But with Black Widow, the MCU seemed stuck. She’d been conceived in a different time, when it was sufficient for women to be sidekicks and decoration. An era when the former Marvel CEO Ike “Mar-a-Lago Cabinet” Perlmutter could block Black Widow merchandise because he didn’t think girls’ toys would sell. Though Black Widow was an extraordinary fighter and a fearless Avenger, she seemed perpetually cast as a foil to the male superheroes, rather than being a compelling character in her own stead. And as Avengers: Endgame proved (significant spoilers ahead), not even in her final moments would Romanova get to be the star. Her death was an act of sacrifice for Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, one in which Black Widow instantly calculated that his wife and children made his life worth more than her own.

I loved Avengers: Endgame as much as the hundreds of millions of other people who saw it over the past few days, despite its inconsistencies, its loosey-goosey treatment of the consequences of time travel, and its entirely implausible presentation of how physically strong one gloveless purple meanie (to quote my colleague David Sims) can be. Still, I was shocked at how perfunctorily the MCU was able to dispatch its founding female character, even as it put Gwyneth Paltrow’s Pepper in an Iron Woman suit and let Tessa Thompson’s Valkyrie ride a winged horse. Was this really the best Marvel could do for Black Widow, a character who’s starred in the MCU for almost a decade? A fall off a cliff, followed by 30 screen seconds of gentle grief from the men who’d apparently loved her the most? (Her death, you’ll note, wasn’t even enough to shake the equanimity of Zen Hulk.)

Black Widow died as she lived: being manipulated by Marvel to add texture to male characters. Over the years, she was Tony Stark’s assistant (“Is that dirty enough for you?” Romanova purred after pouring him a martini), emphasizing the sleazier aspects of Iron Man’s decline due to palladium poisoning. She made Captain America kiss her in a shopping mall during The Winter Soldier to distract two nearby Hydra agents, an act that teased fans and made the steadfast Cap seem vulnerable. She had a long-standing, non-romantic, but only vaguely fleshed-out history with Hawkeye that was the latter’s only defining characteristic until his family showed up. And she had a nascent relationship with Bruce Banner, being the only Avenger who could manage to coax him out of Hulk mode with murmurs and hand-holding (although, as Endgame revealed, while Black Widow was left valiantly holding the band together after Thanos’s snapture, Hulk was getting ice-cream flavors named after himself and sourcing extra-giant cardigans).

There were other indignities over the years. In the first Avengers movie, Loki calls Black Widow a “mewling quim,” an archaic term for female genitalia that should be used only in games of Scrabble. To this date, more than 342,000 people have viewed a Quora question analyzing whether her breasts are real. In 2015, while hosting Saturday Night Live, Johansson gamely starred in a sketch mocking Marvel’s pusillanimity with female superheroes, imagining the Black Widow stand-alone film as a rom-com set in Manhattan.