Once I dug an early grave to find a better land
A while back, I made a remark that Steve Rogers, like Diana of Themyscira, is turned on by JUSTICE, and 
perevision drew lovely Diana/Steve fanart. CROSSOVER OTP 5EVER. I so want fic where they meet and fight bad guys and fall in love! They would be such a great couple, punching out evil and volunteering at the local women's shelter and then going home for a meal they cook together, and then having super enthusiastic and athletic sex, their star-spangled undies strewn about the place with abandon. They would talk art and politics and books and movies. Steve would teach Diana about baseball and Diana would get them ballroom dancing lessons so Steve could finally learn to dance, and they would spar and banter and punch out evil and get turned on by JUSTICE and have to stop for a quickie after taking down a HYDRA cell (and Steve would invariably talk about debriefing afterwards with a straight face but a glint in his eye).
Why isn't there page after page of this glorious perfection available for my reading pleasure?
Speaking of Steve,
thingswithwings wrote a good post yesterday about Steve's characterization in fic and stuff that people get wrong a lot. I don't actually see much of what she's talking about (i.e., Steve as a reactionary super-conservative right winger) in the fic I read (and if it does show up, I tend to click out because NO), but I do see it sometimes when people talk about the character and it makes me tetchy.
Here are some things about Steve that I try to keep in mind about him while writing:
Steve is the first generation son of Irish immigrants1 raised by a single mother2 who worked as a nurse until she died of TB and he became a ward of the state and was placed in an orphanage somewhere in Brooklyn. He lived through the Depression and was likely malnourished on top of being sickly to begin with. He was an art student3. He was bullied and never met a fight he wanted to walk away from even before he was big enough to finish what he started. He had a best friend who set him up on dates and tried to keep him out of trouble. He takes orders from a woman without complaint, though he's awkward in dealing with women he's attracted to in non-work situations4. Later, when given the opportunity to handpick the unit of elite fighting men he's going to lead, he chooses an integrated bunch. He doesn't seem at all fazed that Nick Fury is in charge, nor have problems taking orders from him (as much as he takes orders from anyone. He doesn't like bullies and he spends his war fighting fascism.
(Also important to note, if not directly relevant to his political leanings, is that he dies barely a week [if that] after he loses his best friend; his state of mind when he wakes up and when we first see him in the Avengers is that of someone who's very recently lost or given up everything - including his own life - and come back to a world that is not nearly the free and equal society he believed he was fighting for.)
Given the make up of these circumstances, it's extremely likely that he was an FDR democrat5, pro-union, pro-New Deal, pro-government safety net for the poor and other underserved populations. He'd probably be considered a socialist today, though he's really just an old school lefty progressive. The person on the Avengers whose political views most closely match his is likely Bruce.
I don't think he's some perfect liberal progressive, but I do think his stumbling blocks and blind spots would come from not having the context or the vocabulary to discuss these issues the way they're framed today, and also from not consciously examining the privilege he does have and the assumptions he makes because of it.
When he says "They told me we won the war, but they didn't say what we lost," I don't think he's bitterly mourning the halcyon days of some false conservative paradise known as "the good old days" so much as he's thinking of the cost of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of how even the progress we've made hasn't been as much as he'd hoped and how it often seems to not just have stalled but to be moving backwards in some ways, and this is what he and the Commandos and thousands of other good people fought and died for?
It's not like I expect everyone to always explicitly bring up his politics in fic (I certainly don't) but his beliefs are, or at least should be, evident in his attitude and the way he treats and interacts with other people, and all of these things contribute to how I interpret and present his characterization.
--
1 And given the time and place, likely Catholic, despite those prop dogtags that list his religious affiliation as Protestant (the prop dossiers place his address in Queens, so they're not really reliable). And given my own family background and experience as a (lapsed) Catholic, I don't think Steve would have much trouble being progressive and being Catholic. I'm sure there are things he'd struggle to reconcile, but who doesn't have those?
2 He says his father was killed by mustard gas, which I've always taken to mean his father died in WWI (thus setting his birth date no later than July 4, 1919), but it could mean Joe Rogers came home but was somehow afflicted afterward by the effects of exposure to mustard gas, possibly making him unable to work (thus allowing for the 1922 date that the comics use now).
3 I can't remember if it's in the movie tie-in comics that he takes a WPA job as a sign painter, but in the main 616 comics, I believe he did get a WPA job in addition to drawing ads to sell war bonds before he became Captain America. Regardless, being an artist in that time and place would likely mean knowing, if not necessarily running with, a fairly progressive, if not downright radical, crowd. (Sadly, I don't know if Arnie Roth, Steve's gay friend from the 40s, exists canonically in the movieverse.) But either way, he'd think the WPA - and other New Deal programs to provide jobs and food - was a GOOD THING.
4 See also his dealings with Natasha - he trusts her when she says Clint is okay to come along, and he doesn't question her capabilities in the field, nor her ability to shut down the portal when she says she thinks she can - just her ability to get up there and whether she's sure she wants to do it (and then the look on his face after, I think, speaks volumes, much as his smirk after Peggy decked Hodge did).
5 He definitely was in the comics.
--
Okay, wow, that kind of totally took over this post. I have a lot of STEVE FEELS okay? I spend a lot of time thinking about him.
(also the two songs that played while I was getting ready to post gave me the choice of two subject lines - the one I chose above, or "and my sidekick was all this grief" from Blue Dahlia by Gaslight Anthem. SO HARD TO CHOOSE.)
*
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/546702.html.
people have commented there.
perevision drew lovely Diana/Steve fanart. CROSSOVER OTP 5EVER. I so want fic where they meet and fight bad guys and fall in love! They would be such a great couple, punching out evil and volunteering at the local women's shelter and then going home for a meal they cook together, and then having super enthusiastic and athletic sex, their star-spangled undies strewn about the place with abandon. They would talk art and politics and books and movies. Steve would teach Diana about baseball and Diana would get them ballroom dancing lessons so Steve could finally learn to dance, and they would spar and banter and punch out evil and get turned on by JUSTICE and have to stop for a quickie after taking down a HYDRA cell (and Steve would invariably talk about debriefing afterwards with a straight face but a glint in his eye).
Why isn't there page after page of this glorious perfection available for my reading pleasure?
Speaking of Steve,
thingswithwings wrote a good post yesterday about Steve's characterization in fic and stuff that people get wrong a lot. I don't actually see much of what she's talking about (i.e., Steve as a reactionary super-conservative right winger) in the fic I read (and if it does show up, I tend to click out because NO), but I do see it sometimes when people talk about the character and it makes me tetchy.
Here are some things about Steve that I try to keep in mind about him while writing:
Steve is the first generation son of Irish immigrants1 raised by a single mother2 who worked as a nurse until she died of TB and he became a ward of the state and was placed in an orphanage somewhere in Brooklyn. He lived through the Depression and was likely malnourished on top of being sickly to begin with. He was an art student3. He was bullied and never met a fight he wanted to walk away from even before he was big enough to finish what he started. He had a best friend who set him up on dates and tried to keep him out of trouble. He takes orders from a woman without complaint, though he's awkward in dealing with women he's attracted to in non-work situations4. Later, when given the opportunity to handpick the unit of elite fighting men he's going to lead, he chooses an integrated bunch. He doesn't seem at all fazed that Nick Fury is in charge, nor have problems taking orders from him (as much as he takes orders from anyone. He doesn't like bullies and he spends his war fighting fascism.
(Also important to note, if not directly relevant to his political leanings, is that he dies barely a week [if that] after he loses his best friend; his state of mind when he wakes up and when we first see him in the Avengers is that of someone who's very recently lost or given up everything - including his own life - and come back to a world that is not nearly the free and equal society he believed he was fighting for.)
Given the make up of these circumstances, it's extremely likely that he was an FDR democrat5, pro-union, pro-New Deal, pro-government safety net for the poor and other underserved populations. He'd probably be considered a socialist today, though he's really just an old school lefty progressive. The person on the Avengers whose political views most closely match his is likely Bruce.
I don't think he's some perfect liberal progressive, but I do think his stumbling blocks and blind spots would come from not having the context or the vocabulary to discuss these issues the way they're framed today, and also from not consciously examining the privilege he does have and the assumptions he makes because of it.
When he says "They told me we won the war, but they didn't say what we lost," I don't think he's bitterly mourning the halcyon days of some false conservative paradise known as "the good old days" so much as he's thinking of the cost of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and of how even the progress we've made hasn't been as much as he'd hoped and how it often seems to not just have stalled but to be moving backwards in some ways, and this is what he and the Commandos and thousands of other good people fought and died for?
It's not like I expect everyone to always explicitly bring up his politics in fic (I certainly don't) but his beliefs are, or at least should be, evident in his attitude and the way he treats and interacts with other people, and all of these things contribute to how I interpret and present his characterization.
--
1 And given the time and place, likely Catholic, despite those prop dogtags that list his religious affiliation as Protestant (the prop dossiers place his address in Queens, so they're not really reliable). And given my own family background and experience as a (lapsed) Catholic, I don't think Steve would have much trouble being progressive and being Catholic. I'm sure there are things he'd struggle to reconcile, but who doesn't have those?
2 He says his father was killed by mustard gas, which I've always taken to mean his father died in WWI (thus setting his birth date no later than July 4, 1919), but it could mean Joe Rogers came home but was somehow afflicted afterward by the effects of exposure to mustard gas, possibly making him unable to work (thus allowing for the 1922 date that the comics use now).
3 I can't remember if it's in the movie tie-in comics that he takes a WPA job as a sign painter, but in the main 616 comics, I believe he did get a WPA job in addition to drawing ads to sell war bonds before he became Captain America. Regardless, being an artist in that time and place would likely mean knowing, if not necessarily running with, a fairly progressive, if not downright radical, crowd. (Sadly, I don't know if Arnie Roth, Steve's gay friend from the 40s, exists canonically in the movieverse.) But either way, he'd think the WPA - and other New Deal programs to provide jobs and food - was a GOOD THING.
4 See also his dealings with Natasha - he trusts her when she says Clint is okay to come along, and he doesn't question her capabilities in the field, nor her ability to shut down the portal when she says she thinks she can - just her ability to get up there and whether she's sure she wants to do it (and then the look on his face after, I think, speaks volumes, much as his smirk after Peggy decked Hodge did).
5 He definitely was in the comics.
--
Okay, wow, that kind of totally took over this post. I have a lot of STEVE FEELS okay? I spend a lot of time thinking about him.
(also the two songs that played while I was getting ready to post gave me the choice of two subject lines - the one I chose above, or "and my sidekick was all this grief" from Blue Dahlia by Gaslight Anthem. SO HARD TO CHOOSE.)
*
This entry at DW: http://musesfool.dreamwidth.org/546702.html.
people have commented there.