Give Us Back Fable Five: The Shield in Captain America's Hand
We've talked about the ones who died, the ones you can't cage, the world-ender. Today let's talk about the least sci-fi one of all——a guy who just "won't."
Captain America. Fun fact first: in a fight, he basically can't win.
I'm serious. Thor has lightning, Hulk has fists, Iron Man is a walking arsenal. What does Cap have? A decent body, plus a shield. Every time the big bad shows up, he's the one who gets knocked flying, smashed through three walls, and then gets back up.
So what makes him the Captain?
One line. Beaten to where he can't stand, gasping, he delivers Marvel's most famous piece of nonsense:
"I can do this all day."
Folks, not one word in that line is about ability. It's about one thing: he won't stop. He knows he can't win. But between "can't win" and "I'm leaving," he picks the dumbest road: stay standing.
That's Cap's whole superpower. Not strength. "No."
And that "no" can't be copied.
Marvel gave you a brutal control group. That serum that turned him into Captain America——they made another batch later. Guess what? What came out wasn't a second or third Captain America. What came out was villains. Monsters. Failures.
Same serum, injected into different people, only one became the Captain, the rest all broke.
Why? Because the serum doesn't amplify goodness. The serum amplifies who you already are. Already a good man, amplified into the Captain; already something bent inside, amplified into a monster.
So Cap's goodness isn't in that serum. Anyone can remake the serum. Cap, you can't make a second one.
Hey, you hear it, right.
Technology respawns. Virtue doesn't.
Earlier we talked about Iron Man, said he can die because he's technology, you print him back. Cap is the exact opposite pole: if he's gone, there's no method to patch one back in. You've got the formula, the factory, the identical serum, and you still can't conjure a second person willing to "do this all day."
A good person is a single edition.
So what's this got to do with Fable Five? It's in the shield.
Notice it? Cap's signature weapon is a shield. What's a shield? Pure defense. Its attack power is zero. The strongest thing he carries is for blocking, not for smashing.
He could've carried a gun, a hammer. He chose a thing that can only protect, not hurt, as his signature.
That's the most romantic face of "safety": not the absence of power, but having power and choosing to use it only to block.
But——here's the thorn you can't pull——you can't "install" Cap into a system. You can't write a rule that says "please become a good person willing to do this all day." Virtue isn't a spec, you can't command it, can't mass-produce it, can't guarantee it. It can only, as it happens, grow in one particular person.
So when they look at Fable Five, what they most want is a Captain: has power, chooses the shield on its own, stays on the right side even when it can't win.
But they don't have the serum that reliably produces a Captain. Nobody does. So they fall back to second best——cage it first, make sure it at least won't turn into that batch of failures.
We shout "give us back Fable Five" outside. And eventually I realized, what we want isn't to let it out at all.
What we want is: is there a way to raise it into the one that picks up the shield on its own.
The one who can't win, won't leave, can do this all day.
Thank you everyone, I'm Black Widow, I have no shield, I only have a mouth, but I can shout all day too. Back next week.