my take on gale mota, if this helps: so obvs he's generally holds back and is very careful socially, tending towards watching rather than participating. i also think he's very reactive, inasmuch as he gives people what "fits" their personality. egan's an annoying endearing brat so he gets the longsuffering treatment. curt's longsuffering, so he gets gale's version of a brat. neither is a /lie/, persay, but both are an obfuscation of the whole picture. he deliberately casually makes himself 1/
...hard to know, which is also shown in his general stoic snarky shtick. again, it's not a lie, it's just not /everything/. exactly what part of himself he's trying to hide is up to interpretation (big gay boner for his buddies, anyone?) but i personally think he's trying very hard to hide just how fucking mean he can be. ironically i think this is exactly why bucky is drawn to him (because maybe he'll smack him around a little) who said that 2/2
yessssssss all of this is so good and i agree with nearly all of it: gale is definitely very cautious, very withholding, and very reactive, and i also definitely see a deep capacity for viciousness and anger and meanness as one of the vices he's decided Cannot Under Any Circumstances Be Expressed, Lest He Be Too Like His Father. i think my only major difference in read is i can't see gale bratting, at least not early on; not only does bucky have the brat market CORNERED, but i think gale wants to be good. he doesn't want to have those vices, he doesn't want to lash out when he's angry, he doesn't want to be a dog off the leash. what he needs is a firm hand at the end of the leash, who'll tell him when he's being a good boy.
i think he also wants that hand to hold him back from the anger and the meanness, but this is where i think curt becomes an interesting choice for being that firm hand (vs, say, bucky, who wants to drag gale so far off-leash that they both forget what the concept of leashes are, and i'm losing control of this dog metaphor but you get what I'm saying). because i think curt is happy to put gale where he belongs when it's necessary—it takes barely a touch to his chest and, what, fifteen words to make gale back down in the RAF scene, when gale FORCED bucky back down into his seat to keep him from taking the hit? seriously, curt doms that boy with so light a touch i don't think gale even knows it's THERE—but i also think that curt sees that vicious streak in gale and likes it. it just needs pointing in the right direction. so i think it'd be good for gale in that he can bring curt as many apples as he can get his hands on and get told he's a good boy for it, and curt valuing that protective streak gale seems to lump down into Anger, Which Is Always Bad means gale would get more space to have those feelings in productive ways. i.e. circling the fight like a guard dog to keep the RAF guys from taking any potshots, and reeling curt into safety the second he's in range. and also the two of them brat-taming the fuck out of bucky, with curt telling gale exactly what and how much he should give bucky. i mean what.
[wrt smacking bucky around lmao genuinely i think curt and gale BOTH have crises about That Time Bucky Made Me Hit Him, but they're flavored differently: curt is upset bucky kept pushing at what curt tried to express as a limit, but gale is upset that he couldn't "control" himself in the face of bucky pushing him. i don't think either of them have the language to express any of this clearly, either, so it's a top drop clusterfuck both times, but it's worse for gale because he has the self-hate i'm-just-like-my-dad-after-all spiral waiting and ready to go, whereas curt's like "i'm fucked up over this. why am i fucked up over this. oh, because i didn't want to, i SAID i didn't want to, and bucky didn't listen to me." i've got thoughts about it]