Things In Black Widow (2021) That Hold My Entire Heart, an incomplete list:
- Nat’s eyes tracking Dreykov’s actions as he uses his ring
- Tiny baby yelena singing ‘this’ll be the day that I die’ as they drive off to kill the very person that she is
- 'I like your vest’ ‘I knew it’
- When she SLAMS her NOSE into the desk like what a POWER MOVE
- Alexei having ‘yelena’ and ‘natasha’ tattooed on his arm, okay bud that’s a pretty permanent commitment you made for the most boring mission of your life
- Every time someone shows Natasha Romanoff physical affection
- That moment where Nat is listening to top 40 pop as she drives off
- The fact that she had literally no reason to call Ross and did so just to gloat
- Natasha being completely unaware that she isn’t one of the Big Avengers TM
As a casual nat stan, i feel a little bit weirded out the amount of genuine smiling throughout the snippets i've seen--to the point where i thought it was uncharacteristic. Not that i think nat is incapable of basic human emotions, but i guess i'm used to her being so stoic? Weirdly, her stoicness is what drawn me to her bcs i too am a very guarded person. How do you think the film portray her in this department?
I have been sitting on this one since before the movie came out because I couldn't figure out how to answer it in a way that wasn't spoilery.
Let's gooooo.
I am ALSO seriously into Nat's guardedness. I think that media very rarely knows what to do with women who aren't either great at emotions or complete robots, and in past movies Natasha has given us just enough to show that she's neither. And Nat's reliance on performativity, in particular, has always worked for me; I grew up with the belief that you have to behave in certain ways for people to accept you, and seeing characters get emotional with very little provocation makes me actively uncomfortable as a viewer, like I'm seeing something private I shouldn't.
Nat's emotions in this movie worked for me for a few reasons.
One is one of my favorite details of the movie: Natasha (and Melina) were psychologically conditioned, while Yelena (and the other Widows in her cohort) were brainwashed. The conditioning required the Widows to be extremely carefully controlled, because of the negative consequences if they didn't. The brainwashing removed the ability to control, because it was never their choice. So we see that in Morocco Yelena is extremely controlled, and then right after that we see her expressing emotions far more freely than we ever see from Nat (even ten-year-old Nat) or Melina. She doesn't have the instincts to not.
Another is that in most of the scenes where we see Natasha showing strong emotions, positive or negative, it's with people she was only close with from ages seven or eight to ten or eleven. There's an element of Nat unintentionally regressing and needing to consciously regain her Adult In Control Of The Situation approach, repeatedly; we see it most clearly in the "don't slouch" scene but for me her first scenes with Yelena are that much more telling. She's metaphorically an adult staying in her childhood bedroom at her parents' house and trying to figure out why the bed doesn't feel like she remembers.
A third is one that I didn't actually realize until thinking more about this movie: yes, Natasha is smiling sincerely more here. But she's also angry more. It wasn't until I had seen this movie a few times that I started to think of all the times I've identified Nat as angry in other movies. I still think she HAS been angry, but she's grit her teeth and she's smiled a very tight smile and she has done everything in her power to defuse the situation. (I can't help but think of how Carol's anger got so many fanboys to be like "Why doesn't she smile more?" while Natasha's anger has passed by them entirely unnoticed.) Her smiling, to me, is connected to her ability to express her rage: to try to drown Yelena before offering a truce and drinking together; to yell at Alexei rather than coquettishly convince him to find the Red Room; to call Melina a coward to her face.
Compare it to her conversation with Ross; her tone never wavers. When she has her first conversations with Mason, even though he can tell she's run-down, she's presenting Public-Facing Natasha, who just wants to Get Shit Done. When she thinks Taskmaster is sent by Ross, her ONLY emotional reaction is to say that she's a better shot when she's pissed off. It's only once the Red Room is brought in, and her history is part of things, that her emotions show more on her face.
I don't think Natasha lost all her levels of guardedness in this movie- I think comparing her to Alexei and Yelena is proof of that, as is, frankly, the number of critics who didn't seem to understand what I saw as an extremely clear emotional arc- but I think this movie is a lot closer to the nerve, and as a result we're seeing more get through her mask than we usually would. If that were only positive emotions, I don't think it would work for me. But the film's active choice to give Natasha greater capacity to show her anger made her visible happiness feel more earned, and both parts together made Nat feel like a more complete person to me.
I also think it’s fun how most of the smiling she does is directed towards Yelena, in that fond, affectionate ‘look at this person I not-so-secretly love(d)’ type of way, but also in a ‘can you believe the shit we’ve gone through’ type of way, and the fact that Nat chooses to approach a lot of their shared trauma through wry humour instead of sadness or anger for much of the movie is part of her natural stoicism to me. What’s the point of stoicism, right? Being blasé, unbothered, appearing unaffected no matter how you feel inside. It’s an act and a performance. The circumstances of this film mean that Nat has to confront her past, and it’s too big of a topic to have no response too at all- that would probably look unnatural and forced in and of itself, which defeats the purpose of being stoic- and humor is a less vulnerable choice than the hurt, anger and betrayal that Yelena is buried in pretty much through the entire film. Not to say that Nat doesn’t get towards the anger etc. because she absolutely does of course, but she’s pushed a lot more before she gets there.
All the smiling at Mason at the end of the movie feels earned because it’s such a contrast to how she starts the film: literally running away, refusing to admit that she’s not okay, not acknowledging their friendship, having essentially given up on the Avengers, etc.
god this move and Winter Soldier have such parallels for me in terms of Nat learning to trust, be trusted, and let people in, and retroactively makes the start of Endgame so much deeper
honestly can’t decide if I’m more torn up because of wallowing in the character feelings the black widow movie has given me, or because I’m angry that this is what we could’ve got for so many years, at good times and better times than 2021
......... like...... this is what it feels like for female characters to be treated with respect?????? nice to know?????
ok but tell me why i’ve been sobbing over baby yelena happily singing ‘this’ll be the day that i die’ as that very thing is quite literally in the process of happening, it’s not even subtle yet here i am bawling for this child
It's been nearly two years since endgame and I'll still get a random wave of grief every few months where everything hurts. Ok Marvel does it count as trauma at this point because it should.
Here are my two responses:
THE VERSION I WANT TO HAVE BUT I KEEP TRYING TO INTELLECTUALIZE SO IT DOESN’T HURT SO BAD:
OMFG I KNOW RIGHT???????????????? IT’S THE WORST AND I’M TIRED OF BEING SAD, I JUST WANT TO LOVE THEM.
THE INTELLECTUALLY STEPPING BACK VERSION WHICH GETS LONG BUT IS HOW I AM RATIONALIZING [cw: lots of talk about grief; some abstract discussion of the pandemic]:
As someone in the exact same boat, this answer and the recent Falcon and Winter Soldier trailer both made me feel a lot better. I hadn’t considered how the pilot projects of Phase 4 would be farewells to the fallen heroes of Phase 3- but yeah, totally, after watching the Falcon and the Winter Soldier trailer released today + deep into Wanda Vision, that’s definitely what they’re doing! Part of what made FFH sting so deeply was the lack of acknowledgement for Natasha’s death (and I still stand by this, though, like Vision was a robot who existed for 3 years and Steve is as far as we know very much alive after having lived his whole life, they’re not the same, Natasha’s death was equal to Tony’s and Fury should have said just one thing about it whether or not she was getting her own damn movie)
Phew, can you tell how easy it is to push me back off the cliff (pun very much intended)? I don’t really have a point here other than to say that I hope, hope, hope that the Black Widow movie, whenever we see it, offers the same sort of bereavement process to Nat fans as FFH did for Tony’s. And I hope Steve fans find their healing in TFATWS. Because part of grieving for a fictional character is seeing other fictional characters grieve and value that character, and I hope we get that. I hope we’ve reached the stretches of media that will let us smile and move on.
Like, the TFATWS trailer is currently ripping my heart out because there’s Sam! And Bucky! And Steve’s implicit presence! And Sharon! It’s the whole TWS squad back together again sans one very important person. I need to be able to contextualize my grief for Nat within the MCU- and that will (again, hopefully) happen partly through being shown other characters processing their own grief regarding her death and the impact it had on them, a la WandaVision, FFH and TFAWTS.
Hot take: they’re trapped in two different soul stones alone and will never meet each other.
Hear me out. In the main timeline, all the stones were destroyed, including the one Gamora was sacrificed to obtain. The stones aren’t a homogenous entity across all timelines, as proven by the fact that the Avengers went off and retrieved stones from other timelines and brought them into their own timeline, where they stayed very much intact even though the original stones had already been destroyed by Thanos.
So that means Natasha is in the soul stone belonging to the timeline that she and Clint jumped to in 2014, which must have been an entirely different alt-universe stone, as it was able to exist in a timeline where its sister had been destroyed. Gamora’s in the stone which was unfortunately destroyed, and who knows what happens to the soul world when that happened.
Granted we don’t know what happens in the 2014 stone’s timeline, so it’s possible (but not certain- 14 million possibilities after all) that a different version of Gamora is sacrificed in that universe as well, and joins Natasha for a lil while. Of course, then they both get destroyed either way when Thanos kills the stones in 2018.
Okay, let’s do this one last time, yeah? For real this time. This is it. My name is Miles Morales. I was bitten by a radioactive spider. And for like two days, I’ve been the one and only Spider-Man. I think you know the rest.
SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER VERSE (2018)
dir. Peter Ramsey, Robert Persichetti Jr., Rodney Rothman
today’s concern: I want to finish my fic as planned which means leading towards a barbershop quartet ending, but also i was gonna involve sam more in a later sequel which i’m now no longer writing, so then the remaining option is ENTIRELY REMOVE SAM which nooooo, or shoehorn him in where it feels rushed agh
Currently thinking about the You-See-Colors-When-You-Meet-Your-Soulmate-And-Lose-Colors-When-They-Die trope and how it might apply to Endgame time travel shenanigans and giving myself feelings
stormborns
origamiaround
turnnoffyourmind
discoholicmusic
yousharknotpass
baratheonpilled
pixelskylines
