This may have been my favourite Stan Lee moment! The other thing I liked in that scene was the other veteran pointing out that Omaha Beach wasn't for mortal men - a way of saying, let's not get carried away here; mortal men do and have get into terrible danger fighting wars. Of course, that plays into the underlying Nostalgia For An Era Of Duty And Sacrifice theme, too...
Apparently there's a comics storyline called Black Widow: Homecoming which established Natasha as infertile, but that story is ignored a lot, so it's unclear just how integral to the character infertility is - certainly, I've heard it said that they amalgamated bits of story from years' worth of comics (though the film's called Age of Ultron it doesn't follow the recent-ish comic arc of that name except in the sense that Ultron gets built and goes bad), so it doesn't seem like fidelity to the comics is something they're too concerned with.
I really like your points about how male characters can "have it all", but Natasha as a female character can't. There has to be a price, with Natasha's loss of the ability to have children conflated (and I do think this is the most harmful aspect of the way they throw around the infertility concept) with the erasure of her humanity in the Red Room. Whereas Clint gets to walk in and out of two worlds without, apparently, suffering permanent damage to his psyche. What is it again, a hundred years since we got the vote? Fifty since we got the Pill? Are we equal yet?
And yeah, cinemas are the BEST place to nod off - you couldn't design more optimal conditions! :D
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Apparently there's a comics storyline called Black Widow: Homecoming which established Natasha as infertile, but that story is ignored a lot, so it's unclear just how integral to the character infertility is - certainly, I've heard it said that they amalgamated bits of story from years' worth of comics (though the film's called Age of Ultron it doesn't follow the recent-ish comic arc of that name except in the sense that Ultron gets built and goes bad), so it doesn't seem like fidelity to the comics is something they're too concerned with.
I really like your points about how male characters can "have it all", but Natasha as a female character can't. There has to be a price, with Natasha's loss of the ability to have children conflated (and I do think this is the most harmful aspect of the way they throw around the infertility concept) with the erasure of her humanity in the Red Room. Whereas Clint gets to walk in and out of two worlds without, apparently, suffering permanent damage to his psyche. What is it again, a hundred years since we got the vote? Fifty since we got the Pill? Are we equal yet?
And yeah, cinemas are the BEST place to nod off - you couldn't design more optimal conditions! :D