Avengers Endgame: Male Entitlement Undermines Steve Rogers’ Core Characterization and Story Arc

In my previous editorial, I explored transformative fandom’s movement to embrace Steve Rogers as not only a champion of the LGBT community, but as a member of that marginalized demographic.

From his creation as a stalwart anti-Fascist hero to his present incarnation, Rogers represents the tireless drive to do right, no matter the cost.  A man of peerless ethos and pathos, he consistently shows respect to women.  With his defensive weapon, once-delicate body, and “show-girl” origins, he is also uniquely feminine-coded.  Given these established characteristics, the character’s resolution in Avengers: Endgame feels particularly egregious.

Let’s set aside for now the film’s internal time-travel “logic”–of which even the directors and writers cannot agree–or the film’s aggressive heteronormativity, and the bizarre lack of closure to the Steve Rogers’ life-defining friendship with Bucky Barnes.  Other publications sufficiently explore these themes:

GameSpot: Avengers Endgame: Captain America’s Ending Totally Ruins The Movie

The Daily Dot: How the straight agenda ruined ‘Avengers: Endgame’

Fansided: Avengers: Endgame: A lack of closure at the end of the line

At the conclusion of Endgame, Rogers struggles for five years with the aftereffects of living in a post-apocalyptic world.  A veteran of World War II, frozen for 70 years, almost every event in his life since receiving Doctor Erskine’s serum accumulates shock and trauma.  He’s left with a litany of unaddressed mental health issues (including depression and PTSD), never truly acknowledged by the franchise.

Despite this, Steve consciously chooses to return to an era not only unequipped to treat such issues, but one that actively stigmatized mental health.  The film frames domestic life with Peggy Carter as a cure-all, even though the man she mourned was a version 12 years younger, unburdened by the knowledge of every Hydra-related atrocity set to befall civilization.  He returns to the past fully aware that the Steve who Peggy last saw is still trapped beneath the ice.  The former Steve usurps the latter’s life anyway.

The entitlement doesn’t end there.  During CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, Steve Rogers met Peggy’s descendants at her funeral (including the pandora’s box that is Sharon Carter).  In the events of CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER, Steve studies photos of Peggy’s family in her hospital room.  He sees the joy in her eyes as she reminisces about her long and fulfilling life.  Watching archival film at Smithsonian exhibit honoring him and his elite World War II unit, Steve sees Peggy speaking of her husband—a soldier he rescued when he liberated the 107th Infantry division.

Every aspect of  Peggy’s life suggested that she deeply loved her husband over the course of decades.  In spite of this, Steve Rogers unilaterally decides that he is the true love of Peggy Carter’s life—a choice superior to a man she knew on a soul-deep level.

Regardless of the time travel plot’s internal logic (or lack thereof), Steve deprives Peggy of choice.  He actively inserts himself into Peggy’s life and prevents her from meeting a man with whom she’d had a long and profound relationship.  Did he ever tell her about the family he erased from existence?  How could he truly convey the depth of those experiences he’d supplanted?  How could the power imbalance inherent in such an information gap ever be truly overcome?  Per director Anthony Russo, “If you went back to that timeline, between the point where Steve went into the ice [in CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE FIRST AVENGER] yet before Peggy met her husband, Peggy was available”.

Available for the taking.

Presented from Steve’s point-of-view, the film frames this act  as “romantic”.  From any woman’s point-of-view, what’s done to Peggy is a worst-nightmare scenario.  A man entitled to her body, her time, and her emotional labor decides he’s owed his happy ending because he’s a ‘nice guy’.  Screenwriter Stephen McFeely described Steve’s life with Peggy as “earned” after years of self-sacrificial fighting, as though she’s no more than a reward for a job well-done.  The Steve Rogers that we know would view the sacrifice itself as simply doing good for its own sake.

In addition to molding Steve into an avatar of toxic masculinity, his entire character arc of adapting to modern life—building a found family, exploring his worth outside of being a soldier—is completely undone.  His entire story is recursive.  He began a “man out of time”,  but lived the bulk of his adult life in the twenty-first century.  By going back to the 1940s, the filmmakers make him a man out of time again—an outlier to a culture riddled with racism, sexism, and other glaring inequities.  (Steve has a unique privilege in choosing to go back to an era uniquely suited to his WASP-ish demographic. That Marvel’s idea of denouement rests upon sending their most political character to an overly-idealized, racist/misogynist past is objectively stunning.)

A perfect solution would see Steve dancing with Peggy, but more importantly, talking with her.  Once satisfied that she’s happy, he returns to the life he built with his newly-revived friends in 2023, perhaps to lend his unique experience to helping others recover from the shock of the world moving on without them.  The moment where he stumbles into an office adjacent to hers in 1970 gave the film the perfect opportunity for Steve to see her life’s fulfillment and achieve closure.

Instead, the filmmakers clumsily include a photo of Steve on Peggy’s desk while omitting pictures of her circa-1970 family.  Had Steve looked at the faces of her children and still made the decision to erase them, it would have appeared monstrous. Compounding this issue, Steve recounts his long lost love from the 1940s in a survivor’s therapy group dedicated to coping with the loss of loved ones in Thanos’ Decimation. He doesn’t spare a word for the friends he saw turn to dust.

Countless little details were added to bolster a relationship never particularly well-established to begin with, a major reason why the ending felt wrong; it was completely unearned.  Along with the mysteriously absent family photos and the head-scratching invocation of Peggy in the group therapy, we see Steve dressed in his Avengers-era pleated khakis and tucked-in button downs—a calculated visual regression used to justify an inorganic ending.

Its cover preserving an old photograph of Peggy, Steve’s G.I. compass becomes a surrogate for a romance never fleshed out.  As Screenwriter Christopher Markus observed in a 2016 interview, Peggy was just a woman Steve “kissed once in a moving car”.

The poignancy and potency of Steve and Peggy’s relationship has roots in the metaphor of two ships passing in the night—a bittersweet concept of what could have been.  But there’s nothing else there, not enough shown to establish real, reciprocal love.  A man this obsessed (more than a decade after the fact, from Steve’s perspective) with the first woman to be civil to him is neither healthy nor romantic.

In an episode of Marvel’s animated series, AVENGERS ASSEMBLE, Peggy ends up in the future and Steve briefly considers going back with her, but she resists the idea and tells him, “Your home is here now, in this century. You’ve become an Avenger, and they need you.  Some things were never meant to be”.

Never in any previous comic, any previous Marvel property, any iteration of the character, has Steve Rogers ever returned to the past and stayed there.  It would be contrary to who he is.  Steve always gets up again.  He choses the harder right over the easier wrong.  He always looks forward, head up.  He never runs away from a fight.  Never would he leave a world recovering from a collective, apocalyptic trauma to go live in a Cold War-era domestic ‘utopia’, least of all at the expense of his paramour’s agency.

Read our full review of AVENGERS: ENDGAME.