**Spoilers for Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame ahead.**
When it comes to female characters, we’ve had very few options within the Marvel Cinematic Universe until recently. Now though, things may be looking up. I say “may be” because we did still have to watch Natasha Romanoff die in Avengers: Endgame, and it’s … less than encouraging to know that the screenwriters, Stephen McFeely and Christopher Markus, only did it to “tear” our hearts out.
In a recent interview, the two admitted that they knew nothing about the Black Widow movie that’s in production but went ahead with their plan to kill Natasha off because “no one told us not to do what we were doing.” Look, whatever. I’m sure that can be worked around, but also, to plot out a character’s death just because you wanted people to cry? Not really a good move.
“So, then when she gets to Vormir and is faced with this choice, it is what she’s been working toward for a full five years, is to get that sense of family back, to get all these people back. And you’ll just put yourself in our spot too. We had created these rules, whereby you’re going to have to sacrifice someone that you love in order to get the soul stone. So, in terms of candidates to go to Vormir, Hawkeye and Widow were sort of the only ones that would make sense, and hopefully would tear your heart out.”
I’ve already expressed my outrage over what happened to Nat in Avengers: Endgame, but this shows that the storyline she was given wasn’t even anything to do with her actual character arc, but just McFeely and Markus’s way of making the audience have an emotional connection to what they were doing.
To be quite honest, that diminishes both Nat’s death and Tony’s. Were their stories always just geared to be emotional jabs at us as the audience? I understand that, at the end of the day, it’s still a movie, but when you build character arcs for ten years just to kill someone off as an emotional cheap shot, it probably isn’t the best approach. Sure, Tony’s death at least had an impact, but I think the one on Vormir could have just as easily been Clint, and we would have had the same emotions that we did with Natasha—well, except for the resentment.
Right now, it just feels like they wanted to kill the woman. I’m tired. Stop Letting Men Run Natasha Romanoff Into the Ground 2K19.
(via ComicBook.com, image: Marvel Entertainment)
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