#anticabnw

It's annoying in its own right because along with the America patriot propaganda it logically follows ofc for characters like Sabra & her terrorist actor to easily appear in these stories with some Zionist propaganda.

But it's just really annoying to put it lightly how much Marvel - ever since first putting Sam Cap to page in 2014 - worked overtime to undermine Steve's character making CW a de facto IM movie & painting Steve as in the wrong  for being against the US gov authority & overall stripping back & removing Steve's righteous anger at the US State for what they did with Shieldra, or how FATWS compares its enthusiastically patriotic protagonist to make Steve look retroactively worse

& likewise precluded Bucky's post-WS character arc entirely & retroactively demonized his character as the insufficiently patriotic & therefore untrustworthy one. His whole backstory setup in CATWS painted the US gov in a bad light & culpable via Shieldra, so ofc Bucky gets villainized in phase 3 & likewise FATWS paints Buck at fault for being a target of continuous state violence & institutionalization while Sam- an agent of the state, part of the literal USAF -is presented as moral center while telling Buck he deserves to be at the whim of the US state and blamed for WS crimes the gov funded via Shieldra. Bucky gets surveilled & arrested & monitored by the same US State which funded the supersoldier mindcontrolled assassin program they blame him for while Correctly Patriotic Uncle Sam is shown as a Good US Soldier by contrast while Bucky's story gets retconned & swept under the rug for being to inconvenient to the Patriotic direction they went in.

The propaganda really ramped up with the ink and pages of Sam Cap drying off & becoming their new brand, but marvel's audience who tbh enjoy lapping at the Mouse 's propaganda pool refuse to see beyond the superficial aesthetics which is WHY US media frequently & purposefully chooses these aesthetics & act like neoliberal representation in oppressive structures is radical or progressive.

Which makes all the performative shock over Sabra in BNW fall flat since Sam Cap as a Marvel rebrand is defined by doubling down on Cap as a patriotic literal agent & defender of the US government. Sabra's inclusion is entirely ideologically consistent with what Sam Cap is about FFS, in FATWS the only other character besides Bucky who was exploited by the US gov is Isaiah who CORRECTLY outlines the relationship btwn America & Black ppl & Sam wholly dismisses him as crazy! THAT is was SamCap is about: telling Black ppl to STFU & be patriotic Obama style, but ppl are acting like Sabra is "ruining" Sam's otherwise totally not at all propagandistic stint as a now more patriotic 🇺🇸flag laden hero while America funds multiple genocides as the USA has always done since it's inception.

I haven't watched the trailer (and tbh don't intend to... too depressing) so I can't really comment on specifics of this.

But I will say that I was thinking the other day how MCU's complete refusal to do any Cap character properly, but especially Steve, had the knock-on effect of making it impossible to do a SamCap well too.

Steve was supposed to be impoverished / multiply disabled / ideologically Antifa / feminist / pro-union / New Deal Democrat / Irish-Catholic / urban underdog, etc. And it would make perfect sense for a modern black man to accept the legacy of all that, if Steve had been adapted properly.

In deleting all that and assigning to the mantel what America represents instead, they've turned the shield from an honour into an albatross.

But it's still contradicting their own canon to do so.

Because even the de-yassified MCU Steve never embodied America; he merely set an example to America.

Isaiah should not plausibly believe Steve's shield represents something bad -- as someone who knows nothing about Captain America would -- as if MCU canon!Steve never did any of the good things he did with it.

(This could've been a beat addressed in the main Cap movies; eg. someone assumes Steve is a Republican and his baffled response is 'huh??!')

Following canon, Sam's logical response to that should've been 'wtf it doesn't mean any of that where did you get that from??' not 'yeah but I want to represent that anyway.'

Isaiah correctly lampooned what America's legacy is... but no one bothered to point out that's not what Steve and his shield have represented. Not even the landlord-white version of him we have in the MCU.

That failure makes a nonsense of Sam's entire friendship with Steve.

Why would Sam be friends with the willing bearer of America's bad legacy?

Why would a decent Steve be friends with someone who wants to represent a bad legacy (maybe EG Steve would!) and so on and so on.

Though I guess it's no dumber than Steve not killing Peggy on sight for colluding with Nazis for decades, huh? 😕

I'm looking forward to all the jokes Sam is going to make about Isaiah being a brainless killing machine (y'know, to show what bros they are?)

And when he comes out at the end of it and tells Isaiah he needs to "do the work" to apologise properly for what he did while controlled.

Or perhaps he will suddenly magically understand the concept of innocence, now? 🤔

Sam siding with the authorities might be sadly consistent with the spirit they've taken him in (I've pointed it out before, but it is IC for him to be, eg. a dick to Bucky. Yer man's been doing that since day one).

But it at the very least it contradicts Sam's canon to willingly guard Ross, a man who threw him in enhanced-people-Gitmo like a "common criminal," to paraphrase Sam himself.

(Hey, why would the man who threw Sam in prison later trust Sam to guard him? Is it just a set up to screw Sam over again? Okay, but why would Sam fall for something so openly implausible? Are they giving him the idiot ball?)

The MCU are masters of 'we don't understand what this action we've assigned the character actually shows about them.' Or when they are assigning character actions that contradict past actions.