Did female heroes get fair representation in Avengers: Endgame?

Female superheroes have been on the rise for years now. Does Avengers: Endgame give them a chance to take up as much space as their male counterparts?

Warning: Spoilers for Avengers: Endgame are below.

It’s happened, finally. Avengers: Endgame has come out, fans are abuzz, and people have thrown billions of dollars at this movie in its opening weekend. All of your favorites are packed onto the screen, from Captain America to Ant-Man. So, where are all the women?

The history of the MCU, and especially of the Avengers team, isn’t exactly progressive when it comes to gender parity. For much of the runtime of Avengers: Endgame, there were only two female characters who got more than a few lines: Black Widow and Nebula.

That includes Captain Marvel, too. Carol Danvers, as the incredibly powerful Captain Marvel, appears at the beginning and the end of the film, and not at all between. She dips in to save Tony Stark from a cold death in the first minutes of the film, then bounces until the climactic battle. She gets a few good blows in against Thanos, but without any character development or backstory. Captain Marvel feels pasted in, more as fan service than an earned and valuable character.

Quantity and quality

All told, though female superheroes are getting more screen time than they would have in Marvel’s first movie phase, it’s not always high quality. A clear majority of major players are still men, even after Thanos wreaks havoc. Sure, we’ve got Black Widow and Nebula, but then there’s Captain America, Iron Man, the Hulk, Thor, Ant-Man, and Rhodey as War Machine. And when women are on screen in this movie, they face a heightened risk of paltry lines or even a tragic death

Even major characters aren’t immune to this, as Black Widow doesn’t make it out of the story alive. Now, this being a world based on comic books, there’s a decent chance she may return. If nothing else, Marvel has promised a Black Widow movie sometime between 2020 and 2022. That might take some of the bad taste out of your mouth after witnessing Natasha’s untimely and possibly unnecessary demise in Avengers: Endgame.

Here’s basically what happens: the Avengers decide to bring everyone back. Therefore, they must travel through time and collect the Infinity Stones to make a new Infinity Gauntlet. Natasha and Clint Barton/Hawkeye travel to Vormir in 2014. There, they meet the keeper of the Soul Stone, who happens to be Red Skull from the first Captain America film.

Red Skull tells them that, in order to obtain the stone, one of them must sacrifice the soul of someone they love. Natasha and Clint then argue over who’s going to be the one, with each offering themself up for the task.

Marvel Studios’ AVENGERS: ENDGAME. Photo: ©Marvel Studios 2019

Fridging

This leads to a dramatic scene straight out of a ’90s thriller, where the two come to blow. Eventually, Clint is dangling off a cliff, with Natasha barely holding on to him. She lets go and plummets to the hard ground below. Clint gets the Soul Stone and makes his way back to the original timeline. Once there, he’s got to explain why Natasha had to die for the sake of the plot.

It’s not for too long, however, as Tony Stark’s eventual sacrifice looms larger in the film. We get a loving sequence of Tony’s funeral and grieving family. Where is Natasha’s memorial service? There is only a scene of the remaining Avengers being sad on a dock, and little else.

Surprisingly, Nebula may have had the strongest arc of any woman in Endgame. While big-name characters like Captain Marvel were in and out (though you’ve got to give her credit for putting Thanos in a headlock), Nebula was there throughout the whole story. She’s got a compelling journey, too, from a desperately vicious daughter of Thanos to a core member of the Avengers team.

That’s a heck of a lot of character development, especially when she is face-to-face with her murderous past self. It gets even more striking when she meets up with past Gamora, who had already died in the present Nebula’s reality (time travel really complicates a story, I’m telling you). Good Nebula convinces Gamora that she’s worth a try when explaining that the two became true sisters after years of conflict. It’s an emotional note that is well-earned, unlike Black Widow’s sudden death.

Then again, past Thanos learns about the big plan thanks to Nebula’s cybernetic link with her past self. Good Nebula is captured and put in peril. She suffers through torture and Thanos monologuing while her evil past self deceives the Avengers. At this point, both of the main female characters are out of the action.

Marvel Studios’ CAPTAIN MARVEL..Captain Marvel (Brie Larson)..Photo: Film Frame..©Marvel Studios 2019

What could have been

Sure, we got that cool shot of all of the MCU’s female heroes rallying around Captain Marvel in the final battle, but it came after hours of male-dominated story. Look a little closer, and you’ll start to wonder why it had to be that way.

Why couldn’t all of those women have led the fight against Thanos in the first place? Why couldn’t Black Widow have been the stoic leader of the team instead of Steve Rogers? Why should Scott Lang have been saved from Thanos’ initial destruction, and not Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) as Wasp? How come we only see a brief shot of Pepper Potts in her own high-tech suit, with hardly any backstory? Was there any reason that Valkyrie acted as only a supporting character and not a sword-wielding, Pegasus-riding badass at the center of the action? Why not?

If Endgame had made more room for women, then Iron Man wouldn’t have had to suffer an unnecessary death

And why couldn’t Captain Marvel have wielded the remade Infinity Gauntlet? There’s a good chance she would have survived; at least, she had a better chance than the very human, very fragile Tony Stark. If Endgame had made more room for women, then Iron Man wouldn’t have had to suffer an unnecessary death.

If only Carol had been organically integrated into the story, rather than relegated to a super-powered gofer ferrying ships, gloves, and Iron Men. But then there wouldn’t have been a tragic death to grieve fans. Marvel also would have had to find another way to let Robert Downey Jr. play out his contract.

Even the argument that this film was meant to focus on the “original” MCU Avengers doesn’t quite work. It does not excuse the odd handling of Black Widow, nor does it explain the amount of time given to a relative late-comer like Nebula.

Ultimately, that brief glimpse of powerful women banding together was a band-aid. So, too, were the occasional appearances of characters like Valkyrie, Okoye, and Scarlet Witch. When it comes to real, substantial representation, where female characters help to drive the story and are not merely its victims, Avengers: Endgame is seriously lacking.