User blog comment:Imart77/Avengers Themes/@comment-1895174-20150731231155

Iron Man: The dangers of the military-industrial complex. When big business and warfare are so closely intertwined, the relationship between belligerent sides of a conflict become symbiotic. The bad guy in the original Iron Man is an industrialist selling weapons to both the US Military and Afghani terrorists, and then hired those terrorists to take out Tony Stark just so he could keep doing that. The bad guy in Iron Man 2 is a terrorist taking advantage of an industrialist who enlisted that terrorist's skills to build him weapons to sell to the military. The bad guy in Iron Man 3 is an industrialist who created a fictitious terrorist to justify continuing the War on Terror so he could sell his super-soldiers (insert 9/11 truther theories here). Ant-Man kind of does this, too.

Captain America: Idealism vs. pragmatism. Cap represents the principles he believes the US stands for. He fights with a sense of honor. When he fights Batroc in The Winter Soldier, he puts his shield away and takes his helmet off just to make the fight fair. This leads him to butting heads with those who would compromise their principles to put the advantage in their corner. SHIELD building weapons with the Tesseract, SHIELD/Hydra and Project Insight, and Tony building an advanced AI to control his fleet of drones. Expect this philosophical divide to be the root of their conflict in Civil War.

Thor: Yeah, kind of hit the nail on the head with "worthiness to use power." Is Thor worthy to wield Mjolnir? to rule Asgard? Is Odin? Is Loki? Why is Thor more worthy than Loki? Who is worthy of the Aether's power? Is the Vision worthy of the Mind Stone? These are the central points of conflict in Thor's movies.

Black Widow: Starting over, regret, forgiveness, etc. Natasha's done some terrible stuff in the past and is unsure if she'll ever be able to move on from them. Is that even a possibility when the Red Room went to such extremes to take away her humanity?

Quicksilver & Scarlet Witch: The psychology of "villainy." Desperate, misguided youths from a war-torn country side with extremists. Stop me if you've heard this one before. They don't join up with Hydra and then Ultron because they're evil themselves, but because they believe they are what's best for Sokovia. And to the twins Stark is the symbol of everything that's wrong with their lives, so there's an "enemy of my enemy" thing going on, too.