Captain oh Captain

Although Bucky Barnes and Steve Rogers have been fixtures of each other’s character arcs, their relationship went ignored in Avengers: Endgame, undermining not only a crucial storyline, but Captain America’s entire characterization. Major spoilers lie ahead.

Avengers: Endgame was a movie with a runtime so long, fans called for an intermission. Avengers: Endgame was a movie that contained seemingly thousands of relationships. It carefully made space for Carol to see Nick Fury snapped on a screen, gave us Rocket fighting openly for his family back, and actually let Clint become a murderer to avenge the pain of losing his wife and kids. This movie had time for Shuri and T’Challa to find peace in Wakanda, for Scott to grasp Hope in battle, for Peter to finally get his hug from Mr. Stark, for Wanda to mourn Vision, and for Sam to crackle to life in Steve’s ear. It even had time for Star-Lord to reunite with a Gamora that didn’t know him at all.

And yet nowhere, after, at minimum, two, arguably, four, movies with their relationship at center, was there time for even so much as a second of closure for the battle-tested, inseparable since childhood, through sickness, tragedy, Hydra, and the end of the world, friendship of Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes.

There are really two key parts of Endgame, before the snap is un-snapped and after, two key parts which, based on everything the audience has seen of Steve Rogers, should, if not revolve around, at least contain one Bucky Barnes.

But they don’t.

In Infinity War, it is Bucky that Steve sees disintegrating in front of his eyes, a position that is occupied, contextually and narratively, by the most important person a hero could lose. But for Steve, unlike any of the other heroes who lose their loves, this is not the first time he has watched Bucky slip from between his fingers, it is not even the second, it is not even the third. Time and time, movie after movie, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes battle fiercely for each other, defend each other, protect each other, and always, always, lose each other, and yet it is Peggy that Steve mentions in his therapy group as the loss that haunts him. Peggy who has been dead for almost eight years now. in Steve Rogers’s life. Peggy, who has nothing to do with the snap at all. Peggy, when it is Bucky who blew into the wind.

This repeats, egregiously, as the team suits up to fight Thanos for the first time in the movie, with Steve looking at Peggy’s picture in his compass before telling Nat that “if this doesn’t work, [he] doesn’t know what he’ll do.” But if it does work, it’s Bucky he’ll be getting back. Peggy has nothing to do with this narrative moment, and yet she stands in, where, for every other hero, the person they saw vanish, or whose vanishing they feel the most, is featured.

For instance, when Tony finally returns from space and Steve runs to him, Tony tells him, “I lost the kid.” [Peter]. Rocket yells at Thor to pull it together because he needs to get his family back. [Groot]. Carol and Nat both think about Nick, even though they didn’t see him vanish. Clint talks about nothing except for the loss of his family. But for Steve, Bucky is carefully removed.

Even more glaring though, is the absence of a scene in the second part of the movie, during the final battle. Every. Literally, EVERY character who could possibly reunite with another, does. Steve and Sam, Steve and T’Challa, Rocket and Groot, Tony and Peter, Hope and Scott, Okoye and T’Challa, Tony and Doctor Strange, and yet, there is not a single moment, as all the characters step back from non-existence into existence, where Bucky and Steve find each other. As the original “battle-tested friendship,” this seems like an impossible oversight.

Bucky and Steve have battled together for a century, have been at each other’s sides fight after fight. Not even a thousand years of torture or Steve’s love of his new family prevented that in the other Captain America movies. And yet here, the full circle of Steve seeing Bucky vanish into dust never comes. They don’t find each other, they don’t look for each other, they don’t speak to each other. The movie tells us that narratively Doctor Strange and Tony have more of a relationship than Bucky and Steve.

They may as well be strangers.

All of this seems so against Steve’s DNA, that it shakes the character. Steve Rogers, who once said, “even when I had nothing, I had Bucky,” who fought Tony and dismantled the Avengers for Bucky, who took on every nation of the world to defend his best friend, does not seem like the kind of man who would suddenly forget a century of loyalty. However, the relationship is construed between them, as brothers, as comrades-in-arms, as friends, as more. Bucky was once the only person Steve had in this world, and Steve is now the only person Bucky has.

But nothing, nothing, was as character assassinating to one Steve Rogers as the final moments of the film where Steve decides to abandon his current timeline to dance and marry his one-time crush, Peggy Carter.

It’s fascinating because Steve never refers to Peggy as the “love of his life” in any other movie before Endgame. In fact, Peggy is an undercurrent, but not overly involved with Steve throughout his narrative journey, even in The First Avenger when they are both alive and both the same age. Endgame writer, Christopher Markus, even once referred to Peggy as “a woman Steve once kissed.”

It is instead Bucky who Steve loses, fights for, and saves, over and over again in his arc. And it is Bucky that Steve leaves, callously, at the end of the movie to find Peggy.

This is a strange, selfish, and un-Steve Rogers like thing to do and insults both of the people who are closest to him. Peggy, we know from the Agent Carter TV series and from The Winter Soldier, lived a full life, of which she was proud. She tells Steve that she lived her life and her only regret is that he didn’t get to live his. She had a family (a member of which Steve kisses in Civil War), she builds S.H.I.E.L.D, she is a boss, and a powerful woman. And in ten seconds, Endgame relegates her to “Steve’s wife,” showing her as an object of his affections, merely there to fulfill some strange, domestic fantasy which neither one of them has ever expressed an interest in living out. Peggy has no lines in Endgame, she is there to be peered at and held by Steve. She is not a real character. She has not even had any meaningful character evolution with Steve. She is a woman he kissed once, and now she is his wife. And that’s all she is allowed to be.

It is hard to believe Steve Rogers would want this for a woman he admired as much as Peggy Carter. It is hard to believe he would ignore her expressly telling him she lived a life, a life she could never meaningfully understand losing, even if Steve explains it to her, just to play out a half-baked dream he had a century ago.

And as for Bucky. Where to begin.

Bucky is sad in the last scene of Endgame, which is a confusing choice if the audience is meant to believe that what Steve is doing is just dandy. He seems reluctant, tired, and upset in the ten seconds of interaction they have, he tells Steve he will miss him, he barely makes eye contact. And Steve. Steve doesn’t really seem to care. He doesn’t seem to understand that he’s dooming his best friend to what his own worst nightmare was, being alone in the present without anyone who could understand what that is like. This desire to have shared experience is one of the main reasons Steve is so desperate to get Bucky back in his movies, and all at once, he can’t remember that at all. Perhaps viewers are meant to believe Bucky is no longer alone, and yet, Wakanda aside, where potentially he is friends with Shuri, Steve aside, Bucky has spent no meaningful time, no time at all, with the rest of the remaining team, none that we’ve seen and none even that the storyline set up allows for.

Steve is leaving Bucky alone, alone after Hydra, after being hunted, after dying. And he doesn’t even seem to care.

After four movies devoted to their relationship, this is an insult to the fans and a dismantling of Steve Rogers, who is not a perfect soldier, but a good man. Steve Rogers, who would never do this.

But why?

Why was even a second of closure too much for Endgame to hand over?

The answer lies in Marvel’s inability to process the way the relationship between Steve and Bucky has played out, even as they themselves created it. Bucky’s pain is alien to them. His vulnerability, his arguably feminine role as the damsel, always in distress, as the weapon, an object to be used not heard, as a man whose trauma is so ingrained into his character that it can’t be turned into stoic snark, like Tony’s is, or humor, like Thor’s, and instead sits bright on the surface, are all beyond the scope of understanding. And the notion that it is not a woman who takes him into her arms and heals him, but Steve, drives it to unshowable.

As others have written, there is such a deep intimacy between Steve and Bucky, such a powerful love and an intensity of loss, that if they are together, they must express it, and that expression is taboo. For the fans to like it, is taboo. And the only way to deal with it is to separate them.

In direct contradiction to everything that has come before in Marvel’s own universe, Marvel refuses to give Bucky and Steve the closure they deserve.

the way we’re supposed to understand time travel rules in the mcu, when you go back, you don’t change the present, you create a new timeline, an alternate reality. meaning steve decides to go back to, let’s say, 1945? but everything about his past remains the same. we can assume he’s not a selfish prick, and would decide to go rescue that bucky from hydra. but. that’s not his bucky. it’s a bucky, but that’s not the man he just spent years fighting to get back. and that’s not his peggy. his peggy had an arc of her own, discovered her value, moved on and built a great life for herself. most importantly, that’s not his life. it’s the life of the steve from that timeline, that’s currently stuck in the ice. it’s his past.

and as attached to his past as he’s proven to be, he just spent over ten years in the present. wouldn’t he just be a man out of time once again? the past hasn’t changed, but he has. or at least i’d like to think he has, otherwise we could’ve just skipped to this part at the end of catfa. if the journey made no difference to him, then he just wasted a whole lot of our time. would he really be comfortable talking to 40s bucky, knowing that his bucky is out there somewhere in the present? that he would most likely never find out what kind of life he led? did his relationships with sam and natasha really mean so little to him, that he didn’t think twice about never seeing sam again? did returning to marry peggy really overweigh everything else?

I mean, the Winter Soldier IS a bad boy, all emo with the hair and the amnesia and the metal arm. I think we can all agree that he needs a good spanking. (Just me? No?)

But MCU Bucky Barnes? At least from what we see in the movies, he’s a stand up guy. He enlisted and didn’t get kicked out; he served honorably up until his “death”; he may have been a scoundrel with the ladies but that’s barely suggested, I mean, double dating would not be considered risque for two guys in their early 20s in 1942. His idea of a good time is not a dive bar but a family-friendly technology fair. 

Steve on the other hand, he’s going around with a chip on his shoulder, starting fights he can’t finish, and trying to defraud the military by lying about his identity MORE THAN ONCE in an effort to enlist. His first military engagement happened because he directly disobeyed orders and went AWOL, two court-martial offenses. 

No, it’s not Bucky Barnes, punk. It’s Bucky Barnes, letter man and quarterback with a great attendance record and glowing report cards and is head of the Science Club. But he keeps getting hassled because he’s hanging around with that disreputable Rogers kid who is probably queer and thinks he’s an “artist” and has weird piercings and was last seen ditching class in order stand guard outside of a Planned Parenthood clinic or getting into a fight with the police at an Occupy Movement rally.

Team It Was A Calculated Risk: Steve, Nat, Sam

Team But Boy Are You Bad At Math: Bucky

I cackle literally every time i think about them all talking about decisions they’ve made in the heat of a fight – eg steve’s on va voir, nat vs the chitauri hover motorcycle, sam drop kicking a helicopter – and Bucky’s increasingly appalled face, only to be then confronted by, yeah okay mr. grabbed a motorcycle and headed into oncoming traffic, sure, you get to talk about being bad at math. 

Assuming his two primary sources for Steve Rogers Anecdotes were Howard and Peggy (and I think they were), there’s no way he would have gotten anything approaching an accurate account for who Steve was as a person.

I honestly don’t think Howard knew Steve well.  All his reminiscences are going to be fundamentally colored by the fact that, despite the epiphany he comes to in the S1 finale of Agent Carter (he says something like, ‘he was good before I got my hands on him, wasn’t he?’), Steve’s successes as Captain America are in part his successes because he helped make Captain America.  So all the stories Howard could tell Fury (and, sorry about your horrible childhood, Tony) are going to portray Steve in a very specific way, turning him into the ultimate war hero, the ultimate super solider, the ultimate weapon that Howard helped create.

I doubt Peggy’s telling a lot of truths either but for different reasons.  Or, well.  Peggy doesn’t lie about Steve, but there are certain things she doesn’t say about Steve.  Because everyone knows and mourns Captain America, but she’s one of a small handful of people who actually mourn Steve Rogers.  There are things about him she keeps private and safe for herself.

Like the fondue story?  I am positive that never made it into the global Captain America narrative.  I also don’t think it’s a story Tony or Sharon ever heard.  Howard doesn’t tell it because it’s not a Cap Story, it’s a Steve Story, and Howard’s far more interested in the former than the latter.  Peggy also doesn’t tell it because it’s a Steve Story, and the world isn’t owed any more of Steve Rogers than they already have.  They can keep Captain America, but Steve is hers.

But I honestly believe that if Nick got half a shot of whiskey in Colonel Phillips, he would spend literal hours dragging Steve Rogers through the mud.

“Rogers?  Biggest pain in my ass that ever lived, and that’s before Stark and Erskine got their god damn hands on him.  I’ve had a hemorrhoid or two tried to compete, but nope.  It was Rogers.

“That son of a bitch probably spent six weeks AWOL altogether thinking he knew better than me, the SSR, and all the Allied powers put together.  At the end of it, he’d come into my office, stand at attention, salute.  Then I’d maybe get one ‘yes sir, no sir’ out of him before he started arguing with me about whatever damn fool thing he’d just done.  Which, I shouldn’t have to tell anyone, is not how the god damned United States Army works.  Rogers never did manage to grasp that concept.

“Don’t ask me about vehicle requisitions.  I don’t even know how many cars those idiots wrapped around how many trees.  I finally had to order the motor pool to stop giving him motorcycles at all.  He kept throwing them at the enemy.  That worked for maybe a month.  He started stealing them, and I gave up.

“Once I ran into Barnes just staring at a wall looking whey-faced, terrified, and madder than a hornet.  So I said, “What did that captain of yours do this time?” and he says, “He charged a fucking tank,” and I say, “Of course he did,” and he says, “Dumb bastard wasn’t even wearing his helmet,” and I say, “I don’t understand how you kept that boy alive long enough to con his way into the army in the first place,” and Barnes says, “You’ve got no god-damned idea, sir, you really don’t.”

“You know Carter shot at him once?  I’ve never envied another human being so much in my whole life.

“Steve Rogers gave me most every grey hair on my head, don’t you let her tell you any different.  I had a full head of thick black hair in 1943; by ‘44 I looked like someone dropped a pound of drywall on top of me.  I aged a year for every hour I spent in Rogers’s company.  When I die, if the coroner doesn’t list my cause of death as Steven Grant Rogers, it’ll be god damned perjurous.

“I could have court-martialed that jackass on at least 16 separate occasions, and we wouldn’t have won the war without him.  God rest the son of a bitch.”

….so we have to assume that Fury never talked to Phillips I guess.

Professor Rogers to accompany this Bucky

Captain America

Based on a scene that was deleted from the Avengers film.