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]

One of the MANY! things about this movie that makes me incandescently furious is that while Natasha has to die for stuff that, in her backstory, she was BRAINWASHED FOR AND HAD NO CHOICE ABOUT, Clint goes on a fucking five-year murder spree and is specified as killing Mexican and Japanese people and the movie absolutely completely handwaves it. They don't care. He's innocent in their eyes.

[xparrot]

I didn't see the movie as saying Natasha had to die because she had been a bad guy or did bad things (or is that what the Russos said??) but because she happened to be better than Clint and so won their sacrifice game. Like, we never really saw Natasha do anything bad, we're just told about it, so her death looked more like tragic sacrifice of a hero than a necessary redemption.

...that sounds like I'm okay with Nat's death and I really am not, I am not a huge fan of heroic sacrifice anyway, and that her death get a minute of 'aww too bad' while Tony's gets an orgy of grief...even though Nat is the one who was holding them together for five years and most of them had barely even talked to Tony in that time, but Tony is more important to audiences so is more important to the characters.

[sholio]

Oh yeah, totally agreed on this. I don't see Nat's death as a punishment in any way. It's just that she was the one who won her sacrifice-off with Clint. Taken on its own, I actually loved that scene; if you gotta have a character sacrificing themselves for a loved one, that was a really great scene for it. It didn't read as "redemption by death" to me at all. If it hadn't existed in a context where she was the only female OG team member and as a follow-up death to Gamora's (apparently not gonna be retconned) death in IW, it would have been actually a pretty good heroic death.

As the MCU losing one of its relatively few female characters AND the only major female superhero who's been around since Phase I, though, it's not a good look on them.

I do wish they'd given her a memorial at the end, or something, even a little scene a la Wash in Firefly.

[xparrot]

Yes! The one-upping sacrifice was awesome -- I've seen characters trying to sacrifice themselves for each other before, but rarely so determinedly.

The final outcome, though, was...really frustrating, for all the reasons you said about why it's a bad look to kill Natasha in particular. I also am resentful of how it's framed that it's the 'right' outcome, because sure Clint is a mass-murderer but he has a wife and children who need him, while no one "needs" Natasha (and, like, I don't think that was quite the reading they were going for, but it ends up shaking out that way...)

And really, the final funeral could've been joint her and Tony's, as they both died in the same mission, if at different points; they both willingly gave their lives to save the universe...

[kore]

Well the screenwriters said in the interview

Why does Natasha Romanoff have to die?
McFEELY Her journey, in our minds, had come to an end if she could get the Avengers back. She comes from such an abusive, terrible, mind-control background, so when she gets to Vormir and she has a chance to get the family back, that’s a thing she would trade for. The toughest thing for us was we were always worried that people weren’t going to have time to be sad enough. The stakes are still out there and they haven’t solved the problem. But we lost a big character — a female character — how do we honor it? We have this male lens and it’s a lot of guys being sad that a woman died.
MARKUS Tony gets a funeral. Natasha doesn’t. That’s partly because Tony’s this massive public figure and she’s been a cipher the whole time. It wasn’t necessarily honest to the character to give her a funeral. The biggest question about it is what Thor raises there on the dock. “We have the Infinity Stones. Why don’t we just bring her back?”
McFEELY But that’s the everlasting exchange. You bring her back, you lose the stone.

Was there a possible outcome where Clint Barton sacrifices himself instead of her?
McFEELY There was, for sure. Jen Underdahl, our visual effects producer, read an outline or draft where Hawkeye goes over. And she goes, “Don’t you take this away from her.” I actually get emotional thinking about it.
MARKUS And it was true, it was him taking the hit for her. It was melodramatic to have him die and not get his family back. And it is only right and proper that she’s done.

So to me they are leaning really heavily on the "red in her ledger" idea.

[xparrot]

Hmm, to me, with the emphasis on abuse and mind-control, this quote at least sounds less like they were going with Nat trying to make up for the red in her ledger, and more going for "finally she gets to choose what she does with her life, and she chooses to save the Avengers and the universe."

...The bit about Tony getting a funeral because he's a public figure and Nat not getting one is just weird, when everyone at Tony's funeral has some personal connection to him (they weren't just there because he was rich and famous), and Nat had connections with all the Avengers as we saw all through the movie, and, like, Clint's family loved her? And why couldn't it have been acknowledged that as secret as she tried to live her life, she ended up having so much impact anyway? If the point is that she died for the Avengers, her family, isn't it terrible that they barely are given any opportunity to acknowledge or appreciate that sacrifice?

(also, the "everlasting exchange" thing being why she can't come back makes no sense to me because they LITERALLY BRING THE STONE BACK at the end, that's the whole plan, so...this is apparently a no-cash-returns situation? store credit only??)