Okay no but real talk, this was the moment. This was the moment in Cap 2 where I knew the Russos got Natasha. The costuming and everything else, yes, good, on-point, but this is the first time we’ve really seen the Black Widow at her most terrifying. Tony touches on it, certainly, in IM2 - she’s a double, triple imposter; she’s figuring him out, keeping an eye on him (does he need help? Does he need to be taken down?) while disarming him by being the kind of woman he’d bed and discard, has a hundred times…but those weren’t weaponized moments, they were strategic. But on the Lumerian Star, we see Natasha in action in much the same way we see Steve in action, sliding easily from one performance to the other. The first is that of watching Steve for cracks that might appear – trying to set him up, trying to keep him in a world he’s very clearly denying, not unlike what she was sent to do with Tony. And the second (which, notably, is a version of herself she shuts her comm off before producing) is this: deadly, dangerous, and terrifying; playing the role that was placed on her as an insult, a joke, and that she reclaimed as an honor and a horror story against the people that tried to make her a monster.
Because this is what Age of Ultron got wrong. We already know damn well that Natasha is competent; that’s never been a question. But TWS is the first time we begin to see the underpinnings of that competency: where they come from; what they cost her. The Red Room tried to make Natasha into a weapon – they tried to take her body, her sexuality, her agency away from her; tried to make her the “femme fatale” in every stereotypical sense of the term. The Black Widow title was meant to be very much literal: no man could resist her, much less survive her (to paraphrase Bucky in 616). But Natasha saw that; she always understood that. And Natasha was always more than they believed of her. She took the training; she took the mantle. She took the pain and the suffering and the torment that created the Widow, and she took the rage that came with having the name made into a joke, a pejorative at her expense, the “whore-slut-spy” she never was. It’s the same reason Bucky remains the Winter Soldier, despite the fact that his life and body was taken from him in its creation. Because the Soldier, like the Widow, is a legend. And legends are valuable; legends don’t die. Legends grow, and they transform, and they become bigger, and scarier, and more terrifying than any one human being can become.
Natasha Romanoff never believed herself to be any of the things the Red Room reduced her to. But the Red Room gave her a weapon that they couldn’t take away; that they never had control of, for all of their arrogance in believing they did.
This is Natasha Romanoff, Black Widow. But it’s also Natasha Romanoff, the survivor. She knows what they say about her – and as long as she knows who she is; as long as she knows she’s worth more than the pejoratives, the slurs, and the attempts to cage her in…well, then those things, those things are only a weakness to them.
Legends are so often warnings, after all.
baratheonpilled
kianamaiart
