Nothing On The Radio

🃏📻🃏

[crosleytower]

I’m Crosley_Tower on Ao3!

Series:

“Battle-Grim and Burning” (BNHA | KiriBaku | Fantasy AU)

Recently completed:

“Just A Little Something Else Instead” (Haikyuu!! | OiSuga | 8/8)

Also I sometimes do art! I’ll post it here occasionally

General About:

This is my fandom sideblog!

My pronouns are he/they

I post fics and fanart

Don’t repost my work, I guess?

[icedlemoms]

it's only his second day be nice

[stealingpotatoes]

he's a little confused but he's got the spirit

(commission info // tip jar!)

[mimi-maru]

[mahawavy]

[fioblah]

greedy

tip jar

[everchased]

hahahahaaaa get safe and cared for, idiot

[dewdewdewbababa]

Some Piccolo doodles...

[supertaliart]

Happy Star Wars Day! I’ve decided to make my Skywalker comic into one easily rebloggable post.

[strange-mage]

Ugh remember modern setting Gale? I'm afraid it had to be done again

[skawdia]

This could have been Wyll and Ansur but Larian's playing.

[soaretheypurple]

Scenes from clefairytea's Peaks and Valleys as imagined in the mainline games

[strange-mage]

“Ready and willing”

Tested a new pack of brushes and who else to sketch if not our wicked?

[strange-mage]

- one with the weave -

I... went a bit insane with this one.

[luminarywaves]

if we look at the original timeline (aka annabeth and percy being born in 1993) then 2009 was a big year for annabeth bcus not only did the battle of manhattan take place and she finally started dating percy, but also minecraft came out and i think that would be a big deal to her

[asphodelles]

my take on epilogue gale

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

@dr-reids-fidget-toy#omg I didn’t know that about comic bucky that’s rlly cool

Starting a new post because I have off-topic Thoughts. Comic!Bucky contains fascinating commentary on the Cold War, WWII, and the media representations thereof. MCU!Bucky is (by necessity) pretty watered down. In the Brubaker comics, Bucky isn't brainwashed, at least not in the classic Marvel sense. He's just this guy who believes in the absolute rightness of his country, and has been in combat to support the U.S. since age ~14... and then he gets blown up by a missile, loses his memory, and Department X tells him "his country" is the USSR. So now he's the Winter Soldier. Nothing else about his personality or his politics changes. The Winter Soldier we see in the Brubaker comics is definitely a villain — he kills indiscriminately, kidnaps civilians to get his way, murders Rick Jones out of petty spite. But his personality is basically the same from childhood.

This is Steve remembering Bucky as a kid during WWII:

Brubaker retcons Bucky's role, from "kid sidekick who rushes in first and gets kidnapped, needing Captain America to rescue him," to "kid agent who infiltrates bases first, so that Captain America can follow him." With the memory loss, Bucky goes from slitting throats and setting off bombs for Uncle Sam, to doing it for Mother Russia. He's always been as cold and as willing to kill witnesses as he is as the Winter Soldier. It just never made the news reals.

And that's the other half of his retconned role: being propaganda for other child soldiers (e.g. Toro) who join up in his wake. This is Bucky and Steve watching a Cap and Bucky recruitment newsreel:

As an adult, the real difference isn't that Bucky is Soviet now; it's that he doesn't have Steve holding his leash anymore. To be clear, comic Winter Soldier also isn't free to come and go as he pleases — he's kept in a freezer between missions, he's probably not paid, he's in Department X — but he also has far more agency within the latitude of his orders. He's not dead-eyed and tortured by guilt like we see in the MCU. He goes on side quests to kill other Buckies. He argues constantly with Aleksander Lukin (the comic equivalent of Pierce). He complains about the inconvenience of not just sniping Steve in the head to steal the Tesseract.

Brubaker's point, throughout the comic, is that we have been lied to about World War II being "noble" or "good" or the story of the U.S. saving the day. And that that lie is used to prop up everything from U2 spy planes built with 100x the budget for education, to the Patriot Act nullifying the Fourth Amendment. Because not only is "WWII was a noble war fought without atrocities" nationalistic bullshit, but "Soviets are fundamentally different from us" is too. Bucky's continuity of character reveals both at once. He's a walking Soviet superweapon. Why? Because he was a walking American superweapon first, starting before he was old enough to shave.

Anyway, I get why the MCU had to change his backstory. You have to a) remind the audience who Bucky is, b) show-don't-tell why Steve is sad Bucky is trying to kill him, c) get across the idea that Bucky doesn't want to kill Steve but feels he has to, d) use Bucky to develop Steve's character, and e) set up a way for Bucky to get un-brainwashed. All within the span of ~30 minutes this movie has for this plot, amidst all the other plots. MCU!Bucky plaintively asking Pierce who Steve was, only to get slapped in the face, is sort of like AniTV!Tom constantly pawing at his ear: it quickly gets across that this character isn't acting under his own volition, in a way that minimizes audience confusion.

Plus: it's a Hollywood movie. It wouldn't get funded if it was too critical of the U.S. military. Movies are always, by definition, more conservative than other media because of their need for funding. And the MCU makes a decent effort to incorporate at least some criticism of the U.S., having Zola be involved in Operation Paperclip and having him (while working for the U.S.) order Howard Stark's murder. But a computer ghost reciting dry facts about the CIA recruiting Nazis doesn't have the same gut punch as watching the "good guys" send the literal child to knife his fellow child soldiers during WWII would have had.

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

Further thoughts: that "who the hell is Bucky" line fits so much better with the comic version of the character than the near-silent guy we see in the MCU. In the comics, that moment is in the context of Steve trying to talk the Winter Soldier down from setting off a bomb, and Bucky barely glances up from his demolitions long enough to snap off the line.

Comic!Winter Soldier is snarky, sassy, irreverent — very much like Bucky Barnes. Like, Steve is convinced that "he's not in control"... but that doesn't really fit with what we see, and so much of Brubaker's Captain America run is about how Steve is an object of propaganda who believes in his own propaganda because his entire life would lose all meaning if he ever stopped believing for a second. Plus, Steve has some obvious reasons for wanting to believe that Bucky would be "not responsible for his actions," after watching his oldest friend blow up an apartment building full of civilians.

Like, Steve. Kiddo. If that's true, why is Rick Jones dead? I kinda doubt that the USSR has a vendetta against some contractor whose only claim to fame was that he briefly partnered with Captain America while using the codename Bucky a few decades ago. This run's whole message is "America's memory is short and rose-tinted," returning repeatedly to the gaps in Steve's story of WWII, and thus nothing in his narration can be taken as unfiltered truth.

This take on the Winter Soldier is just so much more interesting. Again: I get it. The movie had to convey Bucky is being mind controlled, and the simplest way to do that was to direct Sebastian Stan to act like a 6-foot marionette.

But there's so so so much there to "Steve's feelings about Bucky are the U.S.'s feelings about the USSR." Including layers such as "We were allies against the Nazis and then I don't know what happened," "We're fighting with the same weapons and techniques," "Okay, but there are some lines I won't cross (ignore all the times I crossed those lines)," "I want peace with you," "I'm scared of you," "I don't know who you are anymore (I don't know who I am anymore)," "I want to believe this has a simple answer," "I miss being friends, because I want to believe things were simple back then," and so on.

Just having it be "Bucky is being Literally Puppeted by Literal Nazis", even with the recognition that you had these be Nazis who work for the CIA? IMHO, it loses something in translation.