Evidently Marvel has decided to make Steve Rogers, aka Captain America, a Hydra agent from the beginning. Just when I was beginning to take an interest in the superhero genre in large part because of the Captain America character. I rather liked the idea of someone who not only stands for good, but is good. Someone whose “outdated” morality we can look up to and learn from today. So of course they’d have to decide to ruin that.
Where did we reach the point that all our heroes have to be deeply flawed, conflicted, morally ambiguous, or practically indistinguishable from the evil they are fighting? Anti-heroes used to be only one way of telling a story. Now it’s increasingly the way.
At what point did we as a society give up? When did we decide we’re not capable of living up to these paradigms of goodness like Captain America, Superman, and the others–at least as they were? It’s as if we decided, “No, we just can’t be that good. Being good doesn’t get us what we want, so let’s lower the bar, shall we?” Next thing you know we’ve got “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice”, where not only do both heroes fail to live up to their heroic standard, they spend their efforts fighting each other instead of the real evil out there. We have Captain America proving to be false. We have Guardians of the Galaxy, a group of criminals with good hearts, fighting evil because no one else is available. And we have Suicide Squad, which takes a bunch of supervillains and makes them the good guys by virtue of the people they’re coerced into fighting are somehow worse than they are.
Somehow we’ve convinced ourselves that moral ambiguity is a virtue, and all the “good-is-good, evil-is-evil” movies and TV shows of the 1980’s are being remade with a “new and improved” modern morality. And we wonder why our kids are growing up thinking that anything goes, as long as you can make it look cool. We forget that without a strong moral standard to live up to we’re making our heroes and bullies almost indistinguishable, as if they were two sides of the same coin. Our “heroes” are heroes only by virtue of being the main characters.
The result is an government that can’t seem to bring itself to declare ISIS and Al Qaeda as evil, because, you know, they have their reasons, and well, we invaded Iraq and all, and really, who are we to judge? They’d rather deal with the real evil as they see it, which seems to be Americans who disagree with their policies.
Marvel can, of course, do whatever they want–Cap is their property. At best making money has pulled even with telling a good story, and they are part of the Disney machine now, which is also on a mission to “redeem” all their villains. So perhaps it was always just a matter of time. Ultimately I don’t really have a dog in the fight. While I’m increasingly interested in superheroes as a concept, I’ve yet to spend much money on them. Marvel isn’t marketing to me.
But it seems ironic that in an era where we’re supposedly working to improve humanity and eliminate at least some vices we’re also getting rid of anything we might have held up as the example to which we could aspire. We seem to have forgotten that it wasn’t their powers that made superheroes great, it was their super morals. We forgot that the only difference between superheroes and supervillains is what they direct their powers toward, and how they choose to do so. We forgot that we love superheroes because they’re like us, only…better.
The prevailing theory is that he’s under some kind of mind control by Red Skull or not really Captain America. I’m holding my tongue until that story comes to full light. But of course, by then, there will probably be little to talk about and no one talking about it.
Vaguely reminds me of the DC story “Kingdom Come”.
I also remember when I first began to like Cap. I grew up disdaining him, as he had no cool powers to my eye. Then one day, out of boredom, I glanced through a Cap mag, and saw the following scene.
Cap running through the city.
Kids see Cap and one comments to the other, there goes that old fogey Capt America.
Cap thinks to himself, “Maybe my ideals are a bit out of date, but, if it makes me an old fogey to think that right is right and to love my country, then I’m proud to be an old fogey right down to my red white and blue underwear.”
Yes, I suppose all will come out in time. I do note in the couple of articles/interviews I read that they’re playing it really close and not talking about their motivations hardly at all, which they usually seem to be quite happy to do when they’re making a “bold statement”. Not that I have that much experience with these guys.
But yeah, if they’re trying to be inclusive and give everyone a superhero they can relate to, they need to keep at least ONE old fuddy-duddy-goodie-two-shoes-black-and-white-wrong-and-right guy whose main superpower is wanting to do the right thing. I hope they keep Cap “Cap”.
Really the only reason this is controversial is that it’s engineered to be. Do a radical thing, get free press, sell some comics, reset to zero. If Captain America became HYDRA permanently, they would undoubtedly lose sales. Think about the backlash on Batman V Superman’s characterizations. Shoot, that movie is already in the cheap theaters!
Yeah, you’d THINK they wouldn’t be that blind/stupid after seeing how that movie turned out and how popular Cap seems to be as he currently is. But people DO sometimes get a case of the stupids….
Being “important” or “significant” seems to trump ANY kind of sense, these days.
Otherwise I really CAN’T understand the rush to make EVERY character gay.
Part of the reason that I have no interest in the whole superhero genre – I like bits about them but everyone is soooooo damaged & the story lines go on endlessly but also completely change the character repeatedly. Also why I was never interested in soap operas. blech.
I like short stories w/happy endings (and a bit of sarcasm/dry wit for good measure) and I am not ashamed to admit it!
I’m with you on happy endings. I like characters I can cheer for without feeling dirty, and I like it when they pull off the happy ending by being very good at what they do, and not just because the villain got a case of the “stupids”.
Is this in the comics? Because I haven’t seen Civil War yet.
Yes, it’s been announced for an upcoming comic arc.
Well that explains it, Marvel Comics seems to have gone into a spiral where they destroy all their existing characters to kick up controversy and then wonder why they don’t even have their original fans anymore. Like when they made a woman Thor, they did it in such a ham-handed way that the fans slapped their foreheads, and from what I’ve heard the comic has been dull and blatantly misandric ever since, making even Odin a bland sexist.
You can tell an interesting story and have a moral to it. In fact, most good stories HAVE a moral to them. But modern day morality tales have become, “get the biggest, dullest hammer you can find and beat the point into the dust until no one is even willing to discuss the issue anymore, then congratulate yourself on what a great and subtle teacher you are”.
This is exactly how I felt about it. First Snyder completely botches Superman, now these story writers decide to completely throw away decades of character development and all the reasons the character is beloved. Yeah, there will be some sort of explanation (although the writers have been very clear that there is no mind control/alternate universe/clone/time travel mumbo jumbo going on), but still, why can’t good people just be good people doing what’s right because it’s right.