Captain America: Love and Friendship

My last blog post on here detailed my anticipations and fears for Captain America: Civil War. While the movie did not stick to the Civil War plot as I understood it in that post, there was a superhero civil war in it and I was satisfied with the movie overall. It had a good action:plot ratio and the introduction of the newest Superheroes to our Marvel-verse, Black Panther and Spider-man, were spot on and make me excited for their standalone movies. (Though Spiderman: Homecoming may already be part of the Marvel Studios white-washing problem [ addressed in more detail: here, here, and here). P.S. Spoilers follow

Rather than revolve around a superhero registration act, requiring super heroes to “unmask” and work for the government in their crime-fightin’ capacity, it revolved around how and when the Avengers should be deployed. According to accords as we know them, which is not as well explained in the movie as I would like in order to choose “a side”, basically if you are part of the “Avengers,” as we have seen them in previous movies and if you sign the accords you are deployed as needed as defined by a UN subcommittee. If you do not sign, you are a global vigilante whenever you decide to step in and stop crises. Interesting discussion. How would we delegate power to control super-humans? And how would we deal with the fact that the majority of this team are US citizens that believe they are acting in the world’s interests.

This would all be fine if that ice-blast from the past, the Winter Soldier, hadn’t stepped in. (P.S. I <3 Stucky) Captain America politely refused to sign the accords and could fight crime within the US. That was until Bucky Barnes had to be involved and as we saw early in the movie, you so much as mention Benjamin Barnes and it’s kryptonite to Cap’s focus. Because of this, the specifics of the accords take a back seat to a discussion about love and friendship, the ties we create in life and how those endure into the future. The movie revolves around the fact that Cap makes bad decisions because he’s still in love with the past, which is slowly dying with each minute. The passing of Peggy Carter in the film demonstrates how the world that Cap grew up in no longer exists outside his mind and while we feel like he’s been around for a long time it’s been a few years since he’s thawed. He’s still a 1940s man in a 2010s world, with as much as he can learn about the present, his life experiences are still rooted in an age that no one on the current Earth understands, except of course, Benjamin Barnes. His dedication to saving Bucky is a way for Cap to preserve parts of the world that he grew up in even though he knows that that’s impossible. If Bucky hadn’t been implicated in the plot it’s unlikely that the Civil War would have erupted.

On the other side, we also see that the legislation that spurs the accords and our villain is motivated by love. Our villain is interested in destroying the Avenger because without superhumans, we have fewer superhuman-scale disasters. While his actions are extreme, since the accords don’t want to destroy the Avengers, his works expressed the feelings that many other people had towards the Avengers. A woman approaches Tony Stark after a speech to show him her son that died because of their actions, Black Panther’s father is killed because of a bomb, planted by the villain, aimed at destroying the Avengers, and Rhodie is seriously injured because Cap is trying to protect Bucky. Not all of these actions are linked specifically to Cap’s, they demonstrate how superhumans have changed the lives of people in serious ways. “Saving the world” has serious collateral damage and sometimes individual biases/friendships/loves cloud people’s judgement.

These reactions and actions feelings circle us back to the reason for the accords. Why does one super-powered American get to decide what is best for the world? Why does their judgement get more weight than others? Why does one individual’s friendship(s) matter more than the lives of others?

The Girl with Many Faces

I really like watching TV. Like a lot. Which means I watch a lot of shows that aren’t very good. *cough* Once Upon a Time *cough*. But that doesn’t mean I’m blind to the ways that these shows are bad *cough* writing and character development *cough*. It just means I accept their flaws and move forward accepting that is how it is going to be. However, a few tropes have started to bother me because they have shown up in multiple shows that are good and that I like. While not necessarily bad tropes, I find the repetition of a plot device between shows rather fascinating. The two main ones that have continued to bother me are a) lesbians who only talk about men b) the girl with many faces. In this post, I’m going to talk about the latter as I need to remember my other example for a) before I write about it.

The girl with many faces is a trope I noticed specifically in iZombie (a show that I adore) and Dollhouse (a show that I liked a lot). It also appears to varying degrees in other shows such as Agent Carter (which I adore) and probably Alias (a show I haven’t seen) but to varying degrees. What is the girl with many faces? Well, she’s essentially whatever you want her to be. In the case, of iZombie and Dollhouse she is the main character but in almost every episode she takes on either all or part of an entirely different persona.

What’s cool about this? Well, audience members of different personality types can identify with the character depending on who they are in the episode. She can be anyone’s Mary Sue or fanfiction character, taking on the traits you want including butt-kicking, seduction, and intelligence. She can be confident or meek having tech skills or be handy with sewing. The world is her personality.

What isn’t so cool? Well, sometimes the development of female character as an individual is lost. This point often becomes part of character building. In iZombie, Liv is constantly battling with who she is on and off particular individual brains. However, characterizing Liv is still sort of difficult and comes into a sort of stark contrast with Gwen, the character in the comic that iZombie is based off of, who gets memory flashbacks but does not take on the personalities of those individuals. In Dollhouse, this comes with Echo’s increasing self-awareness but still Echo is essentially a tabula rasa for whatever the writers decide who she’s going to be. In both cases, there is a need to write at least two parallel personalities and sometimes the life of either the “true” main character or their “personality of the week” falls a bit short.

Beyond how well this is executed, it was an interesting trope to identify because it perpetuates an odd facet of gender in America. To a certain degree, women are taught to be what they are told to be. Meaning women are taught that whatever someone tells you to be you sort of should be. Women’s behaviors and personalities are encouraged to be more adaptable than men’s. This isn’t always true but I don’t think it’s accidental that both Dollhouse and iZombie focus on females who changes personalities as opposed to males. It is true that both do have male characters who take on different personalities but most cases these examples don’t highlight the extreme differences between one personality and the next, with much more detail given to the female personalities than the males. Or there are a larger number of female-centric episodes as opposed to male centric episodes. The one exception that I can recall is in season 1 of iZombie where Lowell mentions he’s on “gay brain.” However, almost every other male zombie appears to be unaffected, or only minimally affected, by the personalities of those they eat. Dollhouse also had Victor, a male doll, but it’s difficult for me to recall more than a few episodes that had his new persona as a main focus.

This isn’t necessarily a bad device. I really like(d) both of these shows. They have (had) good action, story, and writing with awesome female leads (and we need more of them). But why do cool women have to also be something like 30 other women. Yes, as a young girl I wanted to be all things awesome but at the same time it would be nice to have cool female characters that didn’t have to change all the time to fit the situation. And there are good examples of this, but at the same time why does it appear so often? Is it really so difficult to write one, stable although reflective and evolving, female personality?