thinking about how the avengers and the thunderbolts are heroes for very different times. maybe it's just me as someone who was young enough to still be considered a kid when the first mcu films were coming out, but it really feels like the avengers represent something we can't get back to. everything felt fresh and optimistic back then; we knew they would defeat the bad guys, because the bad guys always lose! that simple. heroes like thor and captain america were inherently good people: sure they'd made a few mistakes, but those were mostly personality flaws. they were pretty much just caring, brave, honest-to-God good human beings, and that's what heroes were to us back then. they made being a hero look easy. we basked in the glorious light of their innocence and goodness and believed that a golden future awaited us.
fast forward to 2025. we're adults now, and so tired of asking where that golden future we were promised is. we've seen too much of humanity's wars, oppression, death, our own greed and selfishness, a frikkin pandemic for heaven's sake. our youthful optimism has been replaced by a hope fragile and barely alive; we don't feel the same reassurance that the bad guys will lose because there have been so many times in real life that they've won. we know now that heroes are not just 'good people.' so what is a hero?
enter the thunderbolts, a bunch of self-proclaimed losers with terrible pasts. they've all messed it up: killed people, abandoned loved ones, been abandoned by loved ones, seen too much to ever completely stop suffering and done too much to ever be looked at in the same light as the inherently good heroes of the past. they can't stop themselves from being sarcastic dumbasses. they seem irredeemable. they feel irredeemable. and yet that is exactly what we need.
because when it comes down to it they choose to be heroes. they see people in danger and they step up, even though it's hard, even though it's not natural to them. they throw themselves into the battle because that is what they have always known and they'll be damned if they sit this one out when they finally have a chance to do something good. they look at one another in their pain and hopelessness and say i know, me too, so let's figure it out together, even though they follow that up with i still hate you btw, you're still a dumbass because that's how we say i love you these days. they show us, jaded and struggling, that you don't have to feel good to do good--that you are good anyway, that you are more than what you have done or felt or been, that there is always a hope for tomorrow. there's a reason the plot is a great big metaphor for mental illness and self-worth, a reason redemption flows through the veins of that film.
in the end i think the avengers affirmed our belief in the goodness of people and the world, but the thunderbolts? they reawaken that hope. maybe their story touched us so deeply because they are responding to the hope that there's some good in this world and it's worth fighting for.