MCU Casualties

[SirSullymore]

From the new trailer:


Avengers battle in NYC = 74 casualties

Winter Soldier Battle in D.C. = 23 casualties

Avengers 2 Battle in Sokovia = 177 casualties

So that's 274 deaths over the course of 3 major alien/terrorist attacks in densely populated areas....is it just me or is that number insanely low. Like the Avengers seem to be doing a bang up job from these numbers, the premise of Civil War seems a tad wonky.

Unless Hulk going crazy in Avengers 2 killed a load of people and they're just not telling us.

 

[DefunctTheory]

The context of the Civil War isn't that the Avenger's need to be stopped, it's that they need to be held accountable. Not financially, or criminally, but people just want them to have to answer to somebody. These are super powered beings that are essentially running around the globe, wrecking the shit out of stuff, and then going off to party.

It's doubly bad because the Avengers came out of SHIELD... a spy organization that spent 70 years running around with zero accountability, tried to put three massive flying death fortresses in the sky to monitor the entire planet, and harbored Hydra, a freak'n Nazi group for their entire existence.

 

[SirSullymore]

Held accountable for what? Being too good at saving people? Well Avengers 2 was Tony's fault but now he's on the pro-accountability side, so hell if I know whats going on. Still, more people die from heart attacks each day than the entirety of these disasters, if I was in the MCU i'd feel pretty safe.

 

[HybridChangeling]

The numbers for the first one make sense, since the first Avengers was focusing SO MUCH attention on limiting the battle to a few blocks and helping the cops and trying not to seem like a destruction fest. The second one makes sense, but the Sokovia one seems waaayyyy off. No way a city got raised and fell and only 177 people died.

I feel your pain OP, because this movie in my opinion is going to reshape the MCU and possibly not for the best. I get the need to do this but this shift from fun superhero romp into a jarring death focused narrative is not what they need to do right now. Knowing what comes next, this makes no tone sense for the series. If they wanted to be serious, they should have done that for the origins, and built the cheesy fun upon a foundation of serious drama and ideas. Or perhaps this is the one "THIS IS SERIOUS" movie before a giant purple dude runs around earth with a bejeweled glove Dr.Manhatten-ing people.

 

[WolfThomas]

The numbers for the first one make sense, since the first Avengers was focusing SO MUCH attention on limiting the battle to a few blocks and helping the cops and trying not to seem like a destruction fest. The second one makes sense, but the Sokovia one seems waaayyyy off. No way a city got raised and fell and only 177 people died.

Well Sokovia didn't fall. It was evacuated and exploded at a safe height. So it wasn't slamming into the ground. I imagine a lot of the deaths were from were the city split with the ground. House collapses and falling cars.

 

[DefunctTheory]

Held accountable for what? Being to good at saving people? Well Avengers 2 was Tony's fault but now hes on the pro-accountability side. so hell if I know whats going on. Still, more people die from heart attacks each day than the entirety of these disasters, if I was in the MCU i'd feel pretty safe.

More people die every day of heart attacks than are beaten to death by the police. That doesn't mean we don't hold the police accountable.

They want to register/control the heroes, not so they can be thrown in jail for what they've done, but so people can actually monitor what the hell is going on, and mandate exactly what the Avenger's are allowed to do and where they can do it. As it is now, the Avenger's are a group of people who can go anywhere, and do anything, they want, and no one can stop them. If they did ever fuck up, either accidentally or on purpose, there's no one currently there to sort it out.

So the Civil War is pretty much between Captain 'Trust Us, We're Cool' America and Tony 'This Train Has No Breaks and It Needs to Stop' Stark.

 

[SirSullymore]

Held accountable for what? Being to good at saving people? Well Avengers 2 was Tony's fault but now hes on the pro-accountability side. so hell if I know whats going on. Still, more people die from heart attacks each day than the entirety of these disasters, if I was in the MCU i'd feel pretty safe.

More people die every day of heart attacks than are beaten to death by the police. That doesn't mean we don't hold the police accountable.

Superhero body cams are the answer!

I'm just being nitpicky because I feel like way more people should have died, plus I'm pretty disappointed with Spider-man so I'm looking for things to be annoyed by. haha

 

[Fox12]

The only thing that bothered me was that I never got a sense of the stakes. I never really cared about New York in that movie, and we never get to see the aftermath of these battles. Now they expect us to care in Civil War? A city gets destroyed in every movie. Another one will probably get destroyed in this one. No one ever even seemed to mention it until now.

 

[Zhukov]

Seems to me a better inciting incident for people wanting controls on superheroes would be Hulk's urban rampage in Ultron.

Although that would sorta require him to have killed people which is probably a bit heavy for the tone they're going for. Banner waking up and having to scrape bits of somebody's grandma out from under his toenails wouldn't really fit.

 

[irishda]

The numbers for the first one make sense, since the first Avengers was focusing SO MUCH attention on limiting the battle to a few blocks and helping the cops and trying not to seem like a destruction fest. The second one makes sense, but the Sokovia one seems waaayyyy off. No way a city got raised and fell and only 177 people died.

That was always the funniest part to me, how much people decried Man of Steel's destruction spree, yet we have to act like 6 people could somehow keep a massive army within "a few blocks". ESPECIALLY when that army's main mode of transportation was flying ships and included massive space robot alien snakes that also flew, bonus points since only 2 of the 6 heroes could actually fly too.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

274 is a pretty big number in today's terrorism-fearing world.

Also, you forgot to include the most important thing: money. According to the same screen shots, all the superhero-ing resulted in 450+ billion dollars in damages. Thats bound to piss of the world governments.

 

[Scarim Coral]

Is there a source to the casualty number?

OT- Yeah I can't help but to laugh at the result especially when compared to Man of Steel Metropolis alone!

Even then during the Civil War film, couldn't Captain America make the claim they have done more good given if they didn't intervene, the casulties would had increase ten fold?

 

[Mechamorph]

The comic story made very little sense, to port it to the MCU makes even less sense. This version of Tony Stark cares about the law about as much as most people do about the neighborhood knitting circle. Holding the Avengers accountable? The Hulk can claim to be legally insane (as a split personality of Bruce Banner) or mentally retarded to the point of low accountability. Captain America has a really interesting legal status since he would have been declared dead at least once. Black Widow and Hawkeye are both SHIELD intelligence assets and thus accountable to SHIELD already. Thor is not even human, not a citizen of any nation on Earth and technically the heir to the throne of a foreign power. The Vision is a sentient artificial human so is he property? Or is he technically the child of Tony Stark and Bruce Banner? What legal status does he have? Scarlet Witch is not a US national. Only the Falcon and War Machine easily exist within accountable frameworks.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

Aside from those numbers being super low (which proves that the Avengers are fucking good at their jobs) the biggest question I have is why the fuck is anyone listening to Thaddeus Ross? Or better yet, why wasn't he court martialed for his frankly appalling actions in The Incredible Hulk?

 

[Zontar]

Also, you forgot to include the most important thing: money. According to the same screen shots, all the superhero-ing resulted in 450+ billion dollars in damages. Thats bound to piss of the world governments.

It's actually much worst then that and effects the global economy and the everyman. 9/11 did between 10-13 billion US dollars in property and infrastructure damage, but the financial cost of the attacks due to the economic fallout was 1 trillion dollars. Those attacks equally over 450 billion dollars is very easily enough to cause a global depression the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Great Depression.

The mentality that these people are running wild and causing such damage to the economy alone could be enough to have massive numbers of people demanding they be held accountable for their actions.

 

[Zontar]

Snip

Those are the major events (though all of them are definitely far too low given how many on screen deaths we get) but then there's also the Hell's Kitchen and purpleman incident as well that people are aware of the connection between enhanced humans and said incidents.

I'm honestly surprised Marvel put the casualty figures so low. I know DC did the same but come one, the Battle of New York even had Daredevil explicit state that hundreds where killed in the aftermath, which itself was an unrealistically low number.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

Also, you forgot to include the most important thing: money. According to the same screen shots, all the superhero-ing resulted in 450+ billion dollars in damages. Thats bound to piss of the world governments.

It's actually much worst then that and effects the global economy and the everyman. 9/11 did between 10-13 billion US dollars in property and infrastructure damage, but the financial cost of the attacks due to the economic fallout was 1 trillion dollars. Those attacks equally over 450 billion dollars is very easily enough to cause a global depression the likes of which hasn't been seen since the Great Depression.

The mentality that these people are running wild and causing such damage to the economy alone could be enough to have massive numbers of people demanding they be held accountable for their actions.

See that makes sense for the New York and Washington DC attacks though since those were successfully thwarted rather than able to reach their logical conclusion I suspect the effect wouldn't be as pronounced; maybe 60-70% of the 9/11 fallout.

I never figured that the Sokovia incident would have much impact in terms of the global economy since it seemed to be a relatively unimportant Eastern European country and not an economic powerhouse. I mean the country is functionally bankrupt (if not now non-existent) and there's a refugee crisis.

 

[Saelune]

Gonna play daredevil's advocate here (pun ) and say that if casualties were to be super high, then what's the point of super-heroes? Maybe it doesn't make sense for us, but we don't have super fast flying powerhouses to rescue us near immediately as it occurs. In real life we have real people who have to learn about what's happening, ready up and show up. They also cant just fly up or punch through to their target locations. Who's to say there aren't other supers saving people too that don't want or just didn't show up in the spot light?

 

[Zontar]

Gonna play daredevil's advocate here (pun ) and say that if casualties were to be super high, then what's the point of super-heroes?

In the words of Captain America from the latest Civil War trailer: "We try to save people. That doesn't mean we can save everyone."

Something to remember is that if New York has 10,000 people die from the invasion, that would still be an improvement over a nuke being dropped on the city or a prolonged Chitauri invasion being dealt with by the military and national guard.