#ppl often get mcu steve and bucky the wrong way round;

[amarriageoftrueminds]

Don't mind me, coming in with the MCU salt as usual:

They gave Steve that very vague line about making compromises and the problem is... it's nonsense.

It's not supported by anything we saw Steve do in CATFA (him or any of the Commandos). We never saw Steve in a circumstance where he even could serve a greater purpose with dubious acts. In fact, Steve in is absolutely opposed to compromises (i.e. he will not stay where he is and not go and rescue the 107).

Fury is also making a gross generalisation about what the SSR did during WWII, and about Steve's generation...

But:

A) the SSR is shown as a large-ish organisation of which Steve is only a small part. Outside of one week's basic training he had minimal contact with the SSR, and spent 99% of his time on the Continent, away from them. (We don't even see him personally in radio contact with them.)

If the SSR were doing something shady while he was away, then we didn't see it... and Steve wasn't part of it.

and:

B) Steve was a complete outcast in his own generation, a man ahead of his time, who wasn't like anybody else, so it's nonsense to lump him in with his whole generation as if he's tarred with the some brush. He just isn't! 🤷‍♀️ That's kinda the whole point of him.

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And we never hear exactly what Steve is thinking about when he says that, either?

For all we know, his 'compromise' might be the next person's 'impeccable behaviour.' He could see killing Nazis as a compromise that would make you not sleep so well (as oppose to capturing them alive).

An early draft of this script had Steve awakening from a nightmare wherein the Howlies rebuked him for abandoning them mid-fight, for example.

He could be thinking about not staying in Austria to look for Bucky's body. He could be thinking about putting the Valkyrie in the water with himself still on board, instead of bailing out to continue the fight (in fact... given how this movie ends, those last two seem the most likely!)

So it could be a case of total crossed wires, where Steve doesn't realise that Fury is accusing him of much worse things than he has actually done, and Fury doesn't realise that Steve isn't admitting to that.

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1) The MCU never addresses the fact that Steve will have had contact with two very different kinds of spies.

There's the modern spies like Natasha, Coulson, Sharon, Fury, etc. who are just spooks, habitual inscrutable liars, people who lie to their own colleagues, etc. Political spies, you could call them. These he doesn't have much time for.

But his first experience of spies would've been in WWII, with Allied spies living undercover in Nazi-occupied territories.

We didn't see any of them, because the writers relegated anything non comphet-serving to a silent montage. But they ought to have been there! (The Howling Commando Frenchy was French Resistance, they should've been in contact with him).

So this is an example of a spy as someone incredibly brave under enormous pressure, living in constant danger, who has to lie purely to keep themselves alive, as part of a larger war effort. Lives would be on the line.

I can easily imagine that Steve wouldn't see it as bad to be one of those kinds of spies.

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2) While he struggles to lie to innocent civilians and people he personally knows and respects, he has no problem lying to more powerful people such as Alexander Pierce, when there is something bigger at stake.

(Likewise no problem acting like he's obeying Col. Phillips's orders to his face, when he's actually about to directly disobey him by running off to save the 107. So authority figures? Those, he can lie to!)

This is probably why he was okay with allowing Jasper Sitwell to believe he was about to die, by having Natasha kick him off that roof.

(Yeah, Sam was there to catch him, so the threat wasn't real... but Steve was fine with letting him think it was real -- which is arguably cruel. Pretty Dark.)

Playing the good guy to Nat's bad guy just to convince a Hydra agent to cooperate with them, doing nothing to stop her when doing nothing is supposed to be anathema to him... but for a very good cause. Arguably a bit OOC because the writers wanted a cool edgy moment. 🙄

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But fyi Fury's actions are extremely reactionary -- because that has come to mean "extreme conservatism or rightism in politics; opposing political or social change" -- a lynchpin of authoritarianism.

Believing it's okay to profile people and punish the innocent just for holding inconvenient views is what Hydra and Project Insight are all about.

Steve is the anti-reactionary one, because he supports preventing authoritarianism, and dismantling the status quo as embodied by SHIELD... while Fury wants to save it, and has to be talked out of that.

Given that Steve's conversation about his own dark side in AOU is with Tony, whom he ends up fighting to protect Bucky in the next movie, I think the quickest route to a believable dark!Steve in fic is basically: Fuck around with Bucky and find out.

The MCU certainly wants you to see 'defending Bucky' as selfish and part of Steve's dark side, even though Bucky is an innocent and it's the right thing to do. Selfless, by definition, not selfish at all!

However...

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3) When millions of lives were at stake in CATWS, Steve was willing to choke Bucky unconscious and pull his arm out of its socket to stop him interfering.

He begged Bucky not to have to... but nevertheless he did do it.

This is the same guy who, when he thought Nat might be on the wrong side of the fight with Hydra, was willing to slam her against a wall to get the truth out of her. He does not fuck around.

Then in CACW Steve is willing, albeit reluctantly, to slip away and leave his friends behind to continue the fight (on Sam's suggestion) ...because it's a lesser of two evils, if he and Bucky are going to go and combat the much greater evil of five loose Winter Soldiers under Zemo's control.

And back in Avengers 1, when Tony had put the nuke through the wormhole but had not yet returned, Steve was willing to make the hard call and close it with Tony on the other side. It was only pure luck (or bad luck, depending on who you ask!) that Tony fell through in time.

In A1 he describes Coulson's murder by Loki as losing a soldier, a result of decisions higher-ups have made for which they might feel guilty, which is why he tries to console Tony about it.

(Likewise, Wanda about the dead in Lagos. Likewise, Nat and her guilt about serving SHIELDra. If Steve had been there, after Rhodey's injury, no doubt he would've been the one telling Sam and Vision that they're not at fault.)

So there is some darkness in canon Steve. But it's more about being willing to make the very difficult decisions (completely necessary as a leader) to put those close to him at risk, for the sake of saving millions/billions of lives.

Of course he also puts himself at risk, alongside them, so he's often being as simultaneously self-sacrificing as not -- and, unlike some, he does put the responsibility for what happens on his shoulders as CO, not theirs. For the purpose of doing the right thing, Steve is capable of leading others 'into the jaws of death,' even if it destroys him too.

tl;dr: IMO he does have a dark side but it's not what people think it is.

A Steve meta(?) from user cloudbells? More likely than you think.

One thing I struggled with when wanting darker plots was Steve's place in them. I always wanted to put him in a dubious, spy-like role where he'd have to set aside some moral hang-ups in favor of being a part of an objectively greater good that, in time, would save everyone.

At first, I thought that it just didn't fit him - that nothing in canon pointed to him being able to accept something like that. I mean, the whole "we don't trade lives" thing is just one of a few instances that seem to prove he leans towards immovable. But there is one line (among other actions we see but I'm using this line as an example) that gives me wiggle room.

In CATWS, when Steve is talking to Fury, he says that sometimes they compromised during the war. Just that one line, and I'm taking it because here's how I see it.

1) If something is catastrophic or horrific enough, then Steve is going to do "whatever it takes" to fix that. It will hurt his heart to have any complicity as a spy, but if that's the path to safety, then he's taking it.

2) Steve isn't fucking stupid. He has the foresight to discern when something could go horrifically bad and when to fight against it. I don't think he's entirely against "the ends justify the means" to an extent. The reason why he may be more at odds with Fury is because there are other paths to ensure safety and a lot of Fury's actions are preventative rather than reactionary to what is already coming.

3) Steve isn't stubborn enough to put his own ethical objections above the welfare of everyone else. That would seem selfish to him, I think. Yes, the guilt might eat him up, but the cause is more important, so unless it's truly not worth it, he's joining in. Some people might say "But user cloudbells! What about in CW when he threw everything away and defied countries just to defend Bucky and get what he wanted?" And to that I say, "Re-watch the movie, study Steve's character, read what was in the Accords that Steve read himself, critically think about his motives, and then come back to me".

With all this being said, I do think it would have to be a guaranteed....make or break event for Steve to play the long game knowing he's going to have to be complicit in or compartmentalize unsavory acts. Also I want to slip in that this is about MCU Steve. We know how 616 Steve fairs when he has to engage in more...shadow work than normal. But 616 Steve also seems more emotionally free or expressive than MCU Steve. Most Steve variants are better off emotionally than MCU Steve lol.