Spoilers The Falcon and Winter Soldier discussion

That wasn't the GRC, that was the Power Broker/Sharon.

Yes. So was Lamar.

 

Had they been shot while taking the food, you may have a point. Karli blew the place up after they had got what they needed, there was no threat to eliminate at that point, it wasn't even in the heat of battle.

There's no black and white. There's noone here that's unequivocally good or bad. Flag Smashers have legitimate reasons for their goals, and reasons to do what they do (would you steal a loaf of bread if your sisters child was close to death and you were starving?). So do the GRC and world governments.

 

New countries? There's no evidence of that.

 

And still I don't understand why everyone looks so surprised when she killed Battlestar, while they were fighting to the death.

 

20 Million refugees. (I googled for that number.)

The Borders are being put back to where they were.

So you're saying that every country in the real world that exists right now, fundamentally changed shape, but still exists in the MCU after the Blip?

By country, I should specify that I mean a "government" is bankrupt and there are zero social services, including the army. If you're not going to pay your army, you're not going to be much of a dictator. So some old man insisting that he is in Turkey as German Tanks roll towards him, better think up a great argument, for those tank s not to move their flag to Ankara, if they are going to spend billions on peace keeping and relief. Actually I see modern Germans as the good guys. They over corrected, but come on, if a country is disestablished, it's fair game.

So what if dozens of countires and their currency fell apart in the weeks after the blip... That's tens of millions of hungry refugees looking for shelter and food, and maybe Spain has a population of 40.

If Spain has a population of 40, and no modern army, Russia is just going to swoop in and rename the place Russia east.

If the GRC needs land to house refugees... And there's North Korea just sitting there with no government, why not bring order? Send in a million Hungarians, and after a month, they've built New Budapest, who completely ignore the lapsed North Korean civil code.

And that's a new country.

 

I didn't say they were innocent, I said they were at her mercy. She tied them up and then blew up the building they were in for no other reason than to execute her prisoners, deliberately and with premeditation, in the most spectacular way possible. She was entirely done Robin-Hooding those supplies and nothing was stopping her from leaving. Karli took Mama Donya's death as a malicious, personal attack by the GRC and wanted to respond in kind to the perceived murder of her loved-one.

And it's giving an uninformed child a lot of the benefit of the doubt to assume those supplies weren't stockpiled for a reason, and that someone else isn't going to go hungry because she decided that her righteous anger and bloodstream full of Nazi drugs made her the only person with the moral clarity to decide who gets help when.

It looked pretty government-backed when the Army was paying for Steve's equipment, personnel, drugs, and Vita-Rays in World War II. And saying both "they have no legal authority" and "they did it because they could" is a contradiction. Either the Government can legally assign someone to the position of "America, Captain" or they can't.

Hm. Your description of Walker as being delusional when he blamed the man he killed for Lamar's death rings a bell. I could've sworn someone else described that exact behavior with that exact word in this thread, possibly in the quote directly above that line.

Anywho, again, the fight was over, Walker had subdued the Flag Smasher, and nothing was stopping him from binding his hands and hauling him in by the book except his own rage. In my view. In your view, by abetting Karli's theft of needed medicines and supplies, he was what the military calls "collateral damage," so long as we just quietly ignore that he was killed after the fighting was over in retribution for the actions of an associate and nothing he personally was culpable for.

Yes, Karli was just like like the American frontiersmen who bravely massacred native villages once they realized the people whose homes they'd stolen weren't actually dead and wanted to live their own lives. They were promised free land and opportunity in a magical place that they were told had no people in it, and by hook or by crook, they were going to make that true.

Walker was ordered to put on a monkey suit and take down an international larceny ring that was founded on the principle that three and a half billion people deserved to be dead because it had been more convenient for them that way, and attempted to do so to the best of his limited ability. He wasn't joy-riding around hanging out with his buddy doing spec-work for the Air Force because he was bored, like some superheroes I could name. It's totally misreading the situation to paint Walker as being vainglorious, sadistic, or narcissistic. He had enough actual flaws without inventing new ones.

Likewise, Karli was obviously motivated by anger that Thanos's great work was undone, and wanted to undo that undoing, and didn't particularly care how or why, so long as the returnees who were ruining her life stopped doing so. Maybe they should be the ones in the camps being shipped off to their ancestral homes. Maybe they should be at the back of the line for jobs and food (which, in some cases, they were, as we saw when Sam tried to apply for a small business loan and was told that having been dead was not an acceptable excuse for his lack of employment history). Maybe she just didn't care what happened to the rest of the world as long as she and her friends were fine.

You're making the mistake of letting yourself be fooled by trappings and slogans. Scratch the surface, and it turns out Karli is fighting for the most entrenched, conservative point of view, the people who are at the top now, benefitting from happenstance and the suffering of others, are the ones who should be protected, and the losers of history should be ignored so they can die off quietly without causing too much stress for those of us lucky enough to have the good life already. People talk a lot about eating the rich, but once you take a couple bites out of them, they'll start to look a lot like Karli Morgenthau, talking about how great things were before those people started getting all the jobs and homes and healthcare, taking up more than their share. Why should she suffer, she's not the one who disintegrated them? If they want to come back to life, they should take responsibility for themselves the way she did, seizing opportunities to improve her lot, not just getting hand-outs from the government taken from the forgotten men and women.

This is a didactic morality play for children. When Karli is accused of being a supremacist and her response is to say that, no, the people she dehumanizes actually deserve to be murdered, a supremacist is someone who dehumanizes and murders people who don't deserve it, you should realize that's exactly what supremacists think, and not just write it off as not fitting with your preconceptions of what someone coded as an activist would believe. There are plenty of grifters, show-horses, career martyrs, and, recently, the literal CIA, who are all eager to exploit the human tendency to evaluate things superficially to co-opt your energy for their own ends without actually advancing the causes you care about, and if you can't tell when comic-book supervillains like Karli Morgenthau or Erik Killmonger are preying on your sympathies to con you, how are you going to realize when it's happening in real life?

 

I'm rewatching the last episode right now.

"People who don't matter".

Girl, are you really taunting a man with serious anger issues? Someone who had showed his worth in a face-to-face fight with you even BEFORE taking the super serum?

What are you trying to achieve here? A suicide-by-supersoldier? At the end of the day, you are just a kid without any training whatsoever, he is a fu##ing elite soldier.

 

Except Karli does have training. Probably fairly advanced combat training. From Sharon. Karli is basically Agent 13 2.0. Only with the super soldier serum to boot.

Ok, to be fair, that's mostly just implied by their discussion in the finale. But it sure sounds like what the creatives intended.

 

Well, when she had to fight him alone, he completely outclassed her. She eventually desperately tried to escape and when it didn't work she tried to distract him by putting the hostages in danger. Advanced combat training, yep.

EDIT: and Walker managed to be the winner in a fight against FOUR super soldiers at the same time. They should claim the money back from whoever gave them this "advanced training".

Joking aside, what do you people think she was trying to do? Some kind of apology? She was really taunting him? Because whatever she wanted to do, she really did it wrong.

 

He wasn't justified in killing that man but just because he's not the one who pulled the trigger on his friend doesn't make him innocent. He was a voluntary participant in a conspiracy that he knew would lead to the deaths of innocent people, every member of the conspiracy is guilty of felony murder whether or not they personally executed anyone.

 

Steve Rogers was supered, then someone got shot. He chased the attacker, but when the kid was thrown in the water he didn't even think about not stopping to make sure the kid was OK. When he caught the attacker he didn't kill him, he immobilized him to interrogate him. That's two differences we see with Walker -- Walker was concentrating on his goal, he let the bloodlust control him, (and he probably used bad language).

It's possible the serum gives some kind of psychological impact, like adrenaline on steroids, which could shut down the rational part of your brain. After all this was a new serum we hadn't seen before, no vita rays, no side effects like going hulky or having your arm burn off or being brainwashed by locomotives. Maybe it comes with a side order of rage, especially when you first take it. Maybe Steve's did too, but Steve didn't have the rage.

That serum itself could exonerate Walker in a court of law. But it also means he isn't Captain America. Cap is a symbol of (American) righteousness. The person taking the moniker has to be the embodiment of that idea, not just a super soldier. Captain America is not Captain America because of the shield, the serum, or the salutation.

And Walker didn't accidentally get injected, like Pepper did in IM3, it was a deliberate choice, that also disqualifies him. He didn't take the drug to immediately save the world either, he took it in the heat of the moment, for revenge, he took it because he felt inadequate. He let his own ego control his decisions.

Walkers actions may even have been justifiable, but Cap has to be held to a higher standard than that, otherwise what's the point in Cap? Cap is the image that the US wants to present to the world - truth, justice and the American way.

Walker isn't anywhere near Karli on the "good-guy/bad-guy" scale, but he's a fair distance from Rogers too.

Maybe she is. She was willing to die. She was hoping to be a martyr, to get more to her cause. By goading Walker again perhaps she'd accomplish that.

Plenty of terrorist/freedomfighters have martyed themselves throughout history for the bigger picture.

 

I think you have a point here. Because she made the worst apology ever.

 

Ah, so people with advanced combat training always win and are incapable of being outmatched in spite of that training? Good to know.

Just because she had training doesn't mean he doesn't have considerably more experience than she, nor that she's entirely in her right mind when she's talking to him in that sequence. Just because she has confidence that she can fight him doesn't mean she's correct.

Out of curiosity, how do you explain her beating Bucky during the convoy fight in episode 2? She's got skills, and she's got strength. Doesn't mean she's a match for Walker in a straight up fight, but she's no pushover.

 

Oh, I agree, entirely, Walker was a terrible choice for Captain America, I'm just pushing back on the idea that the government may as well have given Timothy McVeigh a blue hat and a shield and told him to go out and kill some minorities to reduce the price of oil, while Karli Morgenthau was a precious, innocent angel, come down from heaven to show us how to save the innocent from the ravages of capitalism by tying up working stiffs and fire-bombing the building they're in, and spreading the good news about how people she kills are obstacles and people she spares are nobodies.

 

She just took him by surprise, and he's still a 40s man, with a lot of hesitation about hitting a woman. And probably her version of super-serum was waaaaaaaaaaaay better than Bucky's. Yes, probably she got some kind of training, something like her friends saying her "remember that the thumb needs to be on the outside of your fist, so you don't sprain it".

 

..and as Erskine contrasted Steve with the soldier Colonel Chester Phillips praised, its all gets down to the core of a person, not being a "good soldier" who follows orders (historically, there have been problems tied that distinction). From the start, Walker was motivated not by trying to stop evil, but filling a slot the government felt the world needed. Walker's reasons had nothing to do with being selfless or seeing that he should be in the world to serve a higher purpose, not have others serve him (by giving him unearned respect for putting on a costume). One of the faces of the entitlement personality.

Oh, of course; Karli believed in, plotted and carried out murder and in the season finale, attempted murder of the senators and Sam. There's no anger-induced violence with her actions--it was all premeditated, which made her a threat to society, as she was picking and choosing which lives were worthy, and who was expendable for her warped ideology..or in Lemar's case, not worth much either way if it was not serving her cause..

I think she intended to live; she was going to murder Sam, and if she had been successful--and fast enough--Sharon would have suffered the same fate. Moments before, she screamed "fight me!" at Sam, but that was not to get him to kill her (to be a martyr), but her lust to kill that symbol she despised so much, and in a sense, punish Sam (as a black man) for believing in it.

 

The Power Broker gave Walker a boost. They got Spider-Man level strength. 10 tons. I'm not sure if it was 50/50, but there's a good chance the procedure would fuck you up. Mutant glob in a wheel chair.

Most of power brokers patients became unlimited class wrestlers, including Walker, and Sharon Ventura, the second Ms Marvel who dated the Thing, and entually became a She-Thing.

Was she supposed to have been related to Jesse the Body Ventura?

 

I think the situation "Post-Snap' was:

Yes, the countries and their borders still existed on maps; but because HALF the worlds population dissapeared in an instant, globally everyone started 'coming together' and going where they were needed (because of a new people shortage); and eventually and worldwide most countries stopped enforcing their borders and people everywhere where free to come and go as required to maintain what they could.
^^^
This was the entire basis of the resulting: "One World, One People" movement; and after nearly 5 years, the whole world had adapted to this borderless situation as the 'new normal'.

The the 'Blip' happens and the 1/2 of the Earth's population reappears and they want their lives back as they were. The world is again overcrowded and as a result a group is formed to assist in re-settlement of 'bliped' people and those who now live in what was once their property. As the situation progresses many world leaders propose restoring the old 'borders' of various countries and really returning the world (as mush as possible) to the way it was 'pre-Snap'; with borders , passports, verifiable citizenship, etc.

Also those who got comfortable with how the world had changed (in many of their eyes for the better); got upset, and that's what the 'Flag Smashers' group grew out of. The proposal was to reset everything to how it was 'pre-Snap' as much as possible.

 

Most countries stopped enforcing their borders because their government and currency didn't exist any more.

What about Warlords?

An Armenian general with a few tanks marches on Luxembourg and starts taking slaves, and tributes.

The international response a month after the snap is going to be "fuck it" they are in no position to do anything. 3 years later? And that council Natasha was heading up, sorts shit out. Was she a defacto world leader?

A thing about how America kept it together?

Universal Basic Income?

The smaller falling apart countries could request to become territories of America, Russia or Wakanda... Like How Gul Dukat signed up Cardassia to the Dominion without asking much of anyone if they were alright with that.

More bullets than food.

 

Yup, that was my understanding of the situation. I do wish the show delved a little deeper into that scenario, although I freely admit (as proven by discussions in this thread and others) that the deeper we dig into the implications of the two Snaps, the much uglier the situation should be instead of what we've been seeing.