To me the message is that when people get very, very entrenched in "sides" the consequences are misery, regret, death, etc.
Civil War is such a Rorschach test—it is very easy to find analogies and patterns in it to compare to all different kinds of real-life examples. And there are people who defend both sides of those real-life examples, as well. (This came up again fairly recently in Marvel's Agents of SHIELD when there were huge discussions on fan boards about whether SHIELD was right or wrong to want to create a registry of Inhumans, who had been in hiding in the Himalayas. There were passionate arguments on both sides.)
I don't know enough about the Civil War writers to know whether they had an idea of Right or Wrong going in, or were intentionally creating a specific analogy, but readers will form their own opinions anyway. I agree with you that it is unlikely that the writers intended to portray Government Side = Good. But I think it's far more likely that they picked a difficult problem with bits of right and wrong on both sides, then used that as a means of creating a huge amount of dramatic tension for the characters we love.
Not making an analogy to current politics ;-), I think it's the polarization of the two sides and how deeply Tony and Cap entrenched in those sides that caused the death, destruction, and pain. Listening more to each other could have prevented a lot of the issues. But as my dad likes to say about tv dramas, "Then there wouldn't be any story."
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Civil War is such a Rorschach test—it is very easy to find analogies and patterns in it to compare to all different kinds of real-life examples. And there are people who defend both sides of those real-life examples, as well. (This came up again fairly recently in Marvel's Agents of SHIELD when there were huge discussions on fan boards about whether SHIELD was right or wrong to want to create a registry of Inhumans, who had been in hiding in the Himalayas. There were passionate arguments on both sides.)
I don't know enough about the Civil War writers to know whether they had an idea of Right or Wrong going in, or were intentionally creating a specific analogy, but readers will form their own opinions anyway. I agree with you that it is unlikely that the writers intended to portray Government Side = Good. But I think it's far more likely that they picked a difficult problem with bits of right and wrong on both sides, then used that as a means of creating a huge amount of dramatic tension for the characters we love.
Not making an analogy to current politics ;-), I think it's the polarization of the two sides and how deeply Tony and Cap entrenched in those sides that caused the death, destruction, and pain. Listening more to each other could have prevented a lot of the issues. But as my dad likes to say about tv dramas, "Then there wouldn't be any story."