Fix It Fridays: Captain America & the Love Interest of Doom

It's time for another exciting edition of Fix-It Fridays! Today we take a look at the 'Roid-a-licious Captain America! You too can juice it up for justice, baby!

Ready? Let's do this. Slap on your blue ski-mask of patriotism and let's get rockin'.

**Standard Disclaimer: There will be SPOILERS. Oh yes, there will be spoilers. Massive, six-packy, on-neon-blue-steroids SPOILERS. Consider yourself warned.**

For the record, I am not a Marvel purist. I love me some X-Men and some Avengers, but I'm not enraged when the movies are their own entity, bearing only a vague resemblance to the classic comic plotlines. Therefore, today we are examining the film on its own merits, independent of the Marvel-verse. Mmmkay?

Now, I'm a sucker for supers, so for the most part, I really enjoyed the movie, but as we walked out of the theater, I found myself saying, "Pretty cool. It's a shame the romance arc was totally f*cked." (I was chatting with friends. I promise. I do not just randomly announce my opinions to my fellow movie-goers in a sort of critical Tourette's.) One of my cohorts might have argued with me, and there might have been a no-holds-barred I-know-my-romance-arcs smackdown, but I confess to nothing.

You may be asking, What was wrong with the romance arc, Vivi? Oh, dear reader-friend, what wasn't wrong with it?

There was no happily ever after. Which, admittedly, in a super-flick is not that unusual, but there was no potential for a happily ever after or even a happy for now! At the end of the film, Captain America is cryogenically frozen in the impenetrable shell of his own awesomeness so he can be transported into the future seventy years and thawed out to participate in The Avengers movie next summer.

Seventy years. His love interest is either at least ninety-five years old or dead. Either way, he is much less likely to get with the bow-chicka-wow-wow. (I had a "My eyes!" moment when I accidentally visualized their reunion.)

What's wrong with that? She was presented as The One, reader-friends. The romance arc told us that these two were gonna live happily ever after, dammit. But instead, our heroine either spent her life A) pining for the death of Captain America (downer) or B) got over it and married someone else and popped out a bunch of babies (thus invalidating the romance).

My friend (who foolishly thought to argue romance with me) stated that Captain America doesn't need a love interest because he's married to America. At which point I restrained myself from yelling, "Then why was he cheating on America with Hayley Atwell?" I merely pointed out that the filmmakers established dear Peggy as the Love Interest and then essentially killed her off. Which means Captain America is going to be pining for her for the entirety of the Avengers movie. And as anyone who has seen the Bourne Trilogy knows, there is nothing more pathetic than a pining action hero.

Now perhaps the filmmakers are planning to reveal that Peggy somehow got sucked into the future too, still all young and pretty (let's all roll our eyes together and groan at the totally over-the-top suspension of disbelief required to pull off that ploy) OR they are going to bring in a Peggy lookalike (maybe even a granddaughter) to captivate the Captain (which I find more than a little creepy, not gonna lie). Otherwise, we get Captain Angst in the Avengers and... gotta say, not looking forward to that. Thank God for Robert Downey Jr's snark and My Editor's Hollywood Boyfriend's muscles to keep us from being drowned in Captain Angst's tears.

The annoying thing, to me, is that this was such an easy fix! (Vivi takes a moment to swear and stomp in a circle. Oh, the frustration!)

THE FIX: Peggy is already married. Ta-da! She is the unattainable. Her husband is either A) away at war or B) Howard Stark (somebody has to spawn Tony). She and the Captain still have chemistry, but there is this guilt/tension/resistance and they both know that their Love shall never be (and there can be some question on her side whether she really loves him or is just being kind to a boy who has a crush on her). When she believes him to be dying at the end, she can confess some kind of affection - but the viewer and she and the Captain all know that they could never have truly been together so even though he Longs and Yearns and all that Good Stuff, he is still Available to his True Love Interest in the Avengers or some later film.

But as is, we get to envision the depressing future of Peggy and watch Captain Angst pine, because Peggy is a distraction from his marriage to America. Woe. Woe is us.

Luckily, the Avengers has so many characters, odds are there won't be much screen time devoted to Captain America's girlfriend's hundredth birthday.