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captain america, captain america: the first avenger, dan slott, haters can get off at the first stop, i believe in heroes, marvel, or i will gladly throw you overboard, peggy carter, steve rogers, stories, this is my ship, why heroes are important, writing
I was looking at Pinterest this morning, and I found something…
(TruthWillWin1, thought you might be interested!)
It appears that Dan Slott is just trying to be funny, but this struck me as deadly serious. (I have heard that Mr. Slott has a track record of trying to be funny, failing, and also failing to take the good of the story seriously.)
Yes, Steve Rogers would agree. Because that is Steve Rogers. Truly humble, because he knows all his own failings. He knows, deep down inside, that he is not perfect. He doesn’t try to be perfect. He just tries to be a good man, and sometimes, he finds himself lacking.
And, I would argue, that is why he’s the super soldier, and not Peggy.
Peggy Carter is, on a fundamental level, very different from Cap. (My sister and I actually discovered this fact by asking “What if Captain America was Cecelia “Celia” Rogers and what if Celia Rogers ‘survived’ the plane crash and was found and was present during the events of Agent Carter?” We realized that Peggy and the girl version of Cap are very different. Peggy is a woman in an man’s world who is proud of who she is and makes her way in that world without losing her femininity. On the other hand, Celia is not sure of who she is as a woman. She’s a good person, but does not know how to be ladylike, or how to be an adult woman, for that matter. She’s shy, and self-erasing, and wears blouses and skirts that don’t fit very well, and she isn’t really classically “pretty”–the effect the super soldier serum has on a woman’s body isn’t exactly what a lot of people would consider attractive. She doesn’t look like the Black Widow. She has a lot of defined muscle, and a larger rib cage but a smaller bust. Despite their different backstories, a lot of that does transfer across to Steve.)
Steve Rogers doesn’t go picking fights. He might “ask for it”, but he doesn’t start them. He speaks up, but when he’s not speaking up, he’s not noticed a lot. He’s not self-assured. He tends to question his own motives and actions–which is why Erskine picked him, because he is careful about what he’s contributing to. On the other hand, Peggy can be a bit rash at times, and she’s very self-assured, and while she sometimes questions, she doesn’t second-guess herself nearly as much as Steve does (to be just, I don’t think of them either really needs to second-guess themselves often, because they normally get it right the first time.) Steve doesn’t play up to anyone’s expectations, while Peggy acts up to those expectations so that people will underestimate her quite a bit. Steve is always completely honest and open, and while Peggy admires that, it’s not something that she can be in her line of work.
The world needs people like Steve Rogers to be themselves. (It also needs Bucky Barneses and Peggy Carters, filling their capacities, but right now, let’s focus on Steve.)
The whole reason that Erskine chose Steve was because Steve was already a hero in a small way. He was just giving Steve the ability to do it on another scale.
Also, I feel that when we suggest that Peggy could have ended the war so much sooner if she had been a super soldier, we are devaluing Peggy as she is!
She is a strong woman. She’s strong when Steve can’t be. Peggy doesn’t need the super soldier serum to make a change. She takes charge and steps in and doesn’t let them keep her out, and she’s way more successful at it than Steve.
In so many ways, while Steve is the hero the world looks to, Peggy is the hero Steve looks to. Peggy is smarter about her emotions than he is. He gets lost; she puts him back on track.
On the other hand, Peggy is aggressive, certainly much more aggressive than Steve is, and the serum tends to take your emotions and personality and past choices and push that into overdrive, so Peggy the super soldier might not be the same person that we know and love now. And maybe the war would have been over in half the time, but the ending might have been very different–and that might not have been a good thing. (Though, to be honest, if they could have found some way of stopping Hiroshima and Nagasaki from being bombed, I would get behind it–if it were ethical. The ends do NOT justify the means.)
In short, Peggy doesn’t need the serum. In a similar way that Steve Rogers doesn’t need the serum, true, except he isn’t as strong as she is, emotionally or possibly even physically. She’s just better at going far than he is, and that’s why he is the supersoldier and she is not–because he’s humble and will back out when they’re done with the fight, while she will go on to build SHIELD.
The world needs both Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter, in the roles they find themselves filling. The love story is perfect when each person can be truthfully said to be the other’s “better half.”
In closing, I can only say that I’m glad they did it the way they did. (Also, Mr. Slott, please pay more attention to the good of the story you are trying to tell. Maybe the fans would thank you then. And maybe reading a history book or two wouldn’t hurt, either!)
I have seen that, and I think you have made some great points.
“The world needs people like Steve Rogers to be themselves. (It also needs Bucky Barneses and Peggy Carters, filling their capacities, but right now, let’s focus on Steve.)”
Every person has their place and to reduce one persons value to pander to another is silly. Agent Peggy Carter is great but to stretch it out to a Mary Sue is silly.
Yes. Let’s let Peggy be her own person and not make her someone she’s not, which is what would happen… she is an intelligence agent, not a soldier. She saves lives mostly by figuring out where the enemy will be and when, why, and how to hit them the hardest to keep our boys safe.
I avoid token feminists a lot for this exact reason. Let’s have strong, well-developed female characters, but let’s keep them in context, and if we give them their own story, we GIVE THEM THEIR OWN story, not someone else’s! (Which is why “Agent Carter” was such a stroke of brilliance. “Agent Carter” was Peggy’s story. It was a story that was her own, and played well to her strengths and weaknesses. It’s not a story that would have worked with someone else at the helm. “Diana Prince?” “Sorry, not my department, besides, Peggy’s got this. She’s got this.”
Also, I think the thing that annoyed me in “The First Avenger” was that blond idiot who kissed Steve in front of Peggy. But she was being an idiot and that was her affair. Still, it smacked of convenience on the part of the writers to me… (Which is probably why I write fanfiction. Because all the story arcs can’t be fit in to a two-hour movie, and everyone deserves a story arc. I’d watch a TV series about the Howling Commandos, but only if it centered around different Commandos each time, because each of them deserves their story being told!!!… About the Commandos… I’m actually working on a project which features all of them and Peggy Carter, telling about their adventures in the a bit over a year in between “November 1943” and “March 1945″… mostly because I’m a history nerd and over-research everything… and there are so many awesome real people out there who the Commandos might run into…)
The Howling Commandos would be a story I would love to see!
“if we give them their own story, we GIVE THEM THEIR OWN story, not someone else’s! (Which is why “Agent Carter” was such a stroke of brilliance. “Agent Carter” was Peggy’s story. It was a story that was her own, and played well to her strengths and weaknesses. It’s not a story that would have worked with someone else at the helm. ”
This is the issue I have with Sam taking on the role as the new Captain America as well. I think he is a great choice to take over and he could do the job well but the movie gave the character more public recognition that ever before so they had an opportunity to explore the character and give him more depth. Instead we have Sam with what would be considered a temp job since it would not be likely that he will keep the job forever.
Yes. If we’re going to get stories about how Sam steps into the gap, I want them to take it SERIOUSLY.
It’s important that if we have a role that’s being stepped into, it is homage and not a carbon copy, too…
Well, since they’re so good at bringing people back (Bucky, Coulson… probably a bunch of other guys–I haven’t seen “Agents of SHIELD”), if Steve dies in “Civil War” he still will probably be in the third Avengers movie, either as a flashback, or a ghost, or it will turn out that they brought him back from the dead somehow. That seems to happen an awful lot.
And I will probably feel guilty about being overexcited when he comes back, because I know there have to be consequences and I have to be hard on it like that, for the good of the story, but…
(Yes, I’m the person in the back of the theater who refuses to believe that Qui-Gon is dead. *sigh* I’m also the person who saw a sneak peak scene and didn’t get why everyone was laughing when Steve tore a log in half with his bare hands, because this is serious, people!)
The Howling Commandos is a story in progress… I’m looking for a beta reader who can help me get it right, because I want them to come off as a bunch of military guys, even if they’re not quite average. They’re not even all from the same countries, and I don’t think their commanding officer even got all the way through officer training, if he had the benefit of it at all. I’m not sure how long basic training generally takes or how long they gave them in “The First Avenger”, but I think it’s a safe bet to say that Steve didn’t actually get all the way through it. (And in the Avengers, Loki says something about desperation. You want to see desperation? They’re sending out a partially-trained officer with a bunch of people who would not all be in the same unit in their own armies, and they aren’t even from one nation, on the strength of one, very desperate, rescue, because one person glimpsed the possibility that it could be more and another had hope. The Howling Commandos are not going to march to anyone’s drum but their own. They’re going to be a very tight-knit group, and though the military dynamic is going to be a bit different, it’s going to be there.) So I’m looking for a beta reader who can help me out with that… I also need this beta reader to be good with characterization. Because Dugan and Bucky will be making fun of Steve’s fashion sense, or lack thereof, there will be times when everyone just falls asleep exhausted, on top of each other, there will be quiet moments when it’s only the person who was supposed to watch and one other insomniac awake… there will be Bucky mocking Dugan’s mustache and Dernier blowing stuff up and bemoaning everyone’s absolutely terrible accent when everyone is trying to catch up with Jones and learn French and Morita sneaking into Howard Stark’s lab and removing the alcohol from his alcohol stash so he and Jones can do science “experiments” with it… (aka any use other than drinking it…)
Of course, since this is a serious story, I have a couple of ideas for arcs. One of which involves a traitor, and has Peggy doing most of the detective work. (Oh, and it also features Steve being a bookworm, because STEVE IS A BOOKWORM and I just found out that two of the three “Space Trilogy” books were printed before 1944 and knew for a while that “The Hobbit” had been out for a while by then, and I think Steve would be the sort of person to enjoy the sci-fi genre, maybe a bit more than fantasy, but I think he’d read both. Also, I really love Ransom’s line “In the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, here goes–I mean, Amen!” in Perelandra.)
Erin,
Hi. Something that might be helpful, before going into too in depth of an analysis.
The context:
The original tweet was made January 6th, a Tuesday night, live tweeting while AGENT CARTER was on TV– and right after Peggy handed a bad guy his keister.
So, yes, it was said very much as a “Way to go, Peggy!” kind of joke.
And most people responding to it on the night said they found it funny.
Including a number of people working on the actual show, comic book creators, industry journalists, and devout AGENT CARTER fans.
(Which was probably why it was “Liked” over 700 times AND “favorited” over 700 times as well.)
This is the original Tweet:
The rest of the screen cap that you’re citing are comments by other Twitter users– and not really anything I can control. So I don’t really feel the need to comment on them.
Hope that clears any confusion up.
Thanks,
Dan
I’m so sorry to have taken this out of context! I’m grateful you made the comment, though–it gave me a chance to analyze characters, and that’s one of my favorite things to do. Steve/Peggy is my ship, and I like exploring how relationships work. (I don’t understand why they put that blond woman in “The First Avenger,” unless she was some sort of blatant vehicle so they could tell us exactly how many people Cap saved… we didn’t need her to creep us out while telling us what a hero he is!)
I like the way you analyzed the characters in this, even if the it was a little out of context. I think, regardless of anything else, I think it shows how great the strengths of some characters support the weaknesses of others, and why it’s good that all characters serve a different purpose—and, by extension, so do we! Plus, character analyses are just awesome anyway.
YESYESYES and I will ship Steve and Peggy until the world ends.
Maybe I will write an extension of this, analyzing why I love the Siriwan ship but don’t like the Obitine one, because I had similar reasons… Also, Siri is no longer actually “canon.” *cries* I will never be okay with that. I hope someone re-instates her soon, becuase she’s epic and they could TOTALLY do a standalone series with just Siri and Obi-Wan could be nowhere in sight and it would work. (Just like “Agent Carter” worked.) Strong female characters for the win. Also, if you flunk the Bechdel test do you have to sign up for a re-test date? 😛 Because I’m tempted to write that story with Siri and there will be some shallow (maybe) tabloid gossip monger who asks Siri about her relationship with Obi-Wan, and Siri will say “That’s classified.” Most of the time, though, when Siri talks to other women, it’s generally her telling the girls, “We’re about to take these guys out, you go in here and here, and don’t stop for coffee, Amelia!”
Oh, and apparently Siri has Tardis earrings. Logic?! What’s that?! Who needs logic when fandoms are involved?! 😛 Though, it does come in handy when writing, fanfic or original fiction, whichever you want. 😛
Dan, it was nice to see you responding in a nice way.
With that said erinkenobi I do not think it diminishes your view in any way either.
“Let’s let Peggy be her own person and not make her someone she’s not, which is what would happen… she is an intelligence agent, not a soldier. She saves lives mostly by figuring out where the enemy will be and when, why, and how to hit them the hardest to keep our boys safe.”
She is a great character to explore!
I agree! I love Peggy Carter. She is the most amazing person. I cried a little bit when, in “The Winter Soldier”, Natasha said “Who’s the girl?” because Natasha doesn’t know Peggy?! Sacrilege. If they never actually met, it would have been the saddest thing in the movie, apart from the fact that Bucky was turned into a weapon against his will and everyone else Steve was friends with is pretty much dead.
On second thoughts, though, given what I’ve heard about “Agents of Shield”, it’s probable that Natasha did know who Peggy was and just wanted to learn about the history Steve obviously shares with her. If that was so, it would have been better to ask him outright, because then he would probably have given you a straight answer…
I’m not sure if this is true–I haven’t been able to verify my sources yet–but it seems that Hayley Atwell thought it would be interesting if Peggy received the supersoldier serum and became evil as a result. I think it would be a great story to explore, but I hope that if they do explore it they do it as a “possibility” or in a side universe or something and not as part of the canon in the MCU, mostly because running damage control for that might lead the talented writers in the MCU into territory that can well be considered simply ridiculous… Also, they’d have to figure out a way to fix continuity with “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”, and it might not be pretty…
I hear Peggy will get a second season! Can’t wait until it is out.
Have you watched Daredevil?
I can’t wait either! I feel like it’s a bit late for me to get into “Agents of Shield”, but I’m solidly an “Agent Carter” fan…
(My best friend keeps telling me to watch Doctor Who, and I would like to watch it, but can’t for the same reason. Also, I can’t buy the season sets for myself. I’m trying to earn enough to attend full-time next semester, and for me, tithing will always be more important than indulging.) It sounds like an awesome show… do you think they’ll release it on DVD?
No, I haven’t. No Netflix.
I am sure Shield will be available, but you could find a friend with Netflix some day and watch it with them:)
Hmmm… I wonder if Iris will have access to her Netflix when she comes to visit… 😉
Friends share, watch it together, you supply the snacks!
Absolutely! I’d better figure out something that doesn’t involve Nutella, though–she has a mild allergy to hazelnuts, and the general fall-back snack I normally make has Nutella in it… It’s a bit more advanced version of puppy chow, basically.
Yeah, I’ve come across a lot of people’s opinions on characters like that. Sometimes it’s interesting, and sometimes I just want to plug my ears and go “Stop! You’re ruining the story!”
Great analysis! Love character studies like this. There’s always the “what if”, (I don’t know why it usually happens with opposite characters) of switching places present. But our favorite stories would never be the same. 😉
Yeah… what if’s are fun. I think that Star Wars has a lot of them… 😛
I do it to my own books sometimes. 😛 it doesn’t always turn out well. But if it does, it usually gets stuck in the book. That’s what’s nice about being an author. XD
Yeah… I do this a lot as well. It helps me see the red flags before they’re raised and modify characters if they need to be modified.
Sometimes it gets a little too speculative, though. 😛
Yeah… I normally try to base my extrapolation on something.
XD