hold me under, pray for rain

These changes from comics canon contain some of the things about the character that were compelling, and also the things MCU had no idea what to do with in later installments

In the winter soldier comics, (which are themselves a violent re-invention of the character, he was raised on a military base and became Steve's sidekick after Steve had become Captain America, kind of a darker figure willing to do dirty work that Cap couldn't be seen doing

in the movie, he's Steve's closest childhood friend. They only end up paired up and fighting together because Steve goes on a desperate mission to save his life

in the winter soldier comics, he is something like 7 or 8 years younger than Steve and they still have a mentor/sidekick type of relationship

in the movie they are the same age and steve is no longer a "mentor" figure, that dynamic is eliminated

in the winter soldier comics Bucky loses all his prior memories after his apparent death, making him a blank slate to be groomed into a soviet super-assassin. There is no brainwashing.

in the movie they deliberately erase his memories by strapping him into this scary device that fries his brain with electricity. It's clearly torture: he is shown hyperventilating as the restraints close onto his limbs and then screaming in agony as the device activates.

in the winter soldier comics Bucky as the Winter Soldier is capable of independent thought and snark, and is shown questioning and mouthing off at his superiors

in the movie, Bucky is completely passive. He barely speaks at all; when he does, he is almost childlike, meek and quiet in his interactions with the Hydra characters, stubborn and confused in his fight with Steve. The main antagonist slaps him across the face for not answering a question and he doesn't retaliate at all even though he can obviously kill everyone in the room in the blink of an eye. In the same scene he also lets the scientists manhandle him and eagerly opens his mouth for the mouthguard even as his heart rate is spiking on the monitor and he's starting to hyperventilate because he KNOWS the pain is coming.

(side note: he is shirtless in this scene for no reason)

(second side note: the line "who the hell is Bucky?" is in the movie because it's iconic from the comics, but it's arguably super OOC for mcu!bucky)

The long hair and cyborg arm are straight from the comics, but the most striking change to his appearance is his mask: in the comics, he's wearing a domino mask over his eyes, but in the film, he has an opaque black mask covering his nose and mouth that takes away much of his ability to emote and looks strikingly like a muzzle. The comics mask evokes mysterious wiles; the film's mask evokes dehumanization.

basically the films gave him a much deeper and more intimate connection to Steve while putting the two of them on even footing as friends and partners, and changed him from a morally gray character who indifferently kills people and regrets and becomes angsty once his memories are restored, to a tortured and dehumanized human weapon who obeys despite not understanding anything that's going on because he knows nothing but pain and punishment.

The film's version is really much more interesting. Snarky antiheroes who kill indifferently are a dime a dozen; a character who is palpably, terrifyingly dominating and powerful yet completely powerless in the hands of those who control him, who is hollowed out of all personal identity and who has no agency or control over his own body as it is mutilated, reconstructed and wielded as a weapon, is something much more delicious and fascinating.

We watch this guy slaughter people effortlessly with an apex predator swagger that projects pure dominance and prowess, then we watch him meekly accept abuse and torture with soft, confused eyes.

The rest of the MCU portrayal of Bucky though after that? Clearly no idea what they fuck they had on their hands or what the fuck they were doing with it.

Flattening his character out into "morally gray depression man and he has Gun." And essentially making his story about shouldering responsibility for what he did as the Winter Soldier. A very flat, "guy did bad thing and now he's angsty and guilty about it and trying to redeem himself" (boring) instead of like. the gut wrenching horror of having your memories burned away and your name taken from you and your body reconstructed without your consent and used against your will.

We could be telling the most brilliant stories about The Bucky, if we all understood the essential principles (that stories are not Owned by anyone, but become Alive when they are told, in the hearts of the teller and the listener, and to listen to a story gives the gift of the power to tell it again)

And if we could all defeat our enemy, the Cringe (which is to say, that which cringes at sincerity)

God, the writers you put on this earth to write Buckyfic are trying to create something "Original" instead

The broad consensus in modern western media seems to be that Torture Is Basically Fine. It works. Torture is an effective way of extracting accurate information. And because that alone isn't enough to make it seem legitimate, there's another failsafe: Torture works only on bad people. Villains crack under torture, and heroes don't.

This is how media creates a culture that finds torture justifiable. Especially media that is largely sponsored by the US military, of course, who in a post-Abu Ghraib, post-Guantanamo, post-CIA papers world has an interest in creating public indifference (or straight up support) for torture, but there's torture in animated movies for children, too. It's ubiquitous.

In real life, torture is horrific violence inflicted on our fellow human beings, that traumatizes both the victim and the torturer, creates heaps of false information, and has no discernible benefits. It doesn't work.

But in fiction, it must work, every time, because if it doesn't, then that collapses the entire structure, doesn't it?

In comes Bucky in TWS.

He's a character who is tortured into complete submission. Who is given electric shocks to the brain to erase his memory, but he still holds onto his own humanity. He is tortured into doing horrible things - the torture works - but it doesn't work completely. He breaks through it. He's beaten, abused, violated on screen, but - and this is important! - because he overcomes in the end, he's not the villain. His story evokes pity and sympathy, not suspicion.

With hindsight, it is clear to me that the mind wipe scene was meant to inspire disgust in the audience. Bucky's terror without fighting back, his defeated acceptance of the inevitable, the slow, lingering pan up his unclothed body. This is emasculating; at the time a lot of meta has been written about how Bucky is shot like a woman in a rape scene.

He submits. This is meant to be suspicious.

But it completely backfires, because what is shown and what follows is the story of a victim of unspeakable abuse finally breaking free from his abuser in a show of awe-inspiring mental strength.

(and also through the power of gay love but let's not get into that)

That's a problem. By complete accident, the film ends up saying Hey, torture is maybe sometimes bad? And that cannot be allowed. There is a more conventional torture scene in the film, where Steve and Sam throw a guy off a roof to get information out of him, but that almost doesn't matter. This is the one instance that makes the whole house of cards come crumbling down. If Bucky is a victim, then torture is both bad and does not work.

It is obvious to me that what followed TWS didn't know how to reconcile that. CA:CW felt extremely jarring because it treats Bucky with so much suspicion; it even retcons in the trigger word nonsense to justify that suspicion. Bucky has to earn trust. He has to redeem himself. From what? Not being able to withstand seven decades of torture?

Well, yes, the film says. Torture only works on bad guys. Bucky allowed the torture to work on him, and so, has proven himself to be untrustworthy. The abuse he suffered sullied him. He has to earn back his moral righteousness.

I want to stress that I do not think any of this is intentional. I don't think there was a meeting in the writer's room where they talked about how they accidentally made it seem like Torture Is Bad Maybe, and how they could reconcile that. If that had been the case, CW would have been a more honest movie. But looking back, it is clear in how the directors talked about the characters after CW came out, and in the baffling writing choices they made, that they were trying to breach this disconnect, without being aware that this is what they were doing.

For the fan spaces I hung around in at the time, where cis men were a minority, this was baffling. There's a reason post-TWS fic almost exclusively talked about Bucky's recovery, not his redemption. There simply was, in fandom's eyes, nothing to redeem him from. CW made clear that w completely misinterpreted TWS.

I'd love to go back in time to observe what the fallout from TWS and CW was in male-dominated fan spaces; how they talked about Bucky in 2015 and 2017.

Anyhow. With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious to me that no one involved in the writing of CW and what came after took a moment to actually think about the themes and motives of the movies beyond the shallowest surface, and not just with regards to Bucky.

I've never thought of it in this light, though; this is actually a great explanation for why the trigger words were introduced in Civil War and why it feels like a retcon. Audiences didn't respond to Bucky as expected, and they had to change the method of his control/brainwashing to make audiences read him as a threat/antagonist for Civil War

You're also completely correct that the scene where the protagonists throw the Hydra dude off the roof is a torture scene. (I realized this after watching Jacob Geller's video analyzing the torture scenes in Call of Duty. Highly recommend if this topic interests you)

It is absolutely true that torture scenes in fiction often serve to show off the (usually male) character's "toughness" and mental resolve, which is a fantasy, one that comes out of this political context at the time of Guantanamo and the torture memos and the political agenda to make torture more acceptable/palatable to the public.

So in this context, the vault scene (where Bucky is struck across the face and doesn't retaliate, and passively submits to torture without complaint) evokes sympathy for Bucky but it's also supposed to show that Bucky isn't a "hero" in the same way the Heroes are heroes. Heroes don't "break" under torture; Bucky does.

Which means that accidentally, the scene was a little more honest about torture than movies are usually allowed to be.

This is what I meant when I said the Hydra Trash Party-goers knew what they were doing, btw. Real life torture is almost inseparable from sexual violence.

Which MCU movie was it where Thor was suffering from PTSD and the whole film was spent constantly belittling him and mocking his trauma and his body, to the point that another character threatens to slap him (or actually slaps him? I can't remember) to "snap him out of" a panic attack?

I think it was Endgame (gagging) and if I remember right, that movie had the same directors as CA:TWS, right? The Russo brothers?

Okay.

So this feels pretty revealing of what the directors think about a "hero" and what makes one, right? Thor lost his "hero" status because he was traumatized and because he gained weight, and it's framed as a personal failing of his character that he has to overcome/"get over."

This helps contextualize Bucky's portrayal: a character being "heroic" means being untouchable, and being affected by trauma is at least partially Your Fault.

I remember nothing of most of the character portrayals in later Avengers because I threw it in my brain sewer, but I do remember the climactic scene in endgame where Tony Stark sacrifices himself saying "i am Iron Man," and I thought it was stupid at the time (his last words are erecting a monument to his ego? and we're supposed to think this is cool and heroic?) but it's a message about what makes a "heroic" character: a hero is, above all, defiant.

So in light of this, it does seem likely that Bucky's torture scene is supposed to be unflattering to him.

I know the term "male gaze" has been used wildly inappropriately, but I feel like the real actual sense of the term might actually apply here? The viewer of the films is assumed to be a Dude, and not just a dude, but a dude that subscribes to a certain ideal of toxic masculinity.

Men that don't break down or get vulnerable (or who get over it fast when they do), who are defiant and untouchable to the very end, are supposed to be admirable. Bucky is completely broken and compliant and accepts his abuse, so even if the movie portrays him as sympathetic, he's still not heroic; he's not supposed to be a character that audiences admire and project onto.

However, the directors didn't consider as much who a female audience (broadly) would relate to or find admirable. They didn't consider as much how someone (male or female or other) who doesn't subscribe to toxic masculinity and the idea of heroic males as untouchable would perceive Bucky.

It's possible that the directors never really thought about Bucky being viewed from the perspective of a person who has experienced abuse. From the point of view of toxic masculinity, men are never victims and if they are, they aren't real men.

Which means that a lot of people (many of them women) watched The Vault Scene and instead of thinking

"oh, he's letting the bad guys control him, unlike what a Real Hero [read: a real man] would do, so he's sympathetic but still bad"

they thought

You mentioned the scene with Steve and Nat and Sam chucking Sitwell off the roof; I fully admit that it took a friend pointing out to me that this was an instance of torture, and that it's specifically an illustration of torture being an effective method for acquiring intelligence. I had to sit with that for. A very long time. In order to digest it.

Now when I rewatch the movie, I think about that rooftop scene while watching Steve's conversation with Fury in the hanger bay for the Insight carriers after the Lemurian Star incident:

Nick: "You know, I read those SSR files. 'Greatest Generation'? You guys did some nasty stuff."

Steve: "Yeah, we compromised. Sometimes in ways that made us not sleep so well. But we did it so that people could be free."

(And then this beautiful movie spends the rest of its runtime [among other things] asking the question: "What does it mean, to be Free? What is Freedom?" Honest to god it's been 12 years and we can't answer that question today the way we might have answered it when this film was released.)

But to get back to the question of Torture at hand: I think about this conversation between Fury and Steve, and about whether torturing Sitwell counts as "a compromise" to Steve. (I would argue the movie makes no effort to show that he feels particularly conflicted about the sequence of events that transpires on that rooftop. I ALSO recognize that, tonally, the Point of that scene as far as the filmmakers seem to be concerned is "LOOK HOW COOL THE FALCON IS" and. He is. I love Sam. Sam is Amazing. But Sam did help torture someone in that scene.)

I think about how many times I watched and rewatched the movie without even recognizing when torture was taking place. I think about what happened in USAmerican popular culture after 2001, and I think about not being immune to propaganda.

As is the case around MANY points in Marvel Studios' Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), this movie makes SO MANY incredible points almost CERTAINLY by accident.

@thebeethatkilledyourdad

Okay now I'm thinking about the parallels between Bucky and Natasha (apart from horribly incompetent writing and directing)

Natasha's torture scene sexualizes her partially because she is so sexualized across the board, but you're right about the parallels; both are showing a character in a state of partial undress being tortured and manhandled by multiple older men. We can even draw a parallel between Natasha being leaned backward over the multi-story drop to the floor of the warehouse and Bucky being pushed backward into the chair (a metaphorical void; a fall it's impossible to come back from). Also with Natasha's face being grabbed vs. Bucky being slapped and having the mouthguard placed into his mouth.

The main difference is of course that Natasha's scene leads the viewer on into thinking that she's in real danger, then reveals that she was in control of the situation the entire time; Bucky's scene is a revelation that he's NOT in control at all.

Jonathan Joss was an Indigenous, gay man who was murdered on the first day of Pride month as well as Indigenous History Month. He died protecting his trans husband. Homophobia and racism aren’t marks of the past, and this is a heart breaking reminder of that.

Haruka Kawakami

Don't tell people your triggers, especially any negative ones

You don't even have to tell them your name if you don't want to, you don't have to tell anyone all your alters/headmates names, you don't have to tell anyone how many alters/headmates are in your system