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Look at that jaw. That's a hero's jaw.
[PLAYER INFO]
NAME: Jae
AGE: 26
JOURNAL: NONE :C
IM: booglyboo145
PLURK: ninjae
E-MAIL: anjelsword at gmail
RETURNING: N/A
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Steven Grant Rogers, aka Captain America
SERIES: Marvel Cinematic
CHRONOLOGY: Avengers, just after he’s given Natasha the go-ahead to patch the giant hole in earth’s ceiling
CLASS: Hero
BACKGROUND:
When we first see Steve we're in 1943, our time primarily spent in New York for the first half of the film; it's four years into World War Two, with rationing, propaganda, and fearmongering in full-swing despite America's grind upwards out of the Depression thanks to the industrial necessities of war. It's the world we know, really - unlike with the other films, the only piece of Marvel Movieverse canon to date that really effects Steve's reality is the idea presented and proven in Thor - the Norse gods exist, but not as gods in and of themselves. They're an alien race of vast technological superiority, former visitors to the earth - which is how the Norse legends came to be. They don't practice magic, but a science so advanced that it appears to be magic (hereafter referred to as 'voodoo science').
Certain personalities believe the legends are more than just that, and have devoted themselves to proving it. Johann Schmidt, the man who becomes known as Red Skull, is the only other person in the world to undergo the serum injections that changed Steve Rogers into Captain America. But his change was prompted by a search for a power left behind by the Asgardians, and the belief that man is man's best weapon. Schmidt finally does locate the power source he's hunting for, and uses it - in the span of a year - to develop technology that puts anything up to and including modern military weapons to shame. The Tesseract is a source of explosive power that, when channeled properly, literally annihilates living tissue and can rip chunks from some of the strongest metals in the world. Schmidt leads the Nazi's deep science division, called HYDRA - but breaks away from Hitler and his followers to pursue his own ends once he has all the pieces in place. His followers are fanatics, their faith in Schmidt cultlike, their willingness to die for him absolute.
The division Steve joins to help fight Schmidt and HYDRA is called the SSR - the Strategic Scientific Reserve - and is, in Marvel continuity, the direct precursor to SHIELD. Serving much the same purpose as special forces during Vietnam, they perform hit-and-run raids on Schmidt's facilities deep behind enemy lines, and are to all intents and purposes not acknowledged as existing by the military at large. It seems to be a coalition made up primarily of American and British military and intelligence forces. They're HYDRA's non-evil twin, essentially, though their tech levels are nowhere near those of HYDRA itself and their manpower is limited.
As far as the world at large is concerned, the conflict between HYDRA and the SSR isn't even happening; there might be occasional stories about strange technology (or, you know, UFOs, that sort of thing) seen in regions where HYDRA is active, but Schmidt and the SSR are tangled in their own very private battle for dominance. The only information people outside of the conflict are liable to get with any consistency are propagandist articles about Captain America's exploits, and news about his participation in the war effort against the Nazis.
He goes from this version of the Second World War to the modern day, where available technologies and power sources have developed (mostly thanks to Starktech) from their WWII advanced foundations into things like the Iron Man suit and its knockoffs, rip-offs, and counterparts. Aliens are known to exist now and interplanetary travel is being researched by people like Jane Foster, an astrophysicist who played a key roll in Thor.
It’s somewhat ambiguous as to whether or not the general public knows about the SSR or SHIELD, but Captain America is a well-known public figure, Tony Stark is a household name and out of the figurative superhero closet, and SHIELD has global connections and a terrifying wealth of resources that the SSR could only have dreamed of possessing. It’s into this world that Loki appears, stealing the Tesseract and taking with it Clint Barton and a researcher and friend of Thor. Through a convoluted and largely nonsensical plan, Loki plans to take SHIELD and the Avengers apart and turn aliens known as the Chitauri loose on Earth, subjugating the planet because of daddy issue reasons.
Nick Fury pulls in Steve, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, and Bruce Banner - the first two as muscle, the third as SHIELD muscle, and Bruce to track the Tesseract down as it puts out a low-grade gamma signature. They find Loki first, and Steve and Tony each engage him in turn before scowling maturely at each other and towing Loki back to SHIELD to be interrogated. Thor shows up and borrows his brother for a talk when they’re half-way there and did I mention this movie makes no sense really but I still love it?
Long story short, after Thor and Tony punch each other and Steve moms at them until they agree to get along, everyone skips merrily back to the helicarrier which remains one of the most strategically ill-conceived flying vehicles to ever be fucking awesome. While on board, predictably enough, Bruce Banner is provoked into becoming the Hulk when Clint Barton, brainwashed, appears to wreak havoc and free Loki. Steve and Tony manage to keep the helicarrier from crash-landing in the Atlantic and Natasha reclaims Agent Barton, but Loki gets away and Bruce is flung from the ship and into the depths of Jersey.
Prompted by one of the truly emotional and heart-wrenching sacrifices of the film, the death of Agent Phil Coulson, which Marvel quickly decided to render mostly meaningless through his apparent return in the show pending on ABC, the newly-minted Avengers take to the sky to meet Loki as he summons his army from Stark Tower in New York City. In a series of impressive crane shots and nifty CGI work, the Avengers (including Bruce, reunited with them outside of Grand Central Station) fisticuff aliens as they pour through a giant hole in the universe powered by the Tesseract and an apparatus stationed at the top of Stark Tower. Tony makes a... I guess it’s supposed to be a heroic sacrificial act but it really just comes off as a monumentally stupid decision because really, once the nuke is pointing in the right direction, I think it’s okay to let go. But Tony flies through the hole along with the weapon of mass destruction and Natasha simultaneously discovers a way to close the portal. Steve’s canon point is directly after he gives Natasha the go-ahead, before Tony drops back into New York like a golf ball being shoved out of the hole by a gopher.
HEY LOOK A TIMELINE
PERSONALITY:
Steve was raised until age ten by a courageous nurse and a heroic story - his father, a soldier in the army's 107th heavy armor division during WWI, was also one of the victims of WWI’s forays into biological warfare. To say it colored Steve’s psyche would be one massive understatement; he's tried to live the life he thought his father would want him to since he was old enough to self-actualize. Considering the fact that he'd always been unhealthy -extremely unhealthy - it's taught him a resilience and stubbornness bordering on the moronic. Once he gets an idea in his head he does. Not. Quit. He won't lay down in a fight, and he won't lay down for a bully. He'd have to be literally incapable of getting off the ground to keep himself from a fight once he's involved. One of the last things his mother said to him was to understand the difference between fearlessness and foolishness, which - while it is something he understands - doesn't always stop him from stepping past the edge of what's reasonable when it comes to standing up against bullies.
The Great Depression hit the US in a bad way shortly after his mother's death - shortly after Steve was moved from his Hell's Kitchen home to an orphanage in Brooklyn. All things considered, he was lucky. The populations in orphanages exploded in the years after 1929, orphanages becoming refuges for children whose parents never came back after they left their kids to the state while they went elsewhere to find work, as well as the simply abandoned, the runaways, and those whose parents died. Considering the priority parentless children were given it's something of a miracle that Steve turned out to be as selfless as he did; though he couldn't have been without friends, I doubt he was close to any of those he knew. For all his warmth and empathy, he doesn't trust easily, and his first expectation has always been that he'll be tested somehow by the company of others - either physically or in his ability to take or ignore a joke.
This constant testing has instilled in him a pathological need to prove himself. To be more resilient, more persistent, more disciplined, more responsible than everyone else. If he didn't have the physical benefits that others did, he would distinguish himself in other ways.
The most significant thing about him, however, is the bottom-line reason Erskine picked him for Project: Rebirth in the first place. Steve Rogers is, plain and simple, a good man. Whether through his mother's influence, his father's legacy, his own self-depreciation, or just some peculiar accident of fate, he's an exemplar of selflessness, humility, empathy, and sensitivity to the needs of others. Even as he tries to prove himself, he values others above himself, and sees in them all the potential that others can overlook. What drives him in the film to put down the mic and pick up the shield is the determination to free 400-odd heroes imprisoned behind enemy lines, to track down his best friend/virtual brother. In every instance where he's given the opportunity to either take on the bad guy or try to save someone's life, he goes first for the save without a second thought. He values humanity. He has faith in people, faith in their ability to do the right thing if given the chance, and faith in his country and what it stands for if not all those who manage its policies.
In spite of all that, his initial relationship with the persona of Captain America was shaky at best. He wasn't the kind of person to embrace the stage - too used to being laughed at or ignored for that - and he wasn't expecting the offer of a patriotic job and a promotion to entail singing, dancing, and speeches. Over time, however (the USO and publicity circuit lasted about six months) he started to realize not only how happy his appearances made people, but how important the symbol he represented was to them. His final, true step into the position of Captain America came when he rescued Bucky and his fellow prisoners - when Bucky himself called for the soldiers to cheer the icon they'd been mocking and jeering just days before. One of the reasons Steve remains humble despite the attention and accolades is his own mental divide between himself and the hero; people aren't cheering for Steve Rogers. They're cheering for the Captain. Bucky knows him well enough to realize this, which is probably why he makes the distinction between who he's following into war. Not Captain America. The skinny kid from Brooklyn who was too stupid to run away from a fight.
It's understanding that difference that sets his WWII colleagues apart from the (movieverse) Avengers. The former know Steve Rogers and Captain America; they see where the man and the character meet, and value both for who they are and what they mean. Through experience, they're able to marry the symbol and the individual, and both are stronger for it. Pull Steve out of that time period, away from those who've experienced him as a person, and suddenly you take away that portion of humanity so essential to Captain America himself; he becomes simply the hero without the man Erskine put such faith in. Yes, Steve is still there, who he is hasn't changed, but the way those around him react to his presence does. You can't truly be friends with a caricature, which is what the public face of Captain America was during WWII. He was the USO hero who went overseas to become a real one; an image attached to headlines, not a man.
He's never believed in indulgence. From growing up in a frugal single-parent home to the scarcity of the Depression to the rationing of the War, he's been raised to believe you take what you must and no more, and even that should be shared if there's a need. Selflessness and restraint are ingrained in him too deeply for the excess and gratuitous selfishness of the 21st century not to disgust him in some way. Heroes and true leaders in particular have no business indulging in more than their subordinates are allowed. He didn't when he was on the ground and in the field, his Colonel didn't, his peers didn't, and he holds those around him in the modern day to that same standard. Howard was an exception to the rule, but he proved himself in enough other ways that his excesses were forgivable, even endearing. Being brought from that life and into the painfully commercial 21st century is like being mocked with your own values. In an economy where the definition of poverty shifts at the whims of those who haven’t been required to so much as tighten their belts, where the supposed leaders of the common people support the bastards that line their pockets and ignore the issues faced by the rest, it’s hard for Steve not to trace the patterns of his childhood into a sketch of where we are and where we’re going and wonder at the futility of some of the things he’s fought for since before he even knew he was part of an ideological war.
He’s a man disillusioned. He was never naive. As opposed to so many of the American soldiers who signed up to go overseas, and in spite of his lifelong obsession with the concept of heroes and heroism, on some level he knew what he was getting in to. He’s one of those rare and dubiously blessed individuals whose heart is made for the battlefield. Like Churchill’s declaration that he was never so happy as when he was at war, Steve never had so much purpose and so much faith in the rightness of his mission. One of the first things he asks Fury when the Director stops him during his escape into Times Square (really, guys, you took him to a facility in Times Square?) is “Did we win?” Fury’s answer - “Hell yes, unconditional surrender.” - encompasses so much about the difference between Steve’s understanding of what he was doing and the modern concept of American participation in the Second World War.
One of the first things Steve would have done would have been to read about what happened in WWII after he crashed. Being told it was over and that the Allies had triumphed wouldn’t have been enough, not for him. Not, I imagine, for anyone who lived through global conflict. He would have discovered the American government’s knowledge of what was being done to Jews and minorities. He would have been able to see all the modern analysis of the friction and fallout between the US and Russia and how countries already shredded by conflict were caught like pawns in the crossfire of history. Even more personally significant, he would have read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He would have discovered the fact that America, his country, his government, did to Japan exactly what Steve thought he was dying to protect his homeland from. The people in whom he put his faith, in whom he invested his life, wreaked destruction on civilians with the effectiveness of HYDRA itself.
From his father’s death to his own participation, Steve’s life has been steeped in war. He’s one of the noir generation, in a world where the haunted lives of WWII soldiers have become the stuff of tragedy and romance or been forgotten altogether. In spite of far more widespread knowledge of the psychological impact of warfare, and the blessing of modern consideration for soldiers as opposed to their revilement during Vietnam, the only people who could really understand what he’s trying to deal with are either dead or have had seventy years to make peace with the ghosts they brought home. That isn’t to say that what he’s witnessed is in some way worse or better than what soldiers have seen since, and there is a solidarity and understanding in the survivors of armed combat - but the value of shared experience can’t be overlooked, and those who shared Steve’s experiences have severely dwindled in number. Modern America is an America of terrorist attacks and distant combat, where life spirals on in shrieking attempts at normalcy while things go to hell far away. It’s nothing like the total, constant awareness of war on a global scale and resources carefully monitored and doled out through government quotas that it was in Steve’s day. It’s a land divided against itself, along class lines, religious lines, race lines, political lines, geographical lines. There’s no sweeping external force to bring the majority together. He’s isolated, the bridges he’s built to distant shores blown away or rusted through or guarded by tolls few people know how to pay.
And he’s a man in mourning. His friends are dead. The woman he loves is alive and has had a life and, in my opinion, the reason he didn’t reach out to her was not (entirely) that he didn’t want that contact - what he didn’t want was to usurp whatever peace she’d found by walking into her life again unchanged, with all of his feelings for her exactly as they were when they lost each other. He hasn’t “just” lost his friends, “just” lost the family he built, “just” lost the woman he loves. He’s lost his whole world. He’s been brought into a culture he doesn’t know, one that speaks a language in which he has only academic fluency.
To put it in perspective, modern societal awareness of WWII is probably as (not) prevalent as contemporary societal awareness of the Civil War was in 1933. Yes, of course, the consequences were still being felt - there is no conflict in history that did not shape the world in one way or another - but Americans likely think about the Second World War as frequently and with as much weight as our peers in 1933 did the Civil War. Perhaps even with less weight than the Civil War was given, as that was conflict perpetrated on our own soil. The whispers from overseas and the anti-Semitic and racist ripples encouraged to spread because of them, the suffering from the Great Depression, the weight of the First World War on the shoulders of its survivors - all occupied the minds of those who lived in the time as much as terrorist attacks, Islamophobia and xenophobia, turmoil in the Middle East, and tensions with Russia and North Korea occupy American minds today. There’s no room for conflicts that ended seventy years ago, even if those conflicts are what bred the problems around us. And Steve, no matter how much he reads in his down-time, no matter how many infodumps he gets, no matter how many files he’s supplied with, does not have the ground-up, supersaturated understanding (or at least awareness) of these problems that the people he’s surrounded by do. He’s a refugee in a country built to look like home, and he will never go back where he came from.
One of the other reasons I think he didn’t make contact with Peggy is the subconscious belief that for some reason he doesn't deserve happiness. That because the people he knew aren't there to prove they lived good lives, he doesn't deserve one himself. He uses the refusal of personal closure to punish himself for the choice he made that would have forced her and those he cared about into mourning for him. In short, he has a kind of survivor’s guilt. He gets to see exactly what became of those ideals that he and his peers fought for - gets to see exactly how gilded and how tarnished they were to begin with. The war he fought was a partial fiction, cut apart by history, and he has to spend his young life and maturity untangling the knots that it left in the weft of the world he thought he understood.
As much as it wrings at his heart, it also makes him angry. Angry at himself, angry at the world, angry at SHIELD for pulling him out of the ice, angry in some portion at Erskine and the serum, angry at everything. And, knowing none of that fury is fair, angry that he can't let himself be angry. During the Second World War he grew from a USO spectacle to a symbol of hope and justice for a world gone mad. He had purpose, support, vitality - people who believed in what he fought for as powerfully as he did himself, who knew the man behind the shield and his principles. Now, there is nothing left of him but Captain America, and Captain America has become the punchline to some kind of anti-nationalist joke. Supposed love for one’s country is the purview of racists and gun-hoarding madmen; to be politically enlightened is to despise where you are without taking action to press for its improvement, or to take action and be crushed under the jackboots of politicians who view a people in revolt as a people to be subjugated, not heard. There are no fireside chats, no illusion of closeness with the elected ruling body. Steve looks around him and sees a world that doesn’t want what he was, that has dismissed, demeaned, and devalued him as a tool of propaganda and hawk mentalities. Seventy years have muddied his title with misuse and abuse and he’s left with the refuse of politicians and protesters smeared across his shield in generations of battles he wasn’t around to fight.
The phrase ‘man out of time’ gets thrown around a lot when describing Steve and his relationship with the modern world. More exigent to this incarnation, I think, is the fact that Steve Rogers is a man set adrift, forced to reevaluate the one question to which he thought he knew the answer: What was the point?
POWER:
HE'S A GOOD MAN. IT'S A SUPERPOWER NOW. ALSO, IF YOU GO BY CAP:TFA, VULNERABLE ONLY TO FIRE.
But no really. As Erskine puts it, the serum takes what is already there - inside - and amplifies it. It took, in essence, the spirit of the man that Steve was and made him into more than that - it's voodoo science, okay.
As far as what he displays during the movie, he has vastly heightened stamina, a healing and recovery rate that far outstrips that of an ordinary individual, is more difficult to injure generally speaking (he went flying off the top of a capsizing cab and hit the ground before rolling and came up without a scratch until the dude shot him, I mean really), and preternaturally strong. There is also some implication that his mental faculties are enhanced in those areas which he already showed proficiency - tactical and strategic thinking, etc, as well as muscle- and sensory-memory.
He also has a metabolism four times faster than average, which means (I suppose unless he's trying really, really hard), this here 26-year-old-virgin can't get drunk. Other than that, he's flesh and blood - he can be injured, he can be killed. All it takes is a well-placed bullet or more injuries than his body can heal.
Via Portage, I would request he be granted boomerang powers. That is to say, when he throws things, they come zooming back at him.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[It takes him very little time to figure out how to navigate the comm and the network - they aren’t complicated, and the comm isn’t hugely different than the phone he was provided back in New York. Back in New York?
Dirty, blood-smeared, beleaguered, and still in uniform, Steve lets the audio link stay open for several seconds without speaking. He knows what he wants to say. What he needs to say. But he already asked Fury this question once, and it was hard enough not knowing then.
There’s no debris in the streets. No signs of destruction. No hole in the sky, either, but this New York - this New York...]
Did we win?
[The words come out laced with exhaustion. Steve draws himself up with a deep breath, and his second try sounds a great deal more commanding.] And if someone could confirm the date, I’d appreciate it.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
And this, Steve thinks, in a voice that mocks the tour guides, is where Captain America and his best friend got chased out of a theater in 1931. They sneaked in to see Mata Hari, and almost got hit by a car running across the street. Like many crimes of his youth, this was not Captain America’s idea.
It’s a pawn shop now - a pawn shop and some apartments, at least in his version of things. Here it’s a sushi restaurant and flower shop. He stops into the latter, picking up a simple bouquet for his destination.
The tour goes on, of this New New York. Here, where Bucky would have paid a bum a dollar for his flask and Steve and Bucky shared it until both were admirably sick all over the back steps of a butcher shop that burned down later that year. There, where in another world he took a beating in a back alley before Barnes met him with the news that he was Sergeant James Barnes of the 107th, shipping out the next day.
Later, here: where he would see a hole open in the sky, remember Schmidt’s face as he held the cube in his hand and was ripped from the world and into space. Here, where he would take on aliens alongside strangers - heroes - who could become friends. He leaves a bit of the flowerless vegetation always included with bouquets on the rail running alongside Park Avenue, above where it crosses 42nd. He thinks Stark would appreciate the respectful disrespect in the action. He knows Howard would have been proud.
From there, to 5th Avenue, a fifteen minute walk through the afternoon sun, through the crowds navigating between exorbitant stores and tourists spending on things they’ve been saving to own. It's the same, it's all the same, even with different buildings puncturing the skyline - every New York, his own, his second, and then this one, with its Stark Towers and Avengers mansion and that ridiculous, obscene moon.
This is where Steve Rogers forgot when he was.
He stops in the shadow of the financial buildings on East 53rd, watching the strangers with the slightest lack of focus, letting himself picture different clothes and conversations that seem only fractionally changed the longer he listens. Then it’s the half block to where Paley Park should be, where once upon a time there was a building, a club, where Captain America promised to meet someone. A club that closed fifty years ago, where he was supposed to learn how to dance.
Really, he should have known that it wouldn’t all be the same here. He did know, but figured the address would at least be there, that he could leave the flowers - that maybe it wouldn’t be Paley Park, but that it would be something. Something else. Anything else.
It’s when he’s under the Stork Club’s awning, looking up at the crisp white calligraphy of the name, that he realizes that he dropped the bouquet somewhere between here and the corner. He doesn’t care. Steve reaches up to run his fingers over the dip of the C, nerves burning bright little bursts through his chest while he tries to think.
“They’re closed until dinner.”
He turns, and sees a woman in what must be fashionable day-wear, because it’s all clearly tailored for her. She eyes him with a mix of appraisal and amusement. “Want me to get us a table?”
“No,” he says. It’s too quick, clearly, based on the face she makes. He steps back - away from her and the building. “No, thank you.”
He leaves without looking back. Toward what, where, isn’t really a consideration. 5th Ave, Avenue of the Americas, 7th - he hits Broadway and turns away from Times Square, breaks into a run as he crosses 57th, and misses the Columbus Circle Fountain's addition completely as he plunges into the deep green shadows of the park.
FINAL NOTES:
He doesn’t have much in the way of inventory except for his nomex/kevlar suit and his shield, and he’s kinda beat up and filthy with a moderate-to-severe injury to his abdomen sustained during the fight in Manhattan.
NAME: Jae
AGE: 26
JOURNAL: NONE :C
IM: booglyboo145
PLURK: ninjae
E-MAIL: anjelsword at gmail
RETURNING: N/A
[CHARACTER INFO]
CHARACTER NAME: Steven Grant Rogers, aka Captain America
SERIES: Marvel Cinematic
CHRONOLOGY: Avengers, just after he’s given Natasha the go-ahead to patch the giant hole in earth’s ceiling
CLASS: Hero
BACKGROUND:
When we first see Steve we're in 1943, our time primarily spent in New York for the first half of the film; it's four years into World War Two, with rationing, propaganda, and fearmongering in full-swing despite America's grind upwards out of the Depression thanks to the industrial necessities of war. It's the world we know, really - unlike with the other films, the only piece of Marvel Movieverse canon to date that really effects Steve's reality is the idea presented and proven in Thor - the Norse gods exist, but not as gods in and of themselves. They're an alien race of vast technological superiority, former visitors to the earth - which is how the Norse legends came to be. They don't practice magic, but a science so advanced that it appears to be magic (hereafter referred to as 'voodoo science').
Certain personalities believe the legends are more than just that, and have devoted themselves to proving it. Johann Schmidt, the man who becomes known as Red Skull, is the only other person in the world to undergo the serum injections that changed Steve Rogers into Captain America. But his change was prompted by a search for a power left behind by the Asgardians, and the belief that man is man's best weapon. Schmidt finally does locate the power source he's hunting for, and uses it - in the span of a year - to develop technology that puts anything up to and including modern military weapons to shame. The Tesseract is a source of explosive power that, when channeled properly, literally annihilates living tissue and can rip chunks from some of the strongest metals in the world. Schmidt leads the Nazi's deep science division, called HYDRA - but breaks away from Hitler and his followers to pursue his own ends once he has all the pieces in place. His followers are fanatics, their faith in Schmidt cultlike, their willingness to die for him absolute.
The division Steve joins to help fight Schmidt and HYDRA is called the SSR - the Strategic Scientific Reserve - and is, in Marvel continuity, the direct precursor to SHIELD. Serving much the same purpose as special forces during Vietnam, they perform hit-and-run raids on Schmidt's facilities deep behind enemy lines, and are to all intents and purposes not acknowledged as existing by the military at large. It seems to be a coalition made up primarily of American and British military and intelligence forces. They're HYDRA's non-evil twin, essentially, though their tech levels are nowhere near those of HYDRA itself and their manpower is limited.
As far as the world at large is concerned, the conflict between HYDRA and the SSR isn't even happening; there might be occasional stories about strange technology (or, you know, UFOs, that sort of thing) seen in regions where HYDRA is active, but Schmidt and the SSR are tangled in their own very private battle for dominance. The only information people outside of the conflict are liable to get with any consistency are propagandist articles about Captain America's exploits, and news about his participation in the war effort against the Nazis.
He goes from this version of the Second World War to the modern day, where available technologies and power sources have developed (mostly thanks to Starktech) from their WWII advanced foundations into things like the Iron Man suit and its knockoffs, rip-offs, and counterparts. Aliens are known to exist now and interplanetary travel is being researched by people like Jane Foster, an astrophysicist who played a key roll in Thor.
It’s somewhat ambiguous as to whether or not the general public knows about the SSR or SHIELD, but Captain America is a well-known public figure, Tony Stark is a household name and out of the figurative superhero closet, and SHIELD has global connections and a terrifying wealth of resources that the SSR could only have dreamed of possessing. It’s into this world that Loki appears, stealing the Tesseract and taking with it Clint Barton and a researcher and friend of Thor. Through a convoluted and largely nonsensical plan, Loki plans to take SHIELD and the Avengers apart and turn aliens known as the Chitauri loose on Earth, subjugating the planet because of daddy issue reasons.
Nick Fury pulls in Steve, Tony Stark, Natasha Romanoff, and Bruce Banner - the first two as muscle, the third as SHIELD muscle, and Bruce to track the Tesseract down as it puts out a low-grade gamma signature. They find Loki first, and Steve and Tony each engage him in turn before scowling maturely at each other and towing Loki back to SHIELD to be interrogated. Thor shows up and borrows his brother for a talk when they’re half-way there and did I mention this movie makes no sense really but I still love it?
Long story short, after Thor and Tony punch each other and Steve moms at them until they agree to get along, everyone skips merrily back to the helicarrier which remains one of the most strategically ill-conceived flying vehicles to ever be fucking awesome. While on board, predictably enough, Bruce Banner is provoked into becoming the Hulk when Clint Barton, brainwashed, appears to wreak havoc and free Loki. Steve and Tony manage to keep the helicarrier from crash-landing in the Atlantic and Natasha reclaims Agent Barton, but Loki gets away and Bruce is flung from the ship and into the depths of Jersey.
Prompted by one of the truly emotional and heart-wrenching sacrifices of the film, the death of Agent Phil Coulson, which Marvel quickly decided to render mostly meaningless through his apparent return in the show pending on ABC, the newly-minted Avengers take to the sky to meet Loki as he summons his army from Stark Tower in New York City. In a series of impressive crane shots and nifty CGI work, the Avengers (including Bruce, reunited with them outside of Grand Central Station) fisticuff aliens as they pour through a giant hole in the universe powered by the Tesseract and an apparatus stationed at the top of Stark Tower. Tony makes a... I guess it’s supposed to be a heroic sacrificial act but it really just comes off as a monumentally stupid decision because really, once the nuke is pointing in the right direction, I think it’s okay to let go. But Tony flies through the hole along with the weapon of mass destruction and Natasha simultaneously discovers a way to close the portal. Steve’s canon point is directly after he gives Natasha the go-ahead, before Tony drops back into New York like a golf ball being shoved out of the hole by a gopher.
HEY LOOK A TIMELINE
PERSONALITY:
Steve was raised until age ten by a courageous nurse and a heroic story - his father, a soldier in the army's 107th heavy armor division during WWI, was also one of the victims of WWI’s forays into biological warfare. To say it colored Steve’s psyche would be one massive understatement; he's tried to live the life he thought his father would want him to since he was old enough to self-actualize. Considering the fact that he'd always been unhealthy -extremely unhealthy - it's taught him a resilience and stubbornness bordering on the moronic. Once he gets an idea in his head he does. Not. Quit. He won't lay down in a fight, and he won't lay down for a bully. He'd have to be literally incapable of getting off the ground to keep himself from a fight once he's involved. One of the last things his mother said to him was to understand the difference between fearlessness and foolishness, which - while it is something he understands - doesn't always stop him from stepping past the edge of what's reasonable when it comes to standing up against bullies.
The Great Depression hit the US in a bad way shortly after his mother's death - shortly after Steve was moved from his Hell's Kitchen home to an orphanage in Brooklyn. All things considered, he was lucky. The populations in orphanages exploded in the years after 1929, orphanages becoming refuges for children whose parents never came back after they left their kids to the state while they went elsewhere to find work, as well as the simply abandoned, the runaways, and those whose parents died. Considering the priority parentless children were given it's something of a miracle that Steve turned out to be as selfless as he did; though he couldn't have been without friends, I doubt he was close to any of those he knew. For all his warmth and empathy, he doesn't trust easily, and his first expectation has always been that he'll be tested somehow by the company of others - either physically or in his ability to take or ignore a joke.
This constant testing has instilled in him a pathological need to prove himself. To be more resilient, more persistent, more disciplined, more responsible than everyone else. If he didn't have the physical benefits that others did, he would distinguish himself in other ways.
The most significant thing about him, however, is the bottom-line reason Erskine picked him for Project: Rebirth in the first place. Steve Rogers is, plain and simple, a good man. Whether through his mother's influence, his father's legacy, his own self-depreciation, or just some peculiar accident of fate, he's an exemplar of selflessness, humility, empathy, and sensitivity to the needs of others. Even as he tries to prove himself, he values others above himself, and sees in them all the potential that others can overlook. What drives him in the film to put down the mic and pick up the shield is the determination to free 400-odd heroes imprisoned behind enemy lines, to track down his best friend/virtual brother. In every instance where he's given the opportunity to either take on the bad guy or try to save someone's life, he goes first for the save without a second thought. He values humanity. He has faith in people, faith in their ability to do the right thing if given the chance, and faith in his country and what it stands for if not all those who manage its policies.
In spite of all that, his initial relationship with the persona of Captain America was shaky at best. He wasn't the kind of person to embrace the stage - too used to being laughed at or ignored for that - and he wasn't expecting the offer of a patriotic job and a promotion to entail singing, dancing, and speeches. Over time, however (the USO and publicity circuit lasted about six months) he started to realize not only how happy his appearances made people, but how important the symbol he represented was to them. His final, true step into the position of Captain America came when he rescued Bucky and his fellow prisoners - when Bucky himself called for the soldiers to cheer the icon they'd been mocking and jeering just days before. One of the reasons Steve remains humble despite the attention and accolades is his own mental divide between himself and the hero; people aren't cheering for Steve Rogers. They're cheering for the Captain. Bucky knows him well enough to realize this, which is probably why he makes the distinction between who he's following into war. Not Captain America. The skinny kid from Brooklyn who was too stupid to run away from a fight.
It's understanding that difference that sets his WWII colleagues apart from the (movieverse) Avengers. The former know Steve Rogers and Captain America; they see where the man and the character meet, and value both for who they are and what they mean. Through experience, they're able to marry the symbol and the individual, and both are stronger for it. Pull Steve out of that time period, away from those who've experienced him as a person, and suddenly you take away that portion of humanity so essential to Captain America himself; he becomes simply the hero without the man Erskine put such faith in. Yes, Steve is still there, who he is hasn't changed, but the way those around him react to his presence does. You can't truly be friends with a caricature, which is what the public face of Captain America was during WWII. He was the USO hero who went overseas to become a real one; an image attached to headlines, not a man.
He's never believed in indulgence. From growing up in a frugal single-parent home to the scarcity of the Depression to the rationing of the War, he's been raised to believe you take what you must and no more, and even that should be shared if there's a need. Selflessness and restraint are ingrained in him too deeply for the excess and gratuitous selfishness of the 21st century not to disgust him in some way. Heroes and true leaders in particular have no business indulging in more than their subordinates are allowed. He didn't when he was on the ground and in the field, his Colonel didn't, his peers didn't, and he holds those around him in the modern day to that same standard. Howard was an exception to the rule, but he proved himself in enough other ways that his excesses were forgivable, even endearing. Being brought from that life and into the painfully commercial 21st century is like being mocked with your own values. In an economy where the definition of poverty shifts at the whims of those who haven’t been required to so much as tighten their belts, where the supposed leaders of the common people support the bastards that line their pockets and ignore the issues faced by the rest, it’s hard for Steve not to trace the patterns of his childhood into a sketch of where we are and where we’re going and wonder at the futility of some of the things he’s fought for since before he even knew he was part of an ideological war.
He’s a man disillusioned. He was never naive. As opposed to so many of the American soldiers who signed up to go overseas, and in spite of his lifelong obsession with the concept of heroes and heroism, on some level he knew what he was getting in to. He’s one of those rare and dubiously blessed individuals whose heart is made for the battlefield. Like Churchill’s declaration that he was never so happy as when he was at war, Steve never had so much purpose and so much faith in the rightness of his mission. One of the first things he asks Fury when the Director stops him during his escape into Times Square (really, guys, you took him to a facility in Times Square?) is “Did we win?” Fury’s answer - “Hell yes, unconditional surrender.” - encompasses so much about the difference between Steve’s understanding of what he was doing and the modern concept of American participation in the Second World War.
One of the first things Steve would have done would have been to read about what happened in WWII after he crashed. Being told it was over and that the Allies had triumphed wouldn’t have been enough, not for him. Not, I imagine, for anyone who lived through global conflict. He would have discovered the American government’s knowledge of what was being done to Jews and minorities. He would have been able to see all the modern analysis of the friction and fallout between the US and Russia and how countries already shredded by conflict were caught like pawns in the crossfire of history. Even more personally significant, he would have read about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He would have discovered the fact that America, his country, his government, did to Japan exactly what Steve thought he was dying to protect his homeland from. The people in whom he put his faith, in whom he invested his life, wreaked destruction on civilians with the effectiveness of HYDRA itself.
From his father’s death to his own participation, Steve’s life has been steeped in war. He’s one of the noir generation, in a world where the haunted lives of WWII soldiers have become the stuff of tragedy and romance or been forgotten altogether. In spite of far more widespread knowledge of the psychological impact of warfare, and the blessing of modern consideration for soldiers as opposed to their revilement during Vietnam, the only people who could really understand what he’s trying to deal with are either dead or have had seventy years to make peace with the ghosts they brought home. That isn’t to say that what he’s witnessed is in some way worse or better than what soldiers have seen since, and there is a solidarity and understanding in the survivors of armed combat - but the value of shared experience can’t be overlooked, and those who shared Steve’s experiences have severely dwindled in number. Modern America is an America of terrorist attacks and distant combat, where life spirals on in shrieking attempts at normalcy while things go to hell far away. It’s nothing like the total, constant awareness of war on a global scale and resources carefully monitored and doled out through government quotas that it was in Steve’s day. It’s a land divided against itself, along class lines, religious lines, race lines, political lines, geographical lines. There’s no sweeping external force to bring the majority together. He’s isolated, the bridges he’s built to distant shores blown away or rusted through or guarded by tolls few people know how to pay.
And he’s a man in mourning. His friends are dead. The woman he loves is alive and has had a life and, in my opinion, the reason he didn’t reach out to her was not (entirely) that he didn’t want that contact - what he didn’t want was to usurp whatever peace she’d found by walking into her life again unchanged, with all of his feelings for her exactly as they were when they lost each other. He hasn’t “just” lost his friends, “just” lost the family he built, “just” lost the woman he loves. He’s lost his whole world. He’s been brought into a culture he doesn’t know, one that speaks a language in which he has only academic fluency.
To put it in perspective, modern societal awareness of WWII is probably as (not) prevalent as contemporary societal awareness of the Civil War was in 1933. Yes, of course, the consequences were still being felt - there is no conflict in history that did not shape the world in one way or another - but Americans likely think about the Second World War as frequently and with as much weight as our peers in 1933 did the Civil War. Perhaps even with less weight than the Civil War was given, as that was conflict perpetrated on our own soil. The whispers from overseas and the anti-Semitic and racist ripples encouraged to spread because of them, the suffering from the Great Depression, the weight of the First World War on the shoulders of its survivors - all occupied the minds of those who lived in the time as much as terrorist attacks, Islamophobia and xenophobia, turmoil in the Middle East, and tensions with Russia and North Korea occupy American minds today. There’s no room for conflicts that ended seventy years ago, even if those conflicts are what bred the problems around us. And Steve, no matter how much he reads in his down-time, no matter how many infodumps he gets, no matter how many files he’s supplied with, does not have the ground-up, supersaturated understanding (or at least awareness) of these problems that the people he’s surrounded by do. He’s a refugee in a country built to look like home, and he will never go back where he came from.
One of the other reasons I think he didn’t make contact with Peggy is the subconscious belief that for some reason he doesn't deserve happiness. That because the people he knew aren't there to prove they lived good lives, he doesn't deserve one himself. He uses the refusal of personal closure to punish himself for the choice he made that would have forced her and those he cared about into mourning for him. In short, he has a kind of survivor’s guilt. He gets to see exactly what became of those ideals that he and his peers fought for - gets to see exactly how gilded and how tarnished they were to begin with. The war he fought was a partial fiction, cut apart by history, and he has to spend his young life and maturity untangling the knots that it left in the weft of the world he thought he understood.
As much as it wrings at his heart, it also makes him angry. Angry at himself, angry at the world, angry at SHIELD for pulling him out of the ice, angry in some portion at Erskine and the serum, angry at everything. And, knowing none of that fury is fair, angry that he can't let himself be angry. During the Second World War he grew from a USO spectacle to a symbol of hope and justice for a world gone mad. He had purpose, support, vitality - people who believed in what he fought for as powerfully as he did himself, who knew the man behind the shield and his principles. Now, there is nothing left of him but Captain America, and Captain America has become the punchline to some kind of anti-nationalist joke. Supposed love for one’s country is the purview of racists and gun-hoarding madmen; to be politically enlightened is to despise where you are without taking action to press for its improvement, or to take action and be crushed under the jackboots of politicians who view a people in revolt as a people to be subjugated, not heard. There are no fireside chats, no illusion of closeness with the elected ruling body. Steve looks around him and sees a world that doesn’t want what he was, that has dismissed, demeaned, and devalued him as a tool of propaganda and hawk mentalities. Seventy years have muddied his title with misuse and abuse and he’s left with the refuse of politicians and protesters smeared across his shield in generations of battles he wasn’t around to fight.
The phrase ‘man out of time’ gets thrown around a lot when describing Steve and his relationship with the modern world. More exigent to this incarnation, I think, is the fact that Steve Rogers is a man set adrift, forced to reevaluate the one question to which he thought he knew the answer: What was the point?
POWER:
HE'S A GOOD MAN. IT'S A SUPERPOWER NOW. ALSO, IF YOU GO BY CAP:TFA, VULNERABLE ONLY TO FIRE.
But no really. As Erskine puts it, the serum takes what is already there - inside - and amplifies it. It took, in essence, the spirit of the man that Steve was and made him into more than that - it's voodoo science, okay.
As far as what he displays during the movie, he has vastly heightened stamina, a healing and recovery rate that far outstrips that of an ordinary individual, is more difficult to injure generally speaking (he went flying off the top of a capsizing cab and hit the ground before rolling and came up without a scratch until the dude shot him, I mean really), and preternaturally strong. There is also some implication that his mental faculties are enhanced in those areas which he already showed proficiency - tactical and strategic thinking, etc, as well as muscle- and sensory-memory.
He also has a metabolism four times faster than average, which means (I suppose unless he's trying really, really hard), this here 26-year-old-virgin can't get drunk. Other than that, he's flesh and blood - he can be injured, he can be killed. All it takes is a well-placed bullet or more injuries than his body can heal.
Via Portage, I would request he be granted boomerang powers. That is to say, when he throws things, they come zooming back at him.
[CHARACTER SAMPLES]
COMMUNITY POST (VOICE) SAMPLE:
[It takes him very little time to figure out how to navigate the comm and the network - they aren’t complicated, and the comm isn’t hugely different than the phone he was provided back in New York. Back in New York?
Dirty, blood-smeared, beleaguered, and still in uniform, Steve lets the audio link stay open for several seconds without speaking. He knows what he wants to say. What he needs to say. But he already asked Fury this question once, and it was hard enough not knowing then.
There’s no debris in the streets. No signs of destruction. No hole in the sky, either, but this New York - this New York...]
Did we win?
[The words come out laced with exhaustion. Steve draws himself up with a deep breath, and his second try sounds a great deal more commanding.] And if someone could confirm the date, I’d appreciate it.
LOGS POST (PROSE) SAMPLE:
And this, Steve thinks, in a voice that mocks the tour guides, is where Captain America and his best friend got chased out of a theater in 1931. They sneaked in to see Mata Hari, and almost got hit by a car running across the street. Like many crimes of his youth, this was not Captain America’s idea.
It’s a pawn shop now - a pawn shop and some apartments, at least in his version of things. Here it’s a sushi restaurant and flower shop. He stops into the latter, picking up a simple bouquet for his destination.
The tour goes on, of this New New York. Here, where Bucky would have paid a bum a dollar for his flask and Steve and Bucky shared it until both were admirably sick all over the back steps of a butcher shop that burned down later that year. There, where in another world he took a beating in a back alley before Barnes met him with the news that he was Sergeant James Barnes of the 107th, shipping out the next day.
Later, here: where he would see a hole open in the sky, remember Schmidt’s face as he held the cube in his hand and was ripped from the world and into space. Here, where he would take on aliens alongside strangers - heroes - who could become friends. He leaves a bit of the flowerless vegetation always included with bouquets on the rail running alongside Park Avenue, above where it crosses 42nd. He thinks Stark would appreciate the respectful disrespect in the action. He knows Howard would have been proud.
From there, to 5th Avenue, a fifteen minute walk through the afternoon sun, through the crowds navigating between exorbitant stores and tourists spending on things they’ve been saving to own. It's the same, it's all the same, even with different buildings puncturing the skyline - every New York, his own, his second, and then this one, with its Stark Towers and Avengers mansion and that ridiculous, obscene moon.
This is where Steve Rogers forgot when he was.
He stops in the shadow of the financial buildings on East 53rd, watching the strangers with the slightest lack of focus, letting himself picture different clothes and conversations that seem only fractionally changed the longer he listens. Then it’s the half block to where Paley Park should be, where once upon a time there was a building, a club, where Captain America promised to meet someone. A club that closed fifty years ago, where he was supposed to learn how to dance.
Really, he should have known that it wouldn’t all be the same here. He did know, but figured the address would at least be there, that he could leave the flowers - that maybe it wouldn’t be Paley Park, but that it would be something. Something else. Anything else.
It’s when he’s under the Stork Club’s awning, looking up at the crisp white calligraphy of the name, that he realizes that he dropped the bouquet somewhere between here and the corner. He doesn’t care. Steve reaches up to run his fingers over the dip of the C, nerves burning bright little bursts through his chest while he tries to think.
“They’re closed until dinner.”
He turns, and sees a woman in what must be fashionable day-wear, because it’s all clearly tailored for her. She eyes him with a mix of appraisal and amusement. “Want me to get us a table?”
“No,” he says. It’s too quick, clearly, based on the face she makes. He steps back - away from her and the building. “No, thank you.”
He leaves without looking back. Toward what, where, isn’t really a consideration. 5th Ave, Avenue of the Americas, 7th - he hits Broadway and turns away from Times Square, breaks into a run as he crosses 57th, and misses the Columbus Circle Fountain's addition completely as he plunges into the deep green shadows of the park.
FINAL NOTES:
He doesn’t have much in the way of inventory except for his nomex/kevlar suit and his shield, and he’s kinda beat up and filthy with a moderate-to-severe injury to his abdomen sustained during the fight in Manhattan.