This isn't a specific theme but how about something to do with Civil War, how Steve's choices could only be made because him and his crew had superpowers/ had skills. I'm comparison to Tony who made the real world choice and it seems the movie narrative punished him for it.

Sorry it’s taken a while for me to get back to you on this one.

The power element is a tricky one, because without Steve having any of these powers, none of these problems would have occurred. Causality and all that. If Steve didn’t have powers, he and Bucky would both be long dead.It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg scenario.

I don’t think the choices he makes could only be made because he has powers/skills. It’s because he has the powers and skills that the conflict happens. Before Bucky even shows up, there is conflict because of the Accords and even if it wasn’t really handled that well as the running thread of conflict (supplemented by “robot-armed assassin who kills peoples’ parents”), that’s what I want to look at because it’s the heart of everything in this film.

I’ve made an argument before that the difference between Tony’s powers and Steve or Wanda’s is that Tony has the ability to take them off. He can remove his suit and step back from everything. He can put down the thing that makes him a weapon - a nuclear deterrent as he called himself back in Iron Man 2. He can lock them up, put them away, and be a normal human being.

Steve and Wanda don’t have that luxury. They have these powers but they can’t just toss them in the basement. Steve will always be the powerful super-soldier. Wanda is infused with these powers and as Steve said “she’s just a kid” but the whole world sees her as this living weapon and no matter what she does, she can’t stop being that weapon.

Tony is making the pragmatic choice as a weapons designer and creator. He is seeing the repercussions of his actions and his creations. It’s the sensible choice and for him, it is certainly the right one. He knows he needs to have limits put on him and that’s fine for him. The trouble is that the accords is that they treat people like weapons. Ross describes Thor and Banner as “a couple of 30 megaton nukes…” and Tony describes Wanda as a “weapon of mass destruction”.

For Steve and Wanda, the accords mean that they will be treated as a commodity rather than a person, and worse than that, they’ll be weapons who have no say in who/what/where they are allocated: “we surrender our right to choose”. There could be conflicts they could help in, but if they tried, they would be considered criminals. They outright say that if the non-normals don’t comply, “they will come for me”.

There’s no right position here. The military were correct to suggest that the Avengers needed oversight, but then they treated some of the Avengers as tools and objects to be shelved until needed instead of people who have no choice about the powers they have. They were telling a man who repeatedly defied orders and went behind enemy lines and risked a medical super trial all so he could save as many people as he could that he might be prevented from saving people. They were telling a young woman that she was too dangerous to be given her freedom.

I do want to feel bad for Tony for everything that happened to him, but his weapons and his choices are his own. Wanda, Steve, Natasha, Bucky - those people don’t have the choice anymore. They are what they are and what has been done to all of them can’t be undone by signing a bit of paper. They can’t simply be closed up - “internment” as Steve puts it - because they’re deemed inconveniently powerful.

So back to the point. Steve is already at odds with Tony because of the accords, particularly because neither of them can understand the other’s experiences and why they feel so strongly about it. If it wasn’t for the tension rising over the accords and Peggy’s death, Steve wouldn’t have been pulling back so hard. The accords exist because of his powers, ergo, the choices are only made because he has those powers.

Look at their confrontation about Wanda and the way Tony talks about her like a weapon. Steve is increasingly angry and justifiably so, because if Wanda - a genetically enhanced human being - is a dangerous weapon in Tony’s eyes, what does that make Steve to him? Tony doesn’t see it that way - he sees the simple clean-cut world of dangerous things being controlled. He’s been trying to do it since the first film, when he saw what his weapons can do. This miscommunication is what drives the wedge more firmly between them. Steve says himself “Every time I think you see things the right way…” and Tony clearly believes he does.

Powered or non-powered, they both have different experiences, see the world in different ways and neither of them can see the others’ perspective. Tony believes he’s doing what need to be done “to stave off something worse” and Steve sees it as a form of captivity.

As for Tony being punished, I can’t really comment on that because I have bias for the poor bastard who was abducted, tortured, brainwashed, forced to murder a ton of people and had just escaped it all and found a stable life, only to have it all go boom. (There does seem to be an excess of Tony angst in a film called Captain America, though…)

(And I apologise in advance if this is rambling and makes no sense. I am very tired and it is late)