posting an old rhodeysam meta for @redwingsupportgroup in re to my latest ask. wrote this a few years ago but iāve never seen anyone talk about it so here!!
listening to sam talking to steve about losing riley drew parallels for me about rhodeyās accident in civil war.
sam tells steve that he and riley were pararescue, meaning both of them had falcon suits and took on falconās duties during their tours. when he tells steve that someone shot riley out of the sky, he claims āthere was nothing i could do about it. itās like i was up there just to watch.ā the amount of pain sam wouldāve harvested due to losing riley and not being able to do anything about it is momentous. he wouldāve sat on that shit for years, though about it for days on end. losing his best friend because he wasnāt able to save him? sam, a pararescue, not being able to do the one thing he was put in the field to do; rescue. it would tear him up completely.
marvel do a good job of ignoring samās possible ptsd from the war/losing riley other than mentioning his work in a va support group briefly in captain america: the winter soldier. other than that, correct me if iām wrong, we donāt really see much of it. sam willingly joins the avengers because ācaptain america needs my helpā, but the idea of his ptsd resurfacing is completely untouched. itās not normalā sam wouldnāt have been able to go back into it so easily and lightly like he did. there would be moments off camera where his ptsd plays on him, where does missions like in tws/iw and these thoughts about his tours come back to him. he suffers. he does.
and rhodeyās accident in civil war would be one of them. that beam from vision was meant for sam, not rhodey. vision meant to hit him, not rhodey, yet rhodey took the fall because samās survival instinct kicked in. as rhodey falls from the sky and sam flies to try and save him, in his mindā itās losing riley all over again. of course this close of a parallel would trigger samās ptsd and the reoccurring event would play on his mind. he tries so desperately to save rhodey as he falls because he couldnāt save riley when he fell. sam wasnāt prepared to lose another person he called a friend, despite the stupid feud in civil war, and it hit him hard.
ultimately when rhodey is injured, the civil war is stopped immediately, and sam even goes to check that heās okay. if the writers remotely cared about him... theyād have let him stay with tony to see if he was okay. because it meant something to sam in that moment of panic. it meant something because it hit hard with him that yet someone else was falling from the sky and he couldnāt do anything to save him. the line āitās like i was up there just to watchā comes into play so poignantly and perfectly once againā because ultimately? sam does watch riley fall to his death. he watches rhodey fall to paralysation. he canāt do anything about either of the situations.
and this entire situation playing out once again for sam is probably one of the most painful parallels marvel has indirectly pulled. yet sam continues to fight. he continues on to infinity war, his friendship with rhodey mends itself because it never was samās fault in the first place. sam and rhodey could easily have one of the best friendships in the mcu but arenāt given the screentime or the time of day by the writers. thereās unspoken quips from the writers in lines like āthe hotels werenāt exactly five starā, the shared look between sam and rhodey in infinity war. they could be THAT duo, rid of toxic masculinity and full of care and love for one another. but marvel stay silent
