The relationship between Tony and Howard Stark feat. Steve Rogers.
Bonus:
One of the things that never fails to PISS ME OFF about MCU fandom is how nobody ever addresses how fucking UNFAIR all of this is to Steve himself!
Steve didn’t make Howard act like a douchewad; Steve didn’t seduce him, or court his favor, or do anything to try and get Howard to put him onto such a high pedestal that Tony would spend legitimate effort trying to knock Steve off it every time he’s in an insecure mood.
No, Steve fought a war, in the best way he knew how, and if that included dying, then fine, it included dying. He doesn’t deserve Tony whacking him over the head with Howard’s failings as a dad every time he turns around. That was never Steve’s fault, but Tony never lets him forget about it either.
As a parent I get especially angry about this. Because by pinning blame on Steve, who is 100% without fault in this scenario, they’re excusing Howard’s shitty parenting and culpability. And that’s disturbing.
Steve is not responsible for Howard’s issues.
…The only one responsible for Howard’s issues was Howard.
If one truly believes in accountability and they want to be accountable for their actions, then part of accountability is not creating or accepting excuses.
Not only isn’t Steve responsible for Howard’s behavior and Howard’s weird Steve fixation, Steve isn’t AWARE of it. Steve comes out of the ice remembering Howard as merely a friend. For Steve all of Tony’s resentment and hostility comes out of left field.
Maybe Tony telling Steve he grew up hating Steve at least was the dawning of understanding.
Yes, yes yes – Howard’s shitty parenting/putting Steve on a pedestal wasn’t Steve’s fault at all; but Tony’s resentment is equally understandable.
I love the fact that Abraham and Howard were the ones who built Captain America. He is quite literally the Golem built by these two modern-day Jewish wizards to go where these men could not, and defend their people from the men who would kill them.
And Abraham put the words in Steve’s head: not a perfect soldier, but a good man. That’s Steve’s shem.
“This is a very detailed description of how Steve Rogers essentially failed in his mission. He thought he died to destroy HYDRA, but HYDRA did so much better after he had left than before.”
“This is a very detailed description of how Steve Rogers essentially failed in his mission. He thought he died to destroy HYDRA, but HYDRA did so much better after he had left than before.”
CATFA tried to pack the backstories for Howard, Peggy, Bucky, Zola, and Steve into one fucking movie, along with the whole Red Skull thing and they just ended up going nowhere. The Howling Commandos alone are worth an entire two hour film (it’s called Inglorious Basterds. I am in denial), and instead we get a montage.
Okay so the short version is the first one would be every prewar stucky fic ever and the second one would be Inglorious Basterds.
The long version is this. Here you go drop-deaddream, you asked for it.
The trio of photos in the second row are of the Lower East Side, so if you want to see what Howard Stark’s old neighborhood looked like (well after he put it behind him), here it is in all its yiddishkeit glory.
The last picture is of Cooper Union, which is my personal headcanon for Steve’s art school (in Cum Laude especially), so here’s what it looked like when he would have been attending. It looks the same now, 😉
The photos are part of a large trove at Indiana University’s Cushing collection. The NYC ones are of very specific parts of the city, almost entirely lower Manhattan in the peripheries — the docks, the Bowery, the LES — but are worth going through.
Peggy confronts Howard in “The Blitzkrieg Button“ Sneak Peekx
As destronomics is pointing out in subsequent posts, this is completely setting Howard Stark up as a Jew.
The Lower East Side is probably the most infamous of NYC’s many Jewish enclaves (my parents grew up in ones in the Bronx and Brooklyn). Shirtwaist-making (garment industry anything) was a predominantly Jewish occupation and Jews had a share of the fruit market. There are ways to spin Howard’s history to make him a gentile, but… you’d have to make him a very special boy to grow up in that neighborhood with parents in those trades and have him be a goy.
Representation matters, we constantly say, and so this is me giddy at the possibility of Howard being a landsman. A lot of the Jewish characters we see are coincidentally Jewish, but a chance to see someone whose Jewishness was a defining part of his story… A Jewish Howard didn’t have a choice whether to embrace his Jewishness as either a young boy in a ghetto or a wealthy adult on the Upper East Side; you can be damned sure everyone knows he’s Jewish and quite a few hold it against him. Anti-semitism in the post-war period could exist quite nicely with “Never Again,” same as it does now. A Jewish Howard may live a completely secular life now and hasn’t set foot in a shul since his parents died, but he probably can still speak and read Yiddish. And it makes his actions during the war — being up at the front, being willing to fly behind enemy lines, doing everything he could instead of staying home and sitting in his office profiting — a little more interesting.
(Picture, if you will, Project Rebirth planning arguments taking place entirely in Yiddish and Yinglish.)
I don’t know if they’ll do anything with this or just leave it as a coded statement, but… hey, Howard a Yid? I’m chuffed.
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