We were having an early dinner before watching Avengers: Endgame, and someone suggested placing bets on predictions for the film. (Just for points—we’re all broke.) My one and only prediction was that they were going to steal Titanic’s ending and that the final scene would be a door opening into a 1940s USO hall with Peggy in her WWII dress uniform, waiting to finally have her dance with Cap. “Steve goes to Heaven, everyone else lives.”
I wasn’t exactly right, but my joke landed closer than I expected?
[Spoilers ahead.]
Last week I wrote about the ways Marvel dabbled in a particular type of secularized Rapture narrative. I wondered if Endgame would dwell on a post-Snapture world, creating a sort of superheroic Leftovers. As it turned out, the film did spend some time exploring how the world would cope with a catastrophe that large… but then it veers in a fascinating direction by using its time travel plot to create glimpses of a pseudo-afterlife for some of its characters in the form of personalized, secular Heavens.
I’ll get into it in a slightly more depth in a moment, but when I say “secular Heaven” I mean that characters are given an opportunity to reconcile or reunite with dead loved ones—the kind of opportunity that a character usually gets in a gauzy afterlife-type of setting. (Or occasionally at King’s Cross Station.) Given that the MCU has revolved around issues of death since the first Iron Man, this maybe isn’t that surprising, but I was still startled by who got chances at closure and who didn’t. And while we expected the characters who were Snaptured to be returned to us (it’s hard to mourn Peter Parker when you know Far From Home is hitting theaters in July), Endgame makes an interesting choice in revisiting characters who suffered non-Snap deaths, long before Infinity War and Endgame. And in addition, they gave us two different joyful resurrections, and one that’s straight out of a horror movie—but I’ll also get to those in a second.
Garden Variety Resurrections, Plus One Zombie?
The MCU’s big ending gambit revolves around death. Not just with a villain named Thanos, but also in showing half of the population snapped out of existence in the final moments of Infinity War. I remember how weird the mood in the theater was—somber, mournful. Even those of us who knew that the characters would come back somehow were deeply unsettled by watching everyone disappear. The last shots of the film show stalwart Captain America collapsing on the ground and helplessly muttering “Oh, God,” as he realizes they’ve failed… and then we cut to Thanos smiling in his empty Eden.
The opening of Endgame follows on this tone, first with the eerie sight of four-fifths of the Bartons disappearing, followed by the elegiac, grey-lit scenes of support groups and empty neighborhoods in the post-Snap world. The film grounds us in death and loss. But here’s an interesting thing: it also gives us multiple resurrections.
The first resurrection is that of Tony Stark. The day that his ship is finally going to run out of oxygen, Tony records a final message for Pepper (hoping that she’s still alive, since he obviously can’t know) and then lets himself go to sleep. He’s awakened by Captain Marvel’s incandescent glowing self. When Nebula carries him down the ramp, He’s being returned to Steve and Rhodey, but he’s also learning that Pepper survived the Snap. After nearly a month, they have someone returned from apparent death.
Meanwhile, Cassie Lang gets her dad back five years after his disappearance. She assumed he’d been Snapped, had his name added to San Francisco’s Memorial Wall, and then he turns up at her door. For him it’s only been a few hours of being stuck and confused in the Quantum Realm, plus obviously the gut-churning panic of a day spent trying to find her once he found out the Snap had, uh, Snappened. From her point of view, though, he was gone for five years. She has mourned him and moved on into her tweens, and now suddenly he’s returned to her, looking exactly as he did when he left. (Although, this is Paul Rudd we’re talking about, so there wouldn’t be any noticeable aging anyway.)
The film doesn’t give much time to these reunions. They expect us to do the work and fill in the emotional conversations between Tony and Pepper, and what must have been a bumpy couple of days of catching up for Scott. Of course then Scott immediately drives cross-country to meet up with the Avengers. The film also skirts the issue of U.S. infrastructure—how are the highways doing? How are gas prices? How did Scott manage this trip in a van that’s been sitting in a storage lot for five years? How exactly did he walk out on his shocked and overjoyed daughter, to drive from San Francisco to New York, seemingly only a couple days after coming back from the dead??? This is all the more upsetting since the movie never tells us if Cassie’s mom or stepdad survived the Snap. But that still isn’t the most upsetting resurrection of the movie.
Pepper and Rhodey ran to embrace Tony as he staggered down the ship’s ramp, and Cassie Lang burst through her front door to hug her long-lost father. I’m not such a stonehearted human that I’ll deny tearing up on both of those occasions. But I was also shocked by the movie’s unexpected riff on a zombie/vampire narrative, when Gamora comes back… different. This is not the Gamora who chose of her own free will to go against Thanos’ plan. Not the woman who risked her life to stop Ronan and get the power stone, the one who created a new family with the Guardians, repair her relationship with Nebula, and maybe, kinda, sorta, started a relationship with Quill. We don’t get the Gamora who’s learned how to sing—and neither does Quill.
No, this is the angry, murderous Gamora, vicious and savage and still complicatedly tied to Thanos, who is just taking her future-sister’s word for it that the two have a real bond. This isn’t even a reset, this is a Gamora we don’t truly know. Quill runs into the arms of a woman he thought he’d lost forever, and she kicks him in the crotch and punches him. This is played for laughs in the film, but to see it from Quill’s perspective, one of his last conscious memories is losing his beloved, only to then die himself. Now he’s back, and his girlfriend is standing over him looking at him with utter disgust while her sister mocks him.
In what way is this not a nightmare scenario?
Unlike the prior resurrections this one is a cold hard reboot, and the movie never really addresses the emotions swirling around it.
Oo-ooh Heaven is a place…in the past?
But those are just garden variety returns from the dead. Where the film got more interesting was in how they created secular versions of Heaven.
What is the point of Heaven? Most religions that have a concept of Heaven build it around an idea of worship. For the truly religious, Heaven is an opportunity to spend eternity expressing praise for the Creator figure, or possibly in a sort of ego-less oneness with the flow of creation. But as long as there’s been that concept of afterlife there’s been the parallel idea that it would be an opportunity for reckoning or reconciliation with the dead. Even the great literary architect of afterlife, Dante, only got around to the praising God and Mary part AFTER he spent a whole bunch of Cantos shitposting about where people ended up in Hell and Purgatory. A modern idea of Heaven seems to spring more from this “Five People You Meet in Heaven”-type thread. The MCU, which has spent a shocking amount of its runtime revolving around a meditation on death, now gives us an era-defining blockbuster that meditates on this modern version of Heaven.
We see a hint of it in Clint’s arc. The film, wisely, opens on the loss of his family, giving us the other side of the Snapture. Where in Infinity War we were with characters who knew what was happening and why, now we’re with non-superpowered Clint Barton, on house arrest no less, who can do nothing to save his loved ones. Once he’s rescued from his (dumb, imho) Ronin subplot, he volunteers to test Stark’s time travel bracelent because he’s the one who has lost the most. He’s transported to his farm and hears his kids’ voices for the first time in five years, immediately drops any notion of the plan, and runs to them. Because of course he does—how could you not? Luckily he gets yanked back to the future before they see him. Then, during the brief moment when Bruce’s Snap has worked and we think everything’s worked out, Clint learns that his family is back because Laura is calling him on the phone. But of course, just as he’s picking up, Thanos blasts Avengers HQ into oblivion. Twice Clint gets not a Heaven, but one of those terrible mourning dreams when you know the person you lost is in the next room, or you can hear their voice, and then you wake up into the knowledge that they’re gone.
It isn’t until after the battle, and after Tony’s snap, that he finally gets to return to them in an appropriately misty scene at their farm upstate.
Which brings us to the three “Heavens” of the film.
When Thor and Rocket go to Asgard to grab the ether from Jane, Thor’s reaction is to panic and go look for the ale stores. But instead of either charming Jane or comically running into his past self, he instead has a heart-to-heart with his mother, who died tragically in The Dark World seven years ago—on the very day he’s revisited. He gets a chance to hear her voice and absorb her wisdom again, knowing this time how precious this opportunity is. In the midst of a high stakes heist and time travel shenanigans, he gets to hear his mom say she loves him. The movie takes the time to give him that.
This leitmotif is carried forward even more strongly in Tony’s meeting with Howard Stark, where the two have an emotional conversation about fatherhood and fear. Logistically this simply does not work, because Howard Stark, tech genius and co-founder of S.H.I.E.L.D., would never open up to a total stranger in this way (If he was capable of that, he’d probably be a better dad, no?) and he especially wouldn’t be so chatty with the “guest from MIT” that he just found lurking suspiciously in a secret lab underneath New Jersey. And then Tony hugs him??? Grown adult men who lived through WWII did not hug. It’s part of why we have toxic masculinity.
But that isn’t the point of this scene, of course.
Tony’s arc throughout the MCU has hovered between two poles: his unresolved feelings about Howard Stark, and his fear of, and obsession with, his own death. The first Iron Man takes a midlife mortality crisis and makes it epic—where most moguls simply have a life-changing heart attack, Tony is blown up by his own weapons, taken hostage by terrorists, hooked up to a car battery to magnetize the shrapnel in his chest, implanted with an arc-reactor, and repeatedly told he must not waste his life by his dying savior/lab assistant/friend. Instead of a sports car (he already has several of those) he spemds money on a flying suit. Instead of simply trying to change the direction of his warmongering company, he has to personally fly to the Middle East to save people from Stark Industries weapons, before murdering his replacement father and saving the world. Along the way he tells Pepper that he shouldn’t have survived “unless it’s for a reason,” and it’s that moment of raw vulnerability that convinces her to work with him as Iron Man in addition to working with him as Tony Stark.
In his second solo film, he learns that the thing that’s keeping him alive is also poisoning his blood, leading him to up the midlife-crisis-ante with a highly inadvisable car racing stunt, and an even more highly inadvisable drunken birthday party/brawl, before a clue from his dead dad helps him invent a new element to keep himself alive. Then he almost dies again saving the world from the Chitauri in The Avengers, but only after telling Bruce Banner that he must have survived his gamma radiation blast “for a reason.” Iron Man 3 is all about the PTSD Tony has from his latest near-death experience, his commitment issues (Pepper), his fatherhood issues (Harley), and an ongoing meditation on whether humans have souls—which is kind of? Sort of? proved in a deleted scene. His arc in Age of Ultron revolves around his vision of the horror of a post-Thanos universe, and his arc in Civil War dredges up all the old daddy issues when he has to confront the truth about his father’s death.
Really, for a series of fun blockbusters starring improbably good-looking people, it’s weird how much these movies are about death and loss.
The point of Tony Stark meeting Howard in the past is that Iron Man, already dead twice over in the MCU, already at death’s door a third time before Captain Marvel saves him, has to get a few moments of delicious onscreen Heaven before he makes his big sacrifice play at the end. He gets to talk to his father, man-to-man, in a way he never did while Howard was with him on Earth. He gets to impart some fatherly expertise to the impossibly accomplished icon who never treated him like an adult. And then at the end he gets that hug that he’s wanted since the opening scene of Iron Man. When he gets back to the future it becomes obvious that they’re not all making it through this. They lose Widow (introduced all the way back in Iron Man 2, don’t forget) and things repeatedly look hopeless before they turn the tide of the battle. And even then it has to fall to Tony to end things by embracing the death that he’s dodged since 2008. But first he leaves a message for his daughter, who will grow up knowing he loved her. He hugs Peter, who will know how proud he is. Tony has undone all of the damage his father did, and then some—he has become a better man than Howard Stark, but he has also been given the chance to reconcile with his father.
Having given us several different time travel-based pseudo Heavens, it now goes about getting rid of the self-made God who’s caused all these problems. Thanos cast himself as the only right-thinking being in the universe. He was the only one who could see that life needed to be halved, and his implacable reasonableness was immune to all of the screams and pain of his victims. One of my favorite things about Endgame was that they recast this twice. We see him in his Garden having snapped the Stones themselves out of existence. He is alone, in pain, in a horrifying twist on an Edenic Paradise—but he still doesn’t express any regret for his actions, just a very, very slight warmth toward the Esau to Gamora’s Jacob, Nebula. Then Thor decapitates him, and they are all cast from the Garden back into a hopeless post-Snap universe. At the end of the film the Past Thanos crashes into the future, still arrogant and convinced of his own righteousness. Except now, faced with Earthly unruliness, he lets all of his masks slip. He doesn’t just want the Snap to create balance, he wants instead to destroy all of life, so that he might recreate the universe in his own image, with no memory of the pain he’s caused, so he might be worshiped as the God he’s always wanted to be.
Which of course is the point where Tony, man of science, unruly human resident of Earth, uses the mystical Infinity Stones in concert with his own brilliant tech to Snap Thanos out of existence. Human imagination and curiosity, in concert with scientific training, defeats an arrogant mad god.
But the film still has one more secular Heaven to give us. When Cap left to take the Infinity Stones back in time, I think we all knew what was gonna happen. Obviously when he misses his return trip it’s because he’s going to show up old, having lived out the life he sacrificed in First Avenger, and obviously he has to stop by to give Sam his Shield so that Falcon and Bucky can go off to their Disney+ spin-off. It’s a lovely scene, and for a moment I thought I wasn’t going to get my ending. But ohhh no. There’s a wedding ring. And then in the last scene, the truly last scene, we go back in time, and the camera literally sails into Steve and Peggy’s house as they slow-dance to the Harry James Orchestra recording of “It’s Been a Long, Long Time.” It isn’t exactly a slow dance in the ballroom of the Titanic, but it’s damn close.
We watch as Steve gets his Heaven—and the love of his life (non-Bucky edition) finally gets that dance. And we’ve already seen Peggy’s funeral, so now we get to go back in time to young Agent Carter. Both of them get the thing they’ve wanted most, and they get it during their lives, onscreen. (Obviously this opens a giant can of time travel related worms [and don’t even get me started on #Stucky] but that’s not what this post is for.) Steve also gets to come back, hand his shield off, and anoint Sam as the next Cap, before presumably returning home to Peggy, or to his life as a-widower-who-still-wears-his-ring (SOB) and shuffling his mortal coil off at some point in the future. However it shakes out, the Russos make a point of ending the film on that dance in the 1940s, since that’s the moment that stands outside of time as Cap’s happiest moment. This is his Heaven.
Heaven is a Place Where Nothing Ever Happens
On the one hand it makes sense that a series that spent so much of its time circling its characters’ mortality would want to cheat a little bit, and give us an emotional reconciliation of our own—this isn’t Game of Thrones, after all. Marvel wants us to be happy. But it also leads me to ask some uncomfortable questions: what about Nat, or Vision, or Wanda? Why do some people’s closures outweigh others? Toward the end, Clint is talking to Wanda and says that he wishes he could tell Natasha her sacrifice worked. Wanda replies by saying “She knows. They both know.” And then Clint hugs her. Now the emotional read on this is that Wanda means Vision—he’s one of the only ones who didn’t come back in any fashion, so now over the course of her time with the MCU she’s lost not only her parents and her twin, but also her lover. But of course she could mean Gamora, who might be with Nat in the Soul Stone? Or she could also mean Tony, the only other person who sacrificed everything in this battle. (Especially since Vision isn’t technically even a human, and what exactly is the threshold for having a soul in the Marvel universe?)
But this doesn’t really do the same work as watching Tony talk with Howard, or Thor talk with Frigga. Obviously Tony hasn’t changed Howard in any substantial way—his childhood is still going to suck. Frigga is still going to die. So why were these moments given precious screen time? Are they there to ease our minds, to give us a sense that our heroes got some sort of happiness in the midst of all the Thanos-related pain? But then what was Natasha’s Heaven? What was Vision’s?
Leah Schnelbach wants the Asgard Heaven! Come frolic with her on the farm upstate that is Twitter!
Mods, spelling error:
“Where in Infinity War we were with characters who NEW what was happening “
Several people on here dislike the Ronin part of the story. In the comics, Black Widow found criminal Clint and convinced him to change sides. The movies reversed that. But Clint was written as a criminal first. And he spent years, criminal or no, as a paid government assassin. In the movies the only thing keeping him grounded was his family. When they were gone the only thing he had left was being an assassin. And without SHIELD around anymore, or the Avengers proper, he simply became a dark hand of justice, all the while hoping to find the information that would bring his family back, or give him some closure.
It probably started with going into town for some supplies and finding some gang or cartel hurting people. He takes them out. He hears about their larger operation in [city in whatever direction] and goes there to stop them because it’s better than sitting in an empty farmhouse crying. Once he sees everyone hurting in this post-Snap world, he sets out to do the only thing he’s good at — take out bad guys. But he can’t stop, because if he stops the pain of doing nothing to save them comes back full force.
Too bad we couldn’t see the intermediate Marvel movie Fall of Heroes.
@1 – Fixed, thanks!
I think Natasha and GOTG Gamora are both in the Soul Stone and maybe GOTG3 will be about getting Gamora back, with Natasha as a bonus. Question: when Tony snapped Thanos and his minions did his Gamora get snapped too?
@@.-@, Natasha and GOTG Gamora are not coming back. At Nat’s funeral, Banner said that he tried to bring her back as part of the snap, but it didn’t work. Considering just how powerful those stones are, if they can’t do it, what else will?
Plus, Nat is in the soul stone back in a different timeline. And the stone that GOTG Gamora was in – got destroyed.
As for past Gamora getting snapped, I think she didn’t, because she had already switched sides. Therefore she wasn’t in Thanos’s army anymore.
> In what way is this not a nightmare scenario?
In the way that Quill is a pathetic, callow man child who deserves such treatment? In the way she deserves better than anything he is capable of offering?
@7 – *yawn*
The refrain about Quill being a “man child” is tired and frankly, boring. Nobody was calling him that until he let his emotions get the better of him in the last film. So, because he was weak and didn’t keep it together, he’s “pathetic”? He deserves to be treated badly by a complete stranger?
For the two comedy – I’ll remind you, comedy – movies he was in, audiences thought he was pretty good. In Infinity War, he was fine up until the very end. But yeah, everyone dogpile on the guy that had just lost the woman he loved and OMG – had feelings.
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@@@@@4. C Oppenheimer
I am pretty sure we saw her on the ship with Thor at the end but I could be totally wrong, I am seeing it again tonight.
Now her choices (as if she has to make one), is between Thor, Quill or a Tree.
@9, What you see on the ship is Quill searching for her. So apparently she did survive.
Also, IIRC, the scene where Quill sees her and she punches him is after Thanos is dusted and everyone is reuniting.
Remember, Scott knows that they will have to time-travel- there’s no rush. He probably spent at least a few days in San Francisco fixing up the van and reconnecting with Cassie. And I assume he had some kind of weird size-changing Mad Maxian cross-country adventure on his way to Avengers HQ.
While reading this, I was reminded of one of Loki’s lines to Thanos all the way back at the beginning of IW: “You’ll never be a god.”. Apropos, yes?
@10, ya I saw it again tonight she wasn’t on the ship, well, at least as much as we saw.
“The film also skirts the issue of U.S. infrastructure” and “Obviously this opens a giant can of time travel related worms”.
So much of the post-snap, and then post-unsnap, worlds doen’t survive a close look. Fridge logic and fridge horror abound. Great when in the theater, but 10 minutes after walking out it’s all “Wait a minute…”
“Grown adult men who lived through WWII did not hug. It’s part of why we have toxic masculinity.”
Hmm. I’d never thought of toxic masculinity as being a sort of cultural PTSD reaction to WW2.
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I’ve only seen the film once so far, and probably won’t go again until my wife and I have finished our rewatch of the previous movies. As to your questions at the end, and the overall point of the article, I can only add my layman’s two cents.
The heavens we get to see on-screen are, tellingly, the heavens that the heroes get to enjoy only while alive. Time travel aside, reconciling the paradox of parenthood (having to appear all-knowing, or at least stable, while nothing could be further from the truth, and only having role models who likewise projected perfection as a deceit) and reconnecting in a meaningful way with people who are no longer in your life (whether we’re talking family or old flames) feels good. Obviously complications can arise that cause issues, but when framed in the film like this—the last things these heroes do before they lose the ability to time travel, marking a permanent end to the opportunity to do so—it’s thematic closure. You hit the nail on the head when you called them “heavens.”
But Nat, Vision, and Gamora-1 are dead. Any heaven they experience would have to be in the classical sense, i.e. on the other side of death. These movies have never tried to portray a literal afterlife. It’s the same reason we don’t see Tony Stark in the clouds, shaking his old man’s hand, smiling down on the funeral. The filmmakers don’t want to cross that line. Maybe it’s to avoid alienating members of the audience who don’t truck with the “Fields of Elysium”-style afterlife, or to allow each of us to project our own desires into the void. For whatever reason, Marvel won’t show us.
Whether that makes Gamora-1’s or Nat’s deaths worse, either objectively or subjectively, I don’t know. I think there’s definitely an argument to be made. It’s also true that movies have finite runtimes just like they have finite development cycles, and not everyone could have their perfect moment. Gamora-1 probably deserved more time, Nat definitely did, and we have absolute license to argue the point until our own runtimes end. But the creators had to release the story, and it was never going to be perfect, no matter what.
As for the question of how the post-post-Snapture world is supposed to fit together, I thought the narration at the end made it clear that Tony’s Snap did way more than dust Thanos and his goons. He wanted to smooth out the inconsistencies, restore not just the people but the happiness and consistency of life before the Snapture. At the very least, it restored the waning infrastructure of the world, but it might very well have been something of a retcon. Far From Home will probably give us answers in that regard, but it’s clear Earth isn’t just carrying on from the post-Snapture, and it wasn’t just reset, either.
@22 – “For whatever reason, Marvel won’t show us.”
They decided to make Asgardians aliens rather than actual gods in order to avoid angering the Christians. They even had Cap say there’s only one god in The Avengers. Pretty sure “not angering Christians” is the reason they’re not showing the afterlife. Whatever version of it they show would be considered sacrilegious by a significant number of people – either because they get it wrong, or because they showed it at all.
They shouldn’t worry so much.
I don’t think I’d be interested in seeing the Marvel version of the afterlife anyway, honestly. But then I’m not Christian.
The Scarlet Witch series we’re getting on Disney+ is confirmed to have Vision, so we’re getting him back in some way, shape, or form. (IIRC the series title, or working title is WandaVision.)
I also think that these “heavens” exist so that the characters that experience them can actually go through certain closure that they desperately need.
Tony always needed to speak with his father again, to the point that he created a “Matrix-Lite” technology at the start of Civil War so he could relive the the last day he saw his parents when he was being snotty to his Dad right before he died. The new father conversation between father and son is amazing in any life.
Thor actually needed to speak with his mother again to regain…himself. Fat Thor who sits around drinking all day is not The Mighty Thor who just wanted his parents to be proud of him and to be a great hero and worthy of the throne of Asgard as well as Mjolnir. And he needed to be The Mighty Thor in order to face Thanos and set right what went wrong, or at least to lead his people since like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expected past Thanos..
In regards to those, it’s not actually heaven. It’s another part of the hero’s journey. Revisiting the lost mentors, the final steeling before the Ultimate Battle. Receiving the counsel of the gods, literally in Thor’s case.
Which is where Steve’s moment is in contrast. He has no conversation. No words. No moment of reconciliation. He just sees her. All over again. The only thing, the only piece of life he ever really wanted other than to make a difference. They don’t even need to speak and she has him all over again. His pre-serum picture on her desk. She never forgot him. So far from choosing a form of death, he chooses life. The Life he wanted with the woman he wanted, and who wanted him. It wasn’t communing with death. It was a moment many soldiers, sailors, airman, warriors of all stripes have. The moment not where and when they choose who they’re fighting against, but who they’re fighting for. Steve wanted his dance. And he was going to have it. But he was going to do it the right way. He was going to accomplish his mission, and go back to the future, undo the Decimation, save the universe…then go back to his girl back home…back in time. Best part…it’s a happy ending for her too. So for Steve it was inverted. Rather than death, his was about life.
I think there’s no need to show an afterlife in the MCU. The MCU has always been grounded in our world, even though it obviously isn’t. Nobody knows what the afterlife is like, even if we all have our own ideas. Not showing it therefore doesn’t contradict or confirm any of them and leaves all options still on the table. We get to have some fantastic speculation opportunities instead, such as over Wanda’s insistence that “They know”. My own personal thoughts is that she was talking about Nat, Vis and Tony. Go back to her visions in AoU, they all look a little bit more prophetic now, so maybe she isn’t being wistful or optimistic. Her powers were always more mystical in the comics, so maybe she is speaking from authority.
Pretty sure that a lack of hugs is not a cause of toxic masculinity, but a result of it. The issue really started in the 1800’s, when it became fashionable to be dour and stoic and not show and share emotion, especially amongst men. Then a series of smaller wars led into The Great War and the mental injuries of that time led to a significant portion of the world suffering with severe PTSD and withdrawing emotionally from each other and their families. Then, just as we were beginning to recover, as a world, we are plunged into WWII.
Yes there is a correlation with not hugging and toxic masculinity, but one is not a cause of the other, rather the former is a symptom of the latter.
This might be one of my favorite articles/analyses I’ve read so far – I’ve never thought much about Tony Stark’s arc (he just wasn’t one of my favorites) in such detail, but I like the way you broke it down.
As for Gamora/Quill – yes, Quill has his immature, man-child moments, that’s true (and of course he kind of got his ‘Good Job Breaking it Hero’ moment in Infinity War). But I do also appreciate that this article takes a moment to recognize that in that specific moment, what he experienced was an emotionally devastating event.