A rantlet? I guess?

[sholio]

Not posting on Tumblr because I don't like hitting myself in the head with hammers, but I was having a conversation with sheron this morning about Endgame and I got to thinking about my biggest narrative problem with it, namely ...

... it works fine as the ending for an individual movie, emotionally speaking (I mean, I have logistical issues with some of it, but not movie-destroying ones) but not as the culmination of multiple character arcs that have built over 10 years.

Like I was saying to Sheron, you can have your big apocalyptic breaking-the-world finale (those can be great! They can be completely kickass! Sometimes it feels good to be pummeled in the feels until you beg for mercy!) or you can have your ongoing franchise full of characters people get really attached to and want to follow from movie to movie, but you can't do both at once, particularly if (especially if!) you put your big apocalyptic finale in the middle.

I feel like this might be one place where comics really steered them wrong, because comics does this kind of thing on a regular basis, the big crossover break-everything events. And on the whole, the MCU's general storytelling style, with multiple interwoven and related series, is patterned after the comics.

But, first of all, this is one reason WHY comics readership is in steady decline, and second, those big comic events tend to end up quietly fixing most of the things they broke over the next year or two anyway, via retcons and/or just quietly ignoring any parts of the continuity that people dislike about the earlier event. I mean, just because it's a standard part of comics* storytelling doesn't make it good storytelling.

*By "comics" I mean Marvel and DC, which is a particular shorthand that drove me ABSOLUTELY BONKERS for many years -- using comics as a synecdoche for a particular brand of superhero comics -- but I have to say it can be convenient when you don't want to type out qualifiers all the time.

Anyway, though, this only works in comics to the extent that it does because regular comics readers have not only been conditioned by decades of inconsistent writing to ignore any part of their favorite titles that they don't agree with, but have also come to accept that it's an advertising gimmick more than a serious part of the story. It matters about as much as the "In this issue, SOMEONE DIES!!" blazoned across 80s/90s covers, "someone" being either a minor character we don't care about or a major character whose death will be fixed sooner rather than later. (I am, for example, annoyed as hell at Marvel killing off Cable and replacing him with a younger clone as soon as I got attached to him, but I figure it's only a matter of time before they get tired of nu!Cable and find a way to bring back the old one, via time travel or dimension travel or clones with the original's memories or some other completely ridonkulous retcon. Last time I checked on my X-Men OTP, Gambit was evil and Rogue was in a coma, and now they're married. IDEK.)

But the point is, comics runs on that kind of nonsense logic. It's like soap operas: you don't expect serious plotting, you expect plastic surgery turning one character into an exact copy of a different actor, and secret babies and kids aging from toddlerhood to teenagers in 3 years and people coming back from the dead.

But the MCU established itself as a realistic universe that runs on plausible(-ish) internal plot logic. Meaning, you only get one shot at it; meaning, if ten years of buildup leads to a character dying, a couple breaking up, a solid hammer coming down on ever doing some popular plot from the comics ... that's it, that's the shot you got. We were supposed to be able to relate to the MCU on a more realistic level, and most of the earlier movies support that.

So it's NOT like those big comics epic crossover apocalypse events where you just assume we're going to subsequently ignore 90% of it. I mean, that DOES seem to be what they're doing with, say, the 5-year timeskip and its likely effects on the world which it appears that future movies are just going to ignore. But it doesn't work the same way because the MCU has been established as a more realistic universe. I'm not surprised in comics if they kill off half the population with an epidemic during the latest big event while over here in Related Title 92, fun romcom hijinks are continuing as usual. That's comics logic for you. But the MCU didn't used to be like that.

And it doesn't mean you can't reward 10 years of audience loyalty by killing off a character or breaking up a couple -- sometimes that is the plausible end; sometimes it's the narratively satisfying end. But there's something frustrating and cheap about building up to that as the Big Finish, and then putting out a new fun feelgood movie 2 months later along with the announcement that we've got 10 more movies coming except without all your faves.


ETA: More specific Endgame and general MCU negativity in comments.

Comments

[snickfic]

Yeah, absolutely agreed. The Avengers team-up movies (and I'd include CW here as well) have always felt more like comics to me than the solo movies, in the sense of being more about action and spectacle than about telling coherent stories about pre-existing characters that make sense in the context of those characters' overall arcs. However, IW and Endgame ratcheted that comic book feel up a BUNCH of notches, because "half the universe died, five years later they all come back and everything's fine now" is EXACTLY the kind of ridiculous logic that typifies comic books and that people make fun of them for. And that's without even going into, as you say, what it means for individual characters, some of whom are in the middle of their stories.

Ugh. Ugh. Why, Marvel.

[kore]

Yeah, I think the team movies start having problems even as far back as AoU, in terms of how those movies had to tie up previous plots, set up future ones, and oh yeah whatever movie-specific plot too. And then the problem with including every single new character was grotesquely big by IW/EG, which is also a problem with the comics crossover events. There were still neat little character moments here and there in the team movies, but they felt really crushed in between the callbacks and big fight scenes and awful attempts at comedy (the Hulk dabbing. WHY, just, why). The MCU is really built on character movies -- not just Thor and Tony and Steve, but the Guardians, and Scott Lang and his group, Peter and his friends, the epic clash between T'Challa and Erik....But towards the end, mostly with CW, it started to feel to me like the team movies were sucking up all the time and effort because they were such big elaborate set pieces with so many moving parts, and the people got sacrificed to the plots (such as they were).

[snickfic]

Honestly, they've felt like that to me from the very beginning. I don't even like Avengers 1, which I realize is an unpopular opinion. And lots of people complained about the characterization in that one, especially for Steve and Thor - ie, two of the three members of the team who had any pre-existing canon at all. (Unless we're counting The Incredible Hulk, lol.)

[kore]

I really didn't like Avengers 1 at first, but it kind of grew on me -- but yeah, Steve and Thor are both really off in it (I do love the Clintasha). I do like the way it wove everyone together, because I love the trope of fucked-up teams who become found family. But from the perspective of EG, we REALLY didn't get that.

[trobadora]

That's so true about comics event fuckery. I think part of why people are more or less able and willing to roll with it is also because it's already happened a million times, and we know that. And that's just not the case with the MCU audience, even the part of it which expects it in comics. Ugh.

ETA: I meant to say, it would be super interesting to see how comic book readers responded to the first big instance of something like this. Except first you'd have to figure out what counted as the first big instance, and I'd have no idea how to even begin researching that!

[sholio]

I cannot believe I'm enough of a nerd to know this, but I actually do know this, because this was right around the time I started reading comics. There were two of them, Secret Wars in Marvel and Crisis on Infinite Earths in DC, both at approximately the same time in the mid-80s. Secret Wars Wikipedia article here and Crisis article here.

Apparently Secret Wars went over pretty well -- I think maybe because it didn't really change anything, for the most part; crossovers between individual comics were already pretty common, and this was just a bigger version of "your faves get to meet your other faves." Crisis on Infinite Earths was kind of ... uh ... people were still arguing about it when I got into online comics fandom in the mid-90s, and it was basically the opposite; the whole point was to collapse DC's multiple continuities into one, so some people loved and some people really hated it. But those were the first, I think.

/nerd

I think the reaction of comics fans to those events, though, was already biased by decades of American comics being completely ridiculous and then starting to get more serious and grown-up in the 70s/80s, as opposed to operating the other way around. I mean, there's a completely different history for it outside the US, but by the 80s it still really had a reputation as kids' entertainment, it's just that it had started to take off as an entertainment-for-adults medium as well, but had a long, existing history of being silly, bonkers, or otherwise not really something you took seriously. So I think adding totally bonkers crossover events didn't really blow things up that much since there was already a lot of goofball stuff going on.

[trobadora]

Oh! It's so cool that you know this; I really do find it fascinating. I knew about both those things (in a "that happened" sort of way), but I had no idea they were actually the first. I never got the feeling Secret Wars left a huge impression on anyone, but I know that Crisis on Infinite Earths definitely did. Makes sense, under the circumstances.

Good point about comics not being taken seriously. I hadn't considered that, but it makes a lot of sense that the general approach would be different in that context, in a way that's not at all comparable to the MCU.

[kore]

The original Civil War event (they had a Civil War II! It sucked even worse!) definitely wasn't the first big comics crossover event, but I thiiink it was the first really hugely popular one, and it pulled in a lot of solo books and there were limited mini offshoots and some consequences (often swiftly retconned or ignored). I don't know if the earlier comics events got their tentacles around everything to that extent. But if you look at the giant Civil war omnibus, it's HUGE, and the collected edition is like 11 books https://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Box-Mark-Millar/dp/0785196943 So of course they wanted to duplicate that and like every single Marvel comics event after that lasted for months, had a ton of spinoffs, affected individual character storylines (which made collections of their stories really weird) and they've just cranked it up to this unholy pace of two or even three a year. Comics fans hate it, but I think the crossover books are still the ones that sell the most in LCS.

[trobadora]

Civil War (I, and it should never have needed that number, ugh) definitely is a big one, yeah.

I don't know anyone who actually likes the proliferation of crossover events, but they're inescapable because they get into everything. I won't lie, they're part of why I drifted away from comics again after discovering them pretty late.

[recessional]

I know of a couple of comics readers who at least from a personal pov hit their first experience with this (like: it may have happened before, but it was THEIR first experience with it) and pretty much all hated it, but then realized it would all Go Away Next Issue and the repeated experiences basically made it common-place.

It's just . . . not my favourite mode of creation.

[trobadora]

I don't know anyone who doesn't hate it! And yet the stuff still sells. *SIGHS*

[kore]

I CAN LISTEN TO ENDGAME RANTS ALL DAY //skinny Steve

Yeah, I definitely agree, and think that the team movies really do have all the flaws of the crossover events in comics -- too many characters, everyone often acts OOC for the sake of the plot, established characterizations are thrown off by different writers, the plots are convoluted and frequently dumb, &c &c. I also feel really annoyed that instead of having a team, we got a sort-of teamup in Avengers -- and an immediate reaction in fic with 2012 Avengers Tower fanon, which is also canon in the comics -- and then the team was constantly being fucked up or pulled apart in nearly every movie after that. After AoU, we don't see them act all together as a team until Endgame! That is nutty.

And the whole Snap premise seemed to buy into the "okay comic book movies can be Tragic and Deep too, watch us be ~grimdark." There was already darkness and even tragedy in the MCU. I think that there's a difference in the mediums -- when people see crashes and characters turning to ash and violent deaths onscreen in realistic photography, it's a lot harder to do that reset. There was really no reason to kill Tony and Nat and disappear Steve. Thor and Clint, and maybe Bruce, seem fine with just fucking off. It kind of feels like they slammed the door on the first 10 years.

[sholio]

There's a post on Tumblr that I can't find now because god knows what I tagged it as, but here's my reblog of a related tangent; the point of the original was basically that the Avengers found-family-baited us, and ... I do actually agree with that, despite the fact that I did also enjoy most of the individual teamup movies as movies. (This was pre-Endgame, I think, but my feelings really haven't changed.) In fact I'm actually just gonna quote a bunch of my own exceedingly long commentary on that post because, I mean, why reinvent the wheel and try to paraphrase when I already wrote it over there:

What I wanted and needed was the movies that take place BETWEEN the Big! Conflict! Movies! I resent that we saw the teams coming together at the end of both Avengers and AoU, and then never actually saw them function as teams. ESPECIALLY AoU, because you could reasonably argue that everyone going their separate ways at the end of Avengers was the reasonable thing for them to do at that point in time - they’ve only just come together, they aren’t really friends yet, and as their separate movies show, they have their own individual lives that don’t overlap much.

But what we needed then was a movie or two of teamy teambuilding, not first of all a movie that was half about building up the team and then half about splitting it and sending them all off on their separate ways AGAIN (AoU) - I mean, ffs, give us at least more than half a movie about one Avengers team before you go forming another one - and THEN, okay, so AoU ended up giving us a new team, but we never got a chance to get into that team at all, because we never even got to see them in action except for like 10 minutes at the beginning of CW before everything was blown to hell AGAIN!

So yeah, basically what’s missing for me with the core Avengers movies is a delivery on the found-family promise. We never see that. I don’t even need an entire movie of everyone getting along and working as a team, as long as it starts and ends (or at least ends) with the “warm found family together” feeling that most of my favorite movies in the franchise have. GotG delivers on that: the final scene of the first movie is everyone going off to have adventures together, the 2nd movie begins by saying “yes, they HAVE been having adventures together”, and then everyone spends most of the movie at each other’s throats, but it closes on a warm “together” vibe again. Similar with Ant-Man: the first movie ended with everyone together as a family, the second movie opened with some of the family members estranged, but closed on a warm note with everyone together again and some new ones brought into the fold.

Avengers just can’t seem to keep everyone together for more than half a goddamn movie!

I also really love OP’s point [this is in the original Tumblr post btw] that we rarely get the Avengers throwing themselves into danger for each other. As opposed to most of the peripheral movies in the franchise, where we do get that, over and over: the Guardians standing together with Peter, or Yondu dying for him; Scott going subatomic to save his family; Loki making the decision in Ragnarok to finally do the right thing and come back and help his brother and people; the Wakandans saving Ross when they didn’t have to, and Ross returning the favor by throwing his lot in with them and being willing to die to help save their country.

Those moments of individual, personal togetherness and willingness to sacrifice, not for grand ideals, but for each other are not entirely missing from the Avengers movies - we do get a few - but they don’t tend to be the big emotional climax of the movie, and they may revolve around characters we haven’t really had a chance to build up any emotional investment in (e.g. Pietro’s sacrifice, which was a good moment but would’ve been a much better moment if he and Clint had more than a scene or two together). Even worse is when, rather than bringing everyone together on a warm fuzzy note, they tend to make things EVEN WORSE and less teamy (like Natasha choosing sides in CW, or Tony deciding to save everyone in AoU by building a planet-destroying robot).

These are all totally legit storytelling tools but they do not tend to result in found family warm fuzzies, which was what I felt the buildup to the first movie was promising, and then subsequent movies in the franchise really haven’t delivered on. I don’t really have strong feelings for the Avengers as a team because the movies have never managed to sell me on the idea of the Avengers having strong team feelings for each other. Families bicker and families fight, and I love movies that develop conflict between the characters and then have them overcome it and have each other’s backs, but the core Avengers part of the franchise feels to me like it’s missed the boat on the “having each other’s backs” aspect. Or at least, we’re sometimes told about it, but never really shown it.

--

Coming back to the present from the above ... it was written pre-Endgame, I think, but it's not like Endgame really changed this much; if anything it just fits the pattern that everyone got on the same page for half a movie in Endgame and then it all blew up AGAIN. They really needed to stick with the same team lineup for more than one movie at a time, but at this point it's not gonna happen and there are no more team movies on the horizon, so yeah, I don't think it's unreasonable that people reacted badly when the big "everyone is friends now!" teamup movie led to everyone being consistently at odds for the next 6 years and then half the team dying.

[kore]

YES THANK YOU THIS IS ALL GREAT Also I really appreciate it, because I don't go on Tumblr that regularly and often miss things I want to see! and I can't figure out how to find meta there.

I also really love OP’s point that we rarely get the Avengers throwing themselves into danger for each other. As opposed to most of the peripheral movies in the franchise, where we do get that, over and over: the Guardians standing together with Peter, or Yondu dying for him; Scott going subatomic to save his family....

That is a REALLY good point. I think we see hints of it some here and there, mainly with Natasha (what a surprise, the first female Avenger is self-sacrificing) -- she cuts off her mission because Clint's compromised, she stays to help Steve in AoU, she lets Steve and Bucky go in CW, and of course she DIES in EG. (Although that's really badly done.) And of course there's Steve going all out for Bucky, but he isn't a team member, and Bruce putting on the gauntlet in EG and, of course, Tony dying. But just compare it to the teambuilding in that one movie, GotG 1 -- they have to band together unwillingly to escape prison, and then they all decide to follow Peter's plan (I cry every time), and then they all literally stand together to use the power gem and the whole movie is about making connections. It's even there as a visual theme with the repeated "take my hand" motif. So by the end I was like "fuck yeah, these people are bonded, I can believe they would do stuff together and I am heavily invested in them staying together." But even the end of Avengers emphasizes how they split up -- there's dyads like Thor and Loki, Clint and Nat, and maybe Bruce and Tony, but the emphasis is all on how they may come back together in the future, if there's another huge crisis. (And then in CW we even get the line about "maybe the superheroes are causing the crises," gahh.)

it's not like Endgame really changed this much; if anything it just fits the pattern that everyone got on the same page for half a movie in Endgame and then it all blew up AGAIN. They really needed to stick with the same team lineup for more than one movie at a time, but at this point it's not gonna happen and there are no more team movies on the horizon, so yeah, I don't think it's unreasonable that people reacted badly when the big "everyone is friends now!" teamup movie led to everyone being consistently at odds for the next 6 years and then half the team dying.

Yeah, another thing that struck me re Endgame was how there are teams from the other movies, but the Avengers aren't a team in the same way, which is very weird because they are in the comics. There was maybe one bit in IW/EG of people acting together against Thanos, and that was the Guardians trying to take him down with all their different talents in one attack. Other than that, it was mostly one-on-one, or smaller groups. That even happens with the Time Heist! Nat and Clint are one team, Rhodey and Nebula are another team, then there's Tony/Scott/Bruce/Steve, and then Tony/Steve, and finally just Steve by himself. And with the effort to get the Tesseract, they screw up. (That happened even in Avengers, too, with Tony going through the portal and Nat trying to close it and the others fighting solo.) I think the Russos wanted that kind of Leverage-style teamwork -- they even said it was like a heist movie -- but it really didn't come off in IW, and then in EG there's just that scene with everyone on the battlefield that's like a living splash page. It's visually impressive as hell, but very quickly goers right back to mano a mano again, the three guys, and then Wanda and Carol, against Thanos. And the one who saves everyone is Tony, because in large part the team movies revolved around him, for better or worse.

The sacrificial acts in EG are all separated off -- Nat and Clint on Vormir, Bruce putting on the gauntlet by himself, Tony doing the second snap. The Russos said there was a deleted scene with a whole lot of people in a ditch or something figuring out strategy, but they cut it because it seemed boring -- but that movie needed more shared strategy, more teaming up. It was like how Infinity War kept teasing the phone Steve gave Tony -- Tony's clearly about to call a couple of times, but then Bruce does it and it's offscreen. That was a giant WTF for me. But in the end it really sums up how the Avengers team is in the movies -- there are possible connections but no real follow-through.

[kore]

also oh my Jesus holy tl;dr, sorry!

-- And in GotG 1, there's also THE scene of "We are Groot" and Groot literally shielding all his teammates in a kind of foliage shelter/parachute. (And everyone in the audience cries again.) The Guardians are a much more disparate group than the Avengers, but they actually bond and the relationships are strong enough that it's not just Peter/Gamora, but the other characters interact too. That little moment with Rocket and Nebula comforting each other in IW is devastating because they both lost someone.

[snickfic]

I also really love OP’s point [this is in the original Tumblr post btw] that we rarely get the Avengers throwing themselves into danger for each other.

Even more of a problem, for me, is that the characters in general don't seem to develop relationships in the team-up movies where they ever feel important to one another. Like, the reason the Nat-Steve relationship feels as important as it does in Endgame is because of movies like TWS laying the groundwork and doing all the heavy lifting.

[sheron]

I also really love OP’s point [this is in the original Tumblr post btw] that we rarely get the Avengers throwing themselves into danger for each other. As opposed to most of the peripheral movies in the franchise, where we do get that, over and over: the Guardians standing together with Peter, or Yondu dying for him; Scott going subatomic to save his family; Loki making the decision in Ragnarok to finally do the right thing and come back and help his brother and people; the Wakandans saving Ross when they didn’t have to, and Ross returning the favor by throwing his lot in with them and being willing to die to help save their country.

This is a great point, and also ties into why Tony's ending really didn't work for me (beyond the heartbreak). Because where is the "together"??? >_>

But we talked about that :D

[recessional]

But the point is, comics runs on that kind of nonsense logic. It's like soap operas: you don't expect serious plotting, you expect plastic surgery turning one character into an exact copy of a different actor, and secret babies and kids aging from toddlerhood to teenagers in 3 years and people coming back from the dead.

But the MCU established itself as a realistic universe that runs on plausible(-ish) internal plot logic. Meaning, you only get one shot at it; meaning, if ten years of buildup leads to a character dying, a couple breaking up, a solid hammer coming down on ever doing some popular plot from the comics ... that's it, that's the shot you got. We were supposed to be able to relate to the MCU on a more realistic level, and most of the earlier movies support that.

I mean that is exactly where/why I went from (kinda unwillingly) totally in love with it to absolutely AUGH NO, for sure.

And it's not that I entirely hate the "comics" mode - I don't get INVESTED in it, because of how it works, but.

But the premise and implicit promise of the early movies was this OTHER mode and that's what snuck up and hooked me. And the minute I could see that it had veered so hard in a different direction was when it just . . . stopped working for me.

It's hard to say that it was "a mistake" from the producers' POVs: they made a crapload of money and appear to have basically got to do The Cool Things they (Feige, at least) wanted to do with "their" characters, and basically pwn wherever they want to.

Buuuut yeah.

[sholio]

*nodnod* Yeah, I remember this was your exact problem with the preceding few movies, and I actually thought about that in thinking about my reaction to Endgame after the movie came out, because it was essentially that exact issue -- that was the movie that hit my personal unrealism filters so hard that it broke my ability to suspend disbelief in the universe. It just took me a few years and a few movies longer to actually get there. But ... I get you.

And yeah, it does make complete sense from their perspective; in fact, they have no incentive to ever stop, because they're raking in a ton of money. It's a different model, not one that's inherently flawed, necessarily - but really not compatible with what they were doing earlier, at least if you really invested in the fictional reality of the world. (As you kinda have to, to write fanfic about it.)

[recessional]

I mean I think it's kiiiinda likely to bite their ass in the long run: I think they're setting themselves up for a saturation point and fall-off/die-off of the franchise-set that is going to end up being quite a bit like what's happening with the Big Two in comics, but in a shorter timespan. I think it'll be very easy for superhero movies to bottom out back at the level of lack-of-respect (and tbh lack of related box-office) that they were prior to the first Iron Man.

But on the way there they've already made a couple billions, and they're liable not to notice as instead they get deeply caught up in the problems of trying to handle the dichotomy of trying to monetize and maintain their PRC-based audiences without being heavily censored/cut out while at the same time pretending they're not, in fact, pandering to the Chinese Communist Party's every whim.

Soooo yeah. I think contemplating the total lack of creative integrity is something they don't give much of a comparative crap about at this point. *wry*

[sovay]

So it's NOT like those big comics epic crossover apocalypse events where you just assume we're going to subsequently ignore 90% of it.

I was really expecting a pure reset on Endgame (which I still haven't seen, and am unlikely ever to) because I couldn't see any other way to square the established reality of the assorted threads with the massive unreality of the crossover event and I still think I would have felt much less cheated by that than by what we actually got. The emotional whiplash you describe here—

and then putting out a new fun feelgood movie 2 months later along with the announcement that we've got 10 more movies coming except without all your faves.

—really does just feel like money-minded contempt.

[sholio]

I normally hate resets, but I think this is one of the vanishingly few cases in which it would have worked, given what they'd set up, and in fact would have worked much better than what they actually did.

[overzelos]

Yeah, I hate resets too because they fly in the face of actual consequences and make the prior choices irrelevant. But when canon is already blatantly disregarding any semblance of consequence in the first iteration, I feel like a reset might actually make choices matter the second time around.

[yalumesse]

Yes! This makes a lot of sense.

I don't think there was ever any way they were going to be able to tie off so many character arcs satisfactorily. There's just too much.

[sholio]

Yeah, I think that's a big part of the problem too; they just built it up to a state that was too unwieldy to work.