Unpopular fandom opinion

[dira]

All the MCU canon we have points to Steve Rogers, both pre- and post-serum, being a fundamentally calm person who is very slow to anger, AND RELATEDLY,

Willingness to enter a fight, or to use violence, is not in itself evidence that a person feels anger.

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Comments

[sholio]

COSIGNED.

... though I do get that, on the one hand, fandom is going to exaggerate character traits because that's just what fandom does. Character had a rough day and poured themselves a drink in one episode? Hope you're ready for 300 fics about their drinking problem! Character A called Character B a cute nickname in 1 episode out of 80? They'll never call them anything else in fic! It can get annoying when everybody seizes on the exact same piece of trivial characterization and blows it up to eleventy, but in general it's just what fandom does. (And I really can't complain about 300-chapter dives into OTT angst based on one minor moment of canonical self-doubt or whatnot, h/c junkie that I am.)

However, I also think fandom has a fundamental problem figuring out what to do with characters like Steve. Fandom just doesn't cope very well with characters who are selfless, well-intentioned people. When characters are jerks in canon, fandom's natural inclination is to seize on their every tiny moment of compassion or self-sacrifice (I support this inclination, for the record XD) but fandom doesn't seem to know how to handle characters who come down solidly on Team Good Guy. Redemption arcs? Boy, does fandom write 'em. Character trying to be a moral person in the face of an unjust world, not so much. Fandom turning Steve into a raging ball of suppressed anger issues is at least more Steve-friendly than some of the other ways it handles him, such as making him a sanctimonious jerk.

[alafaye]

♥

[dira]

AGREED.

[indywind]

Yeeeeep.

[dira]

Having meandered around to this point over at LJ--I wonder if part of the reason people misinterpret Steve in this way isn't also because we see him in that back alley fight engaging in a level of violence that was a lot more normal and unremarkable then than it would be now? Casual fighting like that, among children and adults, just was not a big deal at the time, where i think it's much more !!! now for someone to wind up in a fistfight like that? Maybe?

[sholio]

.... hmmm. That makes a lot of sense to me, honestly.

It's interesting how, no further than we are separated from the 1930s in time, it's so alien to a lot of people now. Having switched fandoms recently from Captain America to Agent Carter, it's also interesting to me how much more contemporary the late 1940s feels than the early 1930s. There are still things people get wrong (still things I'm getting wrong, I'm sure), but while it IS different, it feels like much less of a social and technological jump to the world we know than it did when I was writing Steve as a kid/teenager.

[ratcreature]

That makes sense. I noticed that even from the way violence among children was treated when I was little compared to now. Even as an accepted method of social control.

Like in German there is a word "Klassenkeile" (class beating) specifically for violent peer punishment where everybody in a school class after school beats up a student, who in some way "betrayed" the class they belong to. Like tattled to teachers in ways that harmed the whole class, or went against the group to side with others etc. so it results in that group punishment, and everybody else participates so no individual is singly responsible. In older children's books (not ancient, but like from the 1970s or later even) that is portrayed as a reasonable way to foster group cohesion and enact a punishment.

When I was a student the German school system still encouraged you to form a close group identity with your classmates, like in the lower years you only were friends with people from your class, not with anyone from the other classes in your year, you competed as a group with the other classes, etc. but while the concept was still familiar and used as a threat, group violence never actually happened that I recall. So it was beginning to change, but for the value that you do not break ranks with your classmates to side with adults was still very much in effect. For example implicitly students were expected to rather take punishments as a group than to point a teacher to a guilty individual, even if teachers verbally said something else.