Peter Parker's In Trouble

Ned: Me, cruising in in the sidecar next to ya....

Peter:

Ned:

Peter:

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

Random villain: I’ll give you all 10 minutes to choose which of you dies. Choose wisely.

Tim: Ughhhhhhhh dpmo, that’s such an unoriginal trope.

Dick: Red Robin, shut up

Jason: He has a point, this is, what, the third time this year?

Damian: Fourth. Two Face tried it on the first of January.

Random Villain: Hey! I’m in charge here. Listen to the tall one and shut the fuck up!

Dick: HEY! You don’t tell my brothers to shut up.

Tim: Guys i have an idea

Dick: Shut up Red.

Tim: Hear me out

Jason: Here we go

Tim: Lets just kill ourselves. group suicide. who’s with me?

Damian: So instead of one of us dying, you suggest we should all die?

Tim: Think about it. We wouldn’t be put in this position ever again.

Jason: You know what, i’m walking with you. Cause this is getting kinda embarrassing

Dick: Red this is like the third time you’ve tried to get us to agree to a suicide pact. I think your spending too much time with YJ

Tim: Ultimate brotherly bonding activity

Random Villain: . . . You have one minute left

Jason: Fuck it, i’m setting my helmet to detonate.

Tim: This is why your my favorite

Jason, helmet ticking: Hell yea I am

Random Villain: .. . you keep a bomb in your helmet???

Damian: *sigh* If we are to die I want you all to know that your imbeciles

Random Villain: You guys are nuts, i’m out of here

Tim: See?!? My plans are great

Damian and Dick: Shut UP Red

Jason: *Tosses his helmet across the room* *it explodes*

Dick: YOU ACTUALLY ACTIVATED THE BOMB?!?

Jason: I don’t bluff

Okay, so, stay with me on this. It’s something that I thought of after rewatching a particular movie a little while ago.

After the Snap, Rhodey decides to retire from the military and the Avengers, just like his best friend. He doesn’t necessarily cut off all contact with them, they still talk a decent amount, but he also isn’t the most active in his communication with anyone except Tony and Pepper. Still, now that he’s out of the military and heroism, he wants to find some way to help others. However, it’s when he hears that Pepper is pregnant with her and Tony’s kid that he finally realizes what he wants to do.

When the Snap occurred, so many children were displaced and became orphans. Rhodey applies to become a social worker, going through the approval process and eventually being able to help those children find places to stay. It’s not always the best conditions, but he does try his best.

Through his job, he meets a nice woman, a teacher. She doesn’t recognize him at first. He was a decorated military leader and a regular sight when it comes to the Avengers, but he was usually only ever seen in his suit, which kind of has a big metal helmet covering his face. Still, they hit it off, and she gains an interest in him as a person before she recognizes him from his past exploits. They date and then he eventually marries her. It was a small thing, not crowded. Her family was a little shocked when they saw Tony Stark standing as their new son-in-law’s best man.

They both move on with their lives together. Helping kids in the best way they know how. That is until something interesting happens.

He’s assigned to this pair of kids. Siblings. An older teenage girl with a troublemaking and headstrong attitude a mile long; and young boy who’s intelligence, inventiveness, and natural engineering abilities get help his sister with their antics. Their parents died after the Snap, two of the many casualties that occurred from the aftermath of the disappearance of half of all life on Earth.

Something about the two kind of pulled Rhodes in. He thinks it might be the fact that they remind him of a certain troublemaking genius that he had to deal with college and most of his adult life. They just happened to be split into two people this time.

They’d moved through a couple of homes before he found one that was willing. They weren’t the most caring, but Rhodey knows for a fact that the couple that he put them with weren’t abusive.

Despite this, the kids were regularly at the police station for various different misdemeanors. The officers have long since gotten used to the sight of Rhodey coming into the station to pick up the occasional troublemaker, and the man himself continues to cover for these two kids, allowing them to stay in their current foster home without their foster parents knowing.

Then, he finally finds it. A perfect home for them to live in. They’re willing to accept older kids and seem like the kindest people, from the reviews coming from the other social workers and some of their former charges. However, despite the multiple cases of the kids expressing their wish to leave their current housing situation, they actually say no when he brings this up to them. A few days later, Rhodey figures out why.

The two children had become a major part of a large animal hoarding scandal. Countless stray dogs were found in a multistory, abandoned building. Animal control took control and the police placed them under arrest for a time. They were released, but their foster parents’ refused to take them back. They kids had apparently been stealing different items in order to use in their exploits.

Rhodey, with the other family he had lined up now no longer an option, had no choice but to send the two kids to two seperate gender specific orphanages. Ones that have been overcrowded and underfunded since the Snap.

It’s not a few days later that he gets this feeling. That he wants to know a bit more about just what those kids were up to. With what is probably more than a bit of influence from hanging out with Tony Stark, he completely ignores the police tape at the building and heads inside. There, he finds out just how much work was put into this place. Just how much love and care was put into providing for the needs of the dogs that the kids brought there.

Just as suddenly, a rush of paws is heard as the dogs all run back into the building, despite supposedly being at the pound just hours before. In the entrance of the building; police, animal control, press, and citizens crowd as they follow the dogs in. He sees his wife in the crowd, as well as he two kids that he’d come to care so much about. Using the calm confidence he’s come to possess from working in the military, as a superhero, and as a social worker, he calms the crowd and manages to show them the love, compassion, and care that these kids gave each and every dog they found.

As the press and public rush inside to see the place itself, Rhodey goes to his wife. He’s about to open his mouth, but she already knows what he’s going to say. She agrees completely, but James knows there are still a few things that have to be done, and quickly.

He calls his best friend, Tony Stark, and asks for the man’s help. Tony immediately accepts without even hearing what he’s helping with, but when Rhodey explains the situation to him, the billionaire is even more enthusiastic. He claims that it’ll just be an extension on the wedding gift that he gave Rhodey. The house was a little on the cheap side for the rich business owner’s taste anyways.

So, with that funding, James and his two newly adopted children buy and refurbish the building. They make it a haven for strays and a place where people can bring their own dogs in order to be given a fine and luxurious stay.