But wait, there's more

[sholio]

So apparently this is what happens when you deprive me of Internet for a week and a half. POSTAPALOOZA!

Since I've been thinking about Peggy & co's future lately, let's talk about the MCU future timeline and how it relates to the Agent Carter characters as they age.

To some extent my AC fic is basically taking place in a headcanon AU of my own devising. I haven't watched enough of Agents of SHIELD to avoid canon slip-ups if I deal with SHIELD's future too much, and I don't really want to deal with certain parts of it (like, we know Hank and Janet were active on the superhero scene by the 1960s or the 1970s at the latest, which means they had fully functional shrinking suits -- and for me, the AC 'verse isn't really a superhero 'verse; it's a Cold War spy 'verse). So basically, my fic is taking place in a one-step-away-from-canon 'verse that never quite engages with superheroes if I can avoid it; not that they definitively don't have that future (one of the things I like about AC, actually, is the doomed-tragic aspect of knowing how most of them end up), but rather that I just don't really want to put larger-than-life Marvel superheroes and AC characters into the same fic. They don't really fit together.

But I'm interested in the idea of figuring out how to work characters like a young Alexander Pierce or Obadiah Stane into the future AC 'verse. I was considering the idea that partnering with Stane might have had something to do with Howard really going off the rails. We know that in the 1940s he backed away from making weapons, after the Midnight Oil incident; he's haunted by guilt for the people who died in the weapon's field test. So how did he get from there, to large-scale weapons manufacturing a few decades later? But I'm not sure if Stane actually had that much influence at the company early on. Plus, I don't really want to take all culpability away from Howard; though I do like him, it's much too tidy to say that Stane was largely responsible for the way Stark Industries ended up going. Howard's slide to the darkside isn't something he gets to wash his hands of. Stane might have helped tug him that way, though.

And then there's Pierce. One of my various non-canon-based bits of future speculation is that Jack goes into politics later on -- that he ends up as a Senator or something, not necessarily for the rest of his career, but for awhile. So it's actually very plausible that he might've run into Pierce early in Pierce's career with the State Department. Plus, once Pierce became involved with SHIELD's oversight and management, then Peggy would have known him and worked with him ... though I'm still considering when they might have actually met. (I don't think we know exactly when the hostage crisis involving his family canonically took place, do we?) If we take Pierce as roughly the age of the actor playing him, Redford was born in 1936 according to imdb, so Pierce could've been getting his start in politics as early as the late 1950s.

(Unpleasant thought: Peggy or Jack actually mentored him.)

Comments

[schneefink]

Jack and Pierce... fascinating idea. I would like to think that both Jack and Peggy, but especially Peggy, would at least have more of an inkling that Pierce isn't who he presents to be, but obviously in canon she didn't figure it out.

(Every time I think about the theory that she mentally deteriorated because HYDRA agents in the nursing home tampered with her meds I get sad and mad, but it would be a great & logical strategy for HYDRA...)

[recessional]

The thing about Pierce that I love as a villain, tho, is that in many ways he IS who he presents to be.

He is a charismatic, intelligent, dedicated man who truly believes everything he does and everything he is is for the greater good of the world, and who really believes that he is caring for and protecting the future of humanity.

Where that goes askew is in what he decided that meant and meant he had to (and got to) do, and where that put him in terms of power over other people etc etc, and trust me I am in no way exonerating him. If anything, this makes me angrier at him because if he'd NOT gone skewed he could have been an amazing power for actual good in the world.

But it makes him almost impossible for people like Jack and Peggy to see, because everything about him as he interacts with them is sincere: he honestly wants the outcome of their interactions to bring about a better future for mankind! He really believes that.

And that makes him invisible, because his behaviours and his actions and his words all continue to support that truth, and the only problem is just how disparate their actual ideas of what, in the END, is good for humankind are. And given HYDRA by even the time Pierce would be getting involved was largely Zola and some strung out support-cells and they'd already decided about the whole "we must convince them to surrender rather than attacking", he'd've been playing the long con from the get-go, which meant that their goals/etc didn't even diverge much for decades, because he, too, would have very much wanted a world wherein SHIELD had the capacities to influence world events to a huge extent, and wherein various different power blocs had been shifted in different ways.

Which is just kind of brilliant, in terms of working with a character in the narrative positions he's in.

/randomly sticking nose in

[sholio]

That's my take on Pierce, also. He's NOT a mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash; he's a well-intentioned ideologue. Two of the sharpest, most people-smart characters in the MCU (Peggy and Nick Fury) had absolutely no clue about his true agenda, and the main reason is because, like you said, he wasn't faking; he was really, sincerely motivated by the same things that motivated them, just to a different end.

Actually, that's one of the main things that makes me want to write young!Pierce, because I think he'd actually have been, or at least seemed, very likable. At the age he was when he got into politics, he must have come across as an idealistic young liberal, and I think Peggy would probably have liked him a lot; she'd have seen him as a bright young Hope of the Future type of kid. And you know ... he was! He just took a wrong turn along the way, that led to an absolute horror show later on.

[recessional]

Oh I think he spent most of his life as the most amazing subordinate and later on boss you could ever have: charismatic, supportive, likeable, charming, GOOD at everything he did, and good at making what you want to happen actually happen. I mean the man did get nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize and had a long, apparently successful diplomatic career.

He HAD to be amazingly likeable and bright and young and appealing.

[sholio]

Well, she IS almost 100, so while HYDRA could have instigated her mental breakdown, if they were patient all they really had to do was just wait for nature to take its course. Poor Peggy.

In any case, I basically agree with recessional's take on Pierce, that he's extremely hard to recognize for what he really is because he's actually sincere, and on top of that, sincere in ways that probably would've appealed to Peggy quite a lot. To her he would have seemed like a bright young kid out to make the world better, and I can definitely see her offering him a helping hand as a mentor once she met him, which is both fascinating and horrible to think about.

[recessional]

While I totally think Howard is responsible for Howard's situation, I suspect that Obadiah is basically a cup of water to a drowning man.

Where like, if you posit that totally left to his own devices Howard would still screw right the fuck up, but if someone had brought him up short (like Steve) he could have been salvageable, Obadiah is the other side of the coin: he'd've taken all of those reasons and tendencies that made Howard fuck up and exacerbated and fuelled them, rather than mellowing them.

And the thing is you wouldn't even need to give him too much influence on the company: between world events (they still have the SCARY parts of the Cold War to come) and a bad-for-Howard-that-way FRIENDSHIP, Obadiah could still have a huge extra negative effect while at the same time it still being very much Howard's responses to events that fuel his slide backwards.

(That's how I tend to posit it, anyway: while I do tend to think Stane was HYDRA by the end, I don't even think he started that way: I think he just started as a personality that catalyzed Howard Stark, who energized and motivated him around about the time that mutually assured nuclear destruction and other such things looked like a real possibility, but whose basic personality and tendencies themselves meant that they were the WORST POSSIBLE set of catalysts for each other: a negative feedback loop of both of them encouraging, not the worst parts of their personality necessarily, but the parts most likely to turn them into what they were.

They exacerbated and increased their mutual ruthlessness, tribalness ("us-them" mentality where anything is justified to protect Us against Them), pride, ingenuity without thought for long-term consequences beyond solving the problem at hand, etc. And with Howard that gets you the weapon-lord industrialist who messed up his son, and with Obadiah that gets you someone ripe for Pierce or someone else going "SO HEY ABOUT THAT . . . " and lo, we have what we have.)

I also totally go with Pierce getting into politics as a very young but promising and energetic political-diplomatic Hopeful in the late 1950s, so. :D

[sholio]

Yeah, I can totally see this -- Stane not so much instigating Howard, as encouraging Howard's worse traits.

Also, like some of the other comments were discussing ... I hadn't thought about it quite this way 'til commenters pointed it out, but the sheer practical considerations of developing tech for SHIELD probably played a role too. SHIELD has some high-tech, nasty toys. Whether Howard developed weapons for SHIELD and then sold them as a sideline, or worked out some deal with the government where he could basically equip his own private army as long as he gave them the same stuff, or what, it still seems not only likely but downright inevitable that if Howard was actively involved with SHIELD's R&D division, at least some of what he worked on was probably their offensive capabilities, and he probably did other things with the tech than simply give it to SHIELD.

... Though also, like I was saying in a comment on the LJ side, I don't quite agree with the MCU movies' postulation that weapons manufacturing is de facto evil, and anyone who does it is tainted by association. That's how it works in the MCU movies, but I don't agree that's how it works IRL, so I don't really think that it follows that Howard working on weapons development at ANY point means he'd lost track of his moral compass in all ways. Heck, Tony is still making weapons, in the form of the suits, throughout the movies. Anyway, though, I can totally see Stane as Howard's bad-idea friend who pushes him to act in ways that are personally destructive for him, and pushes the company towards profit-above-ethics even more so than Howard would've done on his own.

[recessional]

I tend to assume that he equipped SHIELD and then sold weapons to the US gov't/etc at least in part to explain why the hell he was manufacturing so many of them? (To the point where at present some of the Tony-fic I'm working on is Tony realizing how much, inevitably, Arnim Zola would have contributed to the development of the weapons tech that formed the mid-century foundation of the Stark fortune, and kind of wanting to be sick.)

And like yeah: he's also going into the nasty parts of the Cold War, and I don't think making weapons is necessarily The Worst Thing when, well, that's your potential enemy (because like, sry, but the USSR was a horrible entity: the Cold War was by no means handled well, necessarily, and NATO's hands are far from clean, but NATO being Highly Questionable doesn't stop the USSR from being outright evil) etc etc.

Which is why I think if someone had been around to act as a CHECK on Howard*, much of SI's history could have been the same, even including the weapons manufacture, without the outright Merchant of Death legacy that he passed on and Tony happily shouldered for quite a while. It's not that weapons manufacture is inherently evil, it's that the way that SI eventually behaved as part of that market and became DEPENDENT on that market (and thus the continuation and perpetuation of that market) that became evil.

And I think Howard would have tended in that way anyway, simply because I think by nature Howard is very . . . self-focused, and prone to finding ways to justify stepping on other people to get what he wants that sound like moral justifications to him and to deceiving himself about what he's doing, out of self-protection. I think with the right balance of personalities he could have had a lot more help in ignoring that and being his better self.

And then I think instead of that he got the absolute OPPOSITE, who was Obadiah Stane, who instead brought out (or they mutually brought out of each other) the absolute epitome of not just "I'll get mine, you get yours, you're not my problem" thinking, but also full self-justification etc etc.

Is my take, anyway. I don't even think Stane was "evil" as such to start with: I think he was ambitious and probably a bit callous when it came to other people, maybe a bit narcissistic/self-centered, and then he just made all the wrong choices from there, and you end up with him dying as Iron Monger.


*and Peggy is neither equipped to do this, nor is it appropriate to expect her to do that AND to run SHIELD in, I note again, the middle of said Cold War: she's an amazing human being but she's not an actual god and is in fact bound by the laws of time, space, and limits of human energy, and ISN'T operating from the right place in their relationship to be able to act as a moral check on Howard without a massive investment of effort and action. So, like.

[selenak]

RE: what made Howard return to weapons manufacturing: no, I don't think it was "just" Obediah, either. I think a big reason was SHIELD. (And I don't mean the Hydra factor within SHIELD.) Which provided Howard with a morally acceptable way to let his imagination re: weapons run riot, because presumably he designed and manufactured all their stuff. However, SHIELD, for all the "world council" noises, is distinctly US based and must have been even more so in the 50s and 60s. For the world of me, I can't see the US goverments during the Cold War, even in the Marvelverse, allow Howard and Peggy to run their own private army which Howard equips with lots of deadly toys if t hey don't get both a say so in the what this agency does and a large piece of the cake, so to speak. No weapons of destruction for SHIELD if not also weapons for the army, so to speak. Plus Howard has to finance the whole enchilada, and even with however many patents he has for non-weapons stuff, army contracts are where the big money is. So in my headcanon, that's how he starts with the larger scale weapons manufacturing - for all these reasons. He can tell himself it's for a good cause (Peggy and SHIELD), while also extremely convenient to him (money, and he's really good at this), but on some level he has to be aware that it's a compromise at best and a sell out at worst with what he knows profiting from death. IMO, that's where Obediah comes in, because I can see Howard giving him business responsibilities and letting him to do the negotiations with the weapons sales, not because Obediah initialilzed it (see above) but because Howard was never able to entirely kid himself about what he's backsliding into doing, and distancting himself via letting someone else do the non-invention part makes it easier. Peggy doesn't function as a moral corrective/challenge because SHIELD does need all that Stark equipment and Peggy isn't a hypocrite about it.

Re: Alexander Pierce, oh, I can see Peggy mentoring him. I wouldnl't even be surprised if young Pierce reminded her of Steve on some level. BTW, I also wouldn't be surprised if he sincerely venerated her. Something I've seen remarked on elsewhere, that Hydra never made a move against Peggy - why should they have? She was their perfect cover, and they profited immensely from her efficiency. They only turned against Fury when Fury was finally suspecting the truth, and as Peggy never seems to have done...

[sholio]

Oh, that makes a lot of sense, with SHIELD. Plus, like I was just now musing in the comments on the LJ side, even if Howard was ONLY developing weapons for SHIELD in the beginning, they definitely have some high-powered hardware, and developing tech for SHIELD (and SHIELD only) would have been a money-losing proposition for Howard, so it's not surprising if he went and started selling it on the side as a for-profit enterprise. I could see Howard and Peggy having some mega-fights about that side of it, but not about the weapons manufacturing in general because, as you said, SHIELD is benefiting hugely from it, so they'd want Howard to keep making his fancy, destructive toys.

... which, now that I'm thinking about it, is not only highly plausible, but just about the only likely way it could've gone.

She was their perfect cover, and they profited immensely from her efficiency. They only turned against Fury when Fury was finally suspecting the truth, and as Peggy never seems to have done...

I think they actually said explicitly in CA:TWS (or somewhere in canon, anyway) that it was more like the reverse: they stayed out of sight while Peggy was in charge because they knew she'd stop them, and didn't start their plans rolling until Peggy was out of the way. That said, while that may have been the INTENT, the way it comes across in the movies is really more like what you're saying here -- that Peggy's idealism blinded her to what was happening on her watch, while veteran suspicious bastard Nick Fury started figuring it out.