The accords were always a disaster in the making

I can’t stop chewing over this huge plot hole and I think until I write this down, I won’t stop, so even though I know no one is going to read this, I have to put it down in words. Ever since the first trailer for Captain America: Civil War, I’ve had this huge WHAT THE FUCK reaction that I’ve been holding on to, hoping that the movie would somehow make the UN sanctioned accords make sense to me, or at the very least, the side objecting to them would point out what a huge, huge mistake this would be with actual, you know, facts. That exist. In the world. And I was really stunned that at no point did anyone point out what a disaster they could be, because of what an actualfax disaster the UN has often been at oversight and peacekeeping. 

It would have taken less than ten minutes for them to dig up some real-world examples of disastrous policies that led to the slaughter of thousands of innocent people, and given those arguments to someone on the team as a basis for their suspicion of what the accords intended to do. But I’m equally baffled by why they had Tony and Rhodey coming out in favor of the accords and the UN and Thunderbolt Ross, for god’s sake, when they would know these things because of the nature of their jobs, and Vision because he has access to all that information in the databanks.

If you’re not familiar with the giant shitstorm that is often UN peacekeeping work and human rights oversight, here are a couple of Greatest Hits for you–and these are just a few that have happened within Tony’s and Rhodey’s lifetime. 

Keep reading

its a disney movie, so the politics are badly framed and half assed

but YES THANK U EXACTLY

part of my brain has been hollering about this

We were both weapons once… to be used.

one thing I noticed about civil war was this cut where they were all suddenly dressed in their suits so i can only assume

@elvhenan look at

some things the captain america civil war mid-credits scene reminded me of

harsh but the LAST ONE 

help

been thinking more about the sokovia accords and how… impractical they are? time for a random history lesson, but thinking back to the league of nations and how they, despite having no regulated army, had to decide unanimously whether or not they could even just send a country’s army/forces to go and help another country in need, and of course this led to decisions and crises being prolonged and left out to dry for way way longer than was necessary or helpful – basically bc nobody could decide whether or not it was a good idea to send x to y, it meant that shit just got worse and worse whilst all these powers wasted time deliberating, and the actual problem got worse. so. y’know. #teamcap

#ALSO HIGH KEY TONY BRINGING UP THE LEND LEASE BILL WASN’T AN ACCIDENT!!! #THE LEND LEASE BILL DRUG AMERICA TO THE PRECIPICE OF WWII ON THE PREDICATION THAT THE USA #WOULD OFFER MILITARY FUNDING AND EQUIPMENT TO ANY COUNTRY #WHOSE DEFENSE THE PRESIDENT DEEMED VITAL TO THE DEFENSE OF THE UNITED STATES #literally tony sits in that room with steve and reminds steve #of a time when the US was so afraid to enter a conflict #that it would throw money and equipment and power behind other countries as literal cannon fodder #and looks steve in the eye and says #essentially #he wants to let them do the same goddamn thing to the avengers #let the UN tell the Avengers where to go and what’s important #let the Accords dictate with no room for discussion at present time what conflicts and what countries and what enemies are vital #Tony Stark doesn’t understand what it’s like to lose your ability to make your own decisions because he’s never lost it #Steve Rogers has spent a lifetime having choices made for him

I damn near cracked up in the theater when Rhodey was trying to defend the accords on the basis of them coming from the United Nations. As if U.N. interventions and resolutions have never stalled out due to the veto of a single member of the security council. As if the U.N. hasn’t repeatedly failed to intervene in genocides. As if the U.N. has never been corrupt and made things worse. As if U.N. “peacekeepers” always lived up to their name, and never sexually exploited children, as if those who blew the whistle on this corruption were never punished.

If Steve has bothered to catch up on his 20th century history at all, he must have known about this shit. Add that to living through the failure of the League of Nations? Rhodey saying that this was all above board because it was from the U.N. must have sounded, at best, dangerously naive.

So Peggy Carter actually pointed out a solution of sorts:

Compromise where you can.

It does make sense to have oversight.  But what I found interesting is how Ross presented the idea of collateral damage to the Avengers, as if nothing similar has ever happened in the world before, done by any military force in any armed conflict. 

So it makes sense for the Avengers to at least be held accountable or to make some sort of reparations in situations such as Sokovia - where we all know shit went down because Tony Stark screwed up massively - or even Lagos, in which Wanda actually saved the lives of hundreds of people in the marketplace as opposed to the very regrettable loss of 11 Wakandans and an unknown number of other civilians in the office building. 

But what I find interesting is that Tony, Natasha and Rhodey never mentioned “Hey, let’s see where we can reach a compromise here because nobody wants the Avengers to be used in some political power play but we can’t just run around doing superhero shit without considering the people who might get caught in the crossfire.”

And yeah, if Rhodey called Cap “arrogant” for believing the “safest hands are still our own” - I would call him dangerously naive for believing the U.N.’s hands are safer, considering the World Security Council’s own disastrous decisions (e.g. decision to nuke New York and Project Insight). 

Also consider:  HYDRA infiltrated the US government all the way to the point where the Secretary of Defense was the head of HYDRA USA and the handler of the Winter Soldier, who was going to use him and three WMDs to engineer a massacre of twenty million people and an actual coup d’etat to overthrow the U.S. government.   What guarantee do we have that there aren’t any undiscovered HYDRA heads in other nations’ governments, especially when Zola himself admitted that HYDRA had infiltrated and nudged world events to get the planet ready to accept totalitarian rule?

So while I don’t hate #teamtony or Tony himself, this is ultimately why I am still #TeamCap. 

#also#SUDETENLAND#Steve remembers that shit#Steve watched that go down#even WITHOUT being caught up on modern history#which he 10000% is#probably more than anybody else tbh#he knows the risks in letting a council of nations make those calls#he’s not here for that shit

OH AND ANOTHER CIVIL WAR THING

I’ll shut up soon, really, I will but but but:

Keep reading

sam and t'challa sending each other cat and bird memes at any time of the day. all the time. asking “is this u?” or taking pictures of random birbs and cats they see and asking “do u know that one?” regardless of where they are like sam could be on a fucking mission and t'challa on a diplomatic trip or something he’d be like “excuse me one second” and take the photo to send to sam even though he knows it’s the middle of the night where sam is and sams probs asleep.

i honestly…have no words…for what markus & mcfeely, captain america movies writers, say about bucky & the postcredit in this interview. the part i’m talking about starts at about 5:30.

Q: Why was it necessary to put the winter soldier back on ice? A: Well because, I mean for one thing he is, give or take his intellectual capacity, 100% guilty. And to have Steve just running around getting free salads with him on some island, it’s a little too unpunished, in a way. This is not a guy who should be running around happily. He may not be 100% guilty, but he’s damn sure not 100% innocent. Q: Why does that not apply to Wanda Maximoff? A: Wanda… Q: You think she suffered enough? A: I don’t think she did anything near as bad […] None of those things were terribly interesting to us, the punishing of nice people, who already feel guilt. In the Bucky issue is…it was a bridge too far I think.

It doesn’t get any clearer than this, straight from the horses’ mouths. “Bucky doesn’t deserve happiness.” I feel like every bad, lazy vibe I was getting off of Bucky’s arc has been categorically confirmed.

Wanda joins up with Hydra and causes the destruction of an unnamed African city wholly within her right mind.  Tony, wholly within his own mind, builds an army of robots bent on exterminating all life on Earth leading to 171 deaths in Sokovia, an unknown number in South Korea, and likely more in other cities as well. I guess his “intellectual capacity” just wasn’t on the same level as Bucky’s, right? Hawkeye gets controlled by Loki and kills an unknown number of his friends and coworkers.  Nat’s been brainwashed, too. Although, unlike Bucky, her brainwashing was in the form of ideological grooming, not manual removal personhood via fantasy electrocutions, and she killed a lot of innocent people because of it.

But apparently none of that was “nearly as bad” as Bucky killing around 25 people over the past 70 years.  He’s just too much of a mean, guiltless, son of a bitch, right?

oh boy does this Explain some Shit.

ohooohoooooooooo w o w

listen im coming back to this which NO ONE will see but whatevr. i listened to this interview before reblogging it and I did not add this comment as i should have. A friend made a very valid point about the unfairness of assigning blame to the creators of these movies......

so here we go.

(DISCLAIMER: this is not a fully formed argument post. this is just me talking. if you want an actual analysis of this movie’s wasted potential, please listen to the Civil War episode of the Overinvested podcast. which is, incidentally, a great podcast.)

I noticed, the first time i listened, this sounds like a coverup answer. This answer doesn’t fit with the way this character has been written previously BY THE SAME PEOPLE.

I have no proof, but I think they were asked to change this character’s arc to have much less actual Development than he could have. why?

WHO THE FUCK KNOWS. you tell me.

(i did not bookmark it cause im a fool but i am fairly sure that the refreeze scene was not the original ending. they did reshoots, and i think this scene was among them. if anyone has the facts on this, lay it on me. )

ok so someone told them to change some shit, when they had something else in mind as a part of their story.

this isnt unusual for Marvel, particularly in the last couple years, and THAT’S THE PROBLEM. i saw this movie twice and you can SEE that the movie was partially formed, revised to cater to the franchise, and remade. and it suffers for it. I’m not gonna write you a novel right now, (SEE DISCLAIMER) but Marvel keeps making eerily similar movies when they could be making fantastically varied but connected standalone stories.

(they did start out doing this! Thor, First Avenger, Winter Soldier, Iron Man, Guardians of the Galaxy: they’re all different, but they’re all somewhere between “worth the ticket” and “HELL YEAH”)

and i know, that i am supposed to jsut be cool with this coffee-to-dishwater meddling, but I’m Not.

It’s lazy. It’s frustrating. These characters and their stories have incredibly devoted fans, and for this movie at least, their writers care! Their actors are great, they KNOW their characters, they know their potential. The directors are thoughtful, they are observant of themes and character dynamics, they can spin a good plot.

but the dishwater got in.

and i know this is a problem that extends Wayyyyyy past marvel to literally all collaborative media and art

but that is not making me less ticked.

I reserve the right to be ticked, and I’m taking my overinvested ass to bed.

Revenge a la Brubaker in 20 years please?

one of my favourite things about tony in ca:cw:

of all the things he could have spent his money on, he chose to pour millions into mental health research, to create a non-invasive non-pharmaceutical therapy technology. and then he stood up in front of a public academic audience and talked about his own mental health problems and what interventions would have helped him.

uh. mild civil war spoiler?

criticisms aside, it’s dumb cartoon time and this was Hilarious

i give u the Beefmobile

#marvel #civilwar

Looking through the Art of Captain America Civil War, and find it quite interesting that at one point they considered giving Steve a more black ops look during the Lagos mission.

i honestly…have no words…for what markus & mcfeely, captain america movies writers, say about bucky & the postcredit in this interview. the part i’m talking about starts at about 5:30.

Q: Why was it necessary to put the winter soldier back on ice? A: Well because, I mean for one thing he is, give or take his intellectual capacity, 100% guilty. And to have Steve just running around getting free salads with him on some island, it’s a little too unpunished, in a way. This is not a guy who should be running around happily. He may not be 100% guilty, but he’s damn sure not 100% innocent. Q: Why does that not apply to Wanda Maximoff? A: Wanda… Q: You think she suffered enough? A: I don’t think she did anything near as bad […] None of those things were terribly interesting to us, the punishing of nice people, who already feel guilt. In the Bucky issue is…it was a bridge too far I think.

It doesn’t get any clearer than this, straight from the horses’ mouths. “Bucky doesn’t deserve happiness.” I feel like every bad, lazy vibe I was getting off of Bucky’s arc has been categorically confirmed.

Wanda joins up with Hydra and causes the destruction of an unnamed African city wholly within her right mind.  Tony, wholly within his own mind, builds an army of robots bent on exterminating all life on Earth leading to 171 deaths in Sokovia, an unknown number in South Korea, and likely more in other cities as well. I guess his “intellectual capacity” just wasn’t on the same level as Bucky’s, right? Hawkeye gets controlled by Loki and kills an unknown number of his friends and coworkers.  Nat’s been brainwashed, too. Although, unlike Bucky, her brainwashing was in the form of ideological grooming, not manual removal personhood via fantasy electrocutions, and she killed a lot of innocent people because of it.

But apparently none of that was “nearly as bad” as Bucky killing around 25 people over the past 70 years.  He’s just too much of a mean, guiltless, son of a bitch, right?

i cannot wait for t’challa to wake bucky up in the black panther movie like [throws new vibranium arm at him] i need your help binch lock and load