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I have seen Endgame!
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. >:|
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. >:|
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I overheard someone ask what happened to the hammer (sorry, can't spell it's name offhand)? Steve took it back in time with him, but he only passes the shield on when we see him as an old man. So maybe it's something to do with that *shrugs*
Though I can see why people missed it.