Marvel Fans Are Emotional About An ‘Avengers: Endgame’ Connection In The ‘Loki’ Premiere

(SPOILERS for Disney+’s Loki and the MCU will be found below.)

Avengers: Endgame included multiple hero deaths, including the end of Tony Stark, along with Natasha Romanoff, who sacrificed herself for the Soul Stone. She’d done so during a trip to Vormir with Clint Barton, and the pair soon discovered that (as was the case already with Gamora) someone wasn’t going to make it out of that situation alive. And since all of the Infinity Stones needed to be retrieved before Thanos’ snap could be reversed, Black Widow made sure she’d be the one to die, after the two fought over who would do so, and Joe Russo ultimately defended the scene as proof that “she’s a better fighter than he is.”

I’m still not sure that explanation works too well. We already knew that Black Widow was more of a badass than Hawkeye, right? Still, Natasha sacrificed herself for her new family (we’ll finally meet her old family in her solo prequel film, which follows the events on Captain America: Civil War, due out on July 9) and to revive half of the universe from dusting. And Hawkeye could go back to his family after all was said and done, so all good? Nope. People are still emotional over Natasha’s death and for understandable reason. That brings us to what is an otherwise humorous joke in the Loki premiere.

Loki finds himself absolutely aghast to have to turn over the Tesseract (Time Stone) to a rather clueless office worker upon arrival at the Time Variance Authority (TVA). He grows even more irritated when that worker opens up a desk drawer, and there’s a bunch of Infinity Stones — which are rendered powerless, like all magic — inside the TVA’s confines. The other workers even use them as paper weights, the worker explains.

The joke here, of course, is that the Avengers went through all that trouble to gather up the Infinity Stones to defeat Thanos, when those things were sitting (and valueless) inside of the TVA. This outcome, however, feels like a gut punch (the collection includes at least three Soul Stones, which are orange) to many fans, who aren’t thrilled at the implication that Black Widow (and, to an extent, Gamora, although Thanos directly killed her) essentially died for no reason. Is this revelation a case of “too soon”? Perhaps, but c’mon, the TVA had to know the value of those stones, and they just let them sit there — to preserve the “sacred timeline” — in a drawer. Also, Black Widow’s on people’s minds with her movie coming out soon, and yeah, this kind-of stings.

Let’s just say that many fans aren’t happy. Tweets like “nat died for the soul stone only for the tva to have 3 in a desk drawer” are all over the place.

Let’s hope that Natasha is somehow vindicated from this slight when Black Widow lands (in theaters and on Disney+) on July 9.