The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

I’m not convinced that deportation was part of the original plot, it doesn’t get any mention until the end of episode 5 and I’m pretty sure it’s only mention in episode 6 is the GRC talking amongst themselves before the attack.

The fact that Sam makes no explicit statement about what the GRC was doing makes me suspect that what the GRC was doing was changed during filming.

I think that the GRC was originally much more generic in the sense of providing poor and discriminatory governance and support but not being engaged in massive forced deportations, but because they had to cut the Flagsmasher origin stuff stuff they wrote in a quick “GRC are doing bad” with with the deportation without properly understanding how evil mass deportations like that are.

Just a look at the GRC membership shows that the entire deportation thing isn’t thought through, several of the members that speak about the need to deport people are countries that people would be being deported to.

Edited by Silasw on Aug 30th 2021 at 12:13:52 PM

We know the Louisiana scenes were the ones mostly shot first, so Sam's beginning and a lot of the stuff in the later episodes likely had to be kept the same or slid downstream and worked towards for that reason.

Edited by AlleyOop on Aug 30th 2021 at 7:19:12 AM

The GRC is a riddle wrapped inside a enigma where I really can't tell what the intent here was and how it all went so wrong. It's kind of a sliding scale of Flagsmashers, Walker and the GRC. With the Flagsmashers their arc works in broad terms, but the missing pieces (e.g the Morality Chain bit with Mama) make the arc feel very forced and contrived. With Walker you can do an autopsy and tell his character arc by where it ended with the set-up and pay-off, but in the show proper there's an entire missing act to his character (as I've pointed out before, episode 5 ends with Walker at his most sinister point but when he shows up in episode 6 he just inexplicably slid-back to heroism off-screen like they just chopped off an entire episode between them).

With the GRC there's just nothing and it's very hard to tell what was the intent and what went wrong because they're so mutilated a concept.

I think the group is actually pretty consistently portrayed. We have Karli talking about how she wants open borders in the world and for things to return to the way they were during the Blip where the immense existential loneliness and lack of labor resulted in everyone being able to immigrate to whatever country they wanted. Essentially, the enormous crisis led to an end to racism and nationalism.

Then the world came back and even if people were no longer racist or want open borders, half of the people still did and wanted their old homes and jobs back.

I think the issue is that it actually very straightforward what they're about and planning.

It's just, again, a writing fumble.

Edited by CharlesPhipps on Aug 30th 2021 at 4:49:25 AM

Sorry if I'm a bit late but I'd like to share my feelings regarding the video posted by Nightwire on Falcon and Winter Soldiers sooner:

• I will reluctantly agree that while Thanos' plan is shown to be bad on the long run, it IS frustrating that nobody tries to attack his position in any way other than "it's bad because genocide" (which IS a valid point but you would think they'd try pointing out the flaws in his plan too). Maybe that's what T'Challah did in What If episode 3.
• Yeah, Killmonger is a terrible example of this because, as all these people seem to constantly forget: T'Challah does acknowledge he had a point and tries to fix this! But I guess that's still bad because Black Panther is a king and royalty = bad. Nevermind that Killmonger also seized power by becoming king through the traditional duel and right by blood rather than through any revolution, and showed no desire to reform the system; no, since his ideas vaguely had a point, that makes what he did better—'
• Now I might be biased on that point, but how exactly is it a legitimate criticism to complain that Falcon wanna change the system from the inside rather than destroy it? That seems pretty legitimate as far as opinions go to me. This guy just doesn't like that the writers disagree with his ideas.
• I do agree that the Flag Smashers (or more accurately Karli) start doing bad shit out of nowhere to justify them being villains, but frankly I didn't sympathize that much with them before that.

I'm not sure it's out of nowhere. When have angry groups ever needed to justify doing bad stuff?

There are many progressives who are rather cynical about the idea of an Internal Reformist as they think such a person will be a failure at best and end up becoming the very thing they were trying to fight against at worst. I don't have any real opinions on that, one way or another myself. Then again, I have plenty in that video to dislike.

Whether reform from the inside is actually possible, vs whether reform from railing against the system has positive results, is a subject of much debate among progressives and activist communities, and has been for a very, very long time.

It's not really something where you can say "actual activists don't think this works," because actual activists don't agree on whether it works or not.

A system that engages in systemic murder against minorities, runs prisons that are glorified slave labor, shoves immigrants into internment camps, and topples entire governments to install dictatorships and plunder their resources...well, it's not a system many people are fond of keeping around, to put it VERY lightly.

Ah we're really doing the Us is evil and must be taken down?

Like have you actually seen the world. Because the US aren't that bad compared to like most countries?

Plus its really naive that the whole a system and government is destroyed will be better as all it will do is lead to a new system appearing. Revoltiooms usually never really end well after all.

That's a topic better suited for another thread in another place. I'm merely explaining why plenty of people are very much against the idea of reformism.

And replace it with what?

Like I said revolutions like this rarely end well. The result is just a new prick who takes over.

Yeah, there's a lot to discuss about it, and I have no desire to turn this into a political debate^^' sorry. I won't pretend to know for sure, I just feel it's a bit unfair to treat Internal Reformism as a horrible message when I feel it's a reasonable (if not perfect) opinion to have rather than any form of imperialistic propaganda.

It depends who you're asking, considering even under various radical ideologies, there's different ideas of what the end goal even is.

Again, not quite sure how suitable it is to discuss it in this thread. Might be best to go into DM's or another, more appropriate thread?

Edited by Diana1969 on Sep 6th 2021 at 7:05:28 PM

Whether or not reform is a good or bad idea, I feel that Sam’s reform being a single stern lecture seems astonishingly light, considering the last time he and Steve went up a government agency preparing to destroy millions of lives they tore it to the ground.

This is more of a general politics discussion, but as for my two cents I'd argue that revolutions don't succeed without some level of internal reformism to keep them from backsliding into Full-Circle Revolution, but also vice versa, and that's why some folks who are ideologically pro-reform still take issue with the finale. You need a mix of both if you want progress that sticks.

And as mentioned elsewhere, I do think that's sort of what Sam was trying to get at with his speech in theory (Karli 2.0 being the implicit revolutionary muscle behind his push for reform). Except, as we know, COVID happened, which resulted in the Flagsmashers subplot being gutted and frankensteined so severely during rewrites, among god knows what else, that the already haphazard execution had an even harder time getting this idea across.

Apparently Anthony Mackie rewrote Sam's speech over quarantine due to considering it too OOC and "too black", which makes me very curious if he was simply referring to the speech using too much AAVE and slang compared to Sam's usual speech patterns, or whether there was more to it and the speech was less conciliatory in its original form.

Edited by AlleyOop on Sep 6th 2021 at 5:29:20 AM

It's really naive to think that you can just destroy the whole thing and make a better system from scratch without a mix of reform from within.

As someone who actually lives in a continent where coups and revolutions happen regularly to tear down the old system...and then leading to a new equally bad one. (And I should note the guys who toppled the old one did often genuinely think they would do a better job initially.)

Is there a thread in OTC where such a discussion is more appropriate?

x3 Wrt Mackie changing the speech over quarantine: is this something he himself said in an interview?

Politics in media or General Politics.

Edited by Aleistar on Sep 6th 2021 at 8:50:33 AM

Thanos discussion short: Thanos's plan is evil and stupid. It's evil because it's a cruel plan to commit mass genocide. It's stupid because the mass genocide would not actually achieve the purpose that Thanos is committing mass genocide for.

The heroes oppose Thanos's plan because it's evil, but the fact that it's stupid goes unremarked upon. Thus, for some, it feels like the movies treat Thanos's plan as cruelly efficient; as if we are to believe that the cruel arithmetic is a net good for the universe, but the cost is too high to pay.

But it's not cruelly efficient. It's evil and stupid.

I actually have the "evil and stupid" problem with the GRC, who are treated as well-intentioned but ultimately misguided. Even setting aside the problem that the writers wrote a genocide by accident; the basic framing of the GRC's goals is evil and stupid. To put it simply: the sides of this conflict were assigned incorrectly.

The two sides are split into the Blipped and the Not Blipped. The GRC are the side of the Blipped. The Flag-Smashers are the side of the Not Blipped. This is wrong at its most basic level, and this already puts the GRC in an indefensible position before anything has even been said.

See. Here's the deal. Five years have passed and the Blipped suddenly returned to existence. So now there are Not Blipped living in their homes, working in their jobs, etc. Blipped Senators returned to find their terms expired and Not Blipped Senators elected in their place. Blipped homeowners returned to find someone else chilling in their living room eating chicken wings. It's mass chaos on an unthinkable scale.

Here's the problem: Your job didn't Blip with you. Your possessions didn't Blip with you. People left their lives behind when they disappeared and, for the last five years, the rest of the world has had to pick up those pieces. You don't return to find someone living in your home. You return in their home. Your couch isn't there; theirs is. It's their bed upstairs. It's their dishes in the kitchen. It's their posters on the wall.

The world did not go on hiatus. It moved on. Your stuff is not in the house anymore. It was thrown away, inherited, resold, etc. a long time ago. It's not coming back.

The question is framed as, "Who gets the house?" But that framing assumes the two sides are equal. They're not. You can't just put the Blipped person's life back together by just moving the Not Blipped person out. Their everything is still gone. All you're doing is disrupting the Not Blipped person too.

If the Not Blipped person keeps the house and the Blipped has to leave, then 50% of the Earth's population have their lives disrupted. If the Blipped person keeps the house and the Not Blipped person has to leave, then 100% of the Earth's population have their lives disrupted. This is not hard math; obviously, it's the Blipped that have to go.

If the GRC represented the Not Blipped, their plans for mass relocation would be cruelly efficient. It would put them in a position where they could be flawed, be overlooking the human element of this otherwise difficult situation, and it would thus be reasonable for Sam to gently correct them as he does in the end. But because they represent the Blipped, because they are determined to disrupt every life instead of half of the lives, they are evil and stupid.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 6th 2021 at 8:12:12 AM

@Alley Oop where did you read about Mackie rewriting Sam's speech?

Sorry for intervening, but I can't find a better thread to ask my question. I stumbled upon MCU: John Walker page and I think there is a lot of trope misuse going on there. I started removing some of the examples, but I'd like to ask for a second opinion. Is anyone willing to check it?

PS My country has been through several revolutions and paid dearly for that, so I'm firmly in the "internal reforms are better" camp. I do think that expecting that one speech will change everything is a bit naive, though.

Edited by Asherinka on Sep 7th 2021 at 12:33:42 PM

"Internal reforms work" is in itself a naive message. That requires that the people in power, who have had hundreds of years of tradition abusing that power, to willingly stop abusing that power. The only internal reform that works is a total system purge; in which the abusive system is removed so that it can no longer commit the abuse it exists to commit. At which stage it ceases to be internal. Internal reform requires you to trust the people who have proven themselves untrustworthy.

Sam's speech was very nice, and has maybe called enough attention to one atrocity to stop it. But we see nothing of the effect it has. We don't see the effects of reversing the atrocity. We don't see the actual plan to help the people who need help.

As someone who actually lives in a continent where coups and revolutions happen regularly to tear down the old system...and then leading to a new equally bad one.

Oh? Which one, if you don't mind my curiosity?

The heroes oppose Thanos's plan because it's evil, but the fact that it's stupid goes unremarked upon. Thus, for some, it feels like the movies treat Thanos's plan as cruelly efficient; as if we are to believe that the cruel arithmetic is a net good for the universe, but the cost is too high to pay. But it's not cruelly efficient. It's evil and stupid.

Pretty much. In itself, I agree that it makes sense for the heroes to oppose it primarily because it's evil - that's what heroes do. But it's somewhat disappointing that they never try to reason with him and show him why that plan is also inefficient and dumb, if just from a pragmatic point of view. It's kinda like that villain from Fallout: trying to use the moral high ground won't work because Thanos is well-aware it's horrible, he just thinks it's a Necessary Evil. If they pointed out practical flaws in his plan, he would have a much harder time defending it and couldn't play the card of "You're naive, I got the guts to do what needs to be done." Evil Will Fail is one of my favourite tropes for a reason.

"Internal reforms work" is in itself a naive message. That requires that the people in power, who have had hundreds of years of tradition abusing that power, to willingly stop abusing that power. The only internal reform that works is a total system purge; in which the abusive system is removed so that it can no longer commit the abuse it exists to commit. At which stage it ceases to be internal. Internal reform requires you to trust the people who have proven themselves untrustworthy.

I respectfully disagree, but like I said, I do not wish to turn this thread into a political debate.

Edited by Theokal3 on Sep 7th 2021 at 10:55:42 AM

The films and tv series show all the devastation and chaos that resulted from the Snap. The earth did not thrive. The movies don't have characters debating with Thanos because that would be pointless (they know they can't convince him) and because they show you how and why it failed.

Villains like Thanos don't change their minds even in the face of logic. In the first X-Men movie, the heroes tell Magneto his plan won't work and he just goes ahead and tries to carry it out anyway because he doesn't care about anyone else's opinions but his own. Telling Thanos how his plan would fail would be an exercise in futility; the guy isn't called the Mad Titan for nothing.