How Black Widow Contradicts Nat’s Avengers: Endgame Story

Warning: This post contains Black Widow spoilers.

Black Widow contradicts Natasha Romanoff’s arc in Avengers: Endgame. After playing an Avenger since 2010, Scarlett Johansson wrapped up her run in the MCU via the Joe and Anthony Russo-directed film from 2019. But while Endgame was generally well-regarded, Nat’s death in the film remains to be a controversial creative choice for the movie.

Thanos’ snap in Avengers: Infinity War wiped out half of life in the universe, including some MCU heroes. It was a difficult time for everyone who was left behind, but in Endgame, it’s clear that Nat was the one to be hit hardest by this loss. It didn’t help that the Avengers were forced to sit on their failure for five years after the Mad Titan destroyed all the Infinity Stones so the decimation wouldn’t be reversed. While Thor’s struggle was rooted in his catastrophic failure to stop the villain’s snap, Black Widow’s problems stemmed from losing some of her closest allies, whom she had deemed family.

That being said, Black Widow effectively contradicts the notion that the Avengers were her only family. Marvel Studios’ latest film introduces Nat’s Russian family, with whom she had spent a few years in Ohio while in an undercover operation in 1995.  Alexei Shostakov/Red Guardian (Red Guardian) and Melina Vostokoff (Rachel Weisz) stood as her parents, while Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) was her sister. Nat lost contact with all of them when they returned to Russia and split up, and reunions became much more difficult after her defection. However, the Black Widow film assembles them back to finally take down the Red Room and the man behind it — General Dreykov (Ray Winstone). Years of animosity, at least between the sisters, were effectively resolved just before they separated again. So, when the snap happened, it’s odd that Nat acted as if the disappearances of her fellow heroes meant she was losing her only family.

Granted that it’s uncertain whether or not her Russian clan was also affected by the snap, the Black Widow post-credits scene hints otherwise, at least for Yelena. Marvel Studios has yet to confirm the whereabouts of Alexei and Melina during the Thanos debacle onto the present time, but chances are that her sister was not snuffed out of existence from the decimation. In the tag scene, Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss) ambushes Yelena’s alone time visiting Nat’s grave to give her next mission. Based on how their conversation panned out, it seems like they have been working for quite some time, which could mean that Yelena may not have disappeared in the five years after the snap. Given this, the sisters could’ve contacted each other during this time, making it easier for Nat during those difficult years.

It’s jarring that Nat herself proclaims that she has another family with Alexei, Melina, and Yelena at the end of Black Widowonly for Avengers: Endgameto pretend that they don’t exist. Of course, this is likely due to the fact that the Russos cracked the story of the Infinity Saga before the standalone film. But what makes this worse is that supposedly, Nat’s fierce eagerness to undo the snap was because she wanted her “only” family to be back which doesn’t really work when her Russian family, at least, Yelena, is still around.

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