What would surprise Captain America?

[lolaraincoat]

I've been reading a lot of Avengers fics - there's been a lot to read - and I've been liking many of these fics quite a lot. Except that there's this one thing that's driving me crazy, so crazy that I keep having to back-button out of perfectly good fics before Nick Fury and the Hulk can even begin to get their freak on, which is kind of tragic.

Comments

[executrix]

Hi! So glad to "see" you again!

I'm writing a Captain America story where, basically, his non-participation in premarital sex is a way of hanging on to a time he didn't exactly leave voluntarily. But the obvious answer would be to get married, so he does.

Although I'm also writing an AU where he became...a combat artist, which you could do as a 90-pound weakling.

Also, if *our* super-soldier serum made you look like the Red Skull, and *theirs* made you look like Steve Rogers (who is kind of Herrenvolk looking) it would have made the comic a LOT less popular.

Also, depending on WHICH canon--because in various comics continuities he was around in the 60s and 70s, indeed one where he resigned being Captain America because he hated Ricahrd Nixon so much. But then, Richard Nixon would have to be explained to a lot of fangirls.

[lolaraincoat]

Hey! good to see you too! You know I'll read anything you write, but please put in a footnote for me on the premarital sex story about how in the war everyone around was having premarital sex all the time, pretty please?

I love having him as a combat artist. And I know nothing of the comics canon, but now I would be delighted to see the Nixon story - that's brilliant!

[executrix]

Roger willco. Robertson Davies, writing about WWI (another time when soldiers were having premarital sex all the time!) said that some soldiers might have decided to abstain on the theory that they were going to die in the very near future so might as well not damn themselves to eternal torture just for a little pleasure, so that might be an issue? Compounded, of course, by low self-esteem.

Also, I will have to have at least one footnote in the story because it's a crossover...

My favorite thing in Berube was finding out that there were quasi-official gay MOSs, because you never know when you'll need to find a homosexual in a hurry and not have time to look around!

[lolaraincoat]

Wait, was I hallucinating you brilliantly quoting one of the Marx brothers in some remark here? Because I was just citing that in the comments over at Dreamwidth with someone whom I'm awfully worried I have offended with my flippant attitude toward Marvel comics canon. Augh! where did your wise remark?

This is pretty wise too, of course. But not what I was looking for. Hmmm.

[np_complete]

Great post. You've said some things I suspected. My own guess about the scriptwriters in the Captain America movie showing the Armed Forces as racially integrated, was that they felt that most people wouldn't realize they'd ever been otherwise and might be distracted by a historically accurate depiction. They'd want Cap to fight it or at least object to it.

You asked about segregation in the 40s in New York, and I can offer one second-hand data point: my Dad, who grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan during the war years, said he never saw segregated bathrooms and water fountains in New York or New Jersey. He saw them for the first time in Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia during the Korean War. (His unit, waiting to be shipped out, was given day passes.)

[lolaraincoat]

Oooh, interesting! Do you know if he attended segregated schools?

[lolaraincoat]

Point #1: no, not even close. You would not believe the scandalous stuff my grandmothers got up to before and during the war (and never repented of.)

Point #2: Like a lot of pop culture about war produced in the 1960s and 1970s, I remember Nick Fury as being supposedly about WWII but really about Vietnam - I mean, I could figure that out when I was nine or ten years old, you know? It was that obvious. Just like MASH was supposedly about the Korean War but really about Vietnam.

Point #3: Yeah, as someone said over on the DW crosspost, writers have to consider not just any random person from the 1940s, but this particular character.

[meri_oddities]

Great post. I so totally agree with this. Half the time, I'm like, what are you talking about? But everyone thinks they know history, especially when they think their generation is the one who invented everything.

Coming from a time when personal phone lines were a luxury, I think he would be amazed at the level of personal gadgetry.

[lolaraincoat]

I don't know - I mean, in WWII soldiers carried a remarkable amount of gadgetry around with them, on their persons or else shared among their units. Granted, none of it was electronic gadgetry, but I don't know if that would matter to him or not.

(On the other hand, I am the person who took the laptop AND the iPad AND the special iPad keyboard AND the iPhone with me to Mexico because I couldn't live without any of them for two months, and promptly got myself a bad local cell phone too, so I am in no position to define or describe anyone else's gadget-related experiences.)

[melannen]

As was mentioned in (only) one Avengers fic I've read, they had wireless communications, text messaging, and portable, pocket telephones on the front lines during the War. They didn't have wireless portable telephones that also did text messaging and could access the entirety of human knowledge, true, but he wouldn't be unfamiliar with the basic concepts, and given the tone in tech articles of the time, he'd probably be more amazed that it took sixty years for them to be popularized as consumer items, than amazed that they existed at all.

[goseaward]

:D Glad to see you got this put together, I was enjoying the Twitter conversation...was that only last night?

Mind if I link elsewhere?

[lolaraincoat]

Link away! And yes that convo was only last night. Time flys when you're on the internet.