- Hey brother. You know what guys
The Infinity Saga isn't over.
I want more, I need more.
It can't be over.
Why, why can't there just be more Avengers versus Thanos.
I want more of it. I mean,
I guess at least there is 'Far From Home'
to look forward to.
That's not that far off.
But it's just not going to be the same.
Like what's even the point
of going on with it now
You know what, actually,
I'm glad that it's over.
I'm glad that it happened.
And I'm glad that I got to be there.
And along for the ride.
Today we are going to be talking about the Avengers
and the five stages of grief.
- ( upbeat music)
- Just a quick warning,
Before we get started.
There will be spoilers in this video
for Avengers End Game.
You have been warned.
Guys for today's video.
We have partnered with Mental Health America.
A nonprofit organization that is looking to provide
mental health care for everyone.
May is mental health month and Mental Health America
is promoting their free online screening tools,
which we're going to link to in the description down below,
we will also link to their information
on finding treatment or support groups.
Just like the one we saw in end game.
Although not exactly like the one in end game,
hopefully you're not there because
half the universe disappeared.
So in the spirit of Mental Health Awareness month,
we thought we would tackle the five stages of grief,
because Avengers End Game actually
does a spectacular job of outlining each stage
As each of the original six Avengers
seems to find themselves
at the beginning of this movie,
very securely in one stage of the grieving process.
If you are unfamiliar with the five stages of grief,
they are in order denial, anger,
bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
Now it should be noted
that these aren't hard and fast rules,
and some people will skip stages
or get stuck in a stage as you will soon see.
But they do happen in this order.
And if successful,
hopefully you will reach the acceptance stage.
Originally when the five stages
were first kind of discovered
It had a lot more to do with patients
who had just found out they had a terminal illness,
but as it turns out,
it actually applies to anybody dealing
with any kind of trauma or loss.
And so, as you might imagine,
after half of all living,
everyone was snapped out of existence.
There was some stuff people needed to work through.
And as the movie opens,
everything is still pretty fresh for everyone.
It's only been 21 days and almost everyone
is either still in the denial or anger stage.
It's a very, like,
'we can still fix this attitude',
'last time you didn't have me'.
'Let's go and kick his purple butt,
get the gauntlet back and reverse this whole thing'.
- Just like that
- Yeah.
- Just like that.
- Yeah, 'just like that'.
It's fine. It's fine.
Everything's fine. We're still going to fix it.
Nothing that has been done. Can't be undone.
We've totally got this.
So most of those guys are still in the denial stage.
And then alternatively, you've got Thor.
Who's just brooding with anger.
and Roddy, who's just shooting down ideas
left and right out of frustration.
- Hey. New girl,
everybody in this room is about that superhero life.
- And they aren't quite wrong at this point.
If their plan succeeds,
it's still possible they could reverse it
and they do come really close.
But when they arrive on Thanos,
spiky fruit farm cut off his arm
and realize that all of the stones are gone.
That is when the real grief starts settling in.
And then we see five years pass.
And that is when we really start to see each of the five
stages of grief really accurately outlined.
First let's look at Black Widow who is stuck at denial.
Denial is the first stage of the process.
And its usually where people go to get over
the shock of what's happened,
insisting that maybe it didn't happen
or hoping against hope
that some how it could still be reversed.
According to his sicom.net
'At this stage you are not living in actual reality.
Rather you are living in a preferable reality'.
It's largely about suppressing your feelings
instead of actually feeling them.
And if there's one thing that we know about Nat,
it's that she's spent basically
her entire life doing exactly that.
So kind of not even surprisingly,
that's exactly what she's been doing
for the past five years.
She is the lone Wolf left out Avengers HQ,
Still trying to put together some kind of a plan.
Still pleading for a world
in which the Avengers is still a thing.
And she even says,
- I used to have nothing,
and then I got this family.
- Where she's at is really demonstrated
in its most obvious form.
Especially relative to others.
When she's having the hologram meeting with
Rocket, Okoye Rhodey and Carol,
and not to say that all of them
have necessarily moved on either.
But you can tell that all of them feel
like she's still kind of just grasping for straws
Nats all like underwater earthquake.
What's up with that.
What are we doing about it?
And a Okoye is like,
it's an underwater earthquake.
What we're doing about it is,
nothing except for totally
setting up Namor aka Marvel's Aquaman,
which by the way I am available for casting.
Point is not Nat is just trying
to find a way to be productive,
trying to find a way to prove
that it's not all over,
because if it is,
she loses all of her identity.
Which brings us very fittingly to what number two,
Clint and anger.
Clint basically does lose his entire identity
in probably the most heart wrenching
opening to a movie since like 'Up'.
And he does not take it well,
at all.
Basically going on a worldwide killing spree.
But you can kind of see how he ended up there.
Like he wasn't able to help out in infinity war
and now all is lost.
So he lashes out by tethering his pain to anger,
'Thanos didn't get you,so I will',
'you didn't die, but my family did'.
'They didn't deserve it, but you do'.
A little heavy shooting today.
The point is though,
when you were dealing with a loss,
it will start to feel like you are no longer connected
to anything that matters.
Quite literally lost your self
and anger can feel like a form of structure
to attach your emotions to.
And for Clint, Ronin is quite literally that structure.
But it is an important part of the grieving process.
You need to feel that emotion
and the more that you allow yourself to feel it,
the more that it'll dissipate.
But do you know who is surprisingly not
a giant green anger monster in this movie?
- (Hulk screaming)
Bruce.
Which brings us the number three bargaining.
Bargaining is when you start to try
and kid yourself that things are better
by negotiating with your grief.
In the past,
Bruce's kind of found a strange coping mechanism
to deal with The Hulk.
- I'm always angry.
- And it served as a fairly
unpredictable wild card for the guy.
- Noooooo
He doesn't really have good control of it,
most of the time.
Or he finds himself stuck
between one of the two options.
So it's strange to find herself with a Bruce
that's kind of somewhere right
in between a veritable Bruhlk if you will.
And he actually seems so happy.
You might even be fooled into believing
that he's actually made his way through his grief
and reached acceptance.
And yet no.
Professor Hulk is really just a physical
manifestation of Bruce going through
the bargaining stage.
The best example is right when we meet him at the diner
where you can tell
that he's trying to replace his grief with happiness
in any way he can find like,
Like hey, look, 'I fixed my Hulk problem'.
'I'm so happy'.
'I get to eat all of this food'.
'That means I'm happy'.
'Little kids adore me'.
'That means I'm happy'.
I'm really unhappy that I just had to dab.
And to be fair, he does look happy.
But acceptance doesn't mean being happy after the thing,
it means fully accepting what's happened
and learning to live with it.
Which you can tell he hasn't
because he still agrees to help them invent time travel.
Which he himself admits
is not his area of expertise at all.
And interestingly bargaining actually even comes up
when Bruce himself goes to collect his stone,
the time stone.
Where every other stone actually involved
a fight of some kind,
his was more of a bargain.
Man those magicians really like a good deal.
- Dormammu, I've come to bargain.
- But that brings us to what number four.
Depression and Thor.
Depression is often the hardest stage to get through.
And when things are at their worst.
You've fully realize that the situation
is over and you feel,
like the easiest thing to do is to give up.
What's the point?
why get up?
Why take care of myself?
Let me just feel numb.
Now I've heard a lot of people kind of complain
about the treatment of Thor in this movie
and kind of myself included.
It screwed with what I imagined Thor to be like.
But given his circumstances.
We almost should have seen it coming.
Going back to infinity war.
He is on his last leg.
He has lost it all.
And having done everything he could do,
including being punched in the face by a star.
He still loses,
it's all for nothing, nothing works.
He's one of the most powerful beings in existence
and he still lost.
But possibly what makes Thor's condition
even worse is the fact that he has completely stalled.
Unwilling to process the grief any further.
He has stolen away to a menial existence
of battling internet trolls,
and mostly just trying to drown it away.
Which is even more devastating.
When you consider how close he is,
to number five acceptance.
We see acceptance with Tony.
And now the important thing to keep in mind about
this particular step
is that it's not like Tony is saying,
it's okay that the Snap happened.
What he's saying is,
'The Snap happened and I am now okay'.
Tony found himself in kind of a unique position
after the snap,
unlike Clint, who lost literally four members
of his five person, family.
Tony had the advantage of making it through
with his closest loved one: Pepper.
And his dream from the beginning of Infinity War
about having a child comes to fruition
and he has Morgan
and basically something to live for.
But that's not to say that Tony
just made it through this because
he had some good things happened.
Tony had to go through all of these stages of grief
and arguably even twice.
Remember what we said earlier.
The stages of grief
were originally discovered around people
who discovered they had terminal illnesses.
That's exactly where Tony finds himself
at the beginning of this movie.
Lost in space without resources
having to accept the fact
that he's going to die out there.
And upon reaching acceptance,
he was miraculously saved,
brought back to earth
and had to restart the whole process over again.
So kind of understandably,
the first emotion we see out of him
after he's face to face with the team again is anger.
What Tony knows though,
is that he did everything
that he could to try to protect the world
from what happened before it happened.
- I see a suit of armor around the world.
- Everything he did after the battle of New York
was in an attempt to stop Thanos.
Even if he didn't even realize
who he was fighting at the time.
But there he finds himself.
On the other side.
He lost, Thanos won.
The mitten is gone.
And yet he's left standing,
a survivor with a wife and a kid,
a purpose.
So when Cap shows up with
this grand plan for a time heist,
it's easy to see why he said no.
He's accepted the situation and just moved on.
It's not okay that has happened,
but it did.
And fictional science isn't the answer.
Until he invents it like one day later.
Because he's just too curious.
And speaking of Cap.
You might be wondering.
Where does he fit in all of this?
Well, if you ask me if the other five Avengers
each represent a stage of grief,
I would argue that Cap represents the grief counselor.
I mean, not for nothing,
but he literally starts the movie
as an actual grief counselor.
So there's that.
But he tries to get Nat to,
sees the bright side,
and sends her to recruit Clint.
He convinces Bruce to work on a time machine
and sends him to get Thor.
And although it takes a little bit longer,
he ultimately gets Tony's mind back in the mission
and gets him on board as well.
Honestly,
what I love so much about this idea is
that it goes beyond over analysis
or just an observation about the movie.
It feels legitimately planned.
All of the characters fit their stage so well.
And I think it speaks volumes to the idea
that this movie isn't just like a major cinematic moment,
but it also comes with a spectacular message.
And guys, for my question of the day.
It's not even a question.
It is a request of the day.
Leave, just a positive thought
and the towel section down below for
someone who might need it.
And guys, as a reminder,
we have all of the information for
Mental Health America.
If you are looking for help
or know someone who is,
all of that information is down below,
but guys as always,
thanks for watching,
be sure to like this video
and subscribe to the channel.
If you haven't already.
If you'd like to see me and J's full,
complete spoiler review of Avengers End Game,
you can click a right here.
Or if you would like to see us sort the Avengers
into Hogwarts houses,
you can click right here.
But J, that's all I've got for you today, man.
I will see you on Tuesday.