Tony Just Wants to Finish His Drink: Alcohol in the MCU

I’ve been meaning to write a post on this forever, and the topic recently went around again, so this seems like a good time. As per my usual method, my goal is to lay out what actually is in the source material, from which I will draw some conclusions and you will probably draw others.

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Really interesting meta, but I’d like to correct the original meta writer to say that there *is* alcohol in The Incredible Hulk – Betty, Bruce and Leo drink wine at dinner before Bruce has his little wibbly moment, and then later, Bruce and Leo drink while they have their frankly amazing heart-to-heart. In the second scene, the wine is actually drawn attention to deliberately – Leo offers Bruce some wine, and Bruce says,‘if you’re having some’ and Leo says, ‘oh, I’m having a lot’.The sharing of the drink helps put both of them at ease enough to have their discussion about Betty and Bruce’s past, the residue that past has left on their present, and how Leo has learned to live with the shadow of Bruce in his and Betty’s relationship.

moo-lee:

Petition to put Hawkeye’s disability and use of a hearing aid in Marvel Cinematic Universe please and thank-you

when-it-rains-it-snows:

dualpaperbags:

MCU Clint Barton: Rugged and Handsome Action Hero, defeats hordes of Chitauri without getting a scratch on him, lands sick jumps off skyscrapers, too cool to speak outside of quips

Comic Book Clint Barton: gets his ass kicked by russian gangsters in tracksuits on a daily basis, would probably eat floor pizza if Kate wasn’t around to stop him

True enough, HOWEVER: Comic Book Clint Barton has plenty of moments of sheer incandescent badass,

therefore it only stands to logic that MCU Clint Barton does indeed eat the floor pizza because there is no Kate around to stop him.

agent-sif:

Ladies of the MCU in action.

desert-neon:

nerdwegian:

sarriane:

ohcaptainrurn:

tofucado:

#ugly sobbing #why #who gave you the right to make me remember this

#please take a moment to realize what this means #bucky was already ‘dead’ when shield was founded by peggy and howard #but they included him anyway #they decided to call him a shield agent #and to put his name on a memorial #he was probably the first name up there since he was dead before shield existed #shield was founded after steve took out hydra #he started that with bucky #he finished it for him #so to peggy and howard bucky was a shield agent #in every way that mattered (via thewinterwizard)

actually, i’m pretty sure his name was listed as one of the SSR agents who were memorialized — they had a different insignia, followed by a few variations of shield’s insignia, probably because of different eras or possibly subsections of shield.

(and this either means that they either put bucky’s NICKNAME (not “james buchanan barnes”) up there, or that skye is a huge bucky fangirl and knows a ton about him and looked for his name.

i’m going for both.)

Yeah, that wall lists both SSR-era agents, as well as SHIELD-era agents.

This screenshot I took below is kinda crappy – there’s a much better version here – but you can see the SSR logo to the left, in the 1941-1965 section.

Also, I think Bucky’s nickname was pretty well known.

The Smithsonian memorial lists his full name, including the “Bucky” nickname, and at the very bottom he’s referred to as just Bucky Barnes. The narrator also calls him “Bucky Barnes.”

But, you know. Her mentor is Phil Coulson. He might have tried to downplay the obsession some, but you know she got some Howling Commandos history lessons at some point, even if she’d never heard the name before in her life. (Which she had, obviously. Not only is it American history, she is an Avengers fan.)

Which just makes me think that at some point Coulson started giving some lecture about Cap history and relating it to something current, and Skye was just all, “We know, Coulson, jeez. The raid took place without official sanction and saved the lives of over a hundred men. Got it. In history class. And at the Smithsonian. And, you know, the last two times you’ve talked about it.”

I just suddenly made this connection. Maybe heaps of people got there before me, but if not, here it is.

In The Incredible Hulk, though it’s the Army hunting Bruce, there’s a moment where SHIELD is very blatantly referenced, which in the past I thought was a bit of a ham-fisted way of reinforcing that Hulk was taking place in the same universe as Iron Man.

But I just realised, what they’re using? It’s Zola’s algorithm.

Though the Army and the FBI (whose logo is also present in that scene, potentially placing the actual computer at an FBI base) no doubt have their own monitoring stuff, Major Kathleen Sparr, Ross’s right hand, is using SHIELD’s proprietary algorithm to skim millions of emails to find the right phrasing, the right target. To find Bruce, and make the connection to Sterns. It has to be a pretty intelligent (or even, dare I say, sentient?) piece of coding to take what on the surface are fairly generic, common words and only return one hit, the correct hit, to point Ross and his team so precisely to Bruce and Betty’s rendezvous with Sterns. I mean, it’s not like the email says, “hey, I’m the Hulk, I’m on the run and the Army is looking for me.” There’s really not much for a standard search algorithm to work with, even if you’re smart about it and use things like Boolean terms.

Bruce was one of the people Sitwell listed on the roof as a Hydra target. Maybe he’s been one for a lot longer than we realised.

Would you mind expanding a bit on your Howard Stark hulk rage feels? :)

ink-phoenix:

I’m gonna keep this to the MCU because thinking about 616 Howard Stark (who is a drunk, unpredictable, abusive asshole who belittles Tony and fucking threatens him with violence what the fuck) makes me foam at the mouth in rage.

Let’s pick this one quote from IM2:

“He was cold, he was calculating. He never told me he loved me, he never told me he liked me so it’s a little tough for me to digest when you’re telling me he said the whole future was riding on me and he’s passing it down. I don’t get that. We’re talking about a guy whose happiest day was when he shipped me off to boarding school.”

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This meta hits all the right notes for me. And I’d like to add that when Steve is on the table, about to undergo a procedure that will likely kill him, Howard doesn’t even say a single word to him, just looks him up and down with this cold, removed stare like Steve is just another component in a machine. And all props to Dominic Cooper for that look, too, because I find that moment the most chilling of all.