It’s been four years and a day since Avengers: Endgame arrived in theaters and gave audiences a glimpse of a fictional life five years in the future.
Streets coated in missing posters, heartbroken superheroes who refuse to move on, and a permanently altered society all emerged as details of this fictional future fans could reconcile with, but one detail was simply too far-fetched for viewers to digest. When Rocket and Professor Hulk make their way out to New Asgard and work to recruit Thor for one last desperate mission, they find him isolated, depressed, and wasting his life playing video games and drinking beer.
His choice of video game — not his weight gain, the questionable choice to use a fat suit, or his apparent alcoholism — strangely became a fixation for a certain subset of fans. They took issue with Thor’s enjoyment of Fortnite (despite an amusing vendetta against “noobmaster69”) but not because a staple of Earth’s mightiest heroes plays one of the more exhaustingly toxic games out there. No, people complained about Thor’s enjoyment of Fortnite because they could not imagine that, five years in the future, the online game would still be popular.
Whelp, you probably know where this is going. It’s only been four years since Endgame came out, to be fair, but Endgame is set five years after Infinity War, which came out in 2018. So the five years that passed between Infinity War‘s setting and Endgame‘s have officially passed, and Fortnite is as relevant as ever. Plenty of people have dropped off the game, of course, but they’ve been replaced by a near-equal number of adolescents, poised and ready to try their hands at some good ol’ online trolling and toxic gamer behavior.
This observation was recently made on Reddit’s Marvel Studios sub, where user esn111 pointed out that Fortnite is “still going strong 4 years on.”
One thing that hasn’t stuck around, according to esn111, is dabbing — yet another criticized element of Endgame. They have an explanation for this as well, however, pointing out that the dabbing scene fits into the Endgame plot perfectly, as it makes sense for “Smart Hulk Banner” to think “he’s down with the kids but instead being out of touch.” And as for the kids themselves? Simple. “Who’s gonna tell the Hulk he’s cringe and dated?”
Dabbing is largely (but not entirely) out of style these days, but it was still relatively common when Endgame was released in 2019. It was cringe then, and it’s cringe now, but Hulk’s lack of understanding of this fact genuinely suits the character perfectly. Bruce Banner was probably always lame (sorry, Bruce) and we can’t expect that to change just because he’s permanently big and green.
The post wrangled up some amusing comments from fellow MCU fans, who pointed out that game development surely would have stagnated in the wake of the Blip. With this in mind, it makes even more sense for Fortnite to maintain relevance far, far past its expiration date.
Quite a few parents also populated the comment section, pleading for the world to inform their children that dabbing is out of style. According to them, the kids are very much still dabbing, and they desperately want it to stop. If we had that kind of power, the world would be a different place. As it is, we might just need to accept that the future — Fortnite and all — is in the kids’ hands now, and, without easy access to Pym Particles, we have little power to change it.
Published: Apr 28, 2023 08:58 am