Heroic Histrionics

Okay, so in an earlier part of this, I shared a thought about Natasha that she knew as much about the Winter Soldier situation as Steve did.

Today I had another thought.

What if she did tell Tony what she’d learned? Not that Steve was with her, but that Zola had implied Bucky had been the one to do his parents in?

What if Tony internalized the concept but didn’t really believe it and this is what led to Natasha and Tony being closer? What if Tony didn’t really believe it because if it was more than a supposition, if it was possible, then Steve would have said something?

What if that moment of restraint in Civil War was because he hoped that Steve hadn’t been with Natasha after all, and thus couldn’t have confirmed or denied anything?

He was exhausted, emotionally betrayed on multiple levels, his best friend was hurt so there was an edge of sharp guilt to that, and he was clinging, through all this, to the concept that in spite of everything Steve hadn’t lied to his face.

What if he just needed somewhere for all that grief and betrayal to go, and attacking Bucky, while at the forefront because he just watched a video of his mother die when he’d convinced himself that couldn’t be true, was more about Steve than the shock and immediate need for revenge?

After all, he’s more than happy to beat the stuffing out of Steve even if he puts a focus on knocking Bucky down and keeping him there, because yeah, Bucky aims to kill and he’s not stupid enough to want that at his back. He wants him out of the way by the end of the fight so he can focus on Steve. Unfocused rage changing to more calculated, if panicked, intent.

So, what if Natasha said something, and Steve didn’t. That’s kind of even worse, in Tony’s mind, than just Steve failing to share. Because Natasha didn’t gain or lose anything by telling him, and he could never have known. Natasha who has in the past lied to him for his own good, essentially. Natasha who isn’t about honesty or forthright confessions, and yet, she was still more honest with him than Steve.

What if that was part of all of it?

If Bucky had not been standing right in front of Tony when the news hit, that scene would have been okay. He would have had time to process the situation, to breathe it out and to step back and look at it logically. He would have had a chance to stick the blame where it belongs, which is on HYDRA, or the Red Room, or whoever else it might have been that placed the hit on his parents and decided they deserved to die.

Tony is a guy who understands that weapons are not at fault for the destruction they cause. It is their wielders, their creators, who are at fault.

In the movie, he tried.

But Steve.

Steve kicked his wavering balance right over, and he just couldn’t do it. It doesn’t help anything that I, personally, tend to believe Tony is that guy who had a fan crush on Bucky as a kid and admired him as the most impressive Commando.

He wants to believe the best of this man. You see it in how easily he caves to the implication that the worst isn’t true about Bucky. He doesn’t even doubt it the moment he’s given a chance to see the man as something more than the bad situation he’s been operating under.

But this.

This is in his face, and painful, and horrible, and the loss of the last adults that were his as a young man.

Added to that, there was the crumbling of lingering dreams and admiration where Bucky was concerned, with Steve stomping on them from the position of a friend who clearly didn’t trust him… It’s a blow, too much of one for Tony to look at logically because everything just hurts.

It hurts especially because it’s not like Steve didn’t have a chance to tell Tony Bucky was innocent of what started this whole situation after they were brought in… and he didn’t tell him that either. Not that, and not this, and then he tried to lie to his face on top of it.

So basically, this was the culmination of a couple weeks of torment on someone who is still grieving over someone, probably several someones honestly, to say nothing of Tony being fully aware that it’s Steve who was the cause of his best friend being in the shape he’s in now, even if he’s not the one who struck the blow.

And just…

It’s not even really about Bucky, at the end there.

It’s just the most recent thing, the sharpest sensation on top of the broken glass that made up everything that’s happened, and it’s giving him a target to lash out at.

And at that moment, when he finally snaps, that target is probably all he can see.

So what does Tony think about Bucky?

Tony’s opinion hasn’t changed about Bucky. Steve, though. Steve is a whole other animal.

Upon talking to someone about Civil War, and how the whole UN meeting explosion thing would pertain to the timeline we’ve established, I realized some interesting points.

They were already keeping an eye on Bucky.

No, think about it. Sharon had not only the time, but the access to get the files and pass them along to Steve. Even if she was in a hurry, these were comprehensive enough paper files that they needed a folder. It wasn’t just a sheet of paper she wrote some recently discovered address or coordinates on, it was a proper file, with god knows what inside.

This does not say new surveillance.

This says old, ongoing surveillance where they didn’t do anything to bring him in.

Why?

Because They had no proof of Bucky having committed a crime.

No, hold up and take a moment to work with me here. Why else would they wait for something as dramatic as the UN bombing to move? Courtesy?

No.

They had nothing concrete. In fact, I ask everyone to remember that line where Natasha talks about how he’s a ghost story in the intelligence community. About how no one was sure he even existed.

That’s not proof of a crime. That’s not even proof of being in the country the crimes were committed in.

But what about Washington D.C?

While for story purposes I like to play with the idea of him having been caught on film sometimes, I sincerely doubt that that is what happened.

Bucky was highly trained in avoiding cameras, in keeping his detection low and unseen whenever possible. He was made into someone that didn’t leave witnesses that could give concrete evidence of a damn thing, and even at his most obvious, his face was usually hidden.

But the Stark video says otherwise?

I don’t actually think so. I think that was a singular instance rather than a trend. In fact, it might have been intentional.

Can you imagine how useful having something documented like that could be if Bucky acted up and needed to have a reminder of who exactly he was now? It was a prime opportunity and one that wasn’t liable to come up again. There is more than one source that indicates he’d slipped his leash before, so why not use something so emotionally crushing to use to bring him back in line?

With that video, his handlers could go ‘See, that was you. You did that.’ and what could he say about it? Nothing. It would be an excellent, if horrifying measure, to make him less likely to resist and cause hassle all around.

Then why wasn’t it destroyed later?

The same reason the book wasn’t. It was clear that they were intended to be handed down to someone else taking control of Bucky, and got lost in the power shuffle when Russia stopped being the ones in control of the Winter Soldier.

It was, simply put, a filing error, not a repeatable offense.

Zemo could have turned the video in and gotten Bucky arrested that way.

And it would have even probably worked, but it wouldn’t have done what Zemo wanted it to do. It wouldn’t have brought the Avengers to fight, and it wouldn’t have had anywhere near the same impact. Who knows though, maybe that was plan R, after everything else he wanted to try to get them dealt with failed.

We don’t know what the man was willing to take as an acceptable revenge at the end of the day, we only see what he actually ended up going with, because it was the first plan that worked.

Ultimately, my point here is that, before that planted video, which placed Bucky at the scene of the UN bombing, they had nothing.

They just had speculation.

Okay, you lot, I’ve seen a lot of posts, a lot of opinions, and I get it, everyone has things they loved or hated about the movie, and that’s awesome. Everyone has their biases about how the characters should have acted, or did, and feel strongly about said biases.

But I would like to remind people about a few things that they seem to have forgotten about Tony Stark.

Tony Stark is someone who has never been willing to submit to a higher authority of his own if he was aware of it. Him bowing to the Accords does not mean that he feels they are something he would not go against for a cause he felt up to the task. In the movie, he very clearly sneaks around them to help his friend even if that goes kind of shitty. He did not do this flagrantly, and he knows that if he got caught he would face consequences. He’s willing to accept them. He’s, of course, going to avoid getting in trouble, but do you really think if he got caught he would fight his punishment? Probably not.

Tony Stark is not a politician. Tony Stark is not a politician. TONY STARK IS NOT A POLITICIAN. I know somehow you guys have missed this, all of you who seemed to think that his lack of surprise meant that somehow he wrote the god damn Accords his own self, but seriously people. His first words to Steve were that if they accepted it, they could go back and fight it, get it revised. If he was an active participant in the writing of them, guess what. He probably would have stalled the writing of them long enough to get Steve and the others on board to help him. But no, that didn’t happen, because they probably didn’t tell him before they wrote the things, because guess what? Tony Stark is one of the people they’re bringing under the legislature. You tell me how often political persons in charge bring the minorities they’re persecuting to the table when they’re writing about them.

The answer you’re looking for is ‘pretty much never’. And in the culture of the MCU, Superheroes are a minority people. Metahumans are deemed as ‘other’ and this is not unimportant. It’s actually very important.

And then, after that people move on to ‘well Tony wasn’t surprised about the Accords!’ and you know what I say to that? Tony is nosy. Tony probably knew something was up and not what for a while before he finally managed to get word on someone to talk to about events. He knew something was coming, after Ultron he probably always knew something was coming. He wrote a book about his dad and published it to raise funds to make up for the Ultron fiasco. He covered for Bruce and handled the media for the team to keep the world focused on him and not his teammates. These are canon. These are shown in news clips in the extras of other movies. So no, Tony wasn’t surprised.

But you know what also is true? Tony read up on an entire field of study overnight in the Avengers. Do you think he couldn’t read one manuscript, one framed as a legislature based contract? When he was the CEO of a company once upon a time? So yes, he understood it, yes he probably had a day or two more warning to read the thing, but no, that’s all he got. That’s all the movie implies. That’s it.

So seriously people, stop bleeding whatever version of Tony you think you’re seeing all over MCU Tony. He’s not a political mastermind that fucked over the Avengers. He’s a man with problems and guilt that happened to agree with over a hundred countries when they slapped him with a document that demanded he take responsibility for things he already felt he’d done wrong.

I can see Steve’s position, why he didn’t agree, and honestly, I think Tony can too. I think he gets it even if he doesn’t think it’s the smart choice. He’s losing people who can help him rally and make this document something less terrible every time someone refuses to sign. So sure, Steve had a point, in how it was not okay to control them, and as other parts of the MCU world canon show, such as in Agents of SHIELD, basically register metahumans, but Tony was seeing how it could be worse. He was seeing what ended up happening.

He was, ultimately, left in a position with no power for change, no support to make it happen, and a document he didn’t fully agree with but saw as less terrible than what could be. Tony was fighting for a place to work from, and that didn’t work out for him, but that doesn’t mean he was the villainous mastermind behind the Accords, and I’ll thank you all to stop saying he was.

Okay, so the other day my husband was watching the Slingshot miniseries and it touches on registering someone from SHIELD for the Accords. Because of this, I remembered seeing a theory someone had that the series set related to the MCU respect the movies but the reverse isn’t true because of how the Accords are shown to be handled in the various runs.

I can tell you right now, after a short bit of discussion to clear it up in my head, that that is not accurate. Yes, people can have the movies without the various series’ and be perfectly happy and have a complete experience, however, that doesn’t mean that the various series’ actually contradict anything in the movies.

Now, to explain the Accords and why they are, and aren’t, being applied in the various places.

In the Movies, the Accords are put to the Avengers, point blank, no confusion. In SHIELD, they’re shown to be put forward to SHIELDies and similar as something to use, and it’s mentioned that people in other parts of the world will be subject to them too. You never see any of the Defenders crew, however, approached about it.

There’s a reason for this.

The Avengers cross country borders as a matter of course. From the first time Tony took his suit back over to the middle east and went after wrecking his weapons, or when Bruce fled the United States, this has been true. SHIELD was built on the notion of international cooperation and stayed that way as well. I find it very likely that anyone else being chased for registration has a similar international capacity.

Now, people will argue that Danny Rand is international too, in his pursuit of the Hand! Well, yeah, but nobody knows that. Most of the world just thinks he’s a rich guy with delusions of altruism. If the government caught wind of him doing vigilante work outside the United States, they’d probably get on his ass too.

As for people like Daredevil, who have indisputably stayed within the country borders, they’re something different. Luke was in jail for things that happened, but he wasn’t registered. He never went to the Raft or any similar superhuman facility. The Vulture ended up in jail, not in a place for supervillains too.

They were local.

These people have no need for international oversight because they are not international. The Accords don’t apply to these people, and thus the punishments of said Accords, because they’re citizens within a country, acting within the laws (or outside of them as the case may be) of only one country. The people endangered and saved are all citizens on the land of one country.

There’s no point in trying to register all your local vigilantes and superheroes. Get them to work with the law enforcement and get the help of people who are registered, yes, that is highly encouraged, but just registering someone because they’re exceptional?

No.

That isn’t what’s happening here.

What’s happening is a form of licensing and oversight for doing international work. Sort of like signing into a government agency and getting a Passport at the same time. You wouldn’t go to another country without one and expect it to work out in your favor, right?

Same thing, just on a slightly stricter, and more crime proactive, scale.

If that involves anyone involved already with a government agency being registered with a more local register before being sent along to the Accords, well. Police officers have records too, and it’s meant in a similar vein.

I’m not saying the Accords are perfect, by any means, but I am saying that, in the context of the world, both the various series and the movies, that they are consistent and make sense.