After watching the Avengers film, I wanted to do a quick Avengers Infinity War analysis of the fanboy prediction sort rather than the critical kind that I did with something like the Dark Knight. I’ll build on some assumptions made in the Guardian analysis, the Buzzfeed interview with the screenwriters, the piece from The Wrap, the Vanity Fair piece with Kevin Feige, and some others. None of those pieces make the hypothesis I will make because none of them fully weigh the totality of what actually transpired in the film itself, though the Guardian comes quite close. There will be spoilers.

Before I begin, can I just say for a moment that I have waited on this moment since X-Men came out in 2000 and I drew a countdown calendar in the shape of nightcrawler’s tail (who didn’t make it into the first film). My peers made fun of me, but I hoped that one day I’d see this many Marvel characters in a film. It didn’t disappoint other than the unfortunate reality that due to rights management we’ll never see Hugh Jackman and Mark Ruffalo team up in a Wolverine-Hulk crossover. Anyways, it was quite satisfying and worth the 18-year wait.

That said, The Wrap piece correctly noted that the moral code “we don’t trade lives” uttered over and over by Cap and Vision and acted out by all of the good guys throughout the film. We don’t know wether the power and reality stones come to Thanos after some sort of protagonist interference, but we do know the rest of the four merge with the Infinity Gauntlet because of that ideal.

• Loki — yields the SPACE stone to save Thor and in so doing loses all but his space (his whereabouts).
• Gamora — yields the SOUL stone to save Nebula and in so doing loses all but her soul.
• Doctor Strange — yields the TIME stone to save Tony and in so doing loses all but his one timeline.
• Vision — yields up the MIND stone to save Scarlet Witch and in so doing loses all but his mind.

Granted, those are premises I’ll have to defend, but roll with me for a minute here. The Wrap’s right again in pointing up how the Avengers revoke, recant, release, and relinquish the stones — and all of their rights and responsibilities — at key moments while Thanos clings to them, even commits genocide to obtain them. They do truly save their friends at all costs while Thanos saves his costs at all friends, so to speak. They point out Dr. Strange’s slow acquiescence:

1. Categoric opposition to yielding up the time stone.
2. Inspection of 14 million timelines and finds only one in which they win.
3. Yielding up the stone to save Tony’s life.

Moreover, he does it because it’s the only way to win. Even dying, Dr. Strange knows they’re in the endgame. Trading lives won’t work. But here’s the thing. The Wrap interprets this literally, that they have to value all life. Certainly that’s true, I suppose, though I don’t know why any sort of atonement theory would negate that (only those caught in ignorance or fallacies would think it would). That said, I believe the statement, though spoken figuratively (“trade lives” means “sacrifice my life to save your life”) is meant literally.

Literally you cannot swap lives — identities — being with another character.

You are who you are.

And being is its own reward.

If we assume this, some other things start to fall into place.

First, The Guardian’s wrong in saying the deaths “are not going to stick” because in the Buzzfeed interview, the screenwriters literally said:

“[Avengers 4] doesn’t do what you think it does,” said Markus. “It is a different movie than you think it is.” Then he paused. “Also…[the deaths are] real. I just want to tell you it’s real, and the sooner you accept that, the sooner you will be able to move on to the next stage of grief.”

So The Guardian doesn’t know what it’s talking about — likely written an old guard critic stuck in deconstructionism and cynicism and nowhere near up to date for the new mythopoetic age we’re busy ushering in.

That said, there’s a telling portion of The Guardian piece that mashes up nicely with The Wrap:

Infinity War is a mixture of two comic book storylines: Jim Starlin’s 1991 Infinity Gauntlet and Jonathan Hickman’s 2013 Infinity. Both can provide hints for Avengers 4. In Infinity Gauntlet, the souls destroyed by the soul stone are not gone but transported to Soul World, a universe that exists inside the stone. A character named Adam Warlock is able to communicate with the stones from Soul World; that, combined with Thanos having a crisis of confidence, allows his daughter Nebula to defeat him. If Avengers 4 pays homage to this, it may mean that Gamora, who Thanos sacrificed in Infinity War to summon the Soul Stone, is not dead after all. We know Thanos is already mourning her death, and that wavering may give Gamora and Nebula the opportunity to finally conquer their father. Even Zoe Saldana herself hinted as much, having let slip in an E! Live interview that she’s been on set for Avengers 4.

Similarly, in Infinity we see an epic team-up battle against Thanos that features Thor, Captain America and Captain Marvel, whom Nick Fury pages in the post-credits of Infinity War. The Marvel Studios head, Kevin Feige, says that Captain Marvel is “by far the strongest character we’ve ever had”, so we’ll probably see that epic fight on screen. We can also expect the fallout from that battle: after defeating Thanos, the Avengers are cemented not only as Earth’s mightiest heroes, but as the universe’s protectors – an act that could easily spin out another decade of films.

Then it gets really thick with The Guardian’s denial:

But how will Avengers 4 actually reverse the deaths? In an interview with Buzzfeed, the Infinity War screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely are adamant that the characters genuinely did die: “[Avengers 4] doesn’t do what you think it does … [the deaths are] real. I just want to tell you it’s real.” Assuming this is not a misdirect, this puts to rest theories that Thanos didn’t just send everyone to a parallel dimension or trap them in Soul World. The answer to fixing this, then, has to be time travel.

Okay, just because what follows is well-structured doesn’t mean their premise is solid. There may be time travel, but that need not mean that the characters are not permanently dead: both can be true as I’ll show in a moment. For now, The Guardian again:

Doctor Strange alludes repeatedly to [time travel]. In one scene, Iron Man is reprimanded for leaning on the Cauldron of the Cosmos, an item in the comics used to peer back in time. Strange also emphasizes that keeping the time stone safe is his only priority; while he’s eventually forced to give it up, at one point he occupies Thanos with a decoy. Where was the real stone before it materialized in his hand? Was it sent back (or forward) in time? With Strange divining only one possible future, out of 14 million, in which the Avengers succeed, the answer is likely to be complicated.

Feeding into this are the two films debuting before Avengers 4, Ant-Man and the Wasp and Captain Marvel. In speaking with Inverse, the Marvel consultant and physicist Spiros Michalakis confirmed that both movies will feature the quantum realm, a pocket universe where linear time and space don’t exist – a key detail if we’re talking time travel. Leaked Avengers 4 set photos seem to confirm the quantum realm will enable time hops, as we can see Ant-Man talking to Captain America in his original star-spangled outfit, and Tony wearing an old S.H.I.E.L.D. patch.

As for how the Avengers will know when to travel to, the Russos have hinted that Stark’s BARF technology from Civil War will play a role. The technology projects memories, which means the Avengers could comb through key events – their battle of New York, for example – to figure out their destination.

All well and good.

But again, they need not use time travel in order to save everyone. They can use it in order to defeat Thanos and not save everyone. They can use the quantum realm to save everyone and not worry as much about time travel as alternate timelines and dimensions. Or any number of combinations.

Let’s assume they’re not going to do the whole X-men revisionist history thing. Let’s assume what happened happened and couldn’t have happened any other way in order to reach Strange’s “end game.”

Let’s also assume that the screenwriter’s telling the truth: the characters are really dead.

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Further, let’s assume that though they’re really dead, the screenwriters do borrow something from the comics other than Thanos and infinity stones. We see this evidenced in other films but especially in this one regarding the soul stone (more on that in a minute).

This may mean that at least four main characters are functionally dead though their being has either transcended or the key parts of their personality are fused with the stones.

More tersely:

The Infinity stones, which communicated with characters, now have personalities parallel to specific Avengers.

The easiest launching point for this idea is Gamora, who is sacrificed for the soul stone and who really does appear at the end of the film in the soul realm. So she’s dead, but somehow her being persists. Red Skull made it clear that he stopped seeking the stones and that the soul stone set up a gambit — that gives it consciousness and will, another indication of the personalities of the stones. When Gamora yields up the SOUL stone in order to save Nebula, she gives up the material stone in order to save the key part of her being: her soul. Thanos, you see, is playing by the letter of the stones. The Avengers play by the spirit of the stones.

What good is it for a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul?

Gamora has the answer: it’s precisely evil to gain the whole world and forfeit your soul. So she gives up the stone and with it, her life. But in so doing she keeps her soul — which is the very essence of what the stone controls. Instead of trying to control other souls, she yielded up that control in order to be who she is.

You can’t trade lives.

You can’t trade identities.

Y’are who y’are.

And being is its own reward.

That’s why she shows up at the end in the realm of the soul still to torture Thanos. Now the fascinating thing is she’s not the only one. Vision seems to have a special relationship with the mind stone, the way it talks to him. DR. STRANGE’s relationship with the time stone is established fairly firmly in his film.  And LOKI shows his in phase one, not to mention the relationship the Guardians have with the power stone and the Collector with reality…

It’s a serious sacrifice for Loki — the trickster, the flighty Asgardian, the guy who wants an escape route, the guy who is pliability personified — to give up his control of space. But in so doing, he kept his whereabouts. He chose to be there in that space with his brother and to occupy that space in a permanent fashion rather than run or manipulate the environment. And so Loki gave up the space stone (the letter of the search) in order to maintain his true identity with space (the spirit of the search).

Vision does a similar thing. He offers up his mind and the whole time they’re working to rescue his consciousness from its integration with the mind stone (which, let’s be honest, is a completely pointless waste of screen time if it doesn’t play a part in the plot of the next film), he’s concerned about Scarlet Witch and how to get rid of the stone in order for them to continue meeting mind to mind. Again gave up the mind stone in order to keep the one thing she loves about him: his mind, his consciousness.

And then there’s Doctor Strange who yields up the time stone (something we know from the film is inextricably bound up with his identity and office and vocation) in order to save his one timeline, his whenabouts. He gets rid of the stone and so becomes bound to the timeline through weaving seamlessly his identity to that time. Spirit of time verses the letter of time.

I believe you can make similar arguments for offscreen stones:

Since the other three main Guardians die and since they already protected the power stone once, you could argue a similar case: that Time Lord’s (and Groot’s and the rest’s) journey is all about them feeling impotent and in revoking their control of power, they actually preserved what made them capable in the first place: teamwork and revoking their capability, influence, and potential.

And since the reality stone’s at the Collector’s, it’s safe to say that he gave up the one thing that would destroy his collection in order to preserve the reality he inhabited.

Thanos, of course, seeks everyone else’s power, space, time, reality, soul, and mind. Having a name that means “immortal” sometimes and “death” others, it’s no surprise that this mad titan’s operating something like Shelob: feasting on light until he eats himself.

But ultimately, if we assume that the antidote is not to “switch lives” but to be fully yourself in the teeth of someone who tries to change every category of your metaphysical being, then for these folks to do that — to choose to die rather than to be changed in esse — they actually preserve the integrity of the stones.

And may even fuse personalities with it.

In such a case, all of them would still be dead, so to speak.

But.

• Gamora’s personality would inhabit the soul stone.
• Dr. Strange would inhabit the time stone.
• Starlord would inhabit the power stone.
• Loki would inhabit the space stone.
• Vision would inhabit the mind stone.
• The Collector (or whoever died yielding it) would inhabit the reality stone.

Would you still need alternate timelines and quantum realm in order to take on Thanos? Well sure. You’d have to first reveal how the quantum reality of these stones had shifted and then to make them “self-aware” so to speak: to shift towards a formal “I-thou” reality and then to take back ownership of the parts of existence they govern. Their being would be their own reward — particularly since you can’t trade “lives.”

Meanwhile Thanos’ being — his self, his identity — would also yield its own reward. He would have nothing left to consume and so would consume himself. These stones are now, likely, holding him together. His grief alone over his deeds may well unmake him.

 

If you dont believe me, do your own Infinity War analysis and watch the film a second time: at the end, is THANOS’guantlet crushed or whole?

Is his arm muscular or atrophied?

Are its veins varicose and anemic or strong?

Is his skin smooth or cracked? HIS breath ragged or easy?

Are the stones dim and cracked or bright and unblemished?

Now tell me: if someone truly wiped out half of the minds and half of the souls and half of the power and half of the spce and half of reality and half of time using coporeal representations of each of the above, what would happen to said coporeal representations? Can nonbeing ever beat being?

And if one chooses nonentity, what reward does one reap?

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