steve-rogers-my-beloved

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

Thiiiiiis. Not only is the "Steve took away her choice" narrative insulting to Steve (as if he just barged into her house with no explanation and demanded she marry him, totally sounds like Steve 🙄) it's insulting to Peggy. Like she didn't ask a million questions about where he'd been, how he came back, what had happened to him. Like he didn't tell her everything she needed to make an informed decision. He chose her and she chose him. Neither of them would accept anything less.

“Steve going back to the past erases Peggy’s autonomy/choice/life.” Or, it gives Peggy another option where she can choose to live a life with the person she loved who literally came back from the dead?!? Like I’m sorry Peggy Carter will never do anything she doesn’t want because of a man, and Steve would always support her and her decision. She chose to be with Steve.

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

"A bitch he kissed once". 80k likes.

I remember when Peggy was a beloved character in the Stucky fandom. When she was often portrayed in fanfic (and other media) as Steve's awesome, kickass, supportive friend (or ex). Back when the fandom didn't consider her a threat to Stucky because she was old and eventually dead. Back when Steve was allowed to have loved her.

And then she turned out to be a threat to Stucky after all, and suddenly she's a nazi. An abuser. A bitch he kissed once.

Misogyny in fandom spaces (specifically mm ship fandoms) is as rampant as ever, and the Stucky/Bucky/Sam fandom is no exception.

I don't ship Steggy that much, but I am happy they got a happy ending together. Even more so when I see posts like that one.

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

if i hear one more person say that steve "abandoned" bucky as if he were a helpless child, i'm going to smack someone.

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

Sometimes I still can't believe the most popular Steve opinion in the MCU fandom is "he should have died". It's real depressing.

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

So I just got a video on my fyp about how Sam was a much better friend to Bucky than Steve ever was... And I just have to wonder which movies Bucky stans watched because I don't think I saw the same ones...

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

insp [x]

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

Unpopular opinion ahead, but as someone who loves Stucky, I never got the point of being upset about Steve's ending as it relates to Bucky, if I'm being honest. Yes, in a perfect world Steve would probably not leave Bucky, but from a production perspective they were going to have to leave each other one way or another. No matter what Steve's ending was, he and Bucky were going to be separated somehow because Chris Evans was leaving and Sebastian Stan was staying. You can't divorce the real-life circumstances of the actors from how that ending shaped up. Bucky was going to keep appearing in the MCU and Steve was going to disappear forever. There was no way those characters were going to be in each other's lives in any significant capacity, because there wouldn't be a good canon way to explain it. What, we'd see Bucky's continued journey in the MCU while Steve was just kind of hanging around off-screen to be mentioned now and again but never be present in Bucky's life or story? That would just be bad writing, and I don't know why that would be any better for their relationship than what we got. And honestly it would be a pretty shitty ending for Steve - to sort of peter out of the canon into an unknown, unspecified fate that can't be explained or explored on-screen. He deserved an actual ending.

That doesn't mean that I liked the ending he got, from a storytelling perspective - it wasn't a very good way to end his journey and I dislike time travel fix-it just in general. But as it pertains to Bucky specifically? I don't think it matters. Even if Steve had stayed in the present, he and Bucky would still have been separated somehow.

Also, I don't think it "ruined Steve's character", which I unfortunately see people say all the time. I'm not going to let a less-than-perfect ending that only came about because the writers backed themselves into a corner ruin the 10 years that came before it. I love Steve, and his last 10 minutes of screen-time is never going to change that.

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

People who think that Steve's motivation in Captain America: Civil War was about Bucky so fundamentally misunderstand Steve Rogers as a character that I have to wonder if we actually watched the same movie.

Steve's opposition to the Accords had nothing to do with Bucky. Full stop. Even if Bucky didn't exist, CA:CW would still have played out the exact same way (except the fight with Tony at the end, obviously). Sooner or later, Steve would have run into a situation where he felt compelled to act, but doing so would go against the Accords. In CA:CW, that situation happened to be the kill order on Bucky, but it could have been a totally different situation and the result would still have been the same. Steve would have chosen to act, knowing it went against the Accords, and he would have found himself on the opposite side of the law. Even the ones who actually signed the Accords, i.e team Iron Man, found themselves in that situation eventually:

Natasha chose to go against orders and let Steve and Bucky get away after the airport fight so they could stop the other winter soldiers.

Tony chose to go against Ross's direct orders and went to help Steve in Siberia.

Vision went on the run with Wanda and helped her avoid arrest.

Rhodey went against Ross's direct orders and chose to help Cap and the rest in Infinity War instead of arresting them.

All of them found themselves in situations where they chose to act in violation of the Accords, because to not do so would be morally wrong. Which was Steve's entire point. Legality isn't the same as morality and putting their powers in the hands of political agendas would inevitably cause the Avengers to either have to fight someone who didn't deserve to be fought, or to be kept from fighting someone who should have been stopped. As shown in the examples above.

So Bucky was totally irrelevant to Steve's decision regarding the Accords. Bucky or no Bucky, Steve would have refused to sign, found himself in a situation where he felt morally compelled to act, and ended up with an arrest warrant on his ass. Which, presumably, Tony would have tried to carry out. And boom, the general plot of the movie happens anyway. That's what the civil war was about, not Steve's relationship with Bucky. The fact that it was Bucky's situation that was the catalyst, instead of some other thing, was coincidental (or, rather, it was because it's a Cap movie and personal stakes as a secondary/parallel plot is more narratively compelling).

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

That little guy from Brooklyn, who was too dumb not to run away from a fight? We’re all following him.

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

i keep trying to find the words to talk about Captain America as a disabled person

because like. the climax of the first act of his movie is his disabled body getting erased, freeing him to do hero things, and we all know about how problematic that is, and if he was a new superhero and not literally made up in the early 40s it would be offensive. (as it is i'm really glad the movie played up a bunch of serious physical impairments instead of going with the halfhearted 'weak and small' take.)

but the thing is Steve remains a disabled man in an abled body.

in the terms Erskine valued him for--not a perfect soldier but a good man, someone who did not lose sight of the value of his own strength, and the value of other people in spite of their not having it--but in other ways, too.

emotional ways. tactical ways--he adapts instantly to being overpowered and outnumbered and works with and around it, in a way Thor and Tony can't because having had educational field trips into helplessness and relative lack of social privilege doesn't teach you not to be shocked by it the way living with it your whole life does.

steve doesn't stop being the man who spent his whole life fighting against being defined by the things he couldn't do. he doesn't stop being someone who expected to die young and wanted more than anything to make the time he did get worthwhile.

he doesn't stop being the person who needed these things because he lived in a world that told him he was worthless.

eugenics was incredibly normalized in America in Steve's day. Americans developed a lot of the theory the Nazis went on to apply. Steve Rogers is someone who grew up hungry, being told he was one of God's mistakes and should die without further polluting the gene pool.

His life did not stop being a fuck you to that ideology the second he got a non-disabled body and stopped being an obvious target.

because that was where the Nazis started, remember? their first mass cullings. they got the disabled concentrated in big hospital institutions, and then started killing them off. because those were the easiest and most obvious targets of their worldview.

steve was already in one of the groups the Nazis wanted to exterminate. this gets much less attention than queer readings, for plenty of reasons including that disability doesn't come with built-in romance plots and that he got made un-disabled by the story, but within canon it was already personal.

he wasn't motivated by self-preservation because lol it's steve, but he wasn't opposed to Nazi Germany as a simple moral ally of its victims, either. he was one of the people fascists wanted to destroy. he knew their kind from the ground. and i think that matters in a way we as a fandom tend to undervalue.

steve doesn't identify as part of a disabled community cuz that wasn't really a thing, and he has a lot of internalized ableism, and neither of those things stop me from relating to him as a disabled protagonist.

at a fundamental level he's always going to be that furious little gremlin showing the world his teeth and demanding it answer for the fact that it contained so much injustice.

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

#battle priorities

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

Steve Rogers + Smiling

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

steve packed BOOKS to go to WAR he is so fucking lame i love him so bad

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

I'm sorry, Nat. I can't sign it. I know. Then what are you doing here? I didn't want you to be alone.

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

Even after everything that happened between them, this is how Steve spoke about Tony:

And this is how Tony spoke about (and to) Steve:

After Ultron, after the Accords, after the fight in Siberia, after years of radio silence, Steve still called Tony earth's best defender. He still respected Tony and tried to do right by him.

And what did Tony do? Got in Steve's face and blamed him for everything. And Steve just stood there and took it.

I will never get over it. Steve deserved so much better.

[steve-rogers-my-beloved]

that goddamn gray t-shirt