Alas, I don't think I'm going back anytime soon, so here's some Lucy Stillman meta as well as my last attempt at getting my "Leila Marino was being set up as a very important character + Lucy's foil in ac1" agenda off the ground.

Whitney Frost was discovered by that talent agent in 1934. I've thought before that that was an odd choice of year, because Whitney would have been 23 at the time; it seemed to me that if they really wanted to drive home the point of how badly she was being exploited, it would have made more sense to have her get sucked into Hollywood at a much younger age, maybe 18 or 19.

So why 1934?

Because that's the same year the Hays Code went into effect.

like, for explanation, i only ever watched it in german (im german, and when it came out i didnt know english, and then after you dont randomly change the language).

continuation of (XX)

You’re completely right. She’s a Canon Sue. 

They really looked at a comics character based on Virginia Hall (i.e. real peg-legged American heroine who managed to stay undercover in Nazi-occupied France twice, despite having a thick Baltimore accent, and helped captured Resistance fighters break out of Gestapo prison!!) 

...and thought ‘hmm yeah she’s boring let’s incorporate the Nazi woman instead and ignore the other non-Nazi love interests (they’re Jewish) oh and let’s make her a Bletchley Park codebreaker and a martial artist boxer and friends with a billionaire inventor and she has a Tragic Past and-’  

All she’s missing is the long ebony black hair with purple streaks and red tips that reaches her mid-back and icy blue eyes like limped tears. 💅 

(The irony of them doing all this thinking they’re making her Steve’s equal by it, when in fact it’s doing the exact opposite. She has no power or significance outside of a man. Steve is his own original character with shown competence and independent motives and backstory; she’s just a cheap mirror who follows everything he does. The very idea of a dance partner means she cannot perform her only function without a man. Even in WhatIf her only powers or accomplishments are all just Steve’s.) 

.

As for the Howlies ep; yeah it’s just more of the cringey mythologising of a past she never actually had (how Disney!) 

She wasn’t on the Continent with the Howlies. 

She wasn’t any kind of a soldier or fighter. 

Her training is not in anything that would be of use or interest to them. 

(They’ve got a tech/radio guy in Morita, a translator in Gabe, an explosives / French geography / Resistance Underground expert in Frenchy, airborne assault expert in Monty, an expert sniper / Hydra lab-internee in Bucky (the only reason they even know there’s a Valkyrie base is because he told Steve! without him, Hydra would’ve blown up half the world!), extra muscle from Dum-dum, all the gadgetry they need from Stark, all the aerial recon they need from Stark’s planes, and Steve’s brilliant tactical mind.

What, exactly, would they need her for?? Carrying more clipboards? Tidying more flags off maps? Missing more saboteurs? Not getting to more grenades on time?? More irrational attacking of Steve?? Hmm. I guess she would be pretty good practise for having a Nazi nutjob around who could fly off the handle at any moment... 

If there were more Howlies than shown in CATFA, they wouldn’t even need her as a spare pair of hands -- they accidentally made her even more irrelevant!) 

And if she’s supposed to be a spy: 

1) she definitely wouldn’t be wherever they are, she’d be undercover somewhere, where a spy would be needed; 

2) why would she walking around with the famous guys and appearing in public showreels, thus blowing her cover and rendering her even more useless than she is already? 

3) why would Dum-dum be so weirded out by her presence and not know how act or what to do with her there, if this had been something she already did during the recent war? (Answer: she didn't. They stole Bucky's valour and gave it to her).

As well as having zero military experience or background, Pggy has no rank.

As Steve himself clearly pointed out when he ignored her ‘orders’ on the plane, she has no right to boss Commandos (or Agents) around. She’s just so in love with the sound of her own voice that she assumes (in ignorance of how society actually works for non posh people) that her high opinion of herself = the right to be in charge. 

Very typical Upper Class assumption of superiority. 

All her scenes with the Howlies are straight up lies.

She wasn’t even on first name terms with Bucky, the original Howlie! 

And to paper over this giant crack, they just introduce new Howlies, as if to say ‘ohh, yeah, she did spend loads of time with them, it was just characters you didn’t see, it was just off screen.’

Newsflash, fucker! That’s not how characterisation works! 

Hmm okay, I just decided Pggy’s actually a many-tentacled alien in disguise as a human. It’s just that the scene where you found that out was off-screen. 

And, ah yes, spirits. Yet another thing they've stolen from Erskine and Bucky -- the only people in all of CATFA shown drinking them (by choice).

(Steve and the Howlies, including Dum-dum, drink beer in the pub scene, when they are at liberty to choose their poison. Pggy is never shown drinking at all. But hey, why let a silly thing like consistency get in the way of further bullshit!)

The people writing really think that what makes a character good is just ‘introduce them and then show how great they are by having every other character kiss their ass. Job done!' 

Kind of like a reverse Whorf Effect. They don’t have to actually go to the bother of showing us how she’s great, exactly, they can just tell us she’s great -- because everyone says so! 

What’s laughable is that HA’s really out there saying Pggy doesn’t need external validation. 

If that were the case, she wouldn’t be throwing temper tantrums and shooting at Steve in public when he’s interested in someone else, or defining her whole life around him. And she would never once say anything about getting her male colleagues’ respect because, actually, if she didn’t need their validation, she would never mention it; she would be indifferent to them, (gaining their respect as a motivation would never even cross her mind.) 

In fact, they show us her in every iteration being absolutely desperate for male validation. The classic ‘not like the other girls’ Pick Me. (Tbh I think probably the writers are too old to be aware of this; their politics are still in the 90s). 

Most damning of all is the ‘I know my value’ line. 

Passing over the absolutely rancid ‘I’m a cool girl -- and cool girls’ don’t complain!’ vibes (oppressed people should just shut up about it -- as long as they know they’re oppressed, that’s all that matters. Hmm. Sounds like something a Republican would say.) 

It’s said to stop a male colleague going and speaking up for women’s recognition in the workplace. 

It shows that actually Pggy doesn’t give a shit about feminism. She wants herself, personally, to be respected by the men... but not women generally! 

(Textbook white feminism. Has the glass ceiling shattered for her by powerful men, by virtue of her class, and then as soon as she’s given power to help other women, she instead immediately rebuilds the glass ceiling underneath herself, when it looks like there’s a danger of other women slipping through. They cannot be allowed to do that, since their presence would undermine the idea of her specialness, for being the only woman there.) 

If instead Pggy had insisted on being given recognition, as a woman... that would’ve had a positive effect on all the other female workers in the SSR.