Respect and Responsibility: A Meditation
What an Episode of Stargate SG-1 and Marvel's The Avengers Have in Common
Last year, Crossover Queen posted this article about respect in relationships on her website. Her main point is how respect is not being demonstrated by the heroes in any given story you can name that has been produced for television or film in the past decade or so. While she is primarily talking about marriage and romantic relationships - which Hollywood has been butchering far longer in a variety of genres and stories - she does mention non-romantic relationships in passing. Specifically, she says:
Granted, screaming fights make for easily filmed drama, but who wants to live that way? I mean, just look at Tony Stark in the MCU. Billionaire, genius, philanthropist, and he still gets no respect.
(Seriously, “I would cut the wire” is a legit answer to Captain America’s question. As General Patton himself said, you’re not supposed to die for your country, you’re supposed to make some other poor bastard die for his country.)
For those of you who didn’t watch The Avengers or may not remember the scene well, this is the moment that she is describing: The one where all the team’s pent up frustrations with one another, SHIELD, Fury, and the situation in general start coming out. At which point, Loki starts psychically nudging them through the Scepter to make their argument worse than it would have been if he hadn’t meddled in their affairs further.
The fact of the matter is, as I told Crossover in a comment on her article, she is right and so is Tony: Cutting the wire rather than laying on it is a good and not infrequently legitimate answer to the question Cap posed to Tony in that scene.
However, it is not and cannot be the only response. Cap’s point is a valid one - it shows respect for the other person’s choice. MCU Tony Stark tends to be an “it’s all about me” kind of guy. He draws attention to himself, likes looking good, and thrives on audience responses to his antics. Given the amount of publicity he needs to do and the fact that he runs a multi-billion dollar company, he almost always has an audience. He literally does not know what to do with himself in situations with lots of people where he is neither in charge nor the center of attention.
That is where the respect part comes in; Tony never learned - or really liked - showing respect as most people recognize and understand it. In a situation with a person or people he distrusts, dislikes, or feels uncomfortable around, he will dial up his generally snarky attitude (which can easily slide into or be taken as disrespect and even bullying) as a coping mechanism to at least feel in charge of himself, if not of the situation. The quiet respect which Steve had ingrained in him as a youth being raised in an entirely different and now vanished world therefore clashes violently with Stark’s penchant for disrespect, which is one of the things that leads to this confrontation between them.
More than that, however, Tony doesn’t like to lose. He does not like failure. And if he loses anything - or anyone - he will consider that a personal affront and failure. As I told Crossover in my comment on her post:
The hard part of being on a hero team isn’t risking one’s own life. Tony risks his life with bravado and knows its not that hard – for him. What he doesn’t want to admit is something Steve learned the hard way to accept: The hard part is watching one’s teammates and friends risk their lives to save the day. Because that hurts a lot more than anything that will happen to the hero personally.
Tony saw Yinsen save his life at the cost of his own, then Coulson die trying to stop Loki. He hates it, he doesn’t want to accept it, and Steve (after Loki’s magical mind influence wears off), recognizes why he doesn’t like it. So he comes to try and help Tony the way Peggy helped him after he lost Bucky. He tries to tell him again that, sometimes, you can’t take all the risks for the team. One person in a unit can’t carry that weight entirely on his own shoulders because the responsibility is shared in a team. We’re all human and can only do so much, and there are times when the other person’s skills and strength is better suited to the task than yours. Even when it means they have to sacrifice themselves for your sake and the rest of team’s.
A recurring theme in modern presentations of Tony Stark is that he feels the weight of the world on his shoulders. That he wants to save the world from itself - more or less represented by him, personally, as he has far too little contact with the world outside the milieu in which he was raised and lives to realize how much bigger the world is compared to what little of it he knows personally. After a point, Tony cannot conceptualize what it is to be small and weak in the manner that Steve Rogers can.
Yes, Stark was weak in that Afghani cave where he was captured in the Iron Man movie, but only to an extent. That weakness did not blunt his intelligence, his skills with machinery, or rob him of his business instincts. In a way, his dealing with the Ten Rings terrorists in Iron Man is not too different from dealing with representatives from another company. The biggest difference is that he will literally be killed if he either does not escape their hold or fails to do what they want.
Tony didn’t spend his formative years or life choosing to be heroic. In fact, in the MCU, he spent most of his life being a hedonistic adolescent even after he became an adult. That is not conducive to a self-sacrificial mindset, nor to a very respectful one, as we see throughout the series. Getting Tony to dial down the snark and actually show respect takes a lot of effort - and usually, that effort has to be accompanied by reality slapping him upside the head hard enough to penetrate his refusal to see past himself.
In the MCU, Steve Rogers spent his formative years surrounded by self-sacrificing people (namely, his mother - who was a nurse - and Bucky, who probably got verbally and/or physically picked on for hanging out with the wimpy kid on the block). He grew up admiring his father, who made the ultimate sacrifice for his country and his family. With all of these influences, his desire to become a soldier and serve others makes a lot more sense and shows how his character was forged over time. Steve had a sense of respect and self-sacrifice drilled into him from the time he could toddle by close observation of some very personal examples, both living and dead.
And the mindset that example inspired in him is encapsulated very well in Cameron Mitchell’s (Ben Browder) speech to Vala Mal Doran (Claudia Black) as they watch Daniel Jackson (Michael Shanks) risk his life for theirs and others in season 10 of Stargate SG-1. The first video is set up for the latter, but the second one has the priceless speech from Browder’s character:
Much like Tony, Vala spent her life before she joined the team in a self-serving manner. Prior to meeting and becoming a member of SG-1, she spent her life conning and stealing from almost everyone she encountered. Necessary self-preservation forced her to join SG-1 when one of her scams psychically and to some degree physically tied her to Daniel Jackson. If the two of them got too far apart, they would pass out and eventually die, so SG-1 had to recruit her and make her a member to keep Daniel alive.
During her adventures with the team this troublesome link was severed, but Vala chose to remain nonetheless because SG-1 had shown they cared about her in a way no one else had. When a new threat to the galaxy in the form of the Ori arrived Vala, as Mitchell notes here and as Tony would understand later in the MCU, risked her life to stop the Ori’s initial invasion. For a time, the team thought she was dead but they managed to recover her alive in a later season and she rejoined them as a regular member of the cast.
None of this means that Vala doesn’t have issues with her teammates. A con artist’s life relies on being more duplicitous than others so that she can pull off a scam and escape with either the loot or the money before the mark gets wise to her or the police catch her somehow. Vala isn’t used to either sacrificing her life or watching those she cares about risk theirs to save hers.
So in this episode, when her desire to stop Daniel is denied, she notably starts down the same snarky path that Tony does in The Avengers, deflecting her own concern onto Mitchell by accusing him of wanting to adhere to some high-and-mighty ideal code. To his credit, Mitchell not only doesn’t take the bait, he cuts her argument right out from under her by redirecting the conversation: “I’m sorry, what about you? When you flew into that Super Gate you knew there was a chance you weren’t coming back.”
Vala’s refusal to face him and her mumbled, “No, no, that was different” are what let Mitchell see why she is behaving this way. She has grown to the point that she can and will risk her life for others, and that is a good thing. But she hasn’t yet reached the point where she can accept that others will want to or have to risk their lives for her and/or those she cares about.
More to the point, she is extremely unprepared to face the fact that those selfless people might just be the ones she has come to care about the most.
Although the writers may be ham-handed in how they handle it, this is the same trajectory Tony takes in the MCU and some other modern Marvel fare. The difference is that he has an adolescent mindset and is trying to atone for his past irresponsibility, which means that like any honest teenager trying to do good, he overcompensates. Rather than tend to his own responsibilities as owner of Stark Industries, Iron Man, and later as an Avenger, Tony shoots higher. He tries to be responsible for the whole planet and everyone on it.
And that’s not good. In it’s own way, it is a hubris almost as bad as his earlier self-absorbed lifestyle. This is why Steve (and others) have a hard time differentiating Tony’s past actions from his current ones as Iron Man in The Avengers. He is still letting his pride lead him and has not yet learned true humility by this point.
What is true humility? People tend to think humility means that one bows and scrapes to others or that it means making oneself the world’s doormat. It is an easy misperception to believe, but the true definition of humility is something else entirely. Humility means thinking about oneself less and more about others. Steve Rogers has this in spades, almost to the point that it becomes a character flaw for him. Daniel Jackson likewise puts the good of others ahead of his own so often and so much that Vala’s urge to stop him makes sense. The audience wants him to stop, too.
The problem, as Mitchell points out, is that he can’t. Someone has to lay on this wire if they are to stop the Ori from destroying everything they know and love. Someone has to put their head in that Ancient device and build the Sangraal, the only thing that can end the Ori’s reign of terror.
Daniel Jackson is that someone. No one else on SG-1’s roster has the experience and the capabilities he does that will allow them to make the Sangraal and still keep enough of themselves present in the present to pull it off. If Mitchell could shove Daniel away and take his place, he would do it. But he can’t and he knows it.
Vala’s desperation and her plea to Mitchell demonstrates she cannot do it either. Samantha Carter is needed up top to regain control of the Stargate, and Teal’c needs to stay with her in case Ba’al gets the idea he can attack her and take control of the situation from the team. Neither Sam nor Teal’c has the skills or the psychological strength to do what Daniel is doing. As I said in the comment on Crossover’s post:
We need that sense of responsibility and respect back. The two go hand-in-hand: how can a wife respect her husband if she doesn’t recognize that he carries responsibilities she can’t, or a husband respect his wife if he doesn’t acknowledge there are risks he can’t take from her? We keep trying to bubble-wrap people we care about to keep them from getting hurt, but we can’t. And the more we try, the worse things get for everyone concerned.
Couples are a team, a duo. They can’t do each other’s jobs as well as their own. That’s not how being a team works. It means specializing in one area and doing well enough in the others you can survive until the other member or members of the party returns to take up their position(s) again. So children need to learn to be teammates in the family, and they learn that from their parents, who are teammates in raising them. Thus, if the parents don’t model good teamwork… Things get harder than they have to be, because no one knows what they’re supposed to be doing, only what they think they are supposed to do. And those two things are not the same at all.
Respect is earned by those who take proper responsibility on their shoulders and live up to it. Vala earned SG-1’s respect when she took on the responsibility of stopping the Ori’s first invasion. But she tried to take away Daniel’s agency and responsibility in the above scene, and on top of his own emotional turmoil at watching a friend he respected struggle to survive so they could have a chance to live, Mitchell snapped at her for it. He also exposed her to herself so she could see not only how much she had changed, but how far she still had to go.
The same thing happens to Tony and Steve in The Avengers. Whether he realizes it or not, Tony is trying to arrogate everyone’s responsibilities onto his own self. In part, as Foxfier noted in her response to my comment, he is embodying the “self-saving princess” idea of “I don’t need saving! I can save myself!” Only he is expanding that to everyone else as well: “You don’t need to lift a finger in your own defense or the defense of what you love. I’ll do it for you!”
Steve rightly does not appreciate that, after all the sacrifices he saw others offer for him in World War II (Bucky’s the most prominent among them). As he tells Tony later in Captain America: Civil War and tries to explain in The Avengers, responsibility is the individual’s right and choice. Tony has no right whatsoever to try and take that away from others just to spare them (and himself) more pain.
Unfortunately, for most of the MCU, Tony does not want to hear that, because the adolescent in him is overcompensating for prior bad behavior. That inner teenager wants what he thinks is redemption so he won’t have to take the hard road of growing up. And that is what leads to a lot of the problems Stark and the Avengers face as the movies progress.
While Steve comes close to making this error himself, for the most part, he avoids it. The few times he trips are so mild, they aren’t actually worth mentioning. Who really remembers him trying to get drunk after Bucky’s “death” in the Alps? Peggy had to help him reorient himself, but once he’d been pointed in the right direction Steve didn’t waver, like a compass needle tuned to true north. There’s a reason we see him take out and look at that compass - and Peggy’s picture - so often in his films.
It is Steve’s physical reminder to stay the course and not take up burdens which he has no right to bear. To paraphrase Peggy Carter, it is a reminder that he must “allow others the dignity of their choices.” To remember that he cannot bear the world’s burden on his shoulders alone, and he has to let his teammates make their own decisions no matter what it costs them and how much it may grieve him personally.
We desperately need speeches like Mitchell’s in fiction and in real life. It is natural to want someone to take our responsibilities from us after a point, but not everything natural is good. Nature calls us to relieve ourselves, but to do so in our chair and not the toilet is not only highly unsanitary, it shows we have let ourselves become less than many animals. Cats go in the litter box or, if they are feral, somewhere on their extended territory and they bury their business. If a human cannot be bothered to do what little a cat will do to clean up after itself, what does that say about that individual human?
Among other things, it suggests that the human in question cannot or will not take care of himself, but either needs someone else to do it or wants someone else to do it for him. The former case happens and it is sad. The latter case also happens, and it is sadder, because the person in that case could control themselves but chose NOT to do so.
There is no respect without responsibility, and responsibility is individual, not communal. I could not take the responsibility my parents had for me as a child on my own shoulders because I have no right to it. I never did.
Just so, my parents have no responsibility for my individual choices. If I decide to eat a bag full of popcorn in one sitting and make myself sick, that is my responsibility, not theirs'. I made that decision and paid for it in short order, not them. They had no effect either way and could justly tell me I brought that illness upon myself.
It was Daniel’s choice to put his head in the Ancient device and risk his life to save others’. It was his decision. No, it was not fair that he should have had to do it. As the Grandfather noted in The Princess Bride, since when is life fair? Where is that written? The enemy gets a vote, and the Ori have stuffed the ballot boxes.
Daniel has pulled out the dynamite that will (hopefully) set those boxes aflame and give his friends the fighting chance they need to survive. That decision deserves respect, something Mitchell gives him and which Vala - for understandable reasons - at first refuses to do. Mitchell has every right to snap at her for that, to grab her by the arms and make her face him as well as the facts. You do not spurn someone’s self-sacrifice the way she was trying to do. Not for anything.
Even when it hurts so badly that you feel like you yourself are dying with the person you are watching suffer, you do not disrespect their choice. That goes for a bad decision on their part as well as a good one, as Steve never for a moment disrespects Tony’s choices in Captain America: Civil War.
Oh, he argues with him about it, to the point of throwing hands. But he never EVER tries to take away Tony’s right to choose. He could have ordered Stark not to sign the Accords. Heck, he could have ordered the whole team not to sign them. Tony probably would have ignored him, but some of the others - particularly Natasha - might have taken the order more seriously and adhered to it.
Steve did not abrogate her right to choose, or Rhodey’s, or Vision’s. He did not do anything to Tony to make him either sign or not sign the Sokovia Accords. Instead, he lived by his words; the safest hands for any individual person’s decisions are their own. While some people need to have choices made for them, such as invalids and children, those choices are always made in trust. Trust that when the children come of age or if the invalids were whole, they would understand that these decisions were the healthy or good ones meant for their benefit.
When someone violates that trust, as Vala and Tony both tried to do? That’s when people like Mitchell and Steve need to grab them or throw hands. Because under no circumstances is it ever right to steal one’s agency from him or her.
You can take on responsibility for another person if circumstances warrant it, but that is always done in trust, and that trust is more precious than gold. Violate it, and not only do you hurt the other person, you hurt yourself. You make yourself utterly untrustworthy to wider society, because if you’re willing to do that once, how likely is it that you won’t do it again?
No healthy relationship, romantic or otherwise, can exist without trust. If people cannot trust one another, if they always have to wonder who is lying, trying to manipulate them, or look forward to using them for their own pleasure or use, society will fall apart.
That won’t be pretty. You may think you would survive that, and you very well might. But how many others would pay the price for your survival? How many people whom you care about now would you lose in the crash of civilization? More to the point, once the dust had settled and rebuilding began, would you be able to recognize yourself? Would you be able to look yourself in the mirror, then go out to work and do your job with people who trusted you and gave you part of themselves to hold in that trust, via camaraderie at the very least or romantic love at the most?
Or would you see a monster smiling back at you, laughing at the knowledge that you belonged to it and would never be free of what it “made” you do because you let it?
Respect must be earned, and you earn it by fulfilling your responsibilities to the best of your capacity. Maybe circumstances or your own faults don’t let you fulfill them perfectly. Fine. It happens.
So what? “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly,” as G.K. Chesterton put it. If it is really your responsibility, then it doesn’t matter if you do it imperfectly. You’re human. Imperfection is part of your nature. Get used to it.
Then shoulder your responsibility to try to improve and move on. It is, at bottom, the human thing to do. Because once a human stops trying to improve…that is when he becomes less than human - and worse than a monster.
Trust is everything in any relationship. Especially, as you've shown regarding superheroes, considering how high the stakes are in their jobs.
I’ve been working through this while I try and write a military fantasy novel, and you described it so clearly. Thank you, Ms. Caroline. I’m saving this for when I lose my way writing the next revision. 🙇♂️