sometimes you fight, not because you think you can win, but because you need to be able to look back later and say, “i fought.”
“In King Lear (III:vii) there is a man who is such a minor
character that Shakespeare has not given him even a name: he is merely
“First Servant.” All the characters around him – Regan, Cornwall, and
Edmund – have fine long-term plans. They think they know how the story
is going to end, and they are quite wrong. The servant has no such
delusions. He has no notion of how the play is going to go. But he
understands the present scene. He sees an abomination (the blinding of
old Gloucester) taking place. He will not stand it.
His sword is out and pointed at his master’s breast in a
moment: then Regan stabs him dead from behind. That is his whole part:
eight lines all told. But if it were real life and not a play, that is
the part it would be best to have acted.”
– C.S. Lewis, “The World’s Last Night”
So Stanford professor Ken Taylor has a whole lecture on this in Hamlet, and the role of defiant resignation (citing Kierkegaard’s concept of resignation) where you are urged to act despite understanding that it won’t change anything, simply to demonstrate your dissatisfaction with the world as it stands, and your belief in what it should be. But Steve demonstrates a lot of this.
When nothing you do matters, all that matters is what you do.
Prince Geoffrey: My you chivalric fool… as if the way one fell down mattered.
Prince Richard: When the fall is all there is, it matters a great deal.
I went under, the world was at war,
I wake up, they say we won.
They didn't say what we lost.
The lack of care given to Steve after his awakening, especially in terms of addressing his grief, survivor’s guilt, and PTSD, will forever infuriate me.
THIS^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Hey dude, you should literally be catatonic from grief and loss and shock but how about you jump right into fighting this mess we made while you were under??? Oh and while we’re at it, you’re gonna be ridiculed, marginalized, and treated like nothing more than a real life action figure.
No one will be particularly kind to you and at the end of the movie, you’ll go off alone while we’re all paired up.
Sound good???
OMG YES, so much this. Two weeks. TWO WEEKS. That’s the only adjustment Steve had between ‘hey, welcome to the 21st century, we do so hope you enjoy your stay’ and ‘hey man, we have this little alien problem, you think you can help us out with that?’. And there form of catching him up is handing him a manila envelope with personnel files on the Commandos, Howard and Peggy and all but Peggy had big red DECEASED stamps on it. That’s so cold, so impersonal. He had to sit there, in a horribly lit apartment, and read those stamps, one right after another, alone.
It took two years for Steve to meet Sam, the first person to ask him how he was doing and if he was happy (and yes, to be fair, I realize that Natasha was trying to help, in her own way, by encouraging him to go out and meet people). Honestly though, just thinking about Steve during those two years breaks my heart. Especially since we have a basis for comparison. Steve’s awakening in the comics was nothing like that, there he had people who reached out to him and took it upon themselves to help him adjust from the get-go. The contrast is heartbreaking.
YES to all of this! Imagine how much more sense CACW would have made (and how even more heartbreaking it would have been), if Tony had reached out to Steve at the end of Avengers, given him a place to stay while they built the team together…*sings We Could’ve Had it AAAAAALLLL” Not blaming “Tony.” That was Whedon’s call to send Steve off on his Lonely Motorcycle Ride of Not Dealing With Things.
well, here’s a story about a plane. one steve did not actually jump out of.
a rare tale indeed.
if youve ever been in the military–any branch, really–you’d know that everyone in every branch thinks their branch is best. this is not a new thing, and it was certainly going strong during wwii. mostly it just meant that if a bunch of marines wandered into an army bar there would be a fight, but honestly it was all in good fun, just a way to blow off steam.
so of course there was a friendly rivalry between us howlies and the pilots we hung around with. most of the pilots and crews we knew were transport guys, not bombers, but we got around more than most units and wound up spending a few weeks stationed near the 97th bombardment group. the 97th was made of b-17s, these huge bomber planes called flying fortresses–and they earned the name, those birds were basically the tanks of the sky. they ran a 10 man crew, and we got friendly with the spectacular idiots of the Pistol Packin Mama. as you can tell from the name of their plane, the were exactly the kind of guys who would get along with a group of people called the Howling Commandoes.
but rivalries being what they were, pranks happened.
the pistol packers fired the opening salvo. merrifield, Mama’s copilot, was probably the mastermind behind it; he was a good tempered guy who never passed on a pun. which was why for the first prank, the pistol packers stole all our underwear. haha, commandoes.
such an affront could not stand. we put shoe polish on the rims of their headsets, and they came off mission with black rings on the sides of their faces. they hid dead fish in our barracks. we salted their coffees.
the usual nonsense.
but then we came back one night to discover that every one of our footlockers had been painted with ‘EAT IT.’
and that, my friends, sparked a whole new wave of stupidity.
morita was the genius behind our retaliation. during wwii, VD was a major concern, and condoms were widely available for any soldier who wanted or needed them. each of us went separately and got as many as we could get our hands on. steve’s face was red enough he couldve been used to flag down a plane. the quartermasters probably thought us howlies were about to host the biggest orgy camp had ever seen, but by the time each of us had contributed to the stash, we had some 300-odd condoms.
so that night we went and broke into the airfield. we were highly skilled troops, it wasnt that hard. gabe mumbled something about using our skills for evil, but soon enough we had found the Pistol Packin Mama, all glorious 104 feet of her.
she’d taken a few hits on their last run, and was awaiting maintenance before she went up again. luckily for us, the repair crews were a little swamped, and it would be a few days before they got to her. so we climbed aboard and set to work.
anything we could fit a condom over got wrapped. joysticks, armrests, controls–all of it got covered in latex. the remaining 250 condoms we inflated. theres nothing more manly than a bunch of soldiers sitting around in a bomber blowing up condoms. and after about four hours of macho dick balloon making, we were near ready pass out from lack of oxygen. but we’d also managed to about half-fill the Mama with condom balloons.
our work done, we sneaked back to the barracks and fell asleep.
as i understand it, merrifeld realized he’d forgotten a lucky picture of his girl inside the Mama, and went back to pick it up. he opened the hatch and a rain of condoms descended on him, which attracted attention from pretty much everyone else nearby. the pistol packers got crap about it from everyone for weeks. eventually, they came to us and declared truce. as a gesture of good faith, steve offered to do some nose art for them.
so steve painted the Pistol Packin Mama. and how a man who cant ask for condoms without his face turning the color of a stoplight can paint a larger than life half naked lady on a plane calm as you like, i will never understand.
okay but in all seriousness i bet it’s a real hazard to cry or even sit on your bed looking unhappy at Avengers Tower because Steve “Mom At The Ready” Rogers WILL appear in your doorway wearing something soft and saying “Hey.” in a gentle, compassionate voice
“Nat, you have to come help. I tried telling him it was my time of the month to get him to go away, but he just went straight out and got me a bumper pack of Tampax and a hot water bottle.”
“You can help me eat all the chocolate he bought because he wasn’t sure what type I’d be craving.”
Bonus : They get used to it, in the end, and wind up kind of relying on Steve and his compassionate ways. Right up until he’s away on a mission, Wanda’s got horrible cramps and she turns to Bucky.
He’s horrified. Eyes wide and backing off with hands up, head shaking. “No, no, no, kid, no - this is NOT my area.” He winds up in the pharmacy, hands on hips, staring at a wall of different sanitary products and has to call Steve, who’s mid-battle.
“Rogers, just tell me which COLOUR-”
“Buck, no- “ Steve grunts, and there’s a loud clanging sound which Bucky assuming is the shield being used. “You gotta know what kind of flow it is.”
“You… What?” Bucky stutters.
“Beginning, middle or end?” There’s a loud explosion and then a ringing noise, before Steve cuts back in. “It’ll be heavier towards the begin-”
“Never mind.” Bucky swipes an entire shelf-worth of pads into his basket and hopes for the best.
“But where’s the chocolate?”
“No one told me to buy any!”
This post keeps getting better… :D (I also bet that Steve is seriously fascinated by the wide variety of women’s sanitary products, considering what the alternatives were in the 1930s…)
Steve Rogers gets himself an Instagram and follows Dwayne Johnson, as one does.
The Rock posts one of his giant breakfast pictures, as he is wont to do.
Steve, lil shit that he is, responds with HIS enormous breakfast, insinuating that perhaps Dwayne Johnson’s breakfast isn’t actually all that much food and if he ate THAT he’d be hungry in, like, an hour.
It goes on like that, for WEEKS, good-natured teasing about how much food they eat spilling over into Twitter and callouts during interviews.
Until they agree to have breakfast together, and the last post about it is just a picture of the two of them, lying flat on the Rock’s living room floor with his dog sniffing at Steve’s head, both of them with big hands splayed over their bellies like they can’t possibly fit any more.
Neither will say who actually can eat more – every time they’re asked, they start in on how awesome the other is and how much respect they have for each other and how glad they are that they got to become friends.
This is everything I have ever wanted.
The first video on the Rock’s instagram gets posted at 4:15 AM – this is not uncommon, nor is the fact that he’s walking around his brightly-lit Iron Paradise. It’s more the bouncing that’s unusual.
“You know what the BEST THING about being buddies with CAPTAIN AMERICA is? Yesterday I got to meet the motherfucking Falcon. That’s right, SAM WILSON was here, was right here! I asked him what it was like to fly, and he grinned at me and then we did like, an hour and a half of planks and v-sits and he had me hanging from the TRX to hold planks and I swear I was shaking halfway through and he just laughed and said, ‘now imagine you have a couple rockets strapped to your ass, now you flyin.’ and I’m tellin’ you, THAT MAN is a fucking ROCK, it was amazing.”
The camera swings around to the barbell setups before coming back to Dwayne’s face. “He also told me that Steve Rogers knows almost nothing about weightlifting and Steve agreed he’s got no idea where his PR might be, so today is gonna be LEG DAY. My entire torso is fuckin’ killing me, but this is gonna be AWESOME. Stay tuned, y’all.”
The second video of the day comes in the afternoon; Dwayne looks exhausted but Steve Rogers looks plenty fresh and also a combination of sheepish and smug.
Dwayne opens with a deadpan, “Leg day.”
“I learned so much!” Steve is enthusiastic, almost bouncy. “This guy is a great teacher.”
“He also,” and the video pans around to the barbell setups seen earlier in the day, “broke my motherfucking gym.”
The thick barbell in the middle of the floor is wickedly bent, standing on its own in an inverted V. All of the big metal plates are scattered around the floor instead of on the racks, and several dumbbells are also twisted into odd shapes. One of the biggest weight plates is buried high in the far wall, only about half of it sticking out, like a giant ninja had thrown a shuriken.
“Don’t worry, Dwayne, we’ll figure out my deadlift PR eventually,” Steve’s voice comes from behind the camera.
“Man, fuck you,” Dwayne can be heard before the video cuts out.
The weight plate stays up in the brick wall; Dwayne doesn’t actually tell anyone that he’d asked if Steve could do that so he’d have a souvenir.
they-told-me-be-seen-not-heard asked: I would kill for more howlie stories. Particularly the one where everyone dressed up as women. Please? I have coffee, bacon, and a genuine grenade (not sure if it still works) from 1942. (Ps pls embarass the golden retriever known as the Star Spangled Man as much as you can. It's funny.)
well, us howlies were willing to do downright stupid stuff for even stupider reasons, so it never took much effort to talk everybody into doing something really really dumb. usually i was the one trying to keep everyone for getting their stupid selves killed, but im proud to say that this particular occasion was all my doing.
so its july 1944, and nazis are still occupying paris. we were sent in to pick up some crucial info from a resistance informer in the heart of the city. but at this point we were already starting to be recognizable, so we needed to disguise ourselves to get through the city. the higher-ups hadnt been specific on how exactly to conduct this particular op, so, left to our own devices, we naturally concluded that we should dress one of the most overmuscled commando squads in the allied forces as women.
we were good at special ops, not logic.
i think whoever suggested it was joking, but in typical howlies fashion, we took things waaay to far, and soon enough we were sourcing dresses and wigs. dum dum and pinky and gabe and jaques and falsworth and morita had to shave their mustaches off. dum dum cried.
morita managed to get his hands on some makeup–he refused to tell us where from–which was great, until we realized that none of us had any idea what to do with it. but then steve admitted what exactly he’d been up to with the ladies of the star spangled show. turns out that aside from hauling their luggage everwhere, he’d also been on hair-and-makeup duty nearly every night. i guess the ladies decided to put his artistic skills to use, because the man knew his way around a blush brush. (the rest of us were not sure what a blush brush was.) even in 2017, he can still do a contour like nobodys business, because he apparently decided that was something worth knowing. so steve did our makeup, and all of us learned how to do lipstick. more useful combat skills for the howlies dossiers.
falsworth had a friend who ran a really fantastic underground drag show, so he negotiated wigs in return for promising to send steve over to help with a show sometime. we did not tell steve about that promise until later. gabe found the dresses, and i dont know where he got them, because they were somehow big enough for us.
except for steve, who has the waist-to-shoulder proportions of a pizza slice. he got stuck halfway into a dress–caught with one arm in, his head and other arm out–with his fully-made-up face slowly turning redder and redder. all of us tried, but we could not wedge steve into that dress.
so instead we put him into a wheelbarrow full of garbage.
the rest of us–the worlds burliest but most well-made-up ladies–set off in groups of twos and threes through occupied paris. happy sam pulled the short straw and had to wheel along the stevebarrow, which not only stunk but was heavy as hell. the nazis working the checkpoints must have liked their ladies large and muscular, because we made it through to the drop point with no problems, aside from falsworth getting a little to in to the flirting. steve kept griping, but we kept telling him garbage is quiet steve, shut up.
we made it to the drop point, this big old house on rue des grands augustins, one of those huge mansions. but what we’d carefully avoided telling steve was who exactly the house belonged to, because his birthday was the next day, and this–aside from being a crucial intelligence mission–was his birthday present.
the house belonged to pablo picasso.
so we all slipped in through a side door, and when happy sam and the steve barrow finally caught up with the rest of us, happy sam turned it over sideways and out tumbled a very irate, still made-up steve in his captain america costume.
he was pissed as hell until he realized who exactly the weird little guy covered in paint was, and then he blushed so red i thought he’d cook the makeup right off his face, and he started stammering like that time in first grade suzy miller said he was cute.
anyway, he and picasso got along like a house on fire, and the rest of us enjoyed some proper french cooking while they babbled art at each other and scribbled in each other’s sketchbooks. picasso drew steve a portrait of himself, which is why one of steve’s battered stained sketchbooks is valued at 700 thousand dollars. it’s because halfway through theres a bunch of picasso sketches, and a little painting of captain america wearing makeup in a heap of garbage.
Anonymous asked: Per the IRC fundraiser: I would LOVE to read a blurb about Steve Cap eviscerating David Duke (or any other white supremacist) a la Chris Evans on Twitter :) (Hi. Thanks for using your powers for good!)
This didn’t go quite in the direction I hoped when I started, but I hope you like it anyway, Anon!
Steve got a Twitter – really, Steve was assigned a Twitter – when he joined the Avengers, but he didn’t use it very often. He didn’t care for it, and forgot about it for long periods of time. People followed him, but didn’t expect much in the way of content.
Then, one day, a tweet popped up from his account.
You shouldn’t punch Nazis in the face. You will incapacitate a Nazi for longer if you punch in the side of the head or the genital area.
What followed was an eyebrow-raising, thirty-tweet essay in which Captain America laid out the basics of hand-to-hand combat and offered advice for most effective techniques. Every time he could have used the phrase “your opponent” or “the other person”, instead he used “a nazi”.
When someone pointed this out to him on twitter, he tweeted back, ‘A nazi’ is fewer characters.
It was an amazing afternoon, but the news coverage of Captain America’s brutal new twitter branding didn’t really hit a frenzied pitch until the following day, when someone tweeted, So you think I should be punched in the face for my opinions?
Are you a nazi? Steve tweeted back.
I voted for Trump.
There was a gap of about half an hour, and then Steve replied, #trump wants people I love to die; at least to be unprotected from violence. Why wouldn’t I strike someone threatening my loved ones?
At which point the President of the United States tweeted, Pathetic Captain America wants to punch the landslide who elected me. Captain: you’re fired!
And Steve tweeted, Donald Trump is scared of me. Watching a sad old man try to fire someone he doesn’t employ is hilarious.
After which it appeared the President may have lost his mind; his tweets, growing increasingly erratic, eventually threatened a nuclear strike against New York unless Steve resigned.
Bring it on, I’ll punch that too, or didn’t you hear about what happened the last time someone tried? Steve tweeted.
At which point the President’s twitter went dangerously silent.
The following day, the White House announced that the President had been admitted to the hospital with ‘cardiac issues’, and was expected to sign resignation papers at noon.
“I’m hearing that the rest of the GOP finally pushed him out. I hope you’re proud of yourself,” Tony said.
“Jarvis was the one who advised me on how best to bait him,” Steve replied, stretching smugly.
“Pence isn’t exactly a cake walk.”
“No, but he’s never going to try to nuke New York, and he’s not so irrational he’d announce the attempt on social media,” Steve said. “My job is to make sure dangerous psychopaths don’t threaten the United States. One down,” he added, grinning.
I would like some Socialist!Steve Rogers making fox news/drumpf’s head explode by calling them on their shit on a national stage.
“Now, you all know, Captain America kept out of the presidential race – great guy, tremendous guy, how can you not love Captain America? – but I feel sure if he allowed himself to be political, he’d be for making America great again. The values of the forties, when we worked hard and fought for what we believed in, when people knew where they belonged – I think if he could speak publicly he’d say, good job, President Trump. Because he represents the people, too, and the people elected me – by a giant landslide, an enormous record-breaking – “
***
Steve had thought, long and hard, considering the talk shows, the various social media platforms, and the other methods of publicity available to him. He finally decided on YouTube, though he did let them film him on something slightly better than a phone video camera.
He talked to the organizers; he asked them if they were sure; and when the time came, during the protest rally, he walked up to the podium in jeans and a #RESIST t-shirt, and he could tell for a minute nobody knew who he was.
“Good morning,” he said, using the smile and the voice he’d practiced selling bonds, seventy years ago. “My name is Steve Rogers. I came to march with you today.”
A ripple went through the crowd.
“My mother and father were immigrants. My mother was a single working mother. As a child I saw Pinkertons trying to break the unions, breaking strikes with bats and brass knuckles. I heard my friends’ parents tell stories about the Triangle Shirtwaist fire where people died because there was no federal safety regulation, because they were disposable – women, immigrants, Jews. I was born in the last Gilded Age, and I lived through every hungry year of the Depression that it led to,” he said, voice gaining momentum. “My ma died because she couldn’t afford treatment. Because it was a doctor for her or a doctor for me but not both.”
There was a roar from the crowd.
“And I saw Americans thrown into camps, and I saw “colored” drinking fountains, and I saw Americans who had to join separate regiments to defend freedom because of the color of their skin, so I know what the values of the 1940s were!” he yelled. “Don’t you tell me people knew their place! Don’t you tell me they weren’t shoved into place by Pinkertons and cops because I saw it happen! I didn’t survive 1940 to see it come round again!”
He glanced to the side, wondering if he’d gone too far, but the woman who’d told him it was okay to speak was grinning and gesturing for him to continue.
“So the President can be very clear about where Captain America stands,” Steve continued, “I’d like him to know that I am a lefty socialist anti-racist son of immigrants and I’m here today for open borders, socialized healthcare, equality in justice, and the death of fascism. You’re right about one thing – I am a tremendous man, and I am allowing myself to be political.”
***
Yet another leak out of the White House today concerning the behavior of the president. Sources say last night President Trump was treated in the Residence for a broken hand, which the White House official statement says is a stress fracture from signing paperwork. Our source states that the President overturned furniture, threatened Secret Service agents, and broke his hand punching a wall. All this after witnessing the mega-viral BE POLITICAL youtube video recorded by Steve Rogers, Manhattan’s own Captain America, at a protest rally yesterday afternoon…
