That Captain America Show Was Weird

Unless someone can tell me if this troupe has another name, I'm making a term for this. I want to be able to call it out with a single phrase similar to Gail Simone's 'Women in refrigerators' when I see it. I'm calling it 'flag smashing." Flag smashing: When a writer makes a character or their ideologies TOO sympathetic and worries the audience will be on their side, will make said character perform an over the top, remorseless act of evil that will make the audience disavow them. Used in a sentence: I was rooting for Daenarys to win the game of thrones until her flag smashing moment where she burned a whole city to the ground for no reason. What examples of Flag smashing do you know?

I remember when the Dora Milaje said they had jurisdiction wherever they wanted I thought “oh that’s cool to see that they also imperialistically think like John Walker” but then I opened Instagram and the official marvel account posted the quote from the Dora Milaje and in the caption wrote “as they should 😌” and I was completely blown away, so that wasn’t intended to show that they were wrong too it was to say their government can go wherever they want enforcing their own will because they’re the good guys.

As a guy living in the middle east, thank you for talking about this topic. You guys in the west have no idea how bad American Imperialism affects us. A small example: the president of Turkey who the west calls an Islamist dictator was supported and placed by the US, before that Turkey used to be much more secular. In a decade it became more and more conservative, because it's easy to control a country if it's a theocracy and you own its leader. Only after the president and US backed Gülen cult got in a fight and the Turkish government started not to listen to the west, it started being called a dictatorship. So many innocent, brilliant Turkish nationals, politicians, officers, journalists died in the process. It's a very long and sad story actually.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier is a series that the more I thought about it the less I liked

I really don't think the writing of Falcon and the Winter Soldier was nuanced enough to intentionally include a subtle jab at American imperialism. In fact the writing in this show has been so in-your-face with all the messages they want to get across that I'm more convinced the writers simply accepted John Walker having jurisdiction without a second thought. Same for the pentagon review, it's so widely accepted as normal that no one thought of it as a critique. It's actually an impressive thing for any viewers who picked up on it and questioned it.

"Violence is bad, actually" said THE AVENGERS (insert that scene where Secretary Ross shows the Avengers a compilation of their destruction in Civil War)

I love how Sam at the start literally kills like 20 enemy soldiers, it's good that he isn't considered a bad guy

As someone who is from actual Latvia, I sure as hell hope some US military guy would not have unsupervised jurisdiction in a foreign country. If the new Cap was working there on the behalf of GRC, he would more likely be accompanied by Latvian GRC representives, not just running around on his own free will.

When watching it, I thought an interesting ending would be if the Flag Smashers did nothing violent, and were just rebelling without killing. This would lead to Lamar accidentally dying though, making them question if they have gone too far. Meanwhile, this gives Zemo the ability to manipulate US Agent to hunt the Flag Smashers done. This would result in a finale where Sam and Bucky had to protect the Flag Smashers from US Agent, which I think would be a nice subversion. Not perfect, but INSTEAD the Flag Smashers become pretty much fully on evil, canceling out their motivations, and US Agent, who started to go down a really interesting path, just got redeemed haphazardly. That being said, though, I heard an episode and storylines may have been cut due to COVID, so I guess I'm a bit nicer on the show because of that. IMO, I still like the show, it just stumbled at the finish line.

"The radicals are right, but the change they represent is too dangerous so we should stick with a slightly tweaked status quo anyway." - Marvel, aka Disney by Proxy

Now I didn't really see Walker as being "redeemed." I mean, HE certainly thinks he was, but choosing to do the obvious right thing once after a comical amount of anguished deliberation isn't that impressive.

An additional interesting layer to that "jurisdiction" scene is Zemo himself. The moment Walker breaks through the door he is silent. It's his house in a city & is the only character to indicate any personal connection with Latvia & has been very vocal about him opinion all episode. Yet in this moment he is purely a spectator, watching on as these 3 factions contest over his immediate future - and then slipping away when they become distracted by that contest. Pretty good stuff

Glad I'm not the only one who felt the message in the series was really muddled. Everyone I talked to after seeing it was like "it's sooo good!" And Im just like 😬 "is it though?"

“Americas most popular fictional series is based on defeating an empire” also worth noting, much of Lucas’s inspiration for the empire is Vietnam era United States, even George was keenly aware back in the day just how imperialist the US actually is. (Side note yes I’m aware additional inspiration is drawn from the nazis and Ancient Rome amongst other things but from the start George has made it clear that he wrote star wars during the nam era and one of the single largest influences was...nam.

The thing is, if they actually change their writing, they would get political, hypocritical, and would go against what Disney and the military stands for

Every time someone says "violence is bad", remember to ask what violence is being marked as bad, who that violence was aimed at, and what it was meant to achieve. Violence to end the violence of others is justified and good.

One way of thinking about Walker's rushed redemption arc is that, from the meta-narrative point of view of your critique, it represents exactly the way that Americans really feel about American misdeeds on the world stage.

Violence is bad when it threatens the status quo. It's ok when used to defend or expand the interests of those in power.

This show seemed like it had a lot it wanted to say but Disney was afraid to alienate anybody so it took the safest route possible