Just on a personal level, from Cap's perspective, it would make sense to me that he might emotionally associate Tesseract technology with Nazi/Hydra ideology, and the slave labor of the Howling Commandos (and all those other guys) that was being used to create Hydra weapons during the war. (Plus, there is something especially creepy and wrong-feeling about a weapon that just instantly erases a person from existence and doesn't even leave a body or any trace that someone was killed, and psychologically makes it so much easier to pull a trigger...)
And as far as the emotional impact of learning about dropping atomic bombs on Japan... I think that for younger people who have grown up with atomic bombs & the Cold War, even, as something that happened to our parents or grandparents, it's hard to imagine how shocking/disillusioning it might be for Cap to learn that we did this? The debate about whether or not it was necessary, or even a war crime, isn't a modern thing, people were discussing this at the time too.
To come back to Cap's specific characterization, I'm thinking of his line to Fury: "They said we won the war, they didn't say what we lost" -- to me, the way he says that could be read as, "what did we lose [by choosing to win the war in the way that we did]". And then he also says to Fury that they should have left the Tesseract in the water-- not, "You should have guarded it better" or anything, but from minute one, he really doesn't think "the good guys" should be having anything to do with this tech.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2012-07-24 07:00 am (UTC)Just on a personal level, from Cap's perspective, it would make sense to me that he might emotionally associate Tesseract technology with Nazi/Hydra ideology, and the slave labor of the Howling Commandos (and all those other guys) that was being used to create Hydra weapons during the war. (Plus, there is something especially creepy and wrong-feeling about a weapon that just instantly erases a person from existence and doesn't even leave a body or any trace that someone was killed, and psychologically makes it so much easier to pull a trigger...)
And as far as the emotional impact of learning about dropping atomic bombs on Japan... I think that for younger people who have grown up with atomic bombs & the Cold War, even, as something that happened to our parents or grandparents, it's hard to imagine how shocking/disillusioning it might be for Cap to learn that we did this? The debate about whether or not it was necessary, or even a war crime, isn't a modern thing, people were discussing this at the time too.
To come back to Cap's specific characterization, I'm thinking of his line to Fury: "They said we won the war, they didn't say what we lost" -- to me, the way he says that could be read as, "what did we lose [by choosing to win the war in the way that we did]". And then he also says to Fury that they should have left the Tesseract in the water-- not, "You should have guarded it better" or anything, but from minute one, he really doesn't think "the good guys" should be having anything to do with this tech.