Captain Steve Rogers

[captain_rogers]

Character Details

Full name: Steven Grant Rogers
Aliases: Steve Rogers, Capt. Rogers, Captain America, the Star Spangled Man With a Plan, Cap.
Canon from: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Canon type (movies/books, etc): Movies
Age (approx if not sure): Physically – 27, Chronologically – 94.
Gender: Male
Link to picture of character (if possible):
http://bit.ly/M77dEM

Point in time when character has been taken from canon: Immediately after The Avengers movie (so it’d be early to mid May, 2012)

Character History:
Steve Rogers never met his father. Born to Joseph and Sarah Rogers of Hell’s Kitchen, New York, Steve was told at a very young age that his father’s death of mustard gas in the trenches of the Great War had been a great, heroic death. That he had died for his country. His mother, a nurse, contracted tuberculosis after working in a TB ward and died when he was six years old, leaving him to be sent off to an orphanage on Eighth Avenue.

Even so young as that, Steve knew he would be a soldier like his father one day and dreamed of nothing else.

He also made a habit of standing up to bullies twice his size and getting beaten up behind nearly every building there was in his Brooklyn neighborhood, and it was during one such beat down that Steve met his soon to be best friend Bucky Barnes.

Before the war Steve graduated high school and moved on to art school with Bucky (although the two had vastly different opinions on the matter of both Bucky’s skill) where he was moderately successful but was hardly the next Picasso (as Bucky claimed he would himself be, while drawing his stick figures). It was there, during one of their classes, that the news was broken to them of Pearl Harbor.

Bucky was the one to stave off Steve’s desire to immediately rush to enlist by pointing out that as thin and sickly as he was, there was no way the doctors would let him through. The two then spent several weeks with Bucky tutoring Steve in boxing, weight-lifting and running him through his paces. Unfortunately for Steve, however, he was still declared unfit for duty on his first attempt to join, while Bucky was signed up immediately and even assigned to the 107th Infantry, Steve’s father’s old unit and the only place Steve has ever wanted to be.

It took four more attempts at enlisting (each time listing a different hometown on his paperwork) before a chance meeting at Howard Stark’s World Exposition put him in the path of Dr. Erskine of the SSR, who upon seeing the potential in the young man, declares him 1A and puts him up as a candidate for the Super Soldier project. Against all odds it was he who was chosen as the subject of the experiment, as he proved that he not only could think creatively but was above all else good and self-sacrificing where his competitors were physically strong, but less courageous and less able to think outside of the box.

The experiment changed his life as well as his body. Erskine’s serum with the addition of a dose of Vita-Rays changed his body from spindly and small to the tall, broad perfect specimen the Army had been looking for. And in the events that followed he lost Erskine, the first man truly to believe in him only to be shipped off to play the ‘chorus girl,’ as Colonel Phillips so sweetly put it, entertaining the crowds under the guise of Captain America in order to sell War Bonds.

Aside from that first dash of heroism that had him unthinkingly chasing down Erskine’s killer through the street and risking his own life repeatedly to capture him (unsuccessfully, as the man committed suicide), he felt largely useless and all his potential wasted.

Until, that was, he heard the news that the 107th had mostly been captured or killed by HYDRA, the same evil group that had been behind Erskine’s death. There he rushed to the rescue (with a little help from the British liaison agent Peggy Carter, who he rapidly fell in love with, and Howard Stark, who he…didn’t) and after freeing the 400 some odd prisoners in the facility and reuniting with a weakened Bucky, came face to face with Red Skull.

Steve made it his personal mission to see HYDRA disassembled and worked alongside Peggy, Stark, Bucky and the Howling Commandos (who he had rescued from that HYDRA facility) to burn the organization to the ground. Bucky was lost in a raid on a train where they’d been attempting to capture HYDRA’s lead scientist and while initially depressed (with an extra dose for the fact that he discovered he could no longer get drunk and drown his sorrows), Steve was whipped back into fighting shape by Peggy’s words of wisdom.

With his friends and Colonel Phillips’ support, they successfully attacked the last HYDRA base and stopped Red Skull’s plan to destroy the Eastern seaboard, but while Steve (accidentally) banished Red Skull to the other side of the galaxy by activating the Cosmic Cube, he was left with a crippled plane heading straight for New York. Rather than let it crash and kill countless people, Steve drove the plane down into the icy waters of the Arctic Ocean.

He thought it would kill him. He was wrong.

Retrieved and revived from the cryogenic sleep he had been in for nearly seventy years, Steve was left with the knowledge that everyone he’d known was now dead and he was now a man out of time.

It would be less than a year before he was given his first assignment with SHIELD and was dragged back into action to fight the Asgardian Loki as he sought to conquer the world. There on the SHIELD helicarrier, he met Bruce Banner and Natasha Romanoff, after an introduction to the agent Phil Coulson who was clearly a great fan of the Captain America legend. Where Bruce was guarded about the meeting, Steve kept an open mind and greeted him with an open offer of friendship and respect without judging him for what ‘the other guy’ could do damage-wise.

During a hand to hand battle with Loki (who proved to be more impressive than Steve was expecting) he met Tony Stark, the son of his old friend Howard, but took an immediate dislike to his showboating ways. His first impression of Loki’s foster-brother Thor proved to be equally sour, as his attempt at quitting Thor and Tony’s fighting over who got to punish Loki first ended with half a forest destroyed and nothing really solved.

While he and Tony later worked fairly well together in a crisis (albeit with Tony demanding more technologically of Steve than a man fresh out of the 1940s could be expected to know about complex computer systems), it was not until Phil Coulson’s death that the group Nick Fury had assembled really pulled together as The Avengers and flew off to fight Loki’s planned invasion of New York.

It was a hell of a battle, but in the end the Avengers were victorious and came out enough in one piece (at least individually one piece apiece) to go for shwarma after the battle.

Character Personality
First and foremost Steve is one thing…patriotic. He’s the 1940s ideal: he’s determined, persistent, self-sacrificing and forever putting his ideals above all else. He believes in the good in people more than the bad, in standing up to bullies no matter their size or power and even if it means getting beat down repeatedly he will never stop. Now that he’s been given the strength to do so, he wants to defend those who cannot defend themselves and serve his country as his father did, even if it means also giving up his life. He clings to his humanity where the Red Skull had been so quick to dismiss it and that humanity and the compassion in him that comes from it is the core of who he is.

Physically he’s quite confident, but he hasn’t quite gotten over his own lack of self-confidence when it comes to women. He’s awkward around them and tends to ramble or stammer when faced with an aggressive woman coming onto him and where he would never want to hurt or disrespect one, he’s had some trouble disentangling himself from newly amorous women. Women, after all, were never interested in him before the serum.

He’s a man out of time, a lonely soul who lost all he knew and the blossoming new love he felt for Peggy but never really got to explore. He doesn’t really understand modern culture, rarely gets pop culture references (unless they’re pre-1945) and is largely at a loss with what to do with himself when he doesn’t have a villain to fight. In the moment he’s perfectly at ease, calling out battle orders with old familiarity, but once taken out of the fight he’s again unsure and just…lost.

Steve isn’t just muscle but an intelligent man (although nowhere near Stark or Banner on the scale) who was always told by his mother to always use brains before force. He’s fantastic at out of the box thinking and whether that creativity leant to his moderate artistic ability or the other way around, who could say.

Of course sometimes Steve does get a little judgmental of people around him if they don’t fit his ideal of what a hero should be/what a good person should be. He can, however, moderate that judgment as he gets to know the person.

Physical Description:
Steve was transformed by the Super Soldier serum and Vita-Rays to be the absolute best America could want and he very much fits the part of the 1940s American poster boy. Blonde haired and blue-eyed, Steve stands at a good 6’2” and weighs in at 220 lbs of solid muscle (or 1.88 m and 99.8 kg IF YOU’RE UNAMERICAN).

Magical powers or special skills:
Steve’s body operates at the peak of human ability: strength, speed, reflexes and agility, they’re all greatly enhanced and stand above the level of ‘any Olympic athlete that has ever competed.’ His extreme metabolism runs at four times the normal human rate (which does unfortunately mean that he’s unable to get drunk) and has the added bonus of preventing fatigue causing chemical build-up in his muscles and granting him extraordinary endurance. [Would these count as natural as they’re now a part of his everyday biology and not a superpower?]

He’s also a fair hand at sketching, but that’s beside the point.

Any crimes committed in canon: (Attempted) Fraudulent Enlistment into the United States Army