About the Number of Feelings Predicted TBH

Keeping my Black Widow reactions, no matter how vague, sequestered over here to help people avoid spoilers

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Is there a universally accepted idea of how old Natasha was when Budapest happened?

I haven't found one, and I can't parse one out.

I was hoping an answer might show up on commentary but the blu-ray doesn't have commentary. So I assume that if we get that information, it will be in the Art of the Movie book, which BN.com indicates comes out in August of 2022.

That said, here is some pointless and unfounded math:

Natasha's ID in the openings give her a birthday of December 3, 1983. Accepting that as accurate for now (which means believing SHIELD had the wrong birthday for her, which is... hilarious and great, tbh), and assuming release dates of non-flashback-movies are accurate in-universe, that means she was 26 in Iron Man 2. Budapest was Nat proving her loyalty to SHIELD; by IM2 she's seen as loyal enough that she's in Fury's inner circle.

Coming at it in the other direction, while we don't have a date for her Red Room "graduation," the opening credits do give us more of a sense of Nat aging. We know how she looks at eleven (like Ever Anderson); we see teen Widows who look very clearly younger than Nat did in the Ultron flashbacks, when she was getting her hysterectomy.

(Two things I should note here: I assume the red-haired girl with a gun in the BW credits is Nat, but we don't actually know that; for the sake of argument, it could just be a different Widow. And due to Wanda's magic, it's very possible that Scarlett-As-Nat is how Natasha remembers herself but she actually looks like Ever Anderson or the red-haired girl in the credits.)

From a different angle: Young Antonia was played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who was born in 2010, so when it filmed she was presumably about 9 or 10, so say Toni was that age. But then we'd need to math to get to adult Antonia, who is played by Olga Kurylenko, who was born in 1979, which means she would have been about 40 when it filmed, which is older than Scarlett when we know that Nat was much older than Antonia, so that helps us literally not at all. But for math purposes, it's important to note.

Also, I know nothing about costuming, but I didn't notice anything in the Budapest outfits that help us place it in a specific year.

We also know that the timeline is murky, because- again, if we accept all on-screen film canon as equally accurate canon- Nat says in Avengers she was making a name for herself as a mercenary before Clint was sent to kill her and saved her instead, but in Black Widow she says that killing Dreykov was her final act of separating from the Red Room. Nat's loyalty to SHIELD would be less suspicious the farther out she is from defecting, but we don't know if that's measured from when she first left the Red Room or when she tried to take out Dreykov.

(Full context here is also important because we know that after Nat's defection is when Dreykov started using Melina's techniques on the other Widows; I had been assuming that was right at Budapest, and Toni was the first attempt, but could it possibly have been earlier and Toni only got the implant after Dreykov decided her disfigured body was fundamentally broken? There's no good answer here but there are a LOT of intriguingly bad ones.)

So IF we accept all of those givens, which I am not fully ready to do but for the sake of argument will do anyway, I think Budapest had to happen sometime between 2002 and 2009, and I think I would place it around 2007, but I am not particularly confident in that assessment and am quite happy to be proven wrong.

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I liked getting to see more of Nat's "just for her, not trying to project an image for others" approach to clothing. We got it in Endgame too, but the original implication there was that she cared less about how she looked Post-Snap. BW shows us that it was already a go-to style for her. Of course she still loves a leather jacket, but the overall look is less skin tight & polished, not so obviously gendered, more comfy & practical. Which also connects closer to her tomboyish look as a kid.

One of the things I like most about this movie is that it DOES recontextualize Nat in IW/EG so much. Fitted but comfortable clothing isn't her disregarding standards like Endgame wanted us to think; it's what she likes.

Actually, that's true going all the way back, really. We can reevaluate some of her earlier non-mission outfits, like the leather jacket outfit when she first meets Steve on the helicarrier in Avengers or her on-the-run look in Winter Soldier. Throughout her first seven movies, we've seen Nat putting on different outfits and different roles as the situation demands. What Black Widow does is give us a better sense of which of those were closer to performance and which were Nat as Nat. She likes keeping her hair out of her face; she likes leather jackets and hoodies, she likes form-fitting but comfortable. We know what's best for when she's working- when she has to be undercover, or she has to be in her suit- but now we have enough context that we're not just seeing her choices now, we're realizing her choices in retrospect, the ways she let her self shine through the layers of costuming, and I really kind of love that.

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I'm curious why they didn't use the de-aging technique on Natasha for the flashback to Budapest. Or at least it didn't look like it to me. It had to be close to a decade ago, when she would've been in her baby-faced early 20s. Maybe it was such a short moment they didn't see the point? I think it would've been worth it, because it kind of confuses the timeline to see her looking the same.

I agree, especially considering they apparently did it for Ross so it's not like the technology wasn't in play, but at the same time I'm not sure how that would work continuity-wise with the Age of Ultron flashback, which was supposed to be a few years younger than here but very much looked like Scarlett in a bad wig.

Like right now, our extremely rough timeline is:

DECEMBER 1983 OR SOMETIME IN 1984 - Nat is born

SOMETIME IN 1994 - Nat is Ever Anderson circa 2019

SOMETIME IN THE EARLY 2000S - Nat is 2013 Scarlett Johansson in a wig with bangs but no accent.

SOMETIME IN THE SLIGHTLY LATER EARLY 2000S, WHICH IS OUR POINT OF INTEREST- Nat is 2019 Scarlett Johansson in a wig with no bangs and a Russian accent

2010 THROUGH 2018 - Nat is Scarlett Johansson filmed the previous year

2023 - Nat is Scarlett Johansson in 2018, five years older than she was in Infinity War but actually looking younger with the red braid instead of the blonde wig

2016 - Nat is Scarlett Johansson in 2019, including moments just after or just before she was Scarlett Johansson in 2015 or 2017

So I don't know how they could have made this work logistically. I mean, the answer to how they create a Unified Timeline of Natasha would have been "make this movie seven years ago" or "actually use effects in Age of Ultron," but since they didn't do that, I feel like they went with the best of all bad options.

[handypolymath]

Alexei’s career comeback was over the moment he picked up the stuffy instead of the gun.

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Love that it's now 100% confirmed canon that Natasha spends her free time watching over the top Cold War era spy fiction/techno-thriller movies like James Bond and WarGames, and she's a gleeful little geek that gets a kick out of quoting the dialogue.

I love so much that we spent years assuming Nat would mock the shitty spycraft in movies, but actually she's enthralled every time. Like, a five-year-old seeing Frozen? That's Natasha any time these movies are on the screen. Yes she's seen them a million times, but when your entire life is dangerous spy hijinks it must be so nice to see stuff that you do in a context where no one you love is in danger at any time.

Also the thing that's so nice about her being a geek is that the movies have tried so hard to make us think she's a badass. And, I mean, she is totally a badass! But "Do you want to play a game?" could have been a one-off thing, a way to tease Steve and integrate Steve and make her own fun while on the run. Instead it's become a running part of her personality, which takes how the Red Room used popular media as indoctrination and turns it into something she can relax with and make into something that's her own.

Like I feel at this point if we found out that Clint used to call Nat every week after Dog Cops finished airing to dissect the plot, it would not feel out of character, and that is beautiful.

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Consider Natasha helping Steve break their friends out of the Raft, and seeing the way Wanda was restrained and treated like a weapon more than a human, after having just dealt with all this renewed Red Room trauma.

Gee, thanks, Satan.

I love that we have official canon confirmation that Nat was part of the Raft breakout (although, honestly, Civil War not making that clear from the get-go was a fucking PROBLEM but I digress), but like, honestly? Let's just go through the list of pain that we now have context for.

Let's start with the whole group. Assuming they have no more information than the audience, they have no idea where Nat is.

--Oh no. They probably don't even know what side she's on, right? She helped Steve escape with Bucky but the only people who saw that were Steve and Bucky, and then the people on Team IM, who think she betrayed them. The people she put herself out there for don't even know she put herself out there for them.

And now they're in extrajudicial sea prison and- if I'm remembering the third act of CW correctly, which to be fair I may not be because I usually quit after act 2, and I assume someone will correct me if I'm wrong- while they wonder about whether Steve might come save them, no one even considers Nat would. Because they think she was on the other side? Because they think she wouldn't care? Because they know she's a regular human being and that makes it damn hard to take down governments? Because they assume she'd keep her circle small? Like every single possible reason behind that assumption is a world of pain directly contradicted by the events of BW, which they will never know about. Which hurts.

And at the beginning of the movie, she didn't seem to want to break them out! Like, she kept insisting she was better without a team. Obviously, she was denying her emotional attachments to make things hurt less- and obviously she has a lot of baggage around what it means to be a team and what it means to be family and whether any of them would look for her- but she was in fact actually kind of being the person they thought she was. Like it sucks when people have a bad view of you but it sucks in an entirely different way when their negative view of you is based in reality. It's a brutally harsh look in the mirror.

(And I think this is where the events of BW most change Natasha; I think that any belief she might have had that if she could get out of situations anyone could if they really want to got a rude awakening when it turned out her escape from the Red Room directly led to the other women not being able to, and I think that's shock to her system that she desperately needed. This movie more than anything showed me some of Nat's flaws and I love it for that.)

And then you have to consider that, at least 2 weeks before this (because the jet scene was 2 weeks after the Red Room takedown), she broke Alexei out of the gulag. Like, she did what she had to to take the Red Room down, there's absolutely no faulting her for that, but imagine seeing all your friends stuck in high-security prison and knowing that you had the capacity to break people out of those, in fact did it less than a month ago, but left them there. Again, this is not me saying that she did the wrong thing, but imagine the guilt on her end!

We have Wanda, who's about Yelena's age, the only woman on the Raft, being forcibly restrained far more than any of the men are- how does that not conjure up memories? And then on the other hand it's Wanda, who has the ability to manipulate memories and impulses, who is basically the organic version of what Dreykov did! AND she's the one who brought back Red Room memories Nat clearly didn't want to deal with during Ultron and clearly hadn't processed by this point! How fucking confused must Nat's feelings about Wanda be at this point? She's simultaneously what Nat wants to protect and what Nat wants to protect from, and she's sitting there immobilized in prison in a fucking straightjacket.

And then we have Clint and Scott, which, OKAY. I was talking to @sidewaystime about which Avengers Alexei and Melina mirror (it was an EXCELLENT conversation, it gave me a lot of feelings, but I digress), and she pointed out that Alexei considered himself trapped during the assignment with Nat and Yelena and was complaining about how terrible it was even after (we assume) over a decade in a literal Russian gulag, while we know that Steve and Nat rescued Wanda and Sam but Scott and Clint were both willing to stay behind and deal with the government because they'd rather risk jail than not see their kids again. Like repeatedly through the MCU, Clint and Scott explicitly and repeatedly choose family over everything, immediately after Nat had to confront the people who threw her and Yelena away two decades ago and also had to confront the fact that she essentially did the same thing to Yelena. And here's Scott and Clint representing exactly what she wishes had been done to her, and/or that she'd done!

And all of this, all of this, is stuff none of them know. Given that in Endgame both Steve and Clint assert her only family was the Avengers, she never let them know the foundation of her world had been this shaken and they were all embodying parts of that to her! And she was presumably just putting those feelings in the Feelings Box where we work very hard to pretend they don't exist, while she's piloting a plane and waiting for a group of superheroes to re-board it from the prison, which has to bring back feelings from both Yelena holding the plane while she gets Alexei and from when she was fucking ten years old flying to Cuba with her dad surrogate on the wing with a gun and her mom surrogate bleeding out.

Even Sam, who probably prompts the least trauma for Nat (his closest mirror is Yelena, not Alexei or Melina) and who has the best idea of how to interact with other human beings, who would probably be respectful of triggers, has no idea she even has these triggers! So it's not like anyone can protect her, because she's not giving them the necessary information to do so and so it's all just ENDLESS MINEFIELDS.

Literally everything from the end of Civil War hurts more now!

Just imagine if any of that had been intentional.

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What do you think about the way Nat flinched away from Drekov when she was under the pheromone lock? On one hand we know she was actively playing him that entire time…but on the other, her reaction seems SO visceral and SO genuine…like before she even registered, she curled her entire body in on herself and her face just crumpled…. that it really seemed like it was genuine.

Do you think it was part of her act or do you think it was real?

I go back and forth on this.

My short answer is "Yes." My long answer under the cut.

On the one hand, it felt to me like she was almost over-playing it; we haven't gotten to see Natasha's vulnerability much in the MCU, but when we do, it's usually muted, and careful, and only letting a little bit out. To me it felt like it shouldn't have worked to trick Dreykov, who knew her well enough to see her through the mesh mask but was willing to accept this level of, essentially, weakness, as something Natasha would ever fall back to.

Then I came back to how so much of this story is forcing Nat into a position where she essentially regresses to who she was before she built up her defenses; seeing Dreykov alive must put her back in the position where she's however-old-when-she-and-Clint-enacted-Budapest and she doesn't have a support system to rely on, or even a real reputation to lean on, beyond being one of many interchangeable Widows, if perhaps at the top of her class. That was a point when Dreykov controlled everything. As much as we might see him in the context of facing Natasha, one of Earth's Mightiest Heroes, how could she not see Dreykov through the eyes of a ten-year-old trying desperately to protect her baby sister and failing because he was better at the game than she was?

Then I thought about her scene with Loki in Avengers, and how this mirrors that; it's the same kind of "I'm strong but I let that break down so you think you've bested me except whoops look at that I'm actually using your expectations against you." Unlike Loki, Dreykov should be familiar with her using that tactic- and maybe he is and it still works, because his ego is that big.

But then I considered the idea, which I think I like, that this is Natasha's outlet. We've seen over and over that she uses the truth, when she can, because it's more effective than lying. We also know that there are limited times and spaces where she can be released from the pressure of having to be on all the time. The way people treat her is probably under her skin constantly but she has to just do that tense smile and pretend nothing is wrong because it's not like anything would come of it if she spoke up. Even here, when she does speak up- her "you're never going to hurt anyone like you hurt me again" speech- it doesn't actually change anything. It's immediately followed by Dreykov getting away. Because Natasha saying "No, this is fucked up, this isn't okay" has never mattered in her narrative, and I think it's important that it doesn't matter here either. Natasha's opportunities to voice her discomfort in productive ways are virtually nonexistent, and the text even shows us she's right to believe that.

But to use those feelings? To transform her grief and anger and horror and disgust into part of an act that will lull her opponent into a false sense of security, which will enable her to do her job, in ways that often don't finish the fight but do make a dent? That is Natasha's superpower, and that is maybe the only outlet she gets for the ton of crap constantly heaped on her.

I don't know if this is the correct read of the movie, but the idea that she represses and she minimizes and then she puts all of that into performing the exact feelings she believes she's not allowed to have feels extremely on brand for what we know Natasha's had to do all her life. And I kind of love it.

So, do I think it was part of her act or do I think it was real? I know it seems like an easy out, but my answer is yes. And I think that's better than if it were one or the other.

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Steve jumping from a plane without a parachute? Child's play compared to Nat's habit of jumping and/or falling from very great heights. Self-preservation instincts who? She's the one people should've been concerned about. *slaps Nat's back* This Avenger can fit so much trauma & unhealthy self-sacrificial tendencies.

Okay so the first time I saw the movie, my notes straight-up included "See, SOMEONE actually BRINGS a parachute when she jumps off heights, STEVEN." Like for a second it seemed like Natasha was the healthy Avenger! And then it turned out she had her parachute entirely so YELENA would take it, and Nat sent her off so she could then go into uncontrolled freefall on her own, despite her lack of serum and her presence of multiple breakable non-enhanced limbs.

I can admit that I absolutely could not follow large parts of the third-act fight, because I kept being like "This doesn't seem right but I don't know enough about gravity to dispute it?" Like Nat being in freefall because she was trying to save everyone was extremely symbolically resonant, but also I wasn't sure how there was that much TIME to be falling rather than calculating the angle at which she slammed into the ground.

The thing about Natasha- one of the things that makes her sacrifice in Endgame hurts so much- is that we always see her focused on survival. Several movies have told us that unlike Steve or Tony or Thor, she doesn't have a series of principles that she considers higher than survival. Nat, after all, is comfortable with everything that gets what needs to be done, done.

So the idea that Nat would immediately see her parachute as a way to keep Yelena safe, and then focus on getting to the woman who is still trying to kill her, because Natasha made a major mistake when she thought she tore down the Red Room and she's intent on fixing it? YMMV but it means more to me than it would from Steve or Tony, who I'd expect it from, because Nat isn't about big gestures. She doesn't consider them more important than survival.

Except here she does. And I love it.

Anyway it's also fun- by which I mean terrible- to think about how, when she jumped off Vormir, she was probably like "oh, just a giant freefall with no safe protocols in place. I've done this to save people I love before, and if this doesn't work out, I'll probably do it again."

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Thinking about Natasha and Wanda in the context of Natasha and Yelena. Yelena and Wanda are even about the same age. Did Wanda make Nat think of Yelena? Did she easily embrace a big sister instict towards Wanda, or was it too complicated and painful and she kept her emotional distance, at least a first?

I feel like the existence of Yelena- both when they were kids, and during the time of the BW movie- recontextualizes a LOT for us, for how Nat interacts with all of the Avengers. We see her so frequently as the Responsible One, joking about "always picking up after you boys" but also frequently put into the position of being the one who has to get shit done while everyone else is allowed their personal hang-ups and distractions. I've always seen it as the role the token girl has in the text, because in all likelihood that was the entirety of the motivation behind it, but I feel like with our current context we can easily reframe that as Nat defaulting to being the big sister no matter how much she tries to pretend that was never who she was, especially given how much we saw that their situation in Ohio basically necessitated her parentification because no matter what roles they played, one else was going to actually protect Yelena.

I think even if the Yelena parallel didn't ping for her with Wanda before Civil War, spending time with Yelena during this movie would have sparked something, and explains why in Infinity War she's at least trying to establish boundaries with Wanda and keep her safe rather than the kind of laissez-faire approach she's had elsewhere. I don't think that their relationship in IW is different enough from AoU/CW that it needed an explanation, but this one works for me nonetheless.

But also, the parallel I kept coming back to was STEVE and Yelena. Blonde, mouthy, formerly tiny but now fully able to defend themselves, more committed to ideals and big gestures than Nat's practicality. Also, steals a car and Nat ribs them for it. No wonder SJ's talked in interviews about seeing Steve as a younger sibling; Natasha in Winter Soldier was at least in part replicating the dynamic she never fully got to have with Yelena.

I want to go back at some point and do a deep dive for how much of Natasha we can see in these terms; how much she was- consciously or subconsciously- trying to fix the wrongs from two decades earlier. I'm not sure I have a strong opinion in any particular direction yet. But I love that this is an option now for how to read them- it gives us so much more to play with.

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Kid Natasha stalked away looking upset when Melina was comforting Yelena. What did you make of it? Was she shrinking away from Melina's gentleness? From the always present knowledge it was part of an act, even if it felt so real? Or was she reacting to Yelena's vulnerability, so easily on display, so unacceptable in the Red Room? Was there some resentment that she wasn't treated so kindly at the same age?

I feel like I keep saying this about this movie, but this is another one of those situations that I love because every read is awful but also every read informs Natasha's adulthood differently.

I'm gonna go into detail with each of these, and a few more besides, because it's so bad and that makes it so good.

The one thing I think we 100% get from it is how each of them has adjusted to living as a family: Melina knows how to play her part well (with an asterisk). Yelena accepts this as the norm. And Natasha is in that awful in-between place, where she knows she's living in a lie but everything around her insists it's true and even if she has three years of proof of consistency, she doesn't trust it- which, later that day, she's shown to be right not to trust.

Is Melina a good mom? She definitely plays the part of a good mom. She definitely knows how to put on the performance of being a good mom. I don't know if that's the same thing, and more importantly, don't know if Nat or Yelena would think it is; pretty much everyone i know who has significant trauma struggles to reconcile the facade presented to the world against what really went down, and that has to be even harder when the facade was presented even to them. Alexei and Melina both insist they played their roles to perfection, but they were roles. Part of that seeps in. At the end of the day, Natasha was willing to pick up a gun to protect Yelena, while Melina and Alexei were both just fine putting Nat and Yelena in a plane to be shot at.

How did Melina feel about all of it? We know she couldn't have kids of her own (she's been cycled through 4x); we know she doesn't want to go but not only does so anyway but also tells Yelena they're going "home" (echoed, obviously, later with the pigs- "go home where it's safe" even though the home she took them back to was anything but). Was being a parent an act for Melina the way it was for Alexei? Was she comforting Yelena because she was supposed to? Or was she offering what she'd never gotten but wished she had? Natasha said that what Melina had given them was what got them through the Red Room, but how much was intentional parenting and how much was performing and how much was playing house in between experiments in the SHIELD labs? Melina says she didn't raise them to be weak; how much was involved in that?

(The girls do backbends for fun in the backyard; we know gymnastics and ballet are part of Red Room training for Widows. How much of Melina's parenting was preparing them for the world and how much was preparing them for the Red Room? Was it to help them or because she had to?)

After at least two years in the Red Room (because we know Nat was younger than six when she started and this mission has been three years), it's pretty amazing she's able to respond to gentleness as well as she does. How could it not seem like a trap? Yelena isn't a spy; she's living the life the family set up. But Natasha is old enough to see the cracks and know she has to pretend not to.

And seeing Yelena's vulnerability, as you said, must have been terrifying, because vulnerability came with consequences. We see in Cuba that Nat wants to protect Yelena; it must seem like Yelena, crying just from falling down, is painting a giant glowing neon target on her own back. Or is this the RIGHT way to behave? If being better at undercover means showing weakness, what is a baby Widow supposed to do? And how does this reflect in how Natasha as an adult responds to vulnerability, when she needs to offer it and when she needs to (but often can't) accept it?

There's also the theory that she felt responsible for hurting Yelena- did she not want to get in trouble? Did she not want to deal with her guilt for harming her? Did she just not want to see Yelena hurt? Or was she remembering a time when hurt children did not get kisses and firefly lectures, when girls face off in a ring and snap each other's necks?

I feel like all of these are very real possibilities and all of them are terrible but fascinating to explore, and the only thing they have in common is that Natasha, especially as a kid, has absolutely no sense of what is a logical consequence of any given act. The same things that were unacceptable in one context were encouraged in another. The Red Room clearly got under her skin but then she had to spend three years pretending it didn't, and then get right back into it. I mean, shit. It was, what, twelve hours between being encouraged to call their "mom" about Yelena's scraped knee, and Alexei telling her to not try to protect her sister from being kidnapped to the Red Room, which Nat knows for a fact is an abusive murder factory because she's lived there and doesn't want to go back?

Yeah, there's no read here that doesn't hurt.

And I can absolutely understand people who see this as the text not committing to a single read, but to me, it's the text allowing for all the reads at once. This movie had to straddle the line of being a PG-13 movie about severe child abuse, and it leans heavily on giving us just enough to make any read we could figure out feel horrifying.

I think I might feel differently if Nat had more of a future in the MCU, which- as far as we know at this point and hopefully subject to change- she does not. For me it's a kaleidoscope of pain, and every possible twist reveals new ways for us to interpret Natasha. And if we're not going to get new things to interpret, I like that we have this many lenses to use on what we've already got.

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Blue haired young Nat definitely had red roots. It was more obvious when she was in the sun.

Ooh, thank you, Anon. Extremely happy to be corrected on this one!

I have absolutely not been paying attention to details like that because whenever I manage to get past the "oh wow there is so much trauma I am going to roll around in this for DAYS" I get stuck on how she was such a baby, and 1995 was pretty early for kids (especially kids as young as ten! especially in Ohio!) to be dying their hair blue rather than getting highlights or an Angela Chase-esque Crimson Glow, and was this her choice? Was this part of her cover? Was she asserting her independence? How did Alexei and Melina feel about it?

The movie gave us just enough space that it could plausibly be any of the above, and somehow, paradoxically, every single one of them hurts more than all the others. Like somehow no matter which choice you make it is the actual worst one and I love it so much.

But baby Nat has red hair! It's natural! TRULY A GIFT TO US ALL.

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I'm about to be unnecessarily pedantic about word usage & I deeply apologize in advance! Yelena & her Widow group seemingly experienced very literal mind control rather than classic brainwashing, which is more about psychological cohersion. Which is to say, sounds like Nat was subjected to good ol' fashioned brainwashing approaches & Yelena to the streamlined scifi version (that has a useful off switch). Of course, both come w/ their own different but equally awful horrors & resulting traumas.

Anon, please never apologize for being pedantic about this stuff, because (A) it's super interesting and (B) it's better for fic and meta!

The movie gives us Yelena's brief explanation of the difference, which is really all we need within the two hours of the movie, but now that we're out of it and going to be burrowing in to figure out every little detail of the different ways different traumas manifest, it is incredibly helpful to have the correct language to use.

I took four psych courses in college and I was fairly terrible at them, so I am extremely happy to be corrected- I have other asks that discuss this too, but wanted to get at least one posted so that people aren't looking at me, a person who struggled mightily with Psych 102 in undergrad, as someone who knows what the fuck they're talking about when some of you actually do!

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

I feel like we should talk about Nat's tendency of allowing herself to be physically harmed to achieve her goals in situations where there are arguably other options that don't involve her getting beat up.

Anon, this has been straight-up murdering me for the past two weeks, and I love it.

(Content warnings for self-harm and suicidal ideation, because I think when we’re talking about the Widows’ self-preservation instincts that can’t b e left out of the discussion.)

Because it’s not just Natasha. All the Widows prioritize their own safety significantly underneath the mission. Their objective is more important than them personally. And while it’s easy to point to what was done to them- how Dreykov’s control meant he determined it, as epitomized by the Widow who had to self-terminate- we also see it elsewhere, from Melina not wanting to leave Ohio but going anyway to Yelena being willing to sacrifice her own life to kill Dreykov.

We see that they’re all kind of cogs in a machine, at least in the mind of Dreykov and his associates. They seeing the girls as interchangeable and only valuable insofar as they’re useful. The Morocco mission shows how much the Widows don’t even blink at unpleasant tasks, right up until being forced to actually self-destruct. It’s that ingrained in them.

As much as I’ve always argued that Nat’s primary motivator is protecting people, especially girls, it’s striking to see how MUCH they show that here, how she is happy to repeatedly put herself in harm’s way if it means that someone else doesn’t get hurt, or at least she’s not responsible for hurting them. The scenes with the Widows where they’re going for lethal and she’s desperately trying not to, they have the Steve-in-Winter-Soldier parallel but they’re also somehow even worse because Steve is making a conscious choice, even if it’s a bad choice- shout-out to everyone who remembers the “was Steve suicidal at the end of WS?” discourse- and I don’t know that Nat does fully realize the choice she’s making there.

And the thing this does for me is cast so much of what we know about Nat from earlier in a different light. All the things she’s done that were dangerous but heroic- I don’t doubt that it was her wanting to do good, but how much was also her not remembering (or not even realizing) that she’s allowed to have regard for her own safety too?

And I don’t think the other Avengers, or SHIELD, know. It’s so much better and hurtier if they see Natasha how we did, foolhardy but brave. When Nick says that Romanoff is comfortable with everything, he thinks she is, and she thinks she is, and they don’t realize the chasm between what they mean by it, and honestly the more I think about this the more I am in agony. Because how much did they ask her to do because they thought she was normal-human-levels of okay with things when she was actually just not aware that not-okay-with-things was even an option for her?

When she faces off against Loki or Hammer or Pierce, when she lets the Hulk come after her, when she stands on Sokovia and comments on the view- this is all stuff she can do, because the only thing at stake is her health and her life, and how much or how little does she value that? When have we seen her prioritizing in a way that puts her needs first? Because the closest I can come is in Civil War, when she wants to protect the family despite none of the family being willing to protect alongside her. (In a lot of ways this makes BW the conclusion of her unfulfilled goal in CW; Nat’s biggest concern is that family can stay together, and even though it’s a different family, she does eventually manage it with someone.) Even there, it’s Natasha attempting to prioritize the group; I’m not sure if Nat even knows how much she wants them okay for the well-being of the group versus how much it’s for herself until she figures it out at the end of BW- and even there she only uses a parachute to get YELENA to safety and then puts herself in freefall!

And to be clear here I don’t think she actually DOES realize the extent of this by the end of the movie. I don’t think if you went to Natasha and were like “so how about that behavior that amounts to passive self-harm because you will always prioritize someone else?” she wouldn’t even acknowledge it, because it’s just What Heroes Do, and while we in the audience have seen the internal conflict that prompts in most MCU protagonists I don’t think Natasha has. And I don’t think she realizes the impact of not having a serum or a metal suit or magic. I think- and I feel like her conversations with Yelena support this- that Nat sees heroism as atonement and doesn’t realize that there are kinds of selfless heroism that don’t involve fully disregarding the self as anything but a symbol for other people to use, the one who does the poses to be on the magazine covers to show that there’s good in the world, rather than being someone whose life is worth living just because she’s her.

Like I have spent so much time being angry over the five years in Endgame, where we saw so many Avengers give up while 3.0 were the only ones who kept working, and I did not remotely understand what MMRR said they were going for, with Natasha not realizing what was happening and just throwing herself into it. And to be clear, the idea that she was pathetic for not moving on from heroism after the snap is still crap. But the idea that it’s yet another manifestation of Natasha not realizing that her life is not just there to be used but also there to be her life, that she doesn’t need to keep bleeding to stop others’ pain? That’s the good stuff and I wish they’d put it in there, because it puts so many new spins on her sacrifice and make it so much more about Natasha than about a plot hole that needed filling.

Anyway I’m still a fucking wreck over this and I love it, thank you for opening these wounds!

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

The more asks I answer, the more appear.

This is the best problem but I don’t think I’m gonna be going in chronological order anymore, because I absolutely cannot keep track.

Also if any of you expected simple answers, I am genuinely so, so sorry.

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

One thing that always drew me to Natasha was that the nature of Red Room programming meant that her memories were not necessarily reliable (or, at least, this is something fans carried over from the comics). Is this actually a component of the Red Room as depicted in the movie? If not, does the movie play with memory in other ways?

This is another one I held off on replying to until after watching a few times. Because I'm pretty sure people have come to conclusions, but I'm still on the fence.

I know the movie clarifies that while Yelena was brainwashed post-Budapest, Natasha was psychologically conditioned. And because of that- because her memories weren't implanted- I think that's made a lot of people think her memories weren't altered at all. And when I first saw it I was almost inclined to agree?

But no. Fuck that.

The filming style of the opening credits- fast quick cuts; longer cuts are mostly of symbolic objects; rapidly switching photographs of multiple faces; just enough to get the emotional resonance without the literal events- is telling us that we're not getting actual literal This Is What Happened. We're getting impressions, the clearest way they can be shared. They're not in chronological order (e.g. we get Nat and Yelena filming Easter and Christmas in 1992 after we see them being trafficked into the Red Room in 1995) and they aren't all even following our protagonist(s). I think most of us had been correctly assuming that Wanda's manipulation of Nat in AoU was more a vibe than actual literal truth, and I think the way we saw baby Nat and baby Yelena clearly while they were in Ohio, then constantly moving and harder to track in Cuba, and then only in brief shots in the Red Room was extremely intentional.

I also think it's worth being explicit about how gaslighting is absolutely memory manipulation. I can viscerally remember some of the moments when I- a person who was definitely not subjected to the extreme tactics of the Red Room- finally pulled together the pieces to confirm that what trusted adults had told me about my own life as a child was not the truth, and it feels incredibly destabilizing. Nat's entire childhood, including both the three years in Ohio and all the time in the Red Room, she was both lied to and told the truth, and they overlapped so much that it would be difficult for an adult to keep them straight, never mind a little kid.

At bare minimum, canonically and on screen, Natasha was indoctrinated by words (Dreykov telling her this is her home/family) and by conditioning techniques (embodied by the videos) and subjected to extreme physical training, of which we know that 95% of girls failed out and died. Natasha was also given an incredibly skewed idea of normal- she seems to understand it as something to mimic but not something to actually live. (WHY TASKMASTER WAS THE PERFECT VILLAIN FOR NAT'S STORY, AN ESSAY IN SIX MILLION PARTS. But I digress.)

I think the movie is very clear on telling us Nat wasn't brainwashed. I think it was much less clear on telling us if her memories- and her understanding of her memories- were manipulated. And I have a hard time not seeing that answer as yes.

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

what do you think about natasha and yelena's relation now that you have seen the movie? Sibling like or something else? I read one of your post about how complicated their relation can be and I'm curious about it. Its kind of spoilery, I know it but still.

It IS spoilery, which is why I held off to answer til now, and I'm sure a lot of other people have covered it better than I can, but what the fuck, I'm gonna give it a go.

I think that everyone- including, to some extent, the movie itself- wants to boil their relationship down to one thing, even if that one thing is a mess of contradictions. And don't get me wrong, I love the contradictions, and I love what we got on screen from them. It feels complex and layered and real, and a thing I liked is that both of them are 100% right; based on their experiences, combined with the bizarre combination of Black Widow talent at reading people but their own inability to gauge for themselves rather than for the cause, Yelena and Natasha both understood the situations on their own terms.

The movie clearly wanted to use the family device, and I think to some extent it worked; that fake family was the only stability any of them had, and the more I watch the more I realize the profound effect those three years had on all four of them. (It's a lot easier to see in Nat and Yelena, but I appreciated how clear it is that none of them got out emotionally unscathed.) The problem for me, though, is that while it's the closest thing any of them had to family, it's still not, in fact, family.

And just so we're clear here, I don't mean "because they weren't blood related." I mean because the movie tries to put "none of it was real" and "it was real to me" in binary opposition and I don't believe that's the case. I believe that the closeness and the intimacy can be completely real without the situation being remotely real, and I think that it's damaging to lean in to the idea that every relationship has to be easily categorized. I think society finds it a lot easier to assume that the only reason for adults to be close- and also capable of being truly hurt by each other's actions- is if they're either related or romantically/sexually involved, and to show how close Nat and Yelena are the movie went all-in with Door Number One.

I think their relationship is not easily defined. I think that three years undercover as a family meant something but not everything and while we know they hadn't heard from Melina or Alexei since Ohio, I think we still don't know how much, if at all, they were able to interact in the subsequent several years in the Red Room, which changes things pretty drastically. I'm also pretty sure we don't know how much the time in Ohio was actually idyllic, or the one least-bad moment in shitty lives. We know Nat had been in the Red Room before she was six; we see Yelena and Natasha doing gymnastics in their backyard, which feels like sisterly fun and games except that we know (both from comics and from the opening credits) that gymnastics is part of Widow training. We see Melina teaching the girls about science and she tells Nat later that she tried to teach them to not fall for traps. That Melina and Alexei were the best family Nat and Yelena knew doesn't mean that they were family family- just that they might be family in the way four broken Russian spies most needed. Or that they're family the way found family is family, rather than people who grew up together. Or that there's not really a word that encompasses the messiness of their closeness, except that to disregard their closeness does a disservice to all of them.

Do I ship it? Not really. Do I see it as sibling-y? Also not really. In my notes from one viewing I have "queerplatonic partnership????" but that doesn't feel exactly right either. I don't think any of these are blanket AGAINST the text and I wouldn't mind reading any of them if done well- which is good cause that's what 90% of the fics are- but mostly what I think Nat and Yelena are is scarred, and codependent, and terrified, and needy but refusing to admit they need, and a lot of other things that don't fall neatly under a label.

I like that for all of them a lot more than I'd like if they were actually familial, and while I understand the necessity for a label like "family" to tell the a blockbuster story in two hours, I feel like every possible label takes away from some of the complexity that meant so much to me.

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

This ask may seem a bit ridiculous but in your opinion what’s Nat’s original hair color? I always thought it was red but from the previews I’ve seen of younger Natasha with the blue hair, her roots look brown??

Okay, first of all, "ridiculous" is in the mind of the beholder, and I, as a person with 24 pages of handwritten notes from different screenings, am the actual last person to judge.

So my answer kind of depends on if the young teen version we see with red hair at the gun range is also supposed to be Natasha, which I assumed it was. In which case I think her hair was just kind of an auburn-ish red that got brighter as she got older, which also meant they didn't have to put Ever Anderson through too many wigs.

I also am going with red because I really like the color symbolism it offers: red hair, bleached white and then dyed blue. This is Natasha attempting to integrate into US culture, only able to do so through artificial means, but it becomes a part of her physical being.

(Am I reading too much into this? fucking 100% yes, but if we only get one movie I am going to suck every single drop of marrow out of every bone we're given.)