I have seen Endgame!

[sholio]

Rarely has my opinion on a movie been so thoroughly mixed.

As a movie-watcher wanting to be entertained, I really enjoyed it! Despite being very much not on board with some of its narrative choices (mainly Natasha's death and the way Thor was handled as a character), I really enjoyed 90% of the movie. It was much more character-focused than I thought they would be able to get from a movie with so many arcs to tie up. I particularly was not expecting Nebula to have such a great arc; that was a lovely surprise. I knew the movie would involve time travel but was not expecting the tour-de-previous-movie, which was a fun nostalgia trip and a nice way to tie a bow on this phase of the MCU. Characters time-traveling and then having to avoid their past selves while running around in a previous installment of canon is a ridiculous trope that I wholeheartedly love, and the Battle of New York sequence was especially fun. I did not expect all the cameos from canonically dead characters, from Jarvis to Alexander Pierce, and that was incredibly fun as well.

Taken on its own as a movie, it was - I felt - a really enjoyable movie with a few flaws, if you like big bombastic superhero movies. Which I do. If it weren't for the fact that I'm currently quite invested in a fandom way, I think this movie would be kind of like most of the Star Wars or Star Trek movies are for me: splashy big-budget sci-fi movies that I enjoy being entertained by, and mostly ignore the parts that don't work for me, and enjoy being wowed and/or made to feel things by the parts that do work.

However, as a fan who is (or was) actively writing fanfic in several areas of the MCU, and someone who is very emotionally invested in certain groups of characters, I ... uhm. So they managed to completely and totally break literally EVERYTHING I read and/or write fanfic for, from the Netflix MCU shows existing in a miserable dystopia for the next 5 years, to the entirety of Agent Carter and all my fic being jossed, to Loki and Gamora being perma-dead. (I realize we still have *a* Gamora and *a* Loki, but the canonical ones who had all that character development over several movies are still gone. I was so convinced their deaths were going to be fixed that I'm still upset and processing over that.) Just about every ship in the fandom has been completely destroyed, along with the ability of any of the spinoff/TV-verse canons to remain MCU-compliant. (Which I think probably means any chance of the Netflix shows or AC being resurrected at this point is completely dead in the water. Not that there was much chance of it anyway.)

So yeah, I'm still processing how I feel about this. On the one hand, this movie provided a bunch of new story ideas based off the new canon -- which is something you don't usually get for closed canons; I think it's going to be fun to write 5-years-later presumed-dead/post-Snap reunion fic for the Defenders characters, and fic incorporating Steve into the AC universe. I look forward to checking out all the fic and writing some myself. But it did end up doing the thing I feared most from a fandom perspective: it broke all my canons. My choices at this point are essentially to ignore canon and write AUs, or scrap everything I'm working on and write new and different fic that's compliant with the new canon. On a fandom level, I am torn between "I really enjoyed the movie and it gave me new story ideas, which is nice!" and HOW DARE YOU BREAK ALL MY BEAUTIFUL CLOSED CANONS. >:|

Comments

[kore]

even the corners of the 'verse like Black Panther or Ant-Man where everyone survived are still having to deal with a canonical 5-years-of-dystopia time-skip.

I was just infuriated that they kept that. I know they basically did it to make sure Tony kept his happy ending, but it seemed unthinkably selfish of him and it fucks up post-Snap canon two ways, because there's still the trauma of the original Snap, PLUS now the people who have been snapped have to come back to a changed world in which it was assumed they died. (And that's just leaving out the inevitable terrible effects of five billion people suddenly reappearing in a world which apparently has adjusted to having half its biomass for years. Then again they still had cars. IDK.)

[sholio]

It's also completely unnecessary! If the Gauntlet is powerful enough to snap half the cosmos and bring it back, I don't see any possible reason why "... but my daughter is still alive just like she used to be" couldn't be part of the wish. It could even be a really cool and angsty reveal, where he was willing to give up his entire happy ending to put things back like they were and he thinks it's all gone, and then his daughter shows up and he realizes he subconsciously saved her with part of the wish. Or just being prepared to do it and then realizing at the last minute that it doesn't have to be an either-or situation.

The world is just so incredibly different now that it's not going to be a matter of writing "our world plus superheroes", it's a recovering dystopia that's dealing with a whole new influx of problems as they get 3.5 billion people dumped on them just as they're starting to recover from the last time. I fully expect that canon is not going to deal with this, so there's no reason why fic necessarily has to, but it bugs me. And the 5-year timeskip with half the characters aging and changing while the other half stay the same is a problem no matter what.

[kore]

It could even be a really cool and angsty reveal, where he was willing to give up his entire happy ending to put things back like they were and he thinks it's all gone, and then his daughter shows up and he realizes he subconsciously saved her with part of the wish. Or just being prepared to do it and then realizing at the last minute that it doesn't have to be an either-or situation.

I LIKE IT. Hell, dira IIRC just wrote a fix-it that wasn't necessarily that different from that idea. It's just bizarre to me that the writers came up with this total monkey's paw scenario -- if you rewind everything to pre-snap, you wipe out whatever people have been born and changes have occurred in those five years. But if you don't erase those five years, the worldbuilding gets even faultier. WHY they had that fucking timeskip I do not know. (Well of course I do know, they wanted Tony to have a kid, and apparently they wanted to accelerate everybody's decline.) There's just no good reason for it at all.

The world is just so incredibly different now that it's not going to be a matter of writing "our world plus superheroes", it's a recovering dystopia that's dealing with a whole new influx of problems as they get 3.5 billion people dumped on them just as they're starting to recover from the last time. I fully expect that canon is not going to deal with this, so there's no reason why fic necessarily has to, but it bugs me.

PRE FUCKING CISELY, and the other thing that bugs me is, just as you say, I really don't think canon's going to care about it (they have new cars! why do they have new cars five years after a totally cataclysmic event?) so I actually kind of feel angry that they don't care about the consequences and can basically get away with that. Arrrgh. I don't actually like feeling this angry. I love the MCU, it got me back into fandom and writing again and it's a really rich well developed world, with comics background. But it feels like a lot of that got shut down.

[ratcreature]

Actually dealing with that population back and forth would be really interesting. I mean, it would have to be something like the Black Death with its massive mortality the first time it came through Europe, only on fast forward and in a modern society. But society then coped, and even though it felt to them like the end of the world and like end times had come etc., they actually hadn't, and for all the disruptions there was also a lot of continuity.

And I can see the world adapting. Obviously everyone would be massively traumatized, but then we also suddenly meet our carbon targets and then a few years down the line once the immediate catastrophe and displacement had started to work its way through the systems, survivors probably have big wage increases and better bargaining powers economically (like when after the Black Death surviving farm workers had to be paid better), because suddenly workers are actually scarce, and all these kind of administrative bullshit and "service" jobs that are not absolutely essential but got created as occupational overhead as farming, then industry and parts of white collar work get automated to keep "work" so central in capitalism, probably become less affordable. Of course you have much less demand too, but I still think the acute shortage of the people with certain key qualifications would be felt more.

And of course there is suddenly even more surplus of stuff. Housing even in tight markets is suddenly not so scarce anymore either. Even if in many houses that before had couples or roommates the survivor stays alone, there are bound to be many that are just empty and survivors who inherited (or the state if nobody is left). On the flip side there's of course a housing price crash as part of the general economic collapse...

Then just as things start to realign into a new shape a few extra billion people pop up again. That probably causes the next giant economic crash, and a massive famine or something...

[yalumesse]

I mean, I knew it would be bad, but you make some really terrifying points. I would love to read a fic exploring the fallout of all this.

[ratcreature]

Well, you'd hope that when they did the wishing with the all powerful thingy either Bruce or Tony thought to wish some extra food supplies into existence to provide a buffer. And unlike us they have Wakandan tech and Asgardians, so I assume they can do efficient carbon capture, and probably that helps with farming.

[yalumesse]

YES. That would have provided Tony some better angst. And he of all people should know how horribly the world has been affected, both environmentally and the PTSD parts of it.

I was really expecting Tony to have to sacrifice his daughter to save the world, but that wouldn't have gone down will this super "nuclear family = happy ending!" thing the writers had going on. (seriously, Aunt Natasha stepping into Clint's shoes and getting the children she was written into wanting would have WORKED.)