mrsklemzak:

shinelikethunder: A huge amount of MCU fic features Steve Rogers the wonderful, caring, sensitive, supportive boyfriend, and I uh. Kind of want the opposite. Don’t get me wrong, any “Steve is a godawful boyfriend” headcanon should still start from the baseline of Steve being a good person who cares about Doing The Right Thing and treating people decently. But Steve is also: - married to his job

- kind of emotionally constipated

- quick to anger

- prickly about receiving comfort, and awkward about giving it

- blunt and plain-spoken

- prone to expecting a lot of the people around him, and to being openly disappointed/unimpressed when they don’t come through

- going to put duty ahead of personal attachments most of the time

- withdrawn and socially isolated

- reckless, stubborn, and the kind of prideful that answers anything that can be taken as a challenge with “wanna bet?”

- a lifelong dweeb who has never been in a romantic relationship and has no experience in how they work Which is a set of issues that could range anywhere from “highly manageable, if you aren’t afraid to go toe-to-toe with him and don’t expect him to be available 24/7″ to “un-dateable human disaster.” Going by my fairly limited experience with comics, there is precedent for the “un-dateable human disaster” option; MCU doesn’t have to follow it, but it wouldn’t be out of the blue. And let’s face it, MCU Steve could use some better-developed flaws. And oh my lord, Godawful Boyfriend Steve Rogers. Swears he’s not trying to set a record for number of consecutive dinner dates he’s bailed out of halfway through to go Avenging. Fails epically at normal emotional boundaries–is cagey and withdrawn about the weirdest shit, but overshares about his Dead Best Friend Feelings on the first date. Goes abruptly from zero to full commitment once he decides he’s found the Right Partner. Guilt-trips like a pro, and sometimes forgets how fucking intimidating he is when he’s pissed off. Takes an “if you get killed, walk it off” approach to almost all life difficulties. Will always come through with material and moral support in an emergency, but clams up and flees rather than be a shoulder to cry on. Wouldn’t know work/life separation if it clocked him over the head. Don’t get me wrong, Steve’s a nice dude, and unlike most angry repressed masculinity-stereotype characters, he’s capable of being forthright about his feelings when it counts. But there’s plenty of potential there for him to be flat-out fucking terrible at romantic relationships. And even at his best… well, “sensitive” isn’t exactly the word I would use. Considerate, sure. Solicitous of whether he’s saying/doing the exact best possible thing for someone else’s emotional wellbeing, not so much. I kinda want this too! Specially after the “First time losing a soldier?” “People aren’t soldiers” exchange between Tony and him. I want to see more of the callous army toughness of Steve Rodgers. We don’t see that very often. Would like to see more broken, like PTSD, going batshit crazy over little dumb things. To others, who weren’t in the military and don’t understand the thinking, anyway. Fluff is fine occasionally. But sometimes a good story and art involves pain. Terror(Steve hiding when there’s fireworks). Anger(Tony going too far in teasing him about something, or not taking things more seriously). Just a couple of my two cents. This has quite a few notes.

YEAH. Well, YEAH with caveats. Because this hits on some of Steve’s biggest issues, which means it’s not necessarily going to come out in a straightforward way. In particular, he would rather die a thousand very painful deaths than admit that any part of him is broken. It may not always be obvious, because for a stoic icon of masculinity he’s surprisingly willing to show pain and vulnerability, but those aren’t what he’s afraid of. The thing he will resist until his dying breath is not being damaged, it’s hitting a point where he can’t push past it. If you want to get psychological about it, you could point to Steve growing up frail and chronically ill in an era where eugenics was popular and resources were scarce: if there’s one thing that drives him, it’s the need to do his part, to be useful, to never be a burden or a liability, to not let impairment make him nonfunctional.

Which actually leads right back into flaws and sources of conflict, because it affects how he views others, not just himself. Steve Rogers believes in people; the other edge of that double-sided sword is that he expects a lot of them. Even when it’s completely unreasonable, his tolerance for admitting defeat or rolling over without putting up a fight is about negative three on a scale from one to ten. Not that he’ll be mad if you don’t step up to the plate every time. Just disappointed. (Okay, that’s a lie, if he thinks it’s your job to step up to the plate he’ll be mad as hell at you for shirking.)

So yeah, I’m not sure his PTSD would come out as terror and hiding when there’s fireworks–the guy’s fight-or-flight reflex is like 99.8% fight. But I can see it manifesting as him being always on–wanting to be able to relax and enjoy the birthday fireworks on the 4th of July, but unable to let his guard down, always primed for a fight he might have to throw himself into, reflexively drawing one arm across his body at every explosion even when his shield is in the other room. (Despite the general fandom backlash against exaggerated pre-TWS fanon, I think there’s plenty of truth to Steve being an uptight stick-in-the-mud–not out of prudishness, but out of duty-mindedness + inability to turn off. The sad part is that he doesn’t want to be.) I mean, at this point I’m barely even headcanoning, just spinning variations on his nightmare vision in AoU–the fear that he’s broken for any life except violence and combat.

And he does want a life outside fighting. That’s the thing. Steve prizes being tough in the sense of never giving up no matter how much he’s hurting, but he resists being tough in the sense of callous or unfeeling or never giving anyone a chance to hurt him. All those scenes of numb disconnection in TWS and the cut scenes of Avengers–he looks miserable about it. He’s an increasingly guarded person the more shit life flings at him, but he still keeps making himself take his guard down. TWS was all about the raw courage it takes to trust people in a world where some of them can and will betray you: Steve’s strength lies, not in invulnerability, but in the vulnerability of trusting others come through for you and yourself to absorb the damage when they don’t. Despite his loss and grief and difficulty forging human connections, he keeps trying–striking up a conversation with that cute jogger on the Mall, letting himself be a tongue-tied dweeb about asking Sharon out, maintaining his fraught relationships with Fury and Natasha. The SHIELD team he’d been training and fighting with for two years turned on a dime and stabbed him in the back and turned out to have been Hydra all along, and he went right back out and reconvened the Avengers with Tony.

And ugh, feelings. Steve is my fandom bicycle and I multiship him with just about everybody, but you will pry my awkward-virgin headcanons from my cold dead hands, because if that boy wasn’t saving himself for Peggy Carter I will eat my laptop. They were waiting until after the war–because they are both fierce and duty-minded souls who didn’t need the distraction, yes, but also… keeping it separate gave them the prospect of a future where the war was over. One tiny guarded part of themselves they could keep tender and uncalloused, protected from all the horror and killing. That. That’s what Steve keeps struggling towards no matter how much it hurts, because that’s what he’s afraid he’s lost. (And yes, I am pre-emptively rolling on the floor crying over CEvans’ remarks about how much it means to Steve that after a lifetime of putting duty above self, he finally gets something purely personal that is just about him and Bucky and their connection and oh my god Cap 3 is going to kill me.)

OH WOW THAT GOT OFF TOPIC REAL FAST. I have so many feelings about Steve, though. SO MANY. And even the parts that aren’t directly about his questionable status as boyfriend material are about how much goddamn baggage he has about intimacy and trust/betrayal and desensitization and being married to his extremely violent job.