Steve dealing with casualties vs. Tony dealing with casualties
That’s because Steve is an actual trained soldier who has a couple of years of active combat during wartime under his belt, and Tony is a well intentioned rich dude in a fancy suit. It’s almost literally night and day, war v. peace. Steve has a much healthier perspective, to be honest, for their line of work.
That’s…such a bad analysis.
Steve has an incredibly bad perspective for a peacetime officer. His whole perspective is that they try to save as many people as they can, but ultimately people die in the course of their ultimate goal: ending the “war”. Meanwhile Tony’s ultimate goal is to save people, that’s it. There is no ideology behind him truly, only the desire to save people’s lives.
There’s a scene in some generic foreign cop show, I can’t remember which, where an ex-soldier joins a precinct and on duty he and his partner chase down a perp. The perp is a violent offender and he runs down and alley and out into a street. There’s a few cars, a few pedestrians, but overall it’s not crowded. The ex-soldier has a shot on the perp, even though there’s a good few metres between them. He stops running, lines up his shot, and prepares to fire.
His partner stops him, shoves his gun down and screams at him for, well, they cut away but it’s implied a pretty freaking long time.
Because it’s not okay. There are different rules when you deal with civilians instead of soldiers. You do not have the freedom to make potentially lethal judgment calls. It doesn’t matter how confident this man was in his judgement, it’s not his judgement to make.
Police officers making judgment calls outside of what they should be allowed is literally every criticism against the police force you will find.
Soldiers do not make good law enforcement.
The real conversation in civil war is about needs. Is it peacetime? Then no, Steve can’t do whatever he wants. But is this wartime? Has the threat reaches critical that soldiers are needed, and are allowed to violate civilian rights in the name of restoring peace? Because then that’s different.
Literally a summation of civil war is that tony has the right perspective for a peacetime officer, while Steve has the right perspective for a wartime officer. It’s deciding what condition the world is in where the lines blur.
But please dear god don’t reduce iron man’s character to “a rich dude with good intentions”. Iron man’s character is so complicated people literally write papers on it.
“Tony has the right perspective for a peacetime officer, while Steve has the right perspective for a wartime officer.” This is the best analysis of their characters I have ever read!!!
Sometimes I like to torture myself by thinking of that time in The Foxhole Court when they’re playing the first game against Breckenridge and Andrew says to Neil, “‘Hey, Pinocchio,’… ‘This one’s for you.’”
When I first read that, I thought it was Andrew referring to Neil being a liar. But looking back, I realized it’s more than that: Neil at the beginning of the story is not a real boy. He’s a puppet–of his mother, his father, his own need to survive even if that means he doesn’t really live–who has spent years not able to be a real person. He doesn’t even cry when he burns his mother’s body, unable to let himself feel real emotions. And Pinocchio in the book even changes his identity several times, much as Neil does.
It fucks me up that Andrew recognizes this at the beginning. It’s not just that he knows Neil is a liar; it’s that he knows Neil is struggling between staying a puppet and becoming real. He keeps trying to give Neil incentive to stay and make himself live: the keys, the shared cigarettes, the shared truths, being willing to be someone Neil leans on but not someone who pulls his strings. Andrew is not Geppetto; he’s The Fairy With Turquoise Hair, the one to whom Neil promises to become real and the one who makes him real in the end.
Over the course of the books, with the support and belief of the Foxes, and with his own determination to take a stand and plant his feet for the people he cares about, Neil becomes his true self. He becomes able to feel, to love, and that love turns him real. And it is Andrew, in the end, who tells him that yes, he can leave Nathaniel Wesninski–the puppet–behind and become Neil Josten, the real boy.
One of the big themes in Blue Lily, Lily Blue was that of the three sleepers along the ley line. Of course, the third sleeper, the one not to be woken, proved to be a demon, and the middle sleeper was presumably Gwenllian, though in the closing chapters of Blue Lily Adam wonders if it might have been himself, in a metaphorical sense.
But what about the first sleeper?
After all, the characters assumed that it was Glendower all through the series, but The Raven King revealed that Glendower was dead, not sleeping, all along. So if it wasn’t Glendower, who was the first sleeper?
We were given the answer all the way back in Blue Lily, Lily Blue chapter 15. While communicating with Cabeswater, Adam draws three tarot cards, each representing one of the three sleepers: the Devil, for the demon, the Empress, for Gwenllian, and Death. What else—who else—does the Death card represent in this series?
Gansey. All the way back in the reading in The Raven Boys, he drew it as the card to represent himself. And after all, all times are equal on the ley line, so theoretically, Gansey was always sleeping on the ley line, throughout the entire series. And if you need more convincing:
Calla tells Blue that it’s her job, specifically, to wake one of the sleepers (BLLB ch17). And guess what Blue does at the end of The Raven King:
I know the popular theory on how Thanos knew Tony’s name is ~the soul stone~
… but I love the idea that Tony has been inside Thanos’s head for six years just like Thanos has been inside Tony’s head for six years. Given how much they’ve been pushing parallels, it honestly wouldn’t surprise me.
Imagine Thanos waking up from a nightmare. He’s covered in a cold sweat, pulling the bed sheets tight around his shoulders. He starts rocking back and forth–
“Stark is out there…” he whispers under his breath. His purple ass is shook. ‘Cause he knows there’s this guy out there who is gonna fuck his shit up one day.
Like the idea of this big, bad Titan fretting over this goober:
Saaaaame! I really don’t think it’s all the Soul Stone – he was warned about humans not being as weak as they presumed after the Battle of New York. I’m pretty sure he’d wanna know more about the guy that took down his army.
I wanna know if Thanos sent some scouts to get some information about the meddling fucker who blew up his Chitauri warship.
What if Thanos’s scout pulled up videos of Tony from the Internet? The ones where Tony doesn’t have his clothes on?
Thanos sits there, pouring over Tony’s sex tapes and other drunken exploits, and he’s like, “………….. this is it? this is the guy??”
What if like Tony also, he doesn’t know of his name? Only remembering this silhouette of gleaming gold and red armor that delivered tremendous destruction to his army. Much like Tony who was traumatized by space after that, Thanos is shook at the sight of full bodied armors like Tony’s. His fear build up, constructing this image of a fearsome opponent that await him on some supposedly backwater planet.
He knew of Tony’s presence but not his name. He knew somewhere on Earth, there would be this person who would be powerful enough to destroy his armada again but he can’t chicken out now.
While I like the concept of Thanos sending the scout and finding those hilarious tapes, I want to build up the parallel of him and Tony who are aware of each other’s presence but not their name until the very battle itself.
Thanos only know of Tony’s name using the Soul stone. They each finally know the name to put on the fear that had been gripping them for the past six years.
Yes exactly. I wonder if Thanos had these haunting images, maybe even nightmares, of this armored angel from Earth who ripped his entire fleet to shreds.
If Thanos worried that, one day, the red and gold man would come to stand in his way again.
Maybe that’s why Thanos reassured Tony with the line “When I’m done, half of humanity will still be alive.” Thanos knew Tony was Earth’s Best Defender. That Tony was protecting Earth to the best of his ability. And Thanos gave Tony that reassurance as a gift because Tony – this human, this small, little mortal – rattled him. Even drew blood from his near indestructible hide.
That’s why Thanos was going to use all four stones. To 100% make sure the threat Tony posed was gone for good. Heck, Thanos even seemed to hesitate sparing Tony’s life for the Time Stone. Maybe because it was hard to let the possibility stand this red and gold armored angel would come back with avengence.
… and letting Tony live is gonna bite Thanos in the ass.
You know what? Between The Avengers and Avengers: Infinity War, I’d love it if Thanos actually sent an Outrider to Earth to find out all it could about the man who had sent the missile that destroyed the Chitauri mothership.
In the Infinity comic event, Thanos had done something similar. He sent an Outrider to invade Black Bolt’s mind to find out where the Illuminati were hiding the infinity gems.
It’d make sense if Tony was having his mind repeatedly violated by an invisible, sentient creature every night: that could explain why the nightmares in Iron Man 3 were so vivid, so realistic, to the point Tony said he couldn’t sleep. It’d also feed into the idea above that Tony was inside Thanos’ head just as much as the other way round.
Thanos is an intergalactic despot. His army had razed worlds far more advanced than Earth. At the beginning of the Avengers, the Other says:
The Tesseract has awakened. It is on a little world, a human world. They would wield its power, but our ally knows its workings as they never will. He is ready to lead, and our force, our Chitauri, will follow. A world will be his. The universe, yours. And the humans, what can they do but burn?
From the outset, Thanos and Co assumed the fight would be over in a snap (excuse the pun). Then, the next time we see the Other, who was Thanos’ de facto mouthpiece in that film, he says this:
Other: The Chitauri grow restless.
Loki: Let them gird themselves. I will lead them in the glorious battle.
Other: Battle? Against the meagre might of Earth?
Even at this point, Thanos is confident that Earth will fall with little resistance and the Space stone would be his.
Finally, after the Chitauri are defeated, the Other says:
Humans. They are not the cowering wretches we were promised. They stand. They are unruly, and therefore cannot be ruled. To challenge them is to court death.
And we know Thanos leers at the camera in the end shot. But the Avengers film ended in a massive blow to Thanos because it took out his entire army. The same army that destroyed Gamora’s planet with little to no resistance. Since the Chitauri all died Phantom Menace style, I’d think they have a central hive mind, which was on the ship that the nuke destroyed.
Which is why we don’t hear from Thanos for six years. If he had a backup army, wouldn’t they have found a way to Earth before Infinity War? That makes me think Thanos and the Black Order had to regroup and rebuild the army – this time with the Outriders. They don’t have a hive mind and they’re created explicitly for one purpose alone – destruction. Proxima even says in Wakanda that they have blood to spare.
It’s also interesting to me that Thanos saves Earth for last in his gems quest. He goes to Xandar, which you’d think would be technologically more advanced, to retrieve the power stone, then tracks the Asgardians for the space stone, then he heads to Knowhere for the reality stone and Vormir for the soul stone. It just so happens that when he arrives on Titan, he finds the time stone waiting for him. At any point after acquiring the power and space stone, Thanos could’ve gone to Earth. But he didn’t. He sent the Black Order instead – even though he calls them his children, Thanos only ever cares for Gamora. So the Black Order is actually dispensible to him, hence are sent to retrieve the time and mind stone.
Thanos leaves Earth last because he knows (“cursed with knowledge”) that the planet is a formidable adversary, that there’s a man out there named Stark who single-handedly destroyed his entire army. (Because Thanos obviously wouldn’t know that Tony flew the nuke through the portal to first save Manhattan. The destruction of the Chitauri was an added bonus. He’d think it was Stark’s idea to come through the portal and take out the Chitauri.)
Thanos is a strategist. Thor even alludes to this in AoU when he says someone is playing an intricate game. So I’d assume he’d respect another good, albeit accidental, strategist and that’s why he says he respects Tony. Because in his eyes, Tony didn’t hesitate to indiscrimately kill the Chitauri to save his home. He spilled blood to save Earth, something Thanos couldn’t do for Titan.
I absolutely love the idea of Tony being Thanos’ boogeyman just like Thanos had been Tony’s.
Edit: As @starkravinghazelnuts pointed out, the Other tells Thanos at the end of Avengers that to challenge the humans is to court death. And what’s one of Tony’s nickname again? Yep, the Merchant of Death. Ajsksllsdkkdnsas.
One thing is certain. The druids, Kilgarrah and the followers of the Old Religion drove Arthur to his death, using Merlin as the domino to set things in motion.
They claimed to be seeking the time of Arthur, the time of the Once and Future King, when magic would be free and restored. But the actions they took, the ‘wisdom’ they imparted, were directly involved in sealing his doom.
Merlin and Arthur would have been fine on their own, would probably have lived happily ever after, had kilgarah not poisoned his mind against Mordred and Morgana, when they were both still innocent and inclined towards good.
Morgana would not have learned of her true heritage had it not been for the seer pressuring a reluctant Merlin into gazing into the crystals at the Crystal Cave, and therefore ensuring that he would cause the future they had shown him.
Merlin is used as the instrument in ensuring Arthur’s downfall.
And I can’t think of a crueler fate than a man who was devoted to his king so completely, having eternity to come to the realization that it was those who were supposed to help him, his mentors in magic and his destiny, that made him an instrument in killing his dearest friend.
For someone who is self destructive and willing to sacrifice it all, Keith wasn’t really ready to die in the last episode of s4
Because Keith is ONE of those things and not the other – he IS willing to sacrifice it all but he ISNT self destructive, and they’re not mutually inclusive. He believes in the bigger picture – and that sometimes you have to sacrifice to further the cause (the fight for freedom) but he isn’t self destructive. He very much WANTS to live, to find meaning and find reason. He could’ve self destructed when he lost Shiro and ended up in the desert but even as lost and broken as he was he still searched for meaning. He could’ve thrown it all to the wind, rose his hiveebike into the sunset and looked to live day to day and hour to hour, not caring what came of it. Instead he fought to stay relevant to his own life, to find meaning even when things were bleakest for him, and to SURVIVE.
I think that people see Keith’s tendency to give it all and throw himself into dangerous situations and forget the reason behind why he did so, and forget that Keith is a survivor. Becauae he is a survivor and if there is an option to survive he will do so. The only times he throws himself head first into danger is when he sees a chance to further their cause – to fight Zarkon (it’s his chance to end it all) to chase down Lotor and stop him despite the circumstances, and even when he is ready to dive into that shield. It’s not because he doesn’t value himself, but because he values the Cause more. He leaves the team because of it too – because he wants what’s best not for himself but for Voltron and ultimately for the battle they’re fighting and the people they’re protecting.
Funnily, Keith explains himself very clearly very early in the series – Pidge wants to leave for her family and Keith blows up because EVERYONE has a family. It’s not so much an attack as frustration that she can’t seem to understand what he does – that there are so many families lives at stake and they’re the ones who’ve been chosen to protect them. (should he have blown up at her? Not really but it’s Keith).
Keith will always put the goal before himself, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t value himself or that he’s self destructive, it’s just that he sees worth in what they’re fighting for and believes he should do whatever it takes to help them reach that goal.
I think I’m a little resistant to the “Lance is actually a genius” headcanon because a. it implies that a character can’t be useful unless they’re super intelligent and b. part of Lance’s charm is that he’s not an expert in anything. He’s all about practical knowledge.
Like, listen, Lance could never fix an engine, but when something goes wrong with their ship in episode one, he knows exactly what the problem is. He can’t fight as well as Keith, but when they need to wreck those Galra ships on the Balmera, he comes up with a plan that’ll take out the most. He probably couldn’t write a code or do all the funky math stuff Pidge does, but he can calculate the number of vargas they have to wait until they’re able to go into the Marmora base.
Lance’s thing is “okay what do we need?” Lance doesn’t have to fix a ship, he just needs to know enough to tell Hunk what to fix. He doesn’t have to know crazy math, he just needs to know enough to know whether Coran and Allura are talking about a minute or an hour so he doesn’t get killed during a mission. And he doesn’t have to be an incredible fighter, he just needs to come up with the best way to stop the ships from taking off without hurting the Balmera– ie, close the door.
Lance isn’t super book smart or amazing at flying or fighting; he’s a creative little shit who’s good at asking practical questions: Do I need to know this or can someone help me with it? Would knowing this help someone else? and Is there an easier way to do this? He’s really good at knowing what he needs to know and putting things together based on what he has. Rover’s here, but Pidge isn’t with it and it’s beeping? Yikes, that’s a bomb. The queen seems to be out of a trance and says she didn’t mind control us? Must be that creepy snake I was asking about earlier.
He’s perceptive. He looks for simple solutions to difficult problems. He’s aware that he’s not the best at everything, so he uses any resource he has to his advantage, whether it be things in his environment (yo his fight against Hunk in the Depths was nice) or people. In the comics when Pidge has to fight a mind controlled team Voltron, she calls Lance a “top priority” because he has good range and is likely to team up with others. Lance actively seeks the help of other people when he can and distances himself from problems when he can’t so that he can come up with a different solution.
I honestly think that his biggest strength is that he’s not a genius in the way the other members of the team are. Because it makes him take full advantage of what he does have.
Lance is the quintessential jack-of-all-trades: he’s not exceptional at any one thing (unless possibly sharpshooting), but he’s good enough at a LOT of things that he’s a very useful guy to have around. Even if he personally doesn’t necessarily have the technical skill to accomplish what he needs, he can provide ideas or partial solutions to almost any problem he encounters. His versatility and practical thinking are, in and of themselves, exceptional.
He’s also, as you said, perceptive, particularly with people. His disastrous attempts to flirt aside, Lance is clearly the best out of the Paladins at functioning in social situations (Hunk arguably is a close second, but he’s generally more shy and nervous around strangers, while Lance is able to dive right in). Lance is able to make snap decisions about people and when he isn’t being blinded by a pretty face, he’s usually pretty spot on. He’s good at understanding the dynamics of the people around him.
I don’t know which headcanons/metas/whatever you’ve specifically seen or are referring to, but for me at least, when I talk about Lance being really smart, I don’t mean it in the same way that I do when I talk about Pidge or Hunk. I do make it a point to talk about his intelligence, though, because I believe Lance has a kind of intelligence that is sorely under appreciated, both by people in real life and by his fellow fictional characters.
no, you guys don’t understand how much i adore steve and billy’s fight at the byer’s house
because it says so much about steve’s character
mostly that he’s a terrible fighter, but that’s because he’s a protector
billy literally knocks him on his ass the first time they tousle, and the only time steve gets in a clear punch is when it’s to get billy away from lucas
after that, billy’s attention shifts from lucas to steve again, he wants his shot at taking down the almighty “king steve”, and steve quite literally gets the shit beaten out of him
steve barely puts up a fight when billy first knocks him down, because he isn’t a fighter
he gets in a good swing at billy when he’s threatening lucas, but after that it’s kind of like his brain just short circuits and goes now what? because it’s just been set at getting billy the fuck away from lucas, and once billy starts swinging at steve’s pride he topples over like a tower of pebbles, because that’s not something he’s particularly concerned about protecting
steve only has a fighting instinct when it’s connected to his protecting instinct
and we saw this already in season one, at the last fight he fought at the byer’s house, against the demogorgon
steve is freaking out (”this is crazy this is crazy this is crazy this is crazy this is CRAZY” i love my disaster son), and just flees, ass over teakettle, but once he realizes that that means abandoning jonathan and nancy with the demogorgon, he comes in swingin’, and beats the shit out of that motherfucker
steve harrington can’t fight to save his pride, or to set an example, or to just be the aggressor
the only time steve is a capable fighter is when it’s meant to protect those he cares about
(and now that i’m preparing the seasons anyway, let’s talk about steve and his bat, always on the front line, always keeping the ones he loves at his back, whether it be jonathan and nancy or his kids)
and i just love steve harrington and his bigass heart and the fact that he just cares so much, okay??
clintbbarton 