Steve dealing with casualties vs. Tony dealing with casualties
That’s because Steve is an actual trained soldier who has a couple of years of active combat during wartime under his belt, and Tony is a well intentioned rich dude in a fancy suit. It’s almost literally night and day, war v. peace. Steve has a much healthier perspective, to be honest, for their line of work.
That’s…such a bad analysis.
Steve has an incredibly bad perspective for a peacetime officer. His whole perspective is that they try to save as many people as they can, but ultimately people die in the course of their ultimate goal: ending the “war”. Meanwhile Tony’s ultimate goal is to save people, that’s it. There is no ideology behind him truly, only the desire to save people’s lives.
There’s a scene in some generic foreign cop show, I can’t remember which, where an ex-soldier joins a precinct and on duty he and his partner chase down a perp. The perp is a violent offender and he runs down and alley and out into a street. There’s a few cars, a few pedestrians, but overall it’s not crowded. The ex-soldier has a shot on the perp, even though there’s a good few metres between them. He stops running, lines up his shot, and prepares to fire.
His partner stops him, shoves his gun down and screams at him for, well, they cut away but it’s implied a pretty freaking long time.
Because it’s not okay. There are different rules when you deal with civilians instead of soldiers. You do not have the freedom to make potentially lethal judgment calls. It doesn’t matter how confident this man was in his judgement, it’s not his judgement to make.
Police officers making judgment calls outside of what they should be allowed is literally every criticism against the police force you will find.
Soldiers do not make good law enforcement.
The real conversation in civil war is about needs. Is it peacetime? Then no, Steve can’t do whatever he wants. But is this wartime? Has the threat reaches critical that soldiers are needed, and are allowed to violate civilian rights in the name of restoring peace? Because then that’s different.
Literally a summation of civil war is that tony has the right perspective for a peacetime officer, while Steve has the right perspective for a wartime officer. It’s deciding what condition the world is in where the lines blur.
But please dear god don’t reduce iron man’s character to “a rich dude with good intentions”. Iron man’s character is so complicated people literally write papers on it.
“Tony has the right perspective for a peacetime officer, while Steve has the right perspective for a wartime officer.” This is the best analysis of their characters I have ever read!!!
Reblogging for the last two comments. ON POINT.
Okay, but the other thing that’s missing from this is the context of the two statements.
Steve’s line is addressed to Wanda, and they’re talking about Rumlow’s suicide bomb in Nigeria. Wanda tried to divert the explosion away from the marketplace, but it still took out the office building; Steve is encouraging her not to give up, because helping somebody is better than helping nobody. That is not the same as “It’s okay if we kill some people for the greater good.” It’s more like the attitude of a doctor, who has to accept that not all patients survive if they want to keep practicing medicine.
Tony is talking about Charlie Spencer, an aid worker who was killed in Sokovia, to explain why he supports the Accords. Tony created Project Ultron, and therefore takes responsibility for Ultron’s actions. (Even though he couldn’t possibly have foreseen “robots get possessed by James Spader and try to launch a small Eastern European city into orbit,” he did futz around with the Mind Gem over Bruce’s objections.) This is him, chastized, acknowledging that he screwed up.
The observation about peacetime/wartime is absolutely valid and important, but I don’t think that’s what these gifsets encapsulate. Rather, it’s that Steve is taking a deontological position – “If you can help, you should help” – and the potential consequences don’t matter much into whether intervening is the right thing to do.* Tony’s taking a utilitarian position, where consequences are the only thing that matter, and therefore he and Steve are talking right past each other. (And, arguably, so is fandom.)
The last poster wins here IMO.