Re: and Dead Tree Comics
Posted: Sat May 13, 2017 11:37 am
I haven't paid that much attention but isn't this one of those time paradox plots where "Captain America is bad now!" is one more thing they have to fix?
TA wrote:"Hero becomes his evil opposite" is one thing, but a) this is "hero was secretly always his evil opposite, from day 1, never a hero at all, Axis spy who continually sabotaged the allied war effort"
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I mean, villains becoming heroes really isn't the same as heroes becoming villains. It's significant that the brobdingnagian example of a hero becoming a villain and coming back from it you have there, Superman thinking he's Darkseid's son, involved brainwashing. Which isn't the case here - we learn that Cap has been with Hydra since he was young, and was, again, secretly a spy for the Nazis during the entire war. This isn't Cap becoming a Nazi, this is Cap having always been a Nazi. There isn't room for a Steve Rogers atonement arc because there's nothing to atone for. This isn't the Cap we know making a mistake, a slip-up, a lapse in judgment, anything he would regret. The Cap we have known was always a lie, and the real Steve Rogers has always been a Nazi, Secret Empire tells us.
Thad wrote:TA wrote:"Hero becomes his evil opposite" is one thing, but a) this is "hero was secretly always his evil opposite, from day 1, never a hero at all, Axis spy who continually sabotaged the allied war effort"
[...]
I mean, villains becoming heroes really isn't the same as heroes becoming villains. It's significant that the brobdingnagian example of a hero becoming a villain and coming back from it you have there, Superman thinking he's Darkseid's son, involved brainwashing. Which isn't the case here - we learn that Cap has been with Hydra since he was young, and was, again, secretly a spy for the Nazis during the entire war. This isn't Cap becoming a Nazi, this is Cap having always been a Nazi. There isn't room for a Steve Rogers atonement arc because there's nothing to atone for. This isn't the Cap we know making a mistake, a slip-up, a lapse in judgment, anything he would regret. The Cap we have known was always a lie, and the real Steve Rogers has always been a Nazi, Secret Empire tells us.
If the difference between "a supervillain brainwashed him into thinking he'd always been a supervillain" and "a supervillain used the Cosmic Cube to change history so he actually had always been a supervillain" is important to you, fine, go nuts. I see it as a pretty trivial distinction, myself.
Point is, I'm gonna guess the end result is the same: Cap's back to normal (and history is restored) but he still did all that stuff and feels guilty about it. Though it's possible that doesn't happen! Like I said, given the bad publicity Marvel may want to get Secret Empire out of its system as soon as it can. Maybe Cap even uses the Cosmic Cube to not only reset his origin story but to make sure Secret Empire never happened. Retcon it all away like Spider-Man's marriage (and that time he hit his pregnant wife). Guess we'll see.
Brentai wrote:It does seem like the setup to an otherwise routine Crisis-style housecleaning.
You watch, they're going to end this event by booting into the MCU.
Brentai wrote:It does seem like the setup to an otherwise routine Crisis-style housecleaning.
You watch, they're going to end this event by booting into the MCU.
TA wrote:I don't know if you just haven't been following this at all, but you have the framing completely backwards, and are missing the entire problem here. A supervillain didn't use the Cosmic Cube to change history so that he had always been a supervillain. A supervillain wasn't even involved. Cap had always been a Nazi, the Axis won the war, and the remaining Allies used a Cosmic Cube to change the outcome of the war and make people forget. Then, much later, a Cosmic Cube given sentience by SHIELD restored a weakened Cap to his full strength of her own initiative, including his erased memories, and he remembered his Nazi roots and swung back into action. The whole thing is written deliberately in the setup to be exactly what you're saying is the endgame - Cap is back to normal, history is restored. It's just that Cap back to normal is what's fucked. Changing Cap so he was never a Nazi would explicitly be creating another false history, it would be expecting brainwashing to fix the character. Spencer's fucked it this way on purpose, so that those easy fixes can't hold up.