#shra

Interestingly, the NRA send a dude to lobby against the SHRA, on the grounds that it's a violation of the Second Amendment. They figure that if superpowers are regulated, guns are next. I'll touch on this more in The X-Men and Activism 3, but nobody expected the gun lobby to do this. It makes sense, though Ben Grimm is horrified by sharing an opinion with the NRA.

Reed basically filibusters the bill out of existence by delivering a report that would take years to read. Sue does bring up mutants, but frames it as wanting her son to grow up free. It's interesting that mutants aren't considered that different from other superheroes at this point, and entirely in character for the FF to stay out of mutant rights activism unless it affects Franklin.

So, starting out with Captain America: Civil War. I often see people mentioning how bad Age of Ultron was, but I rarely see people talking about how bad Civil War was. Now, AoU killed most of the setup made by the end of The Winter Soldier, but that isn't the only issue. And I think most folks get distracted by the whole Team Tony vs Team Steve thing.

So, small side tangent, we're going to the comics. Civil War in the comics was a very large, very impressive, very impactful crossover event. It was not good.

It was an interesting subject to tackle; in a world where a mutant teenager might literally gain the power to explode like a nuke with zero warning, possibly zero control, to what extend do personal freedoms overrule public safety? I'm in favour of gun control. Now I'm sorry you were born Edward Gunhands, but it doesn't change that you have guns for hands, and those are pretty dang deadly.

To be entirely clear, there is no good answer to this dilemma. There is never a perfect solution to such complex problem. And this is not a real problem, and can't even reflect a real problem, because writers actively make decisions in the way reality does not work.

Spider-Man's webs only break Gwen Stacy's back when it's emotionally impactful, physics don't exist otherwise. That's just the nature of the medium and cannot be avoided.

The idea that keeping some record of people capable of destroying civilisation as we know it, seemed so reasonable to the writers of the Civil War comics, that they made the SHRA side a little more intentionally evil to even the scales. This was overkill, the details of the SHRA were horrible enough.

And that's not even touching the whole vigilante angle. We're all rooting for Spider-Man because he's a superhero (and my favourite example for everything), but truly think about the implication of someone with superstrength deciding to beat up people he thinks are being bad. That's not due process, friends, and it would suck if he decided you were Bad.

Now the point is, comics are not reality. Readers of the comics were rooting massively against the SHRA. We do not judge comics by the standards of reality, because it's fiction and does not work the same way. (Even if some folks on the internet nowadays seem to have forgotten how to separate reality from fiction.) We trust Spider-Man to do the right thing, because he's a hero. He only does the wrong thing when it's part of moving the plot forward. We trust that if someone with superpowers does bad in that universe, superheroes will stop them.

Now we're bringing this back to the MCU. From the get-go, it has tried to be more 'grounded' and 'realistic', though those terms can be taken very very loosely. At the start of Iron Man (and the Incredible Hulk), we are originally lead to believe this world is just like ours. It has lead to some inherent issues.

I strongly suggest watching the video "Superheroes in Empty Worlds" by Overly Sarcastic Productions for a more nuance take, but to put it very simply. We don't have superheroes because we don't have supervillains. The cause of one will be the cause of the other, and the existence of supervillains calls for the existence of superheroes. Simply put, they have nothing to do otherwise.

The MCU has nothing to do for our superheroes. Iron Man films have the unfortunate tendency to kill of their villains. The setting of Earth is kind of incidental for the conflicts of Thor; he brings his own villains from offsite, and when he leaves, he takes them back with him. Captain America is actually a much better example of this. We had the him fighting Hydra in WWII, and in The Winter Soldier it was brought to the modern day. It set Hydra up as the perfect cockroach that you keep stepping on, but somehow they always come back. Then Age of Ultron killed off Hydra. And we had even more superheroes with nothing to do. Now this leads into the issue of Civil War.

There is no job for our superheroes at this point. Aside from the two world-ending scenarios, they have nothing to do. There is no daily, or weekly, or even monthly, supervillain for them to fight and defend people against. So instead, the implication is that they're doing things that we have legal law enforcement for.

So we get this team of superpowered people invading South Africa to stop a terrorist with a bomb. Now, even ignoring the part where they have superpowers, this is a big no-no in the real world. Sometimes, one country will send a police force to help a police force in another country. This is heavily discussed and negotiated, until everyone is in agreement on what is going to happen.

In comics (and cartoons, and various other media where we find the classic superhero story), this is not a problem. The good guys go where they need to be to stop the bad guys. Usually, this is because they're the only ones who can; the supervillain problem, but sometimes it might be because they're the only ones who even know this is a problem. And sometimes, it's just universally agreed that this is what superheroes do, and no one really bothers them.

The MCU never really decided on what side of that line it wanted to be, and so we're never really sure how to approach it. That brings us to: The Sokovia Accords. This is the first big blunder of Captain America: Civil War. We don't get told what they are.

Now, you might find some pretty dramatic details on an MCU wiki, but look closer at the source. Those are all added later in tv series, mainly Agents of SHIELD. Of course, that means they're canon, but I want to talk about the film Civil War here.

We have our superheroes disagreeing on... something. We're not told what it is, what it means. We get some vague arguments about collateral damage and the UN controlling where the Avengers can go, but nothing clear. Now, with this faux-'real world' setting, we can only look to our own United Nations and the Accords they have agreed upon. And one of the main things the UN is critised for is not doing anything. That is, the UN can't do anything unless many nations agree, but more importantly, it can't do much when a nation breaks an agreement. Moreover, the UN makes agreements by nations about nations. It is incredibly strange for it to regulate individuals, because that is outside it's jurisdiction.

Now, you might think, isn't this the divide between fiction and reality we've talked about? And it could be; except the MCU refuses to acknowledge the divide and pretends this world is like our own. And it leads to this cognitive dissonance.

I think it's lazy writing. Because, if you never define what the Sokovia Accords are, you don't need to explain why anyone would be for, or against, them. If it's the extreme registration and restriction of personal freedom of the SHRA, Tony Stark would seem like the devil for supporting it. Particularly in a world with so few superhumans. If it's a UN Accord regulating if teams of superhumans based in one nation need permission to invade the sovereign borders of another nation, Steve Rogers would seem like the devil for supporting it.

And in Captain America: Civil War, we do not get any information on what this supposed to be. We get distracted with a personal conflict and incited to pick sides, in a conflict that reflects poorly on both characters involved.

Now, for the Captain America vs Iron Man personal conflict: I also have a lot of thoughts and feelings on the matter, and this post is already the length of a book report.