Significantly More Emotions Than Expected

I recognize and agree that getting a Black Widow movie after they killed the character set in the past, rather than having it at the time when the character was as the height of her popularity and people really wanted to see what she was doing, was a serious misstep.

But as an overall MCU fan, I’m excited that a Black Widow movie set post-Civil War gives us an unprecedented new approach to canon, which reflects and validates the way participatory fandom works.

Hear me out.

The inherent assumption in any text is that everything important and plot-worthy is shown on screen, and anything we don’t see is by definition less important to the universe. Fandom fills in the blanks, but there’s always the assumption that the REAL stuff happens on screen.

Setting BW during the period between CW and IW tells us that that’s not the case. A whole movie’s worth of stuff, apparently, happened in the spaces between.

And I mean, I’ve been saying that for Natasha for ages, because I’m a Nat fan, and also because she completely dropped out of the end of CW to the point that it felt like a plot hole you could drive a mack truck through. But it was all fan theorizing based on clear bias, you know? We all think our fave is the most important and constantly interesting.

What the existence of this movie establishes is that in the MCU, it’s true, and if it’s true for one character, it’s true for all of them. They all have stories off-screen that could, theoretically, re-set the course of the entire MCU.

So Nick Fury’s in space.

That’s an interesting choice of a tag for a movie that, excepting the post-credits scenes, is very clearly ground-level SHIELD stuff, and pretty damn focused on the Sony-owned parts of the MCU.

Almost seems like they’d only include that if it’s necessary for a very-soon-upcoming movie.

Almost seems like it might be appropriate if it had to in some way deal with the movie’s overall themes of how to deal with the fractured connection between a mentor and mentee before their time together was up, and the goal of recapturing some of that relationship.

Peter and Nick were both snapped and then blipped back to having lost someone really important to them through saving the world and bringing them back.

Based on the very opening scene, we know that Natasha was a public figure; they showed her at the UN in that powerpoint. (This obviously upends MMRR’s “she didn’t have a funeral because she’s SECRET” narrative but I digress.) But everything from the student art at Peter’s school to the displays on monitors in airports to the side-of-the-street impromptu shrines are for Tony.

This is Peter’s story, and his focus is on Tony, so to some degree that makes sense. Given the twist, not seeing Fury wrestle with missing Natasha for most of the movie makes sense. But it’s a really big loss of potential for Nick, when they used SLJ in the whole film but removed Nick as a character from a story about mentor/mentee interactions because they wanted to expand the MCU in a post-credits sequence, unless what he was doing in that post-credits sequence was giving him emotional depth.

a Gamora-and-Natasha in the Soul Stone –look, this plot is such epic bullshit but if it’s going to exist, i’m going to use it to center them – fic where a) they meet all the other people trapped in the soul stone, b) incite some kind of revolution/complicated escape plan because man, you know who is pissed the fuck off? Gamora. Like, Nat made something of her peace with what she was doing but Gamora???? No. She takes like, a day to party when they all feel the unsnappening of everyone else and she takes a fierce, complicated satisfaction in knowing that her real family is alive and her totally bullshit not-a-family is so much dust in the wind but not for nothing is she the deadliest woman in the galaxy and no rock is going to keep her. And now there’s another one like her in this totally and completely arbitrary crapsack (thank you peter) landscape who is…not angry, exactly, because she came here of her own free will, but who would have taken Gamora’s hand and Rocket’s maybe, any of theirs, when they were helping Peter channel the infinity stone and who came to thwart Thanos’ will, and who looks consideringly at Gamora when Gamora comes to her and says “I want out. Help me?” and says, “sure,” with a light shrug. 

and she’d – how long has she been in this endless watery plain anyway? – forgotten how right and good it feels to have someone beside her, to throw ideas at, who hums along (badly, so badly) when Gamora forgets and starts singing to herself, until one day out of nowhere, Natasha says “your sister misses you.”

gamora has to sit down at that. 

“she never said it,” Natasha follows, “not out loud. Neither did Rocket. But they did.”

My current favorite nat story is alternate universe never joined shield Nat getting dragged over to this universe and she’s both real pissed off about it and also very confused by everything. there was a big…thing? that happened? something apocalyptic level and she was involved in stopping it or reversing it, AU!Nat isn’t really sure but none of it seems like her and she holes up somewhere and does research on herself but not before she causes some amount of problem.

meanwhile, nick is catching rumors that natasha romanoff is not dead and also back on the mercenary bandwagon and he thinks really hard about sending a message to clint to investigate, who’s been not coping with his best friend being dead, or to wanda who has made an effort to fall off his radar that has natasha’s fingerprints all over it and he wants to respect that, and does finally send a message to Sam that there’s maybe something he should poke his newly shield-bearing nose into. 

and sam and bucky do finally catch up with her and she’s just like, oh it’s you, and sam goes Nat? and Bucky’s really excellent reflexes are the main reason that Sam doesn’t get shot in the side (”You’re supposed to use the goddamn shield for this, Wilson, what the shit” and sam is like “yeah, yeah, okay, i know, i’m just more used to using the wings and there wasn’t–” “i’m going to spend all day shooting at you until it doesn’t occur to you that there’s not a big magic frisbee attached to your arm that laughs at bullets”) but you know, once they get past the shooting and everything, it’s Sam who spent literal years fighting with Nat daily and knows a LOT about the way she likes to fight and Bucky who is getting a totally unreal sense of deja vu because some of those moves are his moves but scaled down for someone half his size and weight (and also she somehow manages to get up on his shoulders again what the fuck is that about and continues trying to punch him in the head while Sam is trying to pry her off.

anyway, the point is, they do finally manage to fight her and then they drag her back to Camp Steve, who is just like very…..Sam does not know what to make of that expression, because sad doesn’t really seem to do it justice, this whole weight of something that’s not just their Nat being gone but is like the look he used to get when they were on the run and he came across some goddamn thing, a war memorial or whatever, something that sent him back to all the people he never meant to lose, a busload of loss, and not for the first time does Sam wonder what exactly Steve got up to in that minute between one life and the next. 

steve calls wanda and wanda calls clint and AU!Nat is scoffing openly at the very idea that they can three ghosts of christmas her or it’s a wonderful life her, whatever it is that they think they’re going to accomplish by surrounding her with the relics of a dead woman, do they think she’s just going to be that person because they want her to be? is their natasha so replaceable to them? 

(sam calls rhodey, who somehow calls space????, and Bucky seems weirdly pleased when that Raccoon guy shows up with that blue lady that Rhodey hugs and the Raccoon guy says “Carol can’t come, she’s doing something” and he mimes punching and something exploding and Rhodey says “nothing too bad, I hope, she can call us if she needs to” and Rocket is like, right ‘cause what are we going to do that she can’t and also that Okoye says that they can’t expect this woman to want to be the same and that they should set their expectations accordingly, but also that if anyone would want the choice to change, it would be Natasha. “But she can’t get away?” asks Rhodey. “Nah,” says Rocket, “she’s still mostly managing Wakanda while her king guy catches up on what’s happened.”)

I’m supposed to realize that while Natasha, his living compass is throwing herself off a cliff, his physical compass is falling out of his pocket in a fight with his younger self?  I’m supposed to realize that he was losing his compass as he was losing his human compass? I’m supposed to just live with that?