John Walker thoughts because my flashlight ran out and also so did my chill
Okay so first: I do not agree with John Walker. He makes terrible choices. He murders people. He loses it. I am not saying he’s a good guy. But if you actually look at the context? The emotional, mental, human context? He makes… sense. Not excusable sense, but understandable sense.
He wasn’t thinking clearly. He was grieving Lemar. He was carrying the serum, which literally warps your brain and amplifies everything you feel. And what if it was Bucky and Steve instead of Lemar? Or Sam and Bucky? Or even just someone he loved and lost while trying to be a symbol of something bigger than himself? He was trapped between grief, guilt, power, and expectation, and the world demanded he be perfect anyway. He had no space to just be a human beingin a situation that was impossible to survive emotionally.
And also… Midwest emo. Like. Very clearly Midwest emo. I don’t normally post music stuff but hear me out: Be Nice To Me by The Front Bottoms just… screams John Walker. The metaphors hit too hard:
“You’re a flashlight in a dark room… but the batteries ran out.” Lemar is the flashlight. The thing that kept John grounded, kept him human, kept him anchored when everything else is chaos. When Lemar dies? The batteries are gone. John is stumbling blind, still trying to do right, still trying to hold it together, and failing because he literally has no guide.
“You’re a werewolf and I’m a full moon.” John believes he causes everything bad. The serum, his anger, his impulsiveness — he’s the storm. Lemar is caught in it, hurt because of him, and John carries the guilt like a boulder that won’t budge.
All the lines about breaking, failing, lying, and screaming into the void? That’s John screaming into the world after Lemar dies. That’s him trying to make sense of a world that won’t make sense, trying to be the symbol he’s supposed to be, while the person who kept him human is gone.
Some comic context for the record: John is literally canonically a US Agent in the comics, trained to be the government’s “perfect” patriotic soldier. He kills villains under orders, struggles with authority and morality, and has a really messy emotional life in canon too. MCU just… condensed all the trauma into one intense arc with Lemar and the serum.
The song isn’t justification. It’s devastation. It’s guilt. It’s grief and rage and self-loathing all tangled together. John is violent and wrong and dangerous and also… heartbreakingly human. He’s angry, he’s scared, he’s desperate, he’s trying to do the right thing in a world that won’t let him. And he will never be allowed to be a human who fails, because the serum and the government and the symbol he carries won’t let him exist quietly.
So yeah. I don’t condone him. I think he’s terrifying. I think he’s tragic. I think he makes the worst possible mistakes over and over. But I get him. I get the grief. I get the guilt. I get the way the world can take one small mistake and spiral you into hell. And the Midwest emo in him is real and delicious and sad and I am fully here for it.