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domarzioneBad Cap Bingo
1100 words | PG-ish | Steve Rogers
One of the first lessons Steve had had to learn as Captain America, long before he'd ever gotten to Europe, was that being known - to politicians and generals, to the public, to the press, to the enemy - required a thick skin, a thicker skin than he'd ever needed as little Steve Rogers from Brooklyn. For all of the wide-eyed wonderment about his body, there was twice as much doubt about his character, his motives, his intelligence, his utility, his everything else. Usually by people who had no actual basis upon which to base those doubts and even less interest in forming one. It was easier and more fun to assume what you wanted, or at least what was useful to you, than to challenge your own beliefs and find out the truth.
Sometimes Steve fought it - it was frustrating at best, hurtful at worst - and sometimes he just suffered in silence because despite what Bucky had always said, he really could learn from experience and recognized a losing battle when he saw one. The court of public opinion had a hanging judge, to be sure.
That court in the future (his present) was in many ways so much worse than what he'd left behind in 1945. Technology and social change had demolished all of the filters and protections and buffers between object and observer. There were no studios managing what the public knew about their movie stars, no Walter Winchells to draw up the rules of play that were hard but understandable, no shelter from the media storm. There was now TMZ and Perez Hilton to hold reputations up for ransom and Twitter and Instagram and Facebook to turn celebrity reportage into an everyman's hobby; Hilton was in competition with the teenager with an iPhone for catching a famous actress in the wrong arms - or sometimes just at the supermarket. There was no privacy, no off-stage, no respite. It was exhausting and Steve had no idea how Tony managed to not only survive it, but thrive in it.
Steve would never thrive in it, but he'd gotten better at sloughing off the frustration without taking it out on anyone else. The first time Steve had seen a supermarket tabloid headline that he'd fathered a child with a famous (married) actress, he'd gotten upset. Now, he might ask one of the PR staff if this pretend progeny meant that he could field his own baseball team yet. (Yes, possibly including expanded rosters for September call-ups.) Oddly enough, it was the little things that bothered him more than the ridiculous headlines; he could roll his eyes at the headline that he'd busted up a restaurant singlehandedly while partying with the stars, but one person's irate Captain America Is an Asshole screed insisting that he'd rudely blown off their little girl's request for an autograph going viral could still make him sulk. These were equivalent situations as far as public relations went; unprovable was also undeniable and Steve resented that damage control was the same regardless of truth value. In the Twenty-First Century court of public opinion, "no contest" was the most common plea.
The gossip blogs and the tabloids weren't the only ones making things up to their own advantage, of course. Foreign politicians and their governments were often far more creative than anything TMZ could come up with, if often far easier to ignore without repercussions. Captain America had been accused of all sorts of things back in the '40s, too, and if most of his nation-state accusers now weren't as obviously ridiculous as what Goebbels' office had cranked out on a daily basis, a goodly portion of them still were. North Korea was good for one tempest in a teapot every few months - the last one had featured the Supreme Leader personally guiding the DPRK forces against Steve's brazen attempt to impugn the sovereignty of the hermit kingdom, a triumph of juche over capitalism. And while Steve had slept through the Cold War in its entirety, the Kremlin, apparently immune to irony, was also eager to set themselves up as a regular victim of American attempts to influence word affairs by deploying Captain America where he didn't belong. Natasha sent him all of the best bits, usually accompanied by another photo of a shirtless Putin, who liked to tell people that he was Captain America's superior without needing science to help him.
The creation of the Bad Cap Bingo cards by SHIELD's PR department were, in hindsight, a natural response to it all. Steve wasn't sure how it had all started exactly, but it must have been pretty early on, before they'd realized that he had a sense of humor, because they'd hidden it from him. But he'd found one on someone's desk when he'd sat down to sign some paperwork and, when he'd failed to get indignant or righteous about it, they'd gotten less coy. To the point that Steve was often consulted for 'inside information,' although he was still forbidden to purchase his own card. He was, however, allowed and encouraged to make suggestions for squares. There was a permanent list of options taken from the tabloids ranging from the sad to the ridiculous: imaginary relationships, Giving Up the Shield (quitting, getting fired), sexual assault (rape and/or pedophilia), Dying of Something, Criminal Cap, Making Children Cry, Steve Rogers Is a Dirty Boy (the blanket category for sexual kinks, such as crossdressing and bondage, that he'd allegedly been caught enjoying), drugs/alcohol (his documented metabolic enhancement should have mooted this, and yet never did), Johnny Appleseed (paternity accusations, which came at a rate that pushed past an envious imaginary sex life into an exhausting one), Twentieth Century Man (accusations of bigotry, sexism, and whatever else could be conceivably attributed to coming of age in the 1930s), closeted homosexuality, Not the Real Steve Rogers, and Boogie Nights (sex tapes, explicit photographs, sexts, etc.). The balance of the squares were filled according to current events, although al-Jazeera, the Iranians, and Russia's TV-1 seemed to have earned permanent spaces.
He thought about the bingo cards as he lay on his shield in a field of shattered glass in the Triskelion lobby, trying to catch his breath and get his body to move after plummeting from the elevator that had nearly been his murder site. Whoever had Criminal Cap on their sheet this week would be a happy camper, he thought giddily as he pushed himself to his feet and started to run.
1100 words | PG-ish | Steve Rogers
One of the first lessons Steve had had to learn as Captain America, long before he'd ever gotten to Europe, was that being known - to politicians and generals, to the public, to the press, to the enemy - required a thick skin, a thicker skin than he'd ever needed as little Steve Rogers from Brooklyn. For all of the wide-eyed wonderment about his body, there was twice as much doubt about his character, his motives, his intelligence, his utility, his everything else. Usually by people who had no actual basis upon which to base those doubts and even less interest in forming one. It was easier and more fun to assume what you wanted, or at least what was useful to you, than to challenge your own beliefs and find out the truth.
Sometimes Steve fought it - it was frustrating at best, hurtful at worst - and sometimes he just suffered in silence because despite what Bucky had always said, he really could learn from experience and recognized a losing battle when he saw one. The court of public opinion had a hanging judge, to be sure.
That court in the future (his present) was in many ways so much worse than what he'd left behind in 1945. Technology and social change had demolished all of the filters and protections and buffers between object and observer. There were no studios managing what the public knew about their movie stars, no Walter Winchells to draw up the rules of play that were hard but understandable, no shelter from the media storm. There was now TMZ and Perez Hilton to hold reputations up for ransom and Twitter and Instagram and Facebook to turn celebrity reportage into an everyman's hobby; Hilton was in competition with the teenager with an iPhone for catching a famous actress in the wrong arms - or sometimes just at the supermarket. There was no privacy, no off-stage, no respite. It was exhausting and Steve had no idea how Tony managed to not only survive it, but thrive in it.
Steve would never thrive in it, but he'd gotten better at sloughing off the frustration without taking it out on anyone else. The first time Steve had seen a supermarket tabloid headline that he'd fathered a child with a famous (married) actress, he'd gotten upset. Now, he might ask one of the PR staff if this pretend progeny meant that he could field his own baseball team yet. (Yes, possibly including expanded rosters for September call-ups.) Oddly enough, it was the little things that bothered him more than the ridiculous headlines; he could roll his eyes at the headline that he'd busted up a restaurant singlehandedly while partying with the stars, but one person's irate Captain America Is an Asshole screed insisting that he'd rudely blown off their little girl's request for an autograph going viral could still make him sulk. These were equivalent situations as far as public relations went; unprovable was also undeniable and Steve resented that damage control was the same regardless of truth value. In the Twenty-First Century court of public opinion, "no contest" was the most common plea.
The gossip blogs and the tabloids weren't the only ones making things up to their own advantage, of course. Foreign politicians and their governments were often far more creative than anything TMZ could come up with, if often far easier to ignore without repercussions. Captain America had been accused of all sorts of things back in the '40s, too, and if most of his nation-state accusers now weren't as obviously ridiculous as what Goebbels' office had cranked out on a daily basis, a goodly portion of them still were. North Korea was good for one tempest in a teapot every few months - the last one had featured the Supreme Leader personally guiding the DPRK forces against Steve's brazen attempt to impugn the sovereignty of the hermit kingdom, a triumph of juche over capitalism. And while Steve had slept through the Cold War in its entirety, the Kremlin, apparently immune to irony, was also eager to set themselves up as a regular victim of American attempts to influence word affairs by deploying Captain America where he didn't belong. Natasha sent him all of the best bits, usually accompanied by another photo of a shirtless Putin, who liked to tell people that he was Captain America's superior without needing science to help him.
The creation of the Bad Cap Bingo cards by SHIELD's PR department were, in hindsight, a natural response to it all. Steve wasn't sure how it had all started exactly, but it must have been pretty early on, before they'd realized that he had a sense of humor, because they'd hidden it from him. But he'd found one on someone's desk when he'd sat down to sign some paperwork and, when he'd failed to get indignant or righteous about it, they'd gotten less coy. To the point that Steve was often consulted for 'inside information,' although he was still forbidden to purchase his own card. He was, however, allowed and encouraged to make suggestions for squares. There was a permanent list of options taken from the tabloids ranging from the sad to the ridiculous: imaginary relationships, Giving Up the Shield (quitting, getting fired), sexual assault (rape and/or pedophilia), Dying of Something, Criminal Cap, Making Children Cry, Steve Rogers Is a Dirty Boy (the blanket category for sexual kinks, such as crossdressing and bondage, that he'd allegedly been caught enjoying), drugs/alcohol (his documented metabolic enhancement should have mooted this, and yet never did), Johnny Appleseed (paternity accusations, which came at a rate that pushed past an envious imaginary sex life into an exhausting one), Twentieth Century Man (accusations of bigotry, sexism, and whatever else could be conceivably attributed to coming of age in the 1930s), closeted homosexuality, Not the Real Steve Rogers, and Boogie Nights (sex tapes, explicit photographs, sexts, etc.). The balance of the squares were filled according to current events, although al-Jazeera, the Iranians, and Russia's TV-1 seemed to have earned permanent spaces.
He thought about the bingo cards as he lay on his shield in a field of shattered glass in the Triskelion lobby, trying to catch his breath and get his body to move after plummeting from the elevator that had nearly been his murder site. Whoever had Criminal Cap on their sheet this week would be a happy camper, he thought giddily as he pushed himself to his feet and started to run.
