Quote Originally Posted by ecarden View Post
I think I've figured out part of the disconnect for me on the Flagsmashers and it comes from expectations:

Spoiler: Expectations
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So, if you take the MCU at its implied word, especially in Homecoming, then we out to expect that the end of the Blip is basically 'back to normal.'

If that's the case, then new expulsions, new refugee camps and people dying of preventable diseases who weren't in danger before is a major decline in standards of living which should be opposed.

On the other hand, if you expected 3.5 billion people reappeared with no warning and no preparation, doubling the planet's population to result in deaths on a scale not dissimilar to the Snap, then that exact same set of bad conditions looks like a miracle of lives saved.

In one scenario, the GRC being in charge of the resettlement are monsters, in the other they've saved more human lives than anyone outside the Avengers (of course, both could be true. It could certainly be that they handled the immediate emergency brilliantly but can't manage the long term problems and are becoming dictatorial, but we totally lack any real understanding of their structure so I can't really tell).

As my framing suggests, I concede that canon certainly pushes us towards scenario 1, but that's an absolute immersion breaker for me and since it's never stated explicitly in canon, I tend to interpret it as scenario 2 with folks trying to ignore the barely avoided massive death toll.
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The Flag Smashers are comprised of people from disadvantaged nations who benefited immensely from the Snap. The background is that people from the developing world were allowed to migrate into suddenly vacated space in the developed world to provide additional labor and allow those nations to remain at roughly the previous level of economic output they had pre-Snap due to immigration restrictions being functionally eliminated (it's implied that this did not happen in the US, mitigating the issue there). Following the Blip, the people who returned were allowed to reclaim their property and this meant that these migrants, possibly numbering in the hundreds of millions, got kicked out and told to go back to their original homes. The problem is that the places that they were kicked back to were massively neglected for five years and are no longer able to properly support them. Riga seems to be an example of this, which makes sense because the Latvia is the kind of state that would expect to see a lot of out-migration following the snap.

I feel it would really help if we had a better understanding of what Earth looked like during the post-Snap period. For example, if certain major countries collapsed entirely (which seems plausible, your average authoritarian state is going to have a lot of trouble holding together if the leader and 50% of the senior military leaders get ashed), its possible that the geopolitical situation shifted massively. Possibly significant is the line 'Riga, a city on the Baltic Sea' as opposed to 'Riga, capital of Latvia,' which may imply that there isn't a Latvia anymore.

But generally yeah, it's hard to know how to react to the aftermath of a disaster we don't properly understand.