#loki writers are so fucking lazy they just made her a fucking LOVE INTEREST to literally HERSELF and i just despise the approach they've

[p4nishers]

i hate when i can't understand a woman character bc the writers wrote her SO fucking badly. i hate when i'm literally forced to dislike a woman character because she's been written in a way where you genuinely don't know anything about her thoughts or feelings and the narrative doesn't treat her like a person. i fucking despise cis men writing women because it will never fucking be right. they'll will never understand, is the thing, and a woman written by a cis man is always a fucking disaster and i hate nothing more than hating women characters bc men don't have enough braincells or care to make them actually human. fuck male writers who don't even fucking TRY or pretend like they were trying to decently write a female character. fuck. them.

[peach-fiz]

I actually didn't even bother watching the second season of Loki because of the cheap marketing and inconsistent storytelling.

It just felt like the plot was lifted off somewhere it would have made sense, and a character with a similar ego was replaced with Loki and goes through an arc that might have made sense for a blank slate character, but not someone who already has a backstory.

Loki doesn't even feel like Loki after three episodes in S1. The whole point of having a show like that just seems to be about the TVA and Sylvie.

Also the whole genderfluid thing. They 'confirmed' it in the promo and had a line in the script that went completely against anything they just said.

I knew at once that the writers, directors and other parts of production were really just pulling it in different directions and it would probably sound like a jazz trumpeter and a metal guitarist trying to improvise after knowing each other for 15 minutes.

I've been meaning to watch it just so I can have educated opinions on all of it but it's just,, so hard to get into. I definitely agree the marketing was cheap, they did with the 80s McDonald's like they did DB Cooper!Loki and made it centric to the advertising because McDonalds was also getting something out of it which is kinda ass seeing as realistically Loki Laufeyson would burn 6 of them down before he ate in one 😭

I personally don't like either of the major ships in the show but the forced Sylki shit in season 1 really got to me. Like not only did she completely replace him as the main character in HIS show, she's also a variant of him who he wants to make out with and overall it just reads as lazy writing and it's extremely disappointing that Mike Waldron has been put in charge of Multiverse of Madness and The Kang Dynasty since, due to the popularity of the Loki TV show. I was talking to my boyfriend about this last night but it kinda reminds me of the complaints people had ab the last Indiana Jones movie but opposite? Like everyone complained his best friend's daughter was gonna replace him bc she's a Mary Sue and she rlly isnt, she's more reminiscent of Marion in Raiders of the Lost Ark she just doesn't wanna fuck him. But the difference is Indy is a character who's majorly blank for little boys to project themselves onto. Which is great!! It works for those kind of movies, but they're not character development centric like the individual mcu movies tend to be. Loki is characterized in a way that he's drowning in identity issues and family problems and he experiences growth in every installment whether it be positive or negative. It doesn't make sense to take the formula of an Indidna Jones movie where he meets up with a woman who's typically a love interest and has her own issues that are only slightly touched on because that's not the focus, and they go do the plot.

Sylvie is not an Indy Girl, they straight up are trying to replace Loki with Sylvie. And you can tell the character wasn't supposed to have as much importance as she does in the show bc the character was worked on more after the actress they chose was buddies with a producer ( and this is no hate to the actress I'm sure she's delightful everything I've seen her in in terms of interviews has been lovely ).

I also absolutely agree they should've just made a tva mini series to introduce the tva rather than bringing back a dead character who soon will not make much sense anyway because Tom Hiddleston is getting older (and also he deserves to branch out in his career).

The genderfluid thing was a cash grab and it sucks ass, they just want money for acknowledging things already canon in the comics, same with confirming him as bisexual.

My boyfriend is actually writing a fic on ao3 called Find Me that's rlly good if you want Loki content that isn't related to the show.

(YES this is shameless promotion sshhhhshshsh) but fr the loki TV show makes me more confident in my screenwriting bc t h a t got put on disney plus. I'm also working on a Loki show rewrite in my spare time!!

[musclesandhammering]

MCU Opinions That’ll Have Me Burned At The Stake Pt. 1

(Because it actually worked out really well when I did this for Supernatural. BE WARNED: This is largely Loki-centric.)

1.) I feel like most of the movies/shows released in the last 5 or so years have been heavily geared toward casual fans. And I guess there’s nothing wrong with that! But for me it’s annoying as hell.

2.) I hate the MCU version of Wanda Maximoff so fucking much for many many different reasons.

3.) I have a very strong dislike for the MCU version of Steve Rogers for multiple reasons, mostly because of the level of American imperialist propaganda coded into his character.

4.) The movies’ version of Tony Stark is an objectively better person than Steve, and at this point I’m not even sure if Marvel made the billionaire the Big Hero intentionally as capitalist propaganda or if they just don’t see the irony.

5.) Nebula and Mantis are both way way underrated. They have such interesting backstories and are so sympathetic and likeable and it’s frankly a crime that there aren’t more people stanning for them.

6.) Thanos wasn’t as ground-breakingly complex and multi-layered as the critics and dudebros like to claim. All of his “emotional” scenes could arguably have been genuine in an extremely narcissistic and delusional way, but they’re diminished by the fact that there were a lot of villains prior to him that were much more psychologically complex and actually sympathetic to boot (which… he wasn’t).

7.) Thanos’s plan also made no sense at all, considering he claimed to seek balance in a twisted sense of duty- but said plan actually screwed everyone over worse and made resources issues even more detrimental. They should’ve just made him a full on genocidal psychopath or had him trying to court Hela. One of the two. I honestly think this was just the writers being short-sighted and lazy.

8.) Every version of Thor (and all his supporting characters as well) post-Age of Ultron is absolute trash. He’s a joke, he has zero emotional depth, he’s thematically shallow, he’s boring, he’s embarrassingly out of character…. Just, ugh.

9.) I hate Sylvie. Not just her relationship with Loki, I literally hate that her character even exists.

10.) Natasha deserved so much better than being reduced to a love interest in AoU. It wasn’t cute, it didn’t make sense at all, it wasn’t good for the story. She shouldn’t have had a romance subplot at all.

11.) I actually really liked Clint having a family and a farm. I think it really suited his character and added a little bit more depth to him.

12.) Team Tony made a couple mistakes in Civil War, but they were more or less in the right. And Team Cap was almost all the way in the wrong.

13.) Iron Man 2 wasn’t even that bad.

14.) Iron Man 3 is one of my favourite mcu films, everybody else simply lacks Taste.

15.) Sam deserves the shield way more than Steve, but I’m conflicted cause I don’t want him to be the symbol of pro-American propaganda :/.

16.) Bucky and Sarah are cute as hell together.

17.) Doctor Strange deserves way more credit and adoration, I mean mans puts up with some SHIT I tell you.

18.) Either Wanda is the most powerful sorcerer in the mcu and a total heartless piece of shit OR she’s a sympathetic victim possessed by the Darkhold to do awful things and isn’t really that powerful at all. You can’t have it both ways.

19.) Loki is ridiculously sympathetic and gets the shit end of the stick almost 100% of the time, but I’m pretty sure he agreed to work with Thanos of his own free will, before the sceptre had any influence on him. (Make no mistake, he was definitely mind controlled and tortured at some point afterwards, and that should be acknowledged, but like….. he’s not ENTIRELY without blame here, let’s be real. I think he got himself into a mess and then just couldn’t get out).

20.) Frigga is just as bad as Odin, let’s not kid ourselves. I actually can’t stand her.

21.) Thor never actually changed his bigoted war-mongering superiority-based mindset. He just decided that he likes humans, so they’re exempt from it.

22..) Harley Keener deserved to have just as big a role as Peter in Tony’s life.

23.) I don’t mind Vision, I think he’s a pleasant character. But his relationship with Wanda is the most mind-numbingly boring shit I’ve ever seen my GOD.

24.) Bruce was one of my favourite characters, specifically for his calm confidence. That all went out the window in Ragnarok. Ruined his character too.

25.) Taneleer Ativan, En Dwi Gast, etc (Celestials) should’ve been way more powerful than they were.

26.) Rocket is my favourite member of the Guardians. Peter Quill is boring and annoying and Gamora is more sympathetic but still not very interesting.

27.) There should’ve been less action and more time for them to all live in the avengers compound together like 2012 fanfic 2.0. I like the scenes that are fairly calm where they’re all interacting with each other as a group more than the fight scenes.

28.) LGBT representation in the mcu has been pathetic thus far, but I guess it’s like that in everything so..

29.) Ultron was a superb villain but everyone seems to think he’s mediocre. (Top 3 best mcu villains: 3-Ultron 2-Killmonger 1-Loki. Yes, Loki was a legit villain at one point, don’t @ me.)

30.) It’s the biggest crime in cinematic history that Loki never got to come full circle and fight side by side with the avengers. He literally didn’t even interact with them ever again after the invasion (except Bruce) and that’s just tragic. They were setting his storyline up for that! It was the perfect progression. But noooo.

[blackgirlsuperherorants]

With more articulation, I'm ready to talk about why the push for Lokius simply bothers me, and this can be said for other m/m or w/w ships that fans push to be canon so hard just because they ship it.

It's the framing. The framing that if Marvel doesn't do it (or whatever the brand is), it's because homophobia, and if other fans don't like it/ship it, it's because homophobia (even if they ship other queer ships and are queer themselves.) And the biggest problem with that is that it overshadows the REAL issue of lack of queer representation on screen in mainstream nerd media, especially from big things under the Disney umbrella (Marvel and Lucasfilm/Star Wars, especially.)

It makes it bad that your ship isn't canon instead of bad that there haven't been any queer romances on screen in the MCU.

And like, as a writer myself, I find myself dissecting the stories of other media all the time. I can watch an MCU movie or series and pretty much assess what direction the story is going in by the narrative points they're hitting. I knew Sylki was basically gonna happen (even if just a kiss) because narratively, that's what the show was doing as soon as they had that "what is love" conversation on Lamentis-1. It didn't mean I liked it. But I knew it was happening.

Similarly, there's no romantic undertones to Loki and Mobius. None. For Marvel to make them a couple, it would mean they'd be doing it simply because the two present as men and it would make stans happy. And while there's something to be said for fan service, it would be annoying to watch them cram two guys together who aren't romantic in the slightest. I'd much rather see Loki meet some guy and have the same type of undertones they were giving to Sylvie and form a real bond to where the kiss feels earned and warranted. Not just put him with the nearest man because "he gay lol."

And how you guys are claiming it's being queer that makes you want this is beyond me. It's not being queer that makes you want this. I don't want queer characters that fuck everyone of whatever gender(s) they're attracted to even when it doesn't make sense for them to. I want real love stories. I mean, yeah, sometimes we can have a slut character, because that's fun, too, but that's not even what y'all think Lokius is. You seem to want them to be in love. But why? Because he's the first friend Loki made that isn't through Thor?

I hate that, too, because I hate this idea that queer people cannot have friends of their same gender without wanting to fuck them. IDK how y'all are, maybe y'all are like that, but I almost never have wanted to fuck any of my friends. The only few exceptions have been when I tried to befriend someone I had a crush on (in which case, usually the friendship can't work, really, because I have a crush on them.) I also think it's okay if you can have casual sex with friends, or if you have a friendship that develops into romance, but Jesus, do you people not have friends that you don't want to fuck? I am bi, maybe more pan (gender kind of doesn't matter to me, I guess) and I'm friends with people of all kinds of gender identities and like... I love them as people, which is why they're my friends, but I DO NOT want to fuck them. Especially my closest friend. I talked about her, before, here, but she's like my sister. The thought of fucking her is gross, to me. Not because she's gross, but because it feels incestuous.

Loki shouldn't want to fuck Mobius just because they developed a friendship. And that's very much how it's written on the series. They almost dislike each other (or Mobius is at least indifferent to Loki) and then they become friends.

That's not to mention the power dynamic that exists, there. And I know some of y'all are subs, but yeah, it's a bit gross to imply a sexual relationship with Loki's captor.

But on to Sylki. It sucks that I feel like most of y'all hate Sylki because Sylvie is a girl, and not just because it's bad in other ways. Like, the reasons Sylki is bad have less to do with "it should have been Mobius" and more to do with it being a lazy 1980s action movie plot that should have never happened. I'm not as creeped out by the selfcest (as many of you wouldn't have been if she was a he, I'm almost positive), but what's bad about it is that they couldn't have a strong female lead character without her being the love interest of the main guy. She didn't need to be, especially because she was a Loki variant, anyway. There was no need for it to have romantic undertones, and there was no need for them to kiss. It was sexist more than it was homophobic (and I can't help feeling like y'all are kind of being biphobic in this case. Maybe I'll talk about that, later, but yeah.) It was sexist bullshit. And there's valid criticism that Sylvie is underdeveloped. She's just angry and something for Loki to project affection onto.

I was also hoping they'd do a "found family" type of thing with Sylvie and Loki and let her be like the sister he never knew he needed, but no, they had to go trope and make her the love interest. It was lazy and bad and basically went "If Loki girl, main Loki want bone!"

Basically, having the main character fall for a character just because of their proximity and gender is bad and I hate it (and it would have been bad with Mobius, too, but yeah.)

Both the Mobius and the Sylvie thing also feel kind of racist, to me, because the show has prominent Black women who aren't even presented as desirable to Loki. And y'all, of course, ship him with anyone but the Women of Color. Y'all can pull true love with Mobius out of your ass, but he couldn't possibly fall for the Black women. lol.

Anyway. Not every show needs ships, and this show shouldn't have had any. I hate it. It's bad.

I guess on the biphobia front, I have heard some takes that it's not biphobic because Loki being queer in the MCU which hasn't shown any queer relationships, and Loki being the first openly queer character means they shouldn't have shown him with a woman presenting character. Which, I guess I get where you're coming from... but I have also been in fandoms for a long time and I see mostly girls saying this shit, which is what leads me to feel like it's simply jealousy. It happens all the time when a long-beloved single male character/celebrity suddenly starts dating a woman. Everyone hates it. And like, we haven't seen Loki be with ANYONE in the MCU, because mostly he's been doing villainy and his dating life hasn't been relevant. If the demigod says he's bi, he can kiss a woman. Especially a woman version of himself. Like I said, I hate it for other reasons, but pretending it's because he should have kissed Mobius is utterly delusional. He probably shouldn't have kissed anyone. Not in this series. There was no reason for any canon romance, especially because the show has a season 2 and we'll have time to see Loki develop earned, deserved romance with someone.

I'd much rather see them create a character just to be his boyfriend than have y'all push Marvel into making Lokius canon, which is a nonsense ship that only happened because Mobius is the only prominent male-presenting character before we meet the other Lokis.

My sincere wish is for people to remember that their ships are just ships and to enjoy them without getting all self-righteous about it. I TOLD y'all that Lokius wasn't gonna be canon like 4 episodes back, and here y'all are acting shocked and like Marvel took something from you. NOBODY expected y'all to ship Lokius. It's not even queerbait.

You can make clear arguments as to why Sambucky was queerbait. It's there in undertones in the actual series.

You cannot watch Loki and tell me you thought it was queerbait, unless you think men can't have conversations or hug goodbye without being romantically involved. Which means, in my opinion, that you need to learn about healthy masculinity.

Again, this is not a defense of Marvel. They DO need to let characters be queer, for real, and not just by saying " A bit of both". Like, let Loki be queer. Let Deadpool be queer. Let these queer characters be queer on screen. Yes.

But please stop making it about your ship. I'd rather see a flashback of Loki dating a guy and see him kiss someone he loved back on Asgard than watch y'all force Lokius. Because my queer rep is not about your crackship. It really isn't. And the fact that y'all keep calling us homophobic for not liking your ship REALLY needs to be addressed.

Like, when will y'all stop? I got on Stucky shippers about this shit in the past. All of us gay as hell, too, we just don't like YOUR ship. A lot of us like other queer ships. A lot of us like queer ships in other fandoms, too, and even have queer OCs. YOUR ship just ain't it. Stop forcing it. Literally, most of the ship wars between MCU fans have been queer ship vs queer ship, not really queer ship vs straight ship. Like, the number one Stucky rival ship was Stony. Not Steggy. People are not homophobic for not wanting your ship.

Sometimes it's because they ship something else.

And sometimes, like me, it's because they want something to make sense narratively and not happen for the sake of it happening. It's always better writing to have a character meetcute a new love interest than to magically turn a platonic friendship into a romantic relationship. Like, even when the characters are straight. Like, when Moesha dated Hakeem. It was just weird, even if he was kind of a great boyfriend. He was just supposed to be her friend, and people didn't really like it because it didn't fit narratively.

And that's why ships for the most part should be left to fanfiction, with the exception of a few where fans are right to call out the writers for not making it canon because it's clearly bait (like what happened to Destiel shippers. To see Lokius shippers compare themselves to THAT was so ridiculous. Destiel shippers had a decade of evidence only to be let down by a criminally unfair ending. Lokius shippers saw two men have a deep conversation once and lost their minds.)

Anyway, I'm not saying don't ship Lokius. I don't even hate it, really. I just think it obviously shouldn't be canon, and fans pretending like they were robbed of it is ridiculous. Literally, Ao3 exists for this reason. I will never see Steve fuck Sam Wilson, so I wrote it into my fanfic. I am not mad that they didn't actually date in the main MCU storyline.

[annes-andromeda]

Hoo boi, here comes a rant:

So when I watched the WandaVision finale, I was honestly left disappointed by it. I didn’t like a lot of things, which other people have talked about. Not that I regret watching it, but it’s not free of problems

Spoilers for Episode 6 under the cut

But today, I have watched the tfatws finale and...wow I’m disappointed. Yet again. What a shocker.

Some things I didn’t like about the finale and the show in general:

I don’t like that they killed off Kali. I don’t like that the other Super Soldiers didn’t flat out tell her off or have a chance for redemption. Yes Kali was an extremist and although her message was right, her actions were wrong, I hate how they couldn’t think of another ending for her and her teammates so they just killed them. Jesus marvel, how lazy can you get?

God I hate what they did with Lemar. In episode 4, I literally screamed at my phone “LEMAR, STOP BEING THE BLACK FRIEND”. But nope. He was killed off to fuel the white mans pain and he never got any agency of his own whatsoever. He never even got his abilities from the Power Broker like in the comics.

If they wanted to have Walker snap, they could’ve had it that the adrenaline of the Super Serum was getting to him. Lemar would notice this change and try to calm down his BFF. But Walker says something like “I’m gonna complete this mission no matter the cost” or “You’re not the captain here”. He kills that one guy in front of everyone, which shocks Lemar. Walker comforts him, but is distant because he can see the sudden change in his friend. Val confronts Walker and let’s say he meets with the Power Broker or something. Lemar gets his abilities, but betrays Walker and joins Sam and Bucky.

There. It could’ve been so easy, but Marvel just had that need to remove the agency of yet another POC character.

Speaking of the Power Broker: wow what a weak ass plot twist. So they were basically building up the PB as this huge antagonist who was essentially a mafia boss of sorts and SPOILER ALERT...it’s Sharon.

That...That is some Game of Thrones season 8, Star Wars “somehow Palpatine has returned” type of bad writing. Again, there was this whole set up about the PB being this alpha level type of boss, but it’s just...Sharon.

The loud ass external groan I let out was incomprehensible to say the least.

And speaking of Sharon, wow did they do her dirty. Like, so fucking dirty. So instead of giving her some emotional depth and some basic good writing, she’s once again only there to support the male leads and be left behind simply because she’s not a love interest. And I guess she’s an antagonist now so...yaaay🙄

When I said I wanted more Sharon content, boy was this not what I meant.

The last complaint that I have is how they treated Sam. I really don’t like how practically every character was trying to vilify him for giving up the shield.

Yes I know Bucky apologized, which I really appreciate instead of just having the conflict never be addressed again, but was it really necessary to try and make it seem like Sam giving the up the shield was bad?

Also-and you can disagree with me on this-, I felt like they hardly gave Sam any emotional depth. Compared to Bucky, who had that whole flashback of him with Ayo and his whole arc about TWS, to me it felt like they used Sam to explore other characters stories.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the talks with Karli and Isaiah, they were incredibly well done. But it seemed like Sam was just used as an outlet for them. We barely got anything about Sams past aside from Sarah, his nephews, and a few sentences about his parents and his home.

Where are his flashbacks? Where’s his big emotional moment? What about Riley and the accident that literally traumatized Sam?? Ya know, when Sam lost his best friend and could only watch as he fell to his death and do nothing about it?? It’s literally never mentioned again after TWS!!! There wasn’t even any attempt to try and give Sam his bird powers!! For god sakes, he’s supposed to be the main character!!!

And for people who say that not everything needs to be comic accurate: I agree, but if it took Marvel seven years to acknowledge Wanda as the Scarlet Witch and give her magic and it took them practically an entire goddamn decade to give Loki magic, then they could’ve given Sam his powers.

Yes I like how Sam acknowledged some of his struggles as a black man, which was well handled, but by god it seems like the writers just skimmed by him until he became Captain America. But hey, maybe that’s just me.

Also: what a wasted opportunity to have Torres come in as the new Falcon. I mean we got to see the Sam Cap suit, the US Agent suit, but no Hispanic/Latino Falcon?

I don’t regret watching tfatws. I enjoyed seeing more of Sam and Bucky, but I’m still gonna acknowledge some of the questionable creative choices that were made.

Cause at this point, Marvels bad writing is getting very hard to ignore.

[fieldbears]

Washed-Up Stucky MNF/Fic Writer Provides Endgame Opinions

I’m going to try to tackle this linearly, at least to begin with:

I am very much Team Bored With MCU Hawkeye, but I want to give sincere props for the cold open, which I think accomplished several things simultaneously: recapped the consequences of the last film (since, hey, it’s been a fuckin while), set the tone, and began Clint’s narrative arc.

That said, jesus, I’m still irritated by the shoe-horned family to begin with. First they were invented for convenience and narrative stakes, and then their final, ultimate reason for existence was to be temporarily fridged. Take a moment to imagine a world where Clint was the circus runaway loner he was supposed to be, who only had his coworkers as found family, who either responded to The Snap by throwing himself harder into his teamwork work OR went rogue because his sense of justice and agency was so fucking destroyed by what happened. He didn’t need a blood family to have the arc he had. And he didn’t even need the arc he had. But this is a bitchfest about a choice made many years ago, not made in this final movie.

The first third of that movie was rough. The whole thing had the narrative flow of “A Series of Related Short Stories Played One After the Other”, but the first third seems to be Failing To Establish the New World and then Clumsily Establishing The Emerging Situation.

The establishing shots and scenes to show the audience what The Snap’s consequences were worldwide were... lacking. It’s dark? No more baseball? People are relying on natural light instead of interior lighting, but this is also happening at Avengers HQ, where they clearly still have power and internet access to work their tech, so... was it just an aesthetic choice? I feel like the film tried to spend time showing us what the consequences were for the average New Yorker, but instead we get a weird Canonly Gay Russo Character who gave a good performance that tells us about the human loss but not about the mechanics of this new world. We get the ‘no baseball’ shot and all we get afterward are ‘people miss the missing people’. But restaurants still exist? Businesses are functioning? (Wouldn’t New York run kind of smoother if it wasn’t overpopulated?) I feel like we were invited to start thinking about how this dystopia works, but were never given answers. (There are so many interpretations of how things could go wrong if certain people just disappeared, and their knowledge/access were suddenly unavailable, and none of it was explored, even briefly, outside of establishing shots.)

The Garden Planet - it’s discovery, the traveling to it, the fight there - lacked emotional grounding in a way I find hard to explain. The audience was excited for Brie Larson being a fucking boss, and the quick execution of the grab-him-and-cut-his-arm-off plan was satisfying, but the twist and subsequent letdown was just a weird beat after a slog to get there, after waiting on a deep letdown beat from the last movie.

Last thing about flow and emotional beats, because I want to move on to character analysis, and this is a huge one for me: Clint’s fight in Tokyo and Steve’s fight with himself were some of the biggest missed opportunities in the entire film.

Not counting the football field brawl at the end, which I don’t count as a real fight scene, these are the two major fight scenes of the entire film and as far as I can tell, there was no effort made to make these showpieces. They went to the trouble of bringing Clint to Bladerunner Central, and pit him against the last bastion of aesthetic-obsessed mafia in the world. The panning camera in the interior as Hawkeye fought goons brushed past lazy fight scenes that only showed who was winning, not the brutality that Clint was supposedly falling into, not the grit of this new awful world, just... shapeless dark bodies getting thrown through windows? And on top of that, they could have made up (or picked from canon) any Big Bad to pit him against outside in the street, and we get an Orientalist sword fight that could have fit in nicely on a CW superhero show, and some of the most unnecessary exposition dialogue I have ever heard. Someone bothered to weave Clint’s arc in earlier, with Rhodey explaining to Natasha that Clint’s gone International and also Worryingly Dark. Why the fuck do we have the ‘I’ll give you anything you want’ line, on the rotten cherry on top of ‘stop being mean to the yakuza, we didn’t start it’? You already covered his motivations with the cold open.

And while Steve’s fight ended in a FABULOUSLY HEARTBREAKING WAY, the fight itself was nothing - you can pick little character details out like how they both ditched their shields almost immediately, and it was funny that Then-Steve mistook Now-Steve for Loki in the first place, but it was still a completely lost opportunity to get one true superhero battle in this three-hour slog. Both Steves could have gotten up and carried out the rest of the narrative after a decent brawl, but instead they fall a great distance after some blocked shots and it... was nothing? Missed opportunity for some cool shit.

Okay, skipping to character assessments now:

Clint’s character has been mishandled from the beginning and this seemed to be the “better late than never” eleventh hour arc. Except the end of the arc is unclear - it made sense for him to fall apart after losing his Shoehorn Family, but how did Natasha’s choice to fall do anything but fridge someone else, with more agency this time? It makes Natasha noble, which she already was, and it made her win against Clint, which I appreciate, but Natasha didn’t need salvation through death and Clint learns nothing by getting them back, just experiences relief.

Bruce. I want to say, first, that I love Hulk in a Cardigan. Cardihulk can stay. I want fanart, I want t-shirts, give me all of it. But Bruce’s explanation of “I scienced it so I could get the best of both worlds” only gives us half of the acceptance that Banner’s character is already working towards. As we saw most explicitly in Ragnarok, the Hulk isn’t just a physical form, he has his own separate consciousness, originally defined by rage but revealed to be more complicated. Bruce merging into Cardihulk seems to have... erased Hulk’s separate consciousness without merging it into himself? If there had been some acknowledgement of a second voice still within him that shot out opinions or demands for certain menu items in the diner, this would have been a much cleaner end to his arc, which has been equally messy between actor and narrative shifts.

Speaking of Ragnarok... it’s time! Are you ready? Have you read articles about the Gambit Gambit too? Are you fucking depressed that a fat suit was used for comedy gags in the year of our lord 2019? Because I was. The Russos seemed to... not struggle with what progress Ragnarok had put onto Bruce and Thor’s characters, but reject it. This movie’s Thor was anxious for laughs, was desperate for easy answers to a a feeling of lost heroism, and it didn’t feel like a familiar character. The time-travel scene with his mother wrapped it up very elegantly, and was well performed, but that scene didn’t need to follow a series of “chunky drunk in sweatpants” jokes to show us that Thor was struggling. Everyone in the film is fucking holding on by their fingernails, but only one is played for cheap laughs.

At least we get the bisexual Asgard lady king we deserved.

Tony got the right death. He got a hero’s death and Pepper’s last lines of “you can rest now” were exactly the right lines to wrap up an arc characterized by fear and a desire to protect and control at any cost. I knew the MCU was never going to really acknowledge that Tony’s The Problem, even with lines like ‘you should have let me do the fascist robot thing, that was gonna work fine’ thrown around pretty much as soon as he touches down on earth again.

I’m not sure if there’s much to say about Natasha. It was fitting that she was running HQ, that she was struggling, that she was rejecting emotional help from Steve but clearly still close with him. Seeing her break down after hearing the report on Clint felt right after, I think, being told by several directors (or making the personal acting choice? idk) to just be as flat and as decolletagey as possible. And again, while I feel like she would be self-sacrificing on that cliffisde if given the opportunity, and that she would win, the narrative choice to place her there and have that be her end didn’t really give her anything she didn’t already have. She had nothing to prove.

I have a hard time really laying out my thoughts on Steve without launching into the pregnant absence of Bucky, but I’m going to try. Chris Evans did a good job being the emotional heart of a really fractured story with a lot of conflicting pieces. Seeing him lead a talk therapy session after The Snap seemed very out of character for him until one realizes that Sam isn’t there to lead it himself. His scene offering help to Natasha was another good scene between them proving that not every m/f relationship has to be sexual to be interesting or add to the plot. His leadership speech during the Stupid Fucking Slow-Mo Heroes’ Walk to the platform was well done and makes me think of what could have been for the MCU, if they’d ever just let them be a cohesive found-family team for twenty minutes and let them fight some doom-bots or something. Fuck. Imagine.

Something weirdly satisfying about the deceitful ‘hail hydra’ line in the elevator. Yes? Yes.

The hammer scene was satisfying to me without being too gratuitous, but I’ll acknowledge that some people weren’t into it. Having paid more attention to Steve’s arc than most, I’ll argue that he earned it several times over.

His ending - that is, the secret life he alludes to but doesn’t explicitly reveal to Sam - is earned too. I’ve read at least one thing saying that Steve’s arc was all about him learning to let go, but that’s... never what Steve does. Not at the end of any arc, of any comic story, does Steve let go. Not of his principles, not of the people he loves, he is always “Thinking... Thinking About Bucky!” and getting in fights he can’t necessarily win. So I don’t think his final ending is ever Learning to Let Go. I think it’s fair that it’s Just Once, Just This One Time, Getting What You Want And Getting To Enjoy It.

And now I’m backtracking to Bucky. I’ve read one article already that theorizes that Steve’s arc, which was highly prioritized, included literally as little direct interaction with Bucky as possible because... the MCU? the Russos? Marvel?...  is aware that Steve/Bucky is the most popular same-sex ship in the MCU. And that’s tiresome as fuck but I think there’s some truth to it. I wonder if, like in Civil War, we’ll hear later from the actors that a lot of contextual one-on-one scenes were shot and then mysteriously cut from the final edit.

I will say that in my head, Bucky is relaxed when Steve goes back in time for the final time, and lets Sam goes to talk with Steve one-on-one at the bench, because Bucky is not worried if Steve will come back, and does not feel a need to check on Steve on the bench. Because, like Peggy, Bucky has been getting secret visits too. Maybe as far back as during his time in Wakanda, but certainly since the final fight with Thanos. Bucky was calm because he already knew. He didn’t miss Steve because Steve hadn’t given him an opportunity to do so.

d

[kitcat992]

Some honest responses from other MCU fans regarding Endgame

Because I know I’ve been one hell of a negative Nancy the past 24 hours, but wanted to show that my raw distaste for this film doesn’t go unshared.

particledamage: This entire thing sucks. I’m bitter.

SelenitaLunar: Worst ending ever. God can't believe this is the real deal. As a Tony fan they give us everything: Pepperony married and iron baby and Rescue only to kill him in the end and stab our hearts and tarnish all our memories of the MCU and this 11 years? Sure they are gonna subvert expectations, hope they enjoy it fully. As I'm not enjoying Marvel ever again. Shame on them. The Russos can go to hell, honestly.

greengirlrunning: They did Thor and Loki so dirty. The Loki thing is so obviously forced so that it ties in to his TV series, but it really undermines his entire arc in the MCU films. I'm pissed. Don't even get me started on Thor. It's perfectly believable that he would be depressed and feel hopeless, but to turn him into a joke and make him basically useless while Tony and Cap get epic (if problematic) endings? Bullshit.

_Mavericks: I’m sorry to say this, but the plot is pure shit. It’s not the case of getting disappointed because we wanted more. It is simply bad as it is. Sad ending.

sawinadream: Honestly Steve not preventing shit/suddenly acting selfishly AFTER being deemed worthy by Mjolnir/ignoring Bucky in Hydra captivity and SHIELD being infiltrated/the timeline somehow not registering these particular alterations IF he did change anything for the better.... OOC and lazy writing at its finest. Also wtf @ Sharon Carter now? Ew

priscillia28: It sounds like a bad fan theory

delta_charlie_2511: So the leaks we were sure were wrong turned out to be right. What they did to Cap is disappointing. It would have made more sense have him sacrifice himself and then wake up in a dream like sequence with Peggy where she is waiting for him to take her to the dance

valhallaorange: I'm upset with many of the main avengers stories, but I'm going to focus on Cap for this one.

It seems completely out of character for him to go back and marry Peggy, knowing in the future she HAD a husband and children, and a well-iived life of accomplishment. To me, it was a focal point of Cap's character to be unselfish and accepting of his new place in time. That included his love for Peggy and respecting that she lived her life fully.

It seems so wrong that he would go back in time to be with her and erase her family (children, possible grandchildren) in the process.

I'm so disappointed. I feel they've done his character so wrong and the only good movie of him was CA:WS. :(

Now that paired with the characterizations and situations of Tony, Thor, and Nat especially make me sad and unhappy.

ALSO, did the Russos just decide to say "Eh, screw it." With Sharon Carter? (Not a fan of her in the movies, but she also deserved way batter.)

valhallaorange: Agreed. A dance and then back to the future would've been acceptable and given more emotion to the pain and letting go Steve is known to experience. Also, Peggy deserves her own storyline and fully lived life without it being erased and her being reduced to only Cap's love interest.

captainamericasgf: This is literally my worst nightmare holy shit

RyuKenBlanka: Iron Man dying and Cap going back to the 1940's to be with Peggy is just lazy writing and closure for the characters and is the reality of Hollywood and not being able to have actors play roles forever. Both in reality should retire and take more advisory roles.

Suedeash: Also Cap's whole nightmare thing in Age of Ultron was dealing with the fact that he can't go back to Peggy, and yet here he just goes back? And knowing all of the horrible shit that happens in the future like 9/11, the Hydra infestation of SHIELD and all that he just sits back and does nothing? This sounds like a character assassination tbh, it would make far more sense for Tony to live with his family and Cap to have the heroic death as a way to bring his whole character arc to a fitting end.

Jedi_Mom: I think people began to think that it was impossible for marvel and Russos to let us down... we learned that they were capable of mistakes... the hard way.

DXGabriel: So.... when thor was becoming cool they just fuck his character? reaaly?

dracogladio1741: This is so convoluted. The ending is weird to say the least. Jeez.

inkwell84: Critics liked it. Audiences said what the eff.

itellteacherstories: This is what I get for overhyping myself: Disappointment.

lovestarkiller: Tony is gone like that?.... And Cap ending is just so...

FreeTanner17: One of the biggest disappointments is they kill off Natasha, don’t even give her a funeral and basically never mention her name again

Hawkguyism: Honestly, I'm severely disappointed

Cap's ending is a disservice to the character and his arc, Thor's ending makes no sense, he literally abandons all his people, Tony's ending is way too cruel, they could just say he went away and stuff like that, would be much better considering all the character's been through, Hulk and Nat are meeeehhhh, and seriously, how many fucking times is Hawkeye gonna retire? And like,we know he's gonna come back in the Disney+ show to train Kate and stuff

Overall, the plot seems too simple and the endings are pretty bad. Of course, in terms of action and entertainment, this movie will be a blast, but when it comes to story and narrative, it's a letdown. Especially considering we waited 11 years for this.

dumbwatercba: I feel like the writers went online and picked the worse theories out there and made a film out of it. Non of this seems right. The reviews were so positive. This seems like a steaming pile of shit. Thanus seems like the only thing missing from this.

msg53: I was hoping Endgame would be a good stopping point anyway. I would have preferred a satisfying ending, but a shitshow that turns me off of the entire genre works too, I guess.

IrishGrouch24: Man I am pissed the F off right now.

raven_rising:...Thanks Marvel, I kind of hate it.

scruk: I have no idea how they managed to fuck up this badly. No idea. It's like a bad fanfiction written by someone who's only watched Infinity War

CactusJackkkk: I feel like I just wasted 11 years of my life watching these movies with no payoff in the end.

eutears:This absolutely makes no sense. I cannot believe how the Russos thought this might be a good finale. Most of the plot crumbles if you put even a little bit of thought into it.

InlineSurfer: Keving Faige and MCU thinks,  that fans will take whatever they give us, but i cant, this so lazy and stupid script.

Griever11422: Notmycap. Notmytony

[airagorncharda]

Surprising no one, I have some Fucking Thoughts about Infinity War:

(I don’t know if it actually is, but this FEELS like the longest post I’ve ever written. And that is impressive because I am a long winded motherfucker on a good day and because it’s literally ALL negative)

So first off, I Did Not Enjoy this movie. For my complete list of things I DID like, read this very short post instead. If you enjoyed the movie and don’t want to read somebody absolutely slamming it, you should probably leave now.

Secondly, if you don’t want spoilers I’m not sure why you clicked the readmore, but you’ve now been warned: 

SPOILERS past this point!!!!!!!

I disliked this movie so much that I need to break down the varying ways I disliked it into fucking sections. So starting right off:

I find shock value character death to be cheap and lazy.

And boy did they go hard on the shock value character death. Boy, oh boy. BOY oh boy, did they ever. That was pretty much the entire movie.

If you can’t make the stakes feel high without death, you’re a bad writer. If death is the only card you know how to play, you’re a bad writer. 

I was expecting the characters who’s actor’s contracts are up to get killed off as a cheap and lazy way of explaining why they’re leaving. I was instead handed a movie in which literally everyone ELSE died for even cheaper and lazier shock value reasons that are almost certainly going to get undone (and thus be made pointless) in the next film. I was not impressed. 

The writers are painfully white, and refused to stop reminding us.

When the setting of the movie shifted to Wakanda, I wanted to be happy to see Wakanda. But I wasn’t, because the whole reason we went to Wakanda seemed to be so that the racist ass writers could jerk off while watching Wakanda (and Wakandans) get wrecked (and killed in horrific numbers), all so Wanda (who the MCU super duper whitewashed) didn’t have to kill her white robot boyfriend. 

“If Wakanda falls, it will have been for a noble cause” said the racist white writer puppeting T’Challa. 

Prioritizing the feelings of a white girl and the life of her white boyfriend over not just the hypothetical “half of the universe” Thanos thing, but also the very immediate and literal danger to the lives of ALL OF WAKANDA AND ALL OF THEIR FRIENDS was absolutely bewildering levels of antiblack racism and I was just sitting there shaking my head through it all. It was horrible. It is horrible. I cannot believe that line from T’Challa even made it into the movie. “A noble cause” my ass, that’s so violent, what the fuck.

The writers are painfully heterosexual, and refused to stop reminding us.

Again I scream at Wanda and Vision. Wanda and Vision, who I was hyped about being brought into the MCU because I liked them in the comics, but who have been a constant frustration and disappointment (whitewashed and underutilized as they have been) since their introductions. 

Also Quill and Gamora. 

Like, the writers couldn’t figure out a way to make the story interesting or have stakes without threatening hetero’s heterosexual feelings and heterosexual partners. They just.... couldn’t....................... do it............

Like, lets be real. If the lives of literally half the universe was at stake, everybody I know would be like “sure, I’ll die for that cause”. The conflict felt fake as fuck. People who are that selfish aren’t interesting, and half the characters they made that selfish didn’t used to BE that selfish.

Also, like, Gamora demanding Peter promise to kill her was weird on multiple levels. 

She definitely could have been like “I know the location of an infinity stone, and I know he’ll be able to get it out of me if he gets me alone, so I need you to kill me if that happens” but instead she was just like “I can’t give you a single explanation or detail, just promise me you’ll murder me because you love me so much.” Bad writing. 

And I feel like for Peter specifically, asking him to do that was really cruel. His whole issue with his parents was that his dad murdered his mom, like... asking him to kill her seems extra cruel? And she would know that. Doesn’t she have other friends? Couldn’t she have asked Peter to, like, not get mad at Rocket if Rocket kills her for the same reason? Or Drax? Why did it have to be Peter?? Why ask the person who’d be most emotionally traumatized by having to kill you to be the one to kill you if necessary? And why have her remind him of the death of his mom as a way to convince him to kill her? Bad writing.

Also Bruce and Nat were never interesting to begin with.

Also also Tony talking about wanting kids to a very obviously frustrated and uninterested Pepper was weird and uncomfortable. I feel like we’re supposed to be getting some sort of “they should have kids!” vibe but all I got was a “she doesn’t want to have kids and he’s not getting the memo” vibe. I also am very tired of “my partner wants me to stop being a superhero, guess I’ll feel conflicted but do it anyway but also not break up with them” narratives. Bad.

Thanos’ “random” selection of half of earth didn’t seem that random to me. Like, at all.

The shot of Wakandans dying wasn’t half of them dying, it was like 90% of them dying. And if you pay attention to who disintegrated, it’s.... 

T’Challa (black king of a powerful beautiful African nation, the most technologically advanced nation in the world)

Bucky (disabled and neuroatypical)

Sam (a black man)

I forgot to watch the end credits scene because I was so mad but apparently NICK FURY disintegrates in it, my blood is boiling with rage.

Apparently Maria Hill also disintegrates in it, so there goes a strong female character too.

Again I point to the, like, 90% of Wakanda who survived the combat turning to ash anyway.

Mantis (a woman, played by a Korean actress)

Wanda (a woman. Also whitewashed, but Jewish and Romani in the comics)

Groot (played by a man of color)

Peter Quill (played by one of the three white Chris’ in the movie, but dating a character played by a black woman, so of all the white men to die I find this suspect as fuck)

Drax (played by a Filipino actor).

And that’s not to mention Heimdall (a powerful black man), Loki (who is queercoded, and actually queer in the comics) and Gamora (played by a black woman) who Thanos also killed.

“Random.”

Right.

Except the movie was written by people who clearly have a bias and think it’s quality entertainment to watch PoC and marginalized people in general die. And/or they wanted most of those characters out of the way so Infinity War 2 could focus on the white dudes. Which brings me to my next hated point:

Infinity War 2.

Just.

Fuck that.

Fuck that cash grab bullshit of splitting major motion picture movies into multiple movies for no good reason. Fuck letting people go into a movie with a cliffhanger not knowing it’s going to have a cliffhanger. Fuck forcing people to commit to a years wait for closure on a plot without agreeing to. 

People don’t go to superhero movies to watch the villain win, motherfuckers, we want to see HEROES win! It’s supposed to be a movie that feels GOOD to watch because you can pretend for 2 hours that good people triumph over bad people, and we fucking NEEDED that 2 hours of escapism right now! We did not need a movie about a megolomaniac who wins the election and ruins the lives of everyone we love! We didn’t pay for that shit!!!! 

I mean, I didn’t pay for anything, I watched a bootleg version while curled up in bed, but if your movie hadn’t been a sack of cash grabbing propaganda horse shit I WOULD have paid to see it.

Also. 

People are “SPECULATING” a bunch of stuff like “Dr. Strange did what he did to ensure the eventual defeat of Thanos!!” and “everybody who got disintegrated is going to be resurrected in the next movie!!” but like... it’s not speculation if it’s obvious as fuck, guys. Don’t give the writers more credit than they deserve (they deserve zero credit). Don’t act like it’s not obvious and predictable when it is. 

1) Dr. Strange was not being subtle. “I’ve looked at all the potential outcomes and foreseen one in which we win” “We’re in the endgame now.” “It was the only way”. That’s blatant. That borders on heavy-handed. 

2) Most of the characters who died have movies scheduled. They’re coming back. This is not unclear.

As a result... their deaths don’t even feel real, they just feel like racist shock value fodder deaths. I’m not sad about it, I’m furious at the writers. They just killed them off so they could watch them die, and/or so they could avoid utilizing them. And that’s... so gross.

Ending a movie with the genocidal villain winning is not edgy or whatever. It’s just dissatisfying and, especially in the current climate of the world, it feels violent. 

Like, I’m mad that they split the movie, because it’s a cash grab, and then ending it on that note was just violent.

I guess the writers just really hated Ragnarok (and Black Panther).

Cuz like... they just completely wrote Ragnarok out of the MCU, made the whole movie pointless, and backpedaled on everything it accomplished. 

Ragnarok: “Asgard is destroyed, but it’s okay because the people of Asgard survived, and can rebuild somewhere else. Thor lost his eye and his hammer, became a leader to his people, learned that he didn’t need a weapon to harness his powers, and Thor and Loki finally managed to be a team again. Heimdal is given the credit he deserves as a hugely important part of Thor’s life. Also here, have an AMAZING black female character! The story ends with hope for a ship full of refugees.”

Infinity War: “Thor immediately gets a new eye, all (or maybe half??? it was really unclear) of the other Asgardian refugees are slaughtered off screen (big middle finger to refugees and also hope) and then Thor goes off on his own so he’s not really a leader anymore, Loki and Heimdal are dead within 5 minutes of screentime, Valkyrie doesn’t exist, and Thor’s entire plot in the movie is about how he needs a new weapon because he can’t be useful without one :)”

Me, who enjoyed Ragnarok: “wow, fuck you”

Similarly, after watching all the characters from Wakanda in Black Panther be written as their own people, whose stories and lives didn’t revolved around white people... their white-prioritizing characterization in Infinity War, as well as the IMMEDIATE choice to fucking wreck Wakanda at the first available opportunity, was a real fucking let down and kind of a slap in the face.

Peter Dinklage played a literal (though giant?) dwarf??????????

I FEEL LIKE THIS IS FUCKING OFFENSIVE??? Honestly I’m just so so tired of this poor guy getting hired only for roles where his dwarfism is a character trait. He’s a really good actor and I wish he got hired to play characters other than “the dwarf” every fucking once in a while, like jfc. 

(Side note apparently he’s been cast as “the dwarf” in a movie adaptation of the awful book “the dwarf” so that’s... happening........ i guess...................)

I FEEL like this role was particularly weird and maybe particularly offensive, but maybe I’m wrong, idk.

Also his actual visual design was bad. I looked up the character (Eitri) from the comics, and he looked pretty cool in the comics and animated show. He did not look cool in this movie. 

Bendick Camdsfgbitch has too big of a role.

Literally I’ve never met anybody who cares about the Dr. Strange movie or MCU character. The only people who care seem to be Sherlock stans who cannot let go and still think Bean Cummerbund playing [an intolerable asshole who we’re told (but not shown) is smarter than us, who never lets the audience in on his genius] is compelling. 

He’s boring, he’s an asshole, he’s playing an arguably whitewashed role (which is a pattern for him) and he’s not even playing it in an interesting way. Stop trying to make Dr. Strange or his actor happen. We don’t care.

And if the whole two movie plot is going to be about how he really did outsmart Thanos, the supposedly super smart supervillain, then I’m extra super bored as fuck. And so far that’s... super predictably what’s going to have happened. 

It was just really poorly written??

Idk, like it wasn’t even... funny... or good. All the lines were either predictable or they didn’t make sense. And everybody felt slightly (or severely, depending on the character) out of character. 

The plot is fucking garbage, AND THANOS IS TOO

The concept of the world being overpopulated (and that that’s why resources aren’t available for everyone) is an irl lie, my guys. It’s not true. It’s a lie perpetuated by racists and xenophobes and rich assholes who want to excuse letting people die of starvation rather than give up literally any of their giant Scrooge McDuck style piles of money to allow even the most minimally necessary distribution of resources.

We HAVE enough resources to feed and clothe and house and care for everyone on this planet, we just DON’T DO IT because of the bigotry and selfishness of the 1%. 

Also, “Genocide will fix all the suffering in the world” is literally nazism.

AND LIKE!! If the POINT was that Thanos was a space nazi and needed to be killed as a result, because his views are fucked up and have no basis in reality, and nazism must be stopped at all costs-- that could have been okay??? EXCEPT THAT’S NOT HOW THEY HANDLED IT!! Instead of going “Oh, yeah, Thanos is super fucked up and no one should agree with him or his actions or his ideology” they showed him in this weird and uncomfortably reverent light, and gave him this weird and uncomfortable side arc about how much he wuvs Gamora (that’s why he abused her, you guys-- it was because he LOVES her so much). So we’re supposed to like, feel sad for him or something? Oh no, nobody understands him and his logic, he HAS to do this to SAVE everyone. Oh nooooooo. 

But really, he’s a genocidal scrotum-faced piece of shit abuser, and his entire narrative felt like a nazi who abuses his kids just sucking his own dick on screen, and it was NOT enjoyable to watch, or compelling, or edgy. It was just gross, and violent.

ALSO there was NO REASON to give him that backstory. There was no reason to explain his desire to kill everybody. We already knew he wanted to kill everybody. That was already known, and we did not need an explanation about why. Like, they built toward this movie for ten years and they STILL dropped the ball by ignoring 90% of their own goddamn source material that built up to it in the first place.

Plus, Thanos’ plan was to kill half of everybody in order to save the other half, out of a warped sense of... mercy.... Except literally nobody wants him to do that, including (he said) himself. He doesn’t enjoy it. Neither does anybody else. Everybody is trying to stop him constantly. WHY CONTINUE IF LITERALLY NO ONE WANTS YOU TO, INCLUDING YOURSELF?? It just doesn’t hold up or make any sense as a plot once you think about it for ten fucking seconds...??? How did this ever get past the editing stage???

Additionally, Thanos’s visual design was way better in the end credits cameo he had like 10 years ago. This guy was not visually threatening to me, and did not read as powerful or ancient or anything. He didn’t even read like he was an alien, he was just an asshole, and it didn’t impress me like it was meant to.

If the only way to make your villain seem competent is to make your heroes suddenly incompetent, you’re a bad writer.

How did Loki, god of mischief, fight Thanos? KNIFE TO THE FACE!! FRONTAL ASSAULT!! Of... of course that failed? And furthermore, why did they make it a point to remind the audience repeatedly that Loki is a god, right before Thanos killed him by just, like, choking him/snapping his neck? Apparently that’s how you kill a god? Seems like it should be harder than that.

Why didn’t Dr. Strange do his “check all the different realities” thing when they first heard about Thanos? Why didn’t Dr. Strange chop off Thanos’ arm with a portal like his buddy did with one of Thanos’ underlings?

Why didn’t anybody just shoot Quill when he was obviously about to become a problem?

Why did Quill, who had been willing to kill Gamora himself earlier in the movie, suddenly go off the handle at the worst possible moment upon finding out she was already dead? And why was his response so minimal? Like I get that he’s grieving and stuff, but you need to be able to compartmentalize that shit at least a LITTLE bit, buddy-- and if you can’t, then you need to do something bigger than just like punching the guy. At least shoot out his eyes or something.

Why didn’t Thor aim for Thanos’ head? (and for that matter in all the bazillion timelines Dr. Strange looked at, why were there NONE where Thor aimed for Thanos’ head???)

Why did Wanda decide her boyfriend was more important than literally everybody else ever, especially when Thanos winning would mean Vision dying anyway, so like... I get that killing your bf would be traumatic, but suck it up? Why didn’t they consider breaking the stone and THEN reviving Vision? He’s not a human, he’s synthetic, so why would they assume he wouldn’t be able to be rebooted later with a different power source? And why did they gamble half the universe and actively throw away Wakandan lives for him?? I JUST???

The Hulk got his ass kicked by Thanos (a weird scene; why does Thanos know WWE wrestling moves??) so he just... stopped helping. Like, that could have been interesting, if it wasn’t a general theme throughout the movie that most of the characters conveniently stopped being good at what they’re good at so that the plot could progress with adequate Drama. 

Basically I just wanted to scream “get it together!” at most of the cast of this movie throughout the whole film. Don’t nerf your cast to make your villain seem stronger than he is. If you can’t make him stronger on his own merits, you’re a bad writer. 

I don’t understand the reality stone (or how Thanos used it).

It seemed to change whatever he wanted, but... only while he was focusing on it? Or only while he was nearby? As soon as he left, Drax and Mantis reverted back to their normal forms, so does he need to be in the vicinity for it to work? Or was it like an illusion? If so, that’s not changing reality. 

And either way, the ways in which he DID change reality were bizarrely whimsical and made no sense for his character. Like, he kept turning everything to bubbles. If somebody bought him a bubble wand, would he have stopped murdering everyone? Is that his aesthetic? Bubbles and spiralized people? 

Or was that the aesthetic of the stone itself? Because that’s weird too. 

That scene where the ladies fought the lady villain.

On the one hand, I’m glad there was a lady villain and her design was cool, and I’m glad whenever there are scenes where there are no men and only ladies. 

ON THE OTHER HAND I’m fucking tired of the trope where male heroes fight the male villains and female heroes fight the female villains because.... ??? Because they’re fighting someone in their own league? Or because men can’t hit women? Or something?? I find it very weird and suspect whenever a combat situation gets evenly split up between the genders. 

Wanda's powers >:(

Wanda is more powerful (by a LOT) in the comics than she is in the MCU, which is sort of understandable because she’s pretty universe-breaking levels of OP in the comics (like, one time she literally broke the universe), but it’s also pretty frustrating as a fan of comic!Wanda just how MUCH they nerfed her for the MCU. HOWEVER! In this movie they implied that she IS more powerful than she’s seemed up until now. 

And then they barely used her at all. 

I, a fool, thought maybe they were going to do something interesting about her magic. With the repetition that her power mirrors that of the stone, I thought maybe she was going to kill Vision, and then Thanos would use HER instead of the stone because she’s got it’s power inside of her. 

But no. 

They couldn’t have done something interesting where a woman has a role beyond “she’s precious to a Man and therefore important”. Nope.

Every Single Scene was a foregone conclusion.

Honest to god, I don’t remember a single scene where I was like “gosh, what’s going to happen next??” Every single scene was just me thinking “I know exactly what is about to happen, and I don’t want it to” and then I was right, and disappointed.

Every part of this movie was predictable with certainty, except I suppose for the scenes where I thought “surely they wouldn’t do something so weird and/or boring as what it seems like they’re setting up here” but then they did anyway.

Why did Tony think Steve would know where Vision was when Tony didn’t? And why was he right?

They just never explained this and I found it utterly perplexing. 

Tony was like “Probably Steve Rogers would know where Vision is” and my friends and I had to pause the movie to compare notes and be like “wait, why? Why would HE know?” and none of us could figure it out, and then the movie never explained it either.

Nebula was underutilized.

I was just really frustrated at how few scenes she was actually in and how little she was allowed to DO in a movie completely centered on trying to fight the guy who tortured and experimented on her for her whole life. Like, she was in it and she was relevant, but mostly only as a set piece, not a person. But I guess they couldn’t figure out how to make her Precious To A Man, so she didn’t really matter to the writers.

My only hope is that she’s vitally central to the next one, but like... I expect literally nothing good out of the next movie, so it’s not exactly a thriving hope.

The female characters were all underutilized.

The writers are misogynists and you could tell by how few lines any of the women had when they weren’t being shown as Precious To A Man. Which female characters got to be involved in whole entire conversations (rather than just one-off lines)? 

Wanda (while being Precious to Vision)

Gamora (while being Precious to Quill, then to Thanos)

Pepper (while being Precious to Tony)

Honorable mentions for Mantis, Nebula, Shuri, Okoye, and Nat for having a handful of lines each in the entire movie that was HIGH KEY centered on white men. 

The Thanos Fandom

I’ll leave off on people who actually LIKE Thanos right now, because I assume they’re mostly eugenicist nazis and aren’t worth my time.

No, I’m talking about people who like him AS A VILLAIN and think that the movie did a GOOD JOB of making him clearly and wholly and unequivocally a villain who the audience should clearly and wholly and unequivocally feel antagonistic towards. 

It didn’t. 

The movie portrayed him as someone trying to do “the right thing” who has to “make hard choices” because of his “tragic past” which is NOT an acceptable portrayal of a genocidal megalomaniac-- ESPECIALLY not in the current climate of the world. 

If the audience is not explicitly told how to feel about a villain (by point-by-point countering and condemning them), the lowest common denominator of the audience (which is not a small percent of said audience) is going to interpret the villain’s tragic backstory as justification, their “hard choices” as being worthy of empathy, and their worldview as something worth considering. Especially if you write them as such, and ESPECIALLY if they WIN. 

And yet all I keep seeing is people who want to justify enjoying the movie (unnecessary: you can enjoy it and admit it’s content is bad at the same time) by yelling “Of course Thanos’ is CRAZY-- that’s the point!! People complaining about it aren’t giving the audience enough credit!!”

Please read this relevant post talking about Fight Club (and Mad Max). 

“Media designed to teach morals often backfires [because] just exposing [people] to bad behavior is enough to make them internalize that the behavior is [...] acceptable for people to do, [especially when a] movie only really devotes 5% of its screen time to explicitly denouncing [said bad] behavior, and that [...] only arrives at the very end of the film.” 

--a summarized quote from the above, much longer, post.

This is extra EXTRA relevant if you have to WAIT A YEAR before you even GET to the “consequences” part of the morality story. “The typical adult audience member does not think critically enough about film media to process this moral” is a true statement even when the moral is in the last 10 minutes of a 90 minute film-- it’s WAY more true if the moral doesn’t come until A FUCKING YEAR LATER. Another relevant quote from that post is “The director has the responsibility to clearly spell out to the audience the difference between supporting a behavior by depicting it, and criticizing it by depicting it.” This movie half assed that at best. 

Another relevant quote: “Every villain is the hero of their own story. And when the villain is the narrator, the audience is hearing the version of the story in which the villain is the hero, and the audience is moved by that perspective.” 

Thanos was in charge of the narrative of the entire movie. He was functionally the central and thus main character on which the story turned, made clearest by the end screen “Thanos will return”, which up until now has been reserved for PROTAGONISTS. That’s what I’m talking about here. 

He was the villain, but he was also functionally the main character, and the narrative did not put in the work to properly condemn him or his actions. They spent all their time and energy making him fake deep, and then threw a couple “You’re insane!!!” lines in there from heroes to cover their asses that really didn’t have any effect on Thanos whatsoever.

Also please consider that “He’s just CRAZY!! That’s why he’s violent and evil!!” is a tired and ableist trope used primarily to villainize real mentally ill people and to let white men (who are not mentally ill) off the hook for violent toxic masculinity. Mentally ill people in reality are disproportionately likely to be the VICTIMS of violence, not the perpetrators, no matter what media would have us believe. 

Thanos isn’t crazy, he’s a self absorbed, entitled, genocidal megalomaniac, and calling him crazy is a cop out. 

Assuming everyone understood that he’s purely and simply wrong is giving the audience WAY too much credit, especially when his motivation is based on a fabrication that the writers seemed to actually believe. 

No one in the movie said “Thanos, our world isn’t overpopulated-- people in power are just greedy. If you’re going to kill anybody, kill those people. Don’t ‘randomly’ kill half the populous when some people are actually at fault." No one in the movie said “Your logic is based on fallacy” they just said “I don’t care about your logic because murder is always wrong (except when I do it).” Most or all of the protagonists in this series have killed people. I’m not saying they were wrong to, necessarily, but saying “You can’t just kill people” rings hollow from these characters in particular, especially when they’re actively trying to kill Thanos as they say it. Again, they’re right to do that, but IF they’re doing that, they need to be written to have a better argument than “Murder is wrong!” 

Basically the writing of this movie, where the heroes clashed with the villain, was just countering a fallacy that major parts of the audience may actually believe with some fallacies that fall apart at 10 seconds of critical thinking. Therefore, plenty of people will walk away with the wrong message.

ESPECIALLY when you depict Thanos in a reverent light, and have an entire subplot about how much he Loves the daughter he abused and continues abusing and then murders on screen. ESPECIALLY when he faces no genuine threat throughout the entire movie and then wins at the end, and the consequences for his actions have to wait a YEAR to be seen.

Thor "needed a weapon" to survive after taking the full force of a star??? I dont?? Get that.

That’s it, I just don’t understand it. 

Eitri the dwarf was like “BUT YOU’LL DIE!!!” and Thor did the thing anyway (predictably) and didn’t die (predictably) but was sort of dying for The Drama (predictably) and then Eitri was like “He needs the weapon!! to live!!!!!” and I still don’t understand what that meant or why. 

Relatedly, I don’t understand why Groot’s arm is an adequate substance for Thor’s anti-infinity-stone-weapon, when Groot #1 was obliterated by an infinity stone. Am I remembering that right? I don’t understand this. It feels like somebody thought “Hey you know what would be cool?” and that was literally the only thought process behind it. Nobody thought very hard about this before writing it into the movie. Though to be fair, that tracks with pretty much everything else in this movie, so why not, I guess. 

Also stars are way bigger than that, that was not a star. Just saying.

The Red Skull cameo made no sense.

I understand that the tesseract spat him out somewhere else in space, and I’m fine with that (like, that could have been interesting actually), but I don’t understand why he ended up as, like, a ghost doing the bidding of the soul stone or whatever??? Do the stones interact? Did the tesseract tell the soul stone to fuck that guy up cuz he’s an asshole? Was that just the effect of being transported too close to the soul stone? I don’t... understand that at all.

And, in line with the rest of the movie, he was very out of character.

“Thanos is sad because he LOVED Gamora”

Then he shouldn’t have fucking killed her. 

Even the smallest violin in the universe playing “my heart bleeds for you” would be too much. Fuck that guy and his fake depth.

Look I’ve touched on this multiple times already, but I keep coming back to it because it’s absolutely one of the worst things about the movie. 

If they wanted to make a point about Thanos' abuse not being mutually exclusive to the emotional experience of love on his part, they really should have hit it home instead of letting it just flounder. Abuse and love are not mutually exclusive, and we DO need more media that acknowledges that, but this is not how to portray that.

Gamora (or literally anyone) needed to actually SAY “I don’t care if you love/d me, you HURT me. You ruined my life. Your love is worthless and changes NOTHING.” 

Gamora suffered under his abuse pretty much her WHOLE LIFE and then he KILLED her. And he did it BECAUSE he “loved” her? And it was done to give him some sort of fucked up complexity/depth? That’s fucking violent. 

They didn't go hard enough on any of their character arcs/points

like... Steve was clearly shut down and depressed but that was never addressed. 

What was that about Tony wanting to stop being a hero and settle down and have kids??? They spent like 5 whole entire minutes (which is a long time in a movie actually) setting that up as a plot point and then never addressed it again. 

Bucky looked so tired when he saw the arm, like you could see on his face when he realized he was being sent back into war. Another assignment. Gotta kill more people. He looked so TIRED but then the next time we see him he’s smiling at Steve, and it never got addressed (AND THEN HE DIED SO???)

Bruce and Nat shared like one line, and then never spoke again (and while I’m not interested in them as a couple, that still felt weird). 

Rhodey went against that hologram asshole’s instructions and then it never came up again.

Rocket talking to Thor, asking if he’s okay, and Thor saying basically “I have nothing left to lose so I’ll be very useful” never became relevant. Rocket saying “Well, I mean, I’ve got a lot to lose actually” also never became relevant. 

Dr. Strange’s whole “duty” to protect the stone was supposed to be more important than anything, and yet it was not in practice more important than... like... anything, tbh. Nor did he have to deal with the consequences of failing his duty, even a little bit.

Vision was having headaches and then it turned out to be the stone, like, warning him about Thanos or something?? Never became important. 

Bruce couldn’t get the Hulk to help out. That’s... that’s it, that’s the whole character arc, he just couldn’t get the Hulk to help out.

Peter Quill was asked by Gamora to kill her. When the time came, he was actually willing to, but was stopped by an outside force. This was never addressed again, and then they both died. Cool. 

I understand that they might be trying to introduce all these plot points so they can address them in the second half, but.... like........... half these characters died already, and also that’s not a good way to write a two-movie story. Series’ need to have satisfying arcs within each independent installment. This movie did not.

((You may have noticed, also, that most of the characters the movie TRIED to give actual character arcs to, even if they failed, are white men. I noticed that too.))

Characters who have barely if ever been allowed to know happiness or contentment or safety, and then just die, are not enjoyable character arcs, fuck off.

Especially Bucky, but also somewhat true for Gamora, Mantis, Wanda (plus I’m still mad about Pietro). Don’t kill characters who’ve never really gotten to live well. Don’t make characters who only get to suffer and then die. Character arcs like that are almost always written by white male writers about marginalized characters, and it just feels violent. 

Steve’s new shield was weird.

I was actually hyped about T’Challa being the one to get him a new shield, because then it’d still be made of vibranium!! And everything from Wakanda so far looks rad as hell. But, uh... I wasn’t a fan of the design. It doesn’t look throwable, or big enough, or particularly useful. It didn’t do anything cool that I noticed. I thought maybe it was going to have a force field like the shield capes W’Kabi and the other male warriors used in Black Panther, or something else technological. Instead it just, like, gets 4 inches wider if you... put it on... or something??? Mediocre. Not worthy of having been made in Wakanda.

I just wasn’t a fan of pretty much any of the new designs they added to this movie (except the new spider suit, and that one lady villain; but that was really it). 

“All the stones together can alter reality!! Obviously the only solution is murder.”

I know everybody has said this, but why... didn’t Thanos just... create more resources. If the problem was too few resources, why didn’t he snap his fingers and make more??? If you have the ability to alter reality and remake the universe with a snap of your fingers, and your intentions are to improve the quality of life of all people’s throughout the universe, why the fuck is your only solution “murder half of everybody”?? 

And why would you murder a RANDOM half of everybody? Why wouldn’t you murder, like “the half of everybody who is the shittiest to other people, on a planet by planet basis” or something? Like, if your intentions are truly benevolent but you also truly can only use murder to improve the universe (which, like, is a very VERY bullshit “if” but I digress), why would you think the best use of murder would be “random”? That just seems like a privileged person trying desperately not to sound bigoted (while sounding bigoted nonetheless). 

So it doesn’t matter if they’re a mass murdering dictator, or a serial killer, or a sexual predator, or a corrupt politician lobbying for a skewed distribution of resources based on bigotry? They’d still only have a 50/50 shot at dying, even though you claim to be doing this for the betterment of the remaining people’s quality of life? 

What about communities that have already suffered genocide? They have to suffer that again, because you can’t get your head out of your ass long enough to comprehend the nuance of this bullshit situation you’ve created?

What about people who are studying genetically modified food to make resources more plentiful? People who spend their whole lives making hugely positive differences in the distribution of resources? People who are just good, and care about others, and take steps to improve the lives of others, people who aren’t going to fuck up the paradise you want to create? They also have that same 50/50 shot?

And if your goal is only the deaths of 50% of the people in the universe, what about bus drivers who are actively driving buses? What about surgeons who are in the middle of surgery? What about people driving cars on the highway? Killing half the population instantaneously would result in way more death than just half the population. 

This plan falls apart more and more the more you think about it.

"The biggest cast of all time” and NOBODY is queer. 

Like, there are two characters in the entire MCU who could conceivably be considered canonically queer: 

Valkyrie, because she was supposed to have a scene indicating her canon bisexuality. And even though they cut it, it was IN THE SCRIPT so it’s halfway canon.

Loki, but only because he’s queer (genderfluid and pansexual) in the comics. So like, he’s NOT canonically queer in the movies, but he’s also not specified as NOT queer, so...? The writers definitely didn’t intend it, despite queercoding him, but we can pretend. 

And in infinity war, Loki dies 5 seconds in, and Valkyrie straight up doesn’t exist. So????? It was boring and sucked.

They attempted to address the MCU Villain Problem, and failed.

The MCU villain problem, AKA the villains in most MCU movies are forgettable and boring because they and their schemes always came as an afterthought. 

Recently, to address this, the formula (as seen with Killmonger and the Vulture) seems to be "a villain that needs to be stopped, but who is understandable and maybe even relatable and likeable". In both the case of Killmonger and the Vulture, this worked (not perfectly, but it did). They made the villains PEOPLE outside of their villainy. They made them complex, and it was compelling and therefore memorable and interesting. 

They tried to apply this formula to Thanos... in the worst possible way. 

As I’ve already talked about. They tried to make him complex to avoid their usual villain problem, except in the process they MADE HIM THE PROTAGONIST. There wasn’t a hero protagonist. There was only Thanos and a lot of heroes trying to stop him, and posing no real threat to him or his plot at any point.

And the heroes OPPOSED him, but they did not properly condemn him or his logic, and then he won.

Fatphobia and emasculation aimed at Quill for the lulz  

They wanted Peter Quill to be threatened by Thor for some reason, and the way they chose to do that was to make Quill’s friends call him “one sandwich away from fat” and thus “not a man”. 

Then he started vowing to commit to a better exercise routine or something, and tried to lower his voice to sound more like Thor. Bless Thor for not understanding what was going on and thinking Quill was mocking him (aka, not thinking of Quill as having anything he’d need to compensate for), but Quill being threatened by Thor, as well as his jealousy of Gamora’s attention to a “more attractive” man, honestly just felt like the writers scrambling for a reason to give the characters conflict, and settling on a toxic and offensive trope. 

Especially because Chris Pratt is In Shape. He has like a six pack. He’s objectively NOT fat. If he were, and they mocked him for it, that would be fatphobic and shitty, but the fact that he’s NOT just makes it baffling on top of being fatphobic and shitty. It’s like those makeover movies where they put glasses and baggy clothes on a conventionally attractive woman and then claim she looks terrible. 

Bad.

There were better options for Thanos' reasoning and the writers... really should have taken them.

I have HEARD that the comic version of Thanos’ motivation was “He’s in love with the embodiment/god of death, and wanted to kill half of everybody to impress her” and to be honest that would have been a better option.

(Side Note: Maybe the use of Hela as the Goddess of Death in Ragnarok is why the writers of Infinity War hated Ragnarok. Maybe they were mad they couldn’t use her for this movie, and that’s why they murdered and buried everything Ragnarok accomplished with such thorough dedication.)

Other better Thanos motivations just off the top of my head: 

He wanted to take over/colonize/enslave other planets to house his own people who DID use up the resources on their own planet.

There’s actually something ELSE he wants to use the Infinity Stones for, but he needs to kill tons of people to get it, or to get the Infinity Stones.

He was cursed to be immortal and will not be allowed to die until he kills enough other people.

He needs to trade like 10 million souls to the embodiment of death to bring someone he loves back from the dead.

He plans to harvest people from a bunch of different planets to produce a youth serum for alien elites-- (no wait that’s the plot of jupiter ascending)

He just hates people and thinks people should die.

He literally eats people, and he’s enormous so he needs to eat a lot of people.

Just saying, all of these are better motivations than “I’ve just gotta murder people cuz if I don’t then people will run out of food, and then they’ll die. I don’t WANT to, nobody else wants me to either, but I’m going to anyway. I’m sad about it.”

"We don't trade lives" 

This was a line from Steve about killing vs not killing Vision, and in the subsequent context of the movie, it’s violent as hell. 

“We don’t trade lives” he says, to discourage Vision from consenting to death to save everyone. Then he/they take Vision to Wakanda where Wakandan soldiers lay down their lives by the dozens to hundreds to protect Vision. Vision, who was willing to die. 

Steve Rogers is a soldier. He KNOWS that trading some lives for other (hopefully more) lives is how this is going to go. He knows. This was like the “Language” line from Avengers; it doesn’t make sense for the character.

But even beyond that, as I’ve said, they are absolutely going to-- and for that matter they were PLANNING to trade black Wakandan lives for Vision’s safety. And even if that weren’t a plot point, they’d be planning to potentially trade their OWN lives for those Thanos would kill if (when) they fail. 

“We don’t trade lives.” Yes, you do. Of course you do. And the audience knows it because the audience has seen all your other fucking movies. 

Why couldn’t the writers take a breath and stop trying so hard and just let the characters say what they mean. “I don’t want you to die.” “Please let us try to save you.” 

Why couldn’t they have just, like, made up an actual reason why they couldn’t afford to lose Vision? Maybe Vision’s headaches could have been actually utilized as a warning system? Maybe Vision could have communicated telepathically with Tony’s AI all the way through space, so Vision was their only was to know what was going on with Tony and Co.? Maybe destroying the stone while it was inside Vision was massively dangerous (like, could have gone off like a bomb or something....? I mean he CAN use the stone like a laser, maybe trying to destroy it would make it detonate.). 

THERE WERE OPTIONS. Instead they went with the absolute fallacy of “We don’t trade lives,” delivered by a character who would never have said that, and followed by the traded lives of MANY black people for one white man.

Bad.

The Soul Stone has really low standards for supposedly having high standards

Why require somebody to go through with a whole test of “give up the thing or person you love most” to acquire the Soul Stone? Like, the explanation “A soul for a soul” was kind of cool, but what does that have to do with love? It’s not the Love Stone, it’s the Soul Stone. Love doesn’t have anything to do with that, and even if it DID, Thanos’ version of love should have made the stone go “Um, I think the fuck NOT, you abusive motherfucker,” instead of “Sure! I’ll hand phenomenal cosmic power over to you because you just seem super legit. Nothing could go wrong here.”

Was the love thing even real, or was the Red Skull just bein’ his racist self, and wanted to watch Gamora get tossed off a cliff because he’s a nazi and bored as hell?

Furthermore, why did only one of the stones require a test? Is the Soul Stone just really needy? What is the deal with these stones??? Nothing was ever explained at ALL and it made NO SENSE.

Gamora deserved better, and so did every audience member who’s ever been abused.

I’m just gonna circle back to this point and address it head on.

Here’s a great article on this subject from somebody better equipped to address it than me.

But basically just... fuck the writers for showing us her power, and then making it pointless. Making her stab Thanos in the throat and then allowing him to wave it off like it didn’t happen or didn’t matter or like he was just testing her. Fuck the writers for letting her be murdered at the hand of the man who ruined her life, to further HIS goals, and to give HIM ‘depth’. 

If she doesn’t get resurrected in the next movie and deliver the killing blow, I will be even more furious than I already am, and that is honestly already an impressive level of fury. 

God I’m so fucking glad I didn’t pay to see this garbage fire of a movie.

[thiscrimsonsoul]

What did the mun think of Endgame? I was, sadly, very disappointed... They ignored Loki, Vision, Heimdall... Thor's depression and ptsd... no comment. They gave Tony a family just to kill him and including IW, they killed the two main women of each team (Gamora and Natasha) in the exact same way, same music, only to add that "Girl Power" moment later. Wanda fights a Thanos who didn't take anything from her. Whilst fighting this Thanos, they weren't the Avengers; they were the preventers!

{out of parikash}  So… I had a lot of problems with Endgame, but not as many as you might think or the ones you might think. This is gonna all be random, so let’s just get started, haha.

First of all, yeeeeah, I agree with you. No mention of those characters at all. Or Pietro after Ultron. So it struck me upside the head like a two-by-four to realize that some people seriously dislike or even hate Wanda because they think Pietro and Vision died and she didn’t care. Like… the fact that Pietro and Vision were never mentioned again in the MCU after their deaths (unless you count two seconds of his name on a baby’s shirt for Pietro and one indirect and possibly not even a reference to him at Tony’s funeral for Vision) are taken by some people as IC insensitivity from Wanda. Like… they think SHE doesn’t care. And that just like… hurts. Because she does, she cares a shit ton. See… I never ever took that as IC, or even real, haha. My brain automatically filled in like well okay… she does mention them, they do have funerals, she does cry for them… it just happened off camera between movies or during downtime where we didn’t get to see. That was 100% what I always assumed. So to learn that some people actually blame Wanda IC for not reacting at all to their deaths after their movies ended… that really shows the gross mishandling of their characters that MCU has engaged in, in my opinion. Yes, I went there. XD So yeah… I loved the way they handled Natasha’s and Tony’s deaths, but other characters also deserved such attention.

The portrayal of Thor’s depression and PTSD was… absolutely disgusting to me. I’m just gonna lay it out there. My heart broke for him, and he’s not even a favorite character of mine. To have a character break down that much and have it be perceived by other characters as annoying, crass, gross, funny, pathetic, or somehow negligent on his part and placing blame on him… was just… a slap in the face to anyone who has ever been broken down by trauma or grief in their lives. It sent the message that, if you react this way to trauma in your life, you’re lazy, no one will like you, you’ll be a failure, you’ll be a walking joke. And that is really not forgivable, Disney. Like honestly. What the flying fucking pancake. I would never treat any character I have ever written anywhere the way they did Thor. Boo. Not cool. Not acceptable.

Okay… Tony and Natasha’s deaths… here is where I’m going to lose followers haha. Let’s take Tony first.  I… was… never a fan of Tony until after Endgame, and I really didn’t understand him until I recently watched the first Iron Man movie. Yes… I haven’t seen 2 or 3. Yes… I didn’t watch any of them until after Endgame. I had no interest. I didn’t like the man at all. It wasn’t until Endgame that his death made me rethink him. His death, the way he interacted with Morgan, his message at the end… they all made me stop and go hmm a bit. In watching Iron Man, I suddenly realized that he had a very similar personality to and functioned mentally in the same way as a character I created over a decade ago. That character was also loud, crass, ran at the mouth, jokes that were funny, overly defensive, a little off, drank too much, the whole shebang… and it was because he had been traumatized during a war. Other characters around him accepted and understood that he was this way and why he was this way, and they gave him a lot more leeway and understanding than they would someone who had not been traumatized. To still other characters looking in, it was confusing as to why this totally abrasive asshole was being given all these free passes by his friends. Anyway, my point was that as soon as I realized that Tony was at his core the same type of character, I suddenly understood him a lot better, and that helped me to like him more.

In writing Wanda, that made me consider the nightmare/premonition she conjured in his mind in a different light. If you remember in Ultron, right after he wakes from his dream, Wanda is there and she looks… surprised. It’s canon that she saw all their nightmares, Lizzie said it so I buy it, haha. I have actually used her mulling over what she saw in Tony’s head as the bass for IronWitch (which I know is an extremely controversial ship, but somehow I make it work… off Tumblr though, I don’t need that kind of anti-ship hate on her blog), because Wanda was expecting something far more selfish and petty from Tony than what she got. And she doesn’t just see visions, she experiences what they’re thinking and feeling too. So she felt a lot of unselfish things from him that day that really confused her. The man who murdered her parents because he doesn’t care who he kills or he’s so rich that he doesn’t care who he sells his weapons to… which is who she thought he was… wouldn’t have had the kind of vision that he had. It changed her opinion of him, and I headcanon that that’s why she was able to tolerate him a lot more easily than Pietro.

Anyway, my tangent in going into this was that… his death actually made me, a late-comer to the movie-verse of Marvel, really examine his character and the core of his values and soul. In a good way, heh. I thought his death was good. BEFORE YOU KILL ME LET ME EXPLAIN, HAHA. I don’t mean I’m glad he died, because I’m not. That sucked, Morgan’s sad face sucked, everything about that sucked, haha. But… the way in which he died, the sacrifice he made, the way in which he was loved and honored afterward… I liked that. From a writer’s point of view, it felt like a very honorable and virtuous ending for a character who always had strived to be such and felt like he fell short. Well that time, he hit the bar, heh. I liked it. BUT I WILL COME BACK TO THIS ONCE I’M DONE WITH NATASHA SO HOLD THIS THOUGHT, haha.

Natasha… Okay, just like Tony, I didn’t overly like her until she died, haha, but whereas with Tony it was because I had misunderstood the character, with Natasha it was more a case of her completely flying under my radar. Bitch had been making me like her for umpteen number of movies and I hadn’t ever REALIZED it until she went and DIED on me and then I realized I LOVED her. XDDD I shit you not, I was literally like oh no I think I liked that character that just died, haha. It was a weird feeling. But not necessarily bad. What was bad, was the fact that it didn’t need to happen. I mean… was there a problem with just reversing our own timeline and grabbing the stones before Thanos snapped? I feel like there was a reason why we couldn’t’ do that, so I’ll let that one go, but even so… could we not have gone back to maybe when Thanos got the soul stone and taken it from him? Or I mean, my point is there were other options. Of course that would have screwed Gamora fans, haha, but I’m sure there was another way of getting that stone. But… that aside… new paragraph because long…

…as with Tony, I thought her death was well done. It was an emotional, honorable, brave way for again… a character who had often thought she wasn’t good enough or that she had too much red in her ledger. Well it all got erased at that point. It was a great venue, I thought, to showcase her and Clint’s relationship (which incidentally, have you ever seen a more beautiful display of platonic love in a really valid way before? Just ugh, it was amazing), to show how much they loved each other and how much that they were equally willing to sacrifice to set things right. Their commitment to saving the world regardless of what it meant for them was incredibly profound, poignant, and I thought the whole scene was really well done. If she had to die, I think it was a good death deserving of everything else we saw from her up until that point.

If… she had to die. If… Tony had to die. Here’s… where I start to get pissed off, haha. As I said, I feel like there were ways around Natasha dying. And with Tony… I mean… again, it was for an IronWitch thing… but I wrote a little ficlet off Tumblr about Wanda continuing to power the arc reactor herself after Tony did the snap. Now… granted… she couldn’t hold it forever and eventually got tired and distracted by her emotions and Tony ended up dying anyway and it was super sad, BUT… lol… the point was… I believe Wanda could do that. I believe Carol could’ve done that. Or, hey, you’re telling me they couldn’t find any kind of a temporary power source to fuel the arc reactor until they can fix or replace it? how many freaking times did Tony almost die from removal or failure of the arc reactor in Iron Man alone??? I’m not buying this, Marvel! Okay, maybe he died of a combination of the reactor failing and that he got fried by the power going through his arm and torso and head. Okay, that I buy. HOWEVER… HOW MANY OTHER CHARACTERS DID THEY BRING BACK IN SUCH RIDICULOUS WAYS BEFORE TONY AND NATASHA, AND YOU’RE TELLING ME THEY’VE GOT NOTHING THIS TIME? Some seriously ri-DONK-culous shit has happened in order to bring characters back in the MCU. I don’t buy for a second that there’s no way to do it. I just don’t. I personally can’t think of a way to do it, short of just grabbing another Tony and Nat from another reality into this one, haha, but I’m sure one of those giant brains at MCU could have thought of something.

Okay I ranted about Tony and Natasha enough. Now on to Steve. First, let me expression  my deepest sympathies to Captain America fans everywhere. They did him so wrong. I mean oh my holy gracious gravy pants, what the hell even was that?! First of all, in my opinion, someone who would selfishly go back in time to get what they want from a woman who otherwise had moved on and had a family and a life of her own and passed away already peacefully… was not worthy to wield Thor’s hammer. Worthy… to me… means… some kind of higher justice or morality that extends beyond self and into the greater good. There was nothing good about what Steve chose to do. It was selfish, it was really inconsiderate to this woman he claimed to love, and so much for all that junk about not being able to alter too much in the past or in alternate timelines, we have to just do pointed things and get out. Well Steve completely altered HIS OWN TIMELINE. Like. So why can’t  we go grab a mind stone somewhere for Vision? Huh? Why can’t we yoink a Nat or a Tony into this timeline? Why couldn’t we have brought back Pietro? For someone who was supposed to lead, keep order within, and direct prudently a team of people who have all lost and suffered and regretted things… he basically just said to them well nuts to what you want but Imma get what I want so see ya suckers. It was such a shitty thing to do and honestly I pretend like it didn’t even happen. Because no. Steve up until that point through umpteen number of movies would never have done what he did at the end of Endgame. He would have wanted to. He would have thought about it. But he would not have done it. That’s what makes him worthy. He doesn’t do what he wants, he does what serves the greater good, or truth, or justice. MCU dropped the vibranium shield on that one big time.

Okay all morality and character development that got trashed aside… sending Steve back to his timeline would have… changed… a lot more… than him just growing old? He wouldn’t have been encased in ice. Wouldn’t have been found decades later as a young capable person to help out with all the events of later movies. Civil War would never have happened. Lots of things wouldn’t have happened or would have happened differently because Steve would not have even been there. By all rights, when he came back old, everyone else there but Bucky should have been like… who the hell is this guy? They would not have had the history with him anymore. Am I wrong on this? I would love someone’s opinion because this really bugs me that they let this big of a plot hole go.

Now about Wanda... I do understand why that had to be set up that way, but as her mun, I can’t tell you how infuriating and heartbreaking it is getting inside her head at the moment at which Thanos casually tells here “I don’t even know who you are.” Like… here is a girl full of pain and grief and rage who has been so wronged by this guy… and he’s like… who dafuq even r u? At that moment she must have felt like exploding. Her feelings and pain were completely invalidated in that moment. Just… ugh, so painful for her. BUT THEN… MCU ROBS HER OF THE CHANCE TO KILL HIM. Wanda had Thanos. She was going to kill him and basically win things for everyone. But nope. We can’t have a woman do it, we gotta save that honor for Tony, heh. No offense to Tony, it’s just irritating to me heh. LET HER DO THIS, MCU. WHAT ARE YOU AFRAID OF? LET WANDA BE THE STRONG VENGEFUL WOMAN SHE IS AND KICK THIS PURPLE RAISIN’S ASS. It was like they felt they had to do the fans a service of having that confrontational moment but then decided no okay lol but we have a better ending for Thanos so bye bye Wanda. That’s honestly what it felt like and I really hated it.

Aaaaand I have ranted ENOUGH about this, haha. I’m so sorry, I kindof let loose lol. Hope I answered all your questions though!