The Marvel Cinematic Universe spent the better part of a decade getting fans invested in the Infinity Stones, the all-powerful MacGuffins that drove countless blockbusters, established Thanos as the franchise’s first major end-of-level boss and ultimately saw several marquee Avengers sacrifice their lives and livelihoods to undo the damage caused by the Mad Titan.
The Infinity Saga was an incredible achievement, weaving together almost two dozen movies into a single overarching storyline that left audiences shocked to their core when the credits rolled on Avengers: Infinity War, before the epic Endgame saw Earth’s Mightiest Heroes come together and save the day, albeit with a five-year time jump and some temporal shenanigans thrown in.
You can understand why people were so upset that Loki turned the Stones into a throwaway gag, then, when it was revealed the Time Variance Authority has so many of them that they’re effectively meaningless, to the extent office drones are literally using them as paperweights. Responding to ComicBook’s Chris Killian in a TikTok video, Joe and Anthony Russo offered their thoughts on the matter, which you can see below.
While there was an in-canon explanation for why the TVA’s drawers were overflowing with Infinity Stones, it still stung for a great deal of the fanbase, who’d spent eleven years rooting for the Avengers, only to discover that the TVA has been hoarding them from every reality. Clearly, the Russo brothers weren’t warned about the joke ahead of time.