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Random thoughts on Steve vs Tony (vs Loki) on the Helicarrier, two years late and very obsolete -_-;
Just for the record, I've seen neither Thor 2, IM3 nor CA:TWS yet. I should probably fix that, but howandever.
I was just rewatching Avengers recently, though, and there's been a crap tonne of Steve meta floating around lately in the run-up and wake of CA:TWS, which was making me think about it in a new light.
Just for the record, I've seen neither Thor 2, IM3 nor CA:TWS yet. I should probably fix that, but howandever.
I was just rewatching Avengers recently, though, and there's been a crap tonne of Steve meta floating around lately in the run-up and wake of CA:TWS, which was making me think about it in a new light.
Under the Influence of Fear
The confrontation on the Helicarrier took place under the influence of the sceptre, which appears at a base level to boost paranoia in those around it. It boosts anger and irrationality by poking at the defining fears people keep locked up inside them. Or, well, I'm assuming that's what it does, anyway, because probably the easiest way TO boost anger is to induce fear, and I think there's evidence to back it up.
Loki, who was under its influence longest, is muddy evidence because he was insane, angry and terrified long before the sceptre came into the picture, and was lashing out on a world-destroying scale also before the sceptre happened. However, it is suggestive that everyone he personally attacks in Avengers has echoes of his strongest personal fears/shames: Bruce, who has an other-coloured monster under his skin, Natasha, who's a liesmith and an assassin, Tony, who's a diva and a reforged fallen prince. He lashes out at what reminds him of his own failures and flaws. There is evidence that he was under the influence to an extent (eye-colour and physical condition mostly), and while I do NOT think it was full brainwashing the way it was with Clint, I'd say it probably was exacerbating his deep-seated fears the way it did everyone else's.
Tony, in the Helicarrier scene, is lashing out primarily towards SHIELD first, then Steve. Steve was primarily a reaction, lashing back at a barb that hit right home, but I find SHIELD interesting. He went in there already paranoid about SHIELD, because after Obie he's basically incapable of not being paranoid about military agencies anymore, but the amount of focus he and Bruce put on it might be suggestive of the sceptre again. All Tony's paranoia about weapons and weapons-dealing and nuclear deterrents got boosted all over again, if mostly justifiably in this case. Again, a previous personal flaw that he can't help but react to.
Bruce I find probably most interesting, because Bruce doesn't show much in the way of reaction, not outwardly, but he's the one who ends up actually holding the sceptre at the end of the scene, completely unconsciously. His fears, his snipes and barbs, were all about SHIELD caging him and SHIELD using him as a weapon, and again that was justifiable, but aside from those barbs he remained outwardly calm if incredibly bitter right up until just before he realises he's holding the goddamn thing. Which is the same moment everyone else realises that they're being manipulated as well. What strikes me about Bruce is that, if the sceptre works the way I think it does, it would make sense that Bruce wouldn't outwardly act much different, because controlling fear to keep it from erupting into giant green anger has basically been his life story for the past six years. Up until the unconscious wire is tripped, and then we're all in trouble. And in this scene, the unconscious wire and the building anger doesn't result in the Hulk but in becoming the sceptre's tool, and Bruce is the barometer by which everyone else realises what's going on. That does suggest to me that the sceptre hijacks similar processes to what historically results in the Hulk in Bruce - fear leading to anger leading to explosive conflict.
Natasha might also be a factor, in that immediately after this is her confrontation with the Hulk, and her slightly uncharacteristic blue-screen moment afterwards. While I'm fully convinced that was primarily rooted in Natasha's past and personality and the sheer fact of her utter helplessness against the Hulk, which is an entirely sensible thing to go into shock over when you combine it with the fact that she was just thrown into a wall on top of it, it's possible that the sceptre's influence immediately prior to that may have exacerbated her fears and made it harder for her to bounce back from them. Being too weak to help herself is something that I think would resonate very powerfully for Natasha, and the Hulk is practically an avatar of that from more than one angle (other helpless against him, him helpless to stop himself). If the sceptre heightened her awareness just before, and combined with the legitimately traumatic attack itself, I'm not surprised she had to huddle for a bit afterwards (to be honest, even without the sceptre I'm not surprised there).
They were all genuine and legitimate fears these characters had, all rooted in their pasts and their personalities, and seemingly all brought to the fore by the sceptre's influence. They all lashed out and reacted based on deep-seated fears and internal conflicts running under the confrontation, and I think that's essentially what the sceptre does. Play on those fears around it. It makes sense as a tactic from the sceptre's POV if we believe what Loki was shilling in Stuttgart. What better way to make people accept peace and mindless obedience than to heighten the threatening nature of the universe around them? Show them how much they have to fear, make them feel alone and paranoid and angry, and then offer them a way out, a quiet, empty place beyond the fears that hound them. It seems to fit with the effects shown on screen, and it makes sense for the purpose of the thing, so I'm guessing that's what the sceptre actually was doing.
But the thing with Steve, then. The thing about what Steve says to Tony.
"Big man in a suit of armour. Take that away and what are you?"
The thing is, the scenes with Steve leading up to this? Have been about his loss and his uncertainty about his place in a new world. Telling Fury: "They told me we won the war. Nobody told me what we lost.". Asking Phil: "Don't you think it's a bit old-fashioned?" Even with Bruce and Tony, trying to intervene on Bruce's behalf with Tony, only to be kind of shot down by the both of them and told to be paranoid in a different direction instead, one that runs against one of the few certainties he has left. And he does it, he questions, he does the right thing, because Steve has never shied away from doing what has to be done no matter the cost to himself, but where does that actually leave him, by the time we get back to the confrontation scene?
Tony shoots back, Tony shoots right on back with the serum and "everything special about you came out of a bottle" and I think the thing is that Steve thinks he's right. That that was what Steve, needled and aggravated by the sceptre and everything that's happened to him, had actually meant by what he asked Tony in the first place. He'd asked "Big man in a suit of armour, take that away and what are you?" because what he was actually afraid of was "Big strong supersoldier in a uniform, take that away and what are you?"
Because what does he have left, at this point? Nobody knows who he is anymore. They only know the Captain America from Howard's nostalgia or ancient USO films, the propaganda piece that Coulson was so inspired by, but that's not Steve. Any old idiot can get pumped up on serum and put on a uniform (ask Bruce about that one), that doesn't make them him. And if the uniform and the serum are all anyone wants, what's left of Steve himself? The only people who knew him, skinny, scrawny Steve from Brooklyn who wanted to stop bullies, the only people who'd have chosen him over the serum in the first place, are gone. Erskine, Peggy and Bucky, the ones who chose him and followed him for him, they're all gone, and there's nobody left who even remembers who Steve is. These people, he's an ideal to them, not a person, and in several cases apparently a broken ideal at that. He's back to being a dancing monkey for the USO who happens to be able to hit people. What the hell does he have to hold onto anymore?
And then there's Tony, Tony who's shooting him down every time he turns, Tony who's irreverent and not-Howard and poking Bruce and somehow managing to be right where Steve's wrong and asking Steve to make the hard choices, there's Tony right there and Steve lashes out. Because the sceptre, because he's lost, because he's alone, because these two can push each other's buttons without even trying. Because the people Steve lived and died for are gone, the serum made a loop-hole and a way out that no-one else had, and Steve doesn't understand why that happened. ("Always a way out. You know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero.") Steve, much as Loki and Tony and basically everyone else under the sceptre's influence, was primarily lashing out not at other people but at his own fears and flaws, handily and momentarily personified in the form of Tony Stark.
I've read meta, I think, about how Steve and Loki actually have a fair bit in common in terms of backstory - the weak, skinny ones with a strong, popular brother/friend, the ones who could never do what they needed to do to be respected and always had people willing to point it out to them, the ones who went through a traumatic physical change to reveal a completely different body underneath their own, the ones who went to war to prove themselves after that physical change, the ones who fell into the abyss at the end of that war and came back different, the ones whose sense of self is repeatedly and traumatically shattered. It was their personalities and their reactions to what happened to them that show how they're different, and Avengers is where we see that. The scenes that precede this, the lost and angry Steve and the lost and angry Loki, and then the confrontation scene, where Steve's oddly uncharacteristic lashing-out against Tony does seem to echo Loki's lashing out at all and sundry, show some of their similar struggles and their reactions to it.
But then, after this, Steve works with Tony. Natasha works with Bruce. They pull past their fears and past the sceptre's influence, and they work together.
Loki doesn't. There's a moment, one moment, where it looks like he might. When he seems to shake free of the sceptre on the tower (and where, if some screencaps are right, his eyes actually shift from a blueish tinge back to green) and almost listens to his brother. And then ... then he stabs Thor.
And maybe it's because he was longer under the sceptre and Thanos, maybe it's because he's already made his bed and can't help but lie in it, maybe it's because Steve signed up for his transformation and Loki never, ever did, maybe it's because Loki's transformation revealed his life for a lie while Steve's arguably enabled him to reveal an inner truth, or maybe it's purely because they're different people with different values, but that moment is essentially the point where one rises and the other falls. Where one starts to rebuild his shattered self around a core of decency and idealism, and one fractures further as more dreams crumble around him and every echo of his fears seems to gather 'round and mock him.
I think the sceptre plays on fears to promote paranoia and conflict, in order to cement itself as a cure-all and balm against the world around it, to keep its users addicted to it and to create weaknesses for that user to exploit around them. The confrontation on the Helicarrier showed by pretty clear implication that the sceptre doesn't just purposefully create mindless obedience on demand, it also has an ambient effect that increases conflict in its vicinity, and judging by the way people reacted around it, I really do think that the mechanism for that effect is a heightening of fear and paranoia, both to create disunity and also as it's own reward, because fearful people are more likely to turn to a loss of will and caring purely to get a break. The strongest reactions to it are among people with the most glaring fears and losses (Steve, Loki, Tony), while people who are more used to controlling or channeling their fears (Natasha, Bruce and Fury), or who've recently lived hard lessons in controlling anger/conflict (Thor, Bruce) seem to do better, though they don't quite escape unscathed either.
I just think, if it does work the way I think it does, that that ... says an awful lot about what Steve's going through. That his first reaction in the thing's presence, before the confrontation, is to snap at Tony in Bruce's defense, and then later, when he's lost almost everything of his identity, for him to ask Tony "take that away and what are you?" People with nothing, with no armour and no serum and no reputation to stand on, what are they worth? Because they have to be worth something. "People with none of that worth ten of you." He doesn't mean Tony. I don't think he ever really meant Tony. He meant the armour, he meant the serum, he meant the big colourful heroes of this goddamn new world that has nothing, nothing, that's familiar in it. He meant himself, and all the people who died with nothing while the USO's dancing monkey went on to pretend to be a hero in some shiny new time where he hadn't the first clue what was happening. For one second, while the sceptre preyed on him, he broke a little and snapped out his greatest fear: that Steve Rogers had died in the ice or maybe even in the transformation chamber, and all that's left is a shiny, empty suit that everyone thinks is a hero.
And the thing of it is, he is a hero. Take everything away from him, take his life and his time and his very sense of self, and what's left is a hero. What's left is a man who stands up to bullies and tries to save the world and does the right thing even when it leaves him with nothing. Same as Tony. Same as Tony, left with no money and no freedom and a body that was rapidly dying on him, still managed to scrape himself together and fight, not only for himself, but for Yinsen as well. They're both more than the suits and the serum, they're both heroes under it all.
But neither of them really believe it, though they keep goddamn trying anyway. Neither of them are ever really sure they're worth anything without what they've built and what they've become. Which is why what Steve said, despite coming primarily from his own fears, managed to kick Tony right in the teeth, because those are his fears too. That's his terror. Being the shallow, empty man before the cave, the broken man in the cave, instead of what he's built since. Same as Steve fears being the weak, sickly man before the serum, and the empty suit on the USO stage, the man who couldn't fight for what he believed.
I think, on a base level, that the reason they managed to hurt each other so much wasn't because they were different, but because they had an awful, awful lot in common. Sometimes the easiest person to do damage to is someone just like you, because wittingly or unwittingly you know exactly where to hit. Steve, Tony and Loki all had alarmingly similar stressors hidden in their pasts, the same wounds covered over with three very different facades. I find it slightly interesting that Tony and Loki, while being the most obvious comparison among the three, maybe both have as much or more in common with Steve as they do with each other. Steve & Loki, in the shape of their pasts, and Steve & Tony, in their reactions to them and the shape of their future because of it. Heh.
Anyway. Never mind. Rambling meta that's two years obsolete, over and done, yes?
I really ought to get around to the second phase movies at some point, oughtn't I?
The confrontation on the Helicarrier took place under the influence of the sceptre, which appears at a base level to boost paranoia in those around it. It boosts anger and irrationality by poking at the defining fears people keep locked up inside them. Or, well, I'm assuming that's what it does, anyway, because probably the easiest way TO boost anger is to induce fear, and I think there's evidence to back it up.
Loki, who was under its influence longest, is muddy evidence because he was insane, angry and terrified long before the sceptre came into the picture, and was lashing out on a world-destroying scale also before the sceptre happened. However, it is suggestive that everyone he personally attacks in Avengers has echoes of his strongest personal fears/shames: Bruce, who has an other-coloured monster under his skin, Natasha, who's a liesmith and an assassin, Tony, who's a diva and a reforged fallen prince. He lashes out at what reminds him of his own failures and flaws. There is evidence that he was under the influence to an extent (eye-colour and physical condition mostly), and while I do NOT think it was full brainwashing the way it was with Clint, I'd say it probably was exacerbating his deep-seated fears the way it did everyone else's.
Tony, in the Helicarrier scene, is lashing out primarily towards SHIELD first, then Steve. Steve was primarily a reaction, lashing back at a barb that hit right home, but I find SHIELD interesting. He went in there already paranoid about SHIELD, because after Obie he's basically incapable of not being paranoid about military agencies anymore, but the amount of focus he and Bruce put on it might be suggestive of the sceptre again. All Tony's paranoia about weapons and weapons-dealing and nuclear deterrents got boosted all over again, if mostly justifiably in this case. Again, a previous personal flaw that he can't help but react to.
Bruce I find probably most interesting, because Bruce doesn't show much in the way of reaction, not outwardly, but he's the one who ends up actually holding the sceptre at the end of the scene, completely unconsciously. His fears, his snipes and barbs, were all about SHIELD caging him and SHIELD using him as a weapon, and again that was justifiable, but aside from those barbs he remained outwardly calm if incredibly bitter right up until just before he realises he's holding the goddamn thing. Which is the same moment everyone else realises that they're being manipulated as well. What strikes me about Bruce is that, if the sceptre works the way I think it does, it would make sense that Bruce wouldn't outwardly act much different, because controlling fear to keep it from erupting into giant green anger has basically been his life story for the past six years. Up until the unconscious wire is tripped, and then we're all in trouble. And in this scene, the unconscious wire and the building anger doesn't result in the Hulk but in becoming the sceptre's tool, and Bruce is the barometer by which everyone else realises what's going on. That does suggest to me that the sceptre hijacks similar processes to what historically results in the Hulk in Bruce - fear leading to anger leading to explosive conflict.
Natasha might also be a factor, in that immediately after this is her confrontation with the Hulk, and her slightly uncharacteristic blue-screen moment afterwards. While I'm fully convinced that was primarily rooted in Natasha's past and personality and the sheer fact of her utter helplessness against the Hulk, which is an entirely sensible thing to go into shock over when you combine it with the fact that she was just thrown into a wall on top of it, it's possible that the sceptre's influence immediately prior to that may have exacerbated her fears and made it harder for her to bounce back from them. Being too weak to help herself is something that I think would resonate very powerfully for Natasha, and the Hulk is practically an avatar of that from more than one angle (other helpless against him, him helpless to stop himself). If the sceptre heightened her awareness just before, and combined with the legitimately traumatic attack itself, I'm not surprised she had to huddle for a bit afterwards (to be honest, even without the sceptre I'm not surprised there).
They were all genuine and legitimate fears these characters had, all rooted in their pasts and their personalities, and seemingly all brought to the fore by the sceptre's influence. They all lashed out and reacted based on deep-seated fears and internal conflicts running under the confrontation, and I think that's essentially what the sceptre does. Play on those fears around it. It makes sense as a tactic from the sceptre's POV if we believe what Loki was shilling in Stuttgart. What better way to make people accept peace and mindless obedience than to heighten the threatening nature of the universe around them? Show them how much they have to fear, make them feel alone and paranoid and angry, and then offer them a way out, a quiet, empty place beyond the fears that hound them. It seems to fit with the effects shown on screen, and it makes sense for the purpose of the thing, so I'm guessing that's what the sceptre actually was doing.
But the thing with Steve, then. The thing about what Steve says to Tony.
"Big man in a suit of armour. Take that away and what are you?"
The thing is, the scenes with Steve leading up to this? Have been about his loss and his uncertainty about his place in a new world. Telling Fury: "They told me we won the war. Nobody told me what we lost.". Asking Phil: "Don't you think it's a bit old-fashioned?" Even with Bruce and Tony, trying to intervene on Bruce's behalf with Tony, only to be kind of shot down by the both of them and told to be paranoid in a different direction instead, one that runs against one of the few certainties he has left. And he does it, he questions, he does the right thing, because Steve has never shied away from doing what has to be done no matter the cost to himself, but where does that actually leave him, by the time we get back to the confrontation scene?
Tony shoots back, Tony shoots right on back with the serum and "everything special about you came out of a bottle" and I think the thing is that Steve thinks he's right. That that was what Steve, needled and aggravated by the sceptre and everything that's happened to him, had actually meant by what he asked Tony in the first place. He'd asked "Big man in a suit of armour, take that away and what are you?" because what he was actually afraid of was "Big strong supersoldier in a uniform, take that away and what are you?"
Because what does he have left, at this point? Nobody knows who he is anymore. They only know the Captain America from Howard's nostalgia or ancient USO films, the propaganda piece that Coulson was so inspired by, but that's not Steve. Any old idiot can get pumped up on serum and put on a uniform (ask Bruce about that one), that doesn't make them him. And if the uniform and the serum are all anyone wants, what's left of Steve himself? The only people who knew him, skinny, scrawny Steve from Brooklyn who wanted to stop bullies, the only people who'd have chosen him over the serum in the first place, are gone. Erskine, Peggy and Bucky, the ones who chose him and followed him for him, they're all gone, and there's nobody left who even remembers who Steve is. These people, he's an ideal to them, not a person, and in several cases apparently a broken ideal at that. He's back to being a dancing monkey for the USO who happens to be able to hit people. What the hell does he have to hold onto anymore?
And then there's Tony, Tony who's shooting him down every time he turns, Tony who's irreverent and not-Howard and poking Bruce and somehow managing to be right where Steve's wrong and asking Steve to make the hard choices, there's Tony right there and Steve lashes out. Because the sceptre, because he's lost, because he's alone, because these two can push each other's buttons without even trying. Because the people Steve lived and died for are gone, the serum made a loop-hole and a way out that no-one else had, and Steve doesn't understand why that happened. ("Always a way out. You know, you may not be a threat, but you better stop pretending to be a hero.") Steve, much as Loki and Tony and basically everyone else under the sceptre's influence, was primarily lashing out not at other people but at his own fears and flaws, handily and momentarily personified in the form of Tony Stark.
I've read meta, I think, about how Steve and Loki actually have a fair bit in common in terms of backstory - the weak, skinny ones with a strong, popular brother/friend, the ones who could never do what they needed to do to be respected and always had people willing to point it out to them, the ones who went through a traumatic physical change to reveal a completely different body underneath their own, the ones who went to war to prove themselves after that physical change, the ones who fell into the abyss at the end of that war and came back different, the ones whose sense of self is repeatedly and traumatically shattered. It was their personalities and their reactions to what happened to them that show how they're different, and Avengers is where we see that. The scenes that precede this, the lost and angry Steve and the lost and angry Loki, and then the confrontation scene, where Steve's oddly uncharacteristic lashing-out against Tony does seem to echo Loki's lashing out at all and sundry, show some of their similar struggles and their reactions to it.
But then, after this, Steve works with Tony. Natasha works with Bruce. They pull past their fears and past the sceptre's influence, and they work together.
Loki doesn't. There's a moment, one moment, where it looks like he might. When he seems to shake free of the sceptre on the tower (and where, if some screencaps are right, his eyes actually shift from a blueish tinge back to green) and almost listens to his brother. And then ... then he stabs Thor.
And maybe it's because he was longer under the sceptre and Thanos, maybe it's because he's already made his bed and can't help but lie in it, maybe it's because Steve signed up for his transformation and Loki never, ever did, maybe it's because Loki's transformation revealed his life for a lie while Steve's arguably enabled him to reveal an inner truth, or maybe it's purely because they're different people with different values, but that moment is essentially the point where one rises and the other falls. Where one starts to rebuild his shattered self around a core of decency and idealism, and one fractures further as more dreams crumble around him and every echo of his fears seems to gather 'round and mock him.
I think the sceptre plays on fears to promote paranoia and conflict, in order to cement itself as a cure-all and balm against the world around it, to keep its users addicted to it and to create weaknesses for that user to exploit around them. The confrontation on the Helicarrier showed by pretty clear implication that the sceptre doesn't just purposefully create mindless obedience on demand, it also has an ambient effect that increases conflict in its vicinity, and judging by the way people reacted around it, I really do think that the mechanism for that effect is a heightening of fear and paranoia, both to create disunity and also as it's own reward, because fearful people are more likely to turn to a loss of will and caring purely to get a break. The strongest reactions to it are among people with the most glaring fears and losses (Steve, Loki, Tony), while people who are more used to controlling or channeling their fears (Natasha, Bruce and Fury), or who've recently lived hard lessons in controlling anger/conflict (Thor, Bruce) seem to do better, though they don't quite escape unscathed either.
I just think, if it does work the way I think it does, that that ... says an awful lot about what Steve's going through. That his first reaction in the thing's presence, before the confrontation, is to snap at Tony in Bruce's defense, and then later, when he's lost almost everything of his identity, for him to ask Tony "take that away and what are you?" People with nothing, with no armour and no serum and no reputation to stand on, what are they worth? Because they have to be worth something. "People with none of that worth ten of you." He doesn't mean Tony. I don't think he ever really meant Tony. He meant the armour, he meant the serum, he meant the big colourful heroes of this goddamn new world that has nothing, nothing, that's familiar in it. He meant himself, and all the people who died with nothing while the USO's dancing monkey went on to pretend to be a hero in some shiny new time where he hadn't the first clue what was happening. For one second, while the sceptre preyed on him, he broke a little and snapped out his greatest fear: that Steve Rogers had died in the ice or maybe even in the transformation chamber, and all that's left is a shiny, empty suit that everyone thinks is a hero.
And the thing of it is, he is a hero. Take everything away from him, take his life and his time and his very sense of self, and what's left is a hero. What's left is a man who stands up to bullies and tries to save the world and does the right thing even when it leaves him with nothing. Same as Tony. Same as Tony, left with no money and no freedom and a body that was rapidly dying on him, still managed to scrape himself together and fight, not only for himself, but for Yinsen as well. They're both more than the suits and the serum, they're both heroes under it all.
But neither of them really believe it, though they keep goddamn trying anyway. Neither of them are ever really sure they're worth anything without what they've built and what they've become. Which is why what Steve said, despite coming primarily from his own fears, managed to kick Tony right in the teeth, because those are his fears too. That's his terror. Being the shallow, empty man before the cave, the broken man in the cave, instead of what he's built since. Same as Steve fears being the weak, sickly man before the serum, and the empty suit on the USO stage, the man who couldn't fight for what he believed.
I think, on a base level, that the reason they managed to hurt each other so much wasn't because they were different, but because they had an awful, awful lot in common. Sometimes the easiest person to do damage to is someone just like you, because wittingly or unwittingly you know exactly where to hit. Steve, Tony and Loki all had alarmingly similar stressors hidden in their pasts, the same wounds covered over with three very different facades. I find it slightly interesting that Tony and Loki, while being the most obvious comparison among the three, maybe both have as much or more in common with Steve as they do with each other. Steve & Loki, in the shape of their pasts, and Steve & Tony, in their reactions to them and the shape of their future because of it. Heh.
Anyway. Never mind. Rambling meta that's two years obsolete, over and done, yes?
I really ought to get around to the second phase movies at some point, oughtn't I?
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