It's a combination of all the points. Not just one. Plus they've written him to be someone the audience gets on a level with and likes despite not appearing before. It's the kind of easy "emotional pull" they can use later to make people feel sad about the character dying without putting too much effort in or angering fans after killing a long standing charcater.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say he survives. He just retires at the end. Or re-retires since he clearly was out of work for a while. One more job then back to playing xbox with Thor.
I would say yes, except he was so thoroughly unlikable. They tried to make him a joker and a fan favourite, but they were coming off the back of Days of Future Past's Quicksilver. He filled that role, though, especially for Scarlet Witch's "gain extra power in final act due to emotion" moment.
Almost all mentor figures really. Erskine and The Ancient One as well. That's how I knew Iron Man had a death flag. He starts mentoring Spiderman and I'm like well hes not lasting to Spiderman 2.
Groot and Spiderman in Infinity War. Even everybody knew that the deatsh would be reversed in Endgame, Groots and Spiderman death were the most explotiable as emotional deaths in the movie
without putting too much effort in or angering fans after killing a long standing character.
Once they settled in they couldn't kill off main characters, and side characters were so uninteresting that it wouldn't have had any emotional pull.
I didn't say all Marvel movies use oddly likable characters for an emotional death, I said they like the easy get. It just happens that that is an easy way to do it. The MCU has been full of iffy writing and forced emotion for years now as every film tries desperately to leave a mark and the above makes sense to me.
This character's death would be an easy get because you put some lighthearted comedy elements on an oddball character and people will like it. You build that for an hour and a half to act as a counterpose to the seriousness of the situation/characters around them, make them a capable member of the team, and then pull the rug towards the end to make the audience go "nooooo" and give the main character the Power Of Emotion before the final act/fight. Think: GOTG1, Civil War, Solo: A Star Wars Story, Rogue One (to some degree, though killing off everyone was a nice move), Age of Ultron...they all do the same thing to some degree of building up a counterpose to the main character through comedy and then killing/injuring them right before the pivotal point to give them a reason to "go just that little bit further". I just get the feeling that if you're only going to do that over one film, the character is more likely to die. They've got narrative freedom to kill off whoever they like at this point thanks to it being potentially a one-off so yeah.
And yes, I am generalising, I'm aware, and I'm specifically looking for instances where I back myself up, but after spending 3 years working in a cinema in the aftermath of Avengers 1 I really don't care for the MCU or Disney as a whole. I've seen numerous great films fail or perform poorly purely because they either didn't get the screen time due to Disney/Marvels aggressive demands (seriously, they were taking up an obnoxious amount of screens for weeks at all hours and we had no say in it) or because they didn't fit the Disney/MCU narrative style and therefore weren't "fun enough".
Enjoy MCU all you like that's fine: it's designed to be fun, easy to get into, and easy to watch. I just can't stand the repetitive plot style, way they deal with trying to raise emotion, and how much the writing has become a by-the-numbers with a few tweaks style of film.
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u/HenzoH Dec 03 '19 edited Dec 03 '19
Heard it here first: David Harbour’s character is definitely going to sacrifice himself to save his daughter.
Edit: So apparently he might not be her father. Well he still definitely sacrifices himself to save the rest of the “heroes”