Revisiting the MCU's Blip From a Pandemic Perspective (Patreon)

By Jameson Hampton

In comics, a crossover event is when something happens that’s so big, the implications from it are felt across the entire shared universe, rather than just a single comic series. People like crossover events because it’s fun to see characters who aren’t normally together interact with each other, and it makes the setting feel more real when you can see the rippling cause and effect from world-shaking events that disrupt the status quo. Of course, while crossover events are fun, they usually mean something bad happened, like a war or some sort of major societal tragedy. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is currently dealing with the aftermath of a major crossover event—the Infinity War. Thanos’ snap erased half the population from existence, and then Tony Stark’s sacrifice brought them all back five years later. It’s interesting to see how all of the MCU properties have had to deal with this shake-up in the universe since the Blip, as it's referred to within the MCU. But it’s particularly interesting when you consider the similarities between the Blip and the real-life crossover event we have all been experiencing for the past year: the COVID-19 pandemic.

Living through a real-life crossover event has been weird. I’ve absolutely been able to watch the ripples of cause and effect of global shutdowns and quarantines (which, in turn, has made me more capable of conceptualizing the ramifications of the Blip on aspects of society like the economy and the workforce). But the biggest thing is just this feeling that people all over the world are going through this same shared experience. We’re currently in the midst of experiencing a profound shared societal trauma, one that we’re going to have to keep grappling with long after we get out of the proverbial woods of the pandemic. We didn’t lose half the population, but we have lost a lot of lives over the past year—over half a million people have died of COVID-19 in the United States alone, and there have been over 3 million deaths worldwide. That’s a lot of tragedy.

So “shared societal trauma” is a theme that is going to be important for us to explore as a culture as we heal from the magnitude of this event—but it’s also one that’s going to be hard to stomach for a while. I’ve already heard folks speculating about how media will treat “the pandemic years.” Will movies embrace the events of 2020-2021 into their timelines? Or will we see “AU” timelines where the pandemic never happened? At least right now, it seems like the consensus is that we just lived (and are still living) through the pandemic and we don’t want to have to watch movies about it too. Surprise! Having unresolved trauma is painful. We’ve spent over a year saturated with it, and I think it’s pretty natural that we don’t want our media to be saturated with it as well, even if collectively working through some of that trauma could be good for us long-term.

This puts the MCU in a really unique position to grapple with these kinds of issues, because they already had a shared societal trauma event in their timeline. The Blip actually has some pretty profound similarities to the COVID-19 pandemic, which I’m going to go into, but ultimately it’s not the COVID-19 pandemic. That gives the MCU an interesting opportunity to explore this theme of shared societal trauma through a lens that feels more emotionally manageable. It’s a similar theme to what we’re actually going through as a society, but since it’s not the same actual trauma that we’ve been experiencing, it doesn’t pack the same emotional punch. And even though there are distinct similarities, it doesn’t feel like a heavy handed metaphor since the Blip was already a canonical event with an aftermath that was already being explored long before the pandemic hit. But how has the treatment of the Blip changed between the pre- and post-pandemic days? And what can we learn from it?

The snap itself happened at the end of Avengers: Infinity War (2018), but we didn’t start to see any of the fallout from it until Avengers: Endgame (2019), which is the only piece of MCU media that takes place mainly during those five years in between the disappearance of half the population and their sudden return. I wish we’d had a chance to see more of what the world was like during that stretch. There was only one scene that really grappled with that, which depicted a support group for Blip survivors that Steve Rogers was attending, but I’m so curious about the logistics of suddenly having half as many people. How did people survive in the early days? How were they able to maintain emergency services and utilities like the power grid? What happened to the homes and property of the Vanished, the people who disappeared? How did they cope with the loss of essential workers?

Even that support group scene didn’t really resonate with me in terms of living through the pandemic. It consisted mainly of one member sharing a story about going on a date for the first time since the Blip happened five years earlier and how both of them cried during dinner talking about their trauma. (You may actually remember this from a separate controversy, because it was played up that Endgame would have the first LGBTQ+ representation in the MCU, and it turned out to be this one-off character telling a single anecdote about his off-screen same-sex date.) After living through over a year of trauma, it just doesn’t track to me that the average person would still be struggling that actively five years into this situation. Yes, the Blip was a more intense trauma than COVID, but it was legitimately astounding to me how quickly the new status quo started to feel normal. Humans are incredibly adaptable. By the one year mark, my bigger worry was about how to adapt to things starting to return to the way they used to be after becoming so accustomed to pandemic life.

And, of course, while Endgame touched on the trauma of those five years, it treated the return of all the missing people as an entirely joyful event. We saw families tearfully reunited. It felt like the whole world was breathing a sigh of relief. Now things can go back to normal.

But as we’ve slowly realized over the past two years of the pandemic, things don’t really just snap back to “normal” after such a far-reaching and tragic shake-up. We saw the first real glimpses of that in Spider-Man: Far From Home (2019), which was the next MCU film to come out after Endgame and the first to be set fully in a post-Blip world. Far From Home is a fun movie that’s certainly not about trauma at its core, but you do start to see hints of it, particularly in the way that the adults are coping much worse than the teenagers. Peter’s class, in some kind of statistical coincidence, were pretty much all Blipped, which gives them a sense of community cohesion that is probably lacking in a world where most communities are now divided into two groups of people who have had very different experiences during this traumatic time. Plus, younger people tend to be even more resilient and adaptable than their adult counterparts, and the kids of Far From Home are mainly concerned about having to restart their school year from scratch and the fact that their younger siblings are now older than them. (Anecdotally, I think I’ve seen this mirrored during the pandemic too, with the younger generations displaying, in my opinion, commendable resilience and often coping with jokes and memes.) But as I said, hints of the trauma are still visible there, like in Peter’s appearance as Spider-Man at a fundraiser for people who were displaced by the Blip. Aunt May volunteers there, having been displaced herself—she relays her story of “blipping” back into her old apartment and alarming the new family that lives there.

But there are other ways in which Far From Home almost uncannily reflects the general vibe of 2020, despite pre-dating it. When Happy proudly showed off his “Blip beard” that he grew during the Blip, I laughed out loud in sheer disbelief that they accidentally predicted the “pandemic beard” phenomenon so accurately. It wasn’t just jokes that felt particularly on the nose to me, but also the very plot. Mysterio is a fraud, literally creating “fake news” to gain fans and followers, cult leader style. Yes, the “fake news” buzzword certainly predates the pandemic, but his reasoning really resonates in post-pandemic life: the world is so crazy these days, people will believe anything. I feel that. So much has happened in the past 18 months that I never would have believed five years ago. But in a very similar fashion to Q of QAnon fame, Mysterio preyed on that instinct and used it to control people. Q doesn’t believe the conspiracy theories that he touts, but there’s power in getting other people to believe them. (And if Mysterio is Q, then J. Jonah Jameson is Alex Jones, with his Info Wars-esque version of The Daily Bugle, further driving home the point about pundits and how they disseminate information.) Of course, the Spider-Man-fake-news-bombshell from the end of Far From Home is another shakeup in the MCU that hasn’t yet been addressed again, so I’m curious how the writers will tackle that, especially as the culture around sensationalized headlines continues to shift post-pandemic.

Far From Home, of course, was the last piece of MCU media that came out before the real life pandemic got underway, throwing a wrench into the production and release schedule. The next MCU installment that came out was WandaVision (2021), which has trauma baked into every part of its premise. WandaVision’s trauma is not exclusively about the Blip—Wanda brings so much of her own historical trauma and grief to the table, and then passes it on to the residents of Westview—but I can feel the undercurrent of a setting where everyone involved is still recovering from the emotional devastation of the Blip. “Hurt people hurt people,” as they say, and WandaVision is really a story about the cycle of abuse and how easy it can be to fall into, and how new pain and grief can be even more difficult to handle when it’s layered on top of old, unhealed pain and grief.

Also featured in WandaVision was the first real glimpse of the return of the Vanished as a less-than-joyful event. Five years earlier, Monica Rambeau had disappeared from the hospital where her mother—Maria Rambeau of Captain Marvel fame—was recovering from her fight with cancer. Episode 4 of WandaVision opens with the chaotic scene in that hospital, full of confused and scared people who had no idea they had been gone for five years, desperately trying to get a hold of their loved ones. It’s the first time I had really considered all the terrifying side effects of the Vanished returning, and it’s absolutely heart-wrenching to watch. One moment, Monica was sitting with her mother and the next, she was finding out that not only did her mom not make it, but she died several years ago, alone, without her daughter by her side when she needed her most. But the thing that was so striking about this scene is that Monica is by no means the only confused, scared person wandering around those hospital corridors. In that moment, Monica’s trauma is centered, but it’s clear that her tragic story is just one of millions and millions all around the world. This tension between personal tragedy and societal tragedy is one that resonates with me now. I’ve heard a lot of discussion about it being weird and messed up that the U.S. as a whole has done so little national grieving—after all, there were some days in 2020 where we were losing as many people as died on 9/11 to COVID per day. It’s not that I disagree with that; we are going to be coming to terms with this loss for a long time. But living through it also made it clear to me how difficult it is to grieve on that large of a scale—to even wrap your mind around grief that large— especially when you’re dealing with your own personal grief at the same time. It’s overwhelming to both the mind and the soul.

The scale of this tragedy only becomes clearer in the next (and, at the time of writing this, most recent) MCU miniseries, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021), which continues to delve into the weeds of all the logistical nightmares associated with re-doubling the world’s population overnight. It’s pretty core to the premise of the show, actually, from the very first episode, where Sam Wilson is denied for a loan, in part because being Blipped away for five years apparently isn’t very good on your credit score.

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to botched government responses. The Falcon and the Winter Soldier introduced the Global Repatriation Council, an international committee tasked with handling the huge swaths of refugees who were displaced, particularly migrants who weren’t Blipped and were then consequently displaced by the original owners of their new homes suddenly returning. The central conflict of the show is between the GRC and the Flag Smashers, an anti-nationalist group who wanted to preserve the welcoming, borderless world they saw emerging over the past five years. While the show seems to want viewers to see the Flag Smashers as extremists—the bad guys—the GRC were planning to forcibly deport literally millions of suddenly-homeless refugees, after keeping them in camps with poor conditions and a lack of good food and medicine… So who are the bad guys again, really?

Seeing this kind of civil unrest in a post-Blip world also speaks to my experience living through the pandemic. 2020 was also a year characterized by civil unrest, with the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis causing Black Lives Matter protests against police brutality to sweep across the U.S. and beyond. Obviously these protests weren’t about the pandemic in the same way the Flag Smashers were reacting to fallout that was directly caused by the Blip. But police brutality isn’t a new issue by any means, and the perfect storm of factors that caused such a widespread outcry in 2020 specifically was inextricably tied to the pandemic in several ways. On a purely logistical level, with people out of work in record high numbers and things shut down for quarantine, a lot of folks suddenly had more free time than normal to take to the streets for protests.

It affected people’s attitudes too. Everyone was grieving, on both a personal and societal level, and we were having trouble processing all that grief. That grief crystallized into anger—at the government for their botched pandemic responses, at the police for their continued militarized aggression, and at society as a whole for always letting marginalized communities and especially people of color be the most negatively affected by both police brutality and COVID-19. Just like in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, where the most marginalized migrant communities were the most negatively affected by the Blip. That radicalizes people and creates further divisions between the haves and the have-nots, and we’re still seeing that play out in the real world.

So there are a lot of similarities between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Blip, but what can we learn from that? So far, it has mainly been a cautionary tale. On a personal level—do the work to process your own grief before it gets so out of control that it causes you to hurt other people, like Wanda did. On a societal level—if you mistreat people badly enough for long enough, they will fight back against that treatment, like the Flag Smashers did.

But I’m more interested in what Marvel will do next and what we can learn from that. So far, only a couple pieces of media have come out since the pandemic hit, and they were both probably mainly written beforehand. But the Blip will certainly continue to be a major factor in nearly all the upcoming MCU shows and movies, and that gives Marvel a unique opportunity. They can learn from the real life response to this kind of “crossover event” and use that experience to make their story feel more realistic. But if they play their cards right, they can also help us process it. We have no real blueprint to heal from the trauma the pandemic has caused all of us, but maybe watching other people heal from their trauma about the Blip could help us start to map out that blueprint. Wanda’s example of how not to process grief is something, but examples of people processing their grief in healthy, productive ways and coming out stronger for it would be even more powerful.

At the time when the decision was made to tackle the Infinity War event in the MCU, nobody at Marvel could have predicted all of the strange ways it has become relevant and even prescient. But regardless of how it came to be, I hope they won’t squander this opportunity.