The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

I just watched the video Nightwire linked. My thoughts:

• I don't get people's issues with the movies not having the characters give screeds on why Thanos's plan works when the MCU very much shows why what he did was disastrous. If Falcon and Winter Soldier can be credited for anything, it can be that it pointed out how Thanos made things worse for everybody in the long run.

• More leather pantsing of Killmonger I see. Killmonger is a former CIA agent whose actions prior to the events of the film included destabilizing foreign governments. It's verbally stated that his actions in Wakanda is him applying his previous MO to yet another country. There is nothing inexplicable about his violence towards women (and not just women) and desire for world domination. Furthermore, T'Challa does concede that Killmonger was right and is shown taking steps to ensure that the world doesn't create more people like him. It's hilarious that this video's author is so smug about trying to score a "gotcha" against the MCU that he attacks one of the few entries that actually does agree that the status quo is not okay that he ends up rooting for a CIA agent who shows no respect for foreign cultures.

• The video also misrepresents a scene from the finale. Karli isn't killed by Sam, she's killed by Sharon Carter, who is a villain.

• Anarchists are not against leaders, they are against leaders having extra rights. This guy doesn't know that much about anarchism either.

• The video does raise a few good points and to say that Falcon and Winter Soldier stumbled badly in execution but this video is largely a terrible argument against it.

Yeah, I actually disagreed with him about Killmonger as well. I think Black Panther is a very good example of how to execute this type of villain.

Yeah, people really miss that Killmonger is a murderous war criminal who happens to be correct about the way Wakanda behaves vis a vis the outside world. His nickname is KILLMONGER, for chrissake.

1000%. And people keep on missing that Nakia, who is heroic, is also for Wakanda intervening in the outside world. But without burning a sacred plant or destroying a culture.

I think Nakia is a reasonable part of why BP's message comes off alright, as well as T'Challa changing his mind by the end. Having "this guy has a point but is going about it wrong" works a lot better if you also have characters who have the same point without doing the bad stuff. While Sam kinda agreed with Karli in FatWS, it didn't really work in the same way.

It also doesn't really help that Karli's end goal seems kinda vague a lot. It would 1000% have helped more if there was a person who was focusing on community building and helping make it so people can stay where they are, or if they want to go home do so safely. It might have even been interesting if Sam's sister was involved in that, even if as a mention that post snap she's been busy helping others and now needs help herself.

No, they're against singular leadership. They're more about collective leadership or whatever. No hierarchies.

I used to be an anarchist. I detest the ideology but it's incorrect to say it's "against leaders having extra rights", it's more to do with a general opposition to hierarchy and, admittedly, varies from person to person how to interpret that. For some it's "unjust hierarchy" (Bakunin talks about this), for some it's hierarchy in general.

Needless to say, there's a reason anarchist organizing is useless.

Veronica Falcon (Donya Madani) revealed she was going to be in the show for four episodes of the originally-planned run and that, as expected, major reshoots happened that resulted in her character being cut down into nothingness. And the way she describes it sounds as the show's shortening happened mid-filming as opposed to in the writing phase in the way Malcolm Spellman described it.

Four episodes' worth of scenes is a lot, and since they all would've involved Karli in some way, I imagine her motives and goals in the original version (and possibly some of the Sharon Power Broker backstory) would've been at least more defined in the original script.

Edited by AlleyOop on Aug 28th 2021 at 3:25:11 PM

There's also the fact that the writer accidentally wrote a genocide into the show and was completely oblivious to it, which immediately justifies anything that the Flag-Smashers do, and make the show's solution of "Sam talked a bunch of people out of committing a crime against humanity" even more ridiculous.

I used to be an anarchist and still have many anarchist beliefs but my changes basically were due to the fact that I believe you need a lot more systems in place to keep abuses from happening than less.

I think there's actually a lot more merit to Sam's critique than surface value because the biggest argument for the way the show handled it is that Karli's actions were 100% going to make sure that the GRC plan went through.

I don't think this is the show to point out her being guilty of unpragmatic villainy but her handling of the optics utterly blew.

As it turns out terrorism may not exactly help your cause.

Yeah, it's not even subtext because Sam's argument was the fact that Karli lashing out was the direct consequence of their actions. The problem was that it did make the GRC look like the victims in all this. Without Sam to explain the situation, the Flagsmashers would have gone down looking like terrorists.

This isn't an uncommon protesting point either and a major reason why police like to agitate crowds and send provocateurs in or arrange False Flag operations. Because discrediting a movement by saying its violent is common tradecraft.

If we're getting into it, we get the justification for Sam as Captain America right there because he successfully prevents the "deportation/genocide" by wearing the costume and making it political suicide to go against him. Whereas if he was "just" the Falcon he would have probably failed.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 29th 2021 at 1:47:00 AM

I wonder, was the show trying to do a story about deportation, or were they trying to do a metaphor for eminent domain and gentrification, and just followed what the Captain America movies did in treating the whole world like it's the United States?

I feel like they were probably more aiming for eminent domain and gentrification, though I cannot fathom how one would write this and not be at least reminded of deportation.

The Flagsmasher end of the plotline is pretty nebulous in general as far as what they were actually trying to write. I'd have figured the Flagsmashers are a mismash of social justice movements, but interviews indicate the writers see them in line with the Q-Anon movement an the january rioters as well, so it's beyond me what's going on there.

The writers may have been thinking Qanon, but the director/costume designer was pretty clearly thinking BLM. The Flag-Smashers visually invoke the Antifa bogeyman, which colors their reception.

EDIT: Interestingly, "Super-Antifa" is becoming kinda popular as a villain aesthetic. The Miles Morales game did this too. There are two factions to the conflict visibly coded to be Corporate Super-Police and Super-Antifa, and the game's message is, "Both sides are bad (but Antifa is worse)."

I always find myself thinking back to that game whenever the GRC/Flag-Smasher conflict comes up. But at least Miles's game didn't write the Super-Cops committing a fucking genocide while straight-facedly saying that Antifa is worse.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 29th 2021 at 11:08:26 AM

That most certainly is not the message. Tinkerer even sacrifices her life to stop Roxxon at the end. Throughout the game, it is made clear that Roxxon is the true villain with Tinkerer being misguided at worse. This is nothing like Falcon and Winter Soldier.

That did not happen at all. The finale takes place at Roxxon's HQ, where the Underground planted a bomb on Roxxon's reactor. The ensuing explosion would wipe out the entire city, a fact that the Underground wasn't fully aware of. The entire finale is all about stopping the bomb-throwing anarchists from destroying NYC with a thrown bomb, with Roxxon being the target of said bomb.

In the end, Miles defeats Tinkerer and uses his powers to absorb the reactor's energy, at a cost of nearly killing himself. In order to allow him to vent the energy safely and survive, Tinkerer sacrifices her life. YMMV on whether she sacrificed herself to save Miles specifically or if she sacrifices herself to save the city from her, the Tinkerer, but no part of her sacrifice was about stopping Roxxon from doing anything. The city was in danger solely because of what she was doing to Roxxon.

It's exactly like TFATWS. The GRC/Roxxon provide an asshole for the Flag-Smashers/Underground to oppose which lends nuance to the conflict but, in the end, the final boss fight is Karli/Tinkerer who must die to end the conflict (though Tinkerer, at least, saw reason and killed herself rather than being conveniently murdered by another villain). What happens to the GRC/Roxxon after that is left to the post-fight denouement.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Aug 29th 2021 at 11:52:44 AM

You missed something vital. Yes, Tinkerer wanted to destroy the reactor but it wasn't her fault it was a danger to Harlem. The Big Bad knew about her plan and sabotaged it so that it would take out the city instead of just Roxxon as she planned.

Tinkerer had no intention of harming the city. The entire reason she was doing this was to expose Roxxon's harmful practices and her sacrifice was about saving the city. It's all right there on screen. The story treats her as a hero for her sacrifice and has Roxxon'x CEO arrested. Not once does the game treat her as being worse than him.

It should be noted only Phinn is actually an activist.

Her group is just working with her because she provides them superpowered toys.

Yeah the Underground as awohle are just a crime syndicate who want to be on top.

It's only Thinker ironically who cares about the Roxxon stuff.

Still, Roxxon is portrayed as unambiguously worse.

@RavenWilder: I do think the story is meant to be a deportation story, and that it's a strict allegory for ICE tracking immigrants and deporting them primarily to Mexico. I think a lot of the authorial intent wrt the GRC makes sense if you treat them as a global version of ICE.

@AlleyOop: I honestly appreciate you posting that link because it's the first official indicator I've seen of TFATWS being significantly ripped apart in production, most likely because of COVID to some degree. You don't reduce a four-episode role in a six-episode mini to literally a cameo of her dead on a bed without jettisoning vital parts of the story, especially when said role is so closely tied to one of the main villains. It wouldn't surprise me if there was a lot more time given to showing Karli's relationship with Mama Donya and more naturally portraying Donya as Karli's Morality Chain and her more clearly plummeting into radicalization in response to Donya's death.

Even that fails because a lot of us, myself included, think of what ICE is doing is a crime against humanity. Forcing people into camps and then deporting them en masse after stripping them from their homes is also....well, what it is historically.

It may not be author intent but it's what they showed.

I suspect that the full version of the show had scripts etc plotted and probably fully written before Covid caused rewrites (at whatever stage that happened) and in chopping the story down to size the writers kept the characters broadly the same but didn't realize how badly the editing would affect it.

Hypothetically for example they had a more sympathetic Karli who slipped gradually into a more extremist mindset after the death of her Morality Chain. But because viewed never actually saw that, Karli basically broke bad mid series for fairly nebulous reasons.

There may well have been more depth to the GRC too, for example some internal pushback/political fighting over the relocation plan but again this ended up sliced up.

The characters all ended up in the same places they would have done but some important steps to getting there got excised.

I think you may be onto something. For instance, the GRC could have originally been founded on the idea of finding new homes for everyone who was Blipped and then decided on removing everyone who moved into the Blipped Houses, then originally was supposed to come up with new homes for them before deciding on deportation due to racist Senator throwing US weight around.