Almost a week after its release, this afternoon I went to see Endgame!

As I said on twitter on my way out of the movie: what's the word for when you enjoyed 90% of a thing but not the 10% you're emotionally invested in? This is, obviously, a massive oversimplification, but my in-the-moment movie experience was very much, I'm enjoying this wacky time-travel fic a lot! but also whoever is writing Thor hates both him and me, and every time he's in a scene I just have to go utterly limp in order to not dissolve into absolute fury.

Uh in roughly descending order of happiness:

+ GOSH THE WACKY TIME TRAVEL FIC! The whole time heist was a ton of fun, especially all the bits interacting with Avengers -- Steve whispering "Hail Hydra" in the elevator, Steve fighting himself ("I could do this all day!" "Yeah, I know"), Loki getting gagged just because he was being such a little shit and kept making fun of Steve, Loki grabbing the Tesseract and running! DELIGHTFUL.

(Also, like, deeply fucking concerning -- their time travel logistics were AWFUL, oh my god, I don't care how much you insist that This Time Travel Isn't Like In Pop Culture Movies, or how you lean into everyone's subjective experience of their own time stream remaining intact, or what the rules are about the main trunk of time and its branches as explained by Bald Tilda Swinton; you've still just effectively created SO MANY BRANCH TIMELINES, and not all of them are closed loops! Especially the Loki one! At this point tbh I'm kind of assuming that the Loki tv show is going to take place in the branch timeline where Loki fucked off with the Tesseract, which is screamingly funny.

...but also you snapped a version of Thanos who hasn't had time to set into motion literally any of the events that made you have to do this in the first place! NEBULA KILLED HER PAST SELF! NONE OF THIS MAKES SENSE!! grumble grumble comics handwave, I know, and it's not like 90% of time travel plots aren't various kinds of total nonsense, but for some reason this one was just so annoying to me)

+ I've been mad about Tony Stark's arc ever since they did him a full lovely character journey ending in Iron Man 3 and then immediately torpedoed it for the plot in Ultron, but that said, god RDJ can sell pretty much every version of Tony! I knew he was a goner the moment they gave him a kid, but honestly, as a love letter to Tony Stark specifically, this movie was pretty good, and I didn't feel mad-sad about his death, it all seemed fairly narratively satisfying. (I also am ABSOLUTELY BAFFLED that this movie was the one where I finally pinged on Steve/Tony. wtffff, c'mon why didn't it feel like this BEFORE Civil War, that would've made all of Phase Three so much more emotionally satisfying)

+ Scott was fun! lol this is really all I ever have to say about Scott Lang, I find him inoffensive and mildly entertaining. Thank you for providing us with our time-travel plot, Scott Lang!

+ I definitely read a bunch of open tabbed reviews before writing this up and I've mostly seen people kind of pressed about Bruce, but I thought he was ... just fine? Bruce's characterization has been allll over the place, but I found his attempt to integrate his personalities into one functional being kind of charming! (Also the bit where he does desultory smashing in 2012 New York was really funny, good job.)

+ Steve was ... hmm. Okay, so I'm actually not particularly emotionally invested in the Steve part of the MCU or the fandom, and I absolutely see what they were going for with the Steve/Peggy ending, and in the moment I found it really sweet. Then I thought about it for five seconds and became Extremely Concerned about, like, how Steve could possibly function in the past knowing about Hydra and about Bucky, and how Peggy could possibly have kept him a secret, or if he made YET ANOTHER branch timeline where he took down Hydra and freed Bucky many decades ago while having a long and delightful life married to Peggy. Which, like, you go, Steve! But that's not really what's suggested, and also, as a character arc, it's ... shit, is the moral of the story that the new family you've done your damndest to make for yourself, and the best friend you thought was dead that you by some miracle actually got back, less important than settling down to a comfortable nuclear het life with your first love sometime in the past? Neither of those is inherently the superior option, but it's just ... let Steve stay with his people in the present, damn.

+ Not enough Carol! Like, yes, she would've solved it immediately, also you wanted just the core original team for most of it, but ... either let Carol do something and don't just pull her out once or twice, or, idk, don't have her turn up until the end? No, there's no "or," just: not enough Carol.

+ NATASHA, I loved all the bits of Natasha trying to hold the team together and keep doing good and then they just ... they just really did that, didn't they, into the fridge she goes. Also I was never invested in MCU Hawkeye, and like many people are saying, I would have much rather had Clint go! But I guess if you gotta give Tony a family and then kill him, you have to let Clint go back to his fam, semi-tragic white picket fences for everyone!

+ OKAY BUCKLE UP IT'S THOR TIME

Look. Look. I get that every single one of Thor's plotlines has been that something increasingly awful happens, and he has to buckle down and become a better person and push through adversity and triumph. I get wanting to do something else, or being interested in what it looks like when he finally has one terrible thing too far happen to him and breaks. BUT. (Leaving aside the incredibly gross ongoing fat joke, I fucking promise you that Chris Hemsworth unkempt and in a fat suit isn't funny for an entire movie, it wasn't even funny for five goddamn seconds) Thor's breakdown doesn't look like the fucking sad lazy drinking-and-video-games ploy they went with. Thor's breakdown looks like him throwing himself 500% into rebuilding Asgard, and running himself into the ground and doing WHATEVER IT TAKES, and refusing to go when Bruce comes to get him because that's in the past, you can't change the past, New Asgard is what's important, and then suddenly partway into the movie realizing with horror that he's turning into Odin. Sublimating his compassion in the burdens of kingship is his entire fear and the whole reason he's kept attempting to abdicate! Just. I know I've been thinking too much about Thor since 20goddamn11 but this isn't, like, a hard character arc to keep track of, it took me all of five seconds to know what you need to do with him in this movie.

Anyway I still loved every moment with Valkyrie, and a version of Thor that attempts kingship and begins turning into his father is still one that should probably give the rule of New Asgard to her! Go for it! I also loved all of their adorable knit sweaters, A++ Asgardians in sweaters.

But ... yeah wow it's weird to be going through a movie both basically enjoying the ride and also feeling incredibly sad and disappointed. A rough one, pals, and also lololol I care the very least about the Guardians crew, I did enjoy Thor and Rocket but please don't make me suffer through watching Thor and Quill interact, please don't make my favorite thing touch my least favorite thing, I demand Avengers-era Loki immediately materializing from the void to make this bearable. (He won't, he's busy on a tv show, I know.)

Maybe sometime in the next week I will write fic! A lot of my fic does come from a place of LET ME IMPROVE THE THING, but I'm just coming off writing an Adventure Zone fic from a place of sheer delight, and ugh I just kind of want to be writing things from a place of delight, aaaand this is the opposite of that. But, if I do write fic, it will probably be: 50% what I wanted Thor's last five years to be, 50% being extremely opinionated about how to do time travel in a coherent and interesting way (with, like ... everyone who time traveled still has their own personal subjective timeline, but y'all snapped Thanos out of existence BEFORE HE DID ANY OF THE THINGS THAT LED TO YOU DOING YOUR TIME HEIST, the "main" branch of time is now very much one in which Thanos ceased to exist circa Guardians 1, have fun with that); and it's me so it'll probably also be overwrought Thor/Loki fic, what era of Loki you ask, POSSIBLY SEVERAL.

Uh please feel free to have feelings back in comments, I'm sure I've got more where this came from.