Thread:Elledy92/@comment-26838855-20190425183005/@comment-26838855-20190425201537

You're right, Bootstrap Paradox wasn't the best term. I was using it more to describe the fact that there weren't branching timelines, basically saying "It's not the Butterfly Effect".

Because you're right, the Avengers definitely changed some events during the Time Heist. While it's conceivable that Frigga, for example, encountered older Thor on that day in 2013 between Thor: The Dark World scenes, there is some stuff that's incompatible. There's no way Loki escaped with the Space Stone in 2012 because they would've had to find him by the next day and he could have gone anywhere. There's no way Quill got knocked out and rewoken during Morag, and certainly no way the Thanos stuff is compatible with the timeline.

But they corrected it all. The way Banner explains it, the Time Heist incidents are essentially just quick deviations before returning to the normal timeline, rather than a new branch. Not just a new branch that ends up practically identical, but literally the old timeline, like:

For all Time Heist points.

The only thing I don't really get is how it can return to the exact same reality when a few minutes have been changed - not just a new timeline that's almost identical - but that's what Banner and the Ancient One said.

Steve staying in 1970 is the only thing they do that they do not undo, so by the rule that they are keeping the timeline the same, it has to be part of the same timeline in a Bootstrap Paradox. 2023 Steve always married her in 1970 and lived through the next 53 years hidden away.