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bookishwenchI've been reading and writing a fair amount of Frostiron of late, and it's gotten me thinking about CA:CW, particularly the feud between those in favor of the Sokovia Accords and those against them. Here's the thing. I tend to side with Steve's view that having an external group decide when and where the Avengers should intervene and how is a bad idea. However, upon looking at things, I'm starting to agree with Tony in a way. The problem is, both of them are right.
Tony Stark, in addition to being a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, is a genuinely good person. His drive is to make people as safe as possible, at least in part because of his experiences of seeing what his weapons were doing against American troops and their allies. He was horrified by Obadiah Stane's betrayal and by Stark Industries weapons being used by terrorists. Honestly, I think the idea that his weapons were hurting the very people he intended them to protect is at least as big of a trigger of his PTSD as his torture by the Ten Rings. His worst nightmare, pulled from his brain by Wanda, is of failing to protect the Avengers as well as the rest of the Earth, fully believing that he has that power, which, arguably, he may. As I stated, this is a good person, but even good people make mistakes.
Tony's character flaws have been cited by a lot of different people as different things. Some claim he is immature, others that he can be petty, prideful, that he's self-indulgent, a womanizer, or incapable of viewing situations objectively. Under the right circumstances, all of those can be true, but they aren't his chief, main fault. In my opinion, his hamartia is his desire to avoid personal responsibility. He is entirely capable of feeling acute guilt. He wants to fix situations, sometimes to the extreme that he goes too far. Ultron is a perfect example of this. Faced with the possibility that he has not done enough to protect everyone, he creates an AI that comes very close to bringing about his worst fears. Largely, Ultron is an attempt to replace the Avengers, particularly Iron Man, with a so-called perfect defender that will handle crises on its own. Rather than having to field every potential threat personally, Tony builds something to handle them without his input, leaving him out of the loop except, perhaps, for maintenance.
This goes further. In Iron Man 3, Tony blows up all of his suits because he wants to walk away from being a hero. He believes destroying them will make everyone safer, particularly Pepper, who was almost murdered by a rival genius. He is aware there will continue to be dangers, but he wants out of his current situation so he can have a more normal life with Pepper. Who can blame him for this? He is an emotional, mental, and possibly physical wreck after nearly dying in The Avengers. He is screwed up, and he knows it. He sees destroying the Iron Man suits as his way of going back to being someone who doesn't shoulder that burden. He's done enough and it’s someone else’s turn, and he focuses his genius on figuring out a way to safely remove his Arc Reactor, a constant reminder of Iron Man, and becoming symbolically fully human again.
Of course, that does not last. After remaining completely out of the next three films, Tony reappears in Age of Ultron with rebuilt suits and without Pepper. The Arc Reactor is still gone, but he is fully part of the Avengers again. Exactly how this progressed offscreen is left fairly vague, but the upshot is Tony felt compelled to continue to help. He doesn’t want the responsibility, but he takes it, even when he realizes it’s diametrically opposed to his health and happiness. Again, I stress, this is a good person. The problem comes when he creates Ultron. He thinks he can do practically anything, and within the confines of the Marvel universe, he seems to be pretty close to correct. The problem is “anything” includes creating something that is capable of destroying this universe and every other one into the bargain, as shown in What If…?. Ultron is a direct result of Tony’s pride, and it’s a huge mistake on his part as well as Bruce Banner’s, so big that neither of them can quite seem to take full responsibility for it. When Steve points out that Tony never should have acted alone on this, he’s right. Bruce at least seems to believe he was wrong, but Tony steadfastly states that the idea behind Ultron was right and only the execution of it was wrong.
As is usually the case with Tony, when confronted with the reality of what he has done, he feels guilt. In this case, when the mother of a young man who was killed in Sokovia blames him and the rest of the Avengers for his death, Tony reacts by deciding that not only should he no longer be able to make decisions regarding Iron Man, but all the Avengers should join together to give their autonomy over to an outside international panel. He shows footage to them of the damage he says they have all caused, leading to several of them, most notably Wanda, feeling guilt. The problem with this is that Sokovia’s destruction falls squarely on the shoulders of Bruce and Tony. The others were working to save lives, and they succeeded in not only stopping the “extinction level event” but in evacuating the city, costing Pietro his life. The lives that were lost were not because of the Avengers as a whole but because of Bruce and Tony’s invention of Ultron. As for the rest of the montage put forward later in favor of signing the accords, none of the Avengers were responsible for the Chitauri invasion, the explosion at the Triskelion was done in order to stop HYDRA from killing millions, and they were not responsible for the bomb vest that was detonated. Wanda did move the bomber in the wrong direction, but the direct responsibility for the blast lies with Rumlow.
What this means is that Tony Stark is guilt ridden over the deaths caused by Ultron and therefore believes he should be told what to do by committee rather than making independent decisions. Interestingly, this is exactly the opposite decision that Natasha Romanov and Nick Fury came to in the first Iron Man film. They decided he should not be an Avenger because, for lack of a better phrase, he doesn’t play well with others. SHIELD actually did not want him, only Iron Man itself on occasion. To some extent, Tony’s awareness that he has a tendency to overestimate his ability to control situations and has difficulty in refraining from recklessness, leading to an inability to fully think through some of his decisions, does point towards the need for some oversight. So, where’s the problem? Actually, there are two.
The first issue is Tony assumes what is true for him is true for everyone else, thus not simply agreeing to the accords by himself but insisting all the Avengers do likewise. He makes the jump that everyone else has the same issues he does. This simply isn’t true. No one else has created a giant murder-bot on accident. Most of the Avengers do have the ability to realize when they are treading dangerous, hubris-laced waters. Tony is the one with the problem. It’s a bit like the one person who is diabetic deciding everyone needs to change their diet.
Added to this is the huge issue of who is doing the controlling and whether they are going to make better decisions than the Avengers. Even if they do succeed in being a just and fair body, something that is neither automatically a permanent situation nor easy to define, wouldn’t the Avengers still be just as culpable for following the orders of the group when something inevitably goes wrong? And it will go wrong. This does nothing to fix the problem of innocents ending up dead. Remember that the last time an outside group disagreed with the Avengers, New York almost wound up the victim of a nuclear bomb sent by the controlling party. Tony’s and Nick Fury’s choice to intervene despite being ordered not to is what stopped a disaster from occurring.
On the flip side of this argument is Steve Rogers, nearly the embodiment of self-control, or at least that’s how it seems. Tony, usually a rebel, embraces the accords, while Steve, usually regarded as being a good soldier and following orders, is completely opposed to them, and he has good reason. Steve is aware that those in command don’t always know what they’re doing, and he has faced the reality of betrayal repeatedly.
Steve is also a very good man, but this is sometimes misinterpreted as naivety. Frankly, this has always confused me. Steve was a Brooklyn kid who grew up during the Depression, lost both parents by age eighteen, then went on to fight a war. There is no part of that sentence that suggests he’s naïve. Yes, he was originally plagued with diseases and was short and skinny. This certainly didn’t make his life easier; if anything, quite the contrary. Steve has been exposed to the worst sides of humanity repeatedly, but his heart remains in the right place. Erskine figured out that Steve’s greatest asset was his goodness, which only increased with the serum.
Additionally, Steve was a member of the Army, but his experiences both there and with SHIELD are far more likely to convince him that his autonomous choices are the best option rather than following the orders of a group placed over him. Steve joins the military for one reason: he doesn’t like bullies. He wants to fight against evil, and he wants it so much they he becomes guilty of a federal crime multiple times by lying on his rejected enlistment forms. He has a wide variety of illnesses, any one of which would have precluded his ability to join the military by the rules, but he puts his own rules first, resulting in impressing Erskine with his courage and determination and winding up receiving the Super Soldier Serum. It is by not doing what he was told but following his own instincts that he succeeded.
After this, with the destruction of Erskine’s formula, his superior officers believed the best way Steve, a genetically enhanced warrior with nearly limitless skill, could fight the war was by being a war bond spokesman in a travelling musical review. The idiocy of this decision is so extreme that it borders on insanity. Steve originally grudgingly follows along, believing his options are being locked in a lab or this, until it’s revealed his friend Bucky has been captured along with many other soldiers. At this point, Steve goes completely off script and raids a HYDRA base, successfully freeing all the prisoners, including Bucky. He presents himself for disciplinary action on his return because he knew his decision would have consequences and he is willing to accept them despite the fact it is obvious his decision-making ability was greater than that of his commanding officers’ (and with the serum, his IQ almost certainly dwarfs theirs). This is the second specific time having others make his decisions for him and tell him what to do proved incorrect.
Finally, after waking from his coma, Steve begins works for SHIELD only to expose that it has been infiltrated by HYDRA since its inception. Once again, Steve has found that the highest echelons giving him orders are corrupt. The level of betrayal he feels is immense, and he is once again reminded that taking the responsibility of thinking for himself is preferable to following orders blindly, even if guilt comes with it.
In The Avengers, after the apparent death of Phil Coulson, Steve confronts Tony regarding his reaction to Phil’s death. Steve comes to the conclusion Tony has never lost anyone he worked with before which, with the exception of Obadiah Stane’s betrayal, is true. He has lost his parents, but he does not hold himself responsible for their deaths as he believes they were killed in a random automobile accident. He does, however, blame himself so strongly for his immature behavior and inability to express his love for them, particularly his father, that he invests millions in a therapy tool to allow him to experience going back and doing what he wished he would have done earlier on the night that they died. The difference occurs again here. Steve sees that losing soldiers and even civilian casualties in a war is horrible but inevitable, and while he carries guilt from that, he shoulders the responsibility realistically by knowing that he did what he could to save lives, not take them. Tony, on the other hand, reacts to the loss of a friend or family member with guilt, believing that he personally is responsible for at least some part of this to the point that he needs outside, impartial oversight to prevent anything like this from happening.
The problem is there is absolutely no proof that oversight in the Marvel universe works. Multiple examples of it failing spectacularly do exist, many of which Steve has experienced firsthand. Steve is aware that he has to make his own moral decisions and cannot pass that responsibility to someone else. Tony, for his part, has come to the conclusion that his pride puts him at risk of making moral decisions that have horrible repercussions that he does not consider beforehand, and it would therefore be better to turn over his autonomy to others more capable of discerning the larger picture of right and wrong.
In CA:CW, the respective outcomes of these two opposing opinions are seen. Tony, confronted with the information that Bucky murdered Stark’s parents while under someone else’s control, seeks to kill Bucky as an act of vengeance despite the fact he had no free will. He was answering to a commanding group that told him what he could or could not do, in some ways precisely as Tony wanted to do with the Sokovia Accords. In spite of this, Tony continues to see Bucky as personally responsible despite his independence being nonexistent. James Buchanan Barnes can remember every one of his missions, all of which were devoid of the possibility of overruling the commands from his controllers except for his last one. The sole time he manages to have free will was due to Steve’s intervention.
Steve, on the other hand, spends most of Civil War as a fugitive, hiding Bucky from the authorities who believe he has knowingly assassinated multiple people, including the king of Wakanda, prompting the king’s son, T’Challa, to seek his own vengeance for his murdered father, paralleling Tony’s eventual revelation. Steve looks at the evidence and comes to the conclusion it was not Bucky who committed the crimes despite a variety of authorities telling him otherwise, including Tony, who is already angry at Steve for not signing the accords. When it’s revealed that the real killer, Zemo, posed as Bucky for the sole purpose of punishing the Avengers for the death of his family in Wakanda, Tony repents his actions until he realizes that Bucky had murdered his parents, at which point he tries to kill him. This prompts a fight between Tony and Steve, culminating in Steve choosing not to kill Tony even with threats leveled at him and Bucky, instead slamming his shield through his Arc Reactor, which now powers only his suit, not his heart, effectively immobilizing Iron Man. Steve wins, but when Tony demands that he return the shield his father had given him, claiming he doesn’t deserve it, Steve accepts the consequences of his actions, dropping it as he leaves.
In the finale of the film, Steve sends a letter and a phone to Tony, offering his future help and explaining that even in the military he never truly felt he belonged. Steve is ultimately a loner, though a loner with unwavering loyalty, both to Bucky and to Tony. He then goes off to break the law again by freeing the Avengers who sided with him and who have been imprisoned.
Tony, on the other hand, is last seen ignoring the call about the breakout and attempting to help his friend Rhodey, injured earlier in the film while fighting for Tony. Tony is trying to repair damage in both cases. Eventually, his own sense of personal responsibility and self-sacrifice leads him to willingly make a choice that leads to his death in exchange for the life of everyone else.
Ultimately, both Steve and Tony are correct. The Sokovia Accords are necessary within the bounds of the Marvel universe in some cases, but they are not a tool to circumnavigate personal responsibility, autonomous choice, or independent thinking. Taken to one extreme, the surrender of personal power to a group can lead to Bucky’s puppet-life as an assassin. Taken to the other, the lack of accountability can lead to Ultron and the end of all life. Neither outcome is desirable. T’Challa, who eventually puts aside revenge when he realizes it almost led him to kill an innocent man, tells his father’s actual killer that he will no longer seek vengeance but will instead deliver him to the authorities for his crimes, seems to show this balance most clearly.
Looking at it logically, the accords simply couldn’t work for some of the Avengers, even if they wanted it to. While Bruce Banner may be easily restrained by a committee, how would they oversee the Hulk? Thor isn’t even present on Earth a large portion of the time, yet a group of humans intends to tell him what he can do? Clint has chosen to retire, but could the committee compel him to return if they choose? In the future, other elements are going to join the Avengers that could not be foreseen, but it’s a logical jump that other beings with unexpected backgrounds might be included. Instead, the only option that seems reasonable is for the Avengers to hold one another responsible, realizing they are neither culpable for every possible tragedy nor capable of ignoring the importance of consulting one another. The only group capable of controlling the Avengers is the Avengers.
