Why do MCU stans keep saying that MCU Bucky is based on Arnie Roth? I never found that to be true but do you know?
I've written a bit about the Arnie-Bucky thing here before.
The Bucky Barnes/Arnie Roth connection comes from two major points; first, and less significant, is that Bucky Barnes' origin as being Steve's older childhood friend who protects him from bullies is a lot closer to Arnie Roth's than it is comic Bucky, who was a younger orphan who Steve met for the first time at Camp Lehigh after becoming Captain America. Arnie, like MCU Bucky, successfully joined the military (although he was in the Navy), while Steve was unfit for service.
That's basically where the similarities begin and end, however, which brings me to my second point.
Arnie Roth is significant as being one of the first gay characters in Marvel Comics, and so despite being a minor supporting cast member in a run that isn't otherwise particularly significant in the overall history of Captain America, he gets more acknowledgment than what he would otherwise have gotten. People are a lot more familiar with Arnie than they are Bernie, despite originating in the same series, and the main reason for that is that Arnie ends up on queer comic history lists and that is the window through which people know him.
So essentially, because MCU Bucky fans really want him to be gay and would really like some evidence of this in any way they can get it, and because in the comics, Steve and Bucky's relationship can't be mined for queercoding because for most of it, Bucky was an underage dead child who Steve saw as a son, they instead look to other sources, and Arnie with his shiny canonically gay badge is very enticing. The Arnie-Bucky conspiracy only exists because it means they can reverse engineer MCU Bucky being gay, not because it has any real significant proof or origin.
To put it another way, if Arnie Roth was not canonically gay, we would not be having this conversation. Nobody would care, and nobody would think that, because without him being canonically gay, Arnie Roth is not a particularly significant character and his connections to MCU Bucky are tenuous at best. People only see Arnie and Bucky as similar because they really want MCU Bucky Barnes to be gay, and if Arnie Roth was a heterosexual character, not a single person would ever say this, honestly because without him being gay he would be on the same level of obscurity as Bernie Rosenthal or Jack Monroe, characters who were also significant in DeMatteis Captain America but didn't really stuck around.
What we have is a group of people who are desperate to claim that Bucky Barnes is canonically queer, who can't otherwise really use the comics to that end, because comic Bucky Barnes was for most of his history, Steve's adopted son, so they instead pivot to Arnie, who is very convenient for them because he has a vaguely similar origin story as MCU Bucky, and who is gay! and I guess Jewish also so we can say MCU Bucky is Jewish too, despite absolutely nothing suggesting that other than this very frail connection to Arnie. So people like gay-jewish-bucky (who is a Zionist and you should block if you haven't, by the way) make their meta posts extrapolating as much as they can from Arnie, because it's the closest thing to being able to use comic canon that they have. But, to reiterate, if Arnie wasn't gay? Nobody would be making this comparison, because it wouldn't otherwise be important to them.
I do think Arnie's origin was a point of inspiration for MCU Bucky, but that's about it, because Arnie as he is introduced kind of sucks? Not as a character, I love how he is written, but he is a man who is only seeking out Steve despite them allegedly being friends so Steve can help bail him out of a bad gambling debt situation he's in.
Is this your Bucky? A gambling addict?
Arnie doesn't seem to particularly be into Steve at the time, either, he is far more concerned with his boyfriend Michael, and is (justifiably) pissed when Steve shows up to feel sorry for himself at Michael's funeral.
But that doesn't canonise Stucky, does it? If our gay Bucky analogue doesn't actually seem all that invested in Steve, so we're going to ignore it. Actually, we're going to ignore 99% of his character, because beyond the very few details we have of Arnie and Steve's origin together, nothing about Arnie Roth is remotely similar to MCU Bucky Barnes, and these people know it. But they don't have anything else, either, so instead we get this very popular fanon theory that has extremely little basis in reality.
Anyway, to answer your question, MCU Bucky's origin is, I would agree, similar to Arnie Roth's. And it is okay to make that comparison. However, then some people decided that that surely must meant MCU Bucky is just Arnie with the numbers filled off, which is a blatant lie, but it sounds really nice to those Stucky shippers who can't otherwise use the comics for source material the way Stony's at least can, so now we're here, where people who have never read a comic in their lives have very strong opinions about a character with a grand total of 32 appearances.
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