**SPOILERS**
Captain America is supposed to represent the good values of the American everyman. Marvel realizes this, and fans realize this. But recently Marvel faced a conundrum. How do you keep a character like Captain America popular in a complex moral world?
As of this week, we’ve found that the answer is that you don’t. In a recent Captain America comic, it was revealed that all this time (in this certain comic series) Captain America has been a double agent, secretly working with the evil, hated Hydra. We see Cap, standing next to a bound-up man, saying the words “Hail Hydra.”
WHAT?!?!
After the initial shock, I came to the understanding that this move shouldn’t actually take us by surprise. In recent years we’ve seen fans favoring superhero characters with a more ambiguous moral standing — Deadpool, Wolverine, Christopher Nolan’s Batman. This has been accompanied by an overall decline in support for strong moral characters like Superman or Captain America. Most of my friends would challenge me: “But Captain America is soooo boring, he always does the right thing.” And we’ve seen Marvel address these opinions in the recent release “Captain America: Civil War,” where we see Captain America go against the government to do what he believes is right. Fans loved it.
But this begs the question of why we want our heroes to be somewhat villainous, and why we want our villains to be heroes. As a Disney fanatic, I grew up with the black and white morality of the princess versus the evil witch. But even Disney has gone against this narrative, with movies like the live-action Maleficent, where we see Angelina Jolie’s Maleficent as a woman wronged whose revenge plot ends up with her becoming the hero of the story. There’s also several television shows that have used the archetypal villain as the lead and hero of the plot: “Once Upon a Time,” “Dexter” and “Breaking Bad,” to name a few. We even have shows in which every character is a “bad guy,” like “Orange is the New Black.”
Several of these good, lawful characters like Captain America and Superman were invented during war times, when morality was as simple as black and white: Nazi Germany bad, America good. These characters reflect the American need for moral simplicity — if the government was going to ask hundreds of thousands of men to fight, these men needed to believe in moral simplicity.
But in a post-Vietnam and 9/11 world, Americans are afraid, and they’re afraid of everyone. The good guys aren’t so good anymore, and sometimes the bad guys weren’t so bad. But sometimes they are. In other words, we live in a world where the good and bad aren’t so precisely cut and dry anymore. Once on Tumblr, I found a photoset that read “Every villain is a hero in their own mind.” I’ve found that this statement can be applied to a plethora of modern narratives in several mediums.
And now, creators are acknowledging that and turning those morally simplistic characters of the past into something new, exciting and even more telling about the possibilities of the world around us.
Contact Arianna Lombard at ariannal ‘at’ stanford.edu