So right now, if you are on any kind of social media you will see the outrage about Captain America.
If you have somehow managed to avoid it, SPOILER ALERT…
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In the latest comic, Captain America is revealed to have been a Hydra agent this whole time. Yes, creators just made Cap a Nazi.
This has brought about an outpouring outrage from many, and a great deal of sighing and eye rolling from the ‘it’s just an imaginary character’ crowd.
Yes, Marvel owns their characters, and the copyright to everything he’s in…but he also is a beloved character that lots of people have embraced in deep ways that others can probably find very hard to understand.
Ever since Hercules performed his tasks, and Beowulf took on Grendel, people have been drawing strength and inspiration from imaginary characters. Maybe they recall Captain America’s moral integrity when being tested, or his determination when he was just a 90lb weakling trying to serve his country.
Stories after all from their beginnings around the camp fire, have been a way to learn about how to deal with a world set against us. Heroes like Beowulf and Grendel after all would not have persisted throughout so many generations if they didn’t have something deep and important to offer.
It isn’t ours to judge what people get out of characters. Even as writers our own creations, once they are out in the world, are absorbed into the readers in very deep ways. They cease to belong to us, and become personal to the reader. They develop meanings and importance to this wider group of people than we can ever have imagined. They teach things about perserverance, hope, and morals, and inspire those in others.
As a writer I cannot imagine a higher honour than someone I wrote about caring so much about a character that it becomes so beloved. It is hard as an author or an artist to grasp that sometimes. We love them, we create them, and sometimes it is hard to grasp that characters life meaning so much to a reader.
So when something like this Captain American furore breaks out, I actually like it, because it shows that humans are still invested in this imagined things. They still matter, no matter how much technology we surround ourselves with. The grubby, frightened human gathering around the campfire is still within us, looking for strength where ever they can find it.
I feel sure there is some switchero that Marvel is going to pull—but in the end, that doesn’t really matter. The important bits of Captain America, reside in those that care about him passionately, and no matter what the latest writer working on this iteration says, he can’t touch that.
People have fallen in love with someone imaginary, and made him real. As a writer that is a beautiful thing. The rest is all noise.