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avengersobsession
#bucky barnes #is steve’s dark mirror (tags via mooserrific)
This is why it’s important that his name is in the title of the movie! All these people who are like, “there wasn’t enough Winter Soldier in a movie titled ‘Winter Soldier’” have COMPLETELY MISSED THE POINT. The title has multiple layers - there’s the obvious textual one, that it’s Bucky’s name in the intelligence community, and there’s the one that echoes back to the Winter Soldier Investigation during Vietnam - Steve is ALSO a Winter Soldier, in that he’s standing up against crimes the US/SHIELD is committing. He’s not the summer soldier and sunshine patriot, but a winter soldier, a man who stands up for what is right even when it’s his own country committing the wrongs.
Then there’s the fact that Steve is “not a perfect soldier but a good man” and therefore has the autonomy to question orders and stand up for what he believes in when he sees what Project Insight is, even before he knows HYDRA is involved. Whereas Bucky has been stripped of memory, personality, emotion, and any instinct towards self-preservation to be nothing but a weapon, a perfect soldier aimed where he’s pointed, a foil to Steve in that the only way you get a perfect unquestioning soldier is to take away everything that makes him a person.
And then obviously there’s the fact that the Steve/Bucky friendship is the EMOTIONAL CORE of the movie. Steve is flailing around, trying to make connections in the future - Natasha doesn’t quite manage to play it right, not until that moment in Sam’s apartment where Steve says now he’d trust her; Peggy flits in and out of lucidity; Steve doesn’t trust Fury and Fury only barely trusts him because who else can he trust; Sharon isn’t who she says she is when Steve meets her (and neither is half of SHIELD). The only person Steve connects with is Sam, and that connection and trust allows him to shore himself up when everything goes to shit with SHIELD and then when he tries to reconnect with Bucky.
Bucky, who also slept in the ice for 70 years, though not without interruption; Bucky, whose only connection comes through orders and dossiers and missions. Bucky, who’d already been tortured and experimented upon, and therefore survived the fall to be left in a state where he could be used by those who found him and turned into Hydra’s new fist. The Winter Soldier is the super soldier Phillips wanted (strong, fast, always follows orders) but Erskine didn’t; if Schmidt is what happens when an imperfect serum is given to an evil man (and the Hulk is what happens when you add gamma rays and give it to a man with breathtaking anger issues), the Winter Soldier is what happens when you take away any semblance of free will or personhood and all that’s left is the weapon.
The weapon, who for the first time hesitates, who remembers, when suddenly called by name.
what-alchemy
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