do you think that when steve first got unthawed people were generally like, well okay captain america’s alive now, or were they like. naw. no way. what even. THIS IS JUST LIKE THAT TIME WITH THE ANIMAL PLANET DOCUMENTARY ABOUT MERMAIDS. when/how was the announcement to the public even made, anyway? were there camera crews on the scene when they extracted his body? did people know about it before he woke up? was there public debate about whether waking him up was a good idea? HELP.

morgan-leigh:

Well, I don’t think they would have had any reason to know until the events in The Avengers, since I seriously doubt SHIELD was like, let’s have a press conference about this. (Tony’s was bad enough.) And given Coulson’s presentation of ~the suit he clearly hadn’t been like. Captain America-ing or anything before that point. So obviously nobody knew anything about any of this business except about Iron Man, and some weird disturbances (i.e. in Thor, etc) until what happens in The Avengers, at which point GIANT ALIENS FROM THE SKY DESTROYING EVERYTHING WHAT THE FUCK JESUS CHRIST and also, like, Captain America and a Norse God? And the Hulk, whose backstory I know nothing about, maybe he was already common knowledge. Anyway, given GIANT ALIENS FROM THE SKY the rest of it does not seem wildly implausible. I do think it’s amusing that the reaction to all of this is something that the movies basically completely skipped over, though that’s obviously not surprising as it’s not exactly action movie material.

Still: I am sure there would be lots of crazy conspiracy theorists out there who are sure he’s not the real Steve Rogers, and also that Thor is not Thor, and probably also that the GIANT ALIENS FROM THE SKY did not even really happen, because if there are 9/11 conspiracy theorists, then there would be for this, too. People are nuts: the eternal constant.

And yes, given, say, Natasha’s press conference at the end of CATWS, I would say that there was (and would continue to be, at the point we’ve gotten to in the MCU thus far) probably a VERY HEALTHY public debate about the role of the Avengers and whether they should be around and whether they should have a) woken up Steve at all and b) if so, just let him go off and have a normal life, with like, veteran benefits or whatever. Amusingly superheroes are the sort of thing that liberal-minded people would almost certainly be virulently opposed to, I think, but, you know. IT’S ALL GOOD. Probably Steve et al endeared themselves to the left-wing public by taking down crazy enormous drones.

(In future, if they do a Civil War-type plot — which I personally thing is highly likely — these sorts of concerns would obviously become more prominent. Which I think would be very interesting. But we’re not quite there yet.)

Just to add one detail: Bruce says in Avengers ‘I kind of broke Harlem.’ So they do acknowledge the one Hulk movie as his origin story. They don’t (to your point) make it clear what the media fallout was.