Well, it finally happened. I cracked. I lost my sanity. I have heard so many people say “The Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t as good as it used to be” after Avengers: Endgame came out, that you forced me to respond. And not only am I responding. I wrote a whole blog dedicated to telling you how wrong you are and how the MCU is still just as good as it has always been. Yep, that’s how angry I am. I wasn’t expecting to write this, but at this point I feel I have to vent. Warning: There is going to be some unhinged rage in this article.

So if you couldn’t tell from that opening paragraph, I am a huge Marvel fan. I don’t read the comics as much as I used to, but I still watch all the Marvel movies because they still give me that same high I got as a kid seeing all these cool-looking super beings living together in one big comic book universe. Spider-Man, Wolverine, the Hulk, Captain America, the Punisher, Deadpool, etc. These were all very cool characters with cool personalities and cool powers. And sometimes they teamed up! And sometimes they argued! And they had a sense of humor and made funny quips like actual human beings! And they fought really cool villains and sometimes they went to outer space and there were also aliens and gods and different dimensions and an African-American vampire hunter named Blade??? And on top of that, science fiction is my favorite genre, and many of Marvel’s stories were dramatic, well-written and epic sci-fi tales while still being very human and relatable. It’s hard to explain why all this was so appealing, but visiting this world reminded me of having a set of action figures as a kid and just inventing crazy, fun and imaginative adventures for them to go on. Marvel felt like the literary equivalent of that, only dialed to 1,000, and it just came into my life when I was the right age at the right time.

That enthusiastic allegiance to the Marvel Universe has translated to my love of Marvel movies as well, starting with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and never wavering since. But I have a special affinity for the MCU because while I love what Sony and Fox did with Spider-Man and X-Men, here finally was a crossover event that reminded me of the crossovers in the comics. The Avengers was the first film to nail the feeling of an “epic crossover” on the silver screen. A feeling Marvel Studios repeated with Captain America: Civil War when Iron Man battled Captain America over the issue of superhero rights as well as Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, in which every MCU character up to that point travelled through time and space to stop Thanos from wiping out half the population.

Most people from mainstream audiences to film critics to comic book fans seemed to agree that the Infinity Saga (the movies that make up the first three phases of the MCU beginning in 2008 with Iron Man and ending in 2019 with Spider-Man: Far from Home) was a great cinematic achievement that was narratively well-constructed and culminated in a truly entertaining, epic, emotional and satisfying conclusion. Of course I agreed and I couldn’t wait to see what Kevin Feige and the team at Marvel Studios would do in Phase Four with the hope that they would bring even more of my favorite superheroes to the big screen in the Multiverse Saga.

That was when public opinion and I began to turn on each other.

I know I’m built differently from a lot of people because my reaction to the Infinity Saga was that I was a Marvel fan for life, because I have fallen in love with these characters so much over a decade of movies that there was no way I wasn’t going to be invested in whatever they did next. That’s not how other people saw it. In fact there is this loud and annoyingly common opinion I see a lot in the film discussion sphere among people who apparently aren’t Marvel fans anymore because they think the Multiverse Saga isn’t as good as the Infinity Saga. Some of the complaints I hear include the overarching narrative isn’t as coherent as the Infinity Saga’s storyline, there are too many TV shows on Disney+ to follow, it’s not the same without Robert Downey, Jr. and Chris Evans, blah blah blah.

Well as soon as I caught wind of this attitude it enraged the hell out of me because everyone was badmouthing something that I have a huge personal attachment to, which felt like the equivalent of hearing a bunch of people call one of my childhood friends ugly. To be fair, if you asked me whether I liked the Infinity Saga or the Multiverse Saga more, I would say the Infinity Saga is unquestionably better, but that’s also an unfair question since we are still in the middle of Phase Five as I type this, and the Multiverse Saga is far from over. Although even if we’re only talking about the Multiverse Saga’s first phase, the criticism towards it feels off and strangely overblown based on how I felt about those films.

As any therapist would say, if you want to let your anger out it’s a lot healthier to write down your feelings than to punch a hole in the wall, so let me write down my feelings about these criticisms and explain why they are FUCKING WRONG!!! And to do so, I’m going to respond to three major criticisms that enrage me the most.

Criticism 1: The Multiverse Saga doesn’t feel as unified as the Infinity Saga

This complaint only makes sense if you insist on watching movies in phases rather than as individual movies. I know that Marvel literally makes movies in phases, but it’s not my responsibility to focus on how a movie fits together with other movies like a puzzle. It’s my job to focus on how well that movie is executed in its own right. In other words, I didn’t worry about where Kevin Feige’s big plans for the Multiverse Saga were leading while I was watching Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. I was just paying attention to the story of Shuri grieving the loss of T’Challa, the same way I would watch any other drama about grief. If I’m watching a sequel (which basically all MCU films are now), I’ll obviously concern myself with the previous films so that I can understand what I’m watching better. After all no one watches Matrix: Reloaded without watching The Matrix. But if you criticize The Matrix because you don’t think it did a good enough job setting up Matrix: Reloaded, you’re just watching movies wrong. And that’s why I hate this criticism about the Multiverse Saga feeling incoherent. Especially since it’s way too early to judge how well the Multiverse Saga’s three phases will be executed.

Criticism 2: The quality of the movies in the Infinity Saga has gone down in the Multiverse Saga

Are you sure about this one?? Because let’s look at each of the seven movies in Phase Four: Black Widow, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, Eternals, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, Thor: Love and Thunder and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

First, I don’t know why so many people were so lukewarm on Black Widow but that movie was not only well-written but it was full of absorbing drama, high stakes, brilliant action choreography, empathetic characters and surprising plot twists. Not to mention it had a cast that included Florence Pugh and it was a movie about Natasha Romanoff. That’s something Marvel fans have been wanting forever. Shang-Chi similarly had excellent drama but also contained some of the best martial arts action I’ve ever seen in Hollywood, as well as really inspiring themes about avoiding responsibility and processing grief while never forgetting to be fun thanks to Marvel’s trademark sense of humor. Don’t forget that Spider-Man: No Way Home was one of the most memorable and enjoyable events in Marvel Studios history, Multiverse of Madness was a Scarlet Witch horror film directed by Sam Raimi (what more could you want??) and Wakanda Forever was one of Marvel’s most emotional dramas as Shuri and the nation of Wakanda struggle to move on without T’Challa as their king, while director Ryan Coogler simultaneously creates a heartfelt memorial for Chadwick Boseman that had me crying like a baby. As for Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder, those two were not great but they weren’t terrible either, even if I thought the characters in Eternals weren’t interesting enough for the film to work as a serious drama and Love and Thunder wasn’t funny enough to be the hilarious comedy it wanted to be. But 2 out of 7 isn’t enough to bring down an entire phase.

I would even go so far as to say that based on the track record of quality for the previous three phases, Phase Four kind of outshines Phase One and Phase Two a little bit. But that’s a point of view that no one else has because people love Tony Stark, Steve Rogers and the Guardians of the Galaxy so much that it’s blasphemy to compare them unfavorably in any way to Natasha and Shang-Chi. I love Captain America: The Winter Soldier as much as anyone (I rated that movie a 9/10 on Letterboxd) but I also don’t constantly compare every new Marvel film to the films of the Infinity Saga. It seems like that’s what everyone is doing and that’s why so many people are so critical of the Multiverse Saga. But I don’t see any dip in quality that makes Phase Four stand out significantly from any of the previous phases if you judge each film by their own merits.

Criticism 3: Disney+ is adding too much Marvel content to my plate

Look, if you’re a person who does not subscribe to Disney+ or you honestly don’t have time to watch all the MCU shows that are being released on that platform, I have no beef with you. I honestly understand. Adults with jobs and families have busy lives and even if you do have time there are a million other TV shows out there right now you could be watching. But I will say that I have yet to see a Marvel series on Disney+ that is absolutely essential viewing in order to understand an MCU film (if you’ve watched The Marvels you might think I’m wrong about that, but I’ll get to that in a second). Let’s look at those shows. WandaVision, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, Loki, What If…? and Hawkeye all may have clear connections to Multiverse of Madness, Captain America: New World Order, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Black Widow, but none of those films will be ruined if you don’t have any prior knowledge of those shows. You don’t have to watch Sam Wilson struggle to adopt the persona of Captain America in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier to understand Brave New World because the ending of Avengers: Endgame when Steve Rogers gave Sam his shield was a natural lead-in to Brave New World. Even The Marvels, which gets way too much hate for a movie as fun as that one is, did not require you to watch WandaVision, Ms. Marvel or Secret Invasion to understand Monica Rambeau, Kamala Khan or Nick Fury. Those characters and their place within that film’s story were clear, and even if you don’t understand everything happening in that movie, that doesn’t automatically make it bad either. Anything that was absolutely necessary for you to understand would have been in the movie anyway. Of course my brain would have never even let me watch The Marvels if I did not watch Ms. Marvel first, but if you’re such a casual Marvel fan that you don’t mind missing six episodes of Ms. Marvel before you watch a Kamala Khan movie, it sounds like you aren’t a true Marvel fan anyway so why are you even watching The Marvels in the first place?? We all know what Marvel is by now. They have been making complicated crossovers since before the MCU even existed. And watching six episodes of a TV show before watching a single movie is nothing compared to the nature of their impossibly convoluted comic book line.

Although now that The Marvels has failed at the box office, Disney may want Marvel to dumb themselves down. Kevin Feige has stated that there will be less Marvel films and shows being released a year as they try to emphasize quality over quantity. Which I’m fine with. It gives me more of a chance to catch up on other shows. But I don’t care if they release one movie a year or four movies and four shows a year because I’m actually a genuine Marvel fan. Not a fake fan like the people who gave up on them after the Multiverse Saga, but an actual fan who sticks with them no matter what and is just as enthusiastic about them as I was when I was a kid. And if I didn’t like the MCU, I would shut up about it, because I actually don’t enjoy annoying people with my constant complaints. But I guess that makes me a fucking weirdo.

Oh yeah, and one more thing. Secret Invasion is a good show and doesn’t deserve all those negative reviews! So shut up!