Steve Rogers’ battle experience and training make him an expert tactician and an excellent field commander, with his teammates frequently deferring to his orders in battle. Rogers’ reflexes and senses are extraordinarily keen. He has blended boxing, judo, karate, jujutsu, kickboxing, and gymnastics into his own unique fighting style and is a master of multiple martial arts. In canon, he is regarded by other skilled fighters as one of the best hand-to-hand combatants in the Marvel Universe.
do you ever think about how perfectly steve, bucky, and sam typify the 3 big wars america’s fought in over the past century?
steve is the soldier who fought in world war 2. he’s the tail end of the glory and honor of war. his reasons for fighting are clear cut, moral, as far as he can tell. but the weapons used are too deadly, too fatal for glory and honor, really. there’s the attempt to treat enemy combatants with respect, with honor, all while killing them quick than has ever been possible before. there’s the unease of the shift from the old style of fighting to the new. there’s the tiredness that only comes from a second global war in only two decades. there’s the closure that comes from unprecedented total destruction. the thought of “maybe now we can go home. maybe now we can build lives like our parents, those of us that are left.”
bucky is the soldier who fought in vietnam. he’s the one that couldn’t dodge the draft, that couldn’t evade the fight no matter how hard he tried. he’s the one who followed the orders he had to, and rebelled against all the others. his uniform was askew, more civvies than not. he didn’t look a soldier, and he didn’t fight like one either. he didn’t know why he was fighting, who he was fighting. he saw too many innocents die by the hands of his comrades, of himself. he felt agent orange burn his lungs, saw orphans crying in the streets. he came home, the rat-a-tat of machine guns echoing in his ears, always. he disembarked a plane, and was spat on by anti-war protesters. he couldn’t even be angry– he agreed with them. he participated in the winter soldier investigations, confessed what he’d been forced to do, and that almost abated the weight on his shoulders. almost.
sam is the soldier who fought in afghanistan. the modern soldier, with just as much shit as the rest of them. the difference is, where steve was greeted with celebrations and bucky was greeted with vitriol, sam is overlooked, forgotten. he suffers in silence, expected to endure without protest. sam copes, but not all vets are able to do the same. afghan war vets are the ones who take their own lives in droves, the unacknowledged, unknown aftershocks from an invasion founded on half-formed ambitions from men in suits who’d never have to bear the real burden. sam is the modern day vet, unknown, unseen, unthanked.
ok so abt 2 years ago i was trying to get into comics & i decided if i was gonna do this, i was gonna do it right, so i researched lgbtq+ characters in comics & after bouncing around some wikis for a while, i somehow ended up on the page of a character called Arnie Roth. he’s not a superhero, but he’s credited with being one of the first openly gay comic book characters so i decided to keep digging
& i am so fcking glad i did
this is Arnie Roth:
“But it hadn’t always been like this… No, back when they were both growing up on New York’s Lower East Side, during the depths of the depression, the blond-haired adonis was nothing more than a stick-legged young dreamer with his head in the clouds and his hands forever drawing. Arnie Roth was the same age as Steve Rogers – but he was bigger, faster, stronger…” (Captain America #270)
sound familiar???/???//
ok but buckle the fuck up bc we just started this wild ride
Ok please please read this whole thing because whether you care about Stucky or not, there are some amazing marvel comic panels here of Steve Rogers being the ultimate LGBT ally during the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. Additionally, there is an explicitly gay male character who is depicted as a strong and masculine protector of Steve, completely subverting the common stereotype. This is beyond awesome considering the time when these comics came out. Definitely worth the read!!!
the thing about “angry chihuahua” pre-serum steve is that on a vacuum, I get why people like it? like it’s cute, smol steve being angry and sassy, it’s funny, not everything in fandom has to be 100% serious and angst-driven etc etc, i understand that
but at the same time… it bothers me so much because it’s just. so. condescending. like… “awww look at this poor disabled man thinking he can stand up to people, haha, so adorable, thank god he has bucky around to keep him alive!111!”.
(i don’t want to get too much into how this devalues the stucky dynamic bc i don’t even go here, but bucky! respected! pre-serum steve! immensely!! he didn’t see him as a reckless idiot who needed him to survive! it’s like people take the “the little guy from brooklyn who was too dumb not to run away from a fight” quote and only remember this part and forget the rest, the most important part, “I’M FOLLOWING HIM”! bucky knows pre-serum steve was way more of a hero than some dude dressed as the american flag shooting a fake gun at movies!!! that’s the POINT!!)
it’s just so… dismissive of steve’s bravery and cleverness. people take ONE scene in the first avenger where steve gets into a fight he’s clearly not going to win, ignoring that a) the framing of the moment when the guy stands up and steve’s face makes very clear that he KNOWS he’s in trouble, he has no delusions about ACTUALLY being able to win the fight; b) the dude is being an asshole and disrespecting others in the theater and steve! gets! him! to stop!!!! The guy LEAVES to beat him up in the alley, thus accomplishing the main point of Steve’s intervention, aka to let the grieving lady watch the tribute to the troops in peace.
and that’s like… THE ONLY TIME IN THE MOVIE where pre-serum steve does something like this. right on the first enlistment scene, some dude is clearly trying to tease him with the “makes you think twice about enlisting, huh?” talk, and steve just goes “nope” and IGNORES THE GUY AND DOESN’T TAKE THE BAIT. because it doesn’t matter! it’s just some dumbass who isn’t threatening anyone! steve doesn’t need to get into a fight because someone is underestimating him – if he did, he’d fight with everyone all the time, because guess what, as a disabled man in the 40s, steve is barely considered an actual man. there’s a LEGITIMATE scientific view in this time period that argues that people like him should be murdered at birth. he KNOWS how he’s perceived. he’s aware. when he’s talking to the doctor, he’s not brattish – he asks give me a chance and is there anything you can do?. his tone in the latter line specifically is TIRED, not defiant.
and then!! the One Scene apparently everyone who thinks pre-serum steve was a moron with a macho complex didn’t watch: the training montage! where that hodge guy deliberately fucks with the barbed wire just to get in steve’s way and STEVE! DOESN’T! REACT!!!!!!!! he just grits his teeth and tries to keep going and the officer has to be like “rogers take this rifle out of the mud”. there’s no indication that steve EVER tried to fight this guy in the movie, despite the fact that he’s constantly shown laughing/bullying steve during the training. why? because it’d be a pointless fight to pick. it’d be a fight picked out of nothing but pride and steve can’t afford to do that. he stands up for what’s right, not for everything and anything that pisses him off.
it frustrates me that people don’t seem to get this because it’s like… the very core of steve’s character. he’s not a wannabe bully. he’s kind and polite to others (meeting peggy, talking to dr. eskrine. eskrine isn’t just impressed by the “i don’t like bullies” moment, he’s clearly also very pleased by the fact steve doesn’t show prejudice against him for being german). the only moment where he adopts a “fight me” posture that gets him in actual trouble, it’s to protect and help others who can’t stand up for themselves. i get that in theory the idea of smol bean steve fighting everything and everyone might sound fun, but in reality, a person who craves violence and sees it as a prime way to achieve their goals is the opposite of who steve rogers is meant to be.
(and that’s not even getting into when people write POST-serum steve with this “fight me” attitude which is like… how… do you think… that’d be ok… how do you not see a difference between a ninety-pound disabled man and a literal supersoldier trying to intimidate people physically… which part of “a weak man knows the value of strength, and knows compassion” you didn’t understand…)
so imo, this characterization weakens not only steve’s character, but his arc, and even the story of tfa as a whole? the serum works on steve because he’s already a noble, brave, good man. if he was an asshole who bites off people’s hand for looking at him wrong, none of this would make sense. by this logic, eskrine might have as well picked hodge.
Steve doesn’t react when people pick on him, because that’s his whole fucking life. But when he sees other people getting harassed, that’s when his hackles (and fists) are up
so i was watching infinity war again and i noticed that out of thor, tony, and steve’s entrances (marvel’s “big three”), tony’s is the only one where the avengers theme doesn’t play. steve and thor’s pieces are the avengers theme, but in tony’s there’s only two or three measures, just the very beginning of it, after which it morphs into something different and unique (it doesn’t play in his fight with thanos either). and i realized that while it was never addressed on screen, the score tells us how tony feels about the team post-civil war: he feels alone.
think about it: in civil war, natasha, steve, and clint all went against him. no one knew where thor and bruce were. civil war split the team, and left tony feeling that he was on his own, separated from everyone else.
there isn’t really a point to this, i just thought it was a really cool detail alan silvestri put into the score.
if anyone wants to listen to the music itself without the movie, these are the tracks i’m referring to:
another interesting detail is that tony’s entrance theme is actually more thematically similar to peter’s (he won’t come out 0:36-0:41) than any of the other avengers’.
there’s also never a moment where the avengers theme plays during a group shot, something both previous avengers movies had, signifying even more that the team has split apart.
a movie’s score, done right, is just as an important storytelling tool as the writing, directing, and acting.
“For as long as I can remember I just wanted to do what was right…”
That right there is everything. That quiet moment is the heart of Steve’s character. He has a calling that runs deeper than job or career or desires or role. It’s honestly even deeper than his own identity. Steve’s identity changes, his calling doesn’t.
No matter what other human weaknesses and flaws and insecurities he may apply to this, this is a vocation. Folks irl have followed this into all manner of dangerous and/or self-sacrificing roles. When people talk about Steve’s moral compass, it’s not one rooted in his interests or his desires, or even his limitations. It’s not rooted in fear or trauma. It’s rooted in something bigger than he is, that he is always reaching for. Part of the reason his profound change in physicality doesn’t phase him or change his commitment to being a good man is that he’s always felt this connection to something larger than his body and his identity. It’s what drives him more than anything else.
His capacity for self-sacrifice is merely and only a function of this. He never pitied himself his disabilities or superabilities. We see evidence of several people in his life loving him for exactly who he was, and role models that also devoted themselves to some bigger cause. He comes from a strong brave place, and knows how fragile and short one human life is. He’s been responsible for the loss of human life, and we see as he speaks to Wanda in CACW that he lives with that pain by understanding he can still serve something bigger than himself, even with the mistakes and limitations that he is well aware of and accepts. He knows in his heart about something bigger than his own self and his own life that is worth following and embodying, whatever the consequences may be. Death is only one consequence. Leaving his team has been another. Walking away from being Cap has been another. Losing friends, fighting authority figures, all of it. These things are not done for their own sake, or for drama or to make a point. They are the results of this drive to follow something bigger… to do what is right.
He says this quiet, reflective statement to Peggy 20 minutes into CATWS. It’s been true for two movies before this one, and it will be true for the rest of this film, and three extant movies after, and whatever comes beyond. We see him brushing up against authority figures from the beginning, and forging his own path despite them. But here in this film we do see him make a profound discovery. On one hand there is the calling, and then on the other, there is the human organizations those of us with vocations devote ourselves to, to try and fulfill that calling. But the cause that calls us and the human orgs we build to do the work are NOT the same thing. The Steve of the first act of CATWS defines an army as a group of guys who trust each other. While IW Steve would probably say the same thing, I think IW Steve realizes much more viscerally than first act CATWS Steve just how big the gulf is between the call, and most groups ostensibly trying to follow it. He’s seen what his integrity cost him, and he’s seen how many people in this world choose something else over integrity and devotion to that call. He’s disillusioned in a new way.
But he doesn’t waver. He doesn’t regret his integrity. He doesn’t regret his call. He’s not looking for forgiveness. He’s lived his life on his terms, making his choices, doing what is most important to him, which is that call bigger than he is. And there is a sort of deep mindfulness, a deep present-moment awareness to this. He isn’t doing any of this for a reward. His reward is doing the right thing, and feeling that calling sing in his heart.
This devotion is what I love about Steve. It’s what he models for me. It’s what I share with him and learn from him.
the1timetraveller 