i can’t stop thinking about the look on steve’s face as he watches tony process the footage of december 16, 1991.
he looks briefly at the screen, but isn’t at all surprised by what he sees, and before long he turns to look at tony, a little trepidatious, but strangely cold and considering, like i know what this is, i know what it will do to you, i want to see how you’ll respond.
and then tony sees the footage, watches it happen – bucky yanking howard’s head up by the hair, howard calling bucky by name, bucky rewarding him with two swift blows to the face, and howard falling, limp, to the ground; bucky circling slowly to maria’s side of the car, reaching out with his flesh hand, training his eyes coldly on something in the distance as he chokes the life out of her.
tony is heartbroken, he’s betrayed, and steve’s expecting that; when tony lunges for bucky, steve lunges, too, catching him before he can get any closer. and i think tony picks up on how quick steve’s reaction is, too quick even for a supersoldier, because he redirects his attention to steve then and asks him in this broken voice, did you know?
steve tries to sidestep the question at first – i didn’t know it was him – but tony’s too smart for that. don’t bullshit me, rogers! did you know?
and there’s this tense pause, because tony knows, we all know, what steve will say. he looks at tony and he’s totally shattered, his voice tiny and cracked in two as he finally says the word we all saw coming, but dreaded to hear.
yes.
this, finally, is steve’s dark side. it’s no angry, violent thing; it’s small and tender and sad. it’s the hole gauged out of him from too many years spent alone, and it’s all the terrible things he’d do – all the lies he’d tell, all the codes he’d break, all the people he’d hurt – to protect the one person who remembers what he was like when he was whole.
The best example of the gulf between Nat and Steve that neither of them see is that Steve would absolutely not read Nat’s file that she shared with the world post-SHIELD, to prove that his friendship with her, and Nat would absolutely assume that Steve had read her file, to prove his friendship with her.
And both of them would assume that the other understood exactly the right choice and acted accordingly, and never even think to discuss it.
Because friendship.
I just really love the idea a lot that Steve and Nat have such wildly differing ideas of how to show the other person they trust them and that these differences are based entirely in the way their relationship turns in CATWS.
there’s something so fantastic to me in the idea that Steve, who spends half the movie distrusting Nat because she’s not telling him everything, deciding that he’s fine not knowing everything because she’s earned his trust, and that Nat, who has spent the whole movie showing him the best of herself, decides that she can trust that he can see the worst of her and like her anyway.
lemme talk about how much i love the Winter Soldier theme again.
first: i think its basically what Buckys head sounds like. screaming, metallic sounds. that bit in the beginning – ever been somewhere dead silent and get that loud hum in your ears? it sounds like that to me. its a great way to represent how completely alone and isolated he is. the radio-static with the distorted talking, maybe its memories being completely distorted to the point he cant tell what they’re saying.
BUT this is the gorgeous part of it:
so, its been theorized that the metallic sounding scream is actually Bucky screaming as he falls from the train, but slowed down and stretched out with heavy filtering.
lemme tell you why thats got to be true. first, how beyond perfect?? its taking something thats *Bucky*, something he did while he was still himself. a very human sound, full of fear and shit. its taking that -just like Bucky- and turning it into something inhuman and metallic.
also, that even though he’s been turned into a cold, calculating killing machine, the machine is still screaming.
when you get your first look at Bucky, when he pulls the goggles off, what do you hear? the scream. you see his face a bit on the rooftop scene, but good enough as to tell its Bucky. but there we get a closeup of his eyes, and its sort of like the last time we saw him and the first since then are being tied together.
and ok, holy shit, i tried listening to it on my headphones, closed my eyes to focus…and had to open them because its just such a fucking terrifying song i got freaked xD
but think about that. you’re not suppose to know its Bucky yet. you’re suppose to be afraid of this dude, and the music seriously adds to that. but, in reality, its not the Winter Soldier thats scary, its what was done to him. the thing thats freaking you out is his terrified screams
now, ok, maybe its not that i could be wrong.
…except im not.
listen, listen! play the song. listen very carefully at the tail end of the first scream. you can hear Steve yell “Bucky!”.
and what is so bleeding brilliant is that, even though its heavily filtered too, its much less filtered than the rest. its the only thing that sounds remotely organic and human in the whole thing. basically, the one thing still human in Buckys mind is Steve.
on that note: does anyone think they know what the static/radio sounding voices are saying? i need fresh ears
anyways here the song xD (the thing im sure is Steve is about 0:25 seconds in. verrry faint gotta turn that bitch up)
Update
oh my god.
all this time, i never thought of the most obvious thing: the most distorted, unrecognizable words in Buckys mind…would be his.
@kaleenjackson figured it out. the first bit of speech around 1:20, listen a few times, and im pretty sure the words will click too “im with you till the end of the line”
of course thats in his head, if this is Bucky’s mind, and we know he recognizes it when Steve says it….what if he’s spent years trying to figure out what its saying, and then Steve says it and it clicks. The Russo’s said in the beginning of CW he doesn’t remember much, what if he doesn’t remember saying it, he realizes thats what the words he’d been trying to figure out have been.
look at his reaction with this in mind: distorted words in his head that are messed up and he cant understand what therye saying, probably getting more distorted as time went on, but always there. he knows its this on, huge important thing that he’s been trying to figure out for decades…and Steve just says it, and he’s realizing thats what the words in his head have been
this guy knows what they mean. Bucky might not remember saying them, but its this one, deep personal thing he’s been able to hold onto but never understand. if this guy knows them, he has to be telling the truth.
ily @kaleenjackson, i honestly do. this is just fantastic. i need to lay down ive worn myself out. and should go explain to my roommate why she just heard robot screaming and a bunch other terrifying shit and then ‘HOLY FUCK!!!! HO. LY. FUCK”
also on that note, i think the second bit of speech is “Sargent James Barnes”
Because there’s a human element to the Winter Soldier that gets revealed toward the end of the film, the Winter Soldier starts off unrelenting and brutal and mechanized and almost Terminator like but the difference between The Winter Soldier and Terminator is that somewhere behind the wires and all the mechanization is a character that we know and we care about and that more importantly, Cap knows about and it’s very painful to him.
So one of the things I ended up doing with the Winter Soldier was I spent literally ten days just on production with vocals because I wanted to get the sensation of a human trapped inside machinery. SoI did a lot of vocal recordings and then processed the living hell out of them to get these tortured, time-stretched human cries of someone who has been so processed that it’s become mechanized at the same time but you can still hear the human in there.
(The images in this should be collapsed to begin with because, well, one of them is a plate of raw meat that Steve is presumably eating for breakfast. The last image is a gif. Contains discussion of illness, treatments, ableism and eugenics. I should point out first that I don’t have any of these conditions other than asthma.)
So many fics focus only on skinny Steve’s asthma and portray him as being as minimally disabled as possible. Let’s just remember that according to all the various sources (the Disneyland poster, the form Steve hands in to enlist in the film) that Steve:
Had astigmatism – so he’d’ve had poor eye sight. I’ve also seen sources that say Steve is colour blind although I couldn’t find them again for writing this or to check what kind of colour blind Steve could be – it could be anything from red-green colour blindness to trichromatic colour blindness, but I’m not sure.
Had scoliosis – this is where the spine bends in a way that isn’t part of the typical S-shaped curve, so his spine would’ve bent to the side. It’s not a life threatening condition but it can be quite noticeable and I’ve not seen a single fic that’s taken it into account.
Was partially deaf. Again, I’ve never read a fic that mentions anyone speaking up for Steve to hear.
Had arrhythmia, an irregular heartbeat; he also had heart palpitations, high blood pressure and the more generic hearttrouble. I’ve also seen something saying he had angina, chest pain caused by restricted blood supply to the heart muscles.
He also had rheumatic fever at some point which causes red ring-like rashes on the limbs and can affect the brain, joints and heart – which given Steve already had heart problems is not a good thing. It affects older children up to the mid teens. It is treated with aspirin – which is hard on the stomach and unfortunately for little Steve, he also has:
Stomach ulcers. These are extremely painful and can be caused or made worse by drugs like aspirin. Stomach ulcers can be very dangerous if complications arise.
Another stomach complication Steve had was pernicious anaemia, which until the 20s was basically a death sentence. It’s a condition where an enzyme necessary to absorb vitamin B12 is not produced and the patient becomes progressively more anaemic until they suffer complications such as neurological damage or simply die (hence the word “pernicious”). Until 1928 the only treatment was to drink copious quantities of the juice from raw liver (more than a pint a day) or eat half a pound of raw liver a day, which contains the enzyme (cooking would destroy the enzyme). From ‘28, Steve was presumably relieved to hear, a liver extract was produced so that the quantity of liver juice one had to drink was 50x less and was also cheaper. The other symptoms were pretty much the same as other kinds of anaemia. What do you mean you aren’t hungry?
Steve also had flat feet (less serious but with everything else this kid isn’t running anywhere)
He had scarlet fever as a child, which causes a sore throat, bright red rash, and can kill – especially as it can cause heart complications.
Steve’s mother was diabetic- his admission form states that he has a parent or sibling with diabetes, and since it’s automatic disqualification from the army and he has no siblings, that means it must be his mother (unless you don’t think Steve’s dad served in the army at all and he’s just lying to serve with Bucky.) Steve has a higher risk for diabetes. This in itself isn’t going to limit him at this stage in the proceedings, but it doesn’t make him popular with eugenicists either.
Generally his respiratory system is struggling – he gets sinusitis and frequent colds to go along with his…
Asthma. Asthma can be pretty dangerous especially for someone with a heart condition, since symptoms of a severe attack can include arrhythmia. In the 1930s, inhalers were difficult for one person to use (especially if that one person was having an asthma attack), but asthma cigarettes were easily available, considerably cheaper, and hallucinogenic. They did work to a degree, but were nothing compared to today’s relievers. There were also dry powder inhalers, and if you could get hold of one, atomizers and electronic nebulizers for delivering medication. Beyond this, in the 30s, 40s and 50s, asthma was considered a psychosomatic condition – an imagined product of mental illness due to the child crying inside the sufferer during an attack – so talking therapy was used as treatment as well. Steve would’ve been considered both physically frail and mentally ill because of his asthma.
Really, it isn’t a surprise that to go with this he has “nervous trouble“ and suffers from fatigue – hell, it’s tiring just to be Steve. It’s also no wonder that he’s so small, given that his body was under so much stress whilst he was growing.
So what does this all mean for little Steve? Pre-serum Steve is chronically ill from birth or childhood, probably due to complications in birth or his earlier illnesses (there seem to be a lot of things happening in his respiratory system and stomach), and some of which is evidence of what at the time would be considered poor genetics.
People often associate eugenics with the Nazis, but its real home is rooted in the 20th century USA, and it was in full swing in the 20s and 30s. Many German eugenics research programs received their finding from the US before the war. Although as a white man living in New York Steve would’ve been safe from forcible sterilisation or euthanasia, public sentiment was overwhelmingly supportive of casting anyone framed as a dependent on the state or a fault in the gene pool cast out.
Eugenics was legal and mandated, and whilst Steve was growing up, thousands of impoverished women and state dependent children, especially women of colour and mentally ill women were forcibly sterilised by the state, and many people living in mental institutions or care homes were allowed to die of neglect.
Ironically, Captain America and the superserum are essentially an experiment in eugenics, which really reflects just how widespread this attitude was in the 40s. I’m analysing Steve for purposes of fic writing and not any genuine critical analysis here, but there’s no getting away from it: they put a chronically ill, disabled man in, and they get a genetically engineered super-soldier out.
Steve actually surviving both rheumatic and scarlet fever with asthma, heart problems and no antibiotics is pretty much a miracle in itself at this stage, and I guess we should all be grateful that Sarah Rogers was a nurse, because things like half decent atomizers to treat asthma were expensive and hard to obtain.
When Bucky is talking about Steve having nothing to prove, he’s not just talking about a small guy who is too sickly to join the army – he’s talking about someone who would’ve been considered an invalid and unworthy among his peers and made to feel like a dependent all of his life. Steve has to prove everything to everyone except Bucky, the only person who values Steve for himself and not against criteria of fitness or health, and most of all he needs to prove to himself that the things he’s internalised about himself aren’t true.
tl;dr: Basically, it’s time to start portraying Steve accurately in fic and stop glossing over aspects of his health that aren’t as fun to write as an asthma attack.
JUST NOTICED LAST NIGHT THAT BUCKY WAS ALSO ON A DRIP IN THE ENTIRE CHAIR SCENE
I know it’s a fucked up scene, I do, but that to me just is nOPE. What the fuck are they putting into his system on top of the mind wiping and the physical abuse and the conditioning.
wait, what?
THE TUBE ON THE BACK OF HIS RIGHT HAND, IS THAT A DRIP?
Dr. Cyan calling in here, and yes, that is absolutely a peripheral IV cannula on his right hand. Watching the scene carefully you can see the IV stand on his right, with two infusion bags attached (sorry for the crappy images, maybe someone can grab a better screenshot if they have the DVD):
If you watch frame by frame, you can see that Bucky pops the connection tube off when he attacks the med tech; it dangles freely from the IV bag when the guards move to point their guns at him. In real life he’d probably have torn the cannula out of his hand entirely; it happens all the time with little old ladies in my ER so I was disappointed the directors didn’t draw on that particular body horror/’ouch’-factor here.
The infusion bags appear to be one 1,000 mL isotonic saline or D5W/D5NS (dextrose/glucose in a saline solution) for tissue rehydration, and one 500 mL isotonic saline, most likely a diluent for injectable/parenteral drug administration:
Which drug? Well, it could be any HYDRA concoction, but I’d put my money on the tried-and-true fallback of some benzodiazepine. BZDs/derivatives are anxiolytic (anxiety-reducing), hypnotic (sedative/sleep-inducing), anticonvulsant (good for when you’re electrocuting someone’s brain), amnestic (affecting memory), and myorelaxant (muscle-relaxing), a nice cocktail for working with the Winter Soldier – and hey! paradoxical BZD reactions include aggression and violence (such as attacking attending medical staff), and it may also cause anterograde amnesia as well as internalised feelings of turmoil, anxiety, depression, and loss of the ability to experience and/or express feelings. Plus, withdrawal can cause depression, depersonalisation, derealisation, hypersensitivity, psychosis, and suicidal ideation – sounds like a lot of Bucky-in-from-the-cold fanfics, am I right?
Seriously, writing this, I’m wondering where the withdrawal!Bucky fanfics are – the fics I’ve read all focus on his mental issues, but what about the physiological ones? I’d really like to read a fic about Bucky coming off whatever HYDRA pumped him full of – now that’d make for some neat hurt/comfort (and a lot of curling up on Steve’s bathroom floor shaking and puking his guts out).
(When I get my hands on a HD copy of the movie I’ll have a look at the rest of the medical setup in that scene. I’m especially interested in the screens behind the chair – maybe some more medical meta to be explored? Please send any screenshots my way if you have them!)
@whatis2plus2 for when you get back to Project Vesna – important chair stuff
you should totally rewatch the first movie and pay close attention to what Steve’s face does. Or doesn’t do. Because Steve is not a puppy dog, Steve does not wear his heart on his sleeve, Steve is still and steady and tries so very hard not to be easy to read because Steve’s life is pain he cannot share for fear of having his personhood literally revoked. Steve is stand-offish. Steve sees that you’re angry with him and flatly makes light of what he’s doing that’s pissing you off. Steve will give one-word answers to shut you down. Steve doesn’t meet your eyes until he’s finished speaking. Steve rarely smiles and when he does, they’re rarely bright–they’re small and mostly in the crinkle of his eyes and god forbid you make him smile when you’re arguing with him because then they’re sharp and bitter just like his laughter.
Steve Rogers starts fights. Steve Rogers lies to your face. Steve Rogers stands as straight as he can with his crooked spine because he refuses to let you assume he can’t. Steve Rogers is not a golden retriever, he is a sickly, pissy little cat who will bite the shit out of you for trying to pet him.
if sam wilson doesn’t become captain america, like he so rightfully deserves, we riot.
people are saying Bucky and as much as i love Bucky, two things:
bucky doesn’t want it. he’s been at war physically and with himself for literally years. he doesn’t want to fight anymore. he just wants to rest and start healing and start finding himself again without getting interrupted by villains and fighting and saving the world. sam has shown numerous times that not only is he almost exactly like steve (“but slower”) and has the same morals, but he does not let anyone tell him what to do and he fights because he wants to help people and protect them, and he wants to fight for his causes. not too independent that he’s a vigilante but not too much that he’s completely obedient to anyone else. he’d be the perfect cap. he’s ready, he’s deserving, and he wants it unlike Bucky.
some people just want bucky instead of sam bc they don’t want captain America to go to a black man and that’s just the tea ok
i know we all love the fics and headcanons where bucky is gentle with steve and takes special care not to be too rough or hurt him
but come on
bucky doesn’t hold back from pulling him into his side or into a hug that leaves steve surprised at its intensity
bucky is the only person in the world who saw how strong steve was before the serum and the only one who didn’t treat him like he was frail and weak
I’ve always loved the rag doll shake in the first gif, but have you guys noticed Bucky hook his chin over Steve’s shoulder and just … settle on in to the hug?
I never noticed and now I’m obsessed. It even looks like he’s throwing Steve backwards a bit with the force of the hug. I love how even though they’ve been friends forever Steve is always shocked by how forceful Bucky is with affection. Excuse me, I’m gonna stare at this gif forever now.
OMG I’ve never noticed. That’s adorable. Bucky just plops himself against Steve, almost like he’s sagging against him for a second. Now I just keep seeing that back pat as Steve’s way of going, “It’s alright, you big lug.” Cuz I’m not seeing anything that could note Bucky doing the same thing with either of his hands. Seems more like he’s full-on clinging and Steve’s just like Bucky omg.
Bucky is 100% clinging in that hug. Bucky was shipping out, he knew what his chances of survival were. As far as he knew, this was going to be the last moment he ever saw his best friend. Steve’s being all stoic ‘you’ll be fine you big lug, go dancing with the ladies, of course you’re coming back’ either because of denial or just because he has to believe it, or needs Bucky to believe it, but Bucky…Bucky is leaving home, leaving Steve, know that if he dies chances are his body will never be recovered back to the States and that Steve will never know where his last resting place is, and he’ll have been the last in a string of people to ‘abandon’ Steve.
Bucky is clinging like a monkey
I have to ask only one thing; What a hell Marvel thinks?!
the1timetraveller 