Vibranium. It’s stronger than steel and a third of the weight. It’s completely vibration absorbent. — How come it’s not a standard issue? — That’s the rarest metal on earth. What you’re holding there? That’s all we’ve got. — You quite finished, Mr. Stark? I’m sure the Captain has some unfinished business.
CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER 2011 › DIR. JOE JOHNSTON
I… have an unpopular opinion.
This was a kinda shitty thing to do and not funny at all. She gets mad because a guy, who doesn’t even know she likes him, kisses another girl (actually she kissed him and he floundered)? And her response? Is to shoot at him??
I’m sorry, why tf is a woman trying to harm a man when she’s jealous considered powerful and sexy? That is petty and abusive.
Men shouldn’t be permitted violence when they’re angry, women shouldn’t be permitted violence when they’re jealous. Period.
Sorry, this is a broader issue I have with men’s depiction of “powerful” women in media, but this scene encapsulates it.
I can’t stand this scene because it violates the cardinal rule of gun safety: Don’t point a gun at someone unless you’re willing to shoot them, and don’t shoot someone unless you’re willing to kill them. Peggy as a military woman should know that. Almost ten years later and I’m still not down with this scene.
As much as I love Peggy Carter…I don’t love her in this scene. What she does is awful. In a jealous snit, she picks up a loaded weapon and shoots at point blank range at Steve in an enclosed lab with Steve, Howard and lab techs close by. She knew the shield was going to work? No ricochets?? Howard has many prototypes…she knew how well they all worked??? There’s no way. It’s a completely irresponsible overreaction to seeing Steve being kissed by Pvt. Lorraine. Mind you, they were not dating or had any expectations yet. My assumption is it’s supposed to show how tough and no nonsense and takes no shit Peggy is. When actually it shows a great deal of immaturity, insecurity and recklessness and not in a good way.
If you think it’s okay for Peggy to shoot at Steve over an imagined slight, turn it around and have it be Steve shooting at Peggy while she’s holding a shield because Steve assumes she and Howard are “fondue” pals….it wouldn’t be ok at all and we’d want Peggy to run far, far away.
It’s a detriment to her character to be written like this….at least to me.
All of the above.
Yess please…a major red flag..toxic relationship 101 there wasn’t even a relationship to begin with
Also may I add
He was kissed without his consent.
That last point is something I think we as a fandom gloss over way too much.
Like. He’s canonically ignored by women before the serum (to show what? That he’s too sick for anyone to love? That disabled people aren’t desirable at all? Ugh), and the only people who care about him before the serum are Bucky and Peggy (and Erskine, too, although with him it’s more respect than closeness, I would say). But then he gets big, and beefy, and healthy, and suddenly everyone wants a piece of him.
If he was invisible (sexless) before, then he’s a hyper-visible object after. One of the things that’s so heartbreaking about him waking up in the future is that there’s generations of myths about him, and no one ever looks past that. No one sees him (“everything special about you came out of a bottle”). For all that people care about Captain America now, Steve Rogers might as well no longer exist.
And I think this moment is the first time he really realized that. Like, yes, he’s done his dancing monkey routine, being used by the brass. He’s been laughed off stage, but that was all for the cause. The truest thing Steve Rogers had done after the serum was risk his life to save people, because he’s reckless and always finds his way into a fight, and he cares about people so deeply. And then he’s reporting to Stark to get kitted out to keep fighting, because that’s who he is. He’s not a lady’s man, and he never was. So I can guarantee the thought of kissing someone was nowhere near his mind at that moment (except maybe passing thoughts about Peggy or Bucky). He’s intensely focused once he gets going, so I bet he’s already looking at everything in the room, taking in as much as he can, and thinking about ways to use whatever tools Stark will give him. He looks awkward, because he doesn’t know where to go, and he’s still very new to the whole “chain of command” thing, and probably doesn’t quite know the etiquette just yet, like if Stark is with Phillips, is he allowed to go in there and interrupt them? Where even is the room they’re in? Should he just lurk in a corner? Is there something he should be doing??
And then Lorraine starts approaching him, and his body language immediately shows his discomfort: crossing his arms and hunching his shoulders, ducking his head, trying to evade her praise. She literally grabs his tie and pulls him, and yeah, he could totally overpower her and not get pulled along (not implying that it would’ve been okay for her to do that anyway if he couldn’t have, just stating how extremely passive he is. He’s definitely not giving an enthusiastic yes), but also he’s just so ?? What? Is? Happening???
Almost immediately he brings his hands up, and you could maybe, very generously, call it an embrace, because he’s technically holding her arms. But really, it reads to me more like he’s preparing to push her away. We don’t see if he would have because Peggy gets there, but of all the options, why would he put his hands on her arms? He could have wrapped his arms around her to bring her closer or something, but he puts his hands between them, as if to defend himself. (He does have one hand on her hip, but the other is holding onto the arm that is still gripping him by the collar of his jacket)
And then Peggy is there, and she’s mad, and then she walks away saying “you still don’t know a bloody thing about women.” Like. No, of course he doesn’t. That’s been well established already, and you can tell he wasn’t expecting Lorraine to try to do anything. He wasn’t flirting with her, or being anything more than polite. He was just trying to get to a meeting.
And he’s still trying to process what just happened because he’s new at all of this, at people seeing his body and wanting so openly, at a total stranger making advances, because it’s never happened before (I’m assuming the USO girls were all respectful of his boundaries, but he doesn’t look like this has happened to him plenty of times before).
Which is all a very, very long-winded way of saying that this is his first taste of being seen as just an object (on a personal level. He already gets it on a propaganda level). She read the news about him, saw his body, wanted to be with the hero. She didn’t care about Steve Rogers.
And then Peggy, one of the few people who Actually Knows Him! Gets all pissed and says he’s just like all the other soldiers (which he isn’t, and she damn well knows it, but she also knows that will hurt him). Like, look at his eyes peeking over the shield in the fifth gif! That face doesn’t say “I’m ‘cheating’ on my maybe future girlfriend, and I only regret that she caught us.” That face says “what did I do wrong?” That face says “I thought you saw me.” That face says “I have barely any autonomy left, and you’re blaming me for that, and I hurt”
^^^^^^^^👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
I would say that the only person who truly knew and deeply cared about Steve Rogers before the serum was Bucky Barnes. Even if they admired him, Dr. Erskine and Peggy only knew him for a week before he’s changed into the Captain America body……one week….that’s all he’s in training for. There wasn’t enough time for her to “deeply” know pre serum Steve. Only Bucky really knew Steve Rogers “before”…..which makes that scene in ugh, Endgame where the only picture in 1970’s Peggy’s office of pre serum Steve that much harder to take…..not to mention it makes Peggy look like she’s been pining for 25 years…ugh….it’s almost like Agent Carter didn’t happen at all….🤔🤔🤔
So I still hate this and it hasn’t changed
This wasn’t a big power move we all think it is. This was a woman reacting harshly because a guy she liked kissed someone else.
Notice it wasn’t her boyfriend cheating on her or partner, but someone she liked. Not even a date. That was not okay. Will never be okay and if the reverse had happened, if Steve had shot her instead with the shield, he would’ve had his head on a pike by now with people demanding that he has no right to hurt Peggy even if she had been his girlfriend/partner.
So why doesn’t the same apply to Steve? What if that bullet had hit him? Hit someone else? Fuck I would’ve reported your ass for a dumb ass move like that. People dismiss this gross behavior because it was Peggy who did it, Peggy who singlehandedly made feminism during the war and punched a guy and Steve made “she’s pretty cool” eyes at and wanted them together despite the fact that this was unprecedented and controlling.
Even with Agent Carter, it still doesn’t make sense to me for her to be so in love with Steve because she knew pre-serum Steve for about a week or so before he became Captain America and then she was gone until he saw her at the 107th thing. Even then she was helping him and Steve thought she was with Howard. Then the war, which I can see where the crush came from but she barely knew Steve like Bucky or even the Howlies got to know him did. Like Steve, what was with the compass???? Why did that happen? You barely knew her!
I may still be angry about a lot of this it seems
Okay rant time: the shield-shooting thing is insane and abusive, Steve is quite literally both sexually and physically assaulted within a matter of minutes.
Imagine the reverse scenario:
Peggy asks a random Lab Tech where Steve is, when he doesn’t show up she waits, looking off innocuously, obviously not thinking of making a pass at anyone, and the tech, who seems bored, looks her slowly up and down, and starts speaking in a low, ‘sexy’, overly-familiar voice… and when she tries to brush off his praise he crowds up against her, pulls her behind a stack of shelves and kisses her?
Then Steve, who is not dating Peggy, shows up… and yells… at Peggy
Storms off in a way that implies she needs to apologise to him, to make it up to him. Implies she’s stupid for not being able to navigate situations with men better… then when she tries to be sweet and friendly again, Steve fires a gun at her multiple times, in a room full of people, while she’s holding a shield whose efficacy he has no information about?? Endangering her life and humiliating her??
And we’d be supposed to go ‘Wow! what a Guy!’
Ludicrous.
Personally, I’ve always found the claim that Peggy ‘saw’ Steve before the serum to be more than a bit suspect.
Firstly:
Because Steve himself says that their conversation in the car, right before his transformation, is the first time they’ve ever spoken…
But this is definitely the second time they’ve been in a car together (remember after the flag retrieve, the ‘prize’ was riding back to base in the car with Peggy?)
So, she sat in the car with him in silence? Refused to talk to him? Or just didn’t make an attempt? She wasn’t driving, does that mean she didn’t talk to Steve or the driver, or just the driver and ignored Steve??
So…
How, exactly, has Peggy been appreciating him, if she won’t even speak to him?
Secondly:
She doesn’t touch him at all until almost immediately after he beefs up? I know it’s an ad-lib of H.A.’s but it’s canon, now, so…
Thirdly:
In the car, when pre-serum Steve is describing his life in Brooklyn, she is critical (asking why he didn’t run away, why is he so hopeless, etc.)
But like half an hour later, now that he’s buff, she’s saying Erskine would have been proud it was Steve the serum worked on.
Which, 1) demonstrates Erskine appreciated Steve, not her,
2) where was all this ass-kissing when Smol Steve was sitting right next to her in the car, being self-deprecating?? Or when Smol Steve was sitting right next to her in the car at Camp Lehigh, having just demonstrated some ass-kiss-worthy Smarts?
Fourthly:
We’re supposed to take Peggy saying ‘you were meant for more than this’ as a sign of her uniquely appreciative view of Steve…
But it’s not Peggy who first uses that phrasing, she’s quoting someone else.
Guess who?
Steve.
When Erskine is shot, Steve is the one who says ‘He deserved more than this.’
And that sucks for two reasons,
1) it puts her ‘belief’ in Steve in the same symbolic camp as Erskine’s science, as if it’s not really about Steve’s worth it’s more like she’s saying ‘Erskine’s serum was meant for than this.’
And this holds true even later on, when Philips is accusing Peggy of acting as she has because of having a crush, and she says it’s not that, it’s that she had faith… Well, okay, but faith in what, specifically? It’s not explicitly Steve Himself she says she has faith in, we’re just left to infer that. She could still be saying ‘I had faith in the serum’. (She could so easily I have said ‘I have faith in him.’ Or they could’ve done a nice, ‘I had faith’ ‘In what?’ ‘In Steve’ back-and-forth. But she/they didn’t.)
Whereas Bucky goes out of his way, even to the point of correcting Steve, to implicitly state that it’s Steve he believes in and will follow, not the Other Guy. He specifically reduces post-serum Captain America body to ‘an outfit’, not a person.
2) We’re supposed to think that Steve finds Peggy’s proclamation inspiring…
But when Steve asks her if she means what she says (as if it’s important to him), and she confirms, he immediately follows with ‘Then you got to let me go.’ Because at that point it looks like Peggy is going to hamper his attempts to go and retrieve Bucky.
We don’t know that he gives a damn whether she believes in him or not; because he’s just using her own words as a trap to stop her interfering!
Fifthly:
Peggy didn’t choose that photo of pre-serum Steve; it was just the only photo in his file, at the end of the First Avenger, when she looked in there. So it’s the only photo she had access to.
Now, if there had been two photos of Steve, one of post-serum and one pre-serum, and she had deliberately chosen the pre-serum…
There is a humor subreditt ‘Men Writing Women’ and it’s hilarious. One of the common tropes men writers seem to love is ‘beautiful woman walks in the room and all the other women automatically hate her because they are jealous’. Most of the women posters dismissed the idea. Most adult, mature, well-adjusted women don’t hate a woman simply because she’s pretty. We might hate her because she turns out to be a bitch, but not because of her looks. One man said he honestly used to believe that, but looking back, none of the ‘real’ women he knew acted like that. Pretty woman walks in the room, other women attempt to make friends with her. He wondered if it was because if the situation were reversed (handsome man walks in the room) some men would see him as ‘competition’ and just assumed women reacted the same.
And disclaimer-I might be one of the few who didn’t care for Steggy. Didn’t hate it, it was okay for what it was, and I’m not really a big fan of Atwell either, don’t know why. She was okay in that Winnie-the Pooh movie, but not much else.
I like Peggy fine. But these are all valid points. Steve wasn’t a player. He was a guy who was just trying to figure it out after everything. And Peggy assumed stuff about him that wasn’t true. It annoys me.
The analysis just keeps getting better and better.
This was always a scene that bothered me. Peggy barely knows him. But now that he has muscles, she wants to be possessive AF even though she’s never made a move or said a word to him about feeling some type of way. That in itself is OOC for Peggy. Then she has a violent outburst where literally everyone in the room could have been hurt or killed… and there is absolutely no kind of repercussion for it either. In that time, in this time, in any freaking time, discharging a weapon repeatedly in that situation would get you reprimanded in multiple ways. I’m talking psych evaluation, dishonorable discharge, possibly even incarceration. She. Discharged. A weapon. Repeatedly. At a person. At an innocent person. On purpose. And fans praised it. If during that scene in the plane, Steve thought Peggy and Howard were fondue-ing, and he got violent like that on either of him, the whole fandom would go batfuck crazy on how Steve is just another violent possessive male or some other tangent. Yet overall, they praise her for being some kind of take-charge badass who goes after what/who she wants when she fires that weapon at Steve. NO. Just NO. Stop that backwards thinking. What she did was never ever okay.
