Only Sunlight In My Soul

I can’t stop chewing over this huge plot hole and I think until I write this down, I won’t stop, so even though I know no one is going to read this, I have to put it down in words. Ever since the first trailer for Captain America: Civil War, I’ve had this huge WHAT THE FUCK reaction that I’ve been holding on to, hoping that the movie would somehow make the UN sanctioned accords make sense to me, or at the very least, the side objecting to them would point out what a huge, huge mistake this would be with actual, you know, facts. That exist. In the world. And I was really stunned that at no point did anyone point out what a disaster they could be, because of what an actualfax disaster the UN has often been at oversight and peacekeeping. 

It would have taken less than ten minutes for them to dig up some real-world examples of disastrous policies that led to the slaughter of thousands of innocent people, and given those arguments to someone on the team as a basis for their suspicion of what the accords intended to do. But I’m equally baffled by why they had Tony and Rhodey coming out in favor of the accords and the UN and Thunderbolt Ross, for god’s sake, when they would know these things because of the nature of their jobs, and Vision because he has access to all that information in the databanks.

If you’re not familiar with the giant shitstorm that is often UN peacekeeping work and human rights oversight, here are a couple of Greatest Hits for you–and these are just a few that have happened within Tony’s and Rhodey’s lifetime. 

“A Storm of Swords” With images by María José García Photography featuring the Algiz Vördr Totem

children’s literature moodboards: ella enchanted

That fool of a fairy Lucinda did not intend to lay a curse on me. She meant to bestow a gift. When I cried inconsolably through my first hour of life, my tears were her inspiration. Shaking her head sympathetically at Mother, the fairy touched my nose. “My gift is obedience. Ella will always be obedient. Now stop crying, child." I stopped.

Sean McFate, ‘The Modern Mercenary – Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order’ [x] 

#sean mcfate  #mercenaries  #private security contractors  #(angelina jolie obviously)  #this talk and this example mcfate gave specifically came to mind  #while i was watching ‘captain america: civil war’  #cacw  #the avengers  #steve rogers  #tony stark (via fireofspring) 

This is utterly fascinating.  The paragraph immediately after the one above says:

The answer to one is yes. Blackwater had the capacity to do this. I know I looked at this in DynCorp international. They could create islands of humanity for day’s maybe even weeks to hold of the Janjaweed and protect civilians. At the same time the NGO would do its name and shame campaign. The NGO asks should we do this. At the end of the day all parties said no thank you. That was 2008. I can imagine a time when we have parties, an oligarch wants to leave a legacy or something else like that who is less concerned about US/UK and other interests going forward with this. So a world in which we have this sort of demand will attract supply which will mean that we will have more mercenaries. Mercenaries can be incentivised to start, create and expand warfare. A world like that will create a world which will be polycentric in nature, you won’t have strong state centred interests. There will be a durable disorder. A world order that can contain but not solve problems. This is a trend that is happening under our feet right now it doesn’t get a long of attention, it’s like boiling frogs. It takes a long time, but that said we may be going into a world in which security is becoming more commoditised. 

(Bolding mine)

And then this:

So remember I discussed two types of market actors who are similar but they’re still enough to be different. Military enterprises would seek a public private partnerships and have monogamous relationship with a good well-paying client. Whether that be the UK or more preferably the UN to augment peace keeping forces whether that happens is a different question. I think that they would be very responsive to regulatory actions. However if you regulate the industry too much they’ll simply move offshore to places such as Dubai where there are more lax business laws. The bigger concern is mercenaries. They wouldn’t be residing in the UK. They’d be residing in very fragile weak states. They would still want access to global financial services but just as we have “narco states” it’s possible to imagine that we could have “merc states” someday and even I you did have laws in the books internationally there is another Geneva convention about armed civilian contractors which would be very difficult to arrive at. It would also be very hard to enforce that.

So for example, what if the world wanted to go arrest those mercenaries in Nigeria? What would they do? Send the UN? Who would the UN get to do that? What would happen in if the UN force get defeated by the mercenaries? This is a law enforcement problem where the people you’re trying to catch shoot back and they may have substantial firepower. In this case it’s rumoured that the Nigerian mercenaries had MI 24 helicopters which are like flying Russian tanks and could be very significant so that’s the challenges law enforcement have.

(Bolding mine)

This is all sounding curiously familiar.  Wouldn’t it have been interesting if someone made an honest and thorough inquiry of this setup in fictional form?

did tony get peter, legally a minor, to sign the un accords? it would have been without the knowledge or consent of his guardian, obviously. did he get peter to sign to try and protect him, since the internet has already found spiderman? okay, legit. but what happens if the government feels justified in either a.) attempting to make use of peter’s abilities and deploying him on missions or b.) deciding that an enhanced minor is a liability and transferring him to protective custody? what happens then?

i ask this, but honestly, the way peter just goes home to queens indicates to me that peter didn’t sign shit. it indicates to me that tony made a call– that he decided peter’s privacy and safety and continued anonymity was more important than getting peter to sign on the dotted line. furthermore, it indicates that rhodey, vision, and the rest of the pro-accords team have also agreed to keep peter’s identity and status out of their mouths in public. i mean, did they all just forget he was there? did they ever have a conversation like “hey tony, what happened to the kid in the pajamas, ross seems pretty upset about us not bringing him back” and tony was like “shut the fuck up, nobody’s saying nothing about that kid”???? and they were all like, “okay, no prob, let him roam free, kid’s got a good heart and he’s fighting for the little guy.” i mean, ?????? is that not essentially???? steve’s argument???? about autonomy??????

This is what had to be signed and by whom.

Granted, we have no idea if this document is still functioning or was trashed since only three of the Avenger’s members were left at the end of the movie and one of them is down (Rhodey). There is literally no Avenger’s anymore so there’s no point to it anymore. Yet, those that did not sign that were supposed to (to accept responsibility) will still be considered criminals for their actions.

so, why is scott lang in jail?

if the sokovia accords are explicitly only for the named avengers, why is scott lang in jail?

i suppose you can argue that it’s his participation in the airport fight: destruction of property, aiding wanted fugitives, aggravated assault. but those would be civilian crimes, and since he is in no way a recognized avenger, nor is he named in the accords, he remains a civilian. so why is he being held with the other violators of the accords in a superhero supermax without a lawyer or trial?

Peter could have gotten killed, and that knowledge should have been like a neon sign in Tony’s mind, but he acted all blase about it until he suddenly realized Peter HAD gotten kind of hurt?? he was willing to use a starstruck kid as a tool and put him in harm’s way??

Steve was afraid of a repeat of the SHIELD/Hydra incident and I can understand his reluctance in relinquishing his autonomy to make a judgement call. Besides, he just found out that the best friend he’d thought was dead turned out to be alive in the cruelest way possible. A friend that they were obviously gonna kill or imprison for life even if he was, in the end, just another victim.

like, a lot of meta ink is being spilled about tony and steve’s very different, but equally compelling, reasoning; but can we talk about the fact that the accords were being enforced at the fucking WHIM of a single person through the entire movie? ross called every shot. when tony did the right thing and brought him the intel on zemo– intel that threw everything into question– ross’s answer was “so fucking what.” he is, canonically, the same dude that tried to kill bruce banner. he has a longstanding vendetta against enhanced humans. and he is the one the government places in total control over the accords! WHY DOESN’T ANY CHARACTER TALK ABOUT THIS? why isn’t that the fucking cornerstone of the anti-accords argument? that immediately, day one, right out of the gate, we are being asked to submit ourselves to someone who has a history of trying to kill or imprison enhanced individuals without trial.

the villains of this movie– zemo and ross (he’s not evil but he is obstructionist)– are becoming invisible, as we keep circling between steve and tony, steve and tony. but what are the accords going to mean, going forward? what happens the next time peter parker wrecks part of nyc while he’s saving it– will he be hunted and sent to the raft? will he NOT? who decides who is authorized to operate as a powered hero and who isn’t? thaddeus ross, full stop??? where is the oversight the accords promised– why does it seem to be held in the hands of one visibly biased man?

Once upon a time there were three sisters…

Black Panther Teaser © Sahin Düzgün

the great bear rainforest in british columbia is one of the largest coastal temperate rain forests in the world, with twenty five thousand square miles of mist shrouded fjords and densely forested islands that are home to white furred black bears.

neither albino nor polar bear, these rare black bears (there are fewer than five hundred) are known as kermode bears, or what the gitga’at first nation call mooksgm’ol, the spirit bear — a word they did not speak to european fur traders lest the bears be discovered and hunted. to this day, it remains taboo to hunt a spirit bear, or to mention them to outsiders.

the white fur in these bears is triggered by a recessive mutation of the same gene associated with red hair and fair skin in humans. though it remains unclear as to how the trait arose (or disappeared), it is especially pronounced on certain islands.

Inside the facility they open up the backpack, they shake it out and swipe the pockets with swab tests for explosives, for drugs. They spill the contents onto a table topped with plastic sheeting. They photograph each object and hold a small ruler against it, note the condition, the color, the brand. Steve doesn’t watch them do this. At the time they’re processing him, Sam, the fucking– the literal actual honest-to-God King of Wakanda. Steve’s never met a king before. They don’t take Steve’s fingerprints. They do take the shield. That’s as good a fingerprint as any, probably: it’s the only thing anybody’s wanted from him in years.

But: they ask Steve to come back down to the intake suite to look at the backpack, to look at what they want to call evidence. He thinks about refusing, but doesn’t. Not for their sake but for Bucky’s: maybe there’s something in there he can help explain, offer up as proof of innocence. Something only he would understand. They show him everything and he looks at it for a long time and then suddenly the world is blurry, wobbling: the world swims away, and Steve realizes he is crying.

“Sir?” they ask. He is sir again, suddenly; they’d really like him to stop crying, he can tell. He’d like that too, but he can’t, he can’t: he puts his hands over his face to hide it, instead.

It is: a worn-down toothbrush that somebody has scrubbed almost to a nub a plastic comb three small bottles of extra-strength acetaminophen, the kind for migraines a public transit map of bucharest, and another for prague, and another for stockholm two flip-cover notebooks; small, spiral-bound, logoless, like the ones they sell in drugstores by the greeting cards. These are covered in scrawled words that don’t seem to be in order, until Steve realizes it’s a code. A simple letter shift, and he’s doing it in his head now, easily: the first page says “I can’t forget the sound a skull makes against the ground; I need to sleep.”

And also there’s: a handgun with an empty magazine five hundred dollars in small bills, rolled up in rubber bands and (Steve is laughing now, but it feels the same as crying, and it sounds worse) a dirty toy from a Happy Meal, which is something Steve’s never eaten but he has heard of; this is a rabbit with a fakey velveteen coating and a moulded plastic police uniform. Steve’s seen pictures of this rabbit, some movie with this rabbit, on the side of city buses in New York. Someone has been rubbing the rabbit’s ears in the same place, wearing it bald in one spot.

“He had a keychain, kind of like this,” Steve says, to the jerkoffs with clipboards waiting for him to decode this– this pile of nothing. Their unsatisfying mystery. To them this is all garbage. Even the notebooks: there are no missile coordinates, no secrets. They don’t understand. He can see that in their faces. It’s why they brought him down here. “His cousin Georgie bought it for him before he shipped out,” Steve says, even though nobody in this room cares. “A lucky foot, for luck, he,” Steve tries, but he can’t finish, and then he walks out without asking if he can. The door was locked; he only notices afterwards, in the hall, holding the handle he broke off.