The parallels between reality and fiction are forever bound to meet. While it’s always pertinent to remain cognizant that we view current events through the lens of the world around us, fiction and art are the gateways to existing beyond ourselves and our observations. Observe how the worlds in their structures mirror ours, and take what we can learn from them.
While unintentional, the Blip catastrophe from Avengers: Infinity War has rippled throughout the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Its effects have bled into numerous entries in the franchise, and the people struggling to adjust. In our time, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame premiered in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Much has changed in the world since.
Months after Endgame, the world fell into lockdown as the COVID-19 pandemic ran rampant. Essential workers filled the now-empty places of commerce. Streets, normally rushing rivers of pedestrians, instead became tiny trickling drops of mask-wearing pilgrims. Everyone else was forced into hermitage. Quarantine was martial law, dictated by an unseen airborne threat.
I’m not even the first person to illustrate the similarities of how life and art coalesced on this occasion. Kevin Feige himself addressed it in a Variety interview. Look around the internet, and you’ll find many comparable events in articles and videos. I hope that in my in-depth observation, these parallels will feel real.
What is grief, if not love persevering?
Uttered by Vision in the Disney+ miniseries WandaVision, this header’s quote has stuck with many. It’s a beautiful sentiment. The love we feel in grief reminds us that it was there in the first place.
Whether we were living with the anxieties of losing loved ones, we also observed it taking from us. The world watched on phone screens, reading as beloved pop culture icons departed. And then there were the loved ones who passed during the frightening period. Either behind a glass window in hospitals or through a phone screen, people watched in isolation as those they loved left.
Upon Thanos snapping his fingers with the complete Infinity Gauntlet that adorned his hand, half of the world vanished. Dead. Gone. Burnt wisps in the wind. Heroes and villains dissipated into thin air, leaving the surviving Avengers and Guardians of the Galaxy speechless and heartbroken. As you read this, you’re likely remembering Tom Holland’s Spider-Man fighting off the Blip’s effects as he looked into Tony Stark’s eyes in utmost terror before letting go.
The effects of this were immediately on display in Endgame. Five years after Thanos rendered the universe in half, everyone felt lost. Thor grieved his powerlessness in stopping the Mad Titan. Steve Rogers counseled groups of people still mourning their losses. The Avengers in its entirety mourned Natasha Romanoff’s sacrifice at Vormir. People grieved after the Blip and after the return.
This last point manifests grief in Yelena Belova, Natasha’s adopted sister. Much like Romanoff, Belova was a fixture in Russia’s Black Widow program. This program was traumatizing on its own. But Yelena’s grief was a calm, stoic, and uncaring wrath. In the Disney+ series Hawkeye, centering on Clint Barton, also known as the titular character, Belova tracked down this archer in the hopes of revenge.
It took Barton, whistling a whistle that only Belova and Romanoff would’ve recognized, to cease this mission fueled by hurt. There, she saw that he also held the grief she carried; he even had to watch the late Black Widow sacrifice herself to save him, Belova, and the entire universe. Both were powerless. Helpless. Barton, too, had walked Belova’s path as the Ronin, and he felt the ramifications of improper coping throughout that series. It took Belova a while to process this, however. Years, even. That wounds must be healed delicately, instead of exacerbating them.
Time in a bottle
"“I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire. I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it. Because no battle is ever won. They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.”"William Faulkner
I’m going to stay on Yelena Belova for just a bit longer.
Her character arc in the show inspired this very article. Hawkeye, Episode 5, “Ronin”, revealed what she was doing at the same time Thanos snapped his fingers in Wakanda. On a mission to “deprogram” a fellow Black Widow named Ana with fellow agent Sonya, they found she had no traces of the programming. Belova took a moment to relax in Ana’s bathroom, only to disappear in the Blip. When she returned, she saw the bathroom’s color and design had drastically changed. To the world, she was gone for years. To her, it was a few seconds.
Through this, she learned that Ana grew a family while Sonya moved on into civilian life. Most painstaking for Yelena, nevertheless, was the sacrifice that cost her Natasha in her absence.
Five years and the world moved on without her, and she wasn’t there to help. In the blink of an eye, half a decade passed. She won’t get this time back, and it eats at her. The past of killing and losing time resurfaced as she became an unfeeling, depressed gun for hire for Valentina in Thunderbolts* after her run-in with Hawkeye.
She wasn’t the only one to face this. Peter Parker, Michelle “MJ” Jones-Watson, and Ned Leeds joined a new class to resume their year’s schooling in Spider-Man: Far From Home, after the Blip, for example.
Scott Lang, the latest Ant-Man, is a different story. At the end of Infinity War, Lang was left in the Quantum Realm while Hank Pym, Janet Van Dyne, and Hope Van Dyne evaporated outside of it. Stuck in there for those five years, Lang emerged into the world in Endgame, one more sullen and empty. One where his daughter Cassie was considerably older. Moments of her childhood are eternally out of his grasp.
Lang saw that the world was vastly different. Once up to speed on Thanos and the Avengers, he didn’t keep this stretch of time in mind for long. Instead, he laced up and changed the timeline to revert to normalcy, contributing his vital knowledge of Pym Particles to establish time travel. By obtaining the Infinity Stones through said travel, it was his experience and the intelligence of other Avengers that made that mission successful. Thanks to Scott, Bruce Banner brought everyone back with a new Infinity Gauntlet in his Hulk hand, while Tony Stark sacrificed his life to revive everyone lost to Thanos.
In Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Scott’s approach to the Blip time displacement was more comedic. Scott and Cassie Lang’s relationship grew strained as he became a successful writer of memoirs, whereas Cassie dedicated herself to helping people displaced by the Blip find a place in this new world. In this, there are resources in place, or at least attempts to, to adjust with the changes the Blip made on society. Scott was less cognizant of this, being a superhero and all, but Cassie, young and privy, acted on this, showing her growth from a little girl to a purveyor of mutual aid.
Coming out of the quarantine lockdown, we faced similar phenomena with the passage of time. Events that felt more recent suddenly stretched farther and farther away. It’s as though we left our own Blip in 2021 as spaces opened and social distancing became less of a norm, for better or worse. At times, I’ll think it’s only been a few years since The Avengers came to theaters, despite 13 years having passed. Did you know that Avengers: Infinity War was released almost eight years ago? Moving on…
Economic factors
Post-Blip, the MCU struggled. Infrastructures fell, businesses struggled, or likely fell apart entirely. Sam Wilson’s sister, Sarah, felt as much running Wilson Family Seafood in the Southern USA. As he dealt with replacing Steve Rogers as Captain America, Sam contended with his place as a recently returned individual, doubts of filling Steve’s shoes due to his race and lack of super soldier serum, and situations faced by Americans like Sarah.
Through this lens, dealing with a repopulated universe heavily bore on the MCU’s economy.
For some in our reality, this situation was far more dire. Small businesses struggled to stay afloat, if they even survived. How could a place stay open when there was nobody to visit? Of course, this also transitioned into the job market, where unemployment temporarily rose thanks to remote work, and then sank again once quarantine restrictions were lifted in 2021 and the years since, when companies mandated returns to office locations.
More urgently, settings were at capacity, as seen when Monica Rambeau returned to the hospital in a flashback from WandaVision. Initially visiting her sick mother, Maria at the Parkside Hospital in 2018, Monica disappeared and reappeared in 2023 at an empty bedside, Maria no longer there. While nurses, staff, and doctors frantically ran the premises, Monica found a staff member from 2018 still working there, informing Monica that Maria had passed away in 2020. Amid the chaos, injured and sick patients threw the medical facility into disarray.
Financially, the world likely was not prepared for the return of people long thought dead.
During the height of the epidemic, it wasn’t unheard of to hear about highly populated medical centers. Whether in caring for COVID-19 victims or testing patients for it, treatment was difficult for people to receive promptly. When everyone’s at risk, the wait becomes all the more dangerous.
The world adjusted and moved on during the five years without other people. As everyone popped back into existence, billions upon billions of people were displaced. Suddenly, people were homeless and jobless. Of these matters, the Global Repatriation Council (GRC) was founded shortly after the Blip ahead of the events of Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
The GRC was tasked with relocating the migrant workers who had lived abroad to settle into a new life. This proved to be controversial, as it sought to uproot the lives people were already living in their new homes. This is what begat the anti-nationalist terrorist group known as the Flag-Smashers.
Given the current climate with organizations like ICE and the cloudy, vitriolic conversations surrounding them, their similarities to GRC are eerily close.
The new normal
While COVID didn’t resurrect anyone like the Avengers did in Endgame, that remains the only contrast in this comparison.
That doesn’t negate the changes made by the Blip and its unintentional mirror to the quarantine.
Frantically, both fiction and reality searched for ways to return the world to anything resembling what “was”, pretending that it would make everything right again. We see that it is not the case. Ramifications still persist.
Things can never go back to the way they were. If you smash a plate, no matter how you glue it back together, the cracks remain. There’s no going back, only forward. That’s the human story, we progress and progress. Change the old norms in the hopes we evolve into something better, no matter how dearly people want to cling to comfort. We humans are bound to reach out beyond that zone.
Cassie Lang’s efforts to help the displaced find their way to the best life they could lead are proof of this. Each new generation must carry the story of theirs and the generations preceding. So they can make new stories for each newer Earth we find ourselves in. While the powerful entities of the past keep their hold on the now for their vision of what the world should be, the young in each new iteration of society realize that we do our best when we move on—together.
In a way, the MCU’s story is this. That after each Steve Rogers, Thor Odinson, and Tony Stark, a Spider-Man, Yelena Belova, and Ironheart will take their place to make the world a better place, even when the threats to it seem so much.
No matter how dire the situation, we will persevere and our art will reflect it.