Today's news surrounding anything Avengers is, understandably, centred on the new trailer for Avengers: End Game. The trailer looks like a slowed-down and thinned out version of the last movie in the series which was grand, to say the least, and ended with an unusual twist: with the snap of his fingers, the villain of the movie killed off half the rest of the cast, not to mention half the living creatures in the universe. Up to this point, no one has known exactly what to call it. The snap? The snappening? The moment where half the universe turned to dust? None of them quite have that ring to them.
But, thanks to the lovely people at comicbook.com, we've now got the official Marvel approved terminology for the moment that marks a definitive before and after for the Marvel Cinematic Universe: the decimation. The information comes from the MCU prelude comic, where the survivors of the event refer to it, looking back, as the decimation.
As for guy who snapped his fingers, the decimation took a toll on him too. The director, Joe Russo:
His daughter is an emotional price, but the physical price is - you’ll see it if you pause your DVD - right before he uses it to go back into the portal away from Thor while he’s got the ax in his chest, his arm is burnt to a crisp. So the physical price is the extreme power that it took to enact his plan, he paid for physically, and when he sits down on the steps at the end of the movie you can see that it actually carries up into his neck and onto his face.