Thing I love about Steve Rogers #293812

Something I enjoy about Captain America: he chose to become a superhero. The narrative is more typically that the great powers come, then the sense of great responsibility. Peter's little rush of making money and the joy of vengeance followed by Uncle Ben's death is a classic example. Thor was born to the power and had to lose it to become worthy. Tony, like Peter, saw what he'd caused through irresponsibility and decided to do better. Clark decided to do good things with his powers once he got to Metropolis, after an (understandable, he was a kid) lifetime of doing nothing with his abilities but hide them. Natasha was trained and honed into a super-spy and fought her way past her conditioning to change. Bruce wanted vengeance and to overcome fear, so he designed himself superpowers. Diana was a warrior princess who eventually chose to leave her home to fight for justice. Outside Marvel and DC, Buffy was self-centred and shallow and changed by the powers and duty that came together. Faith got her superpowers and she fought evil, but it took a suicide mission and spell in prison for her to get over the idea that fighting that evil entitled her to take what she wanted. All of those stories are touching and heroic! (Maybe not so much Bruce's.)

But something I love about Steve is that the powers came second. He was already a hero who fought bullies and he chose to risk the superserum experiment so he could win against them occasionally.

STEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVE, is basically what I'm saying here.

Falcon is also arguably an example of this? In related news, I love how much Steve and Sam mirror each other and OMG SAM YOU BRING ME SO MUCH JOY.