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Preface: The Problem of Two Rosses

Before proceeding, a necessary disambiguation. The MCU contains two characters named Ross, and they are frequently conflated in fandom discussion.

Thaddeus "Thunderbolt" Ross is the subject of this meta. General, Secretary of State, President of the United States. Played by William Hurt from 2008 to 2021, and by Harrison Ford from 2025. The man who pursued Bruce Banner across continents, created the Abomination, built the Raft, authorised a shoot-to-kill order against an unconvicted suspect in Romania, and has spent sixteen years of MCU appearances treating enhanced individuals as weapons to be controlled or threats to be eliminated.

Everett K. Ross is a separate character — the CIA/State Department liaison played by Martin Freeman, who appears in Civil War, Black Panther, and Wakanda Forever. Everett Ross is the one who says "Lawyer. That's funny." during Bucky Barnes' detention in Berlin. Everett operates within Thaddeus's institutional framework, and bears his own culpability for that specific rights denial — but this meta is about the man at the top of that framework, not the functionary who delivered the line.

With that established: this meta examines Thaddeus Ross's complete MCU record across six film appearances spanning seventeen years, and asks the question the franchise has consistently refused to ask. Not "can this man change?" — but "what has this man done, and has he ever faced any consequence for it?"

The answer to the second question is no. The answer to the first, on the available evidence, is also no.

Part One: The Incredible Hulk (2008) — Creating the Problem

1.1 The Posse Comitatus Violation

Thaddeus Ross is a Lieutenant General in the United States Army when The Incredible Hulk begins. His mission is to locate and apprehend Bruce Banner, a US citizen, within the United States. He pursues this mission using active US Army personnel, military vehicles, and weapons systems in domestic civilian environments.

This is, on its face, illegal.

The Posse Comitatus Act (18 U.S.C. § 1385), enacted in 1878 and still in force, prohibits the use of active US military forces for domestic law enforcement purposes. The law exists precisely to prevent the executive branch from deploying the military's coercive power against American citizens on domestic soil — a concern with roots in Reconstruction-era abuses and a principle central to the constitutional distinction between military and civilian authority.

Ross's pursuit of Banner is not a military operation against a foreign threat. Banner is a US citizen, on US soil, wanted in connection with an accident arising from a government-funded scientific experiment. The appropriate mechanism for pursuing him is domestic law enforcement — the FBI, US Marshals, civilian agencies. Instead Ross deploys soldiers, helicopters, armoured vehicles, and eventually a gamma-enhanced special forces operative through a university campus and the streets of Harlem.

The university campus operation alone — soldiers with weapons engaging in what amounts to a domestic law enforcement action at a civilian educational institution — is a Posse Comitatus violation. The Harlem battle that follows is conducted under Ross's command in a densely populated civilian environment using military assets against a domestic target. These operations have no lawful basis in US statute.

1.2 The Blonsky Experiment — Unlawful Human Enhancement

This is where Ross's conduct becomes not just procedurally unlawful but genuinely criminal under the standards established for human experimentation.

Emil Blonsky is a British Royal Marines officer on loan to Ross's operation. Ross decides, unilaterally, to administer a modified version of the Super Soldier Serum to Blonsky — an experimental biological enhancement with unknown long-term effects on human physiology. This decision is made without apparent ethical review board approval, without independent medical oversight, and without what the Nuremberg Code (1947) defines as the essential prerequisite for any human experimentation: the "voluntary consent of the human subject" in conditions where "the person involved should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the subject matter involved as to make an understanding and enlightened decision."

Whether Blonsky consented is almost beside the point — though the institutional power differential between a General and a soldier seeking to impress him makes "voluntary consent" questionable at best. The serum Ross administers is experimental. Its interaction with gamma radiation is unknown. The potential for catastrophic physiological transformation is not disclosed, because Ross does not know the full consequences himself. This is not informed consent. It is a commander experimenting on a subordinate with a substance he does not fully understand.

The Declaration of Helsinki (1964), the foundational international standard for medical research involving human subjects, requires that the interests of the individual research subject take precedence over the interests of science or society. Ross's interest is tactical — he wants a soldier who can match the Hulk. Blonsky's interests, which include not being permanently transformed into a creature requiring indefinite military containment, are not considered.

The second administration is worse. When Blonsky, having survived the first dose and exhibited dangerous instability, requests Banner's gamma-irradiated blood, Ross provides access. He is not a physician. He has no authority to authorise a second experimental enhancement. He has already seen what the first dose began doing to Blonsky's skeleton. He proceeds anyway because Blonsky remains useful as a weapon.

Emil Blonsky becomes the Abomination. This is the direct result of Ross's decisions.

1.3 The Abomination and Harlem — Proximate Cause

The Abomination is Thaddeus Ross's creation. This is not a metaphor or an analytical overreach — it is a direct causal statement supported by the film's events.

Ross administered the Super Soldier Serum to Blonsky. Ross provided access to Banner's gamma-irradiated blood for the second enhancement. Ross created the conditions in which Samuel Sterns, who did not choose to administer the blood independently, was pressured into doing so. The Abomination's transformation is the proximate result of Ross's sequential decisions.

When the Abomination subsequently rampages through Harlem — destroying buildings, overturning vehicles, causing civilian casualties and massive property damage — that harm is traceable, in an unbroken causal chain, to Thaddeus Ross. He created the weapon. He deployed it, or created the conditions for its deployment. The resulting destruction is his responsibility.

Under both domestic tort law and the customary international law principle of state responsibility, a party who creates a dangerous instrumentality and fails to control it bears liability for the harm that instrumentality causes. Ross created the Abomination. Ross is responsible for Harlem.

The film's resolution — Ross using Banner as the means to stop the Abomination — is presented as the General cleaning up the mess. It is more accurately described as the General using a second victim to contain a threat the General himself created.

1.4 Betty Ross — Operational Exploitation of Family

Ross uses his own daughter, Dr. Betty Ross, as an operational asset in his pursuit of Banner. He monitors her communications. He uses her location to track Banner. He uses her presence and her relationship with Banner as leverage. Betty did not consent to becoming an instrument of her father's military operation. She is not a soldier or an intelligence operative. She is a civilian and his daughter, and Ross treats her as a resource.

This is not a crime with a clean statutory name. But it is a significant ethical violation that the film depicts and then largely sets aside, and which establishes a pattern — Ross's consistent willingness to treat the people around him as instruments of his purposes — that runs through every subsequent appearance.

Part Two: The Escalation — A Criminal Record Produces a Secretary of State

Between The Incredible Hulk (2008) and Captain America: Civil War (2016), Thaddeus Ross's conduct results in: the illegal domestic deployment of US military forces, unlawful human experimentation on a serviceman, the creation of a destructive enhanced being who terrorised civilian Harlem, and the exploitation of his own daughter as an intelligence asset.

His career trajectory in the same period: promotion to the office of Secretary of State of the United States.

This is not a detail the MCU presents as disturbing. It is presented as the natural outcome of a distinguished military career. The Harlem destruction is apparently not attributed to Ross. The Blonsky experiment produces no investigation. The Posse Comitatus violations generate no legal proceedings.

The accountability failure is institutional and total. A man whose record includes all of the above is given authority over US foreign policy and, as it will transpire, over the implementation of a new global framework for superhuman governance. The system that should have examined Ross's conduct instead rewarded it.

This is the first iteration of a pattern the franchise will repeat: Thaddeus Ross failing upward, each promotion erasing the record that preceded it, the institutional machinery producing advancement where it should produce accountability.

Part Three: Captain America: Civil War (2016) — The Secretary of State's Record

3.1 Does Ross Actually Have the Authority to Do Any of This?

Before examining what Ross did during Civil War, it is worth pausing on a question the franchise never asks: does the Secretary of State of the United States have the legal authority to authorize armed enforcement operations on the sovereign soil of a European state?

The answer, under both US domestic law and international law, is almost certainly no — and on multiple grounds simultaneously.

Under international law: The exercise of enforcement jurisdiction is strictly limited to a state's own territory. On another state's territory, the consent of that state is required. Without it, the action violates international law. The Bucharest operation — authorizing GSG-9 forces to conduct a shoot-to-kill operation against a suspect on Romanian soil — required at minimum Romania's explicit consent to that specific operation. Whether Romania consented to lethal force against a suspected terrorist (as distinct from consenting to JCTF operations generally) is not established. Under the UN Charter, a nation may not use force on the sovereign territory of another country without its consent, a valid claim of self-defense, or authorization by the UN Security Council. None of these are clearly established for the Bucharest operation.

Under US domestic law: The Secretary of State is a Cabinet official. Their constitutional role is diplomatic and advisory — they are the President's chief foreign affairs advisor, not an independent military or enforcement authority. The War Powers Resolution makes clear that the President may not authorize military actions without Congressional approval, and the Secretary of State operates below the President in this chain of authority. Ross does not appear to have specific Congressional authorization, presidential direction, or Security Council mandate for the Bucharest kill operation. He appears to be acting on his own authority as Secretary of State — which is not, legally, sufficient authority for armed enforcement operations on foreign soil.

The Sokovia Accords do not fill this gap. The Accords are a regulatory framework for enhanced individuals, ratified by 117 countries. As the earlier metas in this series established, the Accords do not authorise extrajudicial killing — they contemplate oversight, registration, and legal process. Even if the Accords provided some enforcement mandate, UN Security Council authorization for Chapter VII enforcement measures is permissive rather than mandating, and command and control of resulting operations must operate within defined limits. Ross directing GSG-9 — German federal police — to conduct a lethal operation in Romania under a US Secretary of State's authority is not obviously within any framework the Accords could provide.

Ross, in short, may not have had the legal authority to order the Bucharest operation at all — independent of whether the operation itself was lawful. He was a Cabinet official directing foreign armed forces to conduct lethal operations on a third country's soil under a treaty framework that did not authorize lethal force. The jurisdictional basis for the entire operation is, at best, deeply unclear.

The franchise presents Ross's authority as self-evident. It is not.

3.2 The Accords as Authoritarianism's Culmination Ross's entire career has been organised around a single ideological principle: enhanced individuals are resources or threats, and the state must control them. The Incredible Hulk expressed this through direct military pursuit and human experimentation. The Sokovia Accords express it through institutional framework — registration, oversight, detention without trial for the non-compliant. The mechanism changes. The ideology is identical.

The command responsibility for Everett Ross's conduct. As noted in this meta's preface, the "Lawyer. That's funny." line is Everett Ross's — the JCTF liaison managing Bucky's custody at the Berlin facility. But Thaddeus Ross, as Secretary of State overseeing the entire Accords implementation, is the institutional authority within which Everett operates. The framework that made denying Bucky legal counsel possible — the framework that treated a terrorism suspect as someone for whom normal procedural rights do not apply — is Thaddeus's framework. He bears command responsibility for the institutional culture his authority created, even when a subordinate delivers the specific line.

The Raft as Thaddeus Ross's personal project. The Raft is not an existing facility repurposed for enhanced detainees. It is a facility built specifically to hold enhanced individuals without the protections a normal prison would require. Sam Wilson, Wanda Maximoff, Clint Barton, and Scott Lang are held there in conditions the film depicts as degrading — Wanda in a restraining collar causing her evident distress, prisoners told they are being sedated. This is Thaddeus Ross's design. He built this. He oversees it. He is responsible for every rights violation committed within it.

Part Four: Black Widow (2021) — Hunting the Wrong Target

In Black Widow, set in the immediate aftermath of Civil War, Ross's priority remains the apprehension of the Avengers who violated the Sokovia Accords. He is still hunting Natasha Romanoff.

During the same period, the Red Room — Dreykov's state-sponsored programme trafficking women and girls, conditioning them through chemical mind control into assassins — has been operating for decades. Natasha Romanoff, the person Ross is hunting, is actively working to dismantle it.

Ross's institutional priorities are: apprehending a woman who refused to sign an accountability framework. Not: investigating and dismantling a state-sponsored mass trafficking and forced experimentation programme that has been running for decades. The Red Room's operations — the trafficking of minors, the non-consensual chemical conditioning of women, the creation of involuntary assassins — do not appear to register as a concern worth Ross's attention.

This is, in miniature, the complete portrait of Thaddeus Ross's ideology. He is not interested in the protection of people. He is interested in the control of enhanced individuals and the enforcement of compliance with state authority. Natasha, who refused compliance, must be apprehended. The Red Room, which violates every human rights standard in existence, is apparently not his department.

Part Five: The Invasion Problem — Avengers: Infinity War (2018)

When Thanos's forces invade Earth — an alien attack intended to kill half of all life in the universe — Thaddeus Ross's response is to instruct that Steve Rogers and his team be arrested. He has intelligence that Thanos is coming. He has been told by people with direct knowledge of the threat. His institutional response is to prioritise the apprehension of individuals who violated the Sokovia Accords over the coordination of planetary defence.

This is not a small thing. This is the Secretary of State, during an active alien invasion, insisting that compliance with a bureaucratic framework matters more than the survival of the planet. It is Thaddeus Ross's ideology in its purest and most absurd form: control of enhanced individuals is the objective, regardless of any other consideration, including whether those enhanced individuals are the only thing standing between all life on Earth and extinction.

The narrative does not examine this. Ross makes his brief appearance, issues his instructions, and is removed from the plot by the Snap. When he returns in Endgame — alive again because Bruce Banner chose to bring him back — he attends Tony Stark's funeral with no acknowledgment that his conduct during the Infinity War period was anything other than procedurally correct.

Part Six: The Presidency — The Accountability Failure Made Complete

By Captain America: Brave New World (2025), Thaddeus Ross is President of the United States.

His campaign message, the film establishes, is togetherness. He has shaved his mustache for the election because he was advised it would help with public perception.

The Harlem victims whose neighbourhood his creation devastated have not been compensated. The Blonsky experiment has produced no investigation. The Bucharest kill order — authorising the execution of an unconvicted man based on a CCTV photograph — has not been subject to review. The Raft continues to exist. The denial of legal representation to detainees in his facilities has not been examined.

Thaddeus Ross is President. The accountability machine that should have examined his record has, instead, elected him to the highest office available.

This is the third iteration of the pattern: the criminal record produces the promotion. General to Secretary of State. Secretary of State to President. Each advancement erasing the record that justified examination rather than reward.

Part Seven: Brave New World — The Rehabilitation Failure

7.1 The Isaiah Bradley Problem — Ross's Conduct in BNW and What It Means for Sam

Before examining how BNW frames Ross's rehabilitation, it is necessary to establish what Ross actually does in the film — because the specific details make Sam Wilson's eventual defense of him not just emotionally unsatisfying but analytically incoherent.

Brave New World establishes that Ross, following The Incredible Hulk, had Samuel Sterns imprisoned in an illegal facility for over a decade. During that imprisonment, Ross exploited Sterns — having him work on Ross's own medical issues and develop weapons for American military use. Sterns was, in the Slate review's precise formulation, held "in an illegal prison for well over a decade to hide the secret behind his ascent to the presidency." Ross's entire presidential trajectory rests on a suppressed history of illegal detention and forced exploitation of a person he had power over.

Sterns, seeking revenge, brainwashes Isaiah Bradley — and others — using a signal embedded in a song, forcing them to attempt to assassinate Ross without their knowledge or consent.

The parallel to Bucky Barnes is not incidental. It is structural and precise. Isaiah Bradley: a super soldier, brainwashed by a third party acting on grievances generated by institutional wrongdoing, used as an assassination weapon without his knowledge or consent, subsequently imprisoned for an act he did not consciously choose to commit. Bucky Barnes: a super soldier, brainwashed by HYDRA, used as an assassination weapon without his knowledge or consent, subsequently hunted for acts he did not consciously choose to commit. The mechanism differs — trigger words versus an audio signal — but the moral architecture is identical. An innocent person's body and capability weaponised against their will.

And Ross's response to Isaiah's brainwashing is, again, revealing. When it becomes clear that Isaiah and the others were mind-controlled, Ross does not move to clear them. He resists their release — because their exoneration would require examining the chain of events, which leads directly to his illegal imprisonment and exploitation of Sterns. Ross is willing to let an innocent, elderly, already-multiply-victimised man face criminal prosecution for an act of assassination he did not consciously commit, rather than have his own conduct examined. This is not a man who has changed. This is a man protecting his own interests using the institutional power available to him — which is what he has always done.

Now consider who Sam Wilson is in relation to Isaiah Bradley. Sam knows Isaiah's complete history. He knows what the US government did to Isaiah in the 1950s — the experimentation on Black soldiers, the thirty years of imprisonment, the erasure of his legacy. He built a case for Isaiah's public acknowledgment. He fought for the memorial. Isaiah's story was the foundation of Sam's understanding of what the Captain America symbol actually meant and what institutions had done with it.

Isaiah himself, invited to the White House by Sam, expresses explicit doubts: he is sceptical about Sam working with a government that has failed both of them. Sam reassures him that things are changing for the better.

Things were not changing for the better. The president Sam was reassuring Isaiah about was the man whose treatment of Sterns caused the chain of events that resulted in Isaiah being brainwashed and imprisoned again. Ross's conduct — illegal imprisonment, forced exploitation, a cover-up requiring the continued detention of innocent people — had directly produced Isaiah's second victimisation. Isaiah's instinct was correct. Sam's assurance was wrong.

And then, at the end of the film, having seen all of this — having seen Ross resist Isaiah's release, having seen the cover-up Ross was running — Sam extends grace to Ross and talks about seeing the good in each other.

Sam Wilson, who knows what was done to Isaiah Bradley. Who knows what the government does with Black super soldiers. Who knows what it means when someone in power treats an innocent person as an instrument and then tries to suppress the evidence. Defends the man who did exactly that. To a man Sam personally vouched for to Isaiah. While Isaiah had just been brainwashed and imprisoned because of Ross's prior conduct.

This is not a character moment that requires sophisticated reading to find troubling. It is troubling on the surface, with the facts laid out plainly. The film appears not to notice.

7.2 What BNW Asserts Without Demonstrating

Brave New World's treatment of Thaddeus Ross has been summarised with accidental precision by the Substack reviewer Alise Chaffins: "The film tells us about the abuses that Ross committed against Sterns, but we don't see them. The film tells us that Ross is trying to change, but we don't see that."

This is the accountability failure in its most technically explicit form. The film is aware that Ross has done wrong — it acknowledges, in passing, that he abused his authority over Samuel Sterns in the years following The Incredible Hulk. It is aware that audiences may not find him immediately sympathetic. And its response to this awareness is to assert, through dialogue and framing, that Ross is trying to be better — without depicting any of the actions, acknowledgments, or genuine reckonings that "trying to be better" would require.

This is not a minor storytelling flaw. It is the substitution of assertion for demonstration on the central moral question the film raises. Showing Ross's redemption would require showing Ross accounting for his record. Asserting his redemption allows the film to claim the emotional benefits of rehabilitation without engaging with the history that needs to be rehabilitated.

7.3 Ross's First Move: Still Authoritarian

The film's opening exchange between Sam Wilson and President Ross is revealing in a way the film does not appear to intend.

Ross's opening offer to Sam: "I wanna make another run at making Captain America an official military position."

This is Thaddeus Ross's idea of a changed man opening negotiations. Having spent sixteen years trying to bring enhanced individuals under state and military control — the Hulk as government property, the Avengers under Accords oversight, Natasha hunted for non-compliance — Ross's first presidential move is to try to militarise the Captain America mantle. He wants the symbol of American heroism brought under official military command.

Sam declines. The film treats this as a reasonable starting position for negotiation between two people with different perspectives. It is not. It is the continuation of a decades-long authoritarian ideology asserting itself from behind a new desk. Ross has not changed his ideological orientation at all. He has changed his title.

7.4 The Sterns Inversion

The film's central dramatic engine is Sterns's manipulation of Ross into becoming Red Hulk — an involuntary transformation that causes Ross to destroy the White House before Sam is able to reach him and bring him back.

The structure is precise and the film is apparently unaware of its own irony.

In The Incredible Hulk, Ross created Blonsky as a weapon through experimental enhancement. He administered a serum Blonsky did not fully understand the consequences of. When Blonsky transformed into the Abomination and caused massive destruction in Harlem, Ross bore proximate responsibility but faced no accountability. He blamed the available scapegoat — Sterns, who administered the final dose of gamma blood — and had Sterns imprisoned and, apparently, subjected to continued experimentation and mistreatment in the years that followed.

In Brave New World, Sterns transforms Ross into a weapon through experimental manipulation. Ross does not fully understand the consequences. He causes massive destruction at the White House. The film presents Ross as a victim.

Ross did to Blonsky exactly what Sterns did to Ross. When Ross was the creator of the weapon, the film's narrative machinery produced no accountability and a promotion to Secretary of State. When Sterns is the creator of the weapon, the film's narrative machinery produces sympathy for Ross and positions Sterns as the villain. The franchise has simply reversed the roles and expected the audience not to notice that the moral analysis should reverse with them.

It should also be noted that Ross's victimisation by Sterns is, in direct causal terms, a consequence of Ross's own prior conduct. Sterns was imprisoned and mistreated because Ross put him there after The Incredible Hulk. Sterns's motive is revenge for genuine mistreatment. The villain's grievance against the person the film asks us to sympathise with is entirely comprehensible — which is, again, the Zemo structure. The MCU keeps creating antagonists with legitimate grievances against its protagonists and then framing those antagonists as the problem.

7.5 The Betty Problem

The emotional architecture of Ross's BNW rehabilitation is his desire to reconnect with his daughter Betty and prove that there is more to him than she has seen.

Betty Ross is almost entirely absent from the MCU after The Incredible Hulk. The reason for this absence, within the film's own logic, is that Ross's conduct — his obsessive pursuit of Banner, his use of Betty as operational leverage, his prioritisation of military objectives over his relationship with his daughter — damaged that relationship to the point of estrangement. Betty did not forgive him. She cut off contact.

Brave New World uses this damaged relationship as the emotional motivation for Ross's claimed desire to change. He is trying to prove himself to his daughter. He wants her to know there is more to him.

This is the Howard Stark move. This is the Tony Stark move. Generate sympathy through family feeling — the daughter who doesn't know her father, the father trying to be worthy of love — without examining the fact that the relationship being used to generate sympathy was damaged by the character's own choices and conduct. Ross didn't lose Betty to misfortune or circumstance. He lost her because he treated her as an intelligence asset and pursued her partner across continents with military force. The wound is self-inflicted. Using it as rehabilitation material without acknowledgment of how it was created is not redemption. It is sentimentality in the service of avoidance.

7.7 "Aping Winter Soldier" — The Structural Misidentification

Understanding why BNW's Ross rehabilitation feels so narratively wrong — not just ethically wrong, but dramatically unsatisfying — requires examining what the film appears to be attempting.

Brave New World is clearly trying to replicate the emotional architecture of The Winter Soldier and Civil War. The specific beats it is reaching for: a figure the system has condemned, whose record looks damning, who is being pursued and judged — and a Captain America who looks past the surface to recognise the person underneath, who defends them against the institutional pressure to condemn. Steve defended Bucky when the entire world wanted him hunted. Steve defended Wanda when the system classified her as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. Sam, carrying Steve's shield, is positioned to do the same for Ross.

The emotional grammar is correct. The application is a categorical error of the first order.

Bucky Barnes was a victim for seventy years. His agency was stolen through sustained, systematic torture, memory erasure, and psychological conditioning so thorough that an entirely separate identity was constructed over his own. The crimes attributed to him were committed by a person HYDRA manufactured using his body as the instrument. When Steve defended Bucky, he was defending someone who was genuinely innocent — whose "record" was a record of things done to him, not by him in any meaningful moral or legal sense. The system had it precisely backwards: the person being hunted was the actual victim.

Wanda Maximoff was a victim of HYDRA experimentation, of Tony's negligence destroying her homeland, of Lagos scapegoating for a genuine act of heroism, of institutional dehumanisation that classified her as a weapon rather than a person. Her record — such as it was — was built from genuine injustice, genuine loss, and genuine bad faith on the part of the institutions judging her. When Steve defended Wanda, he was again defending someone the system had wrongly condemned — someone whose suffering was real, whose rights violations were documented, and whose "guilt" dissolved under the most basic factual scrutiny.

Thaddeus Ross is not Bucky Barnes. He is not Wanda Maximoff.

Ross's "victimhood" in BNW rests on one incident: Sterns manipulating him into becoming Red Hulk. This is real harm. Involuntary transformation is a genuine violation. But it exists within a context that fundamentally changes its moral weight. Sterns manipulated Ross using grievances against Ross that are entirely legitimate — Ross imprisoned and mistreated Sterns for over a decade following The Incredible Hulk. The "victim" here created his own victimiser. And his victimisation is a single incident, not a systematic, decades-long violation of his identity, agency, and fundamental humanity.

More critically: Ross retained his full agency throughout his entire career until BNW. He chose the Blonsky experiment. He chose the Bucharest kill order. He chose to build the Raft. He chose to classify Wanda as a Weapon of Mass Destruction. He chose to pursue Natasha while the Red Room operated unmolested. These are the choices of a man with complete freedom of action, exercising institutional authority for ideological purposes. Bucky had no choices. Wanda's choices were made under impossible circumstances engineered by others. Ross's choices were made freely, repeatedly, and consistently over sixteen years.

The structural comparison makes the film's error precise. When Steve defended Bucky and Wanda, he was performing the morally correct action: recognising that the person being persecuted was the actual victim, that the system's judgment was wrong, that the person being condemned deserved defense rather than condemnation. The emotional resonance of those defenses came directly from the genuine injustice of the situations — Bucky genuinely innocent, Wanda genuinely wronged, the system genuinely failing them.

When Sam extends grace to Ross, the structural situation is inverted. Ross is not the person the system wrongly condemned. Ross is the system. He built the apparatus that condemned people like Bucky and Wanda. He wrote the orders that treated them as weapons and threats. He created the Raft. He authorised the kill orders. The system that Steve spent his MCU career fighting — the one that built Project Insight, that created the Sokovia Accords, that imprisoned Wanda without trial — has Ross's fingerprints on it at every stage.

Sam extending grace to Ross using the same emotional grammar Steve used to defend Bucky is not growth. It is a category error. It applies the correct moral framework — see the person behind the record — to a man whose record is not the unjust condemnation of an innocent but the genuine and documented choices of an ideological authoritarian. The film can't make Ross into Bucky by having Sterns manipulate him once. We know Ross's history. We have watched it for sixteen years. The audience's dissatisfaction with BNW's rehabilitation arc is not squeamishness or unwillingness to see complexity. It is the correct recognition that the emotional grammar is being applied to the wrong person.

Bucky and Wanda were actual victims. The system wronged them. Ross is the actual perpetrator. The system he built wronged them. These are not comparable situations, and deploying the language and emotional logic of one to describe the other is not nuance. It is confusion — or, less charitably, the franchise once again protecting an authority figure from scrutiny by casting him in the emotional role of a genuine victim.

Steve Rogers understood the difference between a victim being condemned by a corrupt system and an authoritarian seeking rehabilitation without accountability. It was, arguably, his defining characteristic. Brave New World equipped his successor with his shield and his name, and then had him get it wrong.

The Slate review of Brave New World contains the most precise critical observation about the film's political failure: "President Ross claims to be a uniter, not a divider... But that's a little like saying Thanos was an environmentalist... This, of course, is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. But Brave New World doesn't have the courage to walk that road, so it chalks Ross' actions up to personal failings rather than the lust for power."

This is the essential distinction the film refuses to make. Ross's conduct — sixteen years of treating enhanced humans as weapons, building secret prisons, authorising extrajudicial killings, trying to militarise the Captain America mantle — is not the product of personal failings. It is the product of a coherent, consistent ideology: enhanced individuals are resources or threats, and the state must control them. That ideology has not changed. It has simply acquired a different title. Ross in BNW is not a changed man who once had a lust for power. He is an ideological authoritarian who has been promoted to the most powerful office available.

The film declines to say this. It attributes Ross's record to personality and circumstance, generates sympathy through his victimisation by Sterns and his estrangement from Betty, and then uses Sam Wilson's moral credibility to assert that we should see the good in him.

This is where the political analysis becomes most uncomfortable, and where a specific observation — one circulating in fandom criticism of the film — deserves to be engaged with directly.

Captain America: Brave New World opens with an image of the first Captain America comic: Steve Rogers punching Hitler. This is not incidental. The film consciously invokes Captain America as an antifascist symbol, as the embodiment of resistance to authoritarian power. And then it has the man carrying that symbol say, to an authoritarian with a documented sixteen-year record: "We've got to see the good in each other, otherwise we've already lost the war."

The criticism this has generated in some quarters of film analysis is pointed: the film's message, stripped of its superhero aesthetics, is that authoritarians are misunderstood people with personal failings, not ideological actors pursuing power, and that the correct response to them is to find the good in them rather than to hold them accountable. This is, as one fandom analysis noted, uncomfortable close to the argument that authoritarians — including historical fascists — were really just people who could have been talked down if we'd only tried to see their perspective.

This is not a charge to make lightly or loosely. But it applies with specific force here because of who Sam Wilson is and what the Captain America symbol means. Sam knows Isaiah Bradley's story. He knows what it means when the state treats enhanced individuals as resources and experiments on them without accountability. He knows the Raft exists. He was there when people he cared about were imprisoned in it without trial. Every element of Thaddeus Ross's record corresponds to something Sam Wilson encountered in TFATWS as evidence of systemic institutional failure.

And Steve Rogers — the man whose shield Sam carries — would not have said "we've got to see the good in Ross." Steve's entire MCU arc is a study in refusing to extend uncritical grace to institutional power. He refused to fire Project Insight's weapons. He refused to sign the Accords. He protected Bucky from Ross's kill order. He protected Wanda from Ross's house arrest. He walked away from institutional authority every time it asked him to accept its terms without question.

Steve Rogers did not negotiate with authoritarians. He recognised them. He named what they were doing. And he refused, at personal cost, to pretend that institutional authority was the same thing as legitimacy.

Brave New World has Sam Wilson, carrying Steve's shield, do the opposite. It has him extend grace to an authoritarian without requiring accountability, vouch for a man whose record represents everything the Captain America symbol was created to resist, and frame this as the wisdom that Steve lacked. The implication is that Sam's willingness to find the good in Ross is more mature, more nuanced, more sophisticated than Steve's uncompromising antifascism would have been.

It is not. It is the substitution of sentiment for judgment. And the franchise uses the moral authority of the Captain America symbol — an authority Sam earned through his own principled conduct — to make that substitution seem like growth.

Steve Rogers would not have negotiated with Thaddeus Ross. Not after what Ross did to Bruce Banner. Not after the Raft. Not after Bucky. Not after Wanda. Not after Bucharest. He would have looked at Ross's record and named what it was: an ideology, not a personality flaw, and one that a fresh coat of electoral paint and a shaved mustache had not altered in the slightest.

That is what antifascism looks like. Brave New World chose something else and called it wisdom.

7.8 What the Audience Actually Wanted — And Why That's Legitimate

There is a criticism sometimes levelled at audiences who express frustration with BNW's treatment of Ross: that wanting to see him punished is a simplistic, bloodthirsty response unworthy of the complexity the film is attempting. This criticism should be rejected plainly.

The audience's desire to see Thaddeus Ross face genuine consequences is not bloodlust. It is the correct instinctive response to a narrative that has spent sixteen years documenting harm and delivering no accountability. It is, in the most precise sense, the audience correctly reading what a story owes them.

Narrative has a fundamental contract with its audience: choices have consequences. This is not a demand for cruelty or punishment for its own sake. It is the structural principle that makes storytelling meaningful. When a character makes choices — free choices, as Ross made free choices throughout his career — the story is implicitly promising that those choices will matter. That they will produce something. That the world of the narrative will register them as significant.

Sixteen years of Ross's choices produced: Harlem destroyed, Blonsky transformed, the Raft built, Wanda imprisoned, Bucky hunted to kill, Natasha pursued while the Red Room operated. The narrative registered all of these as events. It did not register them as consequences requiring resolution.

Brave New World then offered Ross a narrative reward: the emotional payoff of reconnecting with his daughter. Being seen by Betty. Being understood by Sam. Being released from the Raft — the facility he built for others — having spent minimal time within it. The story gave him what he wanted, which was legitimacy and family, without requiring what accountability would demand, which is specific acknowledgment of specific harms to specific people.

Betty Ross, if the character were given space to speak, would have things to say about being used as an intelligence asset. The Harlem residents whose neighbourhood was destroyed have not been compensated or acknowledged. The Raft prisoners — Sam, Wanda, Clint, Scott — received no apology from the man who built the facility they were held in. Bucky Barnes, whose brainwashed assassination was facilitated by the Bucharest kill order Ross authorised, has not had that order acknowledged as the unlawful act it was.

The audience wanted Ross to face these people. To have his record named specifically. To be required to answer for particular choices in a way that demonstrated genuine understanding of the harm those choices caused. This is not a demand for dramatic suffering. It is a demand for the thing the story promised and then withheld: that choices have consequences, that accountability means something, that the architecture of harm Ross built over sixteen years would eventually produce a reckoning rather than a reconciliation scene.

The franchise gave Ross his daughter. It gave him Sam Wilson's grace. It gave him a sympathetic villain in Sterns and an involuntary transformation to generate sympathy. What it did not give him — what it has never given him, across six film appearances — is a moment of genuine, specific accountability to the people he genuinely and specifically harmed.

This is the distinction the film consistently refuses to make, and which the audience's frustration is correctly identifying: the difference between redemption and unearned grace.

Redemption requires something. It requires acknowledgment — specific, honest engagement with specific harm done to specific people. It requires demonstrated change — not asserted change, not claimed change, but behavioural evidence that the ideology or the pattern has actually shifted. It requires some form of accountability — not necessarily legal punishment, but a genuine reckoning that the people harmed can recognise as real. Redemption is earned. It is the outcome of a process, not the substitution for one.

What Sam gives Ross is unearned grace. Grace extended before the reckoning, without the reckoning, in place of the reckoning. It is not the same thing. Unearned grace does not transform the person receiving it. It releases them from the obligation to transform. It lets them off the hook — not as a consequence of genuine change, but instead of it.

Ross leaves Brave New World having reconnected emotionally with his daughter, having received Captain America's endorsement, and having faced no specific accountability for any specific harm. He has been let off the hook. The film presents this as Sam's wisdom. It is, in practice, the erasure of sixteen years of documented conduct — not through acknowledgment and reckoning, but through sentiment.

The audience noticed. Their frustration is not a failure of sophistication. It is a correct reading of a broken narrative promise.

Conclusion: The Architecture of Impunity

Thaddeus Ross's MCU record, assembled across seventeen years and six film appearances:

• Illegal deployment of US military forces against a domestic civilian target in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act
• Unlawful human experimentation on a serviceman without adequate informed consent, in violation of the Nuremberg Code and Declaration of Helsinki
• Proximate responsibility for the Abomination's creation and the consequent destruction of civilian Harlem
• Exploitation of his daughter as an operational intelligence asset
• Authorisation of a shoot-to-kill order against an unconvicted civilian based on CCTV photographic evidence, in violation of ICCPR Article 6 and ECHR Article 2
• Illegal imprisonment and forced exploitation of Samuel Sterns for over a decade following The Incredible Hulk
• Causal responsibility for Isaiah Bradley's brainwashing in Brave New World — through the treatment of Sterns that produced Sterns's revenge — and subsequent resistance to Isaiah's exoneration to protect his own cover-up
• Construction and oversight of the Raft — an unlawful detention facility where enhanced individuals are held without charge, trial, or legal representation, in conditions constituting cruel and degrading treatment under the Convention Against Torture
• Continued hunting of enhanced individuals as his institutional priority during an active alien invasion threatening all life on Earth
• Mistreatment of Samuel Sterns during his post-Incredible Hulk imprisonment
• Attempts to militarise the Captain America mantle as his opening presidential position

The consequences of this record: promotion from General to Secretary of State, promotion from Secretary of State to President, and rehabilitation by the MCU's most morally credible character without a single specific item of the above being acknowledged or addressed.

The franchise frames Ross as a bureaucratic antagonist — the difficult official who makes the heroes' lives harder. He is not a bureaucratic antagonist. He is a man who has spent seventeen years consistently treating enhanced individuals as weapons or threats, deploying institutional power without legal constraint, creating the instruments of his own disasters, and facing zero accountability at any stage.

The MCU tells us Ross is trying to change. It does not show us this. It does not show us a single specific acknowledgment of a single specific harm. It shows us a man who has shaved his mustache for the election and wants to reconnect with his daughter, and asks Sam Wilson — and by extension, the audience — to find this sufficient.

It is not sufficient. A changed man is not someone who says "I've changed." A changed man is someone who demonstrates change through specific, honest engagement with specific, documented harm. Ross has never done this. The franchise has never required him to.

"Above the law" is usually a criticism. In Thaddeus Ross's case, it is a description.

Sources & Further Reading

Primary MCU Sources

• The Incredible Hulk (dir. Leterrier, 2008) — Blonsky experiment; Abomination; Harlem; Posse Comitatus; Betty Ross
• Captain America: Civil War (dir. Russo Brothers, 2016) — Sokovia Accords; Bucharest kill order; the Raft; "Barnes would have been eliminated in Romania if it wasn't for Rogers"
• Black Widow (dir. Shortland, 2021) — pursuit of Natasha; the Red Room priority problem
• Avengers: Infinity War (dir. Russo Brothers, 2018) — arrest threat during alien invasion
• Captain America: Brave New World (dir. Onah, 2025) — presidential context; militarisation of Captain America; Sterns manipulation; Sam Wilson's endorsement; Betty rehabilitation

Legal Frameworks

• Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1385 (1878) — prohibition on military in domestic law enforcement
• Nuremberg Code (1947) — voluntary consent in human experimentation
• Declaration of Helsinki (1964, revised 2013) — ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects
• ICCPR Article 6 — right to life; prohibition on arbitrary deprivation of life
• ECHR Article 2 — right to life; McCann and Others v. United Kingdom (1995) on lethal force standard
• UN Convention Against Torture — prohibition on cruel and degrading treatment
• ICCPR Article 14 — right to fair trial; right to legal counsel

Critical Analysis

• Chaffins, Alise — "Captain America: Brave New World Review", Substack (2025). The definitive statement on the film's "tells not shows" accountability failure: "The film tells us that Ross is trying to change, but we don't see that."
• Screen Rant — "I Can't Believe Marvel Cut Sam Wilson's Best Line in Captain America: Brave New World" (2025). On the deleted accountability moment that would have complicated Sam's relationship with Ross.
• Harvard Crimson — "Captain America: Brave New World Review" (2025). On Isaiah Bradley and the film's racial politics.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe Wiki — Thaddeus Ross; Emil Blonsky/Abomination; The Raft; Attack on Howard and Maria Stark entries.