Greetings, intrepid readers! M. H. Barton here with another blog post on the art and craft of storytelling. Today, we’ll be looking at midpoints, not only of books but also of entire story arcs. To do that, I wanted to take a deep dive into what I think is one of the best-written midpoints of all – that of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Infinity Saga. In this sprawling arc spanning nearly two dozen films, the midpoint is reached in the film Captain America: Civil War. While this is actually film number 13, putting it a bit past the midpoint numerically, the story represents the narrative and philosophical midpoint of the saga. After looking at this moment in time as is, I’ll also do some speculation about how a single alteration might have completely changed the outcome of the film and, by extension, the films that follow. With that said, let’s get started!
The Civil War
As fans of the MCU are well aware, Civil War brought the philosophical differences between Steve Rogers and Tony Stark to the forefront. After Age of Ultron, Tony has retired as Iron Man, and Steve is leading a new team of Avengers. But after a mission in Lagos goes awry, resulting in civilian casualties, Tony’s guilt begins to get the better of him. Being the control freak that he is, Tony goes behind the backs of the Avengers and approaches the U.S. Department of Defense and the United Nations to draft the Sokovia Accords. This document forces the Avengers to either submit to UN oversight of their activities or be disbanded.
Though the team is divided, Steve can’t bring himself to accept this change. Since his arrival in the present day, Steve’s worldview has been challenged to the extreme. Where he was once a good soldier who always followed orders, he now felt massive distrust in the government. This came to a head during the events of Captain America: The Winter Soldier. From here, the Civil War was inevitable. Steve opposes Tony and goes off the reservation, forcing the rest of the team to pick sides. The end result is a broken remnant of the Avengers led by Tony while Steve takes his allies into hiding as fugitives. This obviously made Earth’s heroes weaker and more vulnerable for the eventual confrontation with Thanos.
Such a twist certainly makes for incredible storytelling, but did it have to be this way? How could the Civil War have been avoided? If it had, would it have harmed the story in the process? Let’s take a look.
One small difference
In my speculative scenario, the beginning of Civil War plays out as in the film, with the botched Lagos mission and Tony’s guilt still present. However, instead of immediately running to the government for a fix, Tony swallows his pride and asks Steve for a private meeting. Steve agrees, and the pair begin to sort out these problems. The mere fact that Tony extended the olive branch changes how these two men interact. While Steve understands and empathizes with Tony’s guilt, he bristles at Tony’s suggestion of governmental oversight of the Avengers. And even though Tony still distrusts Steve for his supposed lack of a dark side, he understands Steve’s position of distrust in government. Still, they both recognize that something has to change if the Avengers are to survive. That’s when Tony comes up with a radical idea.
While Steve is adamant that no governmental committee could be trusted to oversee the Avengers properly, Tony asks him if an individual could. Not just any individual, but the right individual. Someone who completely understands the impossible situations the Avengers often face and the threats they must confront. Steve agrees in theory but doesn’t know of any one person who would fit that bill. Tony says he knows of one: Steve Rogers himself. Steve is confused at first since he already leads the Avengers, but Tony begins to explain.
The safest hands
Tony understands Steve’s core philosophy, “The safest hands are our own,” exists because Steve has become the symbol of individual exceptionalism. This stands in contrast to governments, which are built around the idea of systematic exceptionalism, at least in the best of cases. Tony goes on to say that these governments can hem and haw about property damage and loss of life, but everyone knows the Avengers end up saving far more lives than are lost. What these governments decrying the Avengers are really worried about is power.
Many governments see how powerful the Avengers are and view them as a direct threat to the balance of power in the world. Steve pushes back on this, adamant that the Avengers are protectors, not conquerors. Tony agrees but reminds Steve that this truth is irrelevant, at least in the mind of a powerful bureaucrat with no enhanced abilities, such as Thaddeus “Thunderbolt” Ross. Such individuals are naturally fearful of the very existence of the Avengers, and especially of the possibility that they might go rogue. This fear often drives bureaucrats to do something, anything at all, even if it’s the wrong thing. While some change needs to be made to the Avengers, Steve and Tony have to get ahead of the problem by doing the right something and doing it fast. That’s the only chance they have of these changes being guided by wisdom instead of fear.
Steve understands Tony’s point but still fails to see how one individual overseeing the Avengers could put these governmental fears to rest. Tony then reveals the crux of his radical idea: Steve must put together secret profiles detailing everything about each member of the Avengers. Their background, powers, strengths, and weaknesses must all be documented and a strategy formulated to neutralize them, as Banner had done in helping Tony build the Hulkbuster armor. To further ease global fears, the Avengers could submit to this willingly, working with Steve to develop their own countermeasures before having Vision erase their memories of the details with the Mind Stone. Steve is surprised by the suggestion, but the more he thinks about it, the more he realizes it’s the best way for the Avengers to continue to do what they do best. Still, Tony has yet to figure out the final snag – how to account for Steve going rogue. Steve just grins and says there’s always been a countermeasure for him: The Avengers. Provided that Tony took command, Steve knows the Avengers would be able to stop him if he ever went bad.
The Sokovia Protocols
Thanks to Tony and Steve, the Sokovia Protocols are born. Though the Avengers may still operate independently, Steve gains the trust of each member and past member and convinces them to help build the secret profiles. Still, some members are skeptical, most notably the former Avenger Thor, who refuses to submit, though his frequent time off world leads Steve to classify Thor as not a threat. On the other hand, certain individuals in the various governments of the world are not satisfied with this solution and secretly plan to discredit the Avengers.
Such an opportunity arises less than a year later when a young Peter Parker tries to bring down Adrian Toomes on the Staten Island ferry. Not only did he interfere with an ongoing FBI operation, but his actions nearly destroyed the boat, endangering the lives of the passengers in the process. Tony takes away Peter’s enhanced Spider-Man suit just as in Spider-Man: Homecoming, but the damage has been done. A coalition of government officials, such as “Thunderbolt” Ross, demand Steve Rogers now act in oversight of other enhanced individuals not affiliated with the Avengers, collecting data on them and forming countermeasures in the event they become a threat.
Steve, naturally, refuses this latest demand. He compromised in the creation of the Sokovia Protocols, largely because the Avengers agreed as a team to go along with it, but this would require him to out innocent kids as enhanced individuals and essentially kidnap them to learn more about them. Ross then pressures the President to declare the Avengers disbanded, which in turn pressures other nations to disavow the heroes as vigilantes. Tony brings Peter into the fold of the Avengers to protect him. He and Steve then take the team on the run as fugitives.
A new Endgame
These changes would drastically alter the time between Civil War and Infinity War. While Doctor Strange and Ragnarok would play out largely the same, the events of Black Panther would be very different. Without the Sokovia Accords, the UN would not have convened in Germany when they did, denying Zemo the chance to bomb the event and frame Bucky for it. With Bucky still in the wind, it’s likely that Steve would find him and bring him into the Avengers as Tony did with Peter. But even bigger, King T’chaka would still be alive in Wakanda, though T’challa is still the Black Panther. With several of the deaths in the botched Lagos operation being Wakandan nationals, King T’chaka would have been an ardent opponent of the Sokovia Protocols. Once the Avengers became fugitives, he would have sent the Black Panther to locate them.
The T’challa who hounds the Avengers would not be the wise and noble ruler we know from the MCU. Without the Avengers Civil War, this T’challa would not have been able to learn the hard, painful lessons about revenge and forgiveness. This would be an angry young man out for blood in the name of his people. T’challa would view the Avengers in much the same way his father viewed Ulysses Klaue. Speaking of Klaue, Wakanda would have attempted to capture him as in the film, but without a prior working relationship with Everett Ross from Civil War, the botched operation would likely have resulted in Everett Ross’ death, heightening tensions even further. Worse, Erik Killmonger would have tried his ploy to gain favor with Wakanda. Without T’challa there and with T’chaka now forced to confront his past sins, the king would either abdicate the throne or be killed by Killmonger in ritual combat.
The stage would now be set for an apocalyptic climax. Killmonger is on the throne of Wakanda and stands ready to declare war on the rest of the world, starting with the United States. The Avengers remain in hiding, their attention on the constant raids by Black Panther and his team. But during a major confrontation, T’challa receives a coded message from his late father explaining what has happened back in Wakanda. The Avengers get wind of this and, knowing how destabilizing Killmonger’s reign would be, agree to a temporary truce with T’challa so they can depose Killmonger. But before the operation can begin, a portal opens, introducing Doctor Strange to the Avengers. He reveals he has Bruce Banner with him and needs Tony Stark to come with him to New York, as happened in Infinity War.
From here, things play out much as they did in Infinity War. Tony takes War Machine and Spider-Man with him to New York. He wants to bring Vision as well, but Strange shoots that down in favor of keeping the Time Stone and the Mind Stone in separate locations. In New York, Tony's team soon encounters half of the Black Order and must follow them into space after Strange is captured. Meanwhile, T'challa teams with Steve and the remaining Avengers to try and remove Killmonger from Wakanda. Thanks to insider help from Nakia and Shuri, their incursion is successful, but just as they make their move on Killmonger, the rest of the Black Order arrives with its army, intent on taking the Mind Stone from Vision. All hell breaks loose, but T’challa finishes Killmonger in the chaos, allowing Shuri to regain control of Wakanda’s tech.
At this point, the two battles progress as in Infinity War, with Thanos defeating Tony’s crew and obtaining the Time Stone before moving to Wakanda and taking the Mind Stone. We all know what happens next. Crying Wanda, Thor should’ve gone for the head, and oh snap! So, even with the avoidance of the Avengers Civil War, things look to have ended up in the same place, right? Wrong. There’s one crucial difference from how things played out in the MCU, and it all deals with one of the few heroes I haven’t yet mentioned: Ant-Man. Without the Civil War, Scott Lang would never have been recruited by Steve Rogers. This means he wouldn’t have been put under house arrest, which delayed his further experiments with Hank Pym regarding the Quantum Realm. Without those delays, Scott would almost certainly not be in the Quantum Realm at the time of The Snap. As a result, even if he ended up surviving The Snap, Scott wouldn’t have had the idea for the Time Heist without his time trapped in the Quantum Realm. No Time Heist, no Infinity Stones. The world has no choice but to live with the ultimate failure of the Avengers.
Conclusion
So, what can authors learn from these hypothetical musings? First is the necessity of good conflict. The MCU as it was written does a phenomenal job of this, building the conflict between Steve and Tony through the changes to their world views. While my hypothetical scenario was arguably more realistic, it ends up avoiding one conflict in favor of another, much worse conflict. Yes, the MCU has many characters, Steve and Tony chief among them, acting and thinking at the extremes of their character traits, not with moderate rationality like many normal people. And maybe that’s the point: these aren’t normal people. They’re extraordinary individuals who often carry the literal weight of the world on their shoulders. So, while it may be easy for an outsider to see a solution that avoids the Avengers Civil War, it turns out to make less sense for the Avengers themselves to see it.
Additionally, we can see the importance of midpoints as the primary means for setting up the final climax. Here, we have the awful things happening to the characters we’ve grown to love, the forces of darkness on the move, and little hope in sight of a happy ending. Steve and Tony at odds, the Avengers breaking up, Thor and Hulk nowhere to be found – all the chess pieces are moving into position, ready to coalesce as the final act reaches its climax. A proper midpoint serves a similar role to the point guard on a basketball team, ready to pass the ball to the right teammate at the right time for a big payoff. When an author can write their midpoint with the right amount of tension, it allows them to make the final act all the more satisfying as all the plot threads unravel.
Ultimately, while all parts of a story are vital and important, midpoints are arguably the most vital to the overall plot. The midpoint, when written well, connects everything in the beginning to the changes in the end. The story’s characters, world, and philosophical themes can only reach critical mass through this time of tension, stress, and conflict. I have struggled with this in my own stories, sometimes tending to avoid good conflict rather than embracing it. While we as authors always love writing the final climax, we must learn not to shy away from a proper amount of conflict of different types during the midpoint. Otherwise, we risk the greatest sin of all – a boring, predictable story. But with a strong middle act, we have a fighting chance to craft a magical story that grips the audience and never lets them go.
And that’s going to do it for this blog entry. I hope my hypothetical ramblings helped you in your own storytelling endeavors. Of course, I’d love to know what you thought. Feel free to let me know in the comments or reach out directly if you have any ideas or requests for future entries. I’ve got an active running list of ideas, but I’m always open to more. I’d appreciate it if you’d leave a like and share this post on social media. And to stay up to date on future blog posts, you can sign up for my monthly newsletter on my website. Until the next story!
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