**Spoilers for Marvel’s Avengers: Endgame.**
Every time the screenwriters of Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War/Endgame speak, it’s basically up to a coin flip whether it either makes everything better or worse. The reveal that, in early drafts of Infinity War, the characters of Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) and Steve Rogers were living together is just, deeply, deeply amusing.
Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely shared in a video with Yahoo Entertainment that they “had first drafts where Steve was living with Sharon Carter and it wasn’t going very well.” However, Kevin Feige came in and scrapped that idea. In the video, the writers didn’t reveal any additional information regarding the state of the relationship between the two, but they explained that anything that didn’t involve the stones or Thanos, they pretty much got rid of for Infinity War. Sharon also ended up being among the dusted by Thanos, as revealed in Endgame.
Now, it has been said that the writers didn’t consider any other ending for Steve than to end up with Peggy Carter … which is indeed a choice, so why they thought it would be a good thing to see Steve shacking up with her niece is truly beyond me.
While I’ve never been a fan of what we’ve gotten of Sharon Carter, nor the optics of her being Peggy’s niece and Steve’s love interest, I put the claim for that on the writers themselves. It seems like they only half committed to the idea and introduced Sharon because, in the comics, she’s a big deal love interest for Cap. However, they never made Sharon interesting, and there was never enough time to develop her relationship with Steve because, beyond the Avengers and Sam, most of Steve’s relationships are firmly rooted in the past.
Civil War, the same movie where they kiss, is the one where Steve is trying to protect his best friend, Bucky Barnes, from being murdered. Even as someone who doesn’t ship Bucky/Steve, there is no denying that Steve has more romantic chemistry with his boyfriends (Sam, Steve, and Tony) than Agent 13. Hell, she doesn’t even get to be a part of the all-ladies Avengers team-up shot in Endgame.
It’ll never not be weird for me that Steve goes back in time and has a whole lifetime with Peggy, considering his relationship with Sharon. It turns the character into even more of a sloppy seconds love interest than she was before, plus, with the reveal that Steve is the father of Peggy’s two children, I can’t help but wonder how the hell that was ever handled. If I were Peggy, that would gross me out, and if Steve just never told her—that just seems very manipulative and out of character.
Or, more simply, Sharon just didn’t matter to anyone, and her being cut from IW and Endgame was just a reminder that she didn’t even serve enough purpose to get a Natalie Portman-style cameo, which is a shitty way for any female character to be treated, like them or not.
(via Screen Rant, image: Disney/Marvel)
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