The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the highest grossing film franchise in movie history, and it’s not even close. Star Wars, the second highest grossing film franchise in movie history, has collected a little over $9 billion at the box office. With the release of the fourth Avengers movie in a couple of weeks, the MCU will go comfortably beyond $20 billion in total international box office in just the last twelve years.

They’re doing something right, obviously, to have made all that money. Fans and critics agree—these movies are…totally fine! I’ve seen a bunch of them—mostly on cable or Netflix, rather than in the theaters—and, indeed, they’re mostly fine, mostly forgettable, sometimes pretty good—but never, ever great.

Of course, “great” is the wrong thing to expect from these sorts of movies. No one is expecting hoity-toity FILM-MAKING when they show up to see Hulk and Thor smash each other up before the merrily twinkling eyes of Jeff Goldblum. We want fun and loud and bright and dumb and, most of all, we want competence. And the MCU is perfectly competent.

Brief aside: I audibly laugh whenever I see Bumbledict Cindersnatch do his fancy wizard hands thing. It is very nearly as funny as watching actual adults do karate through the window of a strip mall dojo. He is fully committed to whatever the hell it is he’s supposed to be doing there. And it’s because he takes it so seriously that I find it so funny—same with the adults doing karate. Bendylick Coffeefilch is a total professional, surrounded by total professionals, and everything looks and sounds totally competent. So, yeah, totally fine!

I recognize that we live in a very permissive time in our culture, in terms of it not being cool to “yuck” anyone else’s (or everybody else’s) “yum.” (“Don’t yuck my yum” is, without a doubt, the single worst millennial expression, but that’s a whole other blog, isn’t it.) Why should I dump on something that somebody else likes, especially given how much other CONTENT there is out there for me to enjoy? Can’t I just leave Disney—that rag-tag bohemian artists’ collective just expressing their truth—and their fans alone to mutually enjoy each other, and go watch my Criterion Collection FILMS and PRESTIGE TV and brood to myself about my own undeniably superior aesthetic taste?

Sure, yes, fine. But I’m not trying to tell anybody that the thing that they like so much Really Sucks, Actually. And not to make this about something it’s not—which is absolutely a specialty of mine—but we can still discuss things without having to endorse them with unwavering religious fervor or deride them as the worst malevolent shit to ever pollute the silver screen, if we want to. Everything feels catastrophic and pathologized and fraught, with every conversation and fast food choice and tweet carrying the weight of the goddamn world—but it doesn’t have to. We can just have opinions that aren’t TAKES, and aren’t intended to do war upon anyone’s sense of self, and still be friends, even if it feels like everyone is walking around with their feels turned up to 11 all the time.

And that’s almost certainly why this fundamentally silly, escapist, stakes-free franchise made twenty-goddamn-billion dollars before it reached puberty. Everything else is presented as life-and-death serious all the time—of course we want to watch pretty people play pretend, and have it evince basically no discernible real-world politics over the course of twenty-something films.

I can’t emphasize this enough—fine! Like I said, I think it’s mostly fine, it’s all fine. But goddamn it, is it too much to ask for some fucking stakes? Not even in terms of demanding the “art” comment meaningfully on actual human experience in a way that makes you feel things beyond, “man, I really gotta pee.” I just want there to be a little bit of meaningful stakes in the universe these characters inhabit, and allegedly “live and die” in.

Seriously, who fucking cares who dies when they always come back, anyway?

Let’s take Loki. At the end of the first Thor movie, Loki committed suicide by allowing himself to get sucked into some sort of black hole or space void or whatever. Thor, his brother, screamed “Noooooo!” in total mortal agony as Loki disappeared into the abyss, presumably dead. But, you know, Loki is a god of some sort, so maybe it’s silly to expect him to be dead just because his god-brother and god-dad both clearly think he’s lost forever. So, a couple years later, Loki shows up in the first Avengers movie as the primary antagonist, of course—fine! On to the next Thor movie wherein, at the end, Loki dies. Thor screams “Noooooo!” in total mortal agony as Loki dies so much he turns blue.

Anyway, he wasn’t really dead, then, either, it turns out. Loki’s next death comes at the beginning of Avengers: Infinity War, and big talking purple space thumb Thanos strangles him to death, and Thor…screams “Noooooo!” in total mortal agony, but behind a ball gag this time.

So maybe he’s really dead this time, since that big purple guy seems pretty serious about everything? I don’t know—and who cares?! Certainly not the filmmakers.

But Loki is the God of Mischief, and maybe he isn’t the standard by which we should judge things like “mortal stakes.” Fine—fair, even! How about Spider Man? Spider Man is just a fifteen year-old kid in this universe. He’s sweet and funny and innocent and it’s all very emotionally impactful when he turns to dust in the arms of his mentor and father figure at the end of Infinity War.

That movie came out in April of 2018, with Spider Man dying there, even though the studio confirmed a Spider Man sequel for 2019 in 2017. With Infinity War still in theaters, Tom Holland, the actor who plays Spider Man, posted a video talking about being excited for the Spidey sequel. And then, in January, this trailer comes out, a full four months before Avengers: Endgame will be released to presumably explain the ways in which, actually, Spider Man wasn’t really dead after all.

But putting aside the gods like Loki and the sad spoiler-y realities of big-movie marketing sucking all the meaning out of the “death” of a beloved wisp of near-priceless intellectual property, the moment that really exemplifies the no-stakes arbitrariness with which the MCU handles life-and-death moments for its characters occurred about an hour and a half into Infinity War.

In short: Chris Pratt up there tries to blast his green girlfriend Zoe Saldana into the afterlife—whatever precisely the fuck that would mean, in this universe—so that her long lost shitty purple dad Thanos can’t whisk her away for his own genocidal ends. It’s a big moment! Thanos had just dramatically vivisected two other characters into cubes and ribbons, and Chris Pratt believes he’s killing the love of his life when he pulls that trigger. Instead, bubbles. Everything is just bubbles. Thanos leaves with not-dead (…for now!) Zoe Saldana, the very recently exploded other characters stand up, and nothing has changed.

I get it. They were in some sort of weird dimension or on a funky planet, there was a REALITY STONE distorting everything that was going on, nothing we saw with our eyes was to be trusted, blah blah, fanboy, blah. But sheesh! This movie wants the audience—and the characters—to take very seriously the absolute mortal stakes of every dramatic moment, only to wipe it away with a big “KIDDING!!!” in the very next frame. Nothing anyone does really matters, no deaths or near deaths or seeming deaths are of any consequence. Every mulligan’d death—presented as they always are with the hysterical high-tension melodrama of heart-sleeved adolescence—is just a cheap shortcut to emotions the screenplay doesn’t trust the audience to feel without the (purported) finality of the guillotine. But the IP will die only so that the IP can be resurrected, because the MCU knows you’ll fork over another fifteen bucks in July.

So at the end of Infinity War, when Thanos snaps his fingers and half the universe’s population disappears, I’m expected to give a shit?! Fool me once, shame on you! Fool me 28 times…why, yes, Disney, I would like to sign up for a subscription streaming service filled with only your content, thank you!

Captain Marvel came out a few weeks ago (and, it goes without saying, made a boatload of money). I didn’t see that one yet, but I understand there’s time travel involved, and that Captain Marvel represents something of a super-powerful ace-up-the-sleeve for the Avengers, and that she’ll no doubt play a major role in finally defeating Thanos in Endgame. Some combination of time-travelling and quantum wizarding and good old-fashioned deus-ex-machining will bring back to life the half of the universe’s population that was culled last year. (It’s almost admirable that the MCU waited this long to whip out time travel, the ultimate stakes-eliminator—Superman didn’t even make it one whole movie.) Probably, Marvel will finally even kill off Captain America or Iron Man in a teary moment of self-sacrifice for the greater, universal good—well, you know, again, ahh, and again—but mostly, everything will be back to normal, with all of the IP intact.

Because if there’s one thing that $25 billion in revenue is good for, it’s the assurance that our beloved scrappy bohemians at Disney, with their small-country-sized GDP, will use it to make even more. And who can ask for higher stakes than that?