Relationship Spotlight: Capt. Steve Rogers & Tony Stark (The Avengers)

For better and worse (and they’ve had their share of both,) Tony and Steve have one of the most significant relationships among the Avengers.  Both are strong-minded and have very different ideas about how to do right, and those ideas can clash in tremendous ways.  However, the Avengers is always at its best when the two of them are using their talents in concert in one another, not in opposition (some Tony-Cap-related spoilers.)

On the face of it, nearly everything about where these guys come from is completely different.  Even if you ignore the fact that Cap is out of his own time by about 70 years, there’s little in the way of common ground.  Tony is the son of a technological genius who inherited his father’s brilliance and wildly-successful company, and before becoming Iron Man, he made himself even richer by designing/selling bigger and better weapons of war.  He spent many years thinking mainly about himself:  his own whims, his own inventiveness, his own gratification.  Becoming Iron Man has been a transformative experience for him, and his worldview has shifted dramatically from focusing on self-interest to focusing on the good of others, although his ego is still a force to be reckoned with and he’s very much of the opinion that his way to protect the world is the right way.  Meanwhile, Steve grew up in a working-class family and found himself constantly fighting losing battles against those bigger (but never scrappier) than him.  When the world went to war, he was desperate to do his part and help, lying on enlistment forms in his efforts to get in.  It was his heart that earned him the chance to try an experimental super-soldier serum, which gave him superhuman abilities and made him Captain America.  Beginning with the war and continuing to the present day, Cap has continually strived to do what’s right, always wanting to look out for the little guys and stop bullies who push them around.  He’s a natural leader, a self-sacrificing hero, and a man with a strong moral compass.

In The Avengers, it doesn’t take long for Steve and Tony to clash.  The corrupting influence of Loki’s scepter plays a big role in the harshest words they exchange (Tony doesn’t give a rat’s ass about his fellow comrades, Steve’s only assets are what the serum gave him, etc.), but the seeds of conflict are there even earlier.  They disagree about tactics, which is emblematic of a lot of the issues between them throughout the franchise.  Tony tends to be act-first-think-later, without too many qualms about what he’s doing when he does it, and although Steve can be just as impulsive, the combination of their personalities can lead to combustion.  When Steve gets on Tony to think about how his decisions effect his teammates, Tony sometimes sees it as a pissing contest and feels the need to throw his weight around, going his own way to prove that he can.  (From my view, Tony is usually the one who comes out looking worse here, but it’s hard when Cap is the other guy – it’s not too often that someone solidly gets the moral high ground on him.  And considering how much growth Tony has gone through over the years, he has a lot of baggage to push through when it comes to his actions, whereas that sort of behavior comes much more naturally to Cap.)

We see the biggest throw-down between them, of course, in Civil War, where they unofficially lead the two different sides where the Accords are concerned.  It’s undeniably brutal, and it’s clearly going to take some serious world-threatening calamity to get them back together, but what I like about their conflict here is how evidently neither man wants it to go as far as it does.  Although they’re no strangers to getting under one another’s skin, both men have learned to respect the other greatly, and it’s almost painful for them to see the other going against them so thoroughly.  Tony pleads with Cap to just see reason, to play ball, to back off while they figure out what’s what, and Cap begs Tony to understand the dangerous path he’s starting down.  At every turn, each tries to pull the other back down, but determination is one quality they definitely have in common, and try as they might, neither can get the other to budge until they see everything they’ve spent the last several years fighting towards come crashing down.  I know there’s gonna be all kinds of characters and craziness going on in Infinity War, but they’re going to have to devote some time to these two and how they end up on the same side again.

Relationship Spotlight: Sam Wilson & Capt. Steve Rogers (The Avengers)

Yes, I know Sam is military, too, but I’m not sure what his rank is, so he doesn’t get a title (sorry, Sam!)  I’m also aware that this is about the 4,000^th Relationship Spotlight I’ve done on a Marvel hero and their nonpowered close friend.  Really, though, as long as the MCU keeps giving them to me, I’m going to keep loving them.

Cap and Sam have their friendship version of a meet-cute in The Winter Soldier, where both guys are out on the National Mall for an early-morning run and Steve laps Sam repeatedly, much to Sam’s chagrin.  It’s a funny bit, with Steve just doing his thing and Sam reaching increasing levels of “come on!” as Steve keeps passing him.  Immediately afterwards, though, they introduce themselves and start discussing their respective military experiences.  Sam is quick to pick up on Steve’s struggles readjusting to the world after being on ice, and he invites Steve to stop by the VA hospital where he works.  His ostensible reasons are 1) everyone there would love to see Steve, and 2) it would score Sam major points, but a more serious reason is unspoken but evident:  it can be hard coming home, and everyone deserves some help on that front.

I really like this aspect of their friendship.  At this point in the franchise, Steve is feeling pretty isolated.  Virtually everyone from his time is dead or dying, and he’s having difficulty connecting with people because they can’t relate to his experiences.  Now, Sam is from a different time and fought in a different war.  He was never given superpowers, and he was certainly never frozen for 70 years.  But on an emotional, psychological level, war is much the same no matter what the era, and there, at least, Sam can understand some of what Steve’s going through.  It’s good for Steve to have a friend who doesn’t necessarily expect him to be okay, someone who offers support and a friendly ear.

On Steve’s side, I like that he meets Sam, finds him to be a standup guy, befriends him, and approaches him as an ally all in a very short span of time.  Someone as famous as Steve is bound to have short encounters with strangers all the time, and I’m guessing Sam doesn’t expect him to actually drop by the VA, but that’s just what Steve does.  It’s a nice demonstration both of Steve’s judge of character and of the way he shows people his estimation of them.  Later in the movie, when Steve and Natasha are on the run and there’s seemingly no one to trust, Steve turns to Sam, sure that he can be relied on.

With Steve and Sam, the military dynamic is definitely there, and although Sam has no official Avenger affiliation until Age of Ultron and thus isn’t beholden to Steve in any formal way, he still approaches Steve as both a friend and a commanding officer.  When they undertake something together, Sam gives his input, but usually in more of a “this is what I think, but I’m with you either way” sense.  He frequently defers to Steve and is incredibly loyal to him, risking physical injury as well as incarceration on Steve’s behalf (anyone who complains that Cap is a perfect boy scout should wonder why he’s so often on the wrong side of authority.)  Steve doesn’t ask for this and in fact repeatedly checks in with Sam and offers him outs when Steve is planning a big move; Steve takes on a lot of responsibility for the welfare of the people who follow him and never wants them doing anything they’re not comfortable with.  However, the fact that Sam is so all in with Steve, despite Steve’s tendency to get them both into trouble, is a testament to Steve’s power as a leader.  Following him isn’t easy, but those who do never regret it.

Relationship Spotlight: Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanoff (The Avengers)

Hands down, my favorite friendship among the main Avengers.  I was excited to see Natasha in The Winter Soldier just because I love Black Widow so much, but I came away really liking the great relationship between her and Cap.  Although Natasha is a little too shunted into her plot with Bruce in Age of Ultron for there to be much Natasha-Steve, the duo resurfaces in Civil War and makes up for it nicely (some spoilers, including Civil War.)

The Avengers is very much a “throw different characters together and see what sticks” sort of movie, still figuring out where the best dynamics are, and it’s pretty light on the Cap-Natasha front.  At a time when Steve is still feeling like a misplaced museum piece, she’s casual with him, not viewing him as a relic of SHIELD history but not skirting around his past, either.  The scene in which she tells him about Coulson’s Captain America trading cards in fun, and they do some good work together at the street level during the final battle.

It’s not until The Winter Soldier that we really see their relationship.  At this point, they’ve been working alongside one another at SHIELD for a while, and they’ve gotten to know each other well enough that they joke around and play well off of each other on missions.  Steve, having trouble with the transition from soldier to agent, struggles a bit with Natasha’s spy sensibilities – he doesn’t like her having undeclared agendas, and he sometimes feels he can’t get a read on who she actually is beneath all her assorted covers.  However, when everything hits the fan at SHIELD and there’s no one to trust, Steve (somewhat reluctantly) lets Natasha in on what Fury’s shared with him, and they set off together to uncover the dark truth at the center of SHIELD.

Oh yeah, and they’re awesome.  Since Steve’s new to the spy game, Natasha’s skillset comes in handy for sneaking around and acquiring intel while they’re being hunted by shady people.  She helps Steve blend in/adopt covers, and she traces an important location they need.  When it comes to combat, they work seamlessly together, each lending the other an assist when needed but completely trusting that the other can handle themselves.  It’s an excellent equal-footing partnership, because even though the serum gives Cap abilities that Natasha doesn’t have, she knows how to do plenty of things that he can’t.  All in all, not a pair you want to mess with.

It’s also during this on-the-run team-up that each learns to understand the other so much better.  In between avoiding capture and learning shocking secrets, they talk about their lives and histories, the similarities and differences between the paths they’ve taken.  Steve admits his discomfort with the idea of deep-cover missions like Natasha has done, and despite her matter-of-factness about it on the surface, it troubles her not to know if he really trusts her, and she admits as much to him.  For his part, Steve confesses that he might have answered that question differently in the past, but due to what he’s seen on the mission, he’s absolutely confident that she has his back.  This is the relationship we see, albeit briefly, in Civil War.  Cap and Natasha are two of the few people that remain pretty cordial to each other throughout the film.  Though she signs the Accords and he doesn’t, each understands why the other makes the decision they do, and when the chips are really down, Natasha listens to what Steve has to say and helps him out.  Finally, in the midst of everything going down, I love that she takes the time to fly to London for Peggy’s funeral, just because she knows what a hard time it is for Steve and doesn’t want him to be alone.  Now that’s friendship.

Relationship Spotlight: Capt. Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes (The Avengers)

Possibly my favorite of Marvel’s numerous incredible friendships, which include the likes of Jessica and Trish from Jessica Jones, Matt and Foggy from Daredevil, and Peggy and Jarvis from Agent Carter (man, the TV shows are just on fire!)  This one is undoubtedly the most intense – it’s not for nothing that they have so many shippers – and it’s one that I come back to time and again (spoilers for all the Captain America movies.)

In the first Captain America, Steve and Bucky’s relationship has a somewhat similar dynamic to Matt and Foggy, in that Bucky starts the film as the “stronger” one, the friend who looks out for the more vulnerable Steve and worries about his well-being but doesn’t patronize him, but that dynamic shifts when Bucky realizes Steve has been made into a superhero (although, in Foggy’s case, Matt is already Daredevil at the start of the series – Foggy just doesn’t know about it yet.)  It kills Steve that Bucky goes off to war without him, both because Steve wants to join up himself and because he knows the danger Bucky will be in.  When the initial results of the supersoldier program aren’t what Steve hoped for, learning that Bucky may have been captured is the push he needs to step up and be the hero he was made to be, dropping his war-bond shilling and mounting an unauthorized rescue operation.  It’s when Bucky is broken out of his Hydra prison that he learns about Steve being Captain America.

What I really love about this is that there’s not even a hint of Bucky being jealous or wrongfooted about this.  Having been used to being the alpha male in the friendship – particularly in the ‘40s – it would have been easy for him to feel displaced and struggle to figure out where he fits now that Steve doesn’t need Bucky looking out for him, but we don’t get that at all.  After a groggy “Were you always this tall?” reaction upon first seeing Steve, Bucky immediately gets behind the new Steve, working alongside him to escape the Hydra facility and leading the cheers for Cap when everyone gets to safety.  When he joins Steve’s Howling Commandos, he makes it clear that he’s following, not the famous Captain America, but “the little guy from Brooklyn,” his lifelong best friend.

No wonder it completely wrecks Cap when he sees what’s become of Bucky in The Winter Soldier.  Here’s his best friend, who most likely would have been dead by now even if he hadn’t seemingly been killed in the war, and he’s been twisted and abused, fashioned into a weapon for the enemy.  Shock, relief, and elation that Bucky is still alive, still in the world, one of Steve’s final tethers to his old life, but visceral horror at how he’s been victimized.  How his mind has been ravaged and he doesn’t even know himself, let alone Steve.  How Steve’s other friends tell him that Bucky is too far gone, and the only option is to put him down before he kills them.

But of course, this is Steve and Bucky we’re talking about here, and Steve’s unconquerable faith in his friend is able to break through Bucky’s programming enough for him to gain a foothold, to painfully start figuring out who he is and what’s happened to him.  Their friendship makes Steve stand beside Bucky when the entire world sees him as a monster and a terrorist, it makes Steve risk everything to keep Bucky safe from those who would kill him for the crimes his hands were forced to commit, and it brings Steve to blows with his other closest friends, all in the name of giving Bucky the chance to be his own person once more.  They don’t make many like these two these days.

Favorite Characters: Capt. Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America (The Avengers)

Seriously, how much does Cap rule?  The greatest strength of The Avengers franchise is its richly varied cast of characters – there’s so much to love about all of them, and the highest Avengers in my estimation are often the ones who I watched most recently.  But despite all that excellence, I think Cap might be my favorite of them all (some Cap-related spoilers.)

Steve Rogers, the asthmatic weakling who lied on enlistment form after enlistment form, desperate to do whatever it took to join the fight against the Nazis.  One military scientist looked at him and saw, not a shrimp, but a brave man with a good heart – a man who would always understand the value of strength because he knew how it felt to be weak.  One super-soldier serum later, he was Captain America.

I really love the idea that it had to be Steve, because more so than being strong, Captain America had to be good.  The serum amplifies everything about a person – physically, of course, but more than that.  If that person is cruel or self-serving or reckless, the serum makes them more of that than they were, and Dr. Erskine gets that so much power has to be in the hands of someone who won’t abuse it.  That’s why, even as Steve struggles in his initial training, he continually proves why he’s the one for the job.  Whether he’s risking his life for others or using his smarts to make up for his physical shortcomings, everything he does shows that he’s the right choice.  Tony, shortly after meeting Cap, calls him a “lab rat” and declares that “everything special about [him] came out of a bottle,” but he completely misses the point.  It’s not until he really gets to know him that Tony understands why the world needs Cap.

Some find this to be dull, feel that Cap is a boy scout who’s always right and never forgets to floss.  Next to “grittier” heroes like Tony or Black Widow, Cap might come across as flatter, less complicated.  Not to me, though.  I see Cap struggle plenty – even though his moral compass is in good working order and he doesn’t generally hesitate to do the right thing, it’s still tough to do it.  Frequently, what Cap feels is his responsibility doesn’t mesh with the orders he’s given, and for a soldier, that can be a problem.  Both of his solo films feature him veering off and doing his own thing, with varying levels of pushback (and Civil War obviously looks like it’s going to continue that trend.)  Besides, good doesn’t have to equal boring.  Not that I don’t enjoy grayer characters, because I do (all my love to Black Widow,) but “good” characters can be just as engaging.  Sadly, in the midst of the current antihero craze, it seems there’s not much interest in putting forth the effort to make them so.

One of the things that impresses me most about Cap is his incredible resilience.  He has had a rough time of it.  He lost friends in the war, and he lost his entire world when he got trapped in the ice and woke up in the 21^st century.  Now, he’s in an unfamiliar time where so much is unknown to him and the woman he loved is slipping away under dementia.  He’s seen his best friend suffer horrific mental violations and been forced to fight him, endeavoring all the while to remind him who he really is.  And in the face of all that, Cap just keeps going.  He fights, he reaches out, he honors the past, he makes new friends/allies, and he dutifully chips away at all the history and pop culture he missed.  He doesn’t give up or turn bitter.  He doesn’t insist that the world owes him a break.  He takes all that pain and sublimates it into something good.  Now, that’s a hero I want to follow.

Relationship Spotlight: Steve Rogers a.k.a. Captain America & Peggy Carter (The Avengers)

Strictly speaking, this relationship generally stays in the specific context of the Captain America films and their satellites, but I figured I might as well follow my precedent of lumping all my Marvelverse write-ups, save the individual movie reviews, under the Avengers heading.  This relationship is my favorite romantic pairing in the franchise by a landslide, and it’s high time I geeked out about them a bit.  (Some Captain America spoilers.)

Maybe it’s a little odd to place Cap/Peggy so high, since they really only have one movie together and theirs is more of a will-they-won’t-they turned into a what-might-have-been.  By the end of the first Captain America film, they’ve been utterly separated by time, and they haven’t even had an official date.  (Their last scene in that movie is devastating, oh my goodness.)  So yeah, maybe they’re affecting or significant as a wistful would-be romance, but my favorite?  Really?

Really.  And honestly, a huge part of that is the simple fact that Cap and Peggy are both just so awesome as characters in their own right.  Cap is a runt who was transformed into a golden boy, and even though he packs a hefty punch, he remembers how it felt to be powerless.  As such, his strength is never used for cruelty, and he keeps an ever-present eye on his moral compass.  Peggy, meanwhile, is a cool-as-a-cucumber badass who rises to an important position in an age when her field is considered a definite men’s realm.  She shuts down all the haters in the best way possible:  by proving herself, time and again, to be tough, intelligent, and capable.  Both are strong, both are sensitive, and both strive endlessly to do what’s right.  I mean, come on!

It goes without saying that, when put together, they’re pretty sensational.  From their first conversation, although Steve is sweetly awkward around Peggy (chalked up equally to her hardcore amazingness, his attraction to her, and his inexperience with women,) he in no way treats her as being any less competent due to her gender.  Throughout their time together, if he ever pulls the old, “No, you stay here – I’ll handle this,” it’s not because he doubts her abilities or thinks the fight is no place for a woman.  Rather, it’s just Cap being Cap, wanting to take all the risk on himself because a) he knows the serum gives him an added advantage, and b) his V-for-Victory eagerness do his part sometimes forgets that others wish to do the same.  More often than not, all Peggy has to do is make it clear that she wants to contribute, and then they can go forward as a team.  It’s more than a little heartbreaking to see all the sexism and dismissiveness Peggy has to put up with on Agent Carter, especially since, in Steve, she had someone who always valued her as a person.  In turn, Peggy treats Cap as more than a walking lab experiment.  She respects his integrity and his tactical instincts, and she recognizes that, super-soldier or not, he’s also human and sometimes needs help, comfort, or to be cut a little slack. 

I think both of them see themselves in the other.  Both are well-acquainted with being denied the opportunity to show what they’re capable of, and when they meet, it’s no surprise that each empathizes so easily with the other.  Such compatible, complementary pairings don’t come along nearly often enough.  Let’s take a moment of silence for all that this one could have been; these two would’ve been unstoppable together.