The last post about my kids and Avengers: Infinity War

Looking back on my posts on this blog, I've actually only tagged Avengers: Infinity War three times, and only once within the past two years. Nevertheless, I feel like I've been going on and on about how I didn't want my kids to see it because I believe it contains one of the most mature incidents of violence in any MCU movie, and I wasn't ready to throw open the doors of the whole MCU to them. (That's the opening bit where ______ gets strangled to death.)

Well, doors officially thrown open.

Last night my older son (age 11) had a friend sleep over, and I didn't actually expect they'd be watching an MCU movie. My son has a bit of MCU fatigue, as we all do, though I took him to Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness a few weeks ago and he really enjoyed that. Still, this was the friend who had previously recommended Monty Python and the Holy Grail to him, as written about here, so I imagined things wouldn't be so predictable. They've watched MCU before -- Thor: Ragnarok comes to mind -- but I figured we'd go off in some other unexpected direction this time, as we did last time.

But it's hard to get children to spontaneously conjure the titles of movies they want to see, and when we started to go through Disney+ to jog their memories, it turned out this friend also had not seen Infinity War -- even though he had seen Endgame. In my own mind I had come around to my son possibly seeing Infinity War, and it might have even been me who suggested it last night in order to get us out of a state of decision paralysis that could have theoretically lasted forever. (A luxury we especially could not afford with a movie that runs two hours and 34 minutes.)

Eleven still feels a bit young to me to be taking in some of these images, but he's taken in worse. In fact, a few weeks ago, he saw my favorite comic book movie since these final two Avengers movies, The Suicide Squad, with the other kids who were waiting for a gathering of my wife's friends to wrap up a leisurely dinner. That's a full-on R, with people getting ripped in half and their heads exploding, if I remember it correctly. If he could handle that with a shrug, he'd be fine on Infinity War.

And he was. In fact, when he emerged at about the halfway point to say that my laptop battery was about to die -- I'd forgotten to bring in my power cable when I set up the projector for them in the garage -- he said "This is a good movie." The emphasis was on the proper word, as in "This is a good movie" rather than "This is a good movie," which is a bit more circumspect. Hey, I agree.

In fact, if he even remembered that the strangulation of ________ was the thing that worried me -- though I don't remember if I'd ever hinted at why I didn't want him to watch the movie -- he probably blew right past it without thinking. Especially when he'd only recently seen a human-shark hybrid tear a man apart with his bear hands.

The other reason I dropped my opposition was that I realized it was futile. And now we're talking about my younger son.

We give both kids a lot of latitude when it comes to what they watch on YouTube, within reason. At least while my eight-year-old is watching things in the living room, we walk by regularly and can police anything he's watching that he shouldn't be watching. They're good kids and they don't usually push the boundaries of what they know we expect from them in terms of their behavior. 

Once we started showing them Marvel movies, Marvel-related content on YouTube seemed fair game. I mean, it's only logical, right? When we're casually monitoring the content of what they're watching, we're looking for the YouTubers to be dropping profanity -- which the ones they watch do not -- not concerning ourselves overly with the exact content of the discussion about superhero movies.

The other day, though, I realized that the eight-year-old was watching a YouTuber doing a deep dive into the climax of Avengers: Endgame. This didn't necessarily offend me on a content level, but on a spoilers level. Though to be fair, as they've watched Spider-Man: Far From Home, they've already had the biggest secrets of Endgame spoiled for them -- as discussed here. 

If my son was watching an analysis of exactly what happened at the end of the Avengers saga when I happened to be walking through the room, I can only imagine that he saw ________ being strangled to death sometime when I wasn't.

Whatever. If they want to ruin movies for themselves, they can. Not everyone has the same standards on that as I do, and as we all know, the events of these movies become playground lore pretty quickly.

And if they can handle images that I have determined to be too shocking for them, well, then that's great too.

I guess I'm out of reservations.

Swing open, door, to the cinematic content of the adult world.