The eternal life of the superhero

WARNING!

WARNING!

WARNING!

The following post contains the majorest possible spoilers about Avengers: Endgame!

(Though if you would like to read my spoiler-free review, click here.)

Two nights after my viewing of Avengers: Endgame, I was playing a game of Marvel Trouble with my five-year-old. You have to take those two words separately to understand what they mean in conjunction. "Trouble" is that old game that has the bubble in the middle of the board, which you press to roll a pair of dice (a handy way not to lose said dice). And "Marvel" means it's a version of Trouble -- a game that's a lot like Sorry, it turns out -- featuring the beloved characters of Marvel comics.

There are four different characters you can play, each of whom has four little identical game pieces. There's Iron Man, whose pieces are colored yellow. There's Thor, whose pieces are colored red. Those color assignments are not particularly obvious so I sometimes confuse those pieces for one another. The color assignments get more obvious from there as Hulk is green and Black Widow is black.

As we were setting up the board, I thought the following:

"Wow, half of these characters are now dead."

It was a sobering thought. It occurred to me how unusual it was that you could think of epic, timeless characters, who have graced the comics for many decades, as deceased. Most people have not yet seen Avengers: Endgame and my five-year-old probably won't see it for five years. But soon, most people -- probably including my five-year-old even before he sees the movie -- will know that Iron Man and Black Widow are no longer alive.

Of course, various comic threads over the years have killed off most if not all of these characters. I'm not sure how many times the world's two most famous superheroes, Batman and Superman, have been dead. There's even a whole series of comic books called The Death of Superman.

Yet not until it is done in a movie do we really think of these characters as actually dead. And even then we have to really believe it. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice "killed" Superman, but we believed that one even less than we believed that Spider-Man and Black Panther might permanently be dust.

Even in last year's Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, where the actual Peter Parker is supposed to have actually died, we don't tend to think of that as canon. How can we, when another Spider-Man movie is coming out this year?

Yet the MCU has a definitive finality to it. It is the canon of all canons. And once something happens in an MCU movie, it has an authority that exceeds all of the multiplicity of possible rabbit holes comic books can go down. It is the final It.

And so when my son played Iron Man -- his favorite character -- in Trouble, he was playing with a ghost.

Me, I was feeling less morbid and played the Hulk. I love what they did with the Hulk in Endgame (and with Thor, for that matter).

I usually play Black Widow. It's in part to teach my children, by example, that female superheroes are just as cool as male ones. But this time, I just couldn't bring myself to grab those pieces. I figured at least one of us should be playing someone who isn't a ghost. (Plus, the board was more conveniently oriented for me to play Hulk without having to reach across the board.)

I expected the death of Tony Stark in this movie, because nothing has been better publicized than how Robert Downey Jr. wanted to be done making Marvel movies. Well, maybe that Chris Evans wanted to be done making Marvel movies. Captain America's not dead, but let's just say that the only adventures he'll still be going on are getting a second jello at the old folks home. (And lest you wonder where Captain America is in this version of Trouble, he's a special piece you can get on your team if you role the one side of the second die that has a shield on it. When he's on your team, none of your players can be sent back to the start.)

But I did not expect the death of Natasha Romanoff. That's in part because there is a Black Widow movie in the works, which I now understand must be a prequel. But at the time she gave her life for the soul stone, I figured it was not a permanent loss. And at the end, when Steve Rogers makes his improbable trip back to return all the stones (how does he know how to fly a space ship??), I predicted that instead of seeing him re-materialize five seconds later, we'd see her. Somehow when Steve went to return the soul stone, he'd have made an exchange of his life for hers. When I saw what they actually chose to do, that should have been a more obvious prediction. But my prediction revolved around Black Widow because I just couldn't reconcile that she was actually dead.

My feelings of loss over Black Widow probably have more to do with my feelings of affection for Scarlett Johansson than for the character. Black Widow has never been a greatly written character, in part because she has never truly been able to assert her individuality. She does, however, have a great scene in the first hour of Endgame, in which Johansson almost does some indie movie style acting in expressing her ragged, no-sleep-for-five-years frustration over her helplessness to undo what's been done. That was one of the film's most singular moments ... and now I understand why they made sure they got it in. It would be our last chance to really connect with Natasha Romanoff.

What has since occurred to me, though, is that Iron Man and Black Widow are not really dead.

Oh, they're dead within the MCU. Sure. They're not going to make surprise appearances in Black Panther 2.

But what I mean is, superheroes never really die. The Black Widow movie is confirmation of that. Not only will we see Black Widow again soon, we'll see Scarlett Johansson as Black Widow. She didn't even die because Johansson wanted to stop making movies. She just died because that's what the narrative dictated.

And not only will she live again in the Black Widow movie, she'll live again in an Avengers reboot 15 years from now. And 15 years after that. And 15 years after that.

What makes epic characters epic characters is that we will continue to tell their stories. Maybe we'll pick up earlier in their lives. Maybe we'll pick up in an alternate timeline. Or maybe we'll just scrap what has come before and tell it all again.

So just because a character has died in a movie doesn't mean we're likely to think of them as dead. Kids can still engage in Star Wars-related play acting without having it cross their mind that the characters they're playing -- Han Solo and Luke Skywalker -- are no longer among the living. Heck, Han Solo was most recently experienced by them as alive, in last year's Solo: A Star Wars Story.

If we're being honest, they were never among the living anyway. On some level kids know these are characters, characters who have been explored multiple times in multiple incarnations. That gives them a kind of eternal vigor we can never dampen.

Long live Black Widow and Iron Man.