Are the Infinity Stones Alive in ‘Avengers: Endgame’?

Avengers: Endgame is almost a month away from hitting theaters, which means that the fan theories surrounding it are only starting to get more and more out of the box. A new fan theory from Reddit – which surrounds the Infinity Stones that have played such a major role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe thus far – is no exception.

Reddit user ObtuseOblong recently posited one thing about the Infinity Stones — that they might be a bit more sentient than Marvel fans had initially realized. They chronicle the different instances in which at least four of the six stones have shown some level of sentience, from the Tesseract “misbehaving” in The Avengers, to the Soul Stone having a “certain wisdom” in Avengers: Infinity War, to the whole nature of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner researching the Mind Stone’s “intelligence” in Avengers: Age of Ultron.

While there’s no telling if the Infinity Stones are canonically “alive”, the notion that they certainly seem to be does add a whole other layer to the “Infinity Saga” that has been going on in the MCU thus far. Of course, that raises the question of exactly how much agency the Stones have in the actions of those that use them, particularly with regards to Thanos’ population-shattering “snap”.

The nature of the Stones’ role in the MCU could end up playing an interesting role in Endgame, especially seeing as Thanos seemingly still has control of them when the film begins.

“[The Stones have] been misused by people who didn’t understand their true power. And now that the real master of them, Thanos, has shown up we can see what they actually do,” co-writer Christopher Markus shared in the book Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War – The Art of the Movie. “The problem is, as you can imagine, as you gain control over these things, your story just goes haywire because why are there ay stakes for the man who can control time, space, reality, your mind, your soul and power? He can reset as many times as it’ll take. So you have to build in a lot of bumps in the road or maybe keep one stone away from him for long enough in order for the thing to have any dramatic structure at all.”

Captain Marvel is in theaters now. It will be followed by Avengers: Endgame on April 26th, and Spider-Man: Far From Home on July 5th.