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.
In an interview with Empire Online, Joe Russo said of this scene,
He’s hanging onto that helicopter for an extremely passionate reason. In stories you’ll read where a mother will lift a car
off a child. There’s something very important happening in that scene
and for us it really represented his struggle as a character, one man
pitted against a helicopter that’s trying to take off. Can he stop it?
And what are the limits of his strength?
The
effects of doing this on Steve’s body depend on how much strain is
actually put on his muscles, ligaments, and bones. I don’t recall that
we’ve ever been told the full extent of his strength post-serum in the
MCU (as Joe Russo mentions, this scene is partly an exploration of
MCU!Steve’s abilities), but in the comics he bench-presses around 1,100
lbs:
This
seems about right, or maybe even a little on the low side, considering
his everyday feats of strength in the MCU, such as lifting a motorcycle
with three women on it in CA:FA:
And throwing another motorcycle at his enemies in AoU:
(Psst, Steve, motorcycles are supposed to stay with the wheels on the ground!)
In
order to answer your question, we need to know how much lift the
helicopter can generate vs how much force Steve can apply to it. I know
absolutely nothing about helicopters, but a Bell 429 (which is the
most “helicopter”-looking helicopter I could find on Google) has a cargo
hook capacity of 3,000 lbs, meaning it can take off with 3,000 lbs
suspended below it. So let us assume that Steve is in effect
“reverse-lifting” (pulling down instead of up) 3,000 lbs, which sounds
like a lot, definitely outside his normal capacity.
…Except he’s
not actually doing that, because (as far as I can tell from the
2-second clip) he doesn’t try to pull the helicopter closer to himself
(concentric force), he’s keeping it from flying away (eccentric force).
Because of how muscle fibres work at the molecular level, they can
generate 1.75 times greater force eccentrically than concentrically,
meaning that Steve (at least in the comics) is capable of lifting just
shy of 2,000 lbs eccentrically. That’s pretty impressive!
However,
it’s still less than the helicopter’s 3,000 lbs capacity, so how do we
explain that? Well, Steve isn’t actually pulling eccentrically at the
helicopter by the end of the clip, he’s just holding on to it,
generating static force. This means that his bones and ligaments are now
assisting his muscles to prevent his body from being dismembered. If
you’ve done any weightlifting yourself, you’ll know that your static
strength is much, much larger than either your concentric or eccentric
strength – I’m a total weakling so I can’t do an actual pull-up either
concentrically or eccentrically (feel free to laugh), but I can easily
hang from the pull-up bar, even one-handed, and let my ligaments carry
my full bodyweight with no ill effects.
I don’t know how strong
Steve’s bones and ligaments are, but considering he’s a supersoldier and
nigh on unbreakable judging by his propensity for jumping out of planes
and elevators, I don’t think he’ll suffer any debilitating injuries
from this helicopter stunt – maybe some strains and sprains, and even
so, I bet the movie will show him up and running again shortly
afterwards. 😉
So while it’s definitely impressive, holding down a helicopter trying to take off seems to me to be well within Steve’s
abilities (I was more impressed by the fact that he managed to lift
that steel beam off of Bucky during the fight on the helicarrier in
CA:TWS). Provided Steve can keep a grip on it, of course; helicopters
look pretty slippery. 🙂
To add some extra helicopter- and helicopter-adjacent details and discussion to @wintercyan’s awesome meta:
The situation is probably even more reasonable than @wintercyan lays out, because of the way that helicopters’ ratings are listed, which is a function of how helicopters are used for moving people around versus moving cargo around. [detailed discussion after the read-more!]
Just for reference, sliced bread was invented in 1928. – (x)
Here’s better perspective for this…
Please notice Bucky took pre-serum Steve to that shit. Just… think about that for a moment.
Remember this post whenever you feel tempted to take the Bucky Barnes Is Overprotective joke seriously. He’s not. That’s probably what made Steve get along with him in first place.
Honestly, Bucky’s complete confidence that Steve wouldn’t drop from a heart attack is funny, alarming and utterly sweet all at once
Just imagine how pretty Bucky had to smile to get out of trouble when he dragged a nauseated, bruised, half-dead Steve back to face the righteous fury of Sarah Rogers…
(And personally, I believe that Bucky is not so much protective, as he is territorial. Steve’s not weak, but lay a hand on him and you’ll learn just how strong they both are)
i think this is my favorite post on this entire site. bless.
WHERE THE FUCK IS THE GIF OF BUCKY THROWING STEVE THROUGH A WINDOW?!
And there was never another Rogue One callsign ever – and when the Rogue Group flew the Rogue leader was always back and to the right of true lead position, because it was understood. It was believed. It was known.
Rogue One would always fly with their group, because the Force was with them.
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