can i be educated as to why his characterization was wrong?
- "We have orders. We should follow them." Steve. Steve Rogers. Steve "well looks like I have to go behind enemy lines to go save my best friend and company and you can’t tell me otherwise" Rogers. Steve "sixth time is the charm at the carnival recruiting office" Rogers. I’m not buying it, Joss.
- "I get that reference." We all know that Steve was under ice for 70 years, thus he missed a lot. He keeps a notebook of things he should look up, sure, but for him to be like HEY EVERYONE THE OLD GUY GOT THIS doesn’t strike me as believable. It seems like a shoddy shot at comic relief at Steve’s expense. Steve Rogers is the guy who takes the confused look on someone’s face and explains the reference to them, not the guy who points out that he understood it.
- "We need a plan of attack!" because jumping out of an airplane before you get to your destination, while being fired at, and trying to single handedly complete a rescue mission with a handgun and a metal shield is definitely backing this line of thought up.
- “Let’s start with that stick of his. It may be magical…" "is that what just happened" and "seems to be powered by some sort of electricity" remind me of painting Steve as the naive, less intelligent younger brother that everyone gets tired of explaining everything thing to. Steve has a vocabulary. Steve Rogers grew up with electricity. He knows what it is. Steve Rogers also could have just said that it worked like the Hydra weapon, except there are these unnecessary comments to make Steve seem less than everyone else. I hate that whole scene.
- "What’s the matter? afraid of a little lightning?" since when does Steve mock other people like that? Sure, he was smarmy towards the Red Skull ("Nothin’. I’m just a kid from Brooklyn" "So why are you running?") but they’re retaliations. He doesn’t start that sort of thing. That’s Tony’s job.
- The whole “there’s only one God, ma’am” thing. It just seems so proper and Steve isn’t really proper or good with women, especially ones he’s just met. He doesn’t call Peggy ma’am when he’s conversing with her, he fumbles over “dame, woman, agent.” He also doesn’t seem the kind to bring God into things, even when Schmidt was “harnessing the power of the gods.” The whole line/situation irked me, and that just might be more subjective than objective, so you can ignore this point if you think it has too much fallacy in it.
- Steve always comes up one quip short with Tony. Continually. That might just be a nit-picky thing, but I don’t like it. Smart-mouthed Steve Rogers doesn’t keep playing into somebody’s hand the way he does with Tony. Steve is used to bantering with people- with Bucky, with the people who beat him up - he doesn’t back down with “one more wisecrack out of you” or any of that.
If you like Whedon’s characterization of Steve, that’s fine. You are welcome to your opinion, just as I am to mine. I wouldn’t say his characterization is poor more than it is wrong.
So beautiful that someone explained this. I really enjoyed The Avengers a lot, but at the time when I saw it I would have called Captain America my least favorite Avenger ever. After seeing Cap 2 and rewatching Cap 1 a couple of times and feeling like I actually get who Steve Rogers is now, he’s actually one of my all-time favs on so many levels. The whole reason I didn’t really care for him before was that Avengers was kind of character assassination when it comes to Steve. I’m not really sure I feel like that movie did many of its characters much justice, but Steve in paritcular was really strangely out of character and almost reduced to being a foil for Tony, and nothing about him in that film does him any credit at all.