It’s an extra long episode about an extra long movie. Over 20 movies in the making and now two idiots from the internet get to nitpick minor quibbles.
System Mastery
Jef and Jon review roleplaying games, Star Wars novels and anything else that crosses their paths.
System Mastery 
Hi, it’s me, the person you weren’t sure could exist who got off the MCU train just before Endgame! (More specifically I decided I was done after Infinity War, so there’s a couple other movies I didn’t watch in there too).
I haven’t been watching them all at release, though, it was almost all in one big block. I watched Doctor Strange in theater before I’d seen really any of the other MCU movies–I’d seen Iron Man for a school thing and accidentally was in the same room as most of a screening of The Avengers. But I watched Strange voluntarily because I liked a lot of the ideas it was playing with, and to this day it’s probably my favorite Marvel movie, as well as Strange himself being the source one of one of the two scenes I really enjoyed in Infinity War (the other being the Reality Stone scene with the Guardians). I watched all of the MCU in basically a staggered marathon over 2018 because I figured it was something that would make sense for me to know, rather than it being a big weird gap.
I checked out after Infinity War specifically because, after the snap at the end of what I thought was a really bad and messy movie with like two good scenes in it, it dawned on me that I didn’t actually care about almost any of the characters they wanted me to, or had survive the snap. I realized I was actually only in it for the weirdo movies in the MCU that had unusual visual or conceptual ideas, like Doctor Strange and parts of Guardians 2. And if I don’t give a damn about most of what they offer, I might as well just not watch most of those movies. Including Endgame, because you confirmed in this podcast that DAMN does Strange and his fun brand of weirdo nonsense (as well as most other brands of weirdo nonsense, unless you love those Ant-Man movies I guess) get shafted in favor of punch-em-ups focused on people I got bored of several movies ago.
I got off the train just because I don’t watch movies anymore because they’re expensive. Glad someone found artistic flaws in them.
Am I the only one who likes ESB the least of the original trilogy? I can’t help but feel bored every time I see it.
Also I though that “marvel moms” scene was the worst one of the movie, not “awesome”. Just felt super contrived. Maybe if the cast of characters was less complete- it’s just silly having Mantis in a battle like that, she’s one step away from being Deanna Trois.
I should do all my comments at the same time, but you guys have the time travel slightly wrong. When you go to the past, it’s not an alternate timeline, but when you go to the past and change something it CREATES an alternate timeline. That’s why you can’t change the future because your future is always your future, if you change something it just becomes someone else’s future not yours.
So Thanos leaving the past and coming to the future means there’s a timeline where the snap doesn’t happen because Thanos isn’t there, but it’s not the main timeline. Similarly there’s a timeline where still-evil Loki gets free and goes off on some other adventure.
In other words it’s like every change in the past creates a branch, but the line you’re on stays the same.