Fandom Meme, 25

[osprey_archer]

25. Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

Thanos's plot to kill half of all life in the galaxy in Infinity War was stupid and the Avengers' decision in Endgame to undo it but only kinda was even stupider and all of Marvel's attempts to deal with the aftermath in Spiderman: Far from Home and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier just drive home how very absurd those plot points are, and I refuse to allow any of it to enter into my personal MCU headcanon.

Comments

[rmc28]

VALID

[osprey_archer]

RAGE, RAGE AGAINST THE DYING OF THE LIGHT.

[potofsoup]

AGREED!

[osprey_archer]

The WORST canon development. Genuinely aghast at how hard they broke their own worldbuilding for all future installments.

[kore]

That's what really pisses me off and nearly drove me out of fandom for good (til Wandavision and BW, lol). I can handwave AoU, I can fanwank Civil War, whatever, but killing half the universe is nightmare dystopia number one, and then bringing them all back AT ONCE is not making it better! And since they made it affect everybody, and they're actually keeping this plot development (unlike, say, anything from TWS, IM 3, Ragnarok, &c &c) it seems like future MCU installments will just keep engaging with it, badly. Wandavision and Loki were both basically in bubbles, but one of the dumb and MAJOR plot elements in FATWS was they swapped the refugees and displacers and while that was set a couple of months later, the world didn't look that different, apart from a few closed stores. They had to go to Fake Singapore to find someplace shady! Apart from the terrible racist "optics," if the earth had been through TWO galaxy-shattering events in about five years, your granny's parlor would be a shady arms and drug dealing den! Apparently the power grids and the food supply chain and medicine manufacturing and god knows what were all just fine? Tony is living off the grid in a vacation home with unlimited power and computing power and has mass-manufactured Popsicles? lkjsdfoiausdfkj ljasdlfj (And I am BAD at worldbuilding stuff, so if I notice this, you know it's bad)

tl;dr it's really hard to ignore this terrible, terrible plotting and to fankwank it I have to come up with my own plots and worldbuilding and frankly that's not why I personally write fanfic, if I have to put in that much effort it's not that much different from writing my own stuff. Maybe that means I'm just doing fandom wrong, idk. There were some people going "No this is great, we can fix this! There's a time machine! We can rewrite it ALL!" and I'm just like the Zola trailer. "THIS - is MESSY."

tl;dr tl;dr From what I've seen apart from some determinedly gritty fics, fandom is just ignoring it or at any rate just not engaging with it, anyway

[osprey_archer]

Frankly, I do not believe the refugees would quietly move out to make room for the returned people. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, as they say, and I think most of the refugees would defend their new homes with their lives and the World Council wouldn't be dealing with some piddly little terrorist organization, they would be dealing with house-to-house fighting as they tried to take homes away from people who had lived there five years. It would be an awful, bloody, violent, world-wide civil war.

Assuming that the World Council actually tried to enforce that edict. I bet in reality they'd just kick out the refugees squatting in rich people's houses but leave the people who had taken over vacated normal homes alone and set up refugee camps for the Blipped people.

[kore]

Yeah, I remember reading about refugees trying to go back to their homes in Germany and Poland post-WWII, and the government was definitely not throwing out the people who had moved in during the meantime and welcoming them back. At all.

Half the universe coming back AT ONCE, probably right at the point when everything had maybe started to stabilize? (Thinking about crops and medicines and manufacturing and whatever....) I think you're right the result would have been ugly civil war. They danced around it with the refugee camps, sort of, except the place Karli and her people wound up squatting in looked like a palace? idefk. But like with all the Snap/Blip stuff, the implications are pure horror if you think about it for longer than five minutes, but it's now baked in to the future of that verse! Fuck that.

[kore]

(Also can I just say the kind of crypto-anti-UN stuff with the "World Council" always gives me the heebie-jeebies in the MCU. It just makes me grit my teeth)

[kore]

....I will literally die mad and fuming about this movie

I WANT MY LIFE BACK, KEVIN FEIGE

[kore]

SO SAY WE ALL

[osprey_archer]

Genuinely baffled at the level of groupthink in the MCU that led to them deciding this was a good idea.

[kore]

It was like Badness x Shitty and then exponentially multiplied! "First....we kill off HALF THE UNIVERSE. Thanos wins! The Avengers are losers! It's daring and gritty and dark! THEN....well Tony has to be motivated by his moppet, not by any of the people he's known for the past ten years, so we can't kill the moppet. So we keep everything the SAME, but bring everyone BACK. All at once. And oh yeah, Tony and Steve and Bruce all have this development that makes them really different, but it's gonna have to happen offscreen so we have time for Tony and Howard to catch up. But then -- this is the really great part -- we're gonna KILL half the OG Avengers and take the rest off the table!" (this was before we knew about all the shows) We called it the feel-bad superhero epic of the summer.

I mean it really reads like The Worst Comics Event Ever (except maybe Hydra Cap) that wound up being about how great one Avenger was, when the whole point was this weird little group of superhero misfits came together &c &c. Yes it's nice RDJ cleaned up and became a dad again but that is not why I see superhero movies! and HOW could they not mention Natasha ONCE during that memorial --

....lol I will hate this movie til I fucking die. I'm going to sue Feige for pain and suffering.

[osprey_archer]

I remember after IW there were a lot of reviews complaining that it was a cheap trick to tug the viewers' heartstrings by dusting beloved characters on screen when the next movie would just bring them all back and undo the whole plotline. I guess the head honchos thought the way to answer this criticism was NOT to undo the whole plotline, but just halfway undo it... which misses the point of the criticism, which is "this storyline was designed to wring cheap emotion out of the viewers and it was a bad idea in the first place."

[genarti]

I CANNOT ALLCAPS ENOUGH TO CONVEY THE DEPTH OF MY AGREEMENT.

Honestly, as soon as they killed off all the Asgardians who had just survived Thor: Ragnarok I was in "this movie was a stupid-ass decision so I'm electing to ignore it" territory, but Thanos's plot really was the nail in the coffin. I haven't even seen any of the others you've listed here, because I hated Infinity War so much and have heard nothing to suggest that it's gotten any better. (I do kind of want to see TFatWS, but only kind of, and what I really want is a possibly impossible supercut of only the good bits.)

[osprey_archer]

I think someone at Marvel learned all the wrong lessons from the writing advice "Raise the stakes." NO, this does not mean that making the stakes HALF THE GALAXY will automatically make a good and compelling movie.

TFATWS is half a good show about Sam and Bucky and moving on past trauma and half a clusterfuck that doesn't make sense because it's trying to deal with the consequences of Thanos's Snap and the Avengers questionable decision to de-snapify but only sorta... except those consequences are just as ill-considered as that plotline was in the first place. To be fair, a well-considered vision of those consequences would probably be crushingly depressing and unsuitable for a superhero story, but THAT'S A REASON NOT TO USE THAT STORYLINE IN THE FIRST PLACE.

[kore]

And that was in the credits! That was PRE-CREDITS! You had Kenneth Branagh calling for help and women screaming in the background and the end of Ragnarok was literally blown into pieces! Like, damn, I knew MCU ignored the conclusions of the trilogy movies, like TWS and IM3, but that was so depressing and terrible! Like "Listen up audience, THIS comic movie is SRS BSNS."

[copperfyre]

I agree with you and also every other comment here. I know it’s several years later now but I remain utterly baffled that anyone thought IW/EG was a good plot to have!!! I remain annoyed about it enough that I haven’t actually watched any of the subsequent films or tv shows because I don’t want to watch everyone else struggle to deal with the stupidity that was Thanos’s plan and then the plan to sort of fix it but not really. Whyyyyyyyyyyyyy???

[copperfyre]

ALSO, did Thanos actually mean all life (including, like, jellyfish?) or did he mean all /sentient/ life because those are two very different things!! And if the latter (which seemed to be the case but who knows, Antman didn’t give us an ant update when he appeared so maybe half of all ants did get wiped out too, we’ll never know) then did Thanos take out elephants too? Crows? Dolphins? I know that this really isn’t the point (or even the most annoying thing about these films) but I’m going to be mad about how stupid and poorly explained this was forever.

(The best thing about IW and EG was all these biologists on Twitter going “at last! We can finally find out if viruses are alive!! Did half of them vanish too? (How would we even tell?)” and other such nerdy reactions.)

[osprey_archer]

I have heard BOTH explanations put forth by different parts of the creative team, which also put forth different explanations of Steve's new life with Peggy: is he in an alternate timeline, or is he back in time in his OWN timeline and just... living in Peggy's basement, I guess, given that no one knew about Peggy's Husband, Other Captain America, when Steve defrosted in 2011?

In conclusion, the left hand didn't know what the right hand was doing in this film, which explains but does not excuse the fact that this plotline is such an awful nonsensical piece of dreck.

[silverusagi]

which also put forth different explanations of Steve's new life with Peggy: is he in an alternate timeline, or is he back in time in his OWN timeline and just... living in Peggy's basement, I guess, given that no one knew about Peggy's Husband, Other Captain America, when Steve defrosted in 2011?

And how did either version of this not get nuked by the TVA? Talk about a timeline deviation.

The movies definitely stopped even trying to make sense during/after Endgame. I really thought the plan would have been to 'fix' the timeline and make it so it never happened and all those people never died, not to bring them back five years later.

Also, how would 'half of all life' stop the problem of not enough resources? Not enough water, land? Sure. But not enough food? Uh, not if half of all animals are also gone.

[osprey_archer]

Frankly I think they decided not to fix the timeline because so many reviewers guessed they would fix the timeline (because what the fuck else could you do after the ending of Infinity War?) and they wanted to be ~surprising~. I am all for surprises that are emotionally satisfying and make sense once you look back at how the pieces go together but this is NOT THAT.

[kore]

OMG, that's adorable, I love scientists.

I think Word of God from Feige Himself was that everything got wiped out, grass bacteria viruses (virii?) and I thiiink what Gamora and Natasha say also supports that -- "half of all life." (NOT rewatching to check that) And when Scott sees life coming back, it's birds singing and maybe leaves on the trees, altho I couldn't quite catch that. But like osprey says, apparently one reason these films sucked so bad was that Feige, the Russos, and that screenwriting team all had really different ideas about what was happening.