5 Reasons Why The Marvel Universe Makes Absolutely No Sense

The Defenders ends with the titular heroes escaping police custody, then bringing down the Hand by blowing up a damn skyscraper right in the middle of Manhattan. The authorities ultimately cover up their involvement, but they still know full well what happened, which means plenty of higher-ups do too. Even if the Avengers as a team are woefully under-informed, Captain America is from Brooklyn and Spider-Man is a street-level hero who lives in Queens. You'd think they'd at least pop by to check out the biggest deal since 9/11. Or, y'know, the devastating alien invasion from their own first movie.

Then he popped up again in Captain America: Civil War, handily undoing absolutely everything in the above paragraph. He'd rebuilt his suits, broken up with Pepper, and even figured out how to deal with pesky traumas from the past using a bullshit VR gadget that he called "B.A.R.F." -- 'cause Fun Tony's back, y'all!

Tony Stark's science-bro Bruce Banner presented a similar narrative problem: His journey has always been a quest to control his big green alter ego. But while his personal arc made it clear that he's been really successful, the movies forget this whenever convenient and revert the Hulk to beast mode. A major plot point in The Incredible Hulk is Banner's struggle to gain control over his transformations. The final scene shows him apparently figuring out how to control his "incidents" with meditation, and the first Avengers movie verifies this with Banner's famous line "That's my secret, Cap. I'm always angry," followed by an entirely voluntary transformation and scores of well-controlled ass-kicking. But earlier in that same movie, he's completely unable to stop himself from Hulking out and trying to murder Black Widow in the helicarrier.

Hulk also prevents Iron Man from turning into Iron Pudding when the latter plummets toward the ground in the grand finale, thus displaying a conscious, even compassionate mind. Even the Green Giant's famous curb-stomping of Loki is far from the work of a mindless rampage beast; the Hulk gives Loki a chance to have his say, then quickly subdues him and walks away with a cool one-liner.

Marvel Studios

And then there's the end of Age Of Ultron, wherein Hulk chooses to abandon civilization (and his budding romance with Black Widow) for the greater good, flying away in a Quinjet. The Hulk, in his Hulk form, made a conscious decision to protect the innocent and fucking flew away on a plane.

And yet Hulk is the only Avenger to succumb to Scarlet Witch's mind attack in Avengers: Age Of Ultron, going on a crazed, beastly rampage. Banner's totally got this Hulk thing down ... until some screenwriter types themselves into a corner. Then it's smashie time.

The chubby guy in plaid is Erik Selvig. In this stinger, he has a short discussion with Nick Fury about one of the MCU's resident MacGuffins, the Tesseract, and we find out that he's secretly mind-controlled by Loki. Oh shit!

It's just that if this little scene is canon, it completely undermines the events of The Avengers.

Loki isn't on Earth himself in that scene. He's ... wherever he ended up when he fell off Bifrost at the end of Thor. Loki is possessing Selvig from another dimension, which raises a question: Why did anything in The Avengers happen? That movie very specifically kicks off when Loki uses the Tesseract "from the other side" to arrive on Earth. At this point, he has a scepter that hosts the Mind Stone, which he puts to good use to possess people such as Hawkeye and ... Selvig. Before that, Selvig is completely normal, and even throws a little shade at Loki by identifying him as "Thor's brother." Why would Loki bother to ... repossess Selvig? In fact, why come to Earth at all and start poking your mind-slaves in the chest with your mind scepter if you can do that shit from afar?

Another post-credits scene courtesy of Doctor Strange:

Here we see the esteemed doctor discussing Loki (it's almost as if the MCU doesn't have any other interesting villains) with Thor, and it becomes apparent that the trickster is considered a high-level threat to the world in sorcerer circles. If that's the case, then where the hell were the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj during Loki's invasion in the first Avengers movie? Their entire deal is to protect the Earth from threats from other dimensions, and one of the three Sanctums they use for this is in New York. You'd think that an immensely powerful Asgardian sorcerer god opening an alien-spewing portal right above one of the sites they're sworn to defend with their lives would warrant at least a few fireballs.

Even if we accept that Erskine was somehow the only person who could make the serum, Captain America: Civil War reveals that in 1991, Howard Stark had discovered how to manufacture more of it through unclear, very plot-convenient means.

... and when Bucky flings it back at him, Steve is forced back several yards, skidding across a rooftop like he's auditioning for The Fast And The Furious: Tokyo Drift. So, Bucky (or at least his metal arm) is stronger than Captain America, right?

Fast-forward to Captain America: Civil War. During Spider-Man and Cap's battle at the airport, Spidey manages to web both of Steve's arms, yet Cap easily wins the ensuing tug of war and manages to throw Spidey to the ground. No problem, so now we know that Cap is stronger than Spider-Man. Only, there's a tiny problem with that:

Marvel Studios

If Spider-Man is strong enough to casually catch and inspect Bucky's metal power arm while Bucky is actively attacking him with it, then by all rights, Captain America should not have been able to overpower him like that. This wasn't even a fluke; earlier in the movie, the newly empowered Peter Parker stops an out-of-control car traveling at around 40 miles per hour right before it T-bones a bus. Let's see Captain America do that. Or this, for that matter:

Columbia Pictures

Hey, speaking of Spider-Man: Homecoming: One of Spider-Man's central powers is his spider sense, which warns him shit's about to go south shortly before it actually does. Kevin Feige has said on record that the spider sense does exist in MCU: "I think he has it. And I think he has it with or without that suit. I think how we explore it in a cinematic sense will change." But in Homecoming, Vulture casually picks up a surprised Spidey with his pincer boots and takes to the skies. Spider sense doesn't consider "rapidly approaching monster man with foot-claws" a threat, and the Vulture easily removes Spidey from the equation by dropping him in a lake. At the very least, you'd think he'd hear the man screeching toward him on giant jet engine wings. But then, maybe spiders have terrible hearing. We don't know.

Stone Erickson published his first novel at 14 and won the AALAS Award for best African-American Sci-Fi Novel at age 16. Now he's a struggling college junior who is writing freelance articles to feed his ramen habit. Buy his novel, Black Angel, here to give him royalty money so he can afford to date someone.

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