That Dumpster Matt Murdock Fell Into

Reason the first: From a disability perspective, Cap’s entire arc is problematic, and this ending is the problematic cherry on top of the problematic sundae. First, Steve is implied to be useless to the war effort due to being disabled. Although he argues that he can do more than a child’s job, because he is in fact a grown-ass adult, this is undermined when, in his attempts to become useful to the war effort, his disabilities were erased before he actually managed to do anything objectively helpful. That’s problematic. He may have had a heart of gold and a spitfire attitude, as well as tactical smarts and a nice smile, and Peggy may have fallen in love with him for those things and proven their value in the eyes of morally upright people, but that didn’t help anything in the actual fight until it was paired with a bangin’ bod. He always loses fights when he’s little, so his can-do attitude is clearly valued by a couple characters, but it isn’t enough; it isn’t enough to be disabled and determined. The determination doesn’t actually achieve anything until it’s backed up by brawn. 

This was slightly salvaged by the fact that the resulting Steve is very clearly a disabled kid trapped inside an able body: as people have observed previously, he’s a mouthy little punk at the wheel of a souped-up sports car, using his new privilege to help other oppressed people. His determination to do the right thing is still what makes him more than just any other muscle-bound superhero. But he is, at the end of the day, a muscle-bound superhero, and if he wasn’t, he would be chafing at his inability to contribute, because apparently even a disabled person’s best and most determined attempts at contribution fall short. His character’s saving grace is his zeal in defending and befriending the people like that kid he used to be and can’t stop seeing himself as; people who have been kicked in the teeth by life. He saves Bucky, befriends Natasha, trusts Sam, because he knows what it’s like. Because on the inside, he’s a kid with a hundred health issues and a thirty year life expectancy. He’s a kid who lived in defiance of every expectation and everything the world and past experience told him he couldn’t do. A kid who had to agonizingly change his entire body just for his endless determination to actually move anything. 

Except the thing is, he didn’t have to. But the movie made him have to. It’s not about skinny Steve not being enough; it’s about the movie not letting him be anything but a walking good intention until he grew three feet in every direction. I’m not saying that being skinny Steve didn’t suck, I’m saying that people who have disabilities that cause them pain and are going to kill them don’t have to lose their disabilities to do important things. Because most of them won’t, and none of them have to in order to make a difference. 

Throughout the movies, Steve is fighting against injustice, fighting for the things he believes in. He can’t back down from a fight when the rights of others are in the balance. And then we come to Endgame. He goes with he others to find Thanos to try to reverse what happened, but he can’t reverse it. Okay, he can’t reverse it, but he can fight it in other ways. So five years later he’s helping people fight to get their lives back, helping them fight depression and the feeling of defeat, because he knows they can do this. They can do this all day. Then it turns out he can help make it all right, with this crazy plan, so of course he’s going to help in the effort. And they succeed. So he goes back to the 1940s, marries Peggy, and... stops fighting? 

Now, a lot of people are probably making parallels between Thor and Steve, how Steve is finally getting to be who he is and not who he’s supposed to be. But Steve wasn’t supposed to be the leader; he was supposed to be dead before he turned thirty. He was supposed to be a poster boy for the war effort. He’s already thrown out who he was supposed to be in favor of who he is. So Steve doesn’t become who he is when he goes back to the world where he left it and decides to live a normal life, decides not to fight anymore; he loses who he is. When he decided to go back, he lost the last vestiges of the disabled kid living inside him, that kid’s determination to do the right thing and always fight for what he believes in, that kid’s understanding of what it’s like to be a punching bag for others and for life itself, because this new Steve didn’t need him anymore. Because disabled people are expendable. 

That little Steve Rogers has finally died. Steve becomes who a man is supposed to be; he becomes normal. And what is normality if not compliance with expectations? Normal is what people are “supposed to be.” And so the essence of Steve Rogers is snuffed out. To normal people living normal lives, says Endgame, little disabled Steve Rogers was never worth a goddamn thing, inside or out. Normal people don’t need that spark because they don’t have to fight, and they don’t have to care about anybody but themselves. The one thing that salvaged his character from being an ugly anti-disability train-wreck is gone. Now he’s just another muscle-bound superhero. Now, everything special about him came out of a bottle. 

And honestly, he’s lost everything Peggy loved about him. She loved that little guy first, not because of his biceps but because of his heart. So idk why the hell she’d stay with him. I certainly wouldn’t want to spend my life with a guy who committed thousands of counts of manslaughter and/or aiding and abetting (see Point the Second). Maybe they broke up and that’s why he wasn’t at her funeral ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Reason the second: Morality is relative, but knowing someone is going to commit crimes against humanity and doing nothing is aiding and abetting. Like, at least tell your badass wife or something. Of course, this one only applies if you go with the writers instead of the Russos, in which case he could have told Peggy and stopped a lot of atrocities. Or it could still apply if he created an alternate reality but he really was just there to do nothing and have a normal life.

I mean, besides the fact that either Steve didn’t tell Peggy and effectively lied to her for years and let her great contributions spawn evil and horror, or else did tell her and Peggy decided that to hell with it, whatever, who cares about them anyway, let the world burn and I’ll help it along (a huge disservice to Peggy, like what the hell), not telling ANYONE is completely morally bankrupt. Because... Hydra practices non-consensual human experimentation and vivisection? For decades, on hundreds if not thousands of people? And Steve knows this? Like literally knowing hate crimes and atrocities and murders are going to happen and not helping or alerting people who can help is illegal. It’s called duty to rescue/failure to render aid. Or getting charged with aiding and abetting. And it’s not just one of those laws to maintain order; allowing these things to happen is a moral disgrace. 

If you’re worried about the timeline, don’t go back. But if you’re risking it all by going back anyway, you better not let that shit go down the same way, because maybe everything with Hydra worked out in the end but they mangled a shit ton of eggs. It’s like stopping Thanos: a moral imperative. Less strong in terms of sheer number of people affected, but actually stronger in terms of amount of harm caused per person, because torture followed by grisly murder<<<disappearing out of existence in a by-all-accounts painless puff of dust. If you can even possibly help any version of those people who are being vivisected and shit, you do it. And there’s a ton he can do without taking up the shield and actually fighting, but he became worthy of Mjölnir when he jumped on that grenade, and if he went back and let it all go down the exact same way then, sorry, but he never should’ve been able to lift it. Because there’s being selfish because you deserve it and it’s not hurting anyone; and then there’s putting your desires over not only the desires, not only the needs, but the basic human rights of others, the lives of others, not just in the sense that they died and it was sad but in the sense that their lives were horrible lonely agonizing pain-filled nightmares and then they died pointlessly. One of those I don’t begrudge anyone, and as for the other, all I can say is: screw you. I’ll let you guess which is which. 

Reason the third: It’s completely emotionally inauthentic, and that’s just bad storytelling. It’s everything that’s wrong with tearjerker movies, and yet people who claim to hate emotionally manipulative romances are waxing poetic about it. It’s deus ex machina (looking back, maybe this whole thing should have been foreshadowed by Point the First, see: Steve’s Pimp My Ride moment). 

Thor could have been the one to return the stones, could have gone back to just before his mother died, had her make a fake-Friga the way Loki makes duplicates of himself (Loki did learn all his magic from her, the woman raised by witches), stay hidden with her behind a pillar until fake Friga “dies,” and then whisk his mother away to the safety of the present. He could literally make it so that his mother never died. (And she would have died, in a horrific way. For all Steve knew, Peggy lived a great, fulfilling life without him, and died peacefully, so it’s not like she needed to be saved.) But Thor doesn’t do that. Because it doesn’t fit his arc, his character, or his development over the series. Because it’s ridiculous and over-sentimental and it prevents the fridging of a female character, which of course can’t be allowed to happen. No one would believe it. No one would want it. 

It’s like a pinball reset. Steve returning to exactly where he left off is the time-travel equivalent of “it all happened in a dream.” People should be furious like they were for the ending of St. Elsewhere. It defies the point of every coming-of-age story in history. It’s like someone’s Great Gatsby fix-it fanfic, because you can never go back. No one can. Um... except Steve. 

And in doing so, he undermines the emotional resonance of his entire arc. It hammers the heart-wrenching longing, regret, and strange nostalgia-for-what-never-was of Steve’s scene with Peggy in Winter Soldier down into flat meaninglessness; a wink; an inside joke. And then in Civil War he’s trying to make a difference in this new world, to move forward and keep helping people. So, too, at the beginning of Endgame. That could have been the start of a really powerful arc for him, where he finally learns, through helping others, how he, too, can begin to find his place in the world and move on. But he turns his back on that to move backwards and help no one but himself. 

Real people struggle to move on, because real people have to move on, and many people lose the ones they love and never get a do-over. That’s the emotional truth. And for all that these movies are ridiculous fantastical nonsense, fiction can often be a way to circumvent literal truth to illuminate emotional truths that lie underneath, which are universal to the human experience and therefore speak to that experience on a deeper level. Cap’s stories have always rang emotionally true to me, not only in that I identified with them but in that they’re pretty universally identifiable. Until now. 

I mean, after Age of Ultron I should have been used to Marvel laughing in the face of character development, but maybe I just never learn. Maybe I just always hope people will be better. In that way, I’m like Steve how he used to be, before he sold out. I don’t know if I want to be compared to this Steve, anymore.