team cap reacting to steve’s new look for infinity war ミ☆

Infinity Beard

BOTH. BOTH IS GOOD.

@sweet-coffee-jelly

Dude, Captain America needs my help

captain america: civil war // spider-man: homecoming

I went under, the world was at war, I wake up, they say we won. They didn't say what we lost.

The lack of care given to Steve after his awakening, especially in terms of addressing his grief, survivor’s guilt, and PTSD, will forever infuriate me.

THIS^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Hey dude, you should literally be catatonic from grief and loss and shock but how about you jump right into fighting this mess we made while you were under??? Oh and while we’re at it, you’re gonna be ridiculed, marginalized, and treated like nothing more than a real life action figure.

No one will be particularly kind to you and at the end of the movie, you’ll go off alone while we’re all paired up.

Sound good???

OMG YES, so much this. Two weeks. TWO WEEKS. That’s the only adjustment Steve had between ‘hey, welcome to the 21st century, we do so hope you enjoy your stay’ and ‘hey man, we have this little alien problem, you think you can help us out with that?’. And there form of catching him up is handing him a manila envelope with personnel files on the Commandos, Howard and Peggy and all but Peggy had big red DECEASED stamps on it. That’s so cold, so impersonal. He had to sit there, in a horribly lit apartment, and read those stamps, one right after another, alone.

It took two years for Steve to meet Sam, the first person to ask him how he was doing and if he was happy (and yes, to be fair, I realize that Natasha was trying to help, in her own way, by encouraging him to go out and meet people). Honestly though, just thinking about Steve during those two years breaks my heart. Especially since we have a basis for comparison. Steve’s awakening in the comics was nothing like that, there he had people who reached out to him and took it upon themselves to help him adjust from the get-go. The contrast is heartbreaking.

YES to all of this!  Imagine how much more sense CACW would have made (and how even more heartbreaking it would have been), if Tony had reached out to Steve at the end of Avengers, given him a place to stay while they built the team together…*sings We Could’ve Had it AAAAAALLLL”  Not blaming “Tony.” That was Whedon’s call to send Steve off on his Lonely Motorcycle Ride of Not Dealing With Things.  

                                                                                                                                           #this #steve rogers #everyone goes on about Tony’s ptsd #which he has  #but fuck  #Steve was ripped from the world he knew #he lost everyone but Peggy  #and he just gets sent out into the world #until ‘btw we fucked up with this ikea lamp that you died trying to destroy. also like half of us are nazis. oopsie"  #and Steve goes with it #and everything is fucked up #and Steve is playing at being a supersoldier  #his insides still half frozen with trauma and grief  #he plays it pretty  #even though Tony is a dick to him #and it’s another slap in the face to  #know that Howard became a terrible father  #and there is a seed of bitterness in his son #that Steve didn’t live to see in howard #Steve takes the mission to save the world #because that is what Cap would do  #he’s carrying the shield like a mask  #because the man he was #is still in the ice #he isn’t ready to be himself but in  #the blood on his knuckles seeping into the wraps  #he’s a shell as much as the winter soldier is later  #bucky went into hiding  #living a sparse life as he put pieces of himself together (via @typhoidmeri)

Fem!Steve/Captain America with her shield from the gf. The sailor uniform really fits the color scheme.

Fem!Bucky 

Chronically ill Steve Rogers

(The images in this should be collapsed to begin with because, well, one of them is a plate of raw meat that Steve is presumably eating for breakfast. The last image is a gif. Contains discussion of illness, treatments, ableism and eugenics. I should point out first that I don’t have any of these conditions other than asthma.)

So many fics focus only on skinny Steve’s asthma and portray him as being as minimally disabled as possible. Let’s just remember that according to all the various sources (the Disneyland poster, the form Steve hands in to enlist in the film) that Steve:

So what does this all mean for little Steve? Pre-serum Steve is chronically ill from birth or childhood, probably due to complications in birth or his earlier illnesses (there seem to be a lot of things happening in his respiratory system and stomach), and some of which is evidence of what at the time would be considered poor genetics.

People often associate eugenics with the Nazis, but its real home is rooted in the 20th century USA, and it was in full swing in the 20s and 30s. Many German eugenics research programs received their finding from the US before the war. Although as a white man living in New York Steve would’ve been safe from forcible sterilisation or euthanasia, public sentiment was overwhelmingly supportive of casting anyone framed as a dependent on the state or a fault in the gene pool cast out.

Eugenics was legal and mandated, and whilst Steve was growing up, thousands of impoverished women and state dependent children, especially women of colour and mentally ill women were forcibly sterilised by the state, and many people living in mental institutions or care homes were allowed to die of neglect.

His mother’s death due to TB would also have made him a target for this kind of thinking - in fact, tuberculosis was used as a method for targeting those with “inferior” genetics (whilst “superior” individuals would supposedly be immune) for euthanasia for eugenics purposes - in one mental institution, new patients were given infected milk to kill off those susceptible. 

Ironically, Captain America and the superserum are essentially an experiment in eugenics, which really reflects just how widespread this attitude was in the 40s. I’m analysing Steve for purposes of fic writing and not any genuine critical analysis here, but there’s no getting away from it: they put a chronically ill, disabled man in, and they get a genetically engineered super-soldier out.

Steve actually surviving both rheumatic and scarlet fever with asthma, heart problems and no antibiotics is pretty much a miracle in itself at this stage, and I guess we should all be grateful that Sarah Rogers was a nurse, because things like half decent atomizers to treat asthma were expensive and hard to obtain.

When Bucky is talking about Steve having nothing to prove, he’s not just talking about a small guy who is too sickly to join the army - he’s talking about someone who would’ve been considered an invalid and unworthy among his peers and made to feel like a dependent all of his life. Steve has to prove everything to everyone except Bucky, the only person who values Steve for himself and not against criteria of fitness or health, and most of all he needs to prove to himself that the things he’s internalised about himself aren’t true.

tl;dr: Basically, it’s time to start portraying Steve accurately in fic and stop glossing over aspects of his health that aren’t as fun to write as an asthma attack.

I would add one small correction—the mention of the diabetes doesn’t preclude Steve having siblings who died from it. Diabetes was very frequently a death sentence into the 1920s and the discovery of insulin and while Steve’s mom might have had access to it, as a nurse, there’s also the matter of testing blood sugar, which could be inaccurate. So, my money’s on one or more of his siblings dying from diabetes. 

@pastalava THE CHARACTERIZATION STEVE DESERVES

I’m cryInG

LISTEN STEVE WAS 90 LBS OF SASS BEFORE HE EVER BECAME CAP. DIDN’T ERSKINE SAY IT ENHANCED FEATURES. STEVE ROGERS SHOULD NOW HAVE 4X AS MUCH SASS