
blake kathryn
One Nice Bug Per Day
YOU ARE THE REASON
wallacepolsom
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
we're not kids anymore.
Three Goblin Art
occasionally subtle
Sade Olutola
Monterey Bay Aquarium

Andulka
Xuebing Du
i don't do bad sauce passes

tannertan36
No title available
AnasAbdin

@theartofmadeline

Love Begins

Janaina Medeiros
Mike Driver
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@avengersassemble502
goat fight. non-negotiable.
#LISTEn listen most marvel fights feel so contrived and fake and like la-dee-da-superhero#but this one was REAL and had me on the edge of my seat and still does#partially bc of the street clothes not costumes#partially because steve is fighting 1 on 1 and gets stripped of his shield quick#and he has to show like his physical combat skills#and the ACTING on both their parts.. fucking ace#esp chris evans tho like his face looks PANICKED how often do u see captain fucking america panicked??#anyway in this essay i will (tags via @asterlark)
I think it’s also very important that this is a fight in which the characters *actually interact with their environment* in a way that feels real. Like, yes, have superpowers but there’s no cartoon physics involved, no obvious sense that this was filmed on an empty set with a greenscreen and the background was added later, or that they’re filming without even the people they’re fighting being present, just ‘look over here and make a hand gesture’. The shield gets stuck in a car, there’s that awful moment of the knife sliding along the side of the van that cues up with the mounting tension in the soundtrack. Bucky’s arm impacts the pavement and actually dents it, etc. They’re jumping over/behind the cars and getting thrown into them/into the pavement in a way that feels more visceral than just ‘whoosh there was a wire & we CGI’d in the rest’. t has a sense of real world space to it, and that adds to the feeling of real world stakes.
This is one of the few fight scenes I can recall seeing that makes a little knife look like a real threat. Like I am legit scared for Steve when that thing darts in, because he’s not wearing armor and it really feels like the WS could open him up like a can. I feel like movie fight scenes don’t usually hit that note with knives.
It’s worth pointing out that this scene WAS filmed on a actual set with actual asphalt and cars (with fall pads and stuff, but still). They really were interacting with their environment.
But as a fight nerd, there’s one other thing I want to point out about this fight, and it goes back to @mikkeneko’s point about the knife:
This isn’t a magic fight.
Yes, they’re both super soldiers. Yes, WS has a vibranium arm. Yes, Steve has a vibranium shield. But there are no magic blasts going on here. There’s no wuxia and minimal wire-work (mostly protective for the actors).
WS shoots at Steve until he runs out of bullets because that’s the most efficient way to murder him. Steve either dodges or hides his whole body behind his shield because that’s the most efficient way to not get murdered. The shield gets thrown, caught, thrown back, wedged in a car. Then it’s a knife fight. Throughout, it’s really obvious that neither of them are fucking around. WS is trying to just straight-up kill Steve, Steve is trying to not die. No banter. No dick-measuring. No quips.
This fight is brutal, efficient, and not flashy. Steve’s knife defense is textbook, and aside from that cool little flip that was almost too fast to clock, WS’s attacks are textbook. He’s doing his best to control Steve’s defense and open a hole to wedge that knife in. Steve’s doing his best to control that knife hand and keep just enough space between them that he can close those holes before WS can get to them. It’s telling that he’s paying so much attention to the knife that when WS finally gets through his guard, it’s with his empty, vibranium hand. (Still no idea why he tosses him instead of crushing his windpipe though, that was 100% movie logic.)
When Steve does that flying knee at WS, that’s not about flashy martial arts moves, that’s about brutal efficiency. Your knees and elbows are the hardest points on your body. Steve can engage in fisticuffs with normal people; he can knock out hitler over 200 times. He could also break his knuckles on WS’s face before doing any appreciable damage, and we watch him figure that out. So it’s not kung fu, it’s muay thai. It’s krav maga. Those flips aren’t for show - that’s pure Jiujitsu, the ruthless throws that are supposed to segue into joint locks and dislocations. That is the way to take your opponent apart, literally. He was trying to rip WS’s non-vibranium arm out of its socket.
That pile-driver? That was meant to break WS’s neck. A normal person would die instantly if Captain America pulled that WWE shit on them. We are into the gritty shit now. We have two extremely strong, extremely skilled men who are just trying to kill each other because the only way to win this fight is to die last, and it shows.
They scramble for position through the fight. When one move fails, they don’t bother breaking apart before finding the next-most-efficient killing move and trying that. This is what two people who are actually trying to murder each other look like - most street scuffles stay on the ground once they get there and don’t involve this much skill, but we can excuse that because it’s Captain America and the Winter Fucking Soldier. I still recognize the blocking of this fight as a real fight, not a spar. The urgency, breathlessness, the pragmatism, the messy transitions between moves as you just keep trying to improvise faster than the other guy… that’s all correct.
There’s no magic. There are fists, feet, elbows. There’s a shield and there’s a knife - the first and oldest human-made tools of war. There are chokes. There are joint locks. Not a word spoken. And it helps that they are really there - landing on cars, landing on asphalt.
No other MCU fight even comes close unless you’re including the tv shows, because that Daredevil long-shot hallway fight was pretty fucking badass too.
#this is what happens when bucky hijacks the camera in the field #footage is EXPENSIVE goddammit barnes #literally thirty reels of weird closeups #here’s steve’s eyelashes #here’s a spot steve missed when shaving #another shot from below taken from between his legs #literally wastes thousands of dollars on unusable shots getting uncomfortably close to captain america #ends up in an archive until the late fifties and some dude picks it up and is like ‘hahaha some girl must have had a weird crush on cap man’
Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) Captain America: Brave New World (2025)
Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON (2015), directed by Joss Whedon
#badass
What’s going on in that cyborg brain of yours? You don’t want to know.
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (2021—)
TOM HOLLAND as PETER PARKER in SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME (2019)
dir. Jon Watts
WANDA MAXIMOFF in WANDAVISION | 1.08 Previously On
WANDA MAXIMOFF in WANDAVISION | 1.08 Previously On
Bucky Barnes + first and last scenes in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier (2021-)
Episode One - New World Order
Episode Two - The Star-Spangled Man
Episode Three - Power Broker
Episode Four - The Whole World Is Watching
Episode Five - Truth
Episode Six - One World, One People
Danger! Danger!
Steve Rogers being slightly done™ Captain America: Civil War (2016)
“Get up. Who are you? What do you want?”
CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR (2016)
Elizabeth Olsen starring as WANDA MAXIMOFF
Official trailer for Doctor Strange 2: Multiverse of Madness (2022)
NOMAD STEVE in Captain Marvel (2019)