Thread by @AlexandraErin

I feel like the fact that John Walker was a high school sports hero underscores the problems with the government's idea that you can just take a "peak condition" human and put them in a superhero suit and have them do superhero stuff.

Like, how many high school athletes manage to stay in "perfect physical condition" through a prolonged period of putting their physical abilities to the extreme test?

Without a magic superpower potion, they'd be going through Captains America really quickly.

There's a lot of stuff that makes me go "whuhuh?" about The Falcon and the Winter Soldier but the idea that the government would want "a new Captain America" to do the stuff that Steve Rogers, unaccountable loose canon superhero, did and not the comic book cover stuff?

See, this is why I tell people that Batman isn't a more realistic fantasy figure than Superman. And Batman has canonically received magical and psionic healing of serious injuries over the years.

https://twitter.com/KrisRHoyt/status/1380691436098580486

Obviously in the fictional world of a superhero universe, "super normal" superheroes like Hawkeye or Walker or Batman or whoever can keep fighting alongside and against superpowered combatants without blowing out a knee or whatever just by never writing that they do.

And, for instance, Sam Wilson (much like Tony Stark) also has no superpowers, just access to unusual cutting edge technology, and he can keep up with cyborg experimental supersoldier Bucky or perfect supersoldier Steve.

But I feel like the fact that they specifically put John Walker into a superhero's outfit, one worn by someone who could tank one-hit-kill disintegrator blasts from weapons powered by the space stone, and made so much of the story about the comparison between him and Steve...

Like, I 100% buy that the government would want A Captain America. The part I don't understand is where they're deploying him like he's actually Captain America, or even more so, the extent to which he seems to be free to just deploy himself, run his own ops.

Like, the way he gets to decide how to use his time and his apparently absolute freedom to just fly across the world and run his own ops... that seems like the exact opposite of what they'd want. The whole advantage of appointing a new Captain America is that they own him.

Like, what happened at the end of the most recent episode... I mean, something like that was always going to happen, except it just as easily could have been footage of someone else doing that to him. His power of being an unusually fit normal human being wouldn't have saved him.