Alexei has wanted a drinking contest with the Winter Soldier since the 1980s. Not when he’s mind controlled. But now, it would finally be fair.
A large bearded Russian man shows up on Sam’s doorstep with several types of vodka and Sam’s just like “your problem, Barnes” and walks away.
Alexei is... gregarious. And intimidating. Bucky wants to avoid him so much that all his spy and sniper skills magically disappear. He is six feet tall trying to hide behind a shrub. His arm reflects the sunlight.
Yelena loudly tells him he’s a terrible hider.
A large brown bear is on the stoop now. The bear also has vodka.
I’m sorry I keep having Endgame ideas that entertain me.
So for as long as Steve has Mjolnir, he has the power of Thor, right?
So let’s say he decides to return the soul stone first. He goes in, he tries to get Nat’s life back, Red Skull says it doesn’t work like that, Steve punches the Nazi, and then he says fuck it and, using the ability to fly, grabs Nat on her fall.
Nat takes in their situation. “Since when can you fly?” she asks, immediately assuming she’s dead but at this point is kind of willing to go with it, since it’s not like she can undo anything.
Steve Rogers, who is an asshole and has been every one of his 100+ years, immediately says “I've always been able to fly, I just didn't want you to develop a complex. Why did you think I jumped out of so much stuff without a parachute?”
And Natasha, who is pretty sure she must have a concussion at this point, is just like
Hey! I saw your awesome meta about the Nat deleted scenes. One thing I've been thinking about lately is that line from the CW junior novel where Nat talks about getting dumped in the middle of siberia with her Red Room classmates. One impression that I think a lot of fans get of the mcu Red Room because of this and also a tweet from the Agent Carter set is that only one girl ends up surviving her Red Room "class". (Yelena most likely wouldn't count bc she's younger than Nat and part of a different class) But in BW we clearly see an entire team of widows that were trained together. Any thoughts?
So I have spent WAY too long thinking about this, and based on what we know from various interview snippets from the past two years I think there’s a way to fanwank it all together. If I’m remembering things correctly. Which, to be fair, I may not be.
This gets long. (CW for brainwashing, indoctrination, and abuse- the usual Red Room and Bucky mixture.)
Didn’t they start the movie discussion with talk about the Red Room being re-created to make the current Widows? That could mean new policies, and honestly, “training 32 girls but only keeping one of them” seems like a much less efficient policy than “train all the girls and use them til they die of their own accord.”
(I mean, the metaphor of only one girl surviving is great, and the girls having to kill each other to survive is a perfect way to use brutality to train away their emotions and attachments, but from an Effective Evil Organization standpoint, it’s an unforced expenditure of resources.)
This would allow both the technically-canon we have to stand (because I’m pretty sure both the novelizations and Agent Carter can be seen as TECHNICALLY not the MCU if they’re directly contradicted; only the movies are 100% canon, and as we know even that can be flexible) and create an army of Widows for Nat and Yelena to fight.
There’s also the possibility that killing the girls off IS a slow lifelong thing, like all the Red Room alums are being useful as long as they can but only the one in each class who survives the longest gets the title of Widow. And I know Black Widow is for the deadly spider but that would also play well into the idea of a widow being the one who outlived her companion(s). So then the scenes like in Agent Carter where preteen girls fought to the death wouldn’t be unheard of but also wouldn’t be the norm; the girls would know it COULD happen at any moment but it would be rare.
I can fanwank that a lot better than I can fully square Agent Carter with what we’ve seen from the trailers of Nat and Yelena. I mean, it makes sense that if they need to go undercover as a family they would take children they already had in the murder factory, but it didn’t seem like Dottie and her cohort were going on missions; they were just training and being indoctrinated 24/7. I think there’s so much that could be so interesting if Nat was subjected to similar- did she have to watch Beauty and the Beast the way Dottie watched Snow White? (someone write that Bruce/Nat right now)- but we can’t ignore that she and Yelena had three years OFF from indoctrination. Working with Melina and Alexei would obviously be considered an honor, but would it set them behind in their murderstudies? “Is it better to be taken out of the Red Room and returned or just left there permanently” is more than just a “is it better to know freedom and lose it or never have it”; did Nat and Yelena always have to play catch-up? How does that impact who they are today?
And how much does Bucky-was-taken-by-Hydra apply now? Like, he still has the red star on his arm and Alexei’s costume is damn similar; can we assume Department X was somewhat involved in Bucky’s training as well as the Red Room’s? Because that would mean that in the decade or so after Dottie’s class was indoctrinated they developed actual brainwashing abilities, and would that have been used on the Widows, or was that considered more expensive and less efficient than the indoctrination, especially if the girls didn’t know any different? Bucky had memories of another world that needed to be wiped away, but we saw Dottie didn’t.
Did Yelena and Natasha getting exposed to three years as normal kids change whether the Red Room thought they needed brainwashing versus indoctrination versus both?
And what is the organizational structure of the Red Room by the time Nat and Yelena are there? In Age of Ultron we had Madame B but here we have Dreykov; do we know if Madame B is even in this? Given how many of the visions in Age of Ultron were symbolic rather than literal memories, are we sure that Madame B was ever real, or was she a construct meant to represent all of the authority figures of the Red Room in Natasha’s psyche? If the heads of the Red Room are men- and we know that Dreykov is a Red Room authority figure and that Melina has been through the Red Room several times herself- why was that symbol a woman? (I mean, yes, I know, it’s Joss, but how do we square this in-universe?)
To be clear all of these are terrible options, every last one of them, but I am so excited at all the different flavors of terrible we will get to explore.
The interview Scarlett Johansson did this week in a suit and hoop earrings- which is an extremely good look for her btw- makes me want a Secret Avengers mission, sometime between Civil War and Infinity War, where Sam, Steve, and Nat all have to wear suits Because Reasons.
They Skype Bucky (Secret Avengers is before The Zoom Times), who is currently in Wakanda. He’s wearing pajamas. He critically evaluates their makeup. A goat is eating his hair.
He’s not going to tell them they look good. He has higher standards than that. He puts bowties on some of his goats and does a “who wore it better” fashion shoot. (He says the goats win, but actually Sam does, because have you seen Sam Wilson. But he’ll never admit that.)
Do you consider deleted scenes to be canon? Or since they weren’t included in the official cut, do you consider them more malleable, and therefore does it depend what’s *in* the scenes? Do the angles presented by extra footage fit into your idea of Nat’s character?
I try to. But only when they don't directly contract canon that DOES end up on the screen. And also when it don't interfere with an idea I like better.
I always like to have canon to play with- even if it means I'm figuring out ways around it, it gives me a roadmap, which I find more satisfying than just making things up out of whole cloth. And you can tear Nat and Fury's "keep the circle small" conversation from my cold dead hands. That told us so much about both of them, and it is a crime that it wasn't included. But that's really more character beats than background.
So much of Nat's storyline has been cut from the movies that the novelizations and cut scenes are a lot of what we CAN use to get Natasha's background. I still haven't done the MCU rewatch I'm planning before seeing BW (side note, would anyone be interested in doing a marathon viewing party over the long 4th of July weekend?), but unless I'm forgetting something, the majority of what we know about Natasha's history is pieced together from comics canon, that one episode of Agent Carter, and the MCU cutting room floor. In terms of actual on-screen canon about Natasha's history, there's nothing in IM2, oblique references in Avengers, Winter Soldier background in Cap2, Wanda's vision and the following conversation with Bruce in Age of Ultron, nothing in Civil War, nothing in Infinity War, and then the ballet shoes and the "daughter of Ivan" in Endgame, right?
I feel like as Nat fans we have, collectively, adopted a pretty clear idea of what the Red Room was like, which has been helpful for fan discussions, but has kind of blurred the lines for me, and I keep having to remind myself of how much we don't actually know. It seems like at least part of what I've accepted will be countered by the Black Widow movie itself, given that Nat and Yelena are tiny when they go on their three-year mission and tween Natasha doesn't seem as mercenary as I'd been imagining.
Even with what we've gotten from the text, while the early reviews say it fits well into the established MCU canon, I'm not sure whether that's broadly or including the deep cuts that Nat fans have made to figure out her backstory. Will Madame B be a part of the Red Room here, or was she a manifestation of all the authority figures combined into one by Wanda's magic? Will Natasha visiting her parents' grave still make sense, or does it no longer fit her history? Will we see how Natasha was "unmade" as a child or will that turn out to have been a metaphor?
Ultimately I feel like all of my answers are going to hinge on "what does the new movie give us to contradict or complement what we have?" which is a profoundly unsatisfying answer, even to me.
My happy place escapism headcanons are basically, at this point, divided into variations on “everyone goes to save Natasha and Gamora from the souls tone only to discover they’ve escaped on their own” and variations on “Tony and Pepper are either in an open relationship or the world’s closest and happiest exes, and they keep trying to set the other up with someone and are EXTREMELY competitive about it.”
For something that came out over a year ago, my brain really has not processed that any aspect of Endgame happened at all.
