to be honest, i love masked men.

Rumlow & Bucky

nobody: bucky’s arm: 👊🏼👊🏼

They didn’t call him the Fist of HYDRA for nothing…

Bucky + The Falcon and the Winter Soldier + Text Posts (½)

Let’s pretend Civil War doesn’t exist and Sam found Bucky in his attic during their search.

Inspired by this lovely Tiktok

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZMeDu7r6a/

Winter Soldier x Brock Rumlow Crossbones

Crossover Skyrim & Dragon Age

Stucky taking a nap

anybody still super annoyed tfatws's season ended with the cheap "deeply traumatized person just needs to have a heart-to-heart with one kind person and they're magically healed" thing instead of bucky acknowledging he needs a lot more help/going back to therapy? i get him not going back to that particular therapist, but i am super uncomfy with the way his story was wrapped up in a way that felt almost scared of confronting the ugly reality of what was done to him (as opposed to what the winter soldier did to others, which is an easier plot point to hammer home... hence why we've already had an entire movie & conflict that hinged on it) and what it might mean to move forward.

This and the Medium link on how the show has bungled Bucky’s story nailed it. The decision to treat Bucky as a perpetrator instead of forming a story about him as a victim undermines some of the key moments in the rest of the story. We’re never allowed to see how Bucky feels about what’s done to him, or how the torture/mind-control/imprisonment shapes his world view. Instead we are given a singular view that the only appropriate feeling he needs to have about his days as Winter Soldier is guilt.

I’ve never thought of Sam’s words as a symptom of toxic masculinity in the script, but that’s so true. And it’s absolutely on point that the script treats Bucky’s whole arc as “you just need to man up and deal with it”, which minimises the messy issues of him actually addressing his PTSD in all its complexity that includes the loss of agency, disablement and prolonged social isolation. Another issue that doesn’t get enough recognition is what the sustained period of fight or flight response does to a person. CATWS actually mentioned it in a passing comment during Sam’s sessions: one of the veterans talked about crashing her car to avoid a plastic bag because she thought it was a bomb. Bucky has been living in that state for 70 years, and people don’t just drop back into normal city life. Instead his PTSD is boiled down to guilt that has an easy fix in “being of service”, which is again simplified into telling the family the Winter Soldier murdered their loved one.

What the script doesn’t address is - is this actually a service to the family? Would it be kinder for the family to live with the lie that their parents had died in a car accident, than to relive the grief and shock with the added anger of knowing they were murdered? Does it actually bring any closure to know that the murderer is allowed to roam free and is back working for the government? Do grieving families actually care whether he had a choice or not? I would say Tony’s reaction would be representative of a substantial number of people. I’m not even going to talk about how this method also forces Bucky to relive his own trauma and he’s doing all this without any support or monitoring of his mental health.

And finally that brings me to the point that really bugs me about the script (and sorry I keep harping on about it). Isaiah’s story has strong parallels with Bucky’s - non-consent for being a test subject, false imprisonment, illegal experimentation, torture, identity loss. To paint Bucky as someone who “just needs to man up” undermines Isaiah’s entire story.

I am just so frustrated that they kept treating Bucky as if his past were that of a violent alcoholic and not a tortured POW. Bucky acknowledging that he didn’t have a choice is the first step in facing his past not the resolution of his trauma. It’s, in fact, the ROOT of his trauma. He plays his admission as a profound catharsis, which it is, but it’s criminal that by the end of TFATWS Bucky is the only one (besides, canonically, Steve) who has internalized this. 

Everyone, including Sam, insisting that he needs to make amends and face his victims is acting as if he had even a shred of agency for the past 70 years. Everyone acting as if he is about to slip into the Winter Soldier is acting as if he doesn’t have any agency now. 

It’s normal for Bucky to feel the guilt and the remorse and the terror first, before he accepts that he was powerless. It’s normal for Bucky to want his victims to have closure (though whether his victims WANT this kind of closure is a whole other issue, no way would a sensible therapist ever encourage a patient to do this in person and without the other party’s explicit consent). It’s not normal for Bucky to be told to “do the work” when what Bucky needs is to be allowed to see himself as a victim too. 

Something didn’t sit quite right with me about the conclusion of Bucky’s emotional arc in TFATWS... these comments get to the heart of the problem for me.

Great tags from the poster above:

commission I made at Moscow Comic-Con

Bucky Barnes for @ozzymandius

“You… saved me. After trying to kill me three hours ago?”

“I’ve grown a lot as a person since then.”

Stucky Avengers  +  Cards Against Humanity