The Avengers, or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Just Love The Hounds
The Avengers made me realise that Civil War (and registration) didn't go NEARLY far enough.
Don't get me wrong. I thought it was good, I thought it was possibly even great (for an action movie, by which I mean it was not as good as Red Coloured Grey Truck, but I wouldn't cry to see it out of non-action-movie categories in awards season). I only had one issue with the pacing, which was when, hard on the heels of Loki's escape from the helicarrier, Fury reacts to the knowledge that the portal's been opened, and it was like "How poorly can you react here?" I felt it was actually badly acted and therefore made me want to look at my watch.
And let's face it, the bit with the nuke was cool, but really WHY.
My fears about Joss Whedon were proven mostly untrue! I was really worried that after Loki went and, you know, BROKE BLACK WIDOW WHY, she would then default-lose the fight with Hawkeye but that didn't happen, so good. The thing about this is that if you're going to set someone up as a superspy master assassin emotional automaton who's always on the clock (and the scene when she's called in ROCKED) then having Loki call her a pathetic human who is in debt to Hawkeye for silly reasons and then she cries is REALLY ANNOYING.
If you're Natasha Romanoff, would you actually give a flying fuck what the dude in the jail says? It's possible, though, that it was baiting him in the same way that she did the guy at the call-in scene, by playing the weak human who's just realising the evil baddie's master plan, which I can roll with, but I don't really like having to make such subjective leaps when I evaluate a movie, because I'd rather be very, very clear that that's what's happening than wonder whether I'm watching "Girls can't kick ass" in action or not. And since I don't subscribe to the Cult Of Joss, I go by the concerns I've heard about his handling of female characters. If I want to be insulted because of my gender, I can just rewatch Thor a bunch, honestly, I don't need to watch new movies.
Other than that, the snark was snarky, the action was actiony, the special effects were special, and the plotline about Cap finding out that Phase II was weapons was totally dropped, so I can only hope that Cap 2 is going to be him having a royal bitchfit at all of SHIELD for making weapons out of the Cosmic Cube (and I hope there are a billion references to this being what the Nazis/Hydra/the Red Skull did) because otherwise, pissed I will be, young Skywalker. And let's face it - if they're using the Chitauri for the villain in A1, there's totally grounds for taking Against All Enemies where Steve drops off the grid because he doesn't like, you know, exactly the setup where SHIELD is making weapons their priority or something (I don't remember, it's been a while - mostly I remember that I never got past page 5 of The Tomorrow Men because the writer was WHY.)
I will probably see it five more times in theatres.
Now, all of that said, onto why this movie proves that Civil War/SHRA didn't go far enough.
Here's what Wikipedia has to say about what SHRA is, for those who are just now joining the party. "The act requires any person in the United States with superhuman abilities to register with the federal government as a "human weapon of mass destruction," reveal their true identity to the authorities, and undergo proper training. Those who sign also have the option of working for S.H.I.E.L.D., earning a salary and benefits such as those earned by other American civil servants."
Cue months and months of in-universe active warfare between pro and anti, cue a lot of idiotic tropes (seriously, if you want to have fun, read up on this on TV Tropes, and make time to visit the Cap and Iron Man pages too - this is the one where Iron Man really winds up carrying the Idiot Ball, because of course the guy who decided to up and privatise world peace is going to be all "Everyone needs to register for the good of humanity and also cost-benefit analysis and I have special knowledges that mean this could be so much worse words words words blargh" and the guy who was created in an American lab by American scientists and took as his costume the American flag would be all "America is wrong to do this whither privacy I stand for the dream because remember in the 70s when I ran away from the US Government and oh ho ho children-of-Bush, that was nothing compared to what YOU got, words words words whargarbbl.") and don't forget to cue the fact that the original writers were pretty on board with the concept, but later someone essentially had Iron Man set fire to an orphanage for disabled children and homeless puppies, run by blameless nuns, or some damn thing, just so he could REALLY hammer home the point that Iron Man's pro-reg side is BAD, mmkay. Blah blah blah privacy, bleedley blee.
Oh, wait, maybe that was the part about cloning Thor and using the clone (Clor) to kill Goliath, a Z-list hero that no one ever heard of (but who happened to be black, and THAT'S not suspiciously problematic, because you KNOW in that case that they're going to kill the character that NO ONE cars about, which is how the Wasp got a race-lift in Ultimates and became Asian, because someone said "Wait, this is the 1990s, or whatever, and we need diversity, unlike what we needed in the 60s." I mean, I DO recognise the significance of the Falcon, and I do actually think that Marvel has made some okay steps with race (their sexism is a lot more at issue) but I think in this specific case, they would have been better off to find a white z-lister that no one gave a shit about to kill off.) and that was the worst thing Iron Man has EVAR done.
Never mind all the times that he lied about his identity to protect HIS identity and no one else's, never mind the time that he forced an entire splinter sect to accept his decisions about their lives and doomed them all to being crippled again, and never mind the time that he killed the Supreme Intelligence and then had to face Cap meebling about it being alive (and insane and genocidal). Cloning Thor was, in the words of Rarity (MLP in case you were wondering) the WORST. POSSIBLE. THING.
(Hey, remember that time the Skrulls disguised themselves as cows, infiltrated Earth, and disbanded the Avengers? That was pretty funny. Not that that has any bearing on this, it was just funny.)
But see, here's the thing (finally!). The only way that Civil War makes any sense at all is if you assume two things:
1. Iron Man is, at root, a pragmatist (amply borne out by his actions).
2. Captain America is, at root, an idealist (amply borne out by HIS actions).
I mean, which one of these built an arc reactor in a cave with a box of scraps so that he could escape a prison that was going to force him to make weapons to destroy his own countrymen with so that he could lay some righteous smackdown on his captors and which one led a group of soldiers into a doomed combat situation to rescue others that had been captured, liberated everybody, and got away with nearly zero casualties? Those actions are the defining characteristics of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers (hence why they were the origin stories commemorated on film) so I think this analysis of their personalities holds up.
From that standpoint only, the breakdown in Civil War (Iron Man pro-Reg (and anti-privacy) and Captain America anti-reg (and anti-government, which at the time was Bush and that plays a big part)) makes sense. From a host of others, of course, it makes none, and not least of all from the standpoint that not all writers are entirely consistent about the motivations of each character. BUT ANYWAY.
There's a fic that I can't remember where Iron Man is giving his reasons for supporting Registration, and he says something about looking at city budgets and realising that New York was devoting something like 10% of revenue to repairing superhuman battlesites. And that didn't count the exceptional times that (to take an instance not in 616 continuity) the Hulk rampaged through New York, destroying how many city blocks, doing how many billions of dollars of damage, and killing (and eating, in many cases) 917 people.
Which finally, via a very wandering path, leads me back to the Avengers. See, I had this thought, as I was sitting in the theatre watching the first of the Chitauri squadrons or swarm-ships or whatever they were destroy half of Manhattan: if we lived in a world with real superhumans, we would be nowhere near this level of civilisation development. We would be stuck in, at best, a Middle-Ages sort of tech level, and possibly earlier, because of one minor niggling detail.
Insurance.
In a world with superhumans, insurance does not and cannot exist. Why on earth would you go into the business of providing insurance for locations that may or may not be the scene of the next superhuman squabble? Yes, there's insurance for tornado alley and hurricane and flood insurance available on the Gulf Coast, but you pay astronomically high premiums for those, and the insuring agents can, if there's a large loss, be VERY difficult to force to pay out their owed totals. See also the wrangle about paying the insurance on the World Trade Center, which clearly was insured under the same theory that the Titanic was under-lifeboated - nothing could POSSIBLY happen to it.
In a world with superhumans, svery single metropolitan area in the world just became a target. They are all now uninsured.
Sure, you can get insurance on your farm in Bumfuck, Alabama, if you want it - but maybe you should ask the residents of Broxton, Oklahoma (a real place bee tee dubs) whether being Ground Zero for Siege was a great thing for the ol' property values. In fact, it's a setup point for Fear Itself, that Broxton's residents are abandoning the town because of Asgard being there. Or ask the residents of Unnamed, New Mexico, whether they were able to collect on their insurance policies after the Destroyer kind of flattened their town.
There are other battles and even just minor events (Tony Stark decides to set up a freakshow lab next to your farm, why stay?) that means that, effectively, there is no insurance possible in the world. Because see, the thing about those premiums in Tornado Alley and on the Gulf Coast is that they're at least predictable.
Superhumans, not so much. Their battles, even less so.
Without insurance, I can't think what we have left of our modern civilisation. It's possible that it's just the building insurance industry that would be non-existent, but I'm not prepared to say that, looking at all the cars that were blown up, flattened, sliced in half, used as projectiles, and generally turned into melee weapons in Avengers (or the Dark Knight, or Iron Man). Life insurance? I know that we have to protect the kiddies from the death toll (and Marvel really wants those PG ratings) so we don't know how many people died in Avengers AND we saw lots and lots of miraculous escapes, but people died. A LOT of people died. It's great to say (and I have) that the fact they pancaked a building means that we're all over 9/11, but at the same time, people died. It was touching to see the police officer accept Cap's orders, but people still died. People even died afterwards, when the hivemind was nuked and all the Chitauri (except the one pleading to Thanos, apparently) died, collapsing where they were. On to buildings. And people.
"For the greater good" doesn't encourage me to own a skyscraper if I can't insure it for the event that a superhuman or an earthquake or a terrorist comes callin'. There isn't actually a functional world (at least, as we currently understand it) where I have any reason to develop property, or even technology, if I can't insure myself from the risks of its use and potential misuse. And I'm sure that, in a world without insurance, the litigious and elaborate legal system America has currently got wouldn't have evolved either but that's exactly my point - in a world with superhumans, would the gleaming towers of Manhattan have been there to be ravaged? How often would you rebuild, assuming that you could afford to?
Let's face it - if you live in New York, you've potentially just been damaged by the Hulk's fight with the Abomination, followed quickly by the battle between Iron Man, War Machine, and Whiplash at Stark Expo, and now by a flopping swarm-mother of the Chitauri invasion. I don't know about you, but Bumfuck, Alabama is looking GOOD.
Which is why, honestly, SHRA didn't go far enough. (That's the Superhuman Registration Act that set off all of Civil War, I should have mentioned.) I can't see a universe where superhumans exist that isn't one of two options:
1. Earth's techno-social advancement has essentially stalled out at the level of MAYBE the Age of Sail - there is no significant industry and the Industrial Revolution has not occurred. It may have stalled before that.
2. Earth-811, the Earth of the Days of Future Past storyline, where mutants (I would have to expand this to all superhumans, with the fun twist that it's no longer genetic and therefore the Hounds won't work as concepted) are kept in concentration camps because they're a danger to the rest of civilisation. This has the disadvantage of going into a Wild Cards subtrope - I can't remember the character's name, as she's never on screen, but there is a character who has the ability to transmute materials from one to another. She's a bank robber. How do you imprison the superhuman?
Frankly, you wipe them out. You don't register them, you burn them.
The fact that this just became the thread that holds together Slot Machine Prophet is not real great, given that I've finally admitted that:
1. I don't like writing.
2. I don't want to write.
3. I don't want to be a novelist.
4. I certainly don't want to do the level of marketing graeae is doing because I find that sort of thing tiring.
5. I don't, therefore, want a career writing, so
6. The plot thread that ties my novel all together is not welcome at this time.
Don't get me wrong. I thought it was good, I thought it was possibly even great (for an action movie, by which I mean it was not as good as Red Coloured Grey Truck, but I wouldn't cry to see it out of non-action-movie categories in awards season). I only had one issue with the pacing, which was when, hard on the heels of Loki's escape from the helicarrier, Fury reacts to the knowledge that the portal's been opened, and it was like "How poorly can you react here?" I felt it was actually badly acted and therefore made me want to look at my watch.
And let's face it, the bit with the nuke was cool, but really WHY.
My fears about Joss Whedon were proven mostly untrue! I was really worried that after Loki went and, you know, BROKE BLACK WIDOW WHY, she would then default-lose the fight with Hawkeye but that didn't happen, so good. The thing about this is that if you're going to set someone up as a superspy master assassin emotional automaton who's always on the clock (and the scene when she's called in ROCKED) then having Loki call her a pathetic human who is in debt to Hawkeye for silly reasons and then she cries is REALLY ANNOYING.
If you're Natasha Romanoff, would you actually give a flying fuck what the dude in the jail says? It's possible, though, that it was baiting him in the same way that she did the guy at the call-in scene, by playing the weak human who's just realising the evil baddie's master plan, which I can roll with, but I don't really like having to make such subjective leaps when I evaluate a movie, because I'd rather be very, very clear that that's what's happening than wonder whether I'm watching "Girls can't kick ass" in action or not. And since I don't subscribe to the Cult Of Joss, I go by the concerns I've heard about his handling of female characters. If I want to be insulted because of my gender, I can just rewatch Thor a bunch, honestly, I don't need to watch new movies.
Other than that, the snark was snarky, the action was actiony, the special effects were special, and the plotline about Cap finding out that Phase II was weapons was totally dropped, so I can only hope that Cap 2 is going to be him having a royal bitchfit at all of SHIELD for making weapons out of the Cosmic Cube (and I hope there are a billion references to this being what the Nazis/Hydra/the Red Skull did) because otherwise, pissed I will be, young Skywalker. And let's face it - if they're using the Chitauri for the villain in A1, there's totally grounds for taking Against All Enemies where Steve drops off the grid because he doesn't like, you know, exactly the setup where SHIELD is making weapons their priority or something (I don't remember, it's been a while - mostly I remember that I never got past page 5 of The Tomorrow Men because the writer was WHY.)
I will probably see it five more times in theatres.
Now, all of that said, onto why this movie proves that Civil War/SHRA didn't go far enough.
Here's what Wikipedia has to say about what SHRA is, for those who are just now joining the party. "The act requires any person in the United States with superhuman abilities to register with the federal government as a "human weapon of mass destruction," reveal their true identity to the authorities, and undergo proper training. Those who sign also have the option of working for S.H.I.E.L.D., earning a salary and benefits such as those earned by other American civil servants."
Cue months and months of in-universe active warfare between pro and anti, cue a lot of idiotic tropes (seriously, if you want to have fun, read up on this on TV Tropes, and make time to visit the Cap and Iron Man pages too - this is the one where Iron Man really winds up carrying the Idiot Ball, because of course the guy who decided to up and privatise world peace is going to be all "Everyone needs to register for the good of humanity and also cost-benefit analysis and I have special knowledges that mean this could be so much worse words words words blargh" and the guy who was created in an American lab by American scientists and took as his costume the American flag would be all "America is wrong to do this whither privacy I stand for the dream because remember in the 70s when I ran away from the US Government and oh ho ho children-of-Bush, that was nothing compared to what YOU got, words words words whargarbbl.") and don't forget to cue the fact that the original writers were pretty on board with the concept, but later someone essentially had Iron Man set fire to an orphanage for disabled children and homeless puppies, run by blameless nuns, or some damn thing, just so he could REALLY hammer home the point that Iron Man's pro-reg side is BAD, mmkay. Blah blah blah privacy, bleedley blee.
Oh, wait, maybe that was the part about cloning Thor and using the clone (Clor) to kill Goliath, a Z-list hero that no one ever heard of (but who happened to be black, and THAT'S not suspiciously problematic, because you KNOW in that case that they're going to kill the character that NO ONE cars about, which is how the Wasp got a race-lift in Ultimates and became Asian, because someone said "Wait, this is the 1990s, or whatever, and we need diversity, unlike what we needed in the 60s." I mean, I DO recognise the significance of the Falcon, and I do actually think that Marvel has made some okay steps with race (their sexism is a lot more at issue) but I think in this specific case, they would have been better off to find a white z-lister that no one gave a shit about to kill off.) and that was the worst thing Iron Man has EVAR done.
Never mind all the times that he lied about his identity to protect HIS identity and no one else's, never mind the time that he forced an entire splinter sect to accept his decisions about their lives and doomed them all to being crippled again, and never mind the time that he killed the Supreme Intelligence and then had to face Cap meebling about it being alive (and insane and genocidal). Cloning Thor was, in the words of Rarity (MLP in case you were wondering) the WORST. POSSIBLE. THING.
(Hey, remember that time the Skrulls disguised themselves as cows, infiltrated Earth, and disbanded the Avengers? That was pretty funny. Not that that has any bearing on this, it was just funny.)
But see, here's the thing (finally!). The only way that Civil War makes any sense at all is if you assume two things:
1. Iron Man is, at root, a pragmatist (amply borne out by his actions).
2. Captain America is, at root, an idealist (amply borne out by HIS actions).
I mean, which one of these built an arc reactor in a cave with a box of scraps so that he could escape a prison that was going to force him to make weapons to destroy his own countrymen with so that he could lay some righteous smackdown on his captors and which one led a group of soldiers into a doomed combat situation to rescue others that had been captured, liberated everybody, and got away with nearly zero casualties? Those actions are the defining characteristics of Tony Stark and Steve Rogers (hence why they were the origin stories commemorated on film) so I think this analysis of their personalities holds up.
From that standpoint only, the breakdown in Civil War (Iron Man pro-Reg (and anti-privacy) and Captain America anti-reg (and anti-government, which at the time was Bush and that plays a big part)) makes sense. From a host of others, of course, it makes none, and not least of all from the standpoint that not all writers are entirely consistent about the motivations of each character. BUT ANYWAY.
There's a fic that I can't remember where Iron Man is giving his reasons for supporting Registration, and he says something about looking at city budgets and realising that New York was devoting something like 10% of revenue to repairing superhuman battlesites. And that didn't count the exceptional times that (to take an instance not in 616 continuity) the Hulk rampaged through New York, destroying how many city blocks, doing how many billions of dollars of damage, and killing (and eating, in many cases) 917 people.
Which finally, via a very wandering path, leads me back to the Avengers. See, I had this thought, as I was sitting in the theatre watching the first of the Chitauri squadrons or swarm-ships or whatever they were destroy half of Manhattan: if we lived in a world with real superhumans, we would be nowhere near this level of civilisation development. We would be stuck in, at best, a Middle-Ages sort of tech level, and possibly earlier, because of one minor niggling detail.
Insurance.
In a world with superhumans, insurance does not and cannot exist. Why on earth would you go into the business of providing insurance for locations that may or may not be the scene of the next superhuman squabble? Yes, there's insurance for tornado alley and hurricane and flood insurance available on the Gulf Coast, but you pay astronomically high premiums for those, and the insuring agents can, if there's a large loss, be VERY difficult to force to pay out their owed totals. See also the wrangle about paying the insurance on the World Trade Center, which clearly was insured under the same theory that the Titanic was under-lifeboated - nothing could POSSIBLY happen to it.
In a world with superhumans, svery single metropolitan area in the world just became a target. They are all now uninsured.
Sure, you can get insurance on your farm in Bumfuck, Alabama, if you want it - but maybe you should ask the residents of Broxton, Oklahoma (a real place bee tee dubs) whether being Ground Zero for Siege was a great thing for the ol' property values. In fact, it's a setup point for Fear Itself, that Broxton's residents are abandoning the town because of Asgard being there. Or ask the residents of Unnamed, New Mexico, whether they were able to collect on their insurance policies after the Destroyer kind of flattened their town.
There are other battles and even just minor events (Tony Stark decides to set up a freakshow lab next to your farm, why stay?) that means that, effectively, there is no insurance possible in the world. Because see, the thing about those premiums in Tornado Alley and on the Gulf Coast is that they're at least predictable.
Superhumans, not so much. Their battles, even less so.
Without insurance, I can't think what we have left of our modern civilisation. It's possible that it's just the building insurance industry that would be non-existent, but I'm not prepared to say that, looking at all the cars that were blown up, flattened, sliced in half, used as projectiles, and generally turned into melee weapons in Avengers (or the Dark Knight, or Iron Man). Life insurance? I know that we have to protect the kiddies from the death toll (and Marvel really wants those PG ratings) so we don't know how many people died in Avengers AND we saw lots and lots of miraculous escapes, but people died. A LOT of people died. It's great to say (and I have) that the fact they pancaked a building means that we're all over 9/11, but at the same time, people died. It was touching to see the police officer accept Cap's orders, but people still died. People even died afterwards, when the hivemind was nuked and all the Chitauri (except the one pleading to Thanos, apparently) died, collapsing where they were. On to buildings. And people.
"For the greater good" doesn't encourage me to own a skyscraper if I can't insure it for the event that a superhuman or an earthquake or a terrorist comes callin'. There isn't actually a functional world (at least, as we currently understand it) where I have any reason to develop property, or even technology, if I can't insure myself from the risks of its use and potential misuse. And I'm sure that, in a world without insurance, the litigious and elaborate legal system America has currently got wouldn't have evolved either but that's exactly my point - in a world with superhumans, would the gleaming towers of Manhattan have been there to be ravaged? How often would you rebuild, assuming that you could afford to?
Let's face it - if you live in New York, you've potentially just been damaged by the Hulk's fight with the Abomination, followed quickly by the battle between Iron Man, War Machine, and Whiplash at Stark Expo, and now by a flopping swarm-mother of the Chitauri invasion. I don't know about you, but Bumfuck, Alabama is looking GOOD.
Which is why, honestly, SHRA didn't go far enough. (That's the Superhuman Registration Act that set off all of Civil War, I should have mentioned.) I can't see a universe where superhumans exist that isn't one of two options:
1. Earth's techno-social advancement has essentially stalled out at the level of MAYBE the Age of Sail - there is no significant industry and the Industrial Revolution has not occurred. It may have stalled before that.
2. Earth-811, the Earth of the Days of Future Past storyline, where mutants (I would have to expand this to all superhumans, with the fun twist that it's no longer genetic and therefore the Hounds won't work as concepted) are kept in concentration camps because they're a danger to the rest of civilisation. This has the disadvantage of going into a Wild Cards subtrope - I can't remember the character's name, as she's never on screen, but there is a character who has the ability to transmute materials from one to another. She's a bank robber. How do you imprison the superhuman?
Frankly, you wipe them out. You don't register them, you burn them.
The fact that this just became the thread that holds together Slot Machine Prophet is not real great, given that I've finally admitted that:
1. I don't like writing.
2. I don't want to write.
3. I don't want to be a novelist.
4. I certainly don't want to do the level of marketing graeae is doing because I find that sort of thing tiring.
5. I don't, therefore, want a career writing, so
6. The plot thread that ties my novel all together is not welcome at this time.