As I’ve mentioned, I’ve been watching all (well, most of) the Marvel Cinematic Universe films, and I’ve found myself oddly captivated. They’re really eating into my brain. I watched Avengers: Endgame Monday night, so I’m pretty much done with that arc. While I’ve enjoyed these films, I have to say that I think I’m more intrigued by the possibilities for these stories than I am by the actual movies.

These are great characters, and they’re perfectly cast, with the actors truly embodying the characters. I haven’t read the comic books, so I don’t know how well they compare to that. But they just seem right to me, with what we see on the screen mostly matching what the movies tell us about them. But my frustration is that the really good stuff (at least, the stuff I was interested in) seemed to mostly happen offscreen. In that last movie, we finally got a lot of good, emotional character moments, with the characters on their own and dealing with things or interacting with each other when it wasn’t a life-or-death manner. That was the sort of thing we needed more of along the way because we needed to establish those relationships for the stuff that happened in the last two movies to really have impact.

One thing I feel like they skipped was Steve Rogers (Captain America) adapting to modern times. We went straight from him realizing he was in the 21st century, having skipped straight from World War II at the end of his first movie, to having been around for a bit at the beginning of the first Avengers movie. There were a couple of lines referring to him being more old-fashioned or straitlaced, then a joke about him actually getting a pop culture reference, and then they practically forgot he was from the 1940s.

I also felt like they skipped over the team building process for the Avengers. We had some contrived conflict when they first came together, then they had to work together to save the day, and the next time we see them, they’re a well-oiled machine. Characters who’d barely interacted were acting like best friends and working seamlessly together. That’s the part that would have been fun to see. How did Thor and Captain America become good friends and an effective fighting team? If we’d seen a little more about how that relationship developed, one of the big moments in Endgame would have had a lot more impact.

In some cases, I wasn’t sure what the relationship was supposed to be. I saw some commentaries on Civil War about how terrible it was that Tony and Steve were at odds because it destroyed their wonderful friendship. I hadn’t realized they were supposed to have been friends. It would have helped if we’d seen some development of their relationship and where their points of conflict were because there was a lot of potential material there. As it was, I was on Team Steve and felt like the others had all forgotten what they knew about him, but I didn’t feel any great loss for whatever relationship there was between Tony and Steve.

I really feel robbed that we didn’t get the story of what came after Civil War, when Steve, Natasha, Sam, and Wanda were apparently rogue and on the run. That would have made an amazing movie. I guess they were impatient to get to Infinity War and had a packed schedule, but I wish they’d managed to squeeze that one in—just a good adventure movie about trying to deal with the things the other heroes weren’t able to deal with while avoiding getting caught.

Unfortunately, when my brain feels like something is incomplete, it wants to complete it, so even though I don’t know enough about this universe to really write something, my brain is trying to mentally write the stuff we didn’t get to see while also rewriting what we did see. I can’t afford to use up that much mental energy on something like this! Maybe it’ll find a way to pull out the elements I like and rework it into my own story, but I’m not sure I could pull off rewriting the Avengers but filing off the serial numbers and putting it into my own universe to make my own story that covers the stuff I wanted to see.

Now that I’m more or less caught up (there’s still a Spider-Man movie, but it’s not urgent), I can start on the new Disney Plus series. I watched the first WandaVision last night, and the sitcom format may be too much for me. While other kids hid behind the sofa for things like Daleks, it was things like I Love Lucy and Gilligan’s Island that sent me behind the sofa, unable to bear the cringeworthy embarrassment of the sitcom misunderstandings and other idiot plotting. I know there’s more going on, so I’ll stick with it, but it may be more tense for me than all those invincible villains.