The writers of Avengers: Endgame recently revealed Nebula very nearly wore the Infinity Gauntlet in the Marvel Studios blockbuster, but the scene was removed from the script in early stages because they felt it undercut Tony Stark's climactic moment. Despite their explanation, the way this series of events plays out does not sit quite right with proper storytelling techniques and feels too forced to ultimately be satisfying.

It is clear that the writers worked backward when crafting the final two Avengers films. They knew it had to end with Tony Stark's sacrifice because he was the character who launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and because Robert Downey Jr.'s contract was up and they needed to write him out of the films. It seems that they were writing towards a destination and allowing plot to dictate character, rather than properly allowing the characters to lead the plot. Doing the latter would have led them to the inevitable conclusion that it should have been Nebula who wielded the Infinity Gauntlet to defeat Thanos.

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While Thanos has been present on the edges of the MCU ever since his mid-credits appearance in The Avengers, he had no real relationship to Tony's character journey. Nebula and Gamora were the characters who actually had a direct relationship to Thanos. Nebula was a lackey of Thanos in Guardians of the Galaxy, but her character was rounded out more fully in Guardians of the Galaxy 2 as audiences learned more about her struggle with her abusive father. She deserved the chance to fully complete her story arc by being the one to finally put an end to Thanos' reign of terror.

In Avengers: Endgame, Nebula gets the opportunity to kill her past self, a moment that nicely exemplifies her growth as a character. However, while she kills her past to preserve her future, that does not give her real closure with the Mad Titan himself, the one who literally turned her into a killing machine. She had also finally developed the relationship with her sister she had been craving most of her life, and then Thanos, with basically zero hesitation, murdered Gamora in his pursuit of the Infinity Stones. Nebula had the most personal motivation to kill Thanos. Not only does she want to put a stop to him because it is the right and heroic thing to do for the universe at large, but because of the horrific things he had done to her personally. She deserved the right to be the one wielding the Infinity Gauntlet in Tony's place.

In addition to make narrative sense within the MCU, Nebula wielding the Gauntlet would have been a fitting tribute to the original Infinity Gauntlet comics from 1991. In that series, Nebula does in fact take the Gauntlet from Thanos to defeat him. While not everything in the comics necessarily makes sense for the movies, and the MCU's "adaptations" of comic book storylines are often extremely loose, this is one plot twist that would have been perfect to adapt.

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Killing Tony was clearly the overall intention of the film. Pepper nails it exactly right that Tony would never be able to rest and retire if there was any possibility he could make the world a better or safer place. That is all absolutely true, and he is undoubtedly an admirable and vitally important hero. However, he has already completed the character arc that would require him to actually die for the cause all the way back in The Avengers.

In the first team-up movie, an unimpressed Captain America tells Tony that when the time came, he would not be the one to lay down on the wire and sacrifice himself for the greater good. At the end of the film he does just that and proves Steve wrong when he grabs the nuclear bomb and carries it through the wormhole, not even hesitating when he is unable to contact Pepper for a proper goodbye. He didn't need to literally kill himself to prove himself a hero, because thematically this arc of heroic self-sacrifice had already been completed before.

By writing towards a specific plot point instead of following the logical conclusion of the characters, the writers of Avengers: Endgame robbed Nebula of her rightful chance at closure. Instead, they knew they had to kill off Tony Stark, so they wrote a character arc that Tony had already gone through to reach a specific ending. We do love Tony Stark 3000, and his end was truly heartbreaking and brilliantly acted, but this ending would have been way better with Nebula.

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