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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
If the Accords have a Registration Act-like component, why didn't we see Federal agents show up when Luke Cage started openly using his powers in public? It makes sense if the Accords are limited to what we saw in Civil War, since Luke's activities are a purely local matter and thus not the UN's jurisdiction. But if the government is tracking down any and all superpowered people, Luke's a pretty hard one to miss. It wouldn't surprise me if he was in the frickin' Yellow Pages.
Now, you do have to register with SHIELD and have your name put on the Index when you openly use your powers, because that was well established before the Sokovia Accords. The MCU had registration before Civil War even happened.
edited 12th Jul '17 9:21:44 PM by alliterator
Actually... just as a side conversation, I suppose... yeah. If you were speaking entirely realistically (which the films aren't), then yes - there's laws in place for most of the Avengers.
While the world has never before seen the like of Thor's power and implications, for example, it has seen the like of what he's doing. Going into a foreign land and acting upon your own authority to handle problems because you don't think the people there can handle themselves. Asgard is basically the James Munroe to Midgard's Latin America. America having a grievance against Asgard after the first Thor wouldn't realistically be much different from Lagos having a problem with the Avengers in Civil War.
Being an unfrozen super soldier doesn't make Cap's actions exceptional from a legal standpoint either - especially since he goes straight back into a form of service after thawing out. Hulk is the weirdest case of the lot, what with the "government experiment gone rogue and under the protection of the most powerful corporation of the planet" stuff, but there's still a lot of things that can cover him.
edited 12th Jul '17 10:08:35 PM by KnownUnknown
-Steve and Bucky, who are on the low end of superhuman and wouldn't require special treatment.
-Peter, who's in a similar boat to Steve and Bucky, and also was not even on the government's radar.
-Thor, who is a foreign head of state that never bothered the Earth and only showed up to retrieve rogue Frost Giant/Dark Elf terrorists.
-Bruce Banner, who is already a fugitive.
-Wanda Maximoff, who's already committed far more than the minimum number of crimes to land her in prison.
The only question mark is Vision. We don't have laws regarding the treatment of AI for obvious reasons. The Accords should concern him and only him.
edited 12th Jul '17 10:24:04 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."The problem is wanting some control over people who are really only bound by their own goodwill to help. Which is understandable from a national security standpoint, and there's a reason why interventionist foreign policy is generally frowned upon— things are more complicated than just going in and stomping on the bad guys.
Which is why you need the equivalent of SHIELD, to which the Accords could have been a prelude. But the whole thing was pretty much mishandled by all parties from the get-go, and provided Zemo with exactly the opportunity he wanted to break up the band, and you all know the rest from there.
edited 13th Jul '17 12:16:07 AM by Unsung
They fulfilled the function of the Avengers actually listening to them. There was a trust there.
Seriously, I'm not saying it has to be SHIELD, but tossing the Avengers over to the UN and US Secretary of State carte blanche was never going to work. Some bridge-building is in order here.
edited 12th Jul '17 10:36:08 PM by Unsung
3/6 of the Avengers by the time of Civil War are or were members of the United States Armed Forces. The rest were a KGB defector, a terrorist who should be in jail, and an AI. Of these only the AI really requires special treatment or bridge-building, because holy shit we just created life, why is no one treating this like a big deal?
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."Because Battlestar Galactica's been off the air less than ten years and now we've got Westworld.
AOU really could and should've milked the reaction to Vision *and* Ultron for longer, but didn't, and now it's too late. Realistically you're right, but the entertainment value of adding in that ongoing HSQ in-universe is limited.
The Avengers who worked for the government worked for SHIELD, and the reason they're off on their own is because Hydra, through SHIELD, had apparently infiltrated governments and agencies far beyond SHIELD itself. They're the people least likely to walk into the open arms of the government again at the start of CW— and yes, they're also the instigators in Lagos along with Crossbones and thus the ones the Accords are specifically addressing, but they're still the best ones for the Accords leadership to reach out to and win over. That's not what happened.
edited 12th Jul '17 11:32:14 PM by Unsung
The Index wasn't registration; it was just SHIELD, being an intelligence agency, collecting intelligence on people. It's the difference between having to file a report with the government that records all your movements (unless you're on some sort of parole, a gross violation of privacy rights), and a government agent discreetly following you around so they can keep their own log of your movements (unsettling, but perfectly legal).
So, I just found out that Scott Lang and my favorite Superior Foe of Spidey/Cap/Iron Man Janice Lincoln have had a thing in the comics recently, and while I like Hope... sort off (I like the character better without her being an obligatory love interesting)... I gotta say, that romantic arc sounds a lot more fun.
And hey, there's probably slightly less legal quagmire surrounding Janice (what with being a general Marvel villain introduced in Captain America, using the moniker of a Fantastic Four villain while being the daughter of a Spider-Man villain. And now appearing every once in a while alongside Ant-Man), right? Hey, I can dream can't I?
edited 12th Jul '17 10:51:48 PM by KnownUnknown
The only thing that provided Zeno an opportunity was Steve flying off the handle as usual and ignoring the part of Peggy's speech about compromising where you can.
Steve's had a habit of leaping before he leaps going as far back as his first film. It's like Chris Evans is playing Johnny Storm again but for some stupid reason has more people willing to go along with any inane idea he has.
edited 12th Jul '17 11:13:40 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."Your argument seems to boil down to "The US military is the best and can kill anything, even fictional characters, no matter how tough they are." Which isn't a real argument at all.
edited 12th Jul '17 11:17:45 PM by alliterator
Goddamn it, I thought I escaped this when I dropped the Wonder Woman thread. I don't wanna drop this one, too.
My various fanfics.Civil War itself is plenty self-aware. Not the characters in it, but the film itself— the whole point is that every character involved thinks they're doing the right thing, but that people make mistakes born of not recognizing their own irrationalities. This is not in any way limited to fiction, so I don't have a problem with it showing up as the centrepiece of Civil War.
Cap gets away with being fairly impulsive because his moral compass in general is pretty well-tuned and his judgments about others often turn out to be right. That and he's just lucky. Gotta wonder if that wasn't part of the supersoldier serum as well, straight out of Ringworld.
Wonder Woman's actually simmered down a bit, you're probably safe if you wanted to check back in.
edited 12th Jul '17 11:27:08 PM by Unsung
The US military couldn't kill, say, Goku. Because his on-screen durability showings are beyond their ability to exceed. But Hulk is a different story, because he demonstrably is vulnerable to forces far below what the US military can output with their conventional ordnance. Probably because making Hulk too powerful would break the universe the writers were going for.
edited 12th Jul '17 11:23:51 PM by MonsieurThenardier
"It is very easy to be kind; the difficulty lies in being just."

I think you're confusing the plot of Civil War for the context of Civil War - and for this reason, the idea that the governments of the world could be ignoring the growing gifted situation to solely care about the Avengers just doesn't make sense. The plot is that the governments of the world set restrictions on the Avengers, forcing Cap to make a damning choice at the worst time. The context of Civil War is that increasingly extreme situations and people have forced the governments of the world to change the way they deal with certain individuals, which includes the Accords with target the Avengers but is never implied to their only concern and is, in fact, indicated to be the opposite.
That the plot is only concerned about the Avengers for the sake of the story its trying to tell is not the same as the Avengers being the only relevant aspect here in the mythos, nor especially the idea that they should remain that way moving forward.
It's said in the movie itself that the Accords are part of a growing response (heck, Wakanda's part in the Accords negotiations is said to be spurred into action to deal with a changing world, and the event that explicitly gets their attention is Klaue selling Vibranium to Ultron), and the fact that the world is changing in ways that have to be dealt with is a recurring theme in the MCU as a whole. Curtailing with the Avengers is a pertinent first step, but nothing in the movie implies that everything stops there. The implication is that its the beginning of an era where the world is going to start cracking down on the situation in general.
Note that the alternative is that only the Avengers getting policed in the future while other characters who do the same things don't have to worry about it, which is at the very least a waste of a plot device given that most heroes going forward won't be Avengers, at worst a gaping plot hole. I don't blame the writers of Agents of SHIELD for expanding the idea - though again I don't gel with the Gifted Registration Act concept specifically - because doing so just makes far more sense than the alternative.
Treating the Accords as farther reaching than initially were may be a retcon, but it's not an unreasonable one for the potential in handwaving future plot points that would otherwise need to be introduced on their own.
edited 12th Jul '17 8:17:27 PM by KnownUnknown