{"id":116503,"date":"2016-01-28T03:51:34","date_gmt":"2016-01-28T03:51:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/01\/28\/howard-stark-and-his-friends\/"},"modified":"2016-01-28T03:51:34","modified_gmt":"2016-01-28T03:51:34","slug":"howard-stark-and-his-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/01\/28\/howard-stark-and-his-friends\/","title":{"rendered":"Howard Stark and his\u00a0\u2018friends\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

reclusiveq<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

Rewatching Agent Carter, I got the thought about how Howard uses the term \u2018friend\u2019. I feel like he views everyone as his friend. Wait! Hear me out on this!<\/p>\n

So, basing myself slightly off of this post<\/a> and what\u2019s said in the series, it\u2019s clear that Howard did not have a happy, carefree childhood. He likely grew up Jewish, he clearly states that there\u2019s a ceiling for people like him, and he\u2019s had to learn to lie to advance.<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s back up.<\/p>\n

Howard Stark is clearly a genius. He\u2019s not exactly street-smart, \u00a0and he has this enhanced IQ that wasn\u2019t well-suited for the area. So what friends did he have growing up?<\/p>\n

Well, none and several. He probably had no friends in his neighborhood. Here was this boy, arguably smarter than everyone around him, who wanted out <\/i>and was willing to do whatever it took to get there. And how better to get out than to make friends with the right<\/i>\u00a0people. I mean, everybody wants something<\/i>\u00a0and Howard was smart enough to make sure that he<\/i>\u00a0was the one who got it for them, even if he had to steal (or get someone else to steal it for him – sound familiar?). He became everyone\u2019s new best friend.<\/p>\n

Now don\u2019t get me wrong. He knew they weren\u2019t really<\/i>\u00a0his friends. He\u2019s not stupid.<\/i>\u00a0But friendship, to Howard, became this thing. Anyone was a\u00a0\u2018friend\u2019 because everyone had something they wanted. And they were often willing to pay for that.<\/p>\n

So he used this idea he had crafted of friendship to climb his way out of his old life. He probably told himself that he was going to help people when he got out. But living a lie, stealing to get a better position\u2026 it weighed on Howard until the idea of\u00a0\u2018helping people\u2019 once he was where he wanted to be became just another lie, one that he told himself.<\/p>\n

So what happened later? Well, he met Edwin Jarvis. Like so many others, there was something that Jarvis wanted. But see, what Jarvis wanted wasn\u2019t something petty and material. What Jarvis wanted was to save the woman he loved from ending up another casualty of war. Jarvis did something that made Howard turn his head. He risked his own life to save that of another.<\/p>\n

Why this made Howard stop, I can only guess. But something clearly changed in Howard after that. Suddenly it wasn\u2019t only about the money. He remembered that it was about saving people. Helping<\/i>\u00a0them. Oh sure, he was terrible at it a lot. He has no idea how to connect with real people.<\/p>\n

He knows, of course, that everyone is a potential\u00a0\u2018friend\u2019, but there are only a handful of people who go beyond his idea of friendship. In fact, he can count them on one hand. Edwin Jarvis. Peggy Carter. Steve Rogers. These are the three people who showed him that humans aren\u2019t only petty creatures out for themselves and he really has no idea how to handle that.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So when he calls Peggy and Jarvis his favorites, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s just a sentiment. When he says to Peggy there\u2019s no one else he can trust with the mission of clearing his name, there\u2019s no doubt in my mind that he believes that. Because to him, there\u2019s nobody else he trusts.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

reclusiveq: Rewatching Agent Carter, I got the thought about how Howard uses the term \u2018friend\u2019. I feel like he views everyone as his friend. Wait! Hear me out on this! So, basing myself slightly off of this post and what\u2019s said in the series, it\u2019s clear that Howard did not have a happy, carefree childhood. … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Howard Stark and his\u00a0\u2018friends\u2019”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[14111,6938,11353,5326],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116503"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116503"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116503\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116503"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116503"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116503"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}