#it sincerely makes my eye twitch whenever i see bruce's position here reduced to his relationship with tony.

[angerissue]

Anonymous asked... How would Bruce Banner react to the Sokovian accords? Whether we’re mutuals or not, feel free to ask me about Bruce!

Thanks for sending this question, anonymous, because I've wanted to answer it for some time now! I believe there's only one answer to it, whether we’re speaking about canon or this adaptation of Bruce. I'll be discussing the latter here and using his own experiences, but most of the information works for canon as well, in some sense or other.

Before we go any further, I'm going to mention that Bruce is not someone who hates regulations and wants to abolish them. He appreciates regulations when they're both necessary and beneficial. If we think about it, he has benefitted from regulations from an early age, particularly the time when Brian killed his mother and, because of lawful proceedings, was sent to prison. Bruce is a neutral person at heart, favouring neither totalitarianism or libertarianism. I should also mention that Bruce is under no illusion that the Avengers teams, and enhanced individuals in general, are flawless. He's well aware of his own flaws, and the flaws of other enhanced persons (which I’ll delineate later).

Furthermore, I have classified him as Neutral Good, with a few elements of Chaotic Good that appear in certain situations. His most prominent "Chaotic Good" element is his willingness to break the law when it feels more beneficial, for many people, than following it.

But back to the main question.

Bruce did not support the Accords or even consider them, because his first reaction was horror. And that never really changed.

For reference, below are the main points of the Sokovia Accords as they were initially proposed in this Bruce’s canon. Bear in mind that I've used online sources to find this material, as I don't believe the exact parameters of the Accords had been elucidated in-film.

An "enhanced individual" is defined as any person with superhuman capabilities, whether their powers are innate to their biology or granted from the use of highly advanced technology. All members of the "New Avengers" and other groups that feature enhanced persons, even if a member is not enhanced themselves, are also subject to these terms.

1) All enhanced individuals who do not sign will not be allowed to take part in any police or military activities, or any national or international conflicts.

2) All enhanced individuals who sign must register with the United Nations, and submit to a power analysis and provide biometric data.

3) All enhanced individuals with innate powers who sign must wear a tracking bracelet at all times.

4) All enhanced individuals who use their powers to break the law, or who prove a threat to the safety of the general public, may be detained indefinitely without trial.

5) The New Avengers will not be a private organization, and will operate under the supervision of the United Nations.

6) The creation of self-aware artificial intelligence is prohibited.

Immediately, you can see multiple reasons for Bruce to take issue with the Accords. The first part that stung Bruce was how, despite being an opt-in choice, the Accords were necessitating the wearing of tracking devices for everyone who wanted to work under the government, or for a peacekeeping team in general. Notice this outline did not say “while on the job” — it said “at all times”. This would've meant that enhanced individuals who signed the Accords could never remove their tracking bracelets, even if they weren’t on shift or otherwise at work. This struck Bruce as extremely Orwellian and ignorant of basic privacy, which he'd always viewed as a human right. The notion of 24-hour surveillance made these enhanced individuals more akin to prisoners than valued members of society, when there was no reason to necessitate that treatment. Being forced to wear a tracking bracelet implied that a person was guilty, and people were supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. Why were enhanced humans made an exception to this fundamental human right? And even if this was a punishment for the actions of the Avengers teams, Bruce believed punishments needed to be carried out on an individual level.

Punish the people who were legitimately guilty, not innocent people who were only guilty because they were an “enhanced person”.

(He could even say this was dangerously close to a new form of systemic prejudice and discrimination.)

Bruce was also disturbed by the suggestion that enhanced individuals could’ve been detained without due procedure. This was especially bad because it didn't recognize individuals whose powers had spontaneously manifested, or powers that otherwise caused an individual to harm the general public inadvertently. Bruce’s own situation had been like this — the creation of the Hulk was entirely spontaneous and could not have been predicted by any known science; furthermore, if the Sokovia Accords had been instated before the accident, even if we forget that Ross himself had attempted to nab him, Bruce still would've been imprisoned and unable to defend himself in any way.

Then, we need to remember the incidents with the Hulk that occurred after the main Gamma Pulse accident. This includes the incidents at Culver University, Harlem, the Helicarrier, and so on. Bruce was rarely the instigator behind these occurrences, and arguably, he was even coerced into starting most (if not all) of them — after all, Loki had been responsible for the explosion on the Helicarrier and he had fully intended for the Hulk to rampage, regardless of Bruce's own intent. And for the others, Ross had long been aware of the Hulk’s capabilities and limited mental capacity, but he still chose to incite Bruce on a populated university campus, in the middle of a city, and in other areas that were almost guaranteed to endanger the public. Yet under the Sokovia Accords, Bruce wouldn't be permitted to use these arguments as a defense, even though they could absolve him, exonerate him, or provide reasonable doubt at the least.

He wouldn’t be able to say anything.

This would put him, and everyone else in his shoes, at the mercy of whoever was in charge of their detention.

The Accords also stated that if someone used their abilities to break the law, they would be detained without trial, and one of these lawbreaking activities happens to be vigilante justice. Vigilantism is usually defined as the investigation or enforcement of justice on criminals, by someone not affiliated with law enforcement bodies, and it could also be defined as simply assisting someone on the streets without permission from law enforcement. In other words, while nebulous, the Accords could potentially have been barring enhanced individuals from helping people on a whim. This didn't sit well with Bruce, because being able to assist people immediately, without sitting around for law enforcement to arrive, was one of the best features of his condition; it allowed him to help in time-sensitive situations where someone could've been injured or killed otherwise. In his eyes, making someone wait around in these situations was asking for a dead body.

And while Bruce wasn’t too familiar with law enforcement as a whole, he was aware that the capacity of law enforcement and their personnel was limited, and moreover, willfully preventing well-intentioned parties from assisting and extending that reach was harmful.

(There's also the fact that Bruce himself, for a few months, had doled out vigilante justice to criminals because he was missing his work at S.H.I.E.L.D., so he may have felt personally attacked and offended by the suggestion that it was somehow wrong or unconstructive.)

Bruce also took issue with how the New Avengers, and other peacekeeping teams, would be functioning under the United Nations. Bruce’s past experiences with Ross had instilled into him the belief that government bodies couldn't be trusted with any form of high technology, like the Iron Man armour or the Hulk, and that they couldn't hold power over enhanced individuals without becoming corrupt and trying to abuse it somehow. No matter how good they seemed on the surface, there would always be bad eggs, and the temptation would always be there. And if the government did end up doing something questionable, Bruce didn’t think they would come clean about it anyways. Back when Ross had allowed Blonsky to become the "Abomination", which led to him rampaging through Harlem, Bruce volunteered to transform into the Hulk and stop him. But after the dust settled, Ross made an official statement about the duel, claiming it wasn't the Abomination who caused the property damage and the deaths, but the Hulk. Ross denied his part in the incident, and scapegoated Bruce's alter ego. There was no accountability.

And if the government allowed this to happen, Bruce wondered what else they would allow.

The fact that Ross' name was attached to the Accords gave Bruce another reason to dislike them. His experiences with Ross had been incredibly profound and visceral in most cases; they were connected to vivid emotional and physical trauma that he was still trying to overcome. All of this fear, anger, and resentment towards Ross was still very pronounced in Bruce when the Accords were pitched, so it was difficult for him to untangle his emotional associations with Ross and those of the Accords. For him, they were one and the same. He could not separate them. And because Ross was a no-no, the Accords were as well. This would've happened even if the Accords were sounder and fairer, because however logical they were, the mere fact that Ross was lobbying them was enough to dissuade Bruce. All Bruce would be thinking about in that situation was, how would Ross manage to exploit the Accords once he received signatures? How would he exploit people?

It didn't help that Ross had recently been appointed as the new Secretary of State, which Bruce believed was somehow contrived. He had long seen Ross as someone who wanted to attain as much power as he could within the ranks of the military, so he automatically suspected that Ross had worked the system in a malicious way to gain that extra power.

(And for what reason did he want that extra power?)

This is simply where Bruce’s mind went, however outlandish or unrealistic, and no amount of persuasion would convince him otherwise.

All of this aside, Bruce was also thinking in contingencies. He didn't feel comfortable associating himself with Ross because, in the back of his mind, something told him that if he signed the Accords, and Ross’ crimes (towards either him or other people) somehow became public after it happened, his own public approval would tank just by association. And public approval was immensely important to Bruce, because for most of his life, he’d been desperately seeking the approval of other people, whether closer colleagues or the general public, in order to compensate for the complete lack of approval that Brian gave him when he was a child. Bruce believed that signing the Accords was a surefire way to set himself back, because once everyone realized that he’d signed a document that was lobbied by Ross; by someone who actively violated human rights on multiple occasions (not only the occasions related to the Hulk, but unbeknownst to Bruce, the occasion where Ross had experimented on captured Al-Haquid terrorists), it would be ruinous for him.  

Or so he believed.

If that did happen, it probably wouldn’t be as catastrophic as Bruce imagined in his head. The focus wouldn't be on him, or anyone else who signed the Sokovia Accords, but rather on Ross himself. But we must remember that Bruce spent most of the last decade feeling like he was constantly in danger of being picked out from a crowd and having the spotlight shone directly on him, for the wrong reasons. So his fear of being focused on and scrutinized is very pronounced compared to others’. And his thinking can be very black-and-white in situations that involve sensitive issues overall. Being publicly approved is one of these issues.

Another sensitive issue for Bruce is the fear of making continuous mistakes. He is scared of this because doing so would validate his father’s claims that he'd never do anything good with his life; that his only purpose is to create hardship, just like he’d created hardship for the Banner household and eventually the violent argument that resulted in his mother’s death. Furthermore, in an odd sense, Bruce almost believed that if he signed the Sokovia Accords, no matter how credible his reasoning seemed at the time, it actually would've turned out to be a mistake, and he'd realize that he'd made an error in judgment. And he'd made so many mistakes in recent years that he was extremely paranoid about making one here. This made Bruce less open-minded when he reviewed the Accords.

Phew, that’s a lot of reasons. But we’re not done yet. I did say I’ve wanted to discuss this for a while!

Bruce's reaction towards the Accords also considers the events that inspired them in the first place. He wasn’t present at the New Avengers compound during Ross’ pitch to the team, but he knew that Ross had mentioned specific events to sell the benefits of the Accords — events that brought the most scrutiny and infamy to both Avengers teams, which he labelled as the “driving events” behind the Accords. And while there were some good arguments that Bruce supported, he didn't buy them for the most part.

So let’s deconstruct these events, one by one.

The first event that Ross mentioned was the Chitauri invasion in New York. Here, Bruce believed that the police and the National Guard combined would never have been able to overcome the Chitauri; as if to confirm his suspicions, there was even a canonical exchange between two cops about whether the National Guard and police force even knew what was happening. And while the Avengers did cause damage in certain instances, it was wholly unavoidable, and it paled in comparison to whatever the Chitauri themselves were doing. Most, if not all, of the destruction footage from the invasion revolved around the Chitauri, and not whatever the Avengers did. Bruce had to scoff at how Ross used the Chitauri invasion as a demonstration of the team's culpability, because he knew that Clint Barton hadn't been running around shooting people with arrows, and Tony Stark wasn't indiscriminately firing off reactor beams into crowds. The biggest candidate for destruction was the Hulk, but even with his limited functions, he knew that hurting people was bad, and that it was immoral to bring down an entire building because innocent people could’ve been huddled up inside.

Of course, Bruce was not stupid. He knew that some accidents had likely happened, because the team couldn't possibly have maintained their awareness of every civilian at all times. However, Bruce also believed that any footage depicting these accidents would have been cherry-picked, and the overall amount of footage would have paled in comparison to the amount of footage where the team was saving people. Plus, he could remember how the Avengers were publicly lauded after the invasion (save for the occasional naysayer), not reviled. Had there been a sizable amount of casualties caused by the team, the public's opinion of them at the time would've been far more mixed.

Furthermore, Bruce considered the mentioning of the Chitauri invasion, and the use of difficult-to-watch footage from it, to be a cheap and underhanded way to arouse guilt in the team, despite there being no logical reason for them to feel it. Ross was playing them with this one. Bruce hated this kind of manipulation on principle, and that's on top of the fact that Ross was contextualizing the Chitauri invasion in a way that simply didn’t work.

(Bear in mind that Bruce was not under some delusion that the Avengers were the only team that could’ve stopped the Chitauri invasion, or that the Sokovia Accords would’ve been worthless in this case. He knew that if the Accords were instated, if another peacekeeping team with enhanced persons was conceived, and if another invasion like this happened, that team could have done the job as well. He was only bothered by how Ross chose to present this event as a net negative for the team in spite of how much they helped, and in spite of the ineptitude of the police divisions that basically had them screaming for additional help. And Bruce definitely had not forgotten how the security council attempted to nuke Manhattan entirely, only to be stopped by Tony Stark. If Ross had been less manipulative with his tactics here, and been willing to acknowledge the flaws on both sides rather than firing off the blame towards the Avengers alone, Bruce may have been more receptive. But that didn’t happen.)

After this, Ross brought up the incident with Hydra in Washington, DC, where three Helicarriers crashed and the Triskelion was destroyed. But this didn't convince Bruce either, because the entire incident was the work of Hydra, and the Helicarrier crashes were a necessary evil. It had to be done immediately, no matter where they happened to take flight. Any time they spent deliberating over possible repercussions of certain options, and other technicalities, would’ve led to exponentially more deaths, because once the Helicarriers' systems were online and active, they would've killed dozens of targets per second. Within moments, there would have been more deaths from the Helicarriers' targeting systems than however many casualties occurred from their crashing into the Triskelion. Bruce was not present at the scene, but he knew the logistics of what happened, and he believed that Steve Rogers and his allies made the right call.

If there'd been someone who could ghost into the Helicarriers, and use their abilities to deactivate the electronics without causing physical damage, that would have been preferable. However, that option didn't exist at the time. And even if someone like this did exist now, had they been on a team that worked under the Accords, there would have been red tape and other bureaucracy to deal with before they could be released into the field, and as mentioned above, each second they spent on procedures would have caused hundreds, if not thousands, more casualties. Having a proper response team would have killed too many people, Bruce felt, so the response that happened was ultimately the best one. He was skeptical about why Ross included this event in his pitch.

Then, we have the destruction of Sokovia that was caused by the newborn “Ultron” intelligence. This is one of the rare precedents in Ross' pitch that Bruce understood and felt guilty about, and in a rather immense sense. If someone pressed him about whether he believed he screwed the pooch by creating Ultron, he wouldn't tell them "yes"; rather, he wouldn't say anything at all, which for Bruce, is even more indicative of guilt than any verbal affirmation. However, there is a catch to this. Bruce does feel responsible for the creation of Ultron and the AI's subsequent actions, but we must remember his views on punishment:

Punishments needed to be carried out on an individual level. Punish the people who were legitimately guilty, not innocent people who were only guilty because they were an “enhanced person”.

Thus, Bruce believed it was absurd to enact strict laws for all enhanced people, when Ultron was only created by him and Tony.

(He does, however, understand the reasoning behind the complete prohibition of all self-aware artificial intelligence. He took zero issue with that.)

While we're on this subject, I'll address the argument that if Bruce really felt culpable for Ultron and didn't want anyone but himself to pay for his mistake, he should have turned himself in and requested an end to the issue. However, in his eyes, this likely would have led to further suffering anyways. He couldn't guarantee that Ross would have left him alone while he was incarcerated, or that Ross wouldn’t have attempted to take advantage of it somehow. This was natural for Bruce to suspect, because his last encounter involved Ross attempting to capture him so his abilities could be used in the military and for future research. This is something that Ross had been wanting for years, and that Bruce had been trying to prevent for equally as long, because he believed it would only lead to mass endangerment — whether because the resulting monsters couldn't be controlled, or because it was too much power for Ross and/or the government to handle responsibly. The potential domino effect was too intense for Bruce to reconcile. That's why he didn't step forward; he believed that refraining would've saved more lives than not.

(Aside from the fact that he was sort of indisposed anyways, since his alter decided to front soon after Ultron was defeated.)

Another prominent event that Ross mentioned was the Johannesburg duel in South Africa. And this bothered Bruce too, because once again, this was an incident caused by a single individual, but Ross was using it as a reason to regulate enhanced persons across the board. And who was this single person that Bruce felt deserved the blame? Well, actually, Bruce didn't think it was himself, at least in a sense. He did continue to feel guilty about Johannesburg, simply because he was the person who actually went out and attacked people. However, he also understood that he was brainwashed into losing control, and therefore wasn’t completely at fault. It was an odd dichotomy, for Bruce to feel guilty in an emotional sense, yet logically know he was blameless, but it checks out nonetheless. Moreover... Bruce may have blamed himself in an emotional respect, but when it came to the logical respect? Who did Bruce believe Ross should have been blaming?

Wanda Maximoff.

And does Bruce ever blame Wanda. In fact, he blames Wanda for Johannesburg more than he blames Ross for Culver University and Harlem combined. This is because he considers Wanda to be similar to Ross in the sense that she, too, tried to mess with him, despite knowing about his condition and its lethality. But whereas Ross tried to minimize civilian casualties and damages, generally attempting to keep things quiet and sedate him as a precaution (even if it didn't work in most scenarios), Wanda was not so considerate. She intentionally made him lose control. She wanted him to hurt innocent people, in order for the Hulk to become publicly hated in consequence. She viewed the innocent people of Johannesburg as tools — as a means to an end for her retaliation against him.

Here is an excerpt from my “Extended Reading” section on how Bruce views Wanda and her behaviour in South Africa:

Ever since Wanda brainwashed him into wreaking havoc in Johannesburg, and in consequence, caused him to develop dissociative identity disorder, Bruce hasn’t trusted her. He also doesn’t respect her ethical views because months prior, she had become obsessed with undermining the Avengers, siding with Ultron and harming many innocent people in the process, seemingly without conscience. Additionally, as somebody who always needs to be careful with his abilities, lest he causes harm to others, he believes that Wanda was juvenile and irresponsible in allowing her emotions to control her own powers, especially to such a grievous extent. Bruce often argues with Steve about this, who claims Wanda was merely young and didn’t know any better. Bruce, who was not only forced to mature at a young age but also believed, overall, that someone in their late teens and above should already know the difference between right and wrong, could not abide by this mindset.

Is Bruce biased here? Yes. But it’s understandable; it’s easy to see how Bruce would blame Wanda for the Johannesburg incident once we take his past experiences and the context of the incident into account. And because of that, he views this incident as yet another one where a single person should be blamed, not the entire Avengers team, enhanced persons in general, or even himself in a sense (even though he was, technically, the most visible culprit that people could identify). He is also convinced that even if Wanda hadn’t met Ultron, she still would’ve tried to hex him regardless, simply because of her grudge toward the Avengers. That grudge existed well before Ultron was created.

Next up is the incident in Lagos, Nigeria, where Wanda accidentally slammed a dome of telekinetic energy into a building. This incident was a mixed bag for Bruce, since on one hand, Wanda was, once again, the person responsible for the incident, but on the other hand, he also believed the Avengers as a whole were responsible, just because it was their decision to allow Wanda in the roster. Bruce had never wanted Wanda on the team because of her past collaboration with Ultron, and her actions against him in South Africa (which didn’t just result in the arrival of Hulk, but the deaths of many people at his own hands, something he was very sensitive about). For him, the mere idea of seeing Wanda on the team made his stomach roll. Even though Wanda could technically control her abilities and was supposedly converted for good, Bruce spent the entire course of their work expecting a new incident from her. So while the Lagos incident was genuinely a mistake and temporary lapse in control, Bruce saw this as a form of validation for his suspicions. Moreover, he blamed Steve and everyone else in favour of keeping Wanda on the team, because to him, none of them were willing to trust him and his gut instincts about her. In his eyes, Wanda’s place on the team was the fault of Steve and everyone else in favour of it.

But at the end of the day, the destruction in Lagos was not the fault of the team, but rather an individual — Wanda. Furthermore, Bruce believed that Wanda should have been tried in a vacuum, and that the New Avengers, and all other enhanced humans, shouldn't have been lumped into the same boat culpability-wise and punished for it. Bruce did, however, believe that the team’s decision to hire Wanda should have been called into question and penalized somehow.

And this is where things get interesting.

Bruce could even have suggested it was the fault of the United States government for Wanda's incident in Lagos, because they had failed to address her earlier exploits with Ultron, which bordered on crimes against humanity (and that would have been a no-brainer reason to bring her in). In Banner's eyes, they could have nipped all future problems with Wanda in the bud right then and there, but they chose to sit back and do nothing, as far as he knew. Moreover, he didn't like how the entire New Avengers team, and all other enhanced humans, were suddenly being judged for Wanda's own actions... And by authorities that could've stopped Wanda's actions from escalating in the first place, but didn't.

Bruce found this very hypocritical.

And if we go even further, Bruce likely wondered at some point, in his paranoid brain, whether the United States government intentionally let Wanda roam free in the hope they could eventually use her as an example to create the Accords, once she made a second error. (Notice how this reflects Banner's own belief that Wanda was a ticking time bomb, and how he believed it was only a matter of time before she screwed up again; his suspicion towards the government here was almost certainly projection of some kind.) Bruce knew that if Ross was manipulative enough to work situations and move around pieces very strategically in order to achieve what he wanted, it could’ve happened with Wanda as well. A far-fetched idea to someone on the outside looking in, yes, but that’s how Bruce’s mind works.

Because of the above examples, it should be evident why Bruce wouldn’t support the Accords. There are too many reasons for him to be against them, not only immediate reasons that anyone can see on the surface, but reasons that necessitate a little more thought.

Another smaller thing to note is, because Bruce wasn't there for Ross’ pitch and the emotional spanking in it, it’s possible he simply wasn’t swayed by acute emotions as much as his teammates were, at least when it came to the events that were shown to them. So despite his obvious emotional biases, he still could've been less emotional and more level-headed about the situation than others.

Now to address some other points.

I have seen some interpretations of Bruce that suggested, to my consternation, he would back the Accords because Tony Stark was his friend and he wanted to offer him moral support. I do not agree with this. Bruce wouldn't back them just because Tony was backing them. No matter how the movies have depicted their relationship (sometimes as an awkwardly manipulative one, where Tony would cajole Bruce into doing certain things, but that's beside the point), Bruce is still someone with his own autonomy and experiences, and said experiences are not insignificant in this case, as explained in previous paragraphs. He is sensitive about topics pertaining to personal freedoms, and topics he has a strong emotional connection to, such as Ross and his motivations. And because of this, Bruce cannot simply say, “I support the Accords if you do”. He is loyal, but his moral compass is extremely strong and immovable, more than his loyalty to any one person. He’ll walk away from people if their actions breach his definition of immorality. For someone to claim otherwise, and suggest that Bruce wouldn't refer to his past experiences (something that survivors of trauma do all the time, unconsciously or not), just because he's "friends with Tony", is wishful thinking. It's a nice sentiment (ba dum tss), but it is unrealistic for Bruce Banner and not true to his characterization.  

And imagine how Bruce must have felt when he realized that Tony was supporting the Accords. Remember that Tony was well aware of Bruce's (legal) innocence when it came to the Hulk's past incidents, and that he was understanding when it came to his concerns and misgivings about his condition; it is not a stretch to say Tony would understand how much Bruce had been hurt by Ross, too. It had been in Bruce's body language and the way he spoke. All those tiny affects and suspicions, collected from incident after incident. Furthermore, because Tony knew about Bruce's experiences with Ross and just how much they had affected him, Bruce believed he would never support anything Ross touched — especially because if these Accords were passed, by definition, Bruce would be one of the individuals who should be detained without trial, having committed crimes with his abilities (coerced or otherwise). Tony couldn’t possibly condone this, could he?

So when Bruce realized that Tony was supporting the Accords, he was shocked. And for him, it wasn’t just a matter of supporting a document. He interpreted this as Tony supporting the idea of imprisoning him without trial, and supporting all of Ross' past actions towards him. After all, Ross was one of the main individuals who drafted the Accords. And once Bruce’s initial shock wore off, he simply felt hurt. Because Tony’s decision genuinely hurt his heart, and he took it very personally. It was this situation that, once it escalated, led to Bruce’s alter attacking Tony and catalyzing his exile into space.

We'll put Tony Stark aside now, and discuss the Raft. For those unaware, the Raft is an underwater prison in the Atlantic Ocean that was built to incarcerate people with innate abilities. This prison would receive lots of new inmates upon the ratification of the Accords. Personally, Bruce sees the Raft as a necessity for people who genuinely cannot be rehabilitated, so he agrees with it on a conceptual level. Some people need to be imprisoned, and some people need more security than others, especially some enhanced individuals. The Raft provides this additional security. However, due to the lack of fair procedure as mentioned in the Accords, people who are sent to the Raft could be anything from legitimately evil to innocent and deserving of freedom. For that reason, as the Accords currently are, Bruce sees the Raft as an inhumane and government-approved way to lock up enhanced persons and throw away the key, regardless of their innocence. 

Bruce is so opposed to the current Raft that, if he'd been present rather than off in space, he would've helped Steve Rogers storm the prison and break out their former teammates. This harkens back to his "Chaotic Good" archetype, where he’s willing to break the law if it benefits many people. Here, he would break into a prison to rescue people who were unfairly incarcerated.

And finally... After reading all of the above information, someone may wonder how Bruce could potentially change his mind and support the Accords. What would need to happen?

For starters, everyone responsible for overseeing the Accords, and all of the resulting divisions, would need to be vetted extensively, without bias. Any questionable people would need to be expunged of both their relevance and power when it comes to the Accords. This means that Ross would need to go (along with anyone else who has a history of immoral or objectionable behaviour, but Ross is the main one). Once he is ousted, Bruce would have less reason to suspect that something sinister is going on, or could eventually happen, albeit he’ll never be entirely convinced. He does, after all, have other reasons to distrust the government.

The proposed laws would need to be edited too, so they don’t feel so authoritarian to Bruce. This means the following amendments at the least:

1) If an enhanced person signs the Accords and works on a peacekeeping team, tracking bracelets must be worn on the clock. They can be removed afterwards, guaranteeing freedom of movement and privacy, and insulating their individual actions from their duties as a peacekeeper.

2) Enhanced persons must be given the right to a fair trial. Detainment without trial must be abolished. 

3) Enhanced persons who choose to partake in vigilantism or other immediate responses to crimes must be given a fair trial, and absolved if their actions were deemed not excessive, and necessary for the well-being of the individual in peril. The Good Samaritan Law must apply to enhanced persons.

4) Enhanced persons who sign the Accords and work for a peacekeeping team must consent to a duress and ability test, to determine their level of control over their abilities. This will remove the need for constant surveillance as it pertains to potential loss of innate control.

If those conditions are met, there won’t be as much contention from Bruce. Because again, he does support laws and regulations that promote greater safety if they come from a fair place and don't overlook basic human rights. The Sokovia Accords as they were proposed, sadly, did overlook that.

Bruce’s final suggestion? Reach out to people from successful and non-authoritative worlds beyond Terra, and see how they oversee enhanced persons. And, determine if those persons are actually content with the laws.

However — even then, there’s no real guarantee that Bruce will support the Accords. He's a stubborn person and tends to become narrow-minded if he’s passionate about certain issues. He is also flighty and doesn’t trust easily because of past experiences; not only this, but once someone or something gains his trust and then loses it again, it's very difficult to rebuild that trust. This is a defense mechanism for him, to prevent him from getting into similarly traumatic and uncomfortable situations again. Even if Bruce can logically argue himself into a position where he accepts something; in this case, supporting the Sokovia Accords, his gut instinct and emotional discomfort on a more fundamental, deep-seated level is way more difficult to overcome. It may never be overcome.

But who knows.