But Wait! There’s One More Bullsh*t Excuse for Natasha’s Death in Avengers: Endgame.

According to a recent Vanity Fair interview, women on the crew for Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame apparently asked the writers not to take Natasha’s death away from her. Since the movie’s debut, the screenwriters for Avengers: Endgame, Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, have justified a lot of their decisions with excuses that we just didn’t need. If they just let the movie live and said that was that, okay, but instead, they doubled down on everything so much that we begged for them to stop talking.

But one thing that has continued to weigh on me is their line of excuses for why Natasha Romanoff sacrificed herself for the Soul Stone over Clint Barton. In Endgame, a soul must be exchanged for the Soul Stone, information that no one really knows since Gamora’s death is still a mystery to them. When Clint and Natasha show up, they try to decide who will die in the most Clint and Natasha-esque way, but the fact that Clint Barton got to live on and Nat didn’t? Still bad.

As they told Vanity Fair, Markus and McFeely went around to the female crew to ask them about what would happen if Clint died instead, and their supposed response sounds like a load of bullshit to me:

“A number of women on the crew, when we said, ‘Hey, we’re thinking maybe Hawkeye goes over,’ said, ‘Don’t you do that! Don’t rob her of this!’”

Rob her of … an entire movie of growth and understanding and fighting alongside her friends before her death? Rob her of a funeral? All of that was okay to “rob her of,” but her serial killer friend who murdered a bunch of people of color for four years because his family died gets to live and fight alongside the Avengers when Natasha doesn’t?

The idea that Natasha had to sacrifice herself to make herself a hero is also kind of insinuated here. Sure, she thought that her red ledger was still weighing on her, but the good that Natasha had done with the Avengers, the fights she put herself through for the greater good? All of that helped make her into a hero who deserved more than falling to her death for the Soul Stone at the halfway mark of this movie.

All of this is driven home by the fact that Natasha Romanoff isn’t even getting her own movie until after her death and that she has constantly been sidelined for the storylines of the men in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. So, to have her death be an emotional beat for Clint Barton? Yeah, that’s not as honorable as the “jump[ing] on the grenade” Markus and McFeely may have thought it was, and whoever they polled on her death should have also maybe thought about serial killer Clint Barton before saying that the death belonged to Nat.

(image: Marvel Entertainment)

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