Stucky was in the narrative
I have to say that it’s almost flattering how hard the MCU felt they had to salt the earth during Endgame. I was checked out of fandom then, I had little kids and was attempting to adult, and I remember being in the theater and watching Steve pull that compass out and thinking, oh, that’s how they’re doing it. I wasn’t even surprised, just business as usual.
But this year was the year for escapism and I tumbled hard back into fanfic and meta and all those lovely things that I’d missed for almost a decade and now I’m just angry. Because it’s insulting, honestly, to pretend that this is not a hole of their own making.
The narrative in TWS is completely unambiguous. And while I don’t mean to say that Stucky is canon, I do mean that it was purposefully implied in the structure of the movie. Sam asks Steve directly what would make him happy. Peggy tells Steve that she regrets not that they’d missed being together but that Steve hasn’t gotten to live his life. Natasha is written as trying to set Steve up with multiple women whom he systematically turns down because he can’t connect with them, because they lack shared life experience. The writers make it sexual and imply that Steve hasn’t been with anyone since 1945. Steve is adrift and angry and lonely.
Peggy and Sam and Natasha are all, thematically, asking the same question and the MOVIE ITSELF says that the answer is Bucky. It’s not even about Steve dropping his shield for Bucky, or being with him to the end of the line, or “even when I had nothing, I had Bucky”, it’s that the narrative explicitly says: Steve is missing a part of himself and he can’t move forward in life, romantically and otherwise, without it and then Steve recognizes that missing piece when he recognizes Bucky.
If the characters were precisely reversed, with Bucky the canonical wartime love interest now in a nursing home and Peggy as the most important person in his life who fell from a train in 1945 and violently resurfaced in 2014, it wouldn’t even be SUBTEXT who Steve was going to end up with after TWS, it would be plain text. Heterosexuality is the lens through which these stories are usually filtered, and that’s why it feels familiar, but that doesn’t change what the narrative is. Geez, it’s almost like us queers have eyes and a brain too.
