I was thinking earlier about my Buckyfic "i am an exit" and how I ended up using the Hydra Trash Party in it
I read a lot of fics with these concepts (of Bucky having survived rape as part of his torture in captivity with Hydra), it was super compelling as a story concept because for me the essential thing about Bucky is the total unmaking of what makes a person, the deep, horrible violation of his body and mind.
so obviously this was going to be part of my fic, and I went with the OG "hydra trash party" concept that Bucky was essentially, passed around as a party favor at gatherings of Hydra officials
but this is a fic with a lot of political commentary, that says a lot about fascism. originally because I wanted to get into the eugenicist implications of the Captain America project.
and this required me to treat Hydra as a neo-nazi organization and actually really engage with the fascist ideology driving Hydra, which meant I had to think about the politics/ideological implications of the trash parties
things come up for that immediately, it's related to fascism's intense contempt for weakness, it's related to fascist understanding of masculinity as violent, it's related to the politics of torture, but ultimately it's related to fascist idea of the world as hierarchical, with dominance and the power to punish being worshiped. fascists love the humiliation of those they see as contemptible.
Rape as ritual for maintaining the in-group seems to dovetail pretty much perfectly with this, and I came to include the idea that it was essentially an initiation ritual for Hydra; everyone was forced to be in the role of both victim and perpetrator, creating a form of in-group solidarity and making it difficult to leave.
It's very connected to my ideas about how people internalize fascism: experiencing powerlessness and being crushed/dominated seems to sometimes lead to people justifying the terrible experience as "necessary" then going on to inflict it upon others, because the idea that things could have been different and the pain did not have a purpose is too painful to confront. Like parents who got hit as children and they go on to hit their own children.
How does this relate to Bucky specifically? Well, my interpretation that I wrote in my fic is that the Winter Soldier is a literal incarnation of fascist logic. He is the thing that is beaten into submission, the thing that is crushed and broken and dominated, and he is a perfect killing machine. The Winter Soldier is made what he is through suffering, pain, and total submission, a subhuman creature reaching the highest level of perfection through his total enslavement. this reflects fascist ideas of the rightness of certain people being subjugated.
At the same time, he is the thing that punishes and crushes, he is a weapon used to enforce the power of the fascists. He is death. He is violence. That is all the Soldier is: a tool for committing violence, and violence is the necessary tool to make the world an orderly place according to fascist ideas.
And the fact that Bucky is raped and forced to commit rape, both in ritual-like contexts, is a further extrapolation of these dual realities respectively
