We mature with the damage, not with the years.

Thanks for expressing your concern to me.

First off, I do always like to say that you are entitled to your own opinion. I am not trying to negate your feelings–they are yours and no one can take that from you. But you wrote to me, so I am going to do what I can to answer/explain from my point of view.

There are a few things in your ask that ring of the telephone game. There are sites out there that are taking the story and the facts and spinning them into different meanings than intended, and then THOSE stories are getting more play than the actual facts of what is happening.

I don’t believe Marvel is asking employees to dress as Hydra agents…I think they were offering them T-Shirts with the Hydra logo on them. Hydra are the villains in this story, they are a big part of it, so promoting them makes sense, to me. Again–I edit the Darth Vader books, which are about a traitorous murderer who works for an oppressive fascist regime that literally blew up multiple planets. He’s the main character of the series, but I hope it’s clear you’re not meant to emulate him.

I don’t believe there is any comic where Magneto joins Hydra.

Now…I have not heard anything about actual white supremacists using Hydra to celebrate their own beliefs. If this is actually true…yeah, of course, that is horrible. It also makes them pretty foolish, because again…it’s pretty clear to me Hydra are the bad guys in this story. The story judges them harshly and invites the reader to do so as well. So…to point to them and hold them up as your ideal is a poor choice for a lot of reasons…not the least of which is that the good guys tend to win in comics, the vast majority of the time.

chandri:

allofthefeelings:

jordandwhiteqna:

elshiki:

jordandwhiteqna:

jeeprhyme:

Because there is definitely no difference between Hydra and The Empire. Nope. One of these is definitely not linked to an organisation that killed millions of actual people, nosiree.

I get what you’re saying, of course.

I would argue that there is no real world connection between Hydra and the Nazis. It’s a connection that only exists in the make-believe fantasy adventure stories in comic books. There is no real Hydra to make a deal with the real life people who did the real life things that we all condemn. 

So the problem is with a fictional history.

To counter that, Marvel has said “The fictional history has changed–that part that people have a problem with is no longer true,” and the critics are denying that, pointing back to earlier fictions. But the idea that Hydra is thousands of years old is just as true as the idea that they worked with the Nazis…because both are false, Hydra is not real.

If the problem is that they were EVER associated with a real life group as reprehensible as the Nazis…then, I don’t know what to tell you, that makes it sound like the problem is the choice that they made in the 70s to begin writing stories about Hydra that connected with Nazis. You’re right–it is a questionable thing to write the perpetrators of one of the worst atrocities in all of history into a family adventure series…but it was a choice made many decades ago. They appeared in Marvel comics just as they did in Indiana Jones and lots of other pop culture adventure stories.

If anything, one would think the use of Hydra would be an effort to DISTANCE what should be relatively innocent entertainments from something so terrible as the Holocaust. To NOT force people to think about the most horrific events of the past 100 years when they read a comic, but still deal with something that feels palpable and has stakes.

And again, it’s very important to state–Hydra are bad guys in Marvel Comics. Stories with them in it are not Civil War style “both sides have their merits” type stories. Hydra is wrong, full stop. The stories judge them harshly and encourage the readers to do the same.

And again–I am sure I am not changing anyone’s mind by writing this…and that is fine. Every reader (or potential reader) is entitled to their own opinion and interpretation of the stories and ideas. I am just telling you my point of view on the story and matter at hand.

I’m obliged to push back on this part: “The fictional history has changed - that part that people have a problem with is no longer true.” This claim has the moral nuance and emotional logic of a child who argues “you shouldn’t punish me because today is Opposite Day.” There was a deliberate artistic choice to tell this new story about a new bad guy group but use all the old iconography associated with the old nazi-based fictions. Saying there’s nuance if you read the book doesn’t erase the reader’s abhorrence at the story being told.

The problem *absolutely* is that the fictional group was ever associated with real world nazis, but you have noticed that public umbrage isn’t aimed at people who worked on Marvel titles in the 1970s, or people who worked on Indiana Jones.

You’ve acknowledged you’re not trying to negate people’s feelings but at the same you’d prefer people didn’t associate Hydra with the holocaust when people very clearly do. That’s what’s most immediately frustrating: Marvel and its employees have economically benefitted from the fiction’s close association with reality, but have become suddenly shy about it now that readers are disgusted by this story. It’s an unwillingness to take the temperature of the room that, at this point, is read as deliberate.

I say that I am not trying to negate people’s feelings because I am not. I am not a spokesman for Marvel, I am human being who works at Marvel, and I’m trying to have the discussion with people about what they are feeling and why and then telling them my own thoughts and feelings on it.  So far, in this most recent batch, people have been very civil and I think it’s going well. And again, I should note…I don’t work on Secret Empire, I just think it’s a good story. Well, full disclosure, Deadpool (which I edit) is tying in to it. But I am not working on the main series.

Regarding the idea that the fictional history has changed…I guess I don’t see what the problem is with revising a fictional history with more fiction. Neither events actually happened, so if the people making the stories about Hydra have actively said that in their minds they are no longer affiliated with nor had their origins in the Nazis, that seems (to me) to be equally as true as Hydra being a Nazi splinter group in that both are made up stories.

Please don’t take this as me being facetious or condescending, because I am asking this earnestly: if the problem is with the inclusion of the idea of Nazis in the 70s-80s, why are people not made at the people who made that decision? Again…PLEASE don’t read this in a sarcastic know-it-all tone, I am really asking. Is the argument that this past inclusion was a mistake and but that we should chalk it up to the time it was done, and steer clear in the present? If so, I am not sure why retconning Hydra away from being founded by Nazis isn’t a good thing.

And, I guess, in the end the even larger point is that even if we DO all agree that Hydra are Nazis, or have been Nazis, or share some goals with Nazis while disagreeing with others…what is a complete certainty is that they are presented as the bad guys in the story. They are presented as wrong. The fact that Captain America is Hydra is not a good thing, it is a terrible thing that the story does not support. No one involved thinks Hydra is in the right–just as I assume no one making Indiana Jones thought the villains there were right.

A story where Nazis do bad things and everyone knows they are bad and all the good guys oppose them…doesn’t seem like a bad thing to me. I am not trying to deliberately not take the temperature of the room–I can see that people are upset about the story and series. It’s just that from my point of view, I cannot wrap my head around why. The closest I can come to understanding why people are so unhappy about it is when I see evidence of people being upset by misrepresentations of what is happening in the story rather than what is actually happening, like the people mad about Magneto joining Hydra. 

Anyway, thank you for responding, hopefully people are finding the discussion informative.

I have to jump in here, against my better judgment, because I think that a big part of what people find upsetting is being missed.

It’s one thing to say “Hydra isn’t Nazis,” and I know it’s been established that not every member of Hydra agreed with even allying with them during WW2. But let’s say we accept that (and ignore that cultural osmosis is often bigger than the text itself). Ultimately Hydra still chose to ally with Nazis, and the current series establishes that as far as Steve knows, Hydra helped the Nazis win the war, and the only reason their goals weren’t achieved is that the Allies had a Cosmic Cube.

And despite that, Steve stays loyal to Hydra. Steve, who is supposed to be himself with a different history rather than a completely different person inhabiting that body (which is why the Superior Spider-man comparisons ring false for me), prioritized his own personal well-being over the lives of eleven million people- significantly more, actually, when you factor in that if the Axis won WW2 they never had to stop killing the minority groups they targeted. By identifying with Hydra, whether or not you consider them Nazis, Steve is choosing to be complicit not just in over-the-top supervillain schemes, but also in the very real-world Holocaust. And yeah, Steve has a different history that contributed to this- but that just means that under the right circumstances, Captain America would have no problem favoring bigotry when it leads to personal gain.

I’m not naive here. I know that Cap will go back to being a good guy by the end of this event. It may even be a great and interesting and important examination of who Steve Rogers is and what that means. But I don’t know, because I’m not going to read a book that considers “allied with the Nazis” as a start to a conversation rather than an end of one.

Look, I’m Jewish, and I’m not going to pretend that’s not skewing how I approach this. But the way I read it, this taints every single time he teamed up with Ben Grimm, every date he went on with Bernie Rosenthal, every time he worked with the Maximoff twins. Given the right circumstances, he would have been fine with them being condemned to death just so his side could have a little more power.

Good lord, okay, as someone with a degree in the critical analysis of fiction and its impact on and influence by real-world culture, let me lay this out:

1. “Death of the author” is a literary criticism tool; it’s meant to be used in the artificial, temporary vacuum of a conversation in that context, where we ignore the fourth wall. When the conversation shifts to things like “what real-world events might have inspired this literary choice” or “what real-world impact did this literary work have,” e.g. IRL neo-Nazis adopting Captain America iconography, “death of the author” ceases to apply.

2. This is a thing that comes up a lot around boycotts of fictional works, e.g. the Ender’s Game movie. No, the Ender’s Game film didn’t necessarily push any extremist Mormon views in general or Orson Scott Card’s alarming and regrettable politics in general, but the people boycotting that film weren’t objecting to the story. They were objecting to the fact that the film, totally separate from the content of the film, financially benefited Card and his church and his political agenda. These things are not separable when we are discussing profits, because we live in the real world where these things are constantly influencing each other.

3. The Cap is Hydra storyline is upsetting to many people, if not most, not because Hydra was or wasn’t founded by the Nazis, or predated the Nazis, or whatever. This conversation is the very opposite of a literary criticism argument. This is not a conversation that can take place in a death-of-the-author vacuum. It’s upsetting (at least to me) because Captain America is, specifically, a hero whose explicit stated purpose is to fight for the vulnerable and the marginalized, and because Captain America was created by two Jewish guys specifically as a propaganda tool to fight against the Nazis, and has since, over decades and decades and decades, been thoroughly adopted into popular culture as a major symbol of social progressivism. Whether Hydra is a Nazi organization in the current storyline or not is irrelevant, not least because (as @allofthefeelings noted above) they allied with them and, guess what, 30+ years of narrative association with them has embedded it in the comic-buying consciousness that Hydra = Nazi. There are some associations that cannot be erased. Some bells that cannot be un-rung. And more importantly, there are some situations where you shouldn’t try. Comics are notorious for constantly changing their timelines, but I’ve been reading comics for roughly twenty years now and I’ve never seen a Marvel timeline where, say, the planet Earth had no gravity. Similarly, Steve Rogers is neither a Nazi, nor does he hang around with organizations that have unavoidable Nazi ties. Period. Such is the fundamental social meaning of Captain America.

4. On top of all of this, Marvel’s handling of the backlash has been nothing short of execrable. It’s certainly not impossible to write about a controversial subject with grace, but they haven’t. They’ve brushed off the concerns of fans. They’ve used people’s anger and hurt as marketing spin. In some instances they have outright mocked fans on social media, or at least, their employees have. They have failed, in every possible respect, to maintain the balance between Interesting-But-Controversial storytelling and Flat-Out-Tone-Deaf/ Offensive-Desperately-Insensitive. 

5. Back to Death of the Author and how this is not it: context matters. One can claim Artistry and feign indifference to public reception, but context matters, especially in a for-profit industry. Maybe, way back when they decided to go down this absurd and unpleasant road, everybody thought Hillary Clinton was going to be President and this would be a safer, relatively uncontroversial thing to explore in narrative (though given Steve’s ties with anti-fascism I personally doubt it), but in the Darkest Timeline America appears to currently inhabit, it feels like rubbing frightened people’s noses in the fact that the United States is descending rapidly into a fascist dystopian nightmare and there’s nobody to stand up for them, not even Captain America. I know that these events are planned wayyyyy out, and maybe cancelling it was financially unfeasible, but surely someone in the Marvel upper echelons looked at the news, looked at the plans for Secret Empire, and realized that this was, very possibly, going to go poorly, because while I’ve said a lot of unflattering and critical things about Marvel execs, I don’t actually believe they’re stupid. So maybe they could act like they understand this upsets people and why, instead of whining that people are Too Sensitive about a storyline where one of comic book history’s fiercest defenders of the socially marginalized is suddenly revealed to have been working for the extermination of the selfsame vulnerable people all along. 

It’s a bit like a murder mystery where the detective’s best friend turns out to be the murderer - I’m thinking of Christie’s Three Act Tragedy. Just as I’m sure Captain America will circle back around to being the Good Guy by the time this wretched event ends, the murderer is, eventually, going to be caught and brought to justice. But the detective is still going to feel the pain of that revelation, because it’s still a betrayal, and not one they, or we, are likely to forget any time soon.