical

[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.

[wiyu989]

"Bucky was happy for Steve!"

Yeah, totally.

[meraki-yao]

Watching Agatha All Along again after giving up on Marvel for three years made me think about why I gave it up in the first place.

I was so deep in the MCU. I cried so much during Infinity War that I struggled to walk out of the cinema. I watched Endgame on the first day that it was released. My diary was a CACW notebook. Part of the reason I took up STEM subjects was because of Marvel.

And then after watching MoM in theatres, I stopped.

I'm trying to phrase and figure out what made me give up something I was so invested in, something I loved so much. I think I know why.

The MCU period I was active in gave me characters that I ended up loving, and the later period took them away.

My two favourite characters were ruined. Their character arcs and core characters undone. I'm worried about my favourite too.

I hate it when the sequel undermines the previous works.

When I think of Steve Rogers, I don't think of the guy who chose to either fuck up the entire timeline of the MCU or sat quietly and watch the world in turmoil, his allies die tragically, and his best friend left to a fate worst than dead to get with a girl he wasn't even dating, a woman who had a life of her own and moved on.

I think of Steve from CATWS, the guy from Brooklyn who still does the right thing in a time when morals are blurred. The Steve who is kind, compassionate and brave. The Steve who inspired the base-level employees of SHEILD to follow his example and not bow down in the face of tyranny. The Steve who just had one mission, and that was standing up to bullies.

When I think of Wanda, I don't think of the insane, manic witch/evil goddess who killed thousands mercilessly even though there was a harmless solution, who after all she lost, somehow only wanted her children who she had for three days instead of also her love and her twin.

I think of Wanda, the girl who lost it all, who's family was all killed, who was denied a burial for Vision, who was left alone and abandoned in the world, with so much love in her heart that no longer had a place, a person to go to. The girl who feels so much so deeply that it bended reality. The girl who had to learn, who had to give up her dream, but did so, because at the end of the day, she is a kind person, who doesn't want to hurt people. She was wrong, she takes time to understand and accept the harm she's caused (as we all do), and then makes it right. She tries to be good. Despite everything, she tries.

The later stages of MCU took these two characters that mean so much to me personally, and ruined them.

And I'm fucking mad at them, because it disrespected all the work that made me love them in the first place, and it was preventable. (The original script for MoM where Wanda helps Strange but repeatedly gets tempted by the Darkhold is a much more convincing narrative.)

And I'd say the same applies to others: Natasha, Thor, Bruce, even Strange (although I feel like they never really figured out what they wanted to do with Strange's character)

I miss my characters, I miss my MCU.

[voylitscope]

The way I am insulted by this email I got after I watched CA:TWS last night:

Hey, did you enjoy Captain America: The Winter Soldier? Did you enjoy Steve Rogers as a character? Did you enjoy literally anything about Steve and Bucky's relationship? Well, we actually hate when people like those things. We hate it so much that we're going to suggest you watch MCU movies in an order that makes absolutely no sense and would confuse you deeply if you really did it. We're going to suggest you make a totally illogical jump in films and watch Endgame next!

Like, I don't really think that whatever algorithm Disney+ uses to send out these marketing emails takes any of that into account. But. For fuck's sake.

[gay-jewish-bucky]

As much as I'm glad Daniel Sousa got away from Peggy because he deserved so much better than her, I won't ever forgive Marvel Studios for proving Agent Krzeminski's ableist, misogynistic ass right when he said, "No girl is gonna trade in a red, white, and blue shield for an aluminum crutch."

What a great message to send to disabled people in the audience, "You are only ever good enough to be the second choice to an abled person, you don't deserve a have a happy ending."

[porcelain-dionysus]

Steve’s Endgame Ending fixed

What if at the end of Endgame when Steve is returning the stones, he has to give up something he loves, right? So what if he gives up his super-serum effects (an au tweaked and borrowed from @growingpaynes-art ), and turns back into pre-serum-Steve? A list of reasons why I think this would work:

A) Straight off the bat it’s easy to keep Steve in the MCU with Chris Evans’ contract ending if they replace the actor who plays pre-serum-Steve (obviously with a guy who looks similar to the first movie, but without the CGI). I know people might be confused why he looks different but the MCU’s changed actors before and it’s not the hardest stretch of the imagination. Also thematically it’d be cool to have Steve be literally unrecognisable to the audience.

B) I think a lot of writers for the Avengers are so focused on writing ‘Captain America’; ‘bland, stoic, with no sense of humor’, that they forget about Steve Rogers; the young disabled man who would put his life on the line to fight fascists. This would be a great way to get back to the basics of Steve’s character and show the audience who he truly is.

C) Honestly it would just be nice to show that Steve is just as righteous and brave with his disabilities, something not often shown in media. Even the MCU likes to focus on Steve’s asthma and ignore that he actually was disabled. (which i’ll touch on in a second).

*and now for some more headcannon-y stuff*

A) From screenshots from the movie, and a list at Disneylands Tomorrowland exhibit, the canon list of Steve’s disabilites and health problems are:

Asthma

Anemia

Diabetes

Color-blindness

Arrhythmia

Scoliosis

Chronic colds

High blood pressure

Easy fatigability

Heart trouble

Sinusitis

Fallen arches

Partial deafness

Stomach ulcers

Pernicious Anemia

Astigmatism

Nervous troubles of any sort

History of; scarlet fever, rheumatic fever

(Jesus Christ Steven)

B) It’d be cute to see Steve actually be able live with his disabilities, unlike in the 30’s. I cannot stress how much eugenics there was back then (and still is now, but WAY more casually acceptable back then). Even the actual Captain America storyline reeks of it a bit; experiment on a disabled man to ‘fix’ him and turn him into a soldier. However in the 21st century imagine if he could get the help he actually needs! Obviously a lot of his stuff is chronic, but he could actually live with it instead of just surviving like he would have done. And be able to afford them, unlike back in the Great Depression. Back braces, inhaler, mobility aids etc. It’d be nice to see a disabled person living with themselves as the HAPPY ending, instead of as a tragedy as it’s usually played.

C) The story of him actually seeing worth in his old (new?) body and himself instead of just a vessel for Captain America. A self-acceptance arc. Being able to retire in peace without anyone recognising him as Captain America without having to give up his life in the 21st century.

D) The Smithsonian exhibit is so closely tailored to his propaganda persona that it fails to acknowledge him as a person. I wouldn’t be surprised if the general public has never even seen a photo of him pre-serum, or knew how bad his illnesses were besides ‘just asthmatic and skinny’. He could easily walk around and not be noticed by anyone.

Tldr: Steve’s proper ending in Endgame should have had him return to his skinny form in exchange for the stone, and him being able to retire to finish art school in peace.

[mischievouswork]

I respect the hell out of the person who loves 2011-2013 Loki but acknowledges that 2017 Loki is also canon; good for them. However, you do not have some kind of obligation, as a fan, to accept all MCU content as “canon”.

The MCU has been, for some time, a group of people squabbling over their toys like kids in a sandbox, with the ultimate goal being to make as much money as possible.

If you’re in the fandom but canon ended for you in Phase 1, that’s perfectly valid.

If you accept the comics but not the films as canon, that’s fine.

If all films are canon to you but none of the TV shows, that’s okay too.

And, of course, if canon, to you, is the MCU before it became so popular, back when it actually had to try to be good to appeal to audiences? That’s fine too.

As a fan, you are allowed to say, “this subset of the franchise is canon; everything else is insufficiently prominent, is problematic, or is created with contempt for the content it engages with, and is therefore dead to me.”

This doesn’t give anyone an excuse to go out of their way to harass other fans for having a different opinion about what is/isn’t canon. But it does give everyone every right to refer to fics that go off different parts of canon as ‘Non-canon compliant’ or ‘OOC’ in their own space and circles.

You don’t see Legend of Korra fans going, “Bolin/his costar actress is a valid ship that’s just as canon-compliant as Korrasami”. In fact, from what I understand, most of them ignore that entire arc. Because the creators of that show were pulled in so many directions and jerked around with little warning, and sometimes they ended up making things that weren’t great or didn’t fit well with the overall story.

Many Game of Thrones fans are united in their agreement that the eighth season did not happen and “canon compliant” fics can safely ignore it. Absolutely no one needs to accept that season as canon anyway, because it was, quite frankly, absolute garbage.

There are Captain America fans who refuse to accept Endgame as canon, because it directly contradicts the canon established for him in previous films, and because it’s just too freaking sad.

Nobody should be going out of their way to call out other fans, but also… if something is incompatible with previously established canon, it doesn’t matter if it’s part of the official media from the franchise or not. You can decide on your own cutoff for what is or isn’t canon, and ignore the rest. It’s what fans have been doing since the comic days, before superhero movies were around.

[lokiinmediasideblog]

Can I be controversial and say that I'm tired of shippers (esp. Sylkis and Lokiuses) giving Disney too much credit for the sake of their ships?

With Lokiuses I will be seeing too much credit because Loki and Mobius are standing close together or hugging or something. And them acting like it's the epitome of queer rep. It's not even queerbaiting... they're just next to each other.... I also don't get what is so special about this ship that it has to be cannon, and why some of you treat it like the only queer ship that matters for LGBTQIA+ rep. Y'all don't even get the personalities right in fanfic and turn it into Ineffable Husbands 2.0. I'd argue Lokius has a darker dynamic than that and is far from equivalent to Ineffable Husbands. The characters just kinda look like each other but have very different dynamics.

With Sylkis I've recently been seeing (esp. on TWT but I just saw a post in the Loki tag here on Tumblr) this erasure of Disney's homophobic history with "See they have NO problem with MLM and queer people. Let's forget they used Loki's genderfluidity was used to market the series and nothing was done with it."

Also, the examples provided to prove that "Disney has no trouble with the gays" are: 1. from a movie that Marvel likes to pretend doesn't exist because they only care about money and not rep (and yes it was a very important step. I'm not denying that), and 2. A very recent example of a show that just came out in this very year and last month *ba-dum-tss.* Why the fuck should I congratulate Disney for increasing LGBTQIA+ representation at a GLACIAL pace? Other companies have done better! Istg if you defend them I'll roll my eyes...

Do I have to go over with you guys about the how long it took for Valkyrie's bisexuality to be confirmed within the MCU and not just in interviews? There was so much hype about her being the first confirmed bisexual in the Thor movies. Tessa Thompson FOUGHT to have a scene confirming that Valkyrie liked women in TR that was CUT OFF from the final product.

The closest thing to rep that TR was allowed to have fell more under queer-coding towards the GM and Loki. Loki "cozied up" with the evil Grandmaster to avoid fighting in the gladiatorial arena in some scenes while framing Loki as spineless, treacherous, and needing "correction" from the hero that didn't shy away from fighting in the arena. And the next bit of rep we got from there was fucking gay Russo. Y'all have TERRIBLE memories.

An example of this Marvel defense bullshit to show I am not making this shit up:

Stop giving the fucking mouse credit and money. Y'all don't even like what happened in the series and are also 100% unsatisfied with how it ended.

[birdieart]

I can't explain what it is exactly, but something about endgame Steve feels so... Off. Almost sinister.

Like maybe it's just the atrocious costuming department dressing him like a high society yacht dad or putting him in an uncharacteristic black leather jacket rather than his signature brown one

Or the fact that he looks like a sad Johnny Bravo

Maybe it's the horrendous writing or CEVANS actively making him come across as unpleasant, selfish, and cold...

But that's not Steve Rogers. Something's Wrong here.

[gaia-aviva]

I thought I liked Endgame but as time went on I realized I only liked parts of it. And the more I think about it, the more I realize Endgame didn't have to be as disappointing as it was. I feel like even just a few changes would have greatly improved the movie:

Having an actual scene where Tony and Steve talk about what happened between them. Instead, the movie rushed their reconciliation and we're left to assume they worked out their issues off-screen. (They HAD to have talked sometime in the five-year time gap in Endgame.  You don’t get from “No trust liar” to “If you don’t talk shop, you’re welcome to stay for lunch” without reaching some kind of understanding).

It would have been good to have seen that on screen. It definitely would have been a better use of screen time than Fat Thor and all the offensive and not-funny jokes that came with it. Getting rid of the Fat Thor subplot and giving us more Steve and Tony content would have been a big improvement for the film.

Another thing that we didn't get was any type of closure between Bucky and Tony. There should have been a scene where Bucky saved either Pepper or Tony during the Battle of Earth and Tony would thank him and let him know he's not a murderer, etc, basically make their peace. Heck, even just a nod to each other on the battlefield would have been better than nothing. It certainly would have been more substantial than that contrived girl-power scene.

The aforementioned Tony, Steve, and Bucky scenes I've suggested would have also have helped heal the rifts in the fandom. Obviously not the hard-core haters, but antis on both sides capable of seeing reason would likely soften their stance on the characters.

All this of course doesn't address all of the problems with Endgame, (Natasha's death, Tony's death, Steve's ending, the fact that the MCU had reached its logical conclusion but was still going to continue..., etc.), but I feel like even those changes alone would have drastically improved the film.

[therese-lokidottir]

Things would be a lot simpler for the post-Blip MCU stories had they undone the Snap entirely. As in, instead of just bringing back the dusted, they should've reversed the last five years and made it so it was like they never happened. Call it "The Five Years That Never Were".

As it were, they made it so every subsequent project will have to either touch on the Blip or have to dance around it like an elephant in the room. (Which might explain something I know @valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn has brought up about characters behaving the same post-Blip as they do pre-Snap.)

Wouldn't be the only case of the Russos doing this sort of thing. Because Thor joining the Guardians of the Galaxy in the Endgame epilogue kinda falls into this category too (as James Gunn had no intention of including Thor in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 due to his personal rule that while he'd be happy to loan the Guardians to other writers and directors, he would not take on main characters from other writers' and directors' stories; the only good thing about Thor: Love & Thunder might very well be that Taika Waititi did the heavy work for Gunn when it came to getting Thor kicked out of the Guardians, since Gunn didn't even plan to have any sort of explanation for Thor to be absent.)

No story really wants to deal with the long term fall out half the world disappearing. The few stories that do work into the plot don't focus on the damage it would of caused only about the consequences of what happened in the intervening time. Hawkeye is the one that the plot is affected by Endgame the most but it's not about the Blip it's about what Clint did. Echo's story resolves around the fact Clint killed. TFATWS has the refugees but that could easily be rewritten to be for another reason and you would lose nothing.

You could so easily so it was A complete reset and nothing would change. Like, I feel like writers came in with their own plans and didn't want to have to deal with the blip and also the MCU doesn't want to show just how wrong Thanos was. The damage that would have happened from plan and car crashes the how badly the economy was hurt and if plant and animal life really was also erased then the damage to the ecosystem was also done.

They don't want to take it seriously, so why bother keeping it? It really was pointless

[ijustreallylikecaptainamericaok]

Actually, while I'm here:

Old E/G complaints under the cut.

Thing is, I made my overall peace with Steve's ending a long time ago. It wasn't my ideal by any means (since a big part of what I dig about St*ggy is the tragedy of it all, etc., etc.), but it wasn't my worst case scenario either (like, y'know, his death or one of fandom's more than vaguely ableist ideas.)

All things considered, I can live with it. It's fine.

(Though, I also must admit that fandom's ridiculously extreme reaction did hasten that whole process for me. Anyway...)

But there is one aspect that does still bother me and (like certain parts of the L-o-t-R adaptations) likely always will. Which is that, like a lot of E/G, the credit for it goes to T*ny, of all people. Based on what? One sliver of a moment in A/O/U? Get the fuck out. That's an even more tenuous connection than the one they tried to pull in CW by trying to use Z0la's slideshow from T/W/S as proof St*ve knew what happened to the St*rks. And on top of that, they have St*ve say that shit to Sam. SAM - the guy who'd been trying to get St*ve to prioritize himself from the second they fucking met. Just fuck right off. Not to mention how in the movie it's Nat*sha who tells St*ve to get off his ass. But, no, lets continue trying to gas up a dynamic M*rvel completely bungled and do so at the expense of two dynamics they actually succeeded with. Ridiculous. It's bordering on V!nce McMah0n type of nonsense, I swear.

[shackleton2]

Just found some delightful salty Endgame improvement comics, def recommend, they're sweet and funny and obv a big improvement. Plus some of the ideas in here are cool and thought-provoking! As well as lots of sass directed at the bad ham-fisted choices made in the actual movie

[therese-lokidottir]

I do want to say I disagree with the "if they weren’t going to undo it at the moment it happened — then they shouldn’t have undone it at all." Because the options should not have to be one or the other, especially when there's a magic glove that can do anything. The snapped world is bad, and the audience only sees it from one well off nation's perspective. Who knows the deviation it took on a less well-off place.

The options end up being letting a wound fester or treating it with dirty hands. Doing something might make it worse, but it's also going to get worse is nothing is done. Neither is a good option, and the frustration is there is a med kit right there.

Nobody thought of the devastation losing half of everyone would really bring and in turn no thought was applied to how bring people back YEARS later wouldn't go remotely smoothly.

The one thing about Endgame I can’t get past, the one thing that first WandaVision and moreso The Falcon & the Winter Soldier made brutally, abundantly clear, isn’t even Steve’s super shitty ending, it’s that the Avengers made things infinitely worse by reversing the Blip.

It’d be one thing if they’d made the Blip never take place, or restored everyone one millisecond after they disappeared — things they absolutely could have done, by the way — but they didn’t. They brought them all back five years later. It’s insane. It’s sociopathic.

First of all, a lot of people didn’t disappear that day. They died. People who got hit by suddenly driverless cars, people who went down on pilotless airplanes, people skydiving when the instructor disappeared, people whose doctors crumbled to dust mid-surgery, babies who wasted away in their cribs because their parents got Snapped. None of those people got restored in the Reverse Snap. They just stayed dead.

Second of all, everyone got brought back right where they’d disappeared. Which is fine in theory. Except isn’t it pretty lucky no one was sitting in that chair when Monica got restored? And also that apparently no one had moved that chair in five years? So what if you were on a plane that’s no longer in the air? What if you were on a boat that’s no longer in the middle of the ocean? What if you were skydiving and now there’s no parachute? What if you were on the top floor of a building that’s since been demolished? What if you were in your car in the middle of the freaking freeway? That’s thousands more deaths, conservatively.

But forget about all those dead people for a sec. TFatWS makes it explicit that the world is in complete chaos because of the Reverse Snap. People are displaced, families have been torn apart, people are angry and scared and no one knows what to do. It’s so clear that if the Avengers weren’t going to undo the Snap completely — if they weren’t going to undo it at the moment it happened — then they shouldn’t have undone it at all. That it would have been kinder, better to have let the Snapped stay Snapped. Not just for the sake of the people left, but for the people who disappeared.

Imagine the absolute hell of materializing five years in the future to find someone else living in your house, someone else married to your spouse. To find out your baby died or your mom or your partner. And by the way you have no credit, you have no money, no job history, no possessions, nothing. But good luck trying to rebuild your life and all! Aren't you glad we brought you back? You're welcome!

If the MCU ended with Endgame and no one ever had to think about the ramifications, then fine. Whatever. It’s a happy ending. What a cool final battle!

But it didn’t end there. And as such, it’s not a happy ending. It’s deranged. The Avengers are villains.

And it’s just so weird that no one in-universe seems to acknowledge this. That what the Avengers did was bad. That all this chaos, all this suffering, is entirely their fault.

“Yeah, things suck, but I sure do hope Captain America 1.0 is having fun on the moon! Man, we all miss Iron Man!”

W H A T

I don’t know how to deal with that. I don’t know how we, as an audience, are supposed to reconcile with that. I don’t know how they think they can make that decision seem heroic when every subsequent movie and show just makes it retroactively worse.

[purgeindeath]

it’s kind of amazing how vi had absolutely no character arc this season. like i don’t know if that even counts a character at all. feels like ai tried writing her. she became a cop, cried, served cunt, got an ugly haircut, cried and then fucked caitlyn. 10/10 writing 😍😍😍 so complex and thought provoking and definitely addresses all the interesting aspects about her identity and violence in s1

[erandraws]

This crossover is everything. I can’t wait for Jester to try and convert Fearne to the traveler. I can’t wait for Fjord to find out Orym was given an exalted sword from the wildmother and he’s not even a paladin. I can’t wait for a single battle with 15 initiatives where Liam simultaneously goes first and last.