like a cat outta hell

I choose you e v e r y d a y.

Please consider: the Red Room, fifty or sixty years later, Natasha one of many girls obediently imitating It’s Patsy!

okay natasha is my forever girl and i instantly latched on to trish and i’m realizing despite their very different backgrounds the themes and conflicts of their stories are actually pretty similar? both young girls that had their childhoods taken from them forced into work by abusive adults with part of that work revolving around pretending to be other people and likely with a level of sexual exploitation involved (that’s a pretty obvious implication in natasha’s backstory considering the realities of spywork and particularly when you add in the ballet aspect has anyone ever meta-ed about the red room ballet stuff and connected that to how ballets once had a reputation as brothels? or is the whole thing gross enough already?) (and for trish being a female teen star usually carries with it public sexualization and fetishization the fans we see are almost always creepy dudes that seem less interested in adult woman trish and more into young girl patsy i’m sure jessica meant pimp figuratively but i wouldn’t put it past dorothy to at least try to capitalize on her kid’s sex appeal) then those childhood experiences result in adulthoods where they struggle with their identity and self-image and how to exert control over their lives they work to undo years of damage and they reinvent themselves and literally make new names they make choices about who they want to be and not what other people expect them to be (and the people they choose to be are kind and compassionate and heroic even though life rarely gave them a reason to be so GOOD) yet despite being in a much better place they’re still struggling and put up a front they have that i-have-my-shit-together-and-am-fully-in-control-always facade that hides a mass of issues and insecurities of course saying all of that they still have some pretty big differences in personality and how their traumas present trish wears her good heart and heroism and optimism on her sleeve she’s got a steve rogers brand of righteousness and forthrightness (and recklessness) (and a brainwashed childhood best friend that acted as a protector but those parallels are a whole other post) while natasha puts up a front of cynicism and is cautious and she’s comfortable operating in a world of shadows and mutable morality their issues with self-worth also present in different ways trish knows she’s a good person but strives for perfection and feeling like she’s contributing enough and she’s hard on herself when she doesn’t meet those standards especially when it’s her own self-imposed standards for instance when she couldn’t shake off being tased like her superpowered best friend and a former special ops guy could which was perfectly reasonable but she took it like a personal failure she’s just a goddamned radio talk show host not some kind of hero natasha is absolutely confident in her skills and ability to get the job done knows her worth in a professional context but she doubts her humanity and her goodness doesn’t trust she can be more than the monster she was made to be isn’t sure the good she does now can ever make up for the bad i just have a lot of feels about these two and using the its patsy show to connect them is a stroke of brilliance

This is the fic I’ve always wanted to write and never gotten to, but YES. A big part of what fascinates me about Trish is the same thing that fascinates me about Natasha, and I am so glad to see it written out here.

Trish’s upbringing, while still clearly abnormal- most kids don’t go from just making ends meet to being highly successful child stars- has nothing supernatural about it (besides, obviously, her friendship with superhero Jess). She doesn’t have ballet that turns into murder lessons; she has the set of a hit TV show. She doesn’t have a Madame B; she has a toxic mother. But the underlying themes are the same, and the way they both deal with them- or fail to deal with them- in part by not letting anyone in, and in part by putting up a defensive shield of perfection they don’t let most people see through, is also shared.

Anyway, I guess basically what the bigger point is, they both have a lot of surface relationships. They interact with tons of people in a professional setting and are very socially capable in those situations, but it generally doesn’t go deeper. They’re good at keeping people out of the deeper stuff, but they both have their own found families too, and they are very protective of them for obvious reasons. I think Natasha, despite being more of a lone wolf, has a bigger support system, at least in theory and even after the events of CW, but she’s not particularly comfortable connecting with them and sharing parts of herself and communicating what it means to her. Trish, more of a team player, only has one important person but is very open and frank about what she feels and what that relationship means to her. And that both fits with and contradicts how they tend to interact with the world in general or at least how the world perceives them.

The choice to make Trish into a stereotypical fading-fast Hollywood teen starlet and combine that with alarming levels of racism, rather than seriously engage with questions of performativity and abuse and perfectionism and growing up to be more than what you’d been made into, was a choice. We could have had this. We know what they chose instead.

(I’m undecided if Nebula gets to count as an exception, given that (A) she murdered her past self, so it’s not like no Nebulas were killed in 2018-2019, and (B) Nebula is, I think, still considered by the text to be amoral, despite doing a fuckton of heroic things. Because she still has to prove herself, in ways that, e.g., Wanda- who has ALSO been mistreated by the text- did not.)

but i guess the biggest difference for me with these two characters i’ve emotionally invested so much in is that natasha can still give me joy, even when she’s done dirty by the narrative, whereas anything trish related just makes me sad, made harder because it’s impossible to engage in anything about her without seeing people call her The Worst. this is wandering into all kinds of different directions, so i’ll stop there, but i have many think-y thoughts. 

You know what? I put up with A LOT of problematic behavior from Trish, and I still love her anyway, but this is honestly the most offensive thing I’ve ever seen her do. I can’t in good conscience let this go. Bottled water? I’m going to delete this blog, and Trish Walker is going on my block list.