" If our own government was responsible for the deaths of almost a hundred thousand people... would you really want to know?"

V For Vendetta

Do you remember what I said before? The person left behind has to live to the full. You’ll cry sometimes, but you’ll also laugh a lot and live bravely. That’s the proper response to the love you were given. 

How am I supposed to live without you? I’ll be gone for just a while. I promise. This time, I’ll come to you. I will come looking for you. In our next life, I will make sure to be born with a long life and stay by your side for a long while. I will beg the divinity to let me do just that. I’ll be back soon. I’ll go running and come back running. 

Stages of watching a romantic kdrama...

Stage 1: Seeing the male lead.

Stage 2: When the first leads meet.

Stage 3: When the couple fall in love.

Stage 4: Any time the couple are close to one another.

how to tell your crush you like them 101

“I thought you didn’t drive.”

“Yes, but I wanted to show off that I have a car.”

How Marvel Destroys Character Arcs. Part Two: Captain America

This is continuation post of a previous piece I did concerning character arcs and Black Widow. If you haven’t read part one of this post, you can find it on my page or clicking the link in my bio. Part Three will be Romanogers.

As stated before, SPOILERS FOR ENDGAME AHEAD…

Ready?

Okay.

PART TWO:

Captain America

Captain America had been my favorite avenger – until Endgame, of course. He had been stalwart in his morals, and Chris Evans managed to give us the impression that no matter what threat was facing the avengers, Cap could handle it. If everyone else had collapsed from exhaustion, given up, and been left for dead, we’d see Cap still standing, ready to face down  his foes (which is an exact shot we saw in Endgame prior to his reinforcements). Captain America was a comfort for the audience, a safety blanket, and despite heroes like Thor or Hulk being more powerful, it was Cap that I hung my hat on to get the team through impossible odds.

His character arc is complicated. The writers have a difficult time in moving someone like Cap to grow because what makes him so special is his unwavering belief in fighting for the little guy, in not tolerating bullies, in seeing the world in black and white, what’s right and what’s wrong, and never wavering from being who he is. In a world constantly changing, we admire Cap who remains steadfast, unfazed by the changing times or the people within them.

In Captain America: The First Avenger, prior to the end of the first Act we get the theme of the movie and the character of Steve Rogers. If you read Blake Snyder’s book on screenwriting he says that any good blockbuster movie will have the theme uttered by one of the characters early on in the movie. This time, it comes from Dr. Erskine:

DR. ERSKINE

Whatever happens tomorrow, promise

me you’ll stay who you are. Not a perfect soldier…

HE TAPS STEVE’S CHEST WITH ONE FINGER, LOOKING INTO HIS EYES.

DR. ERSKINE (CONT’D):

But a good man.

Steve clinks his glass with Erskine’s.

STEVE:

To the little guys.

To be a good man. To stay who you are… these are sometimes the hardest things to do in life. What does it take to be a good man? What does it mean to be a good man? And what does it take in this movie for Steve Rogers to stay true to who he is, despite what he is about to experience?

Throughout TFA, Steve Rogers comes into his own as Captain America. He develops a romantic relationship with Peggy Carter and is challenged by his superior to not disobey orders. Steve stays true to himself and does what he believes is right. The perfect soldier, as Dr. Erskine puts it, is a man who has lost himself. He does whatever his superior says. He foregoes his own morals and values for a mission. He would know, wouldn’t he? He came from Germany after all, where a soldier, despite being a good man before he dons the uniform, turns into a monster.

I wish that there would have been harder choices for Steve to make to show the audience the difficulty of always being the good man. Disobeying a superior officer is a great way to do that, but it has been done to death in movies. Other ways I can think of are also cliche: him not leaving a man behind, him making a moral choice to not attack a compound if there are civilians inside it. The first noncliche example I can think of is in Wonder Woman – the No Man’s Land scene. She makes the choice to stay and fight for innocents, despite the despair bearing down on her and her friends. Steve (the other Steve, the DC Steve) tells her that they have to stay with the mission, and utters the line: “You can’t save everybody.” This comes as a bit of foreshadowing, as toward the end of the movie, Steve is the one that cannot be saved.  I digress.

At the end of TFA, Steve makes “the sacrifice play” and puts the plane into the ocean and now we are shown what it means to be a good man (in the writer’s eyes): to sacrifice for the greater good, no matter what. In my opinion, there wasn’t as much of an arc to Cap’s character in TFA. At every moment, no matter what the circumstance, Steve made the choice true to him, to being a good man. It’s great, and we the audience can get behind it, but how does one grow a character that is already so defined from the get go? His arc actually never wavered; it never progressed. And for a movie involving compromise and evil, that’s good, but…

When we get to Winter Soldier, Cap is now in the modern world, 70 years later, and is faced with the changing landscape of truth and trust. We first see a little banter between him and Widow, which quickly turns to a strong conflict of morals and mission. Natasha collects data from the ship while Steve was assigned to saving the passengers aboard. Steve was unaware of Natasha’s mission and is appalled. This is compounded by the fact that Steve is no longer a soldier, where choices are laid out clearly: he is a spy, working for Shield. It conflicts with every aspect of his character. When we hear the line “he’s a man out of time” it isn’t just about him being temporally in a different setting, but that his values and morals are of another era. We want him to hold onto that, but we also want to see him grow.

Instead Cap becomes the anchor with which other characters grow around him. He learns to trust Natasha, sure, and the two develop a more intimate connection, but the real growth here is Natasha herself: by the end of the movie, she accepts her dark past, releases it to the public, and establishes trust with someone other than Hawkeye. Bucky goes from being a controlled spy to setting himself free, all because of Steve’s friendship and the bond that they had when they were young. And as for Steve, his growth is centered around moving on from the past, and accepting his place in this new world, but this arc isn’t really completed until Age of Ultron where he says: “I’m home.”

Actually the exact lines are:

Steve Rogers : I don’t know, family, stability. The guy who wanted all that went in the ice seventy-five years ago. I think someone else came out.

Tony Stark : You alright?

Steve Rogers : I’m home.

This is the first clear indication that Steve has left the desire to return to the 1940s behind him. He’s established himself as an avenger, a leader, and as a trainer in the SHIELD facility with Natasha. And for all the crap Joss Whedon got for AoU with Natasha, he hit the character arc of Cap right: when you go through something like that – a crucible of sorts – it changes you.

Even civil war was a steady continuation of his arc – for the first time ever Steve hid secrets from a friend to protect him, or maybe, to protect himself. He bled into the shades of grey of this new world. And those choices had consequences. AND HE HAD PEGGY’S FUNERAL, WHERE HE KISSED SHARON CARTER, her great niece or whatever. More on this later, but in Infinity War he really didn’t have an arc because he didn’t have time for it, but Endgame…man Endgame did some damage.

The Choice:

For those reading, you already know what Steve does at the end of Endgame. He says he wants to take Tony’s advice and actually live, so he goes back in time, creates an alternate timeline, and spends the rest of his days with Peggy. He quantum leaps back to the main timeline and hands his shield to Sam. It’s a touching moment, but for some of us the scene (like Nat’s death) fell flat.

This is the kind of stuff that drives me nuts because at the end of Endgame, none of the choices prior ever mattered. None of the things Cap actually did or said in any of the other movies mattered, because his final choice is the complete antithesis of his character arc. The writers talk about whether or not his choice was fan service or not. Yeah, it was. And that’s what is really difficult about writing comic book stories or stories like the Harry Potter franchise: the pressure to please fans sometimes overrides the appropriate arc for the character.

Just as bad: it contradicts the main theme of Endgame: there are some things we have to accept. In the promos we hear Peggy’s voice" “you know none of us can go back…” a line harking back to Winter Soldier. Things cannot be the same.

Steve Rogers says: “Some of us move on, but not us.” And that if one were to try and change the past, there will be serious consequences. Natasha’s death coincided with that theme. So did Tony’s. But Steve? Steve had no consequences. So not only did he violate his arc, but his choices also violated the theme of Endgame.

I would have been happy if Steve had gone back to the past, but that choice had SERIOUS consequences – like we saw a clip of the Ancient One saying like there are multiple timelines branching out in all different directions or something, I don’t know, but to have him make that choice – a choice that retcons his character arc – and to have NOTHING happen is a hard pill for me to swallow. Or have him go back, dance with Peggy, but then leave. If his home is the avengers, the ones who sacrificed so much for him, the ones who have spent the last 15 years with, then he needs to stay there, retire, but stay in the present. His actions don’t make sense. They would if Peggy had been an ever present figure throughout his movies, but besides Winter Soldier and Steve seeing a photo of her on a wall, we don’t see that. We see him kissing Sharon Carter, flirting with Black Widow, spending years with her underground and developing an intimate relationship. Not once do we see Steve reflect on missing Peggy and longing to go back through Winter Soldier, Ultron, and Civil War. I’m taking the nightmare Steve had in Ultron (where he danced with Peggy) as an interpretation as just that: a nightmare. It was all the things he actually feared. In the scene the implication is very strong: he knows he can’t stay here, he knows it isn’t right.

It’s not that Cap is being too selfish, because I think Cap also deserves one big helluva win; it’s that his selfish choice conflicts with everything we’ve come to know about him. What would have been great, and would have fit his arc from Ultron and the theme of Endgame, is if Endgame had Cap wondering about going back, debating it, considering the possibilities and tempting fate, but then realizing all the family and home he has here, and fully embracing them as his family (kinda like how Natasha did). Cap then would have accepted the cards life dealt him and he would have acknowledged that that you can’t go back, because going back would be living in the past, metaphorically and literally.

“You know I’d offer to cook you dinner but you seem pretty miserable already” “You’re here to do your laundry?” “And to see a friend.”

I’ll give my love, I don’t care if it hurts

AND THEN ENDGAME RUINS ALL THAT CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. 

Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanoff: 2012 - 2019

Someone: You know you’ll never actually be with Chris Evans, right?

Me: Yeah, I know duh.  (I say while trying to rub my eyes naturally as if I’m not crying on the inside)

— Operation Proposal