I keep seeing a lot of posts about how Steve was in the wrong in CACW because while Tony had a plan, Steve didn’t offer any alternative to it, he was just like NOPE. The thing is though, something that immediately struck me when I watched the movie was the timing of everything. Ross and Tony bring Steve and the others the Accords THREE DAYS before they are to be signed. Those Accords were not drafted, approved and supported by 117 countries in a week. This was 100% intentional. This is also very, very common in American politics. When politicians want to pass a bill they don’t want people to look at closely, they schedule votes at weird times or when a large # of people are away from the Hill (Capital Hill). So you get these 11th hour bills that are hundreds of pages long that no one has had a chance to read, ask questions about, or negotiate on about changes. These bills are stuffed with completely unrelated stuff that gets passed as well because the whole thing has to be signed off on/approved. It’s called “pork barreling.” Those are the questions Steve tries to bring up to the group. When he’s like ‘what happens when…?’ And Tony brushes aside his concerns like ‘oh, I’m sure we’ll get to make changes later when everything dies down.’ But Steve is like what are we agreeing to NOW though? And practically as soon as they are given the “generous” 3 day warning, Peggy dies. Steve flies off to London and everything goes to hell. What time is there to propose or discuss an alternative plan??
The timing was 100% intentional to make sure the Avengers would be subject to the Accords as written–no matter what was lurking on the bottom of page 440 in fine print. Steve is 100% right to be suspicious. This is one of the dirty tricks of American politics that Steve would be totally aware of. And sure, maybe there’s a chance that everything was above board, reasonable, and so on, but you would NEVER sign a thing like that w/o actually checking/reading it. that would be foolish. I mean, did we forget that Project Insight was authorized and approved by The World Council? I guarantee you that Steve hasn’t. I absolutely believe that Steve would have been willing to talk everything out, negotiate, listen to everyone’s pov, and really consider everything carefully…but there’s no time given to do that. It’s all last minute, non-negotiable, and shady. Steve is a master tactician, natural leader, and a reasonable, thoughtful person who is a Big Picture thinker. It’s weird that people just assume he rejects the Accords because he’s being childish or something. That’s not Steve Rogers at all.
THIS. THIS. ALL OF THIS.
Steve was not being unreasonable or being “I DO WHAT I WANT BECAUSE CAPTAIN AMERICA FUCK YEAH” or incidentally “selfish.”
a. All of the points that op makes above - YES. ABSOLUTELY. There was no attempt at a “can we review this and think this over?” and “can we reach a reasonable compromise?” Because nope, the Avengers are presented with a “hey 117 countries ‘agreed’ to this and we better sign because we kinda fucked up in Lagos and this comes on the heels of fucking up in Sokovia (even if Sokovia is technically on the heads of Tony Stark with Bruce Banner and Wanda Maximoff in supporting roles).”
b. Friendly reminder - Steve is pushed to make those drastic choices because Sharon Carter warns him that the order for Bucky Barnes is shoot to kill. Not capture, not question, no further trial or investigation - even in a world where there is available technology to mimic a person’s appearance or with the knowledge that Bucky was savagely tortured and brainwashed and robbed of choice and agency.
And as long as we’re on the subject: Steve is clearly right to be paranoid about what might have been in the Accords. We see that he’s possibly the only person actively trying to read through them, in the initial scene where the Avengers are arguing about them, but he’s obviously not making very good progress because the Accords are like an inch and a half of what I expect is very small print. And once the Accords are signed off on by half the Avengers, we see:
a. The ‘shoot to kill’ order on Bucky Barnes, a prisoner of war who has been tortured and brainwashed for 70 years. They are aware of this, okay, because they know who the Winter Soldier is, which means that a large portion of his files were part of the SHIELDRA dump that Natasha executes. They’re not hunting down a dude who’s been intentionally committing assassinations and terrorist acts, they’re after a guy in need of medical treatment and more therapy than he could possibly ever receive, even in a super soldier’s lifetime. They know his situation, and, honestly, if I were Steve, I’d be feeling pretty goddamn immovable on the subject of Bucky’s execution too. I’m not a lawyer or shit, but I’m actually not even sure Bucky’s legally done anything wrong–I think there are caveats for ‘post-brainwashing and torture’ events. I mean, if you do a terrible thing at gunpoint, that’s considered a mitigating circumstance, surely 70 years of mad scientists tinkering with your brain qualifies. Shit, even if he had blown up the consulate, you would need to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that he’d been acting under his own will, not under HYDRA’s forced compliance, in order to justify a ‘shoot on sight’ command.
b. Total rejection of the right to trial. Steve even explicitly asks for a lawyer for Bucky, and is shot down out of hand. Now, like I said, I’m not a lawyer, but I can tell you that the Geneva convention guarantees the right to a fair trial, with a defense lawyer and everything, to everyone. The fucking Nazi Party got trials, okay, and that means that something in the Accords allowed the UN to bypass that requirement, not only for Bucky (who is, yes, the Winter Soldier), but also for the entirety of Team Cap, which included a war veteran (Sam), a loyal SHIELD agent (Clint), and a girl barely out of her teens (Wanda). They do not get trials before getting sent to the Raft, they just get locked up, and there’s every indication that no one outside the Avengers and the UN even knows what happened to them. Y’know what total loss of right to trial prior to imprisonment probably looks like to a dude who survived World War II? Nothing nice, I’ll tell you that.
c. As long as we’re on the subject, the Accords clearly gave the UN the right to treat any enhanced person they deemed as ‘exceptionally dangerous’ terribly. Wanda is placed under comprehensive house arrest, and then she’s tossed in a prison and a straitjacket. When we see her in the Raft, she barely looks cogent, might’ve been drugged, etc. I mean, if I was trying to subdue a vastly powerful telekinetic and psychic, I might go for heavy sedatives as my solution of choice. They don’t even look like they’ve gotten medical treatment for their injuries–Clint’s face is still a mess. That’s not approved treatment of prisoners, ever.
d. Disregard for the need to investigate a terrorist act resulting in the death of a ruler on foreign soil. I don’t care if you have a picture of the ‘perpetrator,’ you should still be doing an investigation.
I’m sure I could think of other stuff.
TL;DR: Steve’s concerns about the Accords pan out, probably in exactly the ways he was most afraid of. Being able to amend a document later doesn’t mean that you’re not subject to it now, and being subject to the Accords is clearly a problem.
At 11 o’clock at night, you moved across the train car to sit far too close to two girls about half your age so you could interrupt our conversation to tell us how pretty we are. We said thank you, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a second time to say that you didn’t want to bother us, but we needed to hear it, how pretty we are. We said cool, thanks, have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
You interrupted us a third time to say you wouldn’t say anything else, you didn’t want to bother us, you just had to let us know. We said have a good night, and went back to our conversation.
This seemed to perplex you. You came all that way across a train car to bestow upon us this life altering knowledge - the fact we were pretty - and all you got was a polite thank you? You grumbled about gratitude, about how you better not end up on facebook, were we putting you on facebook? Why was my friend looking at her phone? Was she putting you on facebook? All you’d done was tell us we were pretty.
At this point, my friend says, “Sir, we’re trying to have a conversation. Please don’t be disrespectful.”
This was when you got angry. Disrespectful? YOU? For taking the time out of your day to tell us we were pretty? Did we know we were pretty?
“Yes, we knew,” says my friend.
Well, that was the last straw. How dare we know we were pretty! Sure, you were allowed to tell us we were pretty, but we weren’t allowed to think it independently, without your permission! And if we had somehow already known - perhaps some other strange man had informed us earlier in the day - we certainly weren’t allowed to SAY it! Where did we get off, having confidence in ourselves? You wanted us to know we were pretty, sure, but only as a reward for good behavior. We were pretty when you gifted it upon us with your words, and not a moment before! You raged for a minute about how horrible we were for saying we thought we were pretty, how awful we turned out to be.
I took a page out of your book and interrupted you. “Sir, you said you wouldn’t say anything else, and then you kept talking,” I said. “You complimented us, we said thank you, and we don’t owe you anything else. It’s late, you’re a stranger, and I don’t want to talk to you. We’ve tried to disengage multiple times but you keep bothering us.”
At this point, our train pulled into the next stop. My friend suggested we leave, so we got up and went to the door.
Seeing your last chance, you lashed out with the killing blow. “I was wrong!” you shouted at us as we left, “You’re ugly! You’re both REALLY UGLY!”
Fortunately, since our worth as human beings is in no way dependent upon how physically attractive you find us, my friend and I were unharmed and continued on with our night. She walked home; I switched to the next train car and sat down.
So, strange man, I know you’re confused. I don’t know if you’ll think about anything I said to you, but I hope you do learn this: when you give someone something - a gift, a compliment, whatever - with stringent stipulations about how they respond to it, you are not giving anything. You are setting a trap. It is not as nice as you think it is.
But you’ll be happy to know that when I sat down in the next car, a strange man several seats over called, “Hey, pretty girl. Nice guitar. How was your concert?”
“Thanks. Good,” I said, then looked away and put on my headphones, the universal sign for ‘I’d like to be left alone.’
“Wow. Fine. Whatever. Fucking bitch,” he said.
Fucking creepers. May I ask how feminism or anything similar would actually have prevented this from happening? This ya already socially unacceptable.
Men - because to be clear, I called them ‘strange men’ because they were strangers to me, not because there was anything abnormal about them - act this way because they are raised in a culture that lets them believe their time and opinions are more important than the time and opinions of women, and that as a consequence, they are owed women’s attention. They are socialized to believe women should be grateful to them for their attention, and that they are being denied something rightfully theirs when women are not.
Raising someone with feminism, the idea that all sexes/genders are equals and thus no party is beholden to or more important than another, would have prevented this by not allowing men to grow up expecting ‘rights’ that are not actually theirs. You say this is socially unacceptable, but there were 20+ people on that train who actively watched us being harassed and did not say a word. It is socially unacceptable, but this kind of thing happens to me and many other women multiple times a week, with often more traumatic results.
So, yes, I believe more feminism would prevent sexist moments like this. Also, water is wet, the atmosphere is 78% nitrogen, and cheese is addictive.
REBLOGGING FOR THE FUCKING COMMENTARY
“when you give someone something - a gift, a compliment, whatever - with stringent stipulations about how they respond to it, you are not giving anything. You are setting a trap. It is not as nice as you think it is.”
I don’t care about how much you agree with a post, if it’s made by a nazi, a terf, a racist or anything gross- don’t fucking reblog it.
Also, if you see someone otherwise really cool reblogging something with a gross source, let them know. Sometimes a person has no idea what the OP’s beliefs are and will gladly delete the post once they find out.
I always welcome it when people tell me that I’ve reblogged something by someone creepy. I’d rather know and take it down than unknowingly support creepy awful people.
I think the most plausible The Force Awakens headcanon I’ve ever run into is that the galactic media started holding Ben up as the face of the nascent New Jedi Order from a very young age, and everything that’s happened since then is basically the equivalent of a former child star meltdown.
Just, you know, instead of getting drunk and trashing his hotel room, he shivs his dad and blows up the sun, because Skywalkers never do anything small.
