One sole Infinity Stone was actually the one responsible for turning the Avengers into dust

Even though Thanos wielded the power of all six Infinity Stones using his Infinity Gauntlet, he only needed one to turn every Avenger we loved into dust.

It was never easy to choose which Infinity Stone we hated until now. Before, the stones were neat little gems that various Avengers came across to steal from a bad guy or use for their own purposes. But who knew that these powerful little stones would become their undoing?

At first, the Soul Stone might have been a good contender for Worst Infinity Stone of the Year, because Thanos had to trade Gamora’s life to get it — and we’re assuming it’s got the trapped souls of all the other lost ones kept away in there. But now, there’s something even more heartbreaking to about the Infinity Stones: one stone in particular was responsible for turning everyone into dust when they were snapped away.

That culprit, in fact, would be the Power Stone. That’s right, start getting your pitchforks now, because we’re all coming for that stone. This was revealed by Dan DeLeeuw, the Visual Effects Supervisor for Infinity War, whose team made a pretty conscious effort to decide what the “snappening” would look like on screen.

DeLeeuw explained this a recent interview with Inverse (h/t to iO9 for finding it) that his team considered using multiple stones for the effect. But in the end, he said it all came down to one:

"The Power Stone was blipping them out of existence… We had concept art combining all those things, and it was getting too busy. It became too complicated. It was stepping on what the actors were doing. So it became ‘body turns to ash.’ We peeled away all those layers and focused on that one [Power Stone], deciding how quickly it would consume someone, what pattern it would consume them."

While it is sad that we had to tragically watch everyone fade to dust and ash, at least things weren’t as bad as they were originally planned, seeing any other combination of the Avengers being ripped to shreds would be just plain mean.

But those feelings weren’t something that went amiss for DeLeeuw, either, who realized the actors all are their own were enough to make you emotional about them dying. He praised Tom Holland, specifically, for his ability to really knock the scene out of the park.

“When we saw Tom Holland, even in its rough form without any effect, we were crying in the edit,” he said. “We could work with this. But gosh there’s no way to make it better because it’s Tom knocking it out of the park. It’s like the son apologizing for something he had no control over.”

It’s nice to know that DeLeeuw and his team felt the slightest bit of remorse during the final scene. But of course, they couldn’t be that nice to us. And the rest, as they say, is history: we got one of the most soul-crushing scenes in cinematic history.

Now that we know what the Power Stone did, can it be used to reverse the effect of the damage that it’s done? Their souls might be trapped in the Soul Stone, but they’ll still need a body. Here’s to hoping that whatever the remaining Avengers do, it’ll work. We don’t need a whole Freaky Friday-style film where most of the movie is spent putting the Avengers back in the right bodies. (Although, admittedly, that probably would be fun to watch.)