ā¤ Mostly Sam Wilson, my love, my Captain š On a sidequest to give Sam his comics cat back! Thunderbolts hater | she/her | elive on ao3 | Sambucky, Samsteve, Samquin, all Sam is love! š„°
The release of the Doomsday trailer reiterating, yet again, that this fandom, especially a lot of people claiming to be Sam Wilsonās fans, do not give one single solitary damn about the character outside of his connection to Bucky.
For months, Iāve repeatedly talked about how as long as Sam stands next to Bucky in the movie, yāall wonāt care what happens with the character, or how the Avengers name sl is resolved, or if he continues to be sidelined and disrespected by other characters (and fans), and it didnāt take 15 minutes after the trailer dropped to prove I was right. Smhā¦ a blind man couldāve seen it coming.
I know this has been discussed plenty, but I saw these comments earlier, so it's still a topic, but how exactly did Sam treat Walker like shit?
Sure Bucky was very upfront with his dislike of Walker, and even recently still doesn't like him, but what did Sam do besides decline to work with Walker? What exactly did Sam do or say that equals treating Walker like shit? As I recall, Sam tried multiple times to de-escalate, and we saw Walker escalate situations. In their first sit down talk, we found out that Walker and Lemar hacked Redwing, and that's how they found Sam and Bucky. Despite that, and despite the fact that they had no new information to add, Sam still shared what he knew so far. Walker, at the end of their conversation, hits Sam with that "wingman" bit which folks like to ignore for what it is. Sam even says, "it's always that last line." During the rest of the show, Sam is as cordial as possible even though Walker isn't. He tries to pick a fight with Sam after his role in messing up the talk with Karli. Even after Walker wrongfully killed Nico, Sam tries to reason with him, but Walker escalates that situation too. At no point during that fight were Sam or Bucky trying to kill him, but Walker does attempt to kill Sam. Again, what did Sam do or say that equals treating Walker like shit?
Let me also add that Sam tried to stop Walker from getting into it with the Dora, but Walker didn't listen, and he got what he got. In the warehouse, Sam says "this isn't you, John," and "you made a mistake." Sam tried to prevent situations from escalating, and even suggested that maybe Walker could savage some part of his reputation if he would stand down, but that doesn't happen. Although, he does get a light punishment overall. Again, where did Sam treat Walker like shit?
Adding these new ones. These are from a thread talking about Reed holding Sam back. The other replies are just as annoying, but these Walker ones still make no sense. What exactly did Sam do to Walker? All Sam did was not want to work with Walker. I think he feels indifferent to Walker even though he has every reason to dislike Walker in how Walker choose to approach Sam from the start.
These are from the same person who said Sam disliked him before he had a good reason. Walker's actions are his own. If he didn't interrupt Sam and Karli's talk then everything ends there, and Lemar doesn't die. He didn't try to reach them any other way. He hacked Redwing. He had no new information to add, but he still wanted to be in charge. It's interesting that Sam isn't allowed any feelings about Walker's behavior towards him, not even just being annoyed, but Walker stans believe that is justified in everything he does.
Despite my default being happy to see new Sam footage, I still know I'm absolutely going to despise that tower scene. And i still hate the Mjolnir bit.
What is up with lefty types pushing to learn practical skills (sewing/gardening/etc whatever) as like "you'll need to know this after The Revolution:tm:" and not, like, "this is a useful skill to help yourself & others in your communities Right Now". You all sound like doomsday preppers and it's weirding me out. We don't have to prep for communist rapture maybe thee revolution starts with helping your neighbors
YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN LIKE....... it's weird. It's a subtle distinction but it's weird. People wanna be protagonists in post apocalypse movies so bad & when you're like "well that's not going to fucking happen innit" they call you a counterrevolutionary. Like yeah no I'm on board with dismantling the establishment etc etc I'm just saying you're being fucking weird about it. This is an action movie hero fantasy in a gen z aesthetic trenchcoat. You can just repair your clothes and feed people Right Now
MCU Steve and Bucky were never codependent, even in the past, and in the present day they are so not codependent that itās laughable to hear people claim it. Steve knew Bucky was alive after TWS and went right on about his business being an Avenger, while his friend Sam, who didnāt know Bucky, went looking for him during his FREE TIME, not even all day day everyday, but when he could lol. Then, after CW, Steve dropped Bucky off in Wakanda and said deuces, and once again went on about his business. Yāall act like Steve was in Buckyās space and face since the moment he found out he was still alive and he simply was not. They were besties in their youth, and Steve certainly didnāt want Bucky to be out in the cold suffering once he knew he was still kicking, but he was not obsessed with Bucky or attached to his hip. In the modern day, Steve was doing his own thing and Bucky was doing his own thing, and thatās okay to admit. As a matter of fact, yāall sound silly when you wonāt admit it.
thereās this weird consensus on tiktok that sam feels guilty for suing bucky and the thunderflops or was forced and it really makes me itch because yāall will do anything but take a black character serious and we know that for a fact because you canāt do it with their actors either
if we had an entire show about how sam fought to be CAPTAIN AMERICA after the title was handed to him from the original cap himself, and his entire motive in civil war with steve was being against government control, why would he feel guilty for suing for the team name especially after he was just asked to restart and recruit the avengers?
why would be be FORCED to sue? who would force him? and itās funny that in this mystical land sam was forced to sue and heās so guilty but bucky gets to pout in the avengers tower and pretend he has leverage over the CIA after barely being forced to join this goofy team
he isnāt even suing them, which is the most ridiculous thing. heās filing for copyright/trademark over the team name. he could then sue them once granted the rights, but honestly sam is doing the most basic legal protection, whichāas stated aboveāis in line with his characterās historical actions. itās also not petty, not vindictive, not rude, or whatever people also want to paint it as. sam is either spineless or cruel, no in between. and with this, itās simply an act to say āoh, you want to play around? okay, let me get steps ahead of youā. as he should. like are we kidding here. even if you like the thunderflops and root for them, you have to admit that, in universe at the very fucking least, itās a bad look to play superhero government cia shill, and to do it with a stolen title at that. so why the fuck wouldnāt captain america, the guy leading and putting the avengers back together, push back against that? thatās too logical tho, isnāt it.
now, i personally think all of this is stupid and all of it never shouldāve happened, and itās all lazy, pandering writing that, especially if the rumours are true, amounts to basically nothing but more undeserved and disproportionate blowback and antiBlack racism thrown at the character. and the cultivation of it in the fandom as a part of the dominant culture to just āacceptā this narrative, which again is totally built on shit people have made up, is so nasty and honestly sad. yall would rather make shit up to put that white man in the victim box even more and perpetuate antiBlackness with regard to the character and the actual real Black fans (and hey, letās throw the actual real actor playing the character in too) instead of having a real discussion about what this actually means in universe and for the characters. there are layers as to why all of this sucks, but the first step really is just looking at whatās in the damn movie and yall canāt even do that.
below is my review of/thoughts on nolanās odyssey. it contains spoilers, and is copy/pasted from my letterboxd. not normally something i do, but i have a lot of thoughts on this one.
muse, tell me about a complicated man.
odysseus has been complicated at his core for millennia now, a hero who is also a braggart and a jerk and too proud for his own good. a seemingly good husband, a clever general, a wily liar, a cold blooded murderer. a favorite of the gods (or most of them, anyway.)
nolan does his best to complicate odysseus still further.
his odysseus is, generally, a much kinder man. he waits to string his bow to give his hunted a chance to flee, he does what he can to save as many of his men as he can, he finds agamemnon distasteful and brutish, he pictures athena as the young woman his soldiers slaughtered, he cares deeply for the farm boy he brought with him to troy.
he also lies to that boy and leaves him to die. he gets his entire crew cursed by getting in one final shot at polyphemus. he slaughters every suitor in his house.
odysseusās hubris and arrogance and brutishness are still present, more than enough to ensure his long winded odyssey still takes place, but nolan does a lot of work to make him a character worth liking, a king worthy of the title and reverence everyone bestows upon him, in a way that doesnāt quite exist in the original poem, bound by its own greek standards.
heās also a much more haunted man, drowning in his own tragedy and war ravaged life, by the things heās done, the things heās seen, by the sacred pact of xenia heās broken in order to end a war heād helped a power hungry king wage for a decade without end. nolanās odysseus is very reminiscent of his oppenheimer: a clever, imperfect, arrogant, brilliant man who reinvented the world of war and humanity forever, who helped tear down walls without thinking of the consequences he could never undo until it was too late.
itās an interesting take on odysseus, one that isnāt exactly based in the text, but makes perfect sense for the way nolan tends to approach his stories and his protagonists. heās found the perfect story that combines a fragmented take on time and memory with a complicated, immoral, but generally charming and likable āheroā who wants nothing more than to do great things while still getting to go back to how life was before he did them, grappling with the fact that he might never get home. i told a friend of mine before this movie came out that as weird as it might sound, nolan might be the most perfect person to adapt the odyssey. itās so on the nose it could be painful.
for the most part, it wasnāt. i was kind of shocked by how faithful it was in some degrees. many adaptations of the odyssey fall into the same pitfalls: they focus too much on odysseusās deeds and his journey home, and not enough on the home to which heās trying to come back, and what he does when he gets there. nolan threads that needle well, and the movie, and nolanās particular love of time, are both well served by the odysseyās non-linear narrative. you get a good portion of time with both penelope and telemachus, and i was quite pleased in particular by how well penelope was adapted. sheās the heart and soul of the odyssey in many ways, in one of the only poems of that time so incredibly focused on a woman and her ways, on the ways in which women can gain and wield power, and how she is trapped by the conventions and institutions of marriage. emily wilson focuses a lot on penelope and what she knows and doesnāt know in her translation, and itās obvious that, despite nolanās not-so-great history with women, he really took that to heart when he read it and wrote his own.
in general, thereās a lot that points to the fact that emily wilsonās odyssey, in particular, inspired nolan to write his. the language is the most obvious clue, of course, but thereās also the incredible focus on xenia, which wilson spends a significant portion of time on in her introduction and translatorās notes. the odyssey is, at its core, a story about how you should treat your neighbors, and how that can be corrupted by others and by yourself, both in your favor and against it, and nolan played that through line perfectly.
before i get to what nolan didnāt quite adapt, though, iāll take a brief moment to acknowledge the filmmaking here. itās staggering, a behemoth of a film. the practical effects are gorgeous as always, especially in the scene where circe turns the men into pigs, which was viscerally horrifying enough that i almost want nolan to pivot into body horror, and the cinematography is beautiful. the editing, especially at the beginning, is not the best. there are times when nolanās chosen format works against him, and telling an epic might be one of those times. there are plenty of points in which the visuals are choppy, spliced together in a way that screams āwe have a very strict limit of how long this can be because of the amount of film we can put it on!ā thankfully this stays mostly at the beginning, in scenes with telemachus in ithaca and then leaving it, so it mostly works. were meant to feel uncomfortable and out of place and a little disoriented then anyway; it keeps us in line with telemachus.
ludwig gƶransson is well on his way to his fifth oscar. i felt his score in my bones, rattling through my chest, heart beating like a drum.
now. to the rest of it.
nolanās odyssey is undeniably human. athenaāarguably the second most important character in the story, the guiding hand through much of odysseusās struggles, and the one character who gets to come of age in the poem, as telemachus doesnāt manageāis incredibly stripped. she is less a force of will and more a metaphor, a reminder to odysseus of what heās done and what heās lost and that he has to continue on through it and face his own shame if he ever wants to get home. athena is not in the background pulling the strings, currying favor, and convincing her father to make poseidon back down to get her favorite hero home. she is there to remind odysseus of who he is, of what heās done, of what he must do. odysseus must still make his own way home, and he must take responsibility of whatās occurred for him to do it.
the other gods, similarly, are stripped down. poseidonās curse is made off to be like something that was just superstition by odysseusās men, zeus is mostly only evoked when they mention his law. helios causes the death of odysseusās men but we never see it on screen. outside of athena, who feels more like an apparition borne of guilt than a goddess throwing her hand and favor into the ring, the vast majority of the magic and myth come in odysseusās adventures, with circe and the sirens and polyphemus and the lastrygonians, at least half of which felt a little lackluster in their fantastical natures (once again, the circe scenes are a standout). even calypso feels a little stripped, though it makes her much more likable. it does kind of remove one interesting level of gender dynamics and politics in the odyssey though, as penance for that likability.
(speaking of which, i have a LOT of thoughts about nolanās portrayal of helen. theyād take up way too much room in this review but let me know if you want to hear them. tldr thereās something very interesting in the way nolan allows helen to keep her wits and anger and guilt and horror versus the way the poem has her free herself of all sadness with a sort of drug and magic. it also answers how nolan feels about some of the ambiguity there of helenās own role in being with paris rather than menelaus, just like heās a little more transparent about how he feels penelope falls on the divide of if she misses her husband or she misses the social safety net he provides.)
nolanās odyssey lives in a weird space. it is perhaps the most faithful adaptation of the text weāll ever get in terms of what is actually happening in the story, and in the way it is told (as mostly a collection of stories after the fact, though in nolanās version odysseus is recounting to calypso rather than the phaeacians, which is a change i donāt mind at all). there are some small changes (both material and otherwise), like the inclusion of sinon, that i think really work for the story, and some changes that i think really work for nolanās story, like the reduced role of the gods and the focus on the trauma of warfare.
all in all, though, it means nolanās odyssey is a surprisingly faithful adaptation that is somehow still telling an entirely different story. nolan has his own agenda here, and one that i am generally on board with for most of the runtime. i think he blends it well enough with the original story and meaning that i get sucked into it, and am on board with the way heās nolan-ified it all.
at least until the end.
the real tragedy of nolanās odyssey, i think, is it is one of the first truly great nolan films i donāt think stuck the landing.
the ending was perhaps what i was most excited to see nolan do. the odyssey famously doesnāt really have an ending. the ending of the poem is so abrupt and anticlimactic there was a time when scholars thought the last chapter and a half were artificially added on later, and that the real ending is in book twenty-two. the poem ends with odysseus almost going to war with the families of the suitors heād killed, itching for another fight, before athena steps in and forces them all to stand down.
it doesnāt make for a very satisfying ending, and it certainly doesnāt evoke the kind of anti-war character growth odysseus experiences in nolanās odyssey. i was anxiously awaiting to see what heād do with it all.
i canāt say i care for his take this time. odysseus banishing himself along with penelope and leaving telemachus on the throne felt a little too happy ending, a little too good guy saves the day and realizes he can never go home again because of what heād seen. itās a very stereotypical anti-war movie kind of ending, a theme thatās been prevalent in many of its genre since world war i, but iām not really sure it works here.
odysseus is simply not that good of a man, and telemachus is not that good of a leader. odysseus wants revenge for his house, for his home, not just to protect his family. he could have gone for significantly less violence otherwise. and then he just leaves the home heād killed dozens of men to protect, taking along with him the wife who has diligently ruled a kingdom alone for twenty fucking years, entrusting said kingdom to a son who can barely hold his own. telemachus in the poem is well known for never being able to come of age, because odysseus comes home so he no longer has a possible throne. in nolanās odyssey, this gets solved by odysseus sending himself away, except we never really get to see telemachus earn his way up, to prove he can hold his own after his father has swept in and solved most of his problems. the ending feels like a good wrap up to nolanās humanist anti-war messaging, but it feels just as unearned and anticlimactic an ending for odysseus and his family as the poemās does, just in a very different way.
much of my reverence for nolan comes from his ability to stick the landing, as iām a real sucker for an ending, so it did feel kind of like the wind got knocked out of me a little when this one ended how it did. it kept me teetering on a lower score for my entire hour long drive home from the 70MM IMAX theater in the suburbs, but eventually i landed on appreciating nolanās odyssey for the message heās trying to tell, rather than the message the poem was trying to get across.
i canāt say iāll ever rid my mouth of the slight bitter taste of the ending here when i think of this one, but the rest of the movie was sweet enough iāll be happy to return to this one nonetheless.
excited to see what i get out of it when i see it a second, a third, or even a fourth time whenever i have more time. iāve got a lot to marinate on with this one, both as an adaptation and as a film/story in its own right, and iām sure my feelings will continue to be as complicated as odysseus himself.
