stellahibernis | Entries tagged with captain america

I'm enjoying all things Captain Marvel tremendously, except for a little thing that parts of fandom does. Which is, for some reason to highlight how awesome Carol is they need to be bashing Steve. And of course it's a case of Steve being seen through the fanon lens aka stupid and has no common sense at all, yada yada, you know how I feel about that. It shouldn't have to be such a revolutionary idea that you can celebrate a character without putting others down. Also I think it's hilarious that some people consider Carol as super sensible when you know she has a reckless side and Maria has definitely sighed a lot of times over it.

Speaking of Steve and Carol, they both have the drive to do the thing they feel like they should be doing, even when others tell them they shouldn't, that they're not good enough etc. There's a very similar simmering anger in them that helps them push through when people say no. I really like that aspect in their motivation.

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My key reactions after seeing Endgame press conference photos were basically, "DANAI GURIRA! Oh and I like Chris Evans' velvet pants and fun shoes."

That got me wondering if anyone has ever researched whether the preferences shift along with their cycle for bi/pan peeps who have a uterus and are of fertile age. I know there has been a study in which they found straight women liked men who looked like they had more testosterone (more square jaw etc) while they were ovulating than when they weren't.

Because it was shark week for me when the press conference photos were published, and I was wondering if in a few weeks time I'll be appreciating more of Chris Evans than just his pants again:D

That is probably somewhat a head-scratcher for a title, but I’ll get to that after a brief intro.

For a while now I’ve been meaning to write a series on MCU-Steve, but kept stumbling on the way I first considered doing it. The problem was the format I envisioned; it would have handled approximately one movie in one post, which would have made them long enough that I usually wouldn’t have been able to do them at one sitting. As a result, whenever I had inspiration to write something longer, I went for fics instead, and hence no meta series. Until now! I decided to focus on themes instead, which will allow me to make shorter posts that I can just write and post whenever I have time for blogging. I’ll discuss canon while also commenting on the fanon and how those meet and sometimes don’t (to my great distress in some cases). I’ll try to do more than just complain about my pet peeves regarding how Steve is characterized by parts of fandom (which I admittedly have many).

Steve is often (lovingly, jokingly, sometimes as a rather too literal description) called a grandpa, thinking of which lead to me consider what generation he’d actually relate to, displaced as he is, and I realized he’d probably feel fairly connected with the generation that’s the same biological age as he is after waking from the ice. Born in 1918, Valkyrie in spring 1945, and waking up in spring 2012 would make him same age as those born mid-eighties (close enough to my age, as it happens), so solidly a Millennial albeit of the older half.

Obviously there’s the shared life experience that Steve has with those of his birth generation, and that probably helps him connect with the people that are closer to his chronological age, but there’s also the seventy years he hasn’t lived that puts them in a completely different mindset. He shares their past but not the current, because he’s taken a different path getting here. The boomers and Gen X have such a different experience compared to Steve that it’s unlikely to be a close match, and so we come to the Millennials. I don’t think I’m just projecting (although there might be some of that, too) when I say that considering the way history has progressed during our lifetime, it has landed us into a mindset that would probably feel familiar to Steve.

When I think of Steve after his seventy year nap, there is a very definite sense of being unmoored. The reasons for it are of course obvious, his whole life is nothing like he dreamed of or predicted. There was the major upheaval of war followed by the time jump, and he’s left having to adjust to a world that keeps betraying him, where finding solid surfaces he can rely on and people he can trust is difficult.

With Millennials the sense of being unmoored is very common as well. We are living now in a world that’s unlike the one we thought we’d grow into, and there’s so much more uncertainty now than there was in our childhood. The key thing for us is that we remember our childhood before the major fear of terror, before the privacy concerns of our digital life, before the uncertainty of what will happen to our way of life with climate change ramping up etc. For many of us the life we expected to live was much more secure than the reality turned out to be; with making a family, buying a house, or having a secure career are unreachable to more and more of us. It very much feels like the life we were reaching for turned out to be a mirage as conditions changed as we grew up, and we’re left grappling for solid surfaces.

It’s funny how appropriate it is that Steve as he is displaced in time in MCU also reflects so many of the worries and insecurities of the Millennials. Maybe that’s why he resonates so well with us, probably more than even those who made the movies originally expected. He was in many ways considered the least cool of the Avengers, but now looking back his is a story that affects countless of us. Maybe it’s because he is lost as well, or maybe it’s his determination to still move forward even when faced with uncertainty that has allowed us to grow attached to him.

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It says part one in the title, and I’ll try to write one of these approximately every week, centering on different themes. Please feel free to make suggestions! Some that I know I’ll tackle are his recklessness, the determination to do the right thing, the effects of the serum, and how he interacts with people, including him being a leader. A while ago I made a post titled I have opinions about Steve Rogers, which isn’t exactly a part of this series, but is obviously related.

In particular I have a laundry list of stuff of how Steve is portrayed in fandom that to me is very much at odds with canon (insert disclaimer not all fic and meta writers here), and the one that annoys me today is:

Why is Steve (and occasionally Bucky as a package deal, but more often it seems to be just Steve) so often treated in fics like he isn't a fully functioning adult capable of making his own decisions?

I'm always annoyed when he is just sort of part of the Avengers rather that in the lead, because he would want to be part of making the decisions, but when it stretches to the rest of his life? Even more annoying. I've seen stuff like others picking his clothes as a routine, choosing his apartment and decoration, organizing his social calendar etc. And I get it's hard to draw the line between helping (because he does need support and I love found family stories where it's functioning and mutual) and just hijacking his life like he's a child, but the latter is unfortunately common.

Very common seems to be someone, usually Pepper, confiscating his twitter account, and I'm always like, he's not in your charge nor is he your employee, what right do you have? He has a right to be stupid on internet if he wants to, and frankly, I don't think he'd be as prone to getting into pointless flame wars as he's portrayed. CATFA makes it pretty clear he's fully capable of restraining himself when there's no point in blowing up (look at the training montage, the others bully him relentlessly and he just takes it bc there's nothing to win by protesting).

Further more, what makes people think Steve would go for any of that? We know he used to want to get by on his own before the war and had a chip on his shoulder the size of contiguous US about it, that just doesn't go away, and so the way he just maybe mildly grumbles about the above stuff just doesn't work for me.

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In other news, the Steve centric Endgame trailers are raising my hopes, and I'm trying to push it away because I'd love for the movie to have Steve in its heart the way Avengers movies so far haven't, but I just don't want to be disappointed.

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Also I'm going to have to find a place to camp at for the afternoon, I've been working from home due to an afternoon meeting (which was supposed to be much closer to home than office), but it was cancelled. However, we'll have the water cut off for the afternoon, so I'll still have to go, bc I need my afternoon coffee. I guess I'll go see about the workspaces in our new central library.

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Definitely fallen in too deep

Entries tagged with captain america

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Steve Rogers in MCU pt. 1: A Millennial?

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August 2020

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