What would surprise Captain America?
Jun. 13th, 2012 01:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lolaraincoatI've been reading a lot of Avengers fics - there's been a lot to read - and I've been liking many of these fics quite a lot. Except that there's this one thing that's driving me crazy, so crazy that I keep having to back-button out of perfectly good fics before Nick Fury and the Hulk can even begin to get their freak on, which is kind of tragic. So in case you were thinking of writing anything in the Marvel-verse ever, and you were hoping to avoid me making sad puppy-eyes face, please, please, please consider this question carefully:
What would surprise Captain America in 2012?
See, people keep writing (and reccing!) stories in which eternally-27-year-old Steve Rogers, who is thawed out in 2012 after having been frozen in Arctic ice since 1945, is shocked by this crazy modern world. It's kind of irresistible as a plot point, to be fair. I just wish people writing these fics did not show such a profound lack of imagination in picking which aspects of this crazy modern world would horrify him. So far what amazes and/or upsets Captain America in fics I've read has been:
* sexy dancing by scantily clad teenagers to unfamiliar loud music
* sex
* premarital sex
* homosexual sex
* marriage equality
* computers
Computers as consumer goods, I agree, are pretty new and different. But when thinking about what might shock Captain America, writers should remember that World War Two, like all the big wars since 1850 or so, gave a huge impetus to technology, and even an ordinary soldier would have seen rapid change in information technology over the course of the war. Presumably the guy who got shot up with the top-secret super-soldier serum would have been around a lot more rapid technological change: radar, early computing (Alan Turing, who invented the Turing test, spent World War Two pioneering decryption software, remember), the first glimmerings of television (though not broadcast), the first antibiotics ...
So it's not so much that computers would shock the defrosted Captain because of their newness, I think. They might shock him because they are the latest development of the flowering of consumer culture in the postwar decades. So I'm not sure they would shock him more than disposable plastic sporks or drive-through Starbucks. Bear in mind that he grew up in the Great Depression: throwing stuff out would be very hard for him; being surrounded by objects which were made in order to be thrown out might astonish him.
As to sex: every generation imagines that they invented it, and every generation is wrong. But if you're thinking of World War Two as part of the vast, undifferentiated Time Before Sex Was Invented, you are extra-wrong with wrong on top and a side order of really, really wrong.. World War Two was, besides everything else it was, an occasion for lots of young (mostly) healthy (mostly) people to get out into the world and meet a whole bunch of interesting strangers. They danced sexily to loud music (I know the Glenn Miller Orchestra doesn't sound that way to us, but imagine all those brass and wind and percussion instruments playing as loud as they could in a ballroom. It was loud.) So they danced in ways that revealed their underwear to the world, and then they had sex. That's why the military produced all those interesting vintage posters warning about the dangers of attractive spies and also VD. That's why the invention of penicillin mattered to the war effort. That's why the Baby Boom. During the war, Americans made funny movies about all the sex people were having - Miracle at Morgan's Creek for instance - and a decade later some of them told Alfred Kinsey all about it.
As Kinsey discovered, some of the sex people were having during the war was with people of the same sex. In fact, Alan Berube mades clear in Coming Out Under Fire that gay men and lesbians in the military faced very little official trouble until after the war was over - at which point they faced terrible discrimination indeed. But Captain America would have been under the ice by that point. The world he left was full of unmarried people having all kinds of sex with relatively few consequences except pregnancy (and yes, birth control existed before the Pill) and venereal disease. So to me, fics depicting Captain America as a prude or a homophobe need to explain how he came to be so out of step with his own time. Or writers who want a prudish Captain America could show him as having gone into the ice in the 1950s - a much more buttoned-down time.
Marriage equality is a new thing in the world, yes, but like all new things it has historical antecedents. Communities of men who prefer sex with other men can be found in the historical record pretty much in any city in the world across the past two centuries at least, and gay liberation was an idea if not a political movement as early as the 1880s in parts of Europe. For Steve Rogers' home town, Brooklyn, fic writers might want to consult George Chauncey's terrific book Gay New York, which includes a brief account of a marriage ceremony - not a legel one, to be sure - between two men in Brooklyn in the 1920s. So while Steve Rogers might find marriage equality surprising, I very much doubt it would be on the top of his list of astonishments.
So, not sex and not computers, then. What would surprise Captain America?
Nick Fury. Nick Fury as played by Samuel Jackson, anyway. Remember that the US military was racially segregated during World War Two (yes I know that Captain America supposedly fought in an integrated unit, but all that tells us is that the guys who wrote the script for that movie know just as much history as the average fangirl, or maybe a little less) and that the biggest argument for maintaining segregation was that white guys could not possibly be led into battle by non-white guys. So to wake up to find Nick Fury as his commanding officer - I'm not saying that Steve Rogers would be upset, necessarily, but he would be very, very surprised.
And, more broadly, racial integration generally would shock him. Steve Rogers did grow up in a place and time where marriage was very strictly regulated: marriage between people of two separate races was illegal almost everywhere in the United States until 1962. I don't know if he grew up with separate drinking fountains and segregated public transportation - but if I were writing fic about Captain America waking up in 2012, I would do some serious googling about segregation in New York City. Did he attend segregated schools? That seems likely.
Maria Hill would probably shock him, too. While women were part of the military during the Second World War, they served in separate, auxiliary branches - and similarly to the segregated units in which non-white Americans served, that was to prevent any woman ever from having military authority over any man. Again, thinking more generally, he would not be surprised at all to see women working, but to see women in professional positions would be something very new to him. Pepper Potts would make sense to him as a secretary, but not as a CEO. He would have seen lots of women nurses, but no women doctors. No women scientists, either, so he would be surprised to meet Jane Foster.
Two other big surprises:
Changes in social class in America. As I already said, the rise of the middle class and all the material cultural surrounding it - suburbs! dixie cups! - was pretty much a post-war phenomenon. So was the collapse of the labor movement. In the neighborhood where Steve Rogers grew up, nearly all employed adult men would have belonged to a union. He didn't have a union, because he was a soldier, but he will be surprised to find that most of the guys working on rebuilding New York after it got Loki'd are not union members. Oh, and before World War Two, very few Americans went to college - he'll be impressed to keep meeting all these educated people.
And finally, geopolitical change. Probably the biggest shock would be that Europe is now united (sort of) and that Germany and France are now closely allied. Slightly less shocking, because anyone who was paying attention could see this looming over the horizon throughout the war, would be the bitter division between the US and Russia (though he might need the whole Cold War explained to him, several times, with emphasis on the bomb. Or should I say, The Bomb.) But also he would be amazed by the end of British imperialism. And the Chinese Revolution! The Iranian revolution! African decolonization and the end of apartheid! The Cuban Revolution! India and Pakistan and
... yeah, anyway, there's a lot for him to catch up on.
But not sex. Really there's not too much new there at all.
ETA: Wow, that's ... a lot ... of comments. I'm glad you're here and will try to respond eventually, but no promises. In the meantime, if you are thinking about commenting here, please read this first. Thank you!
*****
What would surprise Captain America in 2012?
See, people keep writing (and reccing!) stories in which eternally-27-year-old Steve Rogers, who is thawed out in 2012 after having been frozen in Arctic ice since 1945, is shocked by this crazy modern world. It's kind of irresistible as a plot point, to be fair. I just wish people writing these fics did not show such a profound lack of imagination in picking which aspects of this crazy modern world would horrify him. So far what amazes and/or upsets Captain America in fics I've read has been:
* sexy dancing by scantily clad teenagers to unfamiliar loud music
* sex
* premarital sex
* homosexual sex
* marriage equality
* computers
Computers as consumer goods, I agree, are pretty new and different. But when thinking about what might shock Captain America, writers should remember that World War Two, like all the big wars since 1850 or so, gave a huge impetus to technology, and even an ordinary soldier would have seen rapid change in information technology over the course of the war. Presumably the guy who got shot up with the top-secret super-soldier serum would have been around a lot more rapid technological change: radar, early computing (Alan Turing, who invented the Turing test, spent World War Two pioneering decryption software, remember), the first glimmerings of television (though not broadcast), the first antibiotics ...
So it's not so much that computers would shock the defrosted Captain because of their newness, I think. They might shock him because they are the latest development of the flowering of consumer culture in the postwar decades. So I'm not sure they would shock him more than disposable plastic sporks or drive-through Starbucks. Bear in mind that he grew up in the Great Depression: throwing stuff out would be very hard for him; being surrounded by objects which were made in order to be thrown out might astonish him.
As to sex: every generation imagines that they invented it, and every generation is wrong. But if you're thinking of World War Two as part of the vast, undifferentiated Time Before Sex Was Invented, you are extra-wrong with wrong on top and a side order of really, really wrong.. World War Two was, besides everything else it was, an occasion for lots of young (mostly) healthy (mostly) people to get out into the world and meet a whole bunch of interesting strangers. They danced sexily to loud music (I know the Glenn Miller Orchestra doesn't sound that way to us, but imagine all those brass and wind and percussion instruments playing as loud as they could in a ballroom. It was loud.) So they danced in ways that revealed their underwear to the world, and then they had sex. That's why the military produced all those interesting vintage posters warning about the dangers of attractive spies and also VD. That's why the invention of penicillin mattered to the war effort. That's why the Baby Boom. During the war, Americans made funny movies about all the sex people were having - Miracle at Morgan's Creek for instance - and a decade later some of them told Alfred Kinsey all about it.
As Kinsey discovered, some of the sex people were having during the war was with people of the same sex. In fact, Alan Berube mades clear in Coming Out Under Fire that gay men and lesbians in the military faced very little official trouble until after the war was over - at which point they faced terrible discrimination indeed. But Captain America would have been under the ice by that point. The world he left was full of unmarried people having all kinds of sex with relatively few consequences except pregnancy (and yes, birth control existed before the Pill) and venereal disease. So to me, fics depicting Captain America as a prude or a homophobe need to explain how he came to be so out of step with his own time. Or writers who want a prudish Captain America could show him as having gone into the ice in the 1950s - a much more buttoned-down time.
Marriage equality is a new thing in the world, yes, but like all new things it has historical antecedents. Communities of men who prefer sex with other men can be found in the historical record pretty much in any city in the world across the past two centuries at least, and gay liberation was an idea if not a political movement as early as the 1880s in parts of Europe. For Steve Rogers' home town, Brooklyn, fic writers might want to consult George Chauncey's terrific book Gay New York, which includes a brief account of a marriage ceremony - not a legel one, to be sure - between two men in Brooklyn in the 1920s. So while Steve Rogers might find marriage equality surprising, I very much doubt it would be on the top of his list of astonishments.
So, not sex and not computers, then. What would surprise Captain America?
Nick Fury. Nick Fury as played by Samuel Jackson, anyway. Remember that the US military was racially segregated during World War Two (yes I know that Captain America supposedly fought in an integrated unit, but all that tells us is that the guys who wrote the script for that movie know just as much history as the average fangirl, or maybe a little less) and that the biggest argument for maintaining segregation was that white guys could not possibly be led into battle by non-white guys. So to wake up to find Nick Fury as his commanding officer - I'm not saying that Steve Rogers would be upset, necessarily, but he would be very, very surprised.
And, more broadly, racial integration generally would shock him. Steve Rogers did grow up in a place and time where marriage was very strictly regulated: marriage between people of two separate races was illegal almost everywhere in the United States until 1962. I don't know if he grew up with separate drinking fountains and segregated public transportation - but if I were writing fic about Captain America waking up in 2012, I would do some serious googling about segregation in New York City. Did he attend segregated schools? That seems likely.
Maria Hill would probably shock him, too. While women were part of the military during the Second World War, they served in separate, auxiliary branches - and similarly to the segregated units in which non-white Americans served, that was to prevent any woman ever from having military authority over any man. Again, thinking more generally, he would not be surprised at all to see women working, but to see women in professional positions would be something very new to him. Pepper Potts would make sense to him as a secretary, but not as a CEO. He would have seen lots of women nurses, but no women doctors. No women scientists, either, so he would be surprised to meet Jane Foster.
Two other big surprises:
Changes in social class in America. As I already said, the rise of the middle class and all the material cultural surrounding it - suburbs! dixie cups! - was pretty much a post-war phenomenon. So was the collapse of the labor movement. In the neighborhood where Steve Rogers grew up, nearly all employed adult men would have belonged to a union. He didn't have a union, because he was a soldier, but he will be surprised to find that most of the guys working on rebuilding New York after it got Loki'd are not union members. Oh, and before World War Two, very few Americans went to college - he'll be impressed to keep meeting all these educated people.
And finally, geopolitical change. Probably the biggest shock would be that Europe is now united (sort of) and that Germany and France are now closely allied. Slightly less shocking, because anyone who was paying attention could see this looming over the horizon throughout the war, would be the bitter division between the US and Russia (though he might need the whole Cold War explained to him, several times, with emphasis on the bomb. Or should I say, The Bomb.) But also he would be amazed by the end of British imperialism. And the Chinese Revolution! The Iranian revolution! African decolonization and the end of apartheid! The Cuban Revolution! India and Pakistan and
... yeah, anyway, there's a lot for him to catch up on.
But not sex. Really there's not too much new there at all.
ETA: Wow, that's ... a lot ... of comments. I'm glad you're here and will try to respond eventually, but no promises. In the meantime, if you are thinking about commenting here, please read this first. Thank you!
*****
no subject
Date: 2012-06-17 02:20 am (UTC)And that's not even getting into Depression culture shock, going from that level of scarcity to today's supermarkets and so on. I remember my sister telling me she got back from Ghana after an internship and nearly broke down over the 14 million types of bread at the supermarket. My grandmother grew up in the Depression and *still* shows signs of it, and she's had 70 years to adjust. I bet that the homeless presence in New York is significantly different from his experiences, too.
I do want to take a moment and talk about a pet peeve of mine in Steve characterization, which is that just because something is new to him or different than what he knows does *not* mean that he is uncomfortable or a dick about it. He's not going to react in panic to Jarvis; he's going to ask questions. He might make dated assumptions, but he's going to react positively to progress (there's a great scene in Captain America: Man Out of Time where he assumes a woman is a nurse rather than a doctor, and is all "hey, that's awesome!" when she corrects him. ♥). Steve is a curious guy who loaded his suitcase full of books before he went to basic training, an intelligent fighter who has adapted tactics on the fly for fighting both ray guns *and* aliens. While he can be insanely stubborn and opinionated, he has a flexible mind and a good heart.
Anyway. /ranting
no subject
Date: 2012-06-17 04:14 am (UTC)There's some discussion of how New York has and has not changed in the follow-up post to this one - I agreed with you, but
no subject
Date: 2012-06-17 05:09 am (UTC)Thank you! Also, ooh, followup post! I had a few thoughts, which I'll put over there for clarity's sake.
no subject
Date: 2012-06-18 11:28 am (UTC)