"I'm a leaf on the wind...

I see this pretty much everywhere and honestly, I don’t really understand it. Because while yes, technically, if you’re going by just their date of birth, then they are 95 and 98, respectively. But it’s not like they lived out all 90-something years of their lives.

Steve was in his 20s when he hit the ice and was frozen. For the next 70 years, he was in stasis. His body didn’t age, his brain wasn’t processing new memories, he wasn’t gaining any life experience. Essentially, time stopped for him and restarted when he was defrosted. So he’s not a 95-year-old man in a 20-something year old body. He’s just a 20-something-year-old man who’s been displaced in time.

Bucky’s a bit more difficult because while he was also in his 20s or so when he fell and Hydra took him, we don’t know how long they may have kept him awake before putting him in cryo. He must have at least been awake long enough for them to put the arm on him and for him to learn how to use it. And then throughout the years, he was woken periodically for probably a few days up to a few weeks; however long it took him to complete his missions. So by now, he’s probably aged a couple of years from when he had fallen but it’s still not like he lived (and aged) through all the years between 1945 and 2015. It’s also questionable how much life experience he would have gotten from the times when he was awake.

Anyway, so basically, I don’t really get why everyone (I don’t mean just fans, I mean canon too) treats Steve and Bucky like they’re super old. They’re just time-displaced.

I’ve also always been really confused as to why exactly Steve’s considered the leader of the Avengers (in the MCU verse, anyway) when he’s really the youngest member going by number of years lived. Unless it’s that he’s the only one who’s had military training and has led a unit so he’s the only one with teamwork and leadership experience under his belt while everyone else is used to working alone or with just one other person?