I rewatched The Avengers today and I finally realized why Steve is such an ass. I can’t believe I never understood before.
Steve literally crashed a plane into a glacier over the Tesseract. He lost his best friend and the opportunity to be with the love of his life over the Tesseract. Of course he’s pissed off and unwilling to help when Fury comes to bother him about the fucking Tesseract.
This is the same fight he fought in during WWII. It’s the fight they told him he won when they defrosted him. Of course he’s mad. Probably betrayed and frustrated, too.
I was always disappointed in The Avengers for depicting Steve this way and now I’m embarrassed because I never understood the reasoning behind it. I’ve seen the light.
Not only that, but at the time of The Avengers, Steve has been out of the ice for two weeks. He lost his best friend, the love of his life, everyone and everything he’s ever known two weeks ago. He fought Red Skull and saw the Tesseract vaporise him into thin air two weeks ago.
And then Fury interrupts Steve’s PTSD flashback at the gym to tell him S.H.I.E.L.D. found the Tesseract and promptly lost it to yet another villain bent on world destruction, and Steve is all Jesus F. Christ, I JUST did this!
And then, as if that wasn’t bad enough, Steve discovers that S.H.I.E.L.D. was using the Tesseract to build HYDRA weapons of mass destruction (because S.H.I.E.L.D. is HYDRA, shhh!).
It hasn’t been two weeks since Steve saw whole army battalions vaporised and smashed a plane into the Arctic Ocean to prevent the exact same weapons of mass destruction from reaching New York! And here they are again! In New York, in the hands of his supposed “allies,” who lied to him about their purpose for wanting the Tesseract back!
Steve doesn’t like bullies, he doesn’t care where they’re from. In The Avengers, he realises he’s working for the new bullies and doesn’t have a choice if he wants to save humanity.
So yeah, Steve is pissed. He f–ing hates that f–ing Tesseract, and he’s 100000% done with it and with S.H.I.E.L.D. making all the same mistakes again.
And if you’re upset because I put gay characters and a gay protagonist in the book, I got nothing for you. Sorry, you squawking saurian — meteor’s coming. And it’s a fabulously gay Nyan Cat meteor with a rainbow trailing behind it and your mode of thought will be extinct. You’re not the Rebel Alliance. You’re not the good guys. You’re the fucking Empire, man. You’re the shitty, oppressive, totalitarian Empire. If you can imagine a world where Luke Skywalker would be irritated that there were gay people around him, you completely missed the point of Star Wars. It’s like trying to picture Jesus kicking lepers in the throat instead of curing them. Stop being the Empire. Join the Rebel Alliance. We have love and inclusion and great music and cute droids.
Chuck Windig, author of the newest Star Wars tie-in novel, to people who’re pissed about the book having a gay protagonist. (via trilies)
You’re fourteen and you’re reading Larry Niven’s “The Protector” because it’s your father’s favorite book and you like your father and you think he has good taste and the creature on the cover of the book looks interesting and you want to know what it’s about. And in it the female character does something better than the male character – because she’s been doing it her whole life and he’s only just learned – and he gets mad that she’s better at it than him. And you don’t understand why he would be mad about that, because, logically, she’d be better at it than him. She’s done it more. And he’s got a picture of a woman painted on the inside of his spacesuit, like a pinup girl, and it bothers you.
But you’re fourteen and you don’t know how to put this into words.
And then you’re fifteen and you’re reading “Orphans of the Sky” because it’s by a famous sci-fi author and it’s about a lost generation ship and how cool is that?!? but the women on the ship aren’t given a name until they’re married and you spend more time wondering what people call those women up until their marriage than you do focusing on the rest of the story. Even though this tidbit of information has nothing to do with the plot line of the story and is only brought up once in passing.
But it’s a random thing to get worked up about in an otherwise all right book.
Then you’re sixteen and you read “Dune” because your brother gave it to you for Christmas and it’s one of those books you have to read to earn your geek card. You spend an entire afternoon arguing over who is the main character – Paul or Jessica. And the more you contend Jessica, the more he says Paul, and you can’t make him see how the real hero is her. And you love Chani cause she’s tough and good with a knife, but at the end of the day, her killing Paul’s challengers is just a way to degrade them because those weenies lost to a girl.
Then you’re seventeen and you don’t want to read “Stranger in a Strange Land” after the first seventy pages because something about it just leaves a bad taste in your mouth. All of this talk of water-brothers. You can’t even pin it down.
And then you’re eighteen and you’ve given up on classic sci-fi, but that doesn’t stop your brother or your father from trying to get you to read more.
Even when you bring them the books and bring them the passages and show them how the authors didn’t treat women like people.
Your brother says, “Well, that was because of the time it was written in.”
You get all worked up because these men couldn’t imagine a world in which women were equal, in which women were empowered and intelligent and literate and capable.
You tell him – this, this is science fiction. This is all about imagining the world that could be and they couldn’t stand back long enough and dare to imagine how, not only technology would grow in time, but society would grow.
But he blows you off because he can’t understand how it feels to be fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and desperately wanting to like the books your father likes, because your father has good taste, and being unable to, because most of those books tell you that you’re not a full person in ways that are too subtle to put into words. It’s all cognitive dissonance: a little like a song played a bit out of tempo – enough that you recognize it’s off, but not enough to pin down what exactly is wrong.
And then one day you’re twenty-two and studying sociology and some kind teacher finally gives you the words to explain all those little feelings that built and penned around inside of you for years.
It’s like the world clicking into place.
And that’s something your brother never had to struggle with.
This is an excellent post to keep in mind when you see another recent post criticizing the current trend of dystopian sci-fi and going on about how sci-fi used to be about hope and wonder.
“When is the time you felt most broken?” “I first ran for Congress in 1999, and I got beat. I just got whooped. I had been in the state legislature for a long time, I was in the minority party, I wasn’t getting a lot done, and I was away from my family and putting a lot of strain on Michelle. Then for me to run and lose that bad, I was thinking maybe this isn’t what I was cut out to do. I was forty years old, and I’d invested a lot of time and effort into something that didn’t seem to be working. But the thing that got me through that moment, and any other time that I’ve felt stuck, is to remind myself that it’s about the work. Because if you’re worrying about yourself—if you’re thinking: ‘Am I succeeding? Am I in the right position? Am I being appreciated?’ — then you’re going to end up feeling frustrated and stuck. But if you can keep it about the work, you’ll always have a path. There’s always something to be done.”
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