Captain America is probably my least favorite Avenger, through no fault of his own. He's just not damaged in a way that interests me, and plus, I disliked his lead-in movie.
A lot of people told me Captain America was the best of the Marvel films. But it completely rubbed me the wrong way. The message seemed to be, "It's adorable that you want to help out, but we're not going to crush on you or use you until you're super buff and hot."
This mentality is problematic, right?
But then in The Avengers, I found myself liking him (and the way the narrative treated him) a whole lot more. Yes, he's spry, can jump around, and uses his shield as a boomerang. But in the climactic battle, he's stuck on the NY roads with non-superheroes Black Widow and Hawkeye. To add salt to this wound, Hawkeye gets hauled up to the rooftops where he shoots the bad guys dead, and Black Widow hijacks a Chitauran ride to the Tesseract, where she saves the world.
Captain America? Still on the ground, fighting individual bad guys and rescuing trapped civilians.
But here's the thing. His mundane heroics (mundane by superhero standards, at least) are VALUED. His size and athletic prowess are not what makes him special. It's his leadership, his tactics, and his willingness to sacrifice that make him so great. And those are all things he had before being supersized.
I never thought I'd write meta about Captain America, but such is the power of Joss Whedon. He really gets these characters, and he finds worth in THEM, not in how flashily they accomplish things.
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