On the Deaths of Fictional Characters

Well, I guess:

In Age of Ultron, Natasha is pursuing a romantic relationship with Bruce Banner, a.k.a. the Hulk, a love story that received little foreshadowing and which later MCU entries would almost entirely abandon. Bruce is reluctant to go along with the idea, though, on account of how he periodically turns into a giant green rage monster, and he doesn’t think he should inflict his monstrousness on someone else.

But, Natasha says, she’s a monster too. She was made a monster by the people who turned her into a superspy:

"They sterilize you. It’s efficient. One less thing to worry about, the one thing that might matter more than a mission. It makes everything easier — even killing. You still think you’re the only monster on the team?"

As Vox’s Todd VanDerWerff pointed out in 2015, in the context of Black Widow’s larger arc, Natasha is probably saying that the mysterious awful things she did in the past as a superspy are what made her a monster. But in the context of the scene, it sure does sound like she’s saying she’s a monster because she can’t have children.

Except this summary conveniently leaves out the fact that Banner brings up the subject of children (in context, they've just discovered Barton has kids.  The scene takes place at Barton's house, and the news of children among the Avengers is news to Banner, but not Romanoff, who is obviously their favorite "aunt.")  The whole story line at this point is set up to push the idea of romance=family life, and Bruce is explaining why that's impossible.  I took two objections by Banner, implicit, from that:  in times of high excitement, Bruce might transform into a huge monster; and he might pass on his monstrous genetics to his kids.

I took something else from that, after Endgame:  Bruce is a dick.  He's scared of Natasha's proposal of intimacy (he's scared by Captain America's observation that Natasha is interested in Bruce, too, earlier in Ultron), and in Endgame he's all too happy being "Professor Hulk."  The scene that introduces the "new Hulk" has Bruce happily talking about....Bruce.  It's the perfect summation of Bruce's stunted emotional development.  He reacts to Natasha's overtures in Ultron like an adolescent, not like an adult.  He ran from Natasha at the end of Ultron, returns sheepishly at the beginning of Infinity War, never confronts her (or lets her confront him) about his disappearance or return or their relationship; basically, he freezes her out like an immature adolescent.  In Endgame, when he professes he misses her after her death, he sounds no more hurt than a teenager over a classmate he barely knew.

Frankly, the emotional impact of the death of Natasha was greater, to me, than the death of Gamora; especially since Gamora's been "resurrected" in Endgame, and will clearly play a role in the next GotG film.  And, yes, Tony gets a bigger send off; but he dies and leaves a corpse that can be buried, and he touched the lives of a lot of characters in the MCU.  As Steve Rogers says, "We [the Avengers] were her family."  If they fail to mourn her properly, that failure is more on them than on the film, I think.  We want these guys to be heroes; but there's a part of them that's schmucks, too.  The memorial service for Tony is touching because his wife and daughter conduct it.  A memorial service for Romanoff would have been, frankly, a bit off; a too belated acknowledgment of her importance.  An importance that was under appreciated, but then, she had no "super powers," and frankly most of the male heroes in the MCU are dicks who treat women as ancillary (despite how important she actually is so many times in the movies she appears in).  And it's interesting to me the films give the audience the room to see that; if they're willing to look.

Combined with the way Endgame uses Black Widow’s death to motivate the male Avengers, it kind of feels like the franchise is saying that Natasha isn’t quite worthy of living because she can’t fulfill her primary purpose as a woman and have kids, but luckily, she’s valuable in death because she can motivate everyone else to avenge her death. 

Eh.  Again:  I guess.  Or contrariwise, it makes her sacrifice nobler, because she does it for Clint's children, not for him (or is the argument that we can't value women merely as child bearers, so we can't value the children, either?).  Or, less nobly, she doesn't want to be the one to live and tell his kids why Daddy died, and she didn't.  Either way, it only reflects on her infertility if you want it to; and the problem of her hysterectomy is that she's been forced to become a single use instrument, a weapon, with few alternatives for a "normal life" left to her. It isn't right to think of women as only instruments of reproduction; but how is it right to inflict infertility on them, either?  It is, after all, supposed to be a matter of choice.  Natasha makes hers, and I don't think she makes it because she thinks Clint is more valuable than she is.  I think she does it for his kids, whom she loves as much as Clint and his wife do.

That's the most interesting thing about these analyses:  despite the fact we get an opening scene of Clint's children (and one at the end), nobody wants to think of the children.  Maybe the MCU didn't make Black Widow as feminist an icon as she could have been; but they did make the films, despite the magic and science fiction of them, truer to real life.  Maybe the problem is not so much that Natasha Romanoff didn't get the respect she's due (OTOH, have you seen CAWS?), but that there is, as Agent Hill says in Ultron, so much testosterone among these "heroes." And, as in the story of Thor in Endgame, they still haven't learned yet how to deal with that.  Which is on them because, as I said before, it isn't superpower that wins the day at the end of these 22 films; it's powerlessness.

The films show one thing, but point toward another; if you look, you can almost see it.