those ocean eyes

1. Experimentation on POWs were horrendous during WW2. I happened to click on a collection of Japanese war crimes but the Nazis led a lot of the unethical research on their own front. For those who (rightly) don’t want to click, the Japanese were doing stuff like forcing prisoners to have sex with each other so they can infect the woman with syphilis and then forcefully impregnate female prisoners, then experiment on their babies. Or they were experimenting on prisoners to see the limits of physiology, like submitting them to severe frostbite, animal blood transfusions, unsafe vaccines, deliberate infections, and likely other drugs and poisons.

Prisoners were seen as subhuman, and particularly if you take the headcanon that Bucky may have been Jewish, there would have been very little ethical incentive holding Hydra back. Especially with the heightened healing ability, Bucky would have been a matter of great curiosity (not a good thing when you’re an experimental subject and a prisoner) and would have been subjected to inhumane experiments you and I couldn’t even dream up.

2. Now put this in the context of super soldiers being extremely sought after as a commodity. I use the word commodity because none of them have been afforded rights like humans. We know canonically, that experimentation on trying to create super soldiers continued for much of the 20th century. There were the unethical experiments on Isaiah’s squad, the “Winter Soldier program”, the Hulk, that Russian dude and probably more we haven’t yet heard of. This means that for those 70 years Bucky was imprisoned, Hydra wanted more of him, but ones that were lower maintenance, easier to control and believed their own values. We already talked about how they have no ethical limits on what experiments they might do. Without going into details, but when you for some reason can’t get more serum from his blood or recreating the formula, and you don’t want to or can’t clone, then the method left is reproduction by harvesting sperm.

3. As I’ve mentioned above (and if you clicked through to the article), sexual violence were extremely common during war and occupation against female prisoners. But what about towards men? Turns out, it’s not rare at all, except like many incidences of male survivors of sexual violence, it’s not talked about publicly if at all.

The proportion of affected victims are devastatingly high. This article addresses conflicts in Africa, but I can’t think of any cultural reasons why it would be different in Nazi-occupied Europe.

If you can stomach the article, it talks about the social pressures that prevent men from speaking up. The shame of being seen as emasculated, the strict gender roles enforced by society, the fear of losing their social supports and their loved ones. These are all psychological pressures that would have been relevant in Bucky’s time, given the general poor acceptance of sodomy and male victimhood, as well as (depending on your headcanon) his own perception of his sexuality, which may already be negative due to internalised queerphobia. The flip side of all this, of course, is that sexual violence is an effective torture method to cause shame, fear, self-doubt and suffering. It is a kind of pain that I have no doubt perpetrators understand the permanence of. There is no light at the end of the tunnel, there is no possibility of comfort even should they get back to their old lives, as all these male victims could do is to live in endless silent suffering. Importantly, it fractures your sense of identity especially if a large part of that is tied into enforced gender roles.

4. Lastly, while Bucky’s mind-control is movie science, I think dissociation, derealisation and depersonalisation are an integral part of his mind control process. Sebastian spoke of his headcanon that Bucky was “in a dream like state”, which sounds like derealisation.

And this scene of him placidly letting the Hydra scientists work on him and not responding to Pierce’s questions could be an episode of dissociation.