![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
But wait, there's more
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.)
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.)
no subject
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
no subject
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.
no subject
He HAD to be amazingly likeable and bright and young and appealing.