In 2016 I was in Class 7, battling against ABCs that were meant to determine my future, in a tiny room enclosed by sugarcane and dirt paths somewhere in Nyanza. We called the room a classroom. At an evacuated airport in Germany at the same time, twelve grown-ups were also battling each other for reasons best known to each of them. On one side was a super soldier with a round disc shield that doesn’t obey the laws of physics; another super soldier with a crazy metal arm; some black guy with carbon fibre wings for flying; a guy who can shoot arrows; an actual witch with red powers; and a guy who can talk to ants when he wants to.

These, against a billionaire arms dealer who can build machines and awesome iron suits; another black guy from the army who’s best friends with the billionaire; a lady assassin who doesn’t want to take sides but chose the billionaire’s side for the cameras and plot, I guess; a guy with a yellow glowing stone in his head; the literal King of the Wakanda nation; and a kid from Queens, New York.

But you see, before all that hullabaloo, these grown-ups were a team. A private security force, rather. The most powerful one in Earth-616 at the time, and nobody had raised an eyebrow. Everything had worked out pretty well.

Until…

In Lagos, the mission wasn’t even supposed to be big enough to warrant attention. But as with all great villains, they come with a twist our heroes never prepare for. The villain in this case, HYDRA agent ‘Crossbones’ (Brock Rumlow), decided to wear a suicide bomb vest to take Cap with him in the explosion. But Wanda (Scarlet Witch) dashed in in time to contain the blast with her powers. She did contain the blast, but in a split-second decision—because they were in a crowded market—she decided to lift Rumlow and let him explode far from the people. She ended up floating him into the nearest building, filled with humanitarian workers. Bang!

Now it suddenly looked like the Avengers were a terrorist organization sent to blow up buildings with people in them. Especially in an African country? That was sure to draw attention everywhere.

To be fair, Wanda was still learning to control her powers. Even by the time Avengers: Endgame rolled in, she still didn’t know how powerful she was. I believe she would have actually killed Thanos had the Titan not told his army to rain hellfire. She was also still scared of causing more collateral damage like she did in Civil War.

But I digress.

She had made the best possible decision under immense pressure. But the world would obviously not see it that way; they would see a young girl with powers lose control and kill innocent lives. Now suddenly, the world started to see a pattern.

Ever seen the meme that superheroes claim to have “saved the world,” yet they’ve left the city in ruins? Yeah, that is no meme in Earth-616. After Wanda had her mishap, the world actually saw it like that meme—the remains of battle. They saw a pattern, a pattern of destruction that had been building since 2012 when the Avengers first fought together. And the world had had enough. And what happens when the world has had enough of people wearing costumes playing around with superpowers? The government swoops in. That’s right. In swooped the government, as they always do when shit’s going down. Or up. The government always happens.

The government came in the form of Ross. You might know him from the first Hulk movie, when he was chasing down the green guy. Mr. “I create the monsters I chase.” That one. Only now, he was the US Secretary of State. Word from Nigeria had obviously gotten to him, and he called the Avengers in for a meeting, with this big bound book titled The Sokovia Accords. Sounds cool, right? The government knows how to coat things.

The Accords, summarized, were that Ross (the government) wanted his piece of the pie: to keep the Avengers on a leash. There would be no more running around the world doing cool hero stuff and accidentally hurting people without authorization from the government. Ross showed them a highlight reel of all the times they accidentally destroyed a building, or failed to protect everyone while protecting the world from existential threats. Literally collateral damage when they left places like New York, Washington DC, and Sokovia in ruins and desolation. But hey, they “saved the world,” right?

Ross let them marinate in their failures for a minute, then dropped the line:

“What do you call a bunch of US-based enhanced individuals, who routinely ignore sovereign borders, and inflict their will wherever they choose?”

(Sounds like the US army to me)

The answer hung in the air. No one dared speak it. Ross’s solution was the Sokovia Accords: basically an international control system that determined when and where the Avengers would go, and the consequences for their actions. It wasn’t even Ross’s idea; the UN and 117 nations had signed and agreed on the Accords, so arguing with Ross was pointless.

Sounds fair, right? No need to destroy cities and towns in the name of saving the world with no consequences whatsoever. Let them go fight in the desert or something, where no one is hurt as collateral. But let’s be real, what villain cares about collateral? They won’t call the Avengers out just to fight them in open space. Collateral is the consequence of war. Yet anyone who refused the Sokovia Accords would face a cold, dark supermax prison called the Raft, in the middle of the seven seas.

I myself have been torn by this Accords dilemma ever since first watching Civil War, and have now watched it like a million times. One, to catch tiny details I might have missed. Two, to get ready for Doomsday in December.

To start the two sides of this dilemma, we have Tony Stark, who is for the Accords.

“We need to be put in check. Whatever form that takes, I’m game,” said the Tin Man.

Tony didn’t just say that. He said it out of guilt.

Before the meeting with Ross, he had been ambushed while waiting for an elevator by a grieving mother. A mother who had lost her son in the chaos caused by the Avengers in Sokovia. A building came crashing down on her son, who, if life were fair, would have been preparing to go study at MIT. The kid decided to spend a few more days with his mother before leaving for school. Then the Avengers came swinging to save the world from Ultron, a robot they had created themselves when Tony was playing with stuff he didn’t fully understand.

Now the kid’s death weighed heavy on Tony because he felt it was his fault, just like he felt about every other thing he’d done. He had been left to explore too much: with Stark Industries’ military weapons, with Ultron, with the Mind Stone to create Vision, and with sending the Avengers to Sokovia. Every good intention he had and every thing he tried had blown up in his face, literally. When he said they needed to be put in check, he meant it. He wasn’t trusting himself anymore. Nor the team. He wanted someone, anyone, to put his ambitions and inventions in check. To tell him when to stop before he creates another extinction-level event. Like asking someone to lock the fridge so that you don’t eat too much.

His dilemma was even worse because he also wanted to save the world. In a vision, Wanda had shown him that his greatest fear was that the world would be destroyed by aliens from outer space, like the Chitauri in New York in 2012. And he felt the need to build something to protect the world before that event happened.

“I see a suit of armor around the world.”

But it was in trying to make that suit of armor that he created Ultron and led to where they were now. Tony took the utilitarian philosophy: minimize harm by any means necessary, even if that meant surrendering freedom.

Then there was my favorite, Steve Rogers. Captain America. The guy supposed to represent the best of American values. Except Steve’s American values include a healthy distrust of authority, because he literally watched the government organization he worked for, S.H.I.E.L.D., turn out to be secretly run by HYDRA, a long-serving, under-the-radar Nazi organization.

One of the arguments in the conference room was that the UN running the Accords was not S.H.I.E.L.D. or HYDRA, to which Cap counters: “Yeah, but the UN is run by people with agendas. And agendas change.”

To which I completely agree with Cap. To leave your life in the hands of the government, whatever name they take, is dangerous. He had seen how HYDRA agents pretended to have good agendas under S.H.I.E.L.D. and realized humans change all the time, especially when there’s power at play. What if, through the Accords, the UN ordered the Avengers to do something evil? We’ve seen governments do that countless times with their military. What if they prevented them from stopping a disaster because they deemed it “politically inconvenient”?

Cap had seen institutions rot from the inside. So when he said “The safest hands are still our own,” he was not being arrogant; he was refusing to outsource his moral authority to a committee. It’s the classic superhero dilemma: if you see someone drowning, and the law says you can’t jump in without proper authorization, do you let them drown?

But it was not only Cap vs. Tony. Everyone in the room had a reason they wanted, or didn’t want, to sign the Accords.

Vision, created by Tony and Banner after their little experiments, dropped one of the best lines in the movie:

In simple terms, he was saying villains level up to the strength of the Avengers. The stronger the Avengers got, the stronger the villains got. The stronger the villains got, the worse the destruction. The Avengers’ existence made the world more dangerous. Oh wait, that sounds familiar. Ah, Ultron had said it a few years back.

Natasha, Black Widow, basically didn’t care about the Accords. That’s why she didn’t choose one side in the fight at the airport. She just wanted to keep the family together. She leaned more toward signing, to maintain a bit of control and live to fight another day.

Sam Wilson, thinking like a black man, asked a very important question: “How long before they low-jack us like common criminals?” He was also right. He had seen how the government throws veterans like himself under the bus.

Rhodes was a military veteran too. His stance, other than being Tony’s best friend, was to follow orders, as he was trained. Makes you wonder what army Steve was in, because he sure didn’t like to follow orders. Rhodey knew operating without oversight wasn’t heroic; it was dangerous.

Wanda, still full of guilt from the Lagos incident, barely spoke. Her guilt outweighed everything, because she thought if it wasn’t for her actions, they wouldn’t be in that room. But it was not all her fault. All events had played out to that very moment.

That one scene was about four minutes long, but it was one of the biggest turning points for the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The camera angles were insane, with Tony and Cap always on opposite sides of the lens. Wanda couldn’t keep her head up out of guilt. Vision was always pondering. When Tony mentioned the kid who died in Sokovia, all their heads bowed. While Rhodes and Sam argued about sides, Steve read the Accords page by page. It was tense. Everyone was tense. Sadly it was the final time we saw our heroes in the same room up to Endgame.

Fellow geeks online have been in a debate since 2016 about who—or which side—was right: Cap or Tony. Should they have signed the Accords or not?

I still think, even as I prepare for Doomsday, that they were both right, a situation that can’t coexist. You’re either for the Accords or not. If not, you’re a criminal in the eyes of the government; you can no longer carry out Avengers missions because you have no authorization.

Tony and his team were on the side of authority. They argued that in a state of nature, without authority, everything descends into chaos. People need a governing body to maintain order.

Steve’s team was on the side of not surrendering their rights to a government, and you know how Steve is when he believes in something.

It is security vs liberty: a time-old debate humans have had since the beginning of civilization. The good thing about Civil War is it ended with no clear victors. It picked no side. It left us with this debate years on and showed us the cost of both sides. Sign the Accords, and you might end up enforcing unjust laws or sitting idle while people die waiting for approval. Refuse to sign, and you’re a fugitive of the government.

But outside that conference room was the main architect who made this debate even tougher: Helmut Zemo.

Ever since the Sokovia disaster, which led to Zemo’s family being killed too, he spent years studying the Avengers: their weaknesses, their histories, their strengths, their trauma responses. He saw the cracks long before Ross presented the Sokovia Accords. And Zemo waited for that conference room debate as the perfect catalyst for his plan. He had realized what no other villain had: you don’t defeat gods by fighting them, you make them fight themselves.

Zemo caused the explosion that killed the Wakandan king T’Chaka, then framed Bucky to force Steve into a difficult position: loyalty to Bucky versus accountability. Friendship vs the system. And he knew exactly how Tony would react, because he knew Tony was drowning in guilt. All he needed to do was show Tony that it was Bucky, while working as the Winter Soldier, who killed his parents—to fully ignite the flame in Tony and solidify the rift between the Avengers. Zemo used Tony’s guilt and Cap’s distrust of authority against them, and it worked perfectly.

So they split.

Tony signed.

Steve refused.

The team split. The airport fight happened. My ABCs made my future possible to write this. Everyone picked sides, and inevitably Thanos came at the worst possible time, when the team was in shambles and disunited. And honestly, I think they almost beat that scrotum-faced villain on Titan. If only they had one more heavy hitter, someone like a super soldier with incredible grit and strength. Or maybe a Scarlet Witch burning with rage.

When Ebony Maw attacked New York, Tony had the chance to call Steve but hesitated for a second because of the breakup. By the time he worked up the courage to call Steve, it was too late. He was already on a flying donut headed to outer space. I believe the Avengers lost in Infinity War because they were divided. A team that had survived gods, aliens, and robots tore themselves apart over white pages and binding tape.

Civil War made me realize that simple scenes like the conference room scene, a five-minute scene, can break universes. Ideas break universes. Arguments do. Moral dilemmas do.

What does power actually cost?

Who gets to decide how it is used?

What happens when the good guys disagree on the right thing to do?

And Civil War didn’t give us an easy answer either, it gave us tragedy. Because both Tony and Cap were right. They were both trying to save the world and themselves. They just had different definitions of what that meant. Tony wanted to save the world from the Avengers. Steve wanted to save the world with the Avengers. And in trying to do both, they accomplished neither.

Civil War just showed how hard it is sometimes to make a choice and live with the consequences. Whether you trust yourself to make the right call when everything is on the line. Tony didn’t trust himself anymore, so he signed. Steve trusted himself too much, so he refused to sign. And the whole universe paid the price for both decisions.

I don’t know what I would have done in the same situation. It is good to have oversight, but it’s also good to make decisions yourself, especially when lives are at stake and time is not friendly. In Civil War there was no version where everybody wins. That’s what pained me the most. There are just choices, and the world your choices create.

God, I can’t wait for Doomsday!

Such geek posts will be frequent until Doomsday. Stay tuned.

✍🏽Reagan.