#especially for the character we’ve known for a while like maria hill and antonia

[benjinoff13]

thunderbolts spoiler below

antonia’s story

i’m not exaggerating when i say i’ve seen no one talk about antonia’s death while i had a huge problem with it, and when i say huge problem i mean that it made the entire movie almost unenjoyable for me

besides yelena, antonia was the character i was most excited to see because let’s be honest, who gives a fuck about john walker or ava what’s her name

i understand not everyone liked antonia or cares about her but to people who love nat and black widow she should be important and so she is to me, her story was so intense and is so heavily tied to natasha and yelena

natasha tried to kill dreykov to join shield and in turn she thought she killed a child, this arguably is one of her biggest motivations in everything until black widow for her to join the avengers, to be better and save as many people as she can save and clear her consciousness and wash the blood off her hands

in black widow her and yelena find out antonia is alive but because of that went trough something probably even worse than yelena and nat, antonia arguably is very similar to bucky but gets a fraction of the respect and love he does, she was chemically subjugated into becoming a killing machine, didn’t get to chose who she worked for and was forced to work for her father who i think is the worst villain in the mcu and is responsible for more blood and grief than anyone, this perhaps is something only women can understand

in black widow yelena and natasha saved her and the look on her face is something i will always remember, the pure horror of her realization, her literal and metaphorical scars that are inflicted by the same person that saves her from them will forever be in the back of nat’s and yelena’s mind

and she’s saved, she, like all the other widows, gets the opportunity to make something of herself, to find hapiness and heal, and instead she can’t and goes back to doing what she knows best which is killing and inflicting chaos, same as yelena does

then she appears in the group and is so close to the opportunity all of the others get, she’s so close to finding family and healing from her trauma but instead of giving her that opportunity marvel choses to kill her off in the most irrelevant and disrespectful manner possible

instead of the character that consciously brutally kills an innocent man or the character no one even remembers, antonia of all people gets killed off, i understand they wanted to shock the audience but doing that by killing off a character who is the epitome of what the movie is supposed to be about is not the way, to me it seems like marvel didn’t know what to do with her and killed her off without a second thought

her death gets mentioned 1,5 times and yelena only seems to care very little eventhough she played a huge part in saving antonia and should relate to her an infinite amount

lastly marvel did a terrible job promoting the movie by implying that antonia would be a part of the thunderbolts and was going to be in the movie as much as the other characters, the exact same thing happened to maria hill in secret invasion, this seems to be a trend with marvel, they have a strong female character with a complicated past and an armory of potential but instead of bringing them to life like they would with any male character, they kill them off in a way that leaves the story completely unchanged making their deaths absolutely meaningless

every time i think marvel is taking a step in the right direction when it comes to feminism and diversity, they take two steps back

letting the female characters close the zippers on their suits and giving them flat shoes isn’t enough, they need to actually be written as well as the men, quality AND quantity-wise

two other great posts about this topic are this one about nat’s connection to this and this one about dreykov as a villain