In my merfolk au comic I am kind of making things a little more "grounded" for a certain value of grounded, and I'm banishing the idea of super heroes. So it's merfolk exist instead of super powers, and also there is some higher level of technology available at some points with a little hand-wavey-ness about it, but, eh, like I said, a little bit more grounded. Ish.
One of the things that means is no super serum healing factor, and no drawn out extreme lifespans left and right (though the pursuit of that is a thing, it just hasn't really become a trope). And this is because it feels sometimes like a kind of power scale inflation has happened over time, and we have characters that on the page are said to have like, decades of horrific torture. No, hundreds of years of really hard life! They get tortured in hell for what they experience as thousands of years!!!! And then they come out and act like... idk anyone from an action movie might, I guess? Point is, the audience isn't really expected to understand what hundreds of years of existence would be because that is impossible for humans to do, so like... it's kinda just narrative convenience. It's a trope. And they keep having to make it bigger and badder... but then they have the audience expect the character to behave like a relatively well adjusted character after some ridiculously awful therapy and hand wavey emotional montages. But then the writers can also just blame anything they want on them being still haunted by it, idk... you have ridiculously unrelatable things and then the characters still need to be relatable. Because to portray such a thing as genuinely realistic as possible would take an exhaustive amount of work and the audience wouldn't appreciate it anyway.
What to do. I am having Mer-Bucky be in captivity for roughly 10 years, and although his experience is awful, it is more or less carefully constructed to be survivable and more akin to having been conscripted into an army slash prison slash medical facility. They don't do gruesome horrible torture to him for the hell of it, they don't bother doing any kind of sex crimes to him and in fact anyone who jokes about trying is told off, and although they still use severe conditioning and inhumane treatment, it isn't the same level you could put a human super soldier through over multiple decades. And he's not human, so getting him to cooperate with killing humans is slightly less of a hurdle. They don't think he's a person inside to begin with, so they don't go about "breaking" him the same way.
However, this is also because Bucky is the latest in a long line of subjects. They know how to keep him healthy and relatively regulated because previous merfolk have died gruesomely and were treated in all the kinds of horrifying ways you could imagine a singular super serum bucky to have been treated. So he has some survivors guilt about that, and we get some icky real world parallels to the kind of medical data that was obtained via horrific treatment of minorities and prisoners and other exploited people in history- and of course animals, too. Mer-Bucky is viewed like a kind of horse or dog, but they were unable to breed merfolk in captivity, so there's that extra value in sourcing them.
Bucky is able to cope and recover in part because of the unknown factor of him knowing and loving Steve, and knowing human language and culture. So he knows a bit of what is going on, and can play dumb, and also he understands that these are Bad People, that they are not actually *supposed* to be doing this, and so in an abstract way he understands that there might be justice and consequences for what they are doing (well, this keeps him going for a while, off and on, until he starts to lose hope).
I didn't want to set myself up to do a take on a realistic response to torture, I wanted to do a beautiful merfolk family story with Bucky, and this is kinda how I'm approaching the compromise with making a semi-serious AU on the parts of these characters that I'm so drawn to and why.
Self indulgent, yes. Is it gonna be perfect? Definitely not. But like. Yeah, I wanted a Bucky story where he gets to heal and be happy, and it felt dismissive to say that was a thing that could happen the way I wanted after what he's supposed to have been through. That one is not my lane.
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