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

[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.