It's been more than two years and I am still not over Endgame

This has lived in my head ever since I saw it in cinema, and I still cannot quite reconcile how they "solved" the Thanos problem.  I was really glad when Falcon went into some of the fallout from it, and am really hoping that more of Phase 4 addresses how utterly messed up the solution was, because holy shit.  It was honestly terrible.

I know a lot of people, particularly in the Thor fandom really hate Infinity War, but I genuinely liked it.  I genuinely liked Endgame as well, except for Tony's unrelenting selfishness.  And I think the part about it that really bothers me is how much it felt like a huge backslide for him and his character.  

Tony's entire hero's journey was centred around realising that other people are, well, people.  That there was more to life and reality than what he wanted.  

So, okay.  Let me back it up a bit, and clarify precisely what about Endgame I can't stand.

They only bring back the people who were snapped, on Tony's insistence, because he couldn't lose what he'd found.  They changed nothing else.  Only the people who were snapped.

And Falcon did at least address part of this issue, and I was so glad, because it had been two years at that point.  Two years and I was still going mad over this.  But finally, there was a little bit of acknowledgement to why that was stupid.  We had people popping back up in houses that were occupied by someone else.  Popping back up in the aftermath of war and border shifts.  Popping back up to a world that had no more room for them, that had moved on because there weren't resources for them.  There weren't jobs for them.  There wasn't space for them.  It was a world they no longer belonged to.

And Spider-man kind of gave a wink and a nod to this as well, with the kids coming back and having many of their peers having aged past them.

But neither of these addressed the other part of why Tony's plan was so utterly selfish.  Because they brought back only the people who were snapped.  Not the people who died from collateral damage.  In Infinity War, we see cars and helicopters crashing.  Trains, and planes would have crashed.  It was chaos.  This isn't speculation; we were shown this.  How many people in Clint's position realised their entire family was gone and committed suicide in the aftermath?  How many children, or elderly or disabled people starved to death because they were locked inside a house with nobody to take care of them?  And WandaVision kind of gave a wink and a nod to this as well, when Monica came back to learn Maria had died over those five years, but she didn't die as a direct result of the snap.

How many people did?  How many people died when the train they were riding crashed, or the aeroplane they were on continued on autopilot until it fell out of the sky?

How many people were on those trains or planes, or on the freeways, who were spared of the snap, and their family was spared of the snap, only to have that ripped away by the inevitable accidents we saw happen in Infinity War?  How many people were traumatised by being spared of the snap only to survive an accident that killed the rest of their family?  A family that also survived the snap, but died in the ICU, or never even made it to the hospital at all.

Why didn't these people get their families back?

These speculations are a bit macabre, but these aren't some made up scenario.  There were news stories in early 2020 coming out of China of children, and elderly and disabled people who were dying not of the virus, but of the consequences of lockdown.  Road accidents that destroy families happen every day.  Survivor's guilt is a very real thing that tears people apart in the aftermath of trauma and tragedy.

But Endgame just kind of ignored all of this.  It was as if that final scene in Infinity War never happened.  As if we never saw the chaos on the street, or the helicopter fall into the side of a building.

And then, five years later, how many of these people were forced to re-live this trauma when people came back?  When their neighbours' husbands and wives and children returned, but their family is still gone because a man driving an 18-wheeler disappeared from behind the wheel?

And people liked to joke about how Clint was still paying Laura's phone bill.  But how many people who were snapped came back and were immediately killed?  We saw that chaos in WandaVision, when Monica came back and the hospital was instantly overwhelmed.  She came back exactly where she'd been before.

How many people were brought back, only to fall out of the sky from 30,000 feet?  How many people materialised on freeways, or on train tracks?  How many people died as a direct result of being brought back?

So I ask, one more time, how in the fuck was "only the people who were snapped" at all a viable solution?  How was Tony allowed to become so needlessly selfish?  Tony, whose entire third film was framed around his own trauma from New York?

He wanted to keep what he found?  They had all six stones.  As Thanos said, reality was theirs to control.  They could have done whatever the hell they wanted.  He could have kept his family and put everything back to the way it should have been.  And this was their solution.

The Time Heist was so goddamn good, and then the whole thing was completely let down by the laziest character assassination in Marvel's history.  And that's what it was.  Lazy writing that amounted to character assassination.  Where did Tony's empathy go?  Because I never saw a shred of it in Endgame.  His falling out with Steve and the tension between them, great.  Love it.  Fantastic.  But I cannot forgive the selfishness of that decision.  

What the hell were they thinking with it?

This had better be addressed in upcoming films, because if the fallout ends with the Flag Smashers, I'm gonna riot.

Chapter Notes: Milk Can

This is a chapter in two acts.  The first act is what every transplant and tourist goes through during their first freeze in the valley.  Shock that it freezes, and then frustration and indignation that nothing and nobody is prepared for anything to freeze.  Loki made the same bad assumption so many people make, assuming he would only be driving in hot, dry weather.  And this isn't just limited to transplants and tourists.  Locals just lose their damn minds every time winter happens.  The concept of scraping your windshields is so foreign to people that they'll just drive around blind and assume that's okay.

At this point, Loki's been in the US for about six months.  He's more or less got used to the weirdness that is Las Vegas, but he is still very much an outsider in a lot of ways.  And one of those ways is that he's never going to stop thinking certain American hallmarks are just obscene and garish.  But slot machines in every corner of the city?  Yeah, apparently that's just something you get used to.

And it is, and it's weird.

A lot of the first fic was just a love letter to Las Vegas, and the time I spent there being a weirdo table magician.  That's not going to change.  I made a joke on Tumblr about how the real relationship in this series is the unstable, borderline abusive one Loki has with the city, and as I get farther into this, it gets more and more true.  Loki's intense culture shock plays a very big role in his mental state throughout this entire fic, and it's not something I want to shy away from.  That city does something to you.  It's insidious and toxic, but in a way that can be utterly addicting.

I went through so many iterations of how I wanted the fish tank to go, and ultimately decided to just wholesale rip off Penn & Teller.  It's actually a combination of about three tricks in the end, with the way I've got it set up.  At its heart, this routine is their phone booth trick, which is the one I mentioned going wrong in the last chapter, and their shadow puppet routine, where Penn would fail a straight jacket escape and get hanged in the rigging.  Both have the same concept of not being good tricks, and wind up being great tricks because of it.  In the phone booth, Teller drowns on stage while Penn wastes too much time and doesn't notice what's going on.  In Unicorn, Penn gets hanged in a bad straitjacket escape while Teller hijacks the stage to do a comedy shadow puppet routine.  I love both of these, because they fly in the face of how these sorts of routines are supposed to go.  In both instances, the payoff is so shocking and unexpected, because the trick isn't what you thought it was.  In the phone booth, the trick isn't that Penn finds the correct card in the nick of time.  The trick is that the correct card somehow winds up inside Teller's mask after he drowns.  In Unicorn, the trick isn't Penn miraculously escaping.  It's that Penn was never in the rigging in the first place.  Both are wonderful switches, pulled off by incongrous misdirection.  So I wanted to play with that.  Let this ancient, tired trick be something else.  Let it be a switch that comes from nowhere.  Loki doesn't escape, because he's not the dead guy in the box.

And then there's a sneaky allusion to the box jumper they opened their show with for a while.  Loki and Darcy keep talking about a "black board."  This isn't like a chalkboard you'd find in an old classroom.  It's a technique for making something appear or disappear from a box by obscuring it with a piece of plywood painted black.  With the right lighting, the board is completely invisible to the audience, which can allow a performer to walk across the stage without being seen.  Or, in this case, allow them to switch out performers in a fish tank.

I said in my opening notes that this fic is going to ruin a lot of magic tricks.  And part of that is because there's no way to adequately convey what is effectively a scam via prose.  I can describe what appears to happen for a spectator, but in prose, the magic vanishes.  In prose, anything can happen because I say it happens, whether it's possible or not.  Instead, the magic is how they make their routines work.  With a few exceptions, I'm not actually using anyone's full routines in this series.  I'm taking the tricks and methods I know from various routines and cobbling together something new.  Loki's version of the Milk Can resembles Penn & Tellers by drawing inspiration from it, but their methods and entire routine were completely different.  Putting the performer in a glass box, and then drowning him for a shock payoff is where the similarities end.  The routines I do take from actual people are properly old, and published to be performed as is.  So even if you do go see a stage show, and someone does a similar routine to what I've got in this series, you won't see it performed as I describe it.

Unless someone does Al Baker's breakfast routine.  There's pretty much only one way to do that one.