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Steve/Tony was once the Fan-Preferred Couple but it lost a lot of fire in Phase 2 given the two's lessened interactions and Character Development taking them in different places. It reached its climax in Captain America: Civil War where it was revealed that Steve had withheld from Tony that Bucky had killed Howard and Maria Stark, firmly establishing that Bucky is the most important person in Steve's life. Steve/Tony still has some followers but nowhere near as much as Steve/Bucky. By consequence, Steve/Bucky also comprehensively killed Steve/Sharon, Steve/Sam, and to a lesser degree Steve/Natasha. Steve/Sharon sunk even further after The Falcon and the Winter Soldier showed Sharon, quite understandably, now hates Steve and was a victim of Adaptational Villainy.
Revealing Clint to be married in Avengers: Age of Ultron killed all his ships pretty much overnight. Either out of support for Clint/Laura or because Clint was suddenly not worth the energy anymore.
Adaptation Displacement: Which has actually become quite a large complaint about the MCU. It's so iconic that other Marvel adaptations, and even Earth-616, have adopted aspects of it in favour of telling new stories.
The MCU is now better known, and earns more, than the mainstream Marvel comics.
Thanks to the MCU's iconic status, only long time comic fans are likely to remember that:
The Infinity Stones were originally known as the Infinity Gems.
Marvel building a cinematic universe without access to Spider-Man, the X-Men, or the Fantastic Four? And choosing Iron Man, who was quitethe Scrappy in 2007, to launch it?
A film based on the Guardians of the Galaxy? And one based on Ant-Man? That's just foolish on the face of it.
For the first two Phases, Thanos was an Orcus on His Throne who ended up losing an Infinity Stone (the Mind Stone) thanks to constantly sending his flunkies out to do his heavy lifting. His first cameo was groundbreaking. By the time of Age of Ultron, people were growing tired of his build-up taking so long and there were fan versions of Infinity War online by the time of Civil War. Come 2018 however, and Thanos proved that he was worth the wait.
The MCU shows no sign of stopping with media slated for a decade after the Infinity Saga ended. After having already devoted a decade of their lives to a saga that they feel ended well, some fans do honestly wish that the MCU would end, getting tired of the deluge and/or feeling that the franchise runs the risk of becoming stale and formulaic.
Archive Panic: Over a decade of content with more than twenty instalments, newcomers can be scared off by how big the MCU is.
Black Panther and Captain Marvel brought more diversity into what some saw as a franchise dominated by white males.
For long-time comic readers, Phase 4 sees a lot of Character Rerailment to the characters' Earth-616 personas and abilities as well bringing in more obscure comic ideas and concepts.
Base Breaker: Having lasted for more than a decade with Loads and Loads of Characters, it is easier to say that nearly everyone is this. Everyone has done and/or said something that they'll never live down which has cast them as Unintentionally Unsympathetic in the eyes of one fan group just as much as it causes the other to herald them as the true hero of the saga while either being changed too much from the comics or wonderfully updated for the era of the films. The most prominent example are:
The Mandarin of Iron Man 3. To be fair, a 100% adaptation would have had its own problems, and while some didn't like it, some thought it was a clever subversion. The general consensus seems to be that, while it was clever, it shouldn't have been done to so iconic a villain.
Most human females seem to have an unfortunate tendency to become this (for instance, is Pepper Potts a Badass Normal or did she only serve a role in the first Iron Man? Is Wanda a good person who was led astray or a Psychopathic ManchildKarma Houdini? Is Carol Danvers a strong and compelling female lead or a Flat Character?). The standout however has to be Darcy Lewis from the Thor films. She's either the funniest character in the MCU or The Scrappy of the whole saga.
Bucky Barnes/The Winter Soldier during the Infinity Saga. A well developed Tragic Villain / Anti-Hero or could be replaced with a pineapple and the plot wouldn't change?
Phase 4 proved rather divisive, given how it breaks from the MCU's formula and established superhero tropes. Some have played the "They Changed It, Now It Sucks" card, along with some "too woke" complaints, arguing that established lore and characters are being changed too much from either the comics or prior MCU films. Others enjoy that the 'verse is branching out and not retreating old ground, welcoming the unique stories and increasing representation. And some fans split the difference saying that Phase 4 is fine, if not flawless, but it simply had the bad fortune to followAvengers: Endgame.
Recasting actors has emerged as this starting in Phase 4. Marvel refused to recast the late Chadwick Boseman as T'Challa - going The Character Died with Him route - while they did recast Thaddeus Ross following William Hurt's death.
Likewise, the decision not to recast Kang and replacing him with Doctor Doom. Some think it would have been easier to recast Kang (after all, Spider-Man: No Way Home proved that variants don't have to look exactly the same), resenting that he amounted to an Aborted Arc. Others think Loki Season 2 provided a good end to the arc and are eager to see Doom. And a third option seems to be that they're more uncertain about the fact that Robert Downey, Jr. was chosen for Doom but have decided to wait for more information until passing judgment.
Continuity Lock Out: Avengers: Age of Ultron is when this trope really starts to show. While most entries can largely be viewed alone (and often times there's a recap of relevant information), there are always some things that require knowledge of previous films or shows for things to make absolute sense.
Draco in Leather Pants: Loki. So much so that he's overshadowed most other villains, barring Hela and Killmonger, getting this treatment.
Phil Coulson in Phase 1. He got his own spin-off he was so popular. Sadly though, the way he evolved in said spin-off led to him becoming a Base Breaker.
Despite them not appearing too frequently, Lady Sif and the Warriors Three are very popular with fans.
Wong. Despite not appearing that much, his Not So Above It All moments make him very popular.
Fan Dumb: As the MCU continues, a common complaint has cropped up about how much prior content fans need to consume to understand things. This is generally how Sequels tend to work, needing to be watched in order to understand the story. It's a feature, not a bug. And even then, most fans argue that aside from a few exceptions, most notably the Avengers films or the Spider-Man trilogy, the entries can largely be viewed in a vacuum.
With the DC Extended Universe. So much so that James Gunn went online at one point and told the fans to cut it out.
The Arrowverse seems to have a rivalry with the Netflix shows, Daredevil and Arrow in particular, and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. By contrast, those who mainly watch the movies seem to like the Arrowverse and its heroes, Supergirl in particular. Though with the development of the Disney+ shows, incidentally premiering the same year that Supergirl ended, allowing more direct comparisons to the Arrowverse, some more overt rivalry feelings have begun to ferment. It got worse when some fans who were displeased by Phase 4 began using the Arrowverse characters as Fix Fic material.
A mild one with Sony's Spider-Man Universe and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse over who should get the rights to the Spider-Man characters. MCU fans argue that Spidey with Marvel studios allows Peter Parker to be taken to new places rather than rigidly adhering to the past beats of old Spider-Man media and interact with the wider Marvel universe. Sony fans argue that Spider-Man mythology already has more than enough characters for Peter to interact with and that their films are Truer to the Text about how Spider-Man should be.
After Martin Scorsese made his infamous denouncement of the MCU as "popcorn heavy" while admitting that he's never sat through a film in late 2019, a rather Vocal Minority of MCU fans went right to war with Scorsese's fan base, decrying him as an old man out of touch with what modern audiences want to see, especially after James Gunn had a mature response that was met with a doubling down on the criticism by Scorsese. Though most MCU fans, if agreeing with the Vocal Minority, didn't give it a second thought and considered it ancient history by early 2020.
The most consistently ignored film is The Incredible Hulk. It' so average that no one really remembers it.
Prior to Disney+, the tie-in TV shows were either fully embraced or fully ignored. The Netflix shows were a prime candidate to ignore given how they never leaned into being part of the Shared Universe. Even showing Stark Tower was a no-no for them.
If you want Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. to remain canon, you either have to ignore Season 6 and 7 or lie to yourself that the Avengers managed to get the glove off of Thanos.
After Civil War nicely broke the base, there are some hardline fans on both sides of the debate who refuse to acknowledge Infinity War/Endgame and the Avengers patching things up so that only their hero can be the one who saves the day.
Cap's retirement in Avengers: Endgame is not popular at all. To many fans, it didn't come off as a hard won retirement but more as a selfish abandonment of all his friends, Bucky in particular.
There are quite a few fans who regard Endgame as the end of the MCU, either out of genuinely not being interested in anything that follows, finding Endgame to be a fitting end to the saga, or simply not wanting to devote another ten years of their life to the franchise.
Phase 4 saw a rise in complaints from some rather misogynist parts of the fanbase who believed that the old guard of heroes; Hulk, Clint Barton, Doctor Strange; have been weakened to prop up female heroes. This likely stems from the fact that Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame saw the old guard fight at their full potential to combat a universe ending threat in do or die battles. In Phase 4, the heroes simply don't need to go all out and have returned to their usual levels; Hulk is training She-Hulk and holding back to not injure her, Barton views the Tracksuit Mafia as beneath him and doesn't need to go all out against them, and following the Darkhold turning Wanda Maximoff into an Invincible Villain, Strange can't stop her one-on-one.
For all the complaints that Phase 4 was directionless, so was Phase 1. The difference is that Phase 4 has Continuity Lock Out from the previous three Phases and people have grown to expect a clear Myth Arc from Marvel.
There were likewise a litany of complaints that new Bigger Bad Kang the Conqueror was overhyped by Marvel and not very threatening based on his on-screen record. These were the exact same complaints levelled at Thanos before Infinity War, given that he lost an Infinity Stone and his Orcus on His Throne tendencies caused him to outsource his schemes to Loki and Ronan, to the point that Thanos still enjoys a reputation as something of a Memetic Loser. The difference is that Kang's variants tend to keep dying as soon as they're introduced despite his Deity of Human Origin status. Thanos was kept away from the main story and was, despite being mocked by fans, never seen physically losing before he showed up.
Likewise, the MCU has seen complaints about it becoming, as Martin Scorsese infamously said, "popcorn heavy" due to what is seen as an increasing amount of humour undercutting what would otherwise be dramatic moments. But the MCU always placed a heavy focus on its light-hearted comedic moments to counter the drama. The difference is that as the MCU allowed superhero media to become more mainstream, and those other medias generally didn't give comedy an equal focus to drama, it began to seem like the MCU had more jokes than its earlier films.
Likewise, the Unfortunate Implications (see below) that seem to venerate the status quo has been a feature of superhero media as long as there's been superhero media to the point that "Reed Richards Is Useless" was named to summarize it. The difference is that since the MCU leans very hard into "Like Reality Unless Noted" - compared to the Denser and Wackier source material - this trend is more noticeable. And as Marvel Comics writers have said in the past, while Tony Stark could readily cure most problems in the Marvel Universe, that wouldn't fix those same problems in the real world and could potentially be seen as trivializing those problems.
Was once great friends with Harry Potter, particularly after the release of Doctor Strange, though after J. K. Rowling came out as violently transphobic, this association lowered in prominence a bit. There's still some overlap but it's a far cry from its heyday in the 2010s.
Was quite friendly with the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic at first but it's lowered in prominence since 2013. Going by FIMFiction.net, the lessening association seems to be due to fans feeling that the directions both franchises have gone in have made crossing over more difficult. They're not rivals though.
There is a lot of overlap with Star Wars with fans of both eagerly awaiting the day that Disney will have an official crossover between the two. Even the Hate Dumb elements get along by hating on Disney.
Fans of Transformers, particularly fans of the Bayverse, are very fond of the MCU. Transformers One having MCU alum Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson and Brian Tyree Henry among its cast only increased the friendship.
The franchise, the Thor sub-franchise in particular, gels quite well with Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson & the Olympians fandom. Especially follow Riordan's Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard.
Largely in this state with with other Marvel adaptations that ran concurrently with it (such as the X-Men Cinematic Universe and Sony's Spider-Man Universe). Though MCU fans don't like that such adaptations mean those characters are delayed from joining the MCU, they do enjoy the performances and think those variants of the characters would be great additions to the MCU.
With the Monsterverse due to similar tone and many shared actors.
Memetic Loser: Oh there are several[1] but Hawkeye is easily the most notable. Having just a bow and arrow among the Avengers and never taking part in the adventures that star the other Badass Normals puts him rather near the bottom of the popularity list.
Memetic Mutation: Fans apparently think the story in Norse Mythology about Loki shape-shifting into a horse and ending up pregnant is hilarious, and has become an endless source of fanart jokes.
Nick Fury = Demoman. Both are badass black men with eyepatches.
TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BUILD THIS IN A CAVE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
Ivan Vanko's "Vhere ees my burd? I vant my burd." from Iron Man 2.
The most popular candidate for this is Thor and the rest of the Asgardians, Odin in particular, counterbalancing Loki's Draco in Leather Pants status, especially following the revelation that Asgard was the Empire before it became the Kingdom. It's very easy to find fangirls painting the Asgardians as a planet of Jerk Jocks who are a day away from returning to their imperialistic conquests.
SHIELD. After Captain America: The Winter Soldier, half the fanbase marked them as Memetic Losers for not noticing Hydra's infiltration. The other concluded that the reason they didn't notice was because SHIELD was ultimately no different from Hydra, simply being Affably Evil in its tyranny.
Sacred Cow: The MCU's Vocal Minority simply will not tolerate any criticism of the saga, no matter how mild, or stand for any jokes at its expense.
Scapegoat Creator: After Phase 2 ended and more BTS information about it came out, Isaac Perlmutter has taken the brunt of the blame for its more controversial decisions. Helped by the fact that he's expressed open pride about his regressive policies, such as delaying Black Widow. The fact that he later came out as a pro-Donald Trump bigot helped quickly sour his reputation amongst the majority of the MCU fanbase.
Among all masked heroes, Spider-Man/Peter Parker receives a fair amount of criticism for frequently unmasking on-screen in subsequent films after Civil War compared to his previous film counterparts.
Seasonal Rot: Phase Three to some. As the buildup to Infinity War kept increasing, it seemed as though all of the Earth-bound adventures, and their long term consequences, mainly those of Captain America: Civil War and Black Panther, were just being hammered through.
Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Back in 2008, Marvel Studios took a massive gamble with Phase 1 of the MCU with no one thinking that it would succeed for a number of reasons. Following the runaway success of The Avengers and not only did every other media giant try and copy this formula, every fan expected a Shared Universe with lots of crossovers. It's honestly difficult to overstate how risky this now played out idea initially was back in 2008.
Darcy Lewis is frequently shipped with a multitude of characters that she never shared any scenes with. The top candidates are Loki, Hawkeye, Steve Rogers, and Peter Quill.
Hawkeye/Coulson based off of 90 seconds of interaction. In fairness, it's suggested a few times that Coulson was Hawkeye's handler so they have a working relationship.
Maria Hill/Black Widow.
Tony Stark/Loki. The two's only scene together is Snark to Snark Combat and it's clear that both would really like to kill the other. But as both Thor and Tony have commented, Loki is Tony's Shadow Archetype and that was more than enough for the fangirls.
Stephen Strange/Tony Stark due to their similar story arcs, personalities, them being "Awesome Facial Hair Bros", and both actors playing Sherlock Holmes. Following their meeting in Infinity War, the pairing only grew in popularity.
Peter Parker/Shuri. Though this one seems to have some platonic popularity as opposed to just romance.
Winter Soldier/Black Widow. Both based on their comic romances and a Pair the Spares mentality for Steve/Sharon shippers to sink Steve/Bucky and Steve/Natasha.
Tony Stark/May Parker. They have only a few seconds of interaction on-screen but the chemistry between Robert Downey Jr. and Marisa Tomei, who had not only dated in real life but portrayed lovers in Only You, was more than enough for fans, especially for those who didn't like Pepper Potts.
Following the ending of Spider-Man: No Way Home and the 2021 Hawkeye Disney+ show, Peter Parker/Kate Bishop emerged as a popular pairing. Helps that Kate can largely be considered a Distaff Counterpart to Peter Parker following his romance with MJ falling apart.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks: It's usually a minority opinion, but it always pops up whenever a character or concept is radically changed from Earth-616.
Although the intention was to showcase the technological advancements throughout the entire movie franchise, many fans expressed dissatisfaction with the continued use of nanotechnology as the heroes' method of donning their suits, as they viewed it as a lazy and cheap alternative to the traditional physical costumes and masks.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Though perhaps unavoidable due to the risk of Continuity Lock Out alienating casual viewers, but some long-time fans of the MCU do wish that the saga would show more of the consequences and fallout of the various movies, namely delving more into the aftermath of the Snap, rather than being Like Reality Unless Noted.
Unacceptable Targets: The one part of the MCU that no one is allowed a shot at is King T'Challa/the Black Panther, the character not the movie, following the tragic demise of his actor Chadwick Boseman who delivered such beautiful performances and did so much philanthropic work all while Secretly Dying.
Unfortunate Implications: A increasing complaint about the MCU since Phase 3 is that many villains (most famously Killmonger and Thanos) make rather salient points about the world with the heroes' response being to uphold the flawed status quo or doing the most token of things to address the problems.
↑Ant-Man, Black Widow, SHIELD, the Guardians of the Galaxy and even Thanos himself.
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