How do we start one of them there Tweeter campaigns?
Spoilers The Falcon and Winter Soldier discussion
- Thread starter Turtletrekker
- Start date
A witty hashtag and a large following.
They'll have to meet Ryan Reynolds along the way.
I thought he just killed that version of Hal Jordan/Green Lantern...?
Having gotten to the end of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, my takeaways are:
1) It kinda sucks that Sharon's apparently become a villain now. I get that she was never gonna be the Lois Lane to Steve's Superman since, well, who can really compete with Hayley Atwell's Peggy for that title?, but I'm still bummed. She feels like a totally different person from TWS and CW, and not in a good sense.
2) John Walker is a violent narcissistic psychopath, and the writers giving him a "redemption" moment after he murdered a man in cold blood and got away with it was just nauseating.
3) The best part of the whole thing was Sam's family.
4) Seeing Sam become Captain America was pretty awesome.
5) Seeing Captain America verbally pimpslap the GRC was pretty cool.
6) The show never explicitly stated this, but realistically speaking, the kind of forced relocation of millions upon millions of people that the GRC wanted to implement has historically always led to mass death. The Partition of India, for instance, with its forced displacement of 10-20 million people, led to between 200,000 and 2 million deaths. So for the GRC to be talking about activating the world's armies to forcibly relocate millions of immigrants from poor countries to rich countries from during the Blip? That means the GRC is knowingly getting ready to kill between hundreds of thousands and upwards of millions of immigrants. These people are mass-murdering war criminals, and if you watch the show in that context, the behavior of the Flag Smasher is considerably less objectionable.
7)
1) It kinda sucks that Sharon's apparently become a villain now. I get that she was never gonna be the Lois Lane to Steve's Superman since, well, who can really compete with Hayley Atwell's Peggy for that title?, but I'm still bummed. She feels like a totally different person from TWS and CW, and not in a good sense.
2) John Walker is a violent narcissistic psychopath, and the writers giving him a "redemption" moment after he murdered a man in cold blood and got away with it was just nauseating.
3) The best part of the whole thing was Sam's family.
4) Seeing Sam become Captain America was pretty awesome.
5) Seeing Captain America verbally pimpslap the GRC was pretty cool.
6) The show never explicitly stated this, but realistically speaking, the kind of forced relocation of millions upon millions of people that the GRC wanted to implement has historically always led to mass death. The Partition of India, for instance, with its forced displacement of 10-20 million people, led to between 200,000 and 2 million deaths. So for the GRC to be talking about activating the world's armies to forcibly relocate millions of immigrants from poor countries to rich countries from during the Blip? That means the GRC is knowingly getting ready to kill between hundreds of thousands and upwards of millions of immigrants. These people are mass-murdering war criminals, and if you watch the show in that context, the behavior of the Flag Smasher is considerably less objectionable.
7)
Deadpool and Hugh Jackman face off against mutant cyborgs. Deadpool's phone buzzes, he pulls it out, reads a message.
Deadpool: "Ooh, ooh, I am so sorry. I gotta go take care of this. Good luck, Wolverine, I'm sure you can handle this on your own."
Hugh Jackman: "I'm Hugh Jackman, bitch."
Deadpool: "'Kay. See ya, Wolverine."
Deadpool walks off, Hugh Jackman stares at mutant cyborgs and sighs.
Later, Deadpool returns, sees mutant cyborgs have melted into a puddle on the ground, Hugh Jackman casually drinks a beer.
Deadpool: "How the hell did you do that?"
Hugh Jackman: "I'm Hugh Jackman, bitch."
Hugh should keep calling Deadpool "Ryan" and saying things like, "Your doctor said you have to give up these ridiculous fantasies. Your wife misses you!"
So when the antagonist you're unsympathetic towards kills someone they have at their mercy out of pique, they're a violent narcissistic psychopath, but when the antagonist you're sympathetic towards does it, it's because it's cheap writing to make sure you don't realize they're making sense.7)
Nope. He was a violent narcissistic sociopath long before then. No one could take up the mantle of Captain America without knowing Steve and not be a narcissist, and his fixation with violence and acts of domination and control were established very early on in the show. This is a guy who gets off on violently enforcing imperialism.
No, but when the antagonist who is motivated by an understandable sense of empathy for the lives of people about to be murdered in the hundreds of thousands or millions by the corrupt government agency starts engaging in arbitrary violence after her empathetic personality had already been well-established, then, yes, that is cheap writing to make sure the audience doesn't change sides.
Oh, yeah, that's not troubling. Only the divinely-appointed King of America gets to choose his rightful successor, and even that designee doesn't get a vote? Say what you will about the Official Performing the Duties of Captain America, and you can say quite a bit, but he didn't volunteer, and he certainly didn't declare himself Captain America after a foreign nation provided him with the necessary accoutrements. Walker was appointed by the duly-elected government of the United States, who decided they needed a Captain America, and in their limited wisdom, decided the best way to get one was to pick whoever had the best bullet-points on their résumé, which is exactly what they wanted to do in the first place during World War II. Walker can be a lousy Captain America without being an intrinsically evil person. And the only people who came close to treating him as redeemable were the Contessa, who's more "using" than "redeeming" him, and Bucky, who has a personal interest in encouraging people who have committed the odd murder here and there to take it one day at a time when it comes to doing the right thing and not doing murders.
Pull the other one! Where was her empathy for the three and a half billion useless eaters she wished had the good sense to stay dead? She and her companions colonized what they thought was a graveyard, and resented it when they found out the corpses they walked over turned out to just be napping. Even if we discount everything before Karli became overtly violent for violence's sake, she was still using force to steal money, medicine, and supplies which, presumably, were going to returnees (or to everyone and not specifically the undecimated half of the population which had recently immigrated, who were the ones she cared about). The clear implication is that she thought it was Thanos's victims who should've been kicked out of their former homes, put into resettlement camps, and shipped off to God-knows-where, while she and her friends continued to enjoy the bounty provided by providence (by which I mean, "the blood-soaked riches left derelict by the greatest atrocity in the history of the Universe") with clear consciences because, by God, they worked hard, they struggled, they earned it, and the people who want it back are greedy butchers who can't be reasoned with.
Remind you of anything?
We don't know that she is.
We only know she's setting herself up to take from the government she feels wronged her.
He didn't get a redemption though.
The whole end sequence juxtaposes him and Sam. Rent-A-Cap failed to save the people in the truck. And while Sam is (literally) lifting them up, Walker is beating on the enemies of the state. Then it finishes with him wearing a black suit (as apposed to Sam's white) acting as an actual man in black G-Man.
They're clearly setting up for a People v. State storyline in the future.
I'm not sure what Walker did constitutes sociopathy. It shows lack of self control in the moment in the heat of anger.
Ouch. That one's going to leave a mark.
Nevertheless, I think you really missed the mark on where the show was going, and I did enjoy the show and thought it was worth discussing, so I'm going to take the opportunity to go into some related aspects I glossed over in my initial reply.
Walker expressed contempt for his own actions in war, and especially the fact that they "earned" him medals of honor. While we never find out what he did, it's clear that he wasn't merely regretful about his actions, he was repulsed by them. That's a far cry from "getting off on violently enforcing imperialism," unless, I suppose, you're assuming he got his medals of honor for rescuing a bunch of orphans and his disgust stemmed from knowing they'd grow up to join the Ten Rings and kill innocent white people or something. But, seriously, I genuinely have no idea where this idea is coming from, aside from the most poisonously biased possible reading of the fact that he was an officer of the U.S. Military who attempted to carry out the missions given to him by his superiors to the best of his ability, and exhibited a classic case of a gifted child's inability to cope with setbacks and failure because everything has always been easy for him. Walker doesn't have a clinical absence of feeling, he's feeling too much because he doesn't have experience regulating his emotions in response to negative outcomes, because he's exactly the kind of strong man who has no context for his strength that Erskine thought would be a pretty shitty Captain America back in The First Avenger, even if he would seem to be the perfect soldier on paper.
Walker immediately exhibits denial, if not outright delusions, about the man he killed, blaming him for Lamar's death not just when talking to Lamar's family (which would be a bit sociopath-y, admittedly), but to Sam and Bucky, five minutes later, after they all saw what happened. Walker's self-image required a reason beyond "he was an enemy" to justify what he'd done, a personal injury to justify his personal rage. Contrast that with Karli, who actually was a bit sociopathic in her clinical application of political violence. Captain America is worth killing for the headlines, but Captain America's sidekick isn't. Killing GRC goons in cold blood does give her a reputation to trade on, so she can threaten Sam's family to ensure he does what she wants, but she'd never actually kill them, not because children or noncombatants are off-limits, but because they don't matter and don't obstruct her aims, and she doesn't really care that Sam thought she meant it and wasn't just threatening them as a figure of speech. It wasn't a "dissonant violent episode" that damned her in the eyes of the narrative. Episode three was so boring and poorly paced I barely realized she'd left the GRC goons to die, or that it was an escalation in her tactics. It was when Karli was talking with Sam and said she didn't see it as killing people, but removing obstacles, and then accused him of tricking her into talking like people were disposable as soon as she heard the words out of her own mouth. When she demonstrated that she knew what she was doing crossed a line objectively, but was so wrapped up in herself she couldn't recognize she'd done it, abstracting away the real lives she was ending just like the GRC did when they just saw the people who had moved into the vacancies left by the decimated as obstacles who needed to cleared away as quickly as possible so we could all go back to normal life.
The entire premise of the show is a philosophical battle over who is going to be the symbol of the future. In this corner, we have John Walker, the Government's Man, focus-grouped, means-tested, and ready to stand up for stability, security, and stagnation. And in this corner, we have Karli Morgenthau, the Flag Smasher, who came from nothing, won a cosmic coin-toss and saw the world didn't have to be the way it was and that there could be a better lot for her and hers, and then had it all yanked away when the old order returned in a flash, and she's ready to tear down any walls, load-bearing or otherwise, that prevent her from keeping the better life she's had a taste of. And our special guest commentators for the evening, Isaiah Bradley and Sharon Carter, who've been through this whole thing before and decided it doesn't matter who's calling the shots, Big Brother or Little Sister, because their ideals don't mean squat as soon as you become inconvenient to their narrative, so your choices are to stop caring and hide from the world, or stop caring about who gets hurt as long as you fill your own plate. Featuring a guest appearance by James "Bucky" Barnes, who holds a monstrous legacy of evil he wants no part of yet cannot separate himself from, and must learn how he can be a force for good in the world without vindicating (or even just ignoring) the awful things that made him the man he is today.
It's not a subtle setup. Everyone's a little right, and everyone's a lot wrong, and they're all bouncing off of Sam, who has common ground with all of them, and is in the unique position to synthesize all their needs into being a new kind of Captain America that can understand how to face today's issues, beyond the ones you can solve by bouncing a magic hammer off a frisbee into the face of a twelve-foot-tall purple guy. It's all a horseshoe. Morgenthau and Walker were coming from opposite directions, but they still ended up in the same place, hopped up on Nazi steroids, killing people to make themselves feel better about the avoidable death of a loved one, and deciding, hey, killing people gets results, and maybe I'll help more good people by killing more bad people. Sam is wise enough to see that what makes the GRC, and Walker, and Karli in the wrong is that they're hurting people, while the GRC, Walker, and Karli all think their opponents are evil because they're hurting the wrong people. They don't disagree about what's being done, just who it's being done to.
I would agree with you if it were only about the initial murder, but he showed narcissistic tendencies prior to that and no remorse following.
Three guards were killed in the explosion Karli set off. In official US Military terminology this is called "collateral damage." Those guards were "protecting" food and medicine that was supposed to be going to refugees. How many refugees died from malnutrition and disease for want of those supplies? Those guards were not "innocent." Meanwhile Walker chopped the head off of someone who hadn't killed anyone.
When the Flag Smashers were getting away on the plane, their member who stayed behind was standing in the middle of the road and the GRC opened fire and turned him into hamburger. Please please please don't try to paint the GRC as innocent victims.
The US Government does not own the copyright to "Captain America" and has no legal authority to proclaim any person with that title. It is not an actual position or rank that is authorized by any regulation or legislation. The ownership of The Shield is "a grey area." The government put Walker on the stage as the new "Star Spangled Man" just because they could. They may as well have "appointed" him as the new Mayor McCheese. The whole thing was a charade to begin with.
The unnamed Flag Smasher didn't kill Lamar and was in fact the one standing behind Walker holding him when Lamar was killed. Walker was out of control and delusional. He was guilty of murder, or innocent by reason of insanity. Pick one. Hint: whatever offences anyone else committed does not let him off the hook, or justify his continued freedom.
Karli and Walker were anything but in the same place. Karli took it to the extreme the way so many groups have been forced to for generations. Walker was making up for a small penis.
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It's been a long time since I read the original comics with Walker. Wasn't he on roids before becoming Captain America?
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