"It was Steve Rogers All Along" is more of a 'Word of God' explanation than it is a personal interpretation of events.
Spoilers Marvel Cinematic Universe spoiler-heavy speculation thread
- Thread starter bbjeg
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It's an interpretation of the writer's intent, not the directors' nor the producer's. That's why I clarified what canon was a while back so everyone is in agreement that canon (although some people don't want to use that word) is what is on screen. Everything beyond that is someone's interpretation.
I was wondering why it looked so weird.
He's Schrodinger's Captain America, until another movie gives a definitive answer he's both livinging in an alternate timeline and living in the Sacred Timeline.OMG--- I laugh in your general direction!
All of you are being pretty hilarious. There is no reason why any one interpretation of this film is definitive until something on screen in the future proves otherwise. Why does everyone have the need to have their personal theory validated only by other people agreeing with them?
Personally I prefer the alternate timeline possibility since it, 1) lines up better with the time travel rules established earlier from the movie, and 2) it's the directors' preferred interpretation and with movies directors are have the final say on creative decisions like that.
That second sentence is a contradiction in terms. "Multiple realities" is just another way of saying "multiple timelines." There are multiple labels used in fiction -- alternate timelines, parallel universes, quantum realities, timestreams, etc. -- but they all mean the same thing. Vernacular is far less precise than scientific terminology, so having two words for a thing doesn't mean they're different things. (Heck, even Many-Worlds quantum theory has more than one term for them, including "measurement histories" and "observational realms.")
And the "Sacred Timeline" was artificial. That was the whole point of Loki season 1. There's nothing "sacred" about it -- it's just that it's the timeline where He Who Remains existed, so HWR created the TVA to artificially "prune" all the other timelines to prevent the rival Kangs from existing, and he created the fiction of the Sacred Timeline as propaganda to convince the TVA that they were doing the right thing rather than committing genocide on a horrific scale. As we saw in episode 1 of Loki, the TVA promptly pruned the branch Loki created when he disappeared with the Tesseract, and presumably did the same with the other alternate branches created in the movie (sorry, Alternate Ancient One). Once the pruning was stopped, the multiverse reverted to its natural state of having many branching timelines.
Except, again, a single timeline cannot be changed; a change will branch off a separate timeline. So if Steve was part of the "Sacred Timeline" all along, it wouldn't be a change, it would be the way it had always been, and thus he would have had no reason to "preserve" it by not intervening. Looked at another way, nothing he could do would possibly erase it, only create a parallel branch alongside it, so there'd be no reason not to change things for the better in that parallel branch. So that logic doesn't apply to this model of time travel. You're making the mistake of applying the BS "history changing" logic you've been conditioned by fiction to expect to the more plausible consistent-history theory of Endgame, and that leads to a nonsensical conclusion.
"It was Steve Rogers All Along" is what ended up onscreen, as was intended by Markus and McFeeley, the Russo Brothers' differing interpretation notwithstanding.
This is a completely backwards way of looking at it.
If the single timeline interpretation is true, then it follows by every description in the movie that he could not change his own past no matter what he chose to do because he - and all his choices - were always a part of the single timeline.
Therefore there is no problem whatsoever with his characterization because there is absolutely no reason to assume he just sat around and did nothing while all the bad stuff we know about happened.
He undoubtedly told Peggy everything and worked with her - under a different name, obviously - to make the world as safe as they could. But they also undoubtedly had to make choices about which threats and problems to prioritize (which Steve Rogers absolutely would choose to do as fairly and righteously as possible, even if that meant his best friend got the short end of the stick because other innocent people were in even worse danger) and they also undoubtedly could not just perfectly fix everything just because they wanted to (rooting out Hydra out of Shield, for instance, could've been a far more political affair than anything solvable with action and heroism and if Hydra had the right backing, Peggy and Steve may not have been able to do more than limit Hydra's maneuvering room and lay the foundation for Fury to eventually take them down). They even could have actually fixed some things only for them to be undone later on (they might've actually believed they'd ended Hydra only for someone to rebuild it after they retired, or they might've actually rescued Bucky only for Hydra to recapture him).
In the video you see multiple realities; however, they all go in the same direction with only minor variations. The Steve at the end of the movie could be from a slightly different timeline but since all timelines are almost the same it really makes no difference in the end because he is essentially the same Steve Rogers.