Iâve only recently started following you and my interest has been piqued. Can I get an intro to Bucky fanfic 101 from you? Iâve never been particularly interested in the marvel fanfic sphere but Iâve heard about Bucky as a standout character in the fandom ecosystem here and there, but since following you and seeing how you speak about this character and his fandom, I canât help but feel like Iâm missing out. Could you be the one to help me? Or this is a journey one must make on their own? I truly donât know where to even start
It would take an eternity to completely re-narrate my Bucky fanfic journey, so here's some links to my post threads from last year as I was getting into the Bucky fanfic world myself, where I discuss and recommend the fics I was reading. Part 1, part 2.
Part 1 has a lentil soup recipe in it as well if you're into that.
However, the rec list in these posts is my path exploring a lush, tangled, complex ecosystem of stories, and it would not be accurate as a description of everything the Bucky fanfiction ecosystem is.
A narrative of one walk through a forest does not capture everything about that ecosystem. I have learned that you can walk through the same forest a hundred times and see a hundred different forests. Living, breathing systems are labyrinthine. They are endlessly new with each path you follow through them, each change in the clouds and each shift in the slant of the light...
anyways. in the 12 years since Captain America: The Winter Soldier was released, stories have emerged and evolved and exchanged ideas and developed and refined new tropes and concepts and dug deeper into many fascinating themes.
Part of the reason the story-ecosystem is so well developed is just that it's huge; MCU being a massive mainstream franchise that, in the years of 2012-2018, most people had some contact with whether they cared for it or not, there were just a LOT of people into it at once.
and it reaches this point where the fanfiction is not just a work someone wrote based off of a blockbuster movie, it starts to become fanfiction of fanfiction, storytelling emerging from a seethe of ideas and themes tangled in this call and response between tellers and listeners who exchange places and read each other's work and create new stuff and pull new people in and pass the stories on.
I'm making it sound very grand and magical. It is, and it isn't. I go through Bucky's tag on ao3 and scroll past 20 fanfics in a row that make me think "You'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to read that."
And it's easy to get caught up in just...the sheer glut of it all, the heaps and heaps of formulaic and generic fanfics that erase anything distinct about the characters to plug them into standard tropes. But that's what abundance looks like. Art that isn't necessary or even good, art that isn't cream skimmed off of the top, art that hasn't been judged or approved or selected or granted value by anyone. But it's part of that ecosystem, and it's a sign that the ecosystem is thriving.
So. I meandered my way aimlessly through Bucky fanfiction, through these entangling vines of context and connection and evolutionary relationships that I could only get a glimpse of. I started to recognize how certain ideas in fanfics were derived from other fanfics, further developing and expanding upon what previous storytellers had done.
Broadly speaking, some fanfics are interested in Stucky as a pairing, but don't delve deeply into what I consider to be THE hallmark of Buckyfic proper: the unmaking of Bucky Barnes into the Winter Soldier. The fundamental Thing about Bucky as a character, for me, is that he is formed out of a person's shattering.
And, yes, there are fics that are deeply interested in Bucky as a character as opposed to Bucky as one half of a slash pairing, that still treat him as basically the same guy but with PTSD now post Winter Soldier, so this categorization is wrong, but the unmaking aspect is what Bucky fanfic seems to iterate upon and extrapolate and develop most intensely.
Bucky fanfic is absolutely lush with explorations of what it means to be unmade. I plunged straight into a dense layer-on-layer sediment of storytellers "yes-and"ing what other storytellers had developed, exploring the ways that a man could have selfhood and personhood ripped from him.
The canon gives us these wrenching hints at a story that could be told: Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, wears a mask that looks like a muzzle; he is completely passive and lets the antagonist slap him across the face without retaliation; he cooperates placidly with his own torture; he hurls his body around as though it doesn't matter what damage he takes; he is scarred where the metal prosthetic that replaced his severed arm attaches to his body; he looks confused and scared and childlike and it's a shocking contrast to how brutally and swaggeringly he tears apart cars and slaughters people.
It's dripping with awful implications and that's what fanfic writers delved into so ravenously. Bucky was stripped of his name, his memories, his identity, and treated like a thing. His body was rebuilt to his captors' liking and used for their purposes. And fanfics explore every aspect of this.
For example, it's very common in these fanfics to have Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, be referred to with it/its pronouns. This is not the case in the canon but it's an accepted part of the story in this corner of the ecosystem.
There are several fanfics that portray Bucky as having Dissociative Identity Disorder, but even among the fanfics that don't explicitly conceptualize it this way, there are TONS of stories where Bucky has multiple "selves" that are like different persons that co-exist within the same body, to the point that some level of "plurality" is almost accepted as a standard part of the character.
The Winter Soldier is sometimes understood to be a separate personality from Bucky, as if man and machine are two persons in the same hybrid, cyborg body, and it's common for him to "switch" from one to the other. The Soldier can be conceptualized as nothing but a sucking void, an absence of self, or it can be its own "self" in the form of the remorseless killing machine, or (and this is where it gets really interesting) it can be this necessary darkness that was always part of Bucky, a self that fully unfolded when he was a sniper in WW2. Sometimes, the scared, broken man that is left after Bucky is rescued from Hydra is a third distinct "self" from the Soldier and the Bucky from before the war. It's fascinating. I could talk about it all day.
In fanfic, Bucky is very often physically disabled in multiple ways from his treatment as the Winter Soldier. It's fairly common for him to need to be tube fed, temporarily or permanently, or to have GI tract difficulties; I've read multiple fics where he suffered from seizures; I've read multiple fics where he suffered from drug withdrawals after escaping. Sometimes the prosthetic arm needs to be removed and he has to live as an amputee. Bucky's speech patterns vary wildly in fanfiction, but it's common for him to have a stilted, robotic way of talking, and sometimes his speech is impaired to some extent.
Relatedly, there's a subset of fics where the Winter Soldier's mask is somehow attached to his face or he can't remove it. Since this changes the canonical identity reveal, it's not as common, but it is one of those collectively iterated tropes (denoted by the tag maskfic, sometimes)
I've also read multiple fics where he was chemically castrated as the Winter Soldier, which sometimes caused lasting problems.
There is, I shit you not, an entire canonical tag on Ao3 for portrayals of Bucky with erectile dysfunction.
When I read, these things did not seem like individual decisions by writers to iterate upon canon in a certain way. The fanfics that used these ideas had clearly been influenced by each other. Once a certain aspect had been refined, other authors could just accept it as "their" canon and run with it.
And, I can say personally, from the experience of reading fanfiction and later writing it, that it's virtually impossible to keep canon and the broader story ecosystem separate in your mind: even if you can remember what is and isn't "canon," part of you just knows that they fed the Winter Soldier through a tube and bathed him by hosing him down, because that's the way you always heard the story told.
The Bucky fanfic ecosystem has done a lot of fascinating things with the lasting psychological effects of being the Winter Soldier as well. A really common theme is that Bucky is so accustomed to his dehumanization under Hydra that he switches to viewing the Avengers as his new "handlers," who he knows will abuse him if he doesn't placate them correctly. I believe Ao3 has a canonical tag for this as well, but I can't remember what it is. In general, Bucky fics delve deep into how the survival behaviors created by abuse don't go away after you escape the abusive situation. In more extreme iterations, Steve or someone else has to basically pretend to be Bucky's "handler" to provide some kind of stability for him mentally. It's fucked up and a lot of fun.
It's the same with the lasting impacts of having his pain disregarded and treated as unimportant: there's a recurring thing that happens in several different fics where Bucky, when he is hurt and someone asks how he is, responds "functional" (because his functionality is all that matters, not whether he's in pain). It's a little phrasing that spread like a virus between different stories written by different people.
It is, of course, impossible to discuss the Bucky Fanfic Ecosystem without discussing Hydra Trash Party.
In the posts at the links at the beginning of the post, I discuss how it's a really, really common element in fanfic for Bucky to have been raped during his captivity as the Winter Soldier. At some point I say something like, "Wow, this [the rape] shows up in a lot of different stories, I'm not sure if it's an unusually common thing with this character for some reason or what..."
This is so funny to me looking back. I really had no idea.
To quickly summarize what took me literal months to figure out: Bucky fanfiction, back in the day, was basically the Dead Dove Cambrian Explosion, except that Hydra Trash Party came before "dead dove, don't eat" and in fact is sort of what "dead dove, don't eat" is based upon, as per the post that literally coined "dead dove, don't eat" as a fandom term.
(There's a Fanlore page that explains everything, you can look it up. )
Technically, Hydra Trash Party can refer to a variety of things related to horrible awful nasty things happening to the heroes of the Captain America films, but in usage, it overwhelmingly refers to the idea that Bucky, as the Winter Soldier, was sexually abused by his handlers. As a tag, it essentially communicates that the fic is going to explore this idea graphically, extensively, or in detail.
I was like "Wow! So this is the fucked up and immoral fanfiction I've heard so much about!"
Obviously, a lot of fans are not interested in reading about these disturbing topics in depth. There's a lot of Hydra Trash Party that I can't stomach myself. However, the idea that sexual violence happened to Bucky when he was the Winter Soldier is everywhere in fic, even if it's only alluded to with a single line. It's another of the things that is commonly accepted as part of the story everyone is collectively telling in the story ecosystem.
For me, this idea comes part and parcel with this essential broader theme of unmaking. Bucky's body and mind are profoundly violated; he is powerless despite his strength and prowess. He is tortured and surgically altered against his will. He has no control over his own body. The deep, nasty, visceral horror of all of this fascinates me. Conceptually and thematically, sexual violence fits perfectly with this story, to the point that it almost feels implicitly present even if we don't say it out loud; when reading an academic book about torture I came across the quote, "all torture is rape and all rape is torture," and while I believe that of course there's a reason those are separate words, it's expressing a truth about torture that is often erased.
Part of the reason it came to fascinate me was my initial reaction to reading a story where Bucky was portrayed as a survivor of sexual violence. At first, I thought, "Wait, does that even make sense? He's a super strong murder machine who could easily kill anyone in a matter of seconds." Then, I thought, "Wait. Rape isn't about whether the victim is able to physically fight back or not. That was a really shitty assumption to make." Then, I thought, "Wait. This is actually realistic to what happens with torture, and fits with the villains' philosophy of power and dominance."
It's rare to get caught off guard like that by a piece of fiction, caught in the act of automatically thinking some shitty thing that society programmed into you even though consciously, you would never, never, never endorse it. I got kind of slapped in the face by the fact that my first instinct was to doubt that someone physically strong could be raped. I think that communicates how important it is to tell that story.
The stories people have written from these ingredients, I have found to be cathartic and moving and thought-provoking.
It's the story-ecosystem that fascinates me, really, not the "canon" itself; the aliveness and interacting of all these elements. When I wrote my own Bucky fanfic, I picked out the things that had compelled me in other fanfics, I delved deeper into things that I wanted to be explored more deeply, I dug into new ideas that I felt would interact in interesting ways with the existing ones, and I grounded it very strongly in my own experiences and interests.
I could go on and on. Even more than I already have gone on and on. And doubtless there is so much more that I haven't even explored yet.
