I just had this realization about Steve Rogers/Captain America from the MCU that I wrestled with for a bit and decided it was right.
To the eldrae, he’s the human Alpha baseline upgrade.
He’s as strong as you can get without augmentation. Tough, resilient, and fast.
He’s smart, has amazingly few cognitive biases (remember, he grew up in an era when Irish was a barely tolerated racial category, let alone black), and most of his dating issues in Winter Soldier were personal preferences, not a general lack of desire. Maybe some issues with underlying trauma, but he’s untrained by most standards of personal psychological management.
And, one of the big core things is that he knows who he is. Most eldrae seem arrogant to a hypothetical observer, because they’re the inheritors of the history and the traditions of an empire that has peers that you can maybe count on both hands and not cheat with binary. Hard to be humble when you have that kind of history.
Steve, on the other hand, knows who he is at the core-a kid from Brooklyn that hates bullies. Everything else flows from there. He’s Catholic in the philosophical sense, not the religious sense. He believes that we have an accounting due at the end of our lives-so best to live your life well, do the right thing, be a good man. So when you present your final product to the Creator, you can say “I did the best I could in this Fallen world.” Even in Endgame, he was doing the right thing-running a support group, because that was the only way he could find to beat Thanos after the Snap, by making it possible for others to live.
The thought just kept bouncing around my skull, and I thought I would share.