#STEVE DISCORD ILL RETURN TO YOU SOON

[cloudbells]

I've been so inactive omg (at least by my standards)!!! I think I've subconsciously put a ban on activity until I've finished some fics and it just translates into radio silence 😭

ALSO I will still get to everyone's asks on this and my main account soon!

[taekwondorkjosh]

Avengers: Endgame - Lets make some sense of That Ending

okay, so this is OBVIOUSLY gonna be so fucking full of spoilers lol. I’m tagging it AND putting my discussion under the cut. I’m going to pad this out though, that way any links to this post on discord don’t show any spoilers of any kind. So uh... hopefully this is enough hahaha. Okay so, seriously, spoilers ahead, read at your own risk, yada yada.

Okay, so this is mostly an analysis of how the time travel used to save the universe works in Avengers: Endgame, and a discussion of my various headcanons and interpretations of what that means for the universe(s).

I’m not a fan of time travel. I’m often angered by its use in ways that make no sense. Time travel stories will break their own rules or not lay out enough of them for the narrative to make sense or have any tension. So, first, lets look at the rules we’re given and why they work for me. 

Banner spells out why they can’t just... go back in time and make things alright, in an inspired way. Since I can’t exactly get the quote, ill try and reiterate it here: You have a past. You travel through time and arrive in your own past. Now, everything between the moment you traveled to and the moment you left becomes your future. You cannot change your future and your past with the same action. You cannot alter your own past. 

So, because their current situation relies on Thanos performing the snap, nothing they do can change that. If they go back in time and try to kill Thanos, they must fail. Otherwise, why go back in time? It would be a waste of time and energy, because it must have failed: you already know it did. In short, anything you try to do has already happened in your timeline, or it created a branch to another timeline. Either way, you wouldn’t know you’d changed anything.

At first, this seems like it doesn’t work, and a lot of time travel stories don’t recognize this. They either point it out and break the rule, or they point it out and don’t break it, or they don’t point it out and don’t break it. In the first case, they’re breaking their own rules. In the second two cases, it often makes the entire film or story pointless outside of the enjoyment the audience got out of watching it happen. Either of the first two cases could have been what happened in Endgame, but instead, they give us more information during Banner’s conversation with the Sorcerer Supreme. 

This conversation with the Supreme makes it explicitly clear what happens when someone travels back in time and changes something: They create an alternate timeline. More importantly, the alternate timeline HAS NO EFFECT ON THEIR OWN TIMELINE. So, if they went back in time and killed Thanos, there would be a new reality where Thanos was mysteriously killed by people that appeared from nowhere and then disappeared. When they return to their own timeline, or should I say, their own reality, they would find no changes. All they did was create a branch, a new universe. 

So, now we have the rules. Anything they mess up changes nothing in their own reality, and in fact a lot of it would prevent Thanos from succeeding in the realities they leave behind. Win-win! However, they do promise to return the stones, so those handful of situations end up not happening. So now lets look at what did happen. 

Lets establish some language. The Prime Reality is the reality portrayed in the films and TV shows so far. More importantly, we’re going to assume that things occur as closely to the events portrayed in the Prime Reality media as possible, unless they are prevented from doing so by something related to time travel. Prime Steve is the captain america from this reality, the one who travels through time to return the stones to where they go. Now, what happened? 

First, chronologically, Prime Steve must choose between returning to Peggy in the 1940s, or returning to the Prime Reality when he was supposed to. He chose to stay in 1940, reuniting with Peggy and living an exceptionally long time. This creates a new reality, which we will call the Steggy Reality. 

Next up in the prime reality is the 1970 situation. Prime Steve stole four cases of pymm particles and Stark stole the Tesseract. Then, presumably almost immediately, Prime Steve returned and put the Tesseract back, fixed the crate it was in, and replaced the four pymm particles. Now, we run into a bit of an issue here, but since it is a problem that shows up later, we’ll address it there. Anyway, nothing was really altered so we don’t get another reality.

However, Tony’s interaction with Howard Stark exists in the Prime Reality. They imply this by Tony mentioning he remembers, more or less, something about that specific time and place. Its also implied that Tony is the one that counseled his father on thinking of a different name for his son, and also gave him that pearl of wisdom about money and time. This could potentially break some of their rules. However, Tony did not know that he would run into his father in the base. He did not know that he was the one who gave his father that little phrase. He might not have even realized that he was doing it. 

So this odd hiccup fits with the rules established. Tony did NOT change anything. His influence was already in effect in his own timeline, which was the only other possibility mentioned above. So, in the Prime Reality, Tony showed up suddenly and gave his dad some advice. Cool, moving on. 

So its 2012, New York. Scott, Steve, Tony, and Bruce are in NY during the events of the Chitauri invasion. Bruce goes and gets the time stone from the Sorcerer Supreme, and as soon as he leaves Prime Steve shows up and hands it back. However, this year is the biggest problem area. 

I mentioned a problem with the Tesseract, and it becomes a problem here for the mind stone as well. The mind stone, the Tesseract, and the power stone all had special containment units that are not pictured in the case Prime Steve took with him. So... what happens? Well, one way to handle this problem is for Prme Steve to go figure out how to make the Tesseract, the Scepter, and the power stone sphere thing as part of his journey through time. Another possibility is a retcon where he took those appropriate containers with him. Another one is to use the time stone to reverse time locally around the individual stones, with the help of the sorcerer supreme, to recreate them. That is the second easiest option, and is most likely considering Prime Steve as a character. 

So, lets get back into it. Lets assume that Prime Steve has all the appropriate containment devices, and he’s in 2012. He’s gotta get the mind stone scepter back to Hydra unfortunately. Well, he knows that Loki escaped with the Tesseract in this timeline. That’s not his problem, he can’t fix that. Its a new reality that they’ll just have to deal with somehow. We’ll call this reality Loki Runs Amok. 

So, how does he get the scepter back into the hands of Hydra without them thinking Captain America is an actual hydra agent? Well, I particularly like the idea of him disguising himself as Loki using the reality stone, nanotech, or help from the Sorcerer Supreme. People attack him, they think he disguised himself as Captain America to get the scepter, and lets them ‘beat him’ just enough so that he drops the scepter. So the mind stone is back where it goes. Now, this reality is fun, cuz Loki is TOTALLY going to figure out that someone used him as a scapegoat to drop off the scepter. he didn’t fight Captain America and tell a lie about Bucky being alive or tell Hydra agents he was one of them. So that’ll be fun. 

2013 Asgard is next chronologically. Prime Steve shows up and, almost immediately after Rocket sucks the reality stone out of Jane, he sticks her again. Any memory of Captain America is waived off as a hallucination. Cool. 

Now, Prime Steve heads to 2014 and drops off the power stone. Quill likely wakes up and is like ‘man I must have hit my head pretty hard.’ There’s no reason to believe that this would change too much, not really. So we don’t get a new reality where Quill never gets the power stone off Morag. 

Okay so, Prime Steve then goes to Vormir and replaces the Soul Stone. I don’t see any reason why he can’t just.... do that. I really like this cuz like, he gets to talk to the Red Skull again. How cool is that??? Now, that’s all the stones! they’re back where they go and Prime Steve leaves 2014 for the 1940s to create Steggy Reality. 

Something else happens here that is super cool though. In 2014, the entirety of Thanos’ army, Gamorra, Nebula, all of it, just disappears into Prime Reality and is Snapped out of existence. That’s one interesting reality. So the Sans Thanos Reality is born. This is the only one where Thanos failing is guaranteed. Cool. 

And that brings us to the present. Prime Steve did not show up when and where he was supposed to. I’m going to assume that Prime Steve didn’t exist in the Prime Reality as an old man. Its made explicitly clear, again and again, that Peggy waited as long as she could, married someone else, etc. The world would not have progressed the way it did if Captain America had been in it. So I refuse to believe that Prime Steve got back to that moment anyway but the way he was supposed: he put on his time travel dohickey and pushed the button at the ripe old age of Fucking Old. It wasn’t meant to keep him out there as long as it did, or maybe it was damaged, and instead of appearing on the platform he appeared off to the side, or he appeared a little early. I particularly like the idea of him appearing on the original quantum tunnel and just being like “aw beans” and walking out of the avengers base while everyone else is doing their own thing. He got to a safe distance and waited for things to settle, for himself to leave, and then met up with everyone as he did in the film. Either that, or he asked Doctor Strange to send him there. 

Alright, so there’s that! I hope my ramblings made sense! I’m probably going to write some more stuff on ideas I have about the individual realities. This was fun!