get your head out of your donut hole

me:

disney:

me:

If this “Chen Honghui” hates Mulan/Ping until he finds out that she is a woman, that isn’t just erasing Shang’s bisexuality: it’s also sexualizing Mulan and stripping her of all her agency and accomplishment. In this version, Mulan isn’t worthy of respect as a person. She is only worth admiring as a woman. He can’t like her as a warrior, as a strategist, as a friend, as a person; he can only like her as a woman. Let me rephrase this: Instead of giving Mulan a chance to earn the same respect Chen offers to all his other warriors, he’s only going to appreciate her once he sees her as a woman. As an “approved” sexual object. ONLY THEN is it worth noticing her or granting her basic human decency and respect. “Something like love,” as the description tells us, clearly has nothing to do with any of her personality and everything to do with genitalia. Even if he was completely and entirely straight, we should see that he’s at least befriending Mulan/Ping before the Gender Reveal. Straight guys can still recognize another man’s good qualities and appreciate them for what they are. If Ping isn’t even a friend before “he” becomes Mulan, then this isn’t “something like love;” it’s just lust and objectification, pure and simple. The “rivalry” is also bullshit. The fact that “rivalry” can change so quickly into “something like love” means only that for Chen, a set of imaginary genitalia is all it takes to completely shift his perspective on someone from “worthy of competition” to “worthy of sex.” What, so he’s just going to abandon the rivalry now that she’s a woman? Oh - because she’s only a woman. He doesn’t have to compete with her anymore, because that’s not what you do with women. A rivalry would imply that she’s still a man, and at least he can view a rival as a decent warrior; but now, she can be comfortably reduced to Sex Appeal.

Also… what about that personality? “Cocky?” A “mean, bullying streak”? Thinks of Mulan as “his chief rival?” Are you going to strip the male lead of EVERY shred of decency? Li Shang isn’t a bully: he is a soldier who pushes his men (and woman) to excel, because this is wartime and that’s the only way to survive. He genuinely cares about them and shows real pride when they show signs of improvement. He doesn’t see them as rivals; he sees them as friends for whom he is responsible. Sure, he doesn’t like Ping at first, but that’s got nothing to do with gender and more to do with the fact that Ping’s initial behavior is so inflammatory. (Dodges commander’s questions; starts fights in the rice line; holds the other soldiers back in training; cheats on assignments, even if that’s the result of Mushu’s intervention). Once Ping proves himself as a person and as a warrior, Shang doesn’t hesitate to reward Ping with all the admiration Ping deserves. 

Disney is so concerned about removing every hint of bisexuality from its movies, it’s also utterly destroyed any decency they could have in a heterosexual romance. In their attempts to make everything nice and straight and cisgendered, they’re bending their characters WAY out of whack. 

They’re taking Mulan - originally a woman who denies gender boundaries to prove that gender doesn’t matter to personal worth - and they’re turning her into a person who can’t earn respect,honor, or even the admiration of her fellow soldiers until she puts on a dress and can be seen, not as a warrior or as a person but as an object of desire. 

Also, Seb has mentioned that researching WW2, what left the deepest impression was how quickly everybody dies. You get attached to someone only to watch their heads being blown up in front of you the next day. I’m sure this influenced how he chose to act this scene. Because you can bet by the time this scene takes place, Bucky has seen many people - hell, maybe even friends - die, and recently, he’s had to see his whole unit be killed or captured by HYDRA. This certainly plays a role here. It’s not just a general sense of “I can’t protect Steve anymore,” it’s more like “I don’t know if Steve will live till next week.” It’s very real, very immediate. It’s a concrete prediction more than a vague fear. And if Steve’s survives, there’s still the fact Bucky knows what’s like to be changed by war, and Steve will be changed by it, which Bucky certainly hates. Either way, he loses the Steve he knew, even more than he’s already lost, with the whole “Steve Rogers is suddenly a super soldier” deal.

I’d say this scene is wartime Bucky in a nutshell. He handles the entire crowd and this whole Captain America propaganda thing without hesitation, he smiles at Steve and makes sure Steve enjoys the moment instead of pulling some “I did my duty” bullshit, and only then he allows himself to be overwhelmed by the fear that comes with being able to think 48923740 worst case scenarios in two seconds. If we can trust interviews with cast and crew, this eventually becomes his role in the war, basically - he thinks fast and does his job protecting Captain America and the missions, he takes care of Steve on a personal level by shielding him from the worst of the war as much as he can, and only then, if there’s time and Steve isn’t looking, he thinks about how the war is affecting him.

But anyway, overall, this scene is about overwhelming loss of everything Bucky knows, as well as an attempt to hide this as well as he can. And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that in the 4th and 5th gifs, Seb looks a lot like comics!Bucky does when he says goodbye to his younger sister, thinking he’ll never see her again and almost breaking down in tears, but unwilling to show her he’s scared. For your reference:

Remember he says to Steve earlier?:

"Right. Because you have nothing to prove."

He knows Steve, he knows what it's all really about - Steve wanting to prove himself and he's angry that this is the reason Steve put himself through all this.

He's fought longer and knows the horrors of the war, and he's afraid but also sure that Steve will sacrifice his life in a heart beat, so he's angry.

Tbh, I don’t think Bucky ever liked “captain America “ he liked Steve.

"You ready to follow Captain America into the jaws of death?"