Pal, CATWS stated that Arnim Zola was invited to SHIELD. There is a picture of Carter, Stark and Phillips working with him. It doesn’t matter that she locked up that one specific scientist, if she allowed another one to waltz free whenever he wanted.
Zola created the Winter Soldier under Peggy’s directorship. I think that is a pretty big move. They took out dozens of high ranking officers, scientists, leaders, activists that got in their way. We know Bucky was already active as the Winter Soldier in the early 50s, since he met Isaiah Bradley in the Korean War (as stated in TFATWS).
They could have done exactly the same with Peggy Carter. Hell, Fury doubts Project Insight for five seconds and he already had the Winter Soldier going after him.
The didn’t, either because she was one of them, or because she was so incompetent they didn’t really need to.
The AOS quote is making a false claim; Hydra didn’t wait to come to power. They didn’t have to wait. They were invited into power in 1945, under Operation Paperclip.
By paying attention to what Peggy’s AOS cameo actually shows you (actually shows, not tells) you’ll notice:
that it’s made explicit no one else is involved in Nazi-hiring decisions other than Peggy during the period when Nazis were still alive to be hired. (As evil as he is, Alexander Pierce is not responsible for decisions made when he was a child. And they had to make that ^ specific SS officer immortal just so he could be alive long enough to be given a job later on (and feature in AOS), so they could blame someone other than her for giving him a job. The plot gymnastics are the red flag, here. You don’t need to go to such great lengths to avoid implying that a character hired Nazis, if they simply… never hired Nazis??)
Peggy alone conducts the Nazi job interviews, personally. Not other AOS or evil g-men, to conveniently shove the blame off onto. (This repeats the pattern of responsibility established in her own show. Where, in addition to freeing an active-enemy-agent Black Widow despite knowing she is one, Peggy also hires a scientist for the SSR – of her own volition, without needing any other authority but her own. He is actually the man responsible for creating the Winter Soldier mind-control/torture technique for Hydra, with Zola, and ends up – with that Black Widow – killing 40+ people through mind-control, including another AOS. But in the AOS show, they’re in such a rush to give Peggy #Girlboss -level responsibilities (and write a scene that they Think retcons her CATWS culpability) that they accidentally show her doing the exact opposite; ie. Even More of the Bad Thing.)
in AOS it’s also shown that she has not only listened to this SS Officer/Nazi’s arguments for why he should be given a job (high on the list of ‘Things Steve Rogers Would Never Do’) but also memorised them. She can recite things he said to her, years later.
she describes the SS Officer’s work while a Nazi scientist (including, for example, cutting up a POC while she’s still awake) as “valuable.”
she admits to him that she would consider working with a Nazi like him.
So Peggy claiming she wouldn’t hire that ^ Nazi is not a flex if she has already hired other Nazis, anyway.
(“I wouldn’t buy that peoples-faces-eating leopard, says Woman who already has peoples-faces-eating leopards at home.”)
And funnily enough, as it happens, the exact circumstances in which she openly admitted that she would work with a Nazi then come true in another universe, in D+ What If…? And the result is that she (you guessed it!) works with a Nazi!
Literally. On screen. In front of you.
So as per D+, working with Nazis is shown to be such an intrinsic part of Peggy’s character that she even does it in other timelines/universes.
Even when she is Captain Brexit and is definitely 100% in charge, and responsible, and a superhuman who could be beating the shit out of Nazis but is currently choosing to do the exact opposite??
At this point, she has worked with Nazis longer than even Red Skull did.
(Incredibly enough, while Red Skull is shown killing high-ranking Nazi officers including SS on screen… she told an SS Officer she thought his work was valuable and she would consider giving him a job… after she had already Red Skull’s chief Nazi scientist a job. 🤦♀️ YIKES.)
They can’t show her being nosy AF throughout CATFA/AC but then handwave Giant Events unfolding right under her nose, as if she wouldn’t notice!
Not even Peggy is self-absorbed enough to fail to notice the building of a giant Nazi science basement underneath her office, in the main timeline! A mere elevator ride away, with her photo on the wall right next to the door!
Or Howard’s buddy ‘Arnie’ (Arnim Zola) wandering around, for decades.
Or said science basement being filled with a giant unwieldy supercomputer containing said Nazi’s brain.
Or the fact that Howard makes breakthroughs with serum and Hydra-tech (both Zola’s specialities) when he previously said he was “not even close” to achieving that.
The fact that Peggy is (coincidentally) also incompetent at spying and cannot recognise other Hydra agents (ie. Johann Fennhoff, Mitchell Carson) until they’re literally kissing her full on the mouth (Dorothy Underwood) is irrelevant when she has:
A) openly
worked
with Nazis right on screen in front of you, anyway,
“Jedi will just say, ‘Oh, this was a test from the Force.’ when anything happens
or say ‘May the Force be with you.’ to someone who’s not a Jedi.” I mean, yeah, they do. Because the Force is a demonstrable, provable thing that tests Jedi all throughout their lives and moves through them and bolsters them. That’s literally how it works in-universe, the Jedi aren’t just going on faith that the Force exists or that it sends them trials, it’s literally what the Force does to Luke on Dagobah, the Jedi on Ilum, Ahsoka and Kanan and Ezra on Lothal. The Jedi are not pulling “the Force is testing me” out of their asses, it’s genuinely just what the Force does.
Reblogging firstly to shine a spotlight on @limnsaber’s excellent tags:
But also to point out that in the later seasons of TCW, you see that there’s a conflicting approach between storytellers in how the Jedi see and treat the Force.
“Obi-Wan doesn’t believe Ahsoka is guilty of these crimes, but he has a very hard time arguing politically that the Jedi Council shouldn’t do what they do to her. He trusts in the Force, which is what they love to say when they don’t know what they’re doing, and they expel her. He doesn’t like Tarkin’s logic [but he can’t argue] that they can’t try her within the Jedi because the public, which we show in this episode arc, who are losing faith in the Jedi, would cry foul ball.” - Dave Filoni, starwars.com, 2013
It’s no secret that if it was up to George, Ahsoka would’ve stayed with the Jedi at the end of the “Wrong Jedi” storyline, possibly dying during Order 66.
Instead, Filoni thought that having her leave the Jedi would be “something different”. To further justify her departure, he frames the Jedi’s belief in the Force as a platitude, like “the Lord works in mysterious ways”.
But then I look at this:
“You never know what’s going to happen. That’s the challenge. And that’s the drama, which has gone through history. It’s all about what are they going to turn into.” Paul Duncan: “Even if you don’t know how it’s going to turn out, you still carry on mentoring because you have to live with hope.” “Hope and faith. I have faith that it’s going to turn out all right. I hope it’ll turn out all right. But either way, it’s the same.” - George Lucas, The Star Wars Archives: 1999-2005, 2020
And it’s clear the narrative of the films doesn’t frame “trusting in the Force” as a bullshit thing. It’s a hopeful thing.
So we’re talking about a group of space monks whose faith is part of what makes them capable of levitating objects. Saying “we must trust in the Force” is not a generic phrase they just throw out there to justify some bullshit they’re not sure about.
It’s a fact: the Force exists, they know it, they sense it, otherwise they wouldn’t be able to lift that object, they wouldn’t have “a bad feeling about this”, they wouldn’t hear millions of people screaming when a planet lightyears away gets blown up.
And while they know that it exists and how it works, they’re not arrogant enough to know its will for sure, but all they can do is hope that it’ll turn out okay.
When Mace Windu says that to Ahsoka, seconds prior Plo Koon had apologized in the name of the entire Council.
So if we’re trying to rationalize that moment by having it fit with Lucas’ narrative, then it becomes clear that Mace is not saying:
“Uuuh, yes! It was totally all part of the plan! We didn’t fuck up, this was a test, we just didn’t know it!”
He’s not covering up the Council’s error, even though that’s how Ahsoka takes it. He is complimenting Ahsoka, he’s saying:
“Congrats for sticking to your guts, we made a mistake but, thankfully, the Force had your back”.
I think it’s worth mentioning that Ahsoka Tano is NOT a gray Jedi. She wears gray. That’s the extent of her “grayness”. At no point has she ever embraced any form of darkness willingly, and she harbors the life energy of a light side force god within her. She’s not going to be the one to make “gray Jedi” canon, an ideology that makes no sense and goes directly against what we know about balance of the force in canon.
Ahsoka is an ex-Jedi. She doesn’t consider herself to be a Jedi, but it will not shock me when her show is about her reconnecting with that part of herself. Her journey seems to be pointing in that direction anyway.
Ahsoka has never forsaken the Jedi code, just the order itself. She is spiritual, not religious if you will. She’s always followed the code of the Jedi. She left because she felt betrayed by the order. She was forced to step back for a minute where she realized that they were the ones that were not living up to their own code because they’d been blinded by the darkness of the times.
I believe that if Order 66 had never occurred, Ahsoka would have already been back in the order and I say this because of the conversation that she has with Yoda after the siege of Mandalore:
Ahsoka: I did my duty as a citizen.
Yoda: Not as a Jedi?
Ahsoka: No. Not yet.
“No. Not yet.”
I digress.
Ahsoka’s moral compass is firmly placed in the light side of the force. She is more Jedi-like than some of the actual Jedi. There’s literally nothing “gray” about her outside of her poncho.
[ID: tiktok captioned: The moment they realized it was the real Janelle Monae on the ACLUE pride float. Janelle stands on a small float and speaks into a microphone decorated with the trans flag. They say, “We are here, we are queer! We are trans! We are the LGBTQIA+ community and we celebrate us right now! The video turns to the crowd and shows shots of people half paying attention to the float, then doing double takes as they see Janelle Monae singing. /]
Delighted watching this video! Wanted to describe it to the bf but then I realized I didn’t actually know Janelle Monáe’s pronouns (knew they were nb though), so I decided to look it up. My delight went up 20 fold learning.
Actor/Singer/Performer Janelle Monáe uses
‘free-ass motherfucker’
but in a pinch finds they/them/she/her acceptable.
