Why Hawkeye Is Actually The BEST Avenger
Low-key greatest hero ever?
Inevitably, as the MCU has transformed from being a great idea in gestation to one of the most potent, successful cultural juggernauts of all time - up there with Disney animated classics, Star Wars and The Land Before Time - people have offered what they'd call "hot takes" on it. Sometimes, those can be cast off immediately as the simple ravings of people who rail against popularity (or bitter DC fans who legitimately follow the binary conflict of the two brands) or as people trying to misread provocatively to get attention.
You will have heard the greatest hits already: Captain America: Civil War is too over-populated. Marvel films are too much fun. Nick Fury is actually a super-powered diety-type... And so is Stan Lee... They're designed to shock and occasionally appall and usually it doesn't take much to disprove them - or at least to call them out.
But there is one hot take that seems to have reared its head since Avengers: Infinity War's marketing campaign really kicked on to the next gear. By virtue of his absence (which absolutely has a reason behind it), Hawkeye has been sanctified by over-enthusiastic fans who have never stuck up for him as the MCU has repeatedly made him the whipping boy of the Avengers (and fundamentally misinterpreted the character from the comics).
All of a sudden, when his absence from the trailers and the poster became a meme, people genuinely started to notice him. To love him. To miss him. But, inevitably, because nobody can be serious these days on the Internet, it's all been done with lashings of self-conscious irony, which sort of misses the point of those committed few who genuinely bang the drum for Hawkeye.
Because, believe it or not, Hawkeye deserves a fan club more than any other Avenger. And frankly, he deserves more praise than any of them as a member of the heroic team too. Why? Because he's the least among them. To borrow a parallel from another huge cinematic franchise, he is the Neville Longbottom of the Avengers: an apparent under-achiever whose favour in the eyes of the heroes seems baffling, but which is proven by his heart, his convictions and his enthusiasm. And as time has gone on - like Neville - his powers have been uncovered as far more than they seemed.
He is no mere bowman, but it's wrong not to acknowledge that unlike every single other Avenger, he has nothing in his armoury in terms of enhancements or genetic powers. He has no Super Soldier Serum (or similar) like Cap, Bucky and Black Panther, no Infinity Stone powers like Vision and Scarlet Witch, no magic like Doctor Strange, no incredible tech augmentations like Iron Man, Ant-Man, Falcon and War Machine, nor supernatural genetics like Thor, Spider-Man or Hulk. And not even the biomechanical improvements Black Widow received in the Red Room or anything like the advantages the Guardians Of The Galaxy all inherently have.
He is JUST a man and that is the most important thing in his story.
Unlike the other Avengers he has a family (Peter Parker's doesn't really count on the same level) beyond the team itself. He chooses to be an Avenger as a job, despite everything about his physiology screaming that he's completely under-qualified. More than any other Avenger, he knows the true, human price Earth would pay if it didn't have its Mightiest Protectors, because he has a wife and three children. That's why he was the first Avenger to feel the full force of an Infinity Stone as a victim (since Cap managed to avoid it), having been mind-controlled by Loki and yet still came running back to his heroic duties.
As his impending transformation into Ronin will probably confirm, Hawkeye is the real emotional heart of the team (hence whispered rumours that he could be linked to the Soul Stone from some more outlandish theorists), and the truly worrying thing is that it is his humanity and his link to normal life that will result in that transformation. If it is because his family are killed, it will be profoundly sad; if it is because of his fellow Avengers dying in his absence, it might be even more tragic.
Because in either of those cases, even if he gets a significant coolness upgrade as Ronin, he's still going to be JUST A MAN running towards a Titan wielding several Infinity Stones with his heart already bleeding. Try and say that image is less heroic or less powerful than the idea of superhumans laying down their lives to save Earth.
It's not possible.
So maybe you should start to re-evaluate how you feel about Hawkeye. And sure, miss him when he's not in Infinity War very much (if at all), but do it for the right reasons, and not for irony's sake. Because that arrow-firing bad-ass is the best of all of those heroes, and he deserves a damn-sight more credit.