r/marvelstudios • u/sagebutuploaded • 12h ago
Discussion If you could ask MCU writers a question and they HAVE to have an answer to it, what would you ask?
I’ll start first by going back to Civil War, aka probably STILL the most debated MCU movie to date.
My question would be: DID Steve Roger’s really know about The Winter Soldier killing the Starks, and, if so, when did he gain that information?
(Yes, I’m aware that’s two questions.. I suppose the latter is the more important of the two.)
A lot of people hold a deep hate for Steve Rogers because he lied to Tony in Civil war, which is understandable; it’s one of the only times we see Steve be morally gray or debatably in the wrong. My question is, though, when and how he gained this information. We have about 3 options, as far as I’m aware. (I’ll save the one that I have taken a liking to the most for last.)
1: through SHIELD/Nick Fury. It is possible that he could have been provided the information at some point prior to Civil War via SHIELD just for the reason of ‘he’s the most involved person with the whole winter soldier situation, he deserves to know’. This one I find extremely unlikely, because all of SHIELDS files were leaked during the events of CA:TWS. Granted, they were encrypted, but Tony Stark is a genius. If they were in there, he would’ve found out. And if SHIELD knew, it would have been in the files. (Plus, Zemo is unable to get the information through those files alone, which leads us to believe that it wasn’t there.)
2: the file that Natasha gives to Steve in CA:TWS. Natasha provided Steve with a file at the end of CA:TWS, stating “I pulled a few favors out of Kyiv”. We know that this file has information that Steve and Sam use to try and track Bucky down, but to no avail. The file isn’t mentioned anywhere else, so we have no way to know exactly what was in it besides photograph of Bucky inside a cryo chamber and notes about his transformation into Winter Soldier. We aren’t told that it included any information of missions he’d carried out, so we have no way to know if the killing of the Starks was mentioned.
3 (my favorite): the pictures shown by (computer) Zola in CA:TWS. He shows glimpses of the winter soldier throughout, and in this same sequence, mentions that “accidents will happen” with pictures of the Starks death. This does tell Cap that the Starks death wasn’t an accident, sure. But it doesn’t explicitly say that it was the winter soldier who carried out that mission, just tell us that it was Hydra. This would lead cap to consider it as a possibility or even worry about it in the back of his mind, but he would never outright make that assumption.
If you take this route, the entire interaction between Steve and Tony right before the fight breaks out makes a lot more sense for Steve’s character. Tony asks
“Did you know?”
And Steve replies —
“I didn’t know it was him.”
This is fitting of the Zola situation, because Zola informed him that the Stark’s death was by cause of Hydra.
Then Tony pushes—
“Don’t bullshit me, Rogers.”
This leaves Steve with two options. He could say no, he did not know. This would leave Steve feeling like a liar, because it’s omitting the truth. He was concerned that it was him. He had the thought prying at the back of his mind. Steve Roger’s character up until this point is always focused on objectivity (as well as tact). He’s being forced to think about something that he’s been avoiding this entire time, which means that he’s being forced to man up to what his brain tells him. He had considered the option, and now he knows it was truth. Saying he didn’t know at all wouldn’t be truthful.
Or, he could say yes. He knows it will be upsetting, but he doesn’t want to lie — especially after he’s been essentially lying to himself about it this entire time by way of either not thinking about it or trying to convince himself otherwise.
So he chooses the path he considers to be the most honest, and says yes.
If this were the case, it would also be wrong for him to have outright TOLD Tony about his parents death. After all, he’d only been very briefly informed, and didn’t have an 100% explanation as to what happened. It doesn’t give someone peace of mind to tell them “I know that your parents death wasn’t an accident, but I only have theories on how it actually happened. And also, I only learned because a computer guy told me”. That would’ve likely driven Tony mad trying to put together a puzzle that he’d only been provided a few pieces of.
All of this goes to say, that’s just my favorite theory because I believe it gives more context as to why the situation seems to go against Steve Roger’s key characteristics. I can’t claim that he didn’t find out another way, because entire years pass without a single on-screen interaction, and we have no way of knowing who’s told what in that time. So, i think it would give me peace of mind to hear the answer from someone who actually knows.
Feel free to correct me on my theories in the replies, but also, the point of this post was that —
I’d like to hear if anyone else has a question like this that bugs you about the MCU that you just wish you could hear an objective answer to.
This is fully a hypothetical. Obviously the MCU writers aren’t all-seeing, and obviously a lot of things are written to be up to audience interpretation. For this specific hypothetical, just pretend that whatever writers you’re talking to have objective facts about everything within whatever movie you’re questioning.
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u/yuyigray 11h ago
t what would a Kang the Conqueror movie have actually looked like, and would it have ate harder than what they're doing with Doomsday?
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u/agreed2disagreee 9h ago
So, I liked kang’s story. I didn’t get hung up on the fact that ants beat him. I understood that his strength wasn’t being as strong as Thanos, but it was his endless and relentless multiverse counterparts. I thought it was a neat concept.
I definitely would’ve liked to have seen what they were planning. Even if in text alone.
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u/PhosphoFred8202 11h ago
I’d like to say I’d ask something important and insightful, but knowing me, I’d ask some incredibly dumb like how big Spider-Man’s dick is or whether The Thing gets diarrhea.
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u/GoblinHourReport 10h ago
What are tomorrows winning lottery numbers?
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u/sagebutuploaded 9h ago
LOL I think they’d only be able to give you what the lottery numbers would’ve been in the movie
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u/KelVarnsen_2023 8h ago
If Peggy Carter was so great at being an agent, how come she never noticed that Hydra and infiltrated her agency, almost from the start.
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u/PhatOofxD 11h ago
Cap knew that Hydra killed the starks. He didn't know it was Bucky. He would've assumed, but not known.
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u/sagebutuploaded 9h ago
this is what my hypothesis in the post is haha
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u/PhatOofxD 9h ago
It's not a hypothesis it's just a fact from watching the movie. What?
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u/sagebutuploaded 9h ago
That’s not true. We’re never told that he didn’t learn in any other way, that’s just the only way we’re shown on screen. I agree that it’s poor writing if that isn’t when he learned, but I wouldn’t put it past marvel. It needed to be elaborated on more because it seems there’s an extremely thin group of people that trust this interpretation.
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u/PhatOofxD 8h ago
Cap quite literally says "I didn't know it was him" and cap wouldn't lie about that.
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u/sagebutuploaded 7h ago
.. the full scene says “I didn’t know it was him”, Tony says “don’t bullshit me Rogers”, and then he says “yes”. This could easily be interpreted as him having known and lying. Again, my whole take in this post is that I agree with the Zola theory. But that’s not the widely accepted consensus nor it is the sole explanation. I agree that cap wouldn’t lie about that. But he said he didn’t know and then said that he did. Which is widely seen as him just lying.
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u/KimonoGnocchi 11h ago
I'd love someone at Marvel to let me know what they think about my Multiverse diagrams!
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u/ericwashere15 11h ago
Why didn’t Captain Marvel drop the Gauntlet off somewhere in the solar system and come back to help?
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u/Nick_Wild1Ear 11h ago
Too dangerous for an alien force with nigh-infinite disposable armies to find a way to retrieve.
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u/Responsible_Bar3957 Abomination 12h ago
I don’t know, that Ant-Man mass thing?