do p*ggy-apologists not get that if bucky had been standing 3 paces back, it would’ve been STEVE who got blasted out of the train?
it would’ve been HER toyboy that zola was torturing, on her dime?
steve in an electric chair while ‘arnie’ plays science-bro with howard stark?
I feel like a lot of people haven’t put together the fact that the train heist at the end of CATFA was actually part of the plan for them to capture Zola to recruit him a few months down the line (which is what they did). And by Steve’s declaration that he wouldn’t rest until all of Hydra were dead or captured, it seems like he wasn’t in on that plan. CATFA and CATWS together paint a pretty solid story about what the founders of SHIELD were doing without Steve’s knowledge and CATWS also tells us how he reacts to the knowledge that Hydra were a part of SHIELD (“We’re not salvaging anything, Nick. Hydra, SHIELD, it all goes.”).
The people who say that she didn’t have the power to make the decision to recruit Zola and work with Hydra forget that she very much had the power to leave if she was so morally opposed to it. Endgame shows us that she was Director by 1970 with Zola still working under her. She certainly had the power to something about it then. It wasn’t a situation where they made one in unchangeable decision. They effectively continued to choose to work with him everyday for the 25+ years after the war.
It makes the way she approaches him seem… more than a little suspect.
Only after he’s proven he’s a viable subject for the serum.
Given SHIELDra’s later M.O. of sending pretty women to recruit men they want on their side, even under Fury: they sent Nat to Tony and Steve, and also Peggy’s niece.
It looks a lot more like ‘send Carter to entice Rogers.’
If they didn’t want him to remain a showgirl; they wanted him out in the field, where he could help them capture useful scientists (the way they captured Erskine*), and also nearby so his body could be accessible to their scientists (i.e. Stark).
The idea that Peggy didn’t have the power to recruit or refuse to recruit Zola (saw one idiot on twitter claiming that anti-P’s are acting like she’s entirely responsible for Operation Paperclip when it was POTUS’ idea. Uh, yeah, she doesn’t need to be responsible for the entire operation to take part in it??) It’s nonsense because:
1) You don’t get to hold this character up as a feminist girlboss with one hand while pushing down her power with the other; what, she’s only an Helpless Female when it suits you? (This is all of a piece with the ‘she didn’t know’ defense. She didn’t see Nazis as unemployable and couldn’t predict they would prove untrustworthy? So she’s an idiot, then?)
2) She’s the co-founder of SHIELD. Even if she wasn’t actually a director before the 70s, she was a co-founder, and she’s close personal friends with Stark, the other founder, upon whom she had so much influence he appeared as a reoccurring character in her show. Even if she didn’t have the actual written power to refuse Zola a job, all she’d have to do is say ‘actually Howard I don’t want him here’ to her buddy Stark and he’s gone!
3) as you said @tastelessnostalgia she was Director two years before Zola died and did nothing to get rid of him. All she had to do was let him die, but instead she oversaw the turning of his brain into a computer, effectively making him immortal, able to exert an influence on SHIELD long after she was no longer director. That is canon trusting of a known-Nazi; it’s tantamount to handing him the keys to her house while she’s out of town. CANON.
4) Even the idea that she could’ve left if she didn’t like it: it wouldn’t even have to be that extreme an ultimatum!
She could’ve just threatened to resign to block the appointment. She could’ve pretended to be okay with him, but actually just used him for intell. and inventions and then had him killed or imprisoned. Or killed him herself; and made it look like an accident, if actively killing him would’ve caused her problems with other people on her side.
All it would’ve taken is one throwaway line saying she tried to get at Zola while he was at SHIELD but was prevented, and we could’ve said there was at least a single piece of evidence she wasn’t okay with it. But there isn’t.
There are a wealth of possible actions a competent agent in her position could have taken to prevent Zola having any influence. But she didn’t do anything, in fact she made it worse.
And another thing:
Operation Paperclip did not (as that same idiot on twitter claimed) begin after 1945.
It began during the war, but in secret, because the Allies were already plotting how to handle (their then-ally) Stalin and the Soviets after the end of the war: they had to race to begin before the war finished, as they were already working on the Manhattan Project, and knew they needed to get scientists in that field away from the USSR.
The people then best placed to help with that, since they had been allied with Stalin, living in Eastern Europe, were high profile Nazis.
If SHIELD was part of OP, then their involvement couldn’t have begun only after the war, because that would’ve been useless; it had to have begun while Steve was there, and behind his back. SHIELD just happened to be called the SSR at the time.
(And that argument which suggests it’s okay for Peggy to do the wrong thing because Steve wasn’t there to stop her. Which, again, a) sexist patronising conveniently-not-a-girlboss-when-it-suits-you, b) if she only does right under supervision then she’s not a good person.)
The proof that OP was going while Steve was there?
Peggy’s presence.
What is a British intelligence agent doing in an American Strategic Scientific Reserve?
Science is not her area of expertise.
She’s a code breaker and a field agent. In other words, a spy.
But not just any spy; a pretty spy.
The kind of spy you could send (like SHIELD did to Steve) to recruit a reluctant man.
There would’ve been agents older than Peggy, with far more experience and knowledge, but Peggy specifically was chosen.
Why?
The answer is clear from her own TV show: multiple times she uses her own looks for an advantage, plays The Pretty Girl when she needs to get to a man, and the tie-in comics show her doing the same thing while undercover and retrieving *Erskine: a scientist of “strategic value” (that’s Nat’s wording from TWS), during the war.
Why do we think Peggy learned how to do this? What use would it have been at Bletchley Park?
Allies + scientists + espionage + honeytrap + WWII = Operation Paperclip. Literally why else is she there? She’s not working on the Manhattan Project, she’s not a scientist!
Even if she was such an idiot that she could be involved in all this without knowing it, or without realising the moral implications, if she was that incompetent, but later saw the error of her ways and apologised (which she didn’t). That still means she was lying to Steve, and to the Howlies, for the whole time he knew her.
Steve absolutely abhors deception and dishonesty, and hates, hates, hates being manipulated (to the point of storming into Fury’s office to shout at him when he did this with Natasha).
His chances of friendship with Nat were almost destroyed just because she lied one time, on one mission, when it affected only them, and then briefly withheld information at a later time (in the hospital). Steve only warmed up to Nat once she started being honest. (IMO, they were only able to be friends at all because she was at least honest about being dishonest, and was doing so under Fury’s direction.) And that was over one lie.
Peggy was the overseer of SSR Operations. She was the Fury in that scenario, not the Natasha. She would’ve had to been telling Steve multiple lies, over months, about something far worse, and about something that directly injured Bucky, and she knew it. If Steve was in character, even if he forgave Peggy, if she was just an incompetent, he 100% would not want to date her after this.
And another thing:
Operation Paperclip did not (as some idiot on Twitter claimed) begin after 1945.
This is correct. It began in 1944, which is why I mentioned that the train heist was most likely part of OP.
What is a British intelligence agent doing in an American Strategic Scientific Reserve?
Science is not her area of expertise.
She’s a code breaker and a field agent. In other words, a spy.
So not to get nitpicky, but her background as a code breaker and a field agent come from Agent Carter, which is no longer canon. From CATFA, all we know about her is that she’s overseeing operations for the SSR which seems to be headed by Phillips and a group or scientists that include Howard. The SSR does not seem to be a big operation according to CATFA. They don’t have funding for their projects. The experiment on Steve wasn’t the landmark ending of Project Rebirth. He was the working prototype that they wanted to show the Senator that was present so that they could get funding to continue Project Rebirth (the same Senator that had him go on the SSO tour). All the men at Camp Lehigh were supposed to go through this experiment had Erskine not been killed.
Another interesting thing that gets skipped over quite a bit is that Phillips tells Peggy that her actions in dropping Steve off over the border might get the SSR shut down. During this interaction, we learn many things: she eventually came back from her date with Stark and confessed that she had the bright idea to drop the only successful supersoldier right on Red Skull’s doorstep without telling anyone (tbf, Steve was taking a car and he most likely wouldn’t have alerted everyone to his presence had he gone alone on foot), she didn’t establish a rendezvous point to meet Steve in case the single form of communication she gave him was compromised, and finally, she mentions that they had done multiple aerial reconnaissance flyovers of the site of the Hydra base and somehow missed the almost 400 men walking on foot back to the camp where they were standing. She is not a field agent. At the very least, she’s not a good one.
The answer is clear from her own TV show: multiple times she uses her looks for an advantage, plays The Pretty Girl when she needs to get a man, and the tie-in comics show her doing the same thing while she’s undercover and retrieving *Erskine: a scientist of “strategic value” (that’s Nat’a wording from TWS), during the war.
Why do we think Peggy learned how to do this? What use would it have been at Bletchley Park?
Like I said, Agent Carter has been officially declared not part of the MCU canon, but it wasn’t canon to begin with. In the show the SSR was a huge operation where Peggy was the bottom of the totem pole. So she went from overseeing operations of the SSR to being a castaway? Where did these other dudes come from? And that’s not even touching the fact that it retconned Zola’s entire monologue. It also basically gave Peggy all of Bucky’s service history, his background with Steve and just straight up pretended he didn’t exist. Even that radio show that’s supposed to allude to Cap rescuing his girl that’s supposed to be a fictionalized version of Peggy is reflecting Steve’s rescue of Bucky.
The tie-in comic does a lot of work for CATFA because the entire movie is just two giant montages that don’t give a background to any character. The tie-in comic adds scene that should have been in the movie when it comes to Bucky and Steve (the fact that Steve’s mom died before he met Bucky is retconned in CATWS and tbh I take the movies as canon and not supplementary content) and Bucky and the Howling Commandos. And on a final not, it presents this idea that a 19 year old Peggy single handedly rescued and recruited Erskine. Sometimes you have to ask if something makes sense when you read it. I don’t suppose they did much research into the code breakers at Bletchley Park or how important the work they did was to ending the war, but regardless, none of this is mentioned in the movies because while the Peggy in CATFA is consistent with the Peggy in CATWS, she is not at all consistent with the one in the supplementary material. What CATFA and CATWS tell us for sure: she was an agent from British Intelligence who was overseeing operations of the SSR and founded SHIELD along with Phillips and Howard before the official end of WWII. The creators invoked OP and that informs exactly what these founders did. There’s no way around it. What the supplementary material tell us: she was awesome because she’s a girlboss, don’t question it.
Yes @tastelessnostalgia I just saw on twits that AC and the other shows prior to WandaVision have been declared not-canon by (was it) James Gunn!
This post came across my dash again and ah, just good times.
But mainly, I wanted to point out something else we haven’t discussed. If I recall, Zola doesn’t say he died in 1972. He says he got a terminal diagnosis that prompted him to build the brain. We don’t actually know when he died. He could have outlived Howard for all we know. In fact, according to Sitwell, Zola’s algorithm works based on the idea that the 21st century is an open book and that can only mean that by the time he died, he at least knew of the internet or something like it and various markers available for predicting behavior. Of course, SHIELD would benefit from this as well.
I was thinking about why Peggy turned out the way she did
I’ve read @amarriageoftrueminds metas on Peggy Carter and Cynthia Glass, and I just kept wondering… why would they have gone to such lengths to use Cynthia as a template for this character, when OG Peggy was right there, a great character in her own right, and wouldn’t be as weird to have her be so out of place in an American unit or command?
Then I re-read this on my dash :
A Tasting Menu of Female Representation
She fails all of these tests in CAtFA. All of them, except for the Anti-Freeze test. No women were assaulted, injured or killed to progress the story. But you could replace her with a sexy lamp and it would make no difference to the story. (She did nothing that no one else couldn’t have done. Literally all she did was talk to Steve. Steve could have done just as fine without her). She failed the Mako Mori test because she did not have any kind of arc of her own. She failed the Bechdel test as she was literally the only woman with a substantial speaking role. She also fails the “Strength is relative” test as she relies incredibly heavily on masculine stereotypes to be considered strong. We see her introduced punching someone and shooting someone. None of these are a personality. She also fails the Furiosa test, because she never has a spot in the story big enough to inspire rage from fanboys, and in general most fanboys just love how she never stepped out of being the perfect girlfriend.
She was literally the only woman in the movie with any lines at all. If she had taken on the Cynthia role, I have little doubt she would have died by the end of the movie. After all, a Nazi or Hydra spy would not have been allowed to have a redemption arc, as a fallen woman. Cynthia Glass died after her change of heart; killing their one female character would have looked awful. Because obviously once a woman is a traitor she can’t be allowed to live. If she was true she would have been good all along right? And have nothing to do as the result.
When a story goes off the rails there are usually a lot of reasons for it in the background, and I can’t help but wonder if this is one of the reasons why. Wanting to avoid the appearance of sexism (the same way they completely sidestepped racism in CAtFA) by just treating it like a non-issue.
I can just imagine the steps happening in the writing room. We need to include Cap’s first loves because we must affirm his hetero prowess. We want to have his current love interest in the present, right? I mean, why bother having two women in a story because you need only one love interest and this is comics and a WAR story baby! But we can’t have Cap’s girl die, that would get the feminists angry, besides we’re already killing Bucky. So just mash them together and not add any other women to the story!
I do not know if I was the only one, but when I first watched CATWS in theaters in 2014, I genuinely thought that they were using the scene in the nursing home as foreshadowing for the Zola reveal and I thought it was brilliant. I even excused Steve blaming Nick Fury at the end for Hydra being inside SHIELD as a knee-jerk reaction to him processing the events of the last couple of days. I was sure the follow up to this movie would be this huge issue Steve had with the founders. I’ve even said before that I thought this was a great basis for a civil war storyline within the MCU rather than it following the superhuman registration storyline. It would have pit Steve and Bucky, the victims of the choices the founders had made during their tenure at SHIELD, against Tony and Sharon, the beneficiaries of the choices the founders had made during their tenure at SHIELD. It’s honestly still a really cool storyline that is only made more interesting in hindsight with Sharon being revealed to be the Power Broker.
I hadn’t thought that, but at the time, I didn’t connect Peggy, really, to Operation Paperclip for some reason. (I know, I know.) Nor did I know anything about Cynthia Glass. I DID notice her line about ‘mucked it up’ and would have loved to have seen more of that explored in-depth. Peggy, what did you all do? What are you clearly not talking about? But she was kept far, far from the splash zone. And it is telling, that they left Nick Fury to shoulder the blame, when Peggy was presented as old, frail and the audience would be reluctant to hold her to account for anything. All the audience saw was someone at the end of her life and unable to understand her situation. That meant the memory of Peggy Carter could be kept untainted, even if it would have been so very interesting for the Cynthia Glass reveal to happen. Or just to discover that Peggy Carter had, in fact, signed off on The Winter Soldier Program, and that SHIELD (and the MCU) couldn’t just blame HYDRA for all the bad stuff that has happened in the world. Or even worse.
I watched some interesting meta videos on how TWS didn’t take it far enough, and instead of HYDRA it should have been SHIELD always being evil, and Nick should have been the ultimate villain, especially if they were going to take down SHIELD. That kind of story was never going to happen, especially not with Nick being played by Samuel L Jackson, and it would have been better if it had been Peggy regardless. That would have been a breech of trust that would have shown SHIELD as corrupt down to the roots. And while I do like Pierce- you could tell Robert Redford was having a blast with the role- having Hydra show up as still existing was considered a cop-out at the time, and still is.
TWS would have been the perfect place to have Carter BE some kind of villain, too, especially given that this is when we’re met with Sharon, with Natasha being Steve’s sidekick, and Maria Hill batting cleanup. We had no shortage of replacement characters (though oddly, all of them are in the same sort of… narrative niche? The sexy spy? Which is… Marvel. I get that it was a spy movie. Why?)
Pretty much all of my recent MCU-verse fic has been incorporating elements of this. It’s been fun. Mostly because few people see it coming.
(though oddly, all of them are in the same sort of… narrative niche? The sexy spy? Which is… Marvel. I get that it was a spy movie. Why?)
So this is the thing about CATWS. Steve does not trust spies. He has a huge problem with Natasha lying and compartmentalizing. He is not willing to compromise on that front. And he doesn’t. The reason he becomes truly friends with Natasha is because she goes on a journey to understanding that she’s been lying for SHIELD under blind loyalty and it’s Steve’s deep distrust in the institution that she’s had this faith in that makes her begin to question it and eventually help take it down. Maria Hill’s loyalty seems to be to specific people. She was a target of the Insight Satellites so one can assume that she had made it clear that her loyalties to the company weren’t unwavering.
The only two who stay sexy spies are the Carters, Steve’s two canon love interests. In the context of his distrust of SHIELD and his distrust of Natasha at the beginning of CATWS, this makes absolutely no sense. (Yes, Maria Hill continues to be SHIELD as of AoU because Joss Whedon wouldn’t know a good story if it wore Natasha’s body suit and punched him, but we’re talking about logical progression of narrative and character integrity, specifically when it comes to Steve and what we’ve seen of him in CATFA and CATWS). Do I understand why Sharon went on the run by herself instead of joining them to go to Siberia? On a Doylist level, I’m guessing scheduling conflicts and that they only wrote that scene to remind us Steve is straight (#givecaptainamericaaboyfriend era was quite a time). On a Watsonian level, I do not, but it led to her whining about being abandoned and becoming the Power Broker so it only proves my point in a convoluted way that I didn’t intend and almost don’t want to take into account.
I recently watched Agent Carter thinking it would somehow portray Peggy as actually morally equal to Steve from what I have heard of people’s reactions to the show. She does not. She is constantly committing crimes which are overlooked by everyone. What this show tells us is that she is over a privileged background and her opportunities were given to her by her brother and her supposed association with Steve when the story doesn’t outright completely rewrite CATFA to superimpose Bucky’s service history onto her while erasing him completely from the narrative altogether. Now the What If’s are doing some rewriting on a whole new level. I hope fanfiction is exploring a lot more of all of this.
Eh, I was thinking more that they were all connected to SHIELD and how all the women were. I mean, it is a spy movie and that’s why I suppose they were there. If someone had been serious about making Sharon Steve’s new love interest, they really shouldn’t have given her entire arc to Natasha. But it was still the one movie that treated Natasha as a character (they should have gotten rid of Sharon entirely if she wasn’t going to actually get the development a love interest demands. Seriously.) Steve not trusting spies is a great setup for Steve/Sam, really.
I’m not sure if I want to rewatch Agent Carter, but I’m glad other people are. Was she ever confronted with a genuine moral conflict? Most of what I remember is that seems completely devoted to ‘proving’ herself in the girlboss way as opposed to trying to help people.
I always consider conspiracy thrillers similar but different to spy movies because they’re not glorifying the spy so much as exposing the secret. CATWS fits that description. In the end, Steve says SHIELD has to go along with Hydra, and as milquetoast as some might find that sentiment, he is blaming SHIELD as much as he’s blaming Hydra. It is pretty important that (AoU aside), two of the spies, the two that end up gaining Steve’s trust by the end, do move on from the job and the one that’s left over just moves onto another org.
I remember hearing people speculate that the arc Natasha got was Sharon’s, but I’ve never actually seen any indication that this was the case. From what I remember, EVC was chosen to be Sharon very close to when they began filming and Scarlett Johansson was confirmed to be in the movie months before that. I feel like arc wouldn’t really have had the same emotional weight for a character who had been introduced at the beginning of the movie, while we seen how deep Natasha’s trust in SHIELD went in IM2 and A1. I always thought the journey was very personal to Natasha and didn’t seem stolen to accommodate her. And the issue with Steve not trusting spies and ending up with one in the narrative is one I have in the comics as well.
I wanted to watch the show because I stopped watching it halfway through the first season when it was first on because I thought the writing was so poor. I actually think it’s even worse than I remember now. I wanted to finish it so I could understand why there is still hype for it. You have summarized the first season correctly. The second season is her committing many crimes because she wants to girlboss all across LA.
I was thinking about why Peggy turned out the way she did
I’ve read @amarriageoftrueminds metas on Peggy Carter and Cynthia Glass, and I just kept wondering… why would they have gone to such lengths to use Cynthia as a template for this character, when OG Peggy was right there, a great character in her own right, and wouldn’t be as weird to have her be so out of place in an American unit or command?
Then I re-read this on my dash :
A Tasting Menu of Female Representation
She fails all of these tests in CAtFA. All of them, except for the Anti-Freeze test. No women were assaulted, injured or killed to progress the story. But you could replace her with a sexy lamp and it would make no difference to the story. (She did nothing that no one else couldn’t have done. Literally all she did was talk to Steve. Steve could have done just as fine without her). She failed the Mako Mori test because she did not have any kind of arc of her own. She failed the Bechdel test as she was literally the only woman with a substantial speaking role. She also fails the “Strength is relative” test as she relies incredibly heavily on masculine stereotypes to be considered strong. We see her introduced punching someone and shooting someone. None of these are a personality. She also fails the Furiosa test, because she never has a spot in the story big enough to inspire rage from fanboys, and in general most fanboys just love how she never stepped out of being the perfect girlfriend.
She was literally the only woman in the movie with any lines at all. If she had taken on the Cynthia role, I have little doubt she would have died by the end of the movie. After all, a Nazi or Hydra spy would not have been allowed to have a redemption arc, as a fallen woman. Cynthia Glass died after her change of heart; killing their one female character would have looked awful. Because obviously once a woman is a traitor she can’t be allowed to live. If she was true she would have been good all along right? And have nothing to do as the result.
When a story goes off the rails there are usually a lot of reasons for it in the background, and I can’t help but wonder if this is one of the reasons why. Wanting to avoid the appearance of sexism (the same way they completely sidestepped racism in CAtFA) by just treating it like a non-issue.
I can just imagine the steps happening in the writing room. We need to include Cap’s first loves because we must affirm his hetero prowess. We want to have his current love interest in the present, right? I mean, why bother having two women in a story because you need only one love interest and this is comics and a WAR story baby! But we can’t have Cap’s girl die, that would get the feminists angry, besides we’re already killing Bucky. So just mash them together and not add any other women to the story!
I do not know if I was the only one, but when I first watched CATWS in theaters in 2014, I genuinely thought that they were using the scene in the nursing home as foreshadowing for the Zola reveal and I thought it was brilliant. I even excused Steve blaming Nick Fury at the end for Hydra being inside SHIELD as a knee-jerk reaction to him processing the events of the last couple of days. I was sure the follow up to this movie would be this huge issue Steve had with the founders. I’ve even said before that I thought this was a great basis for a civil war storyline within the MCU rather than it following the superhuman registration storyline. It would have pit Steve and Bucky, the victims of the choices the founders had made during their tenure at SHIELD, against Tony and Sharon, the beneficiaries of the choices the founders had made during their tenure at SHIELD. It’s honestly still a really cool storyline that is only made more interesting in hindsight with Sharon being revealed to be the Power Broker.
I hadn’t thought that, but at the time, I didn’t connect Peggy, really, to Operation Paperclip for some reason. (I know, I know.) Nor did I know anything about Cynthia Glass. I DID notice her line about ‘mucked it up’ and would have loved to have seen more of that explored in-depth. Peggy, what did you all do? What are you clearly not talking about? But she was kept far, far from the splash zone. And it is telling, that they left Nick Fury to shoulder the blame, when Peggy was presented as old, frail and the audience would be reluctant to hold her to account for anything. All the audience saw was someone at the end of her life and unable to understand her situation. That meant the memory of Peggy Carter could be kept untainted, even if it would have been so very interesting for the Cynthia Glass reveal to happen. Or just to discover that Peggy Carter had, in fact, signed off on The Winter Soldier Program, and that SHIELD (and the MCU) couldn’t just blame HYDRA for all the bad stuff that has happened in the world. Or even worse.
I watched some interesting meta videos on how TWS didn’t take it far enough, and instead of HYDRA it should have been SHIELD always being evil, and Nick should have been the ultimate villain, especially if they were going to take down SHIELD. That kind of story was never going to happen, especially not with Nick being played by Samuel L Jackson, and it would have been better if it had been Peggy regardless. That would have been a breech of trust that would have shown SHIELD as corrupt down to the roots. And while I do like Pierce- you could tell Robert Redford was having a blast with the role- having Hydra show up as still existing was considered a cop-out at the time, and still is.
TWS would have been the perfect place to have Carter BE some kind of villain, too, especially given that this is when we’re met with Sharon, with Natasha being Steve’s sidekick, and Maria Hill batting cleanup. We had no shortage of replacement characters (though oddly, all of them are in the same sort of… narrative niche? The sexy spy? Which is… Marvel. I get that it was a spy movie. Why?)
Pretty much all of my recent MCU-verse fic has been incorporating elements of this. It’s been fun. Mostly because few people see it coming.
(though oddly, all of them are in the same sort of... narrative niche? The sexy spy? Which is... Marvel. I get that it was a spy movie. Why?)
So this is the thing about CATWS. Steve does not trust spies. He has a huge problem with Natasha lying and compartmentalizing. He is not willing to compromise on that front. And he doesn’t. The reason he becomes truly friends with Natasha is because she goes on a journey to understanding that she’s been lying for SHIELD under blind loyalty and it’s Steve’s deep distrust in the institution that she’s had this faith in that makes her begin to question it and eventually help take it down. Maria Hill’s loyalty seems to be to specific people. She was a target of the Insight Satellites so one can assume that she had made it clear that her loyalties to the company weren’t unwavering.
The only two who stay sexy spies are the Carters, Steve’s two canon love interests. In the context of his distrust of SHIELD and his distrust of Natasha at the beginning of CATWS, this makes absolutely no sense. (Yes, Maria Hill continues to be SHIELD as of AoU because Joss Whedon wouldn’t know a good story if it wore Natasha’s body suit and punched him, but we’re talking about logical progression of narrative and character integrity, specifically when it comes to Steve and what we’ve seen of him in CATFA and CATWS). Do I understand why Sharon went on the run by herself instead of joining them to go to Siberia? On a Doylist level, I’m guessing scheduling conflicts and that they only wrote that scene to remind us Steve is straight (#givecaptainamericaaboyfriend era was quite a time). On a Watsonian level, I do not, but it led to her whining about being abandoned and becoming the Power Broker so it only proves my point in a convoluted way that I didn’t intend and almost don’t want to take into account.
I recently watched Agent Carter thinking it would somehow portray Peggy as actually morally equal to Steve from what I have heard of people’s reactions to the show. She does not. She is constantly committing crimes which are overlooked by everyone. What this show tells us is that she is over a privileged background and her opportunities were given to her by her brother and her supposed association with Steve when the story doesn’t outright completely rewrite CATFA to superimpose Bucky’s service history onto her while erasing him completely from the narrative altogether. Now the What If’s are doing some rewriting on a whole new level. I hope fanfiction is exploring a lot more of all of this.
I was thinking about why Peggy turned out the way she did
I’ve read @amarriageoftrueminds metas on Peggy Carter and Cynthia Glass, and I just kept wondering… why would they have gone to such lengths to use Cynthia as a template for this character, when OG Peggy was right there, a great character in her own right, and wouldn’t be as weird to have her be so out of place in an American unit or command?
Then I re-read this on my dash :
A Tasting Menu of Female Representation
She fails all of these tests in CAtFA. All of them, except for the Anti-Freeze test. No women were assaulted, injured or killed to progress the story. But you could replace her with a sexy lamp and it would make no difference to the story. (She did nothing that no one else couldn’t have done. Literally all she did was talk to Steve. Steve could have done just as fine without her). She failed the Mako Mori test because she did not have any kind of arc of her own. She failed the Bechdel test as she was literally the only woman with a substantial speaking role. She also fails the “Strength is relative” test as she relies incredibly heavily on masculine stereotypes to be considered strong. We see her introduced punching someone and shooting someone. None of these are a personality. She also fails the Furiosa test, because she never has a spot in the story big enough to inspire rage from fanboys, and in general most fanboys just love how she never stepped out of being the perfect girlfriend.
She was literally the only woman in the movie with any lines at all. If she had taken on the Cynthia role, I have little doubt she would have died by the end of the movie. After all, a Nazi or Hydra spy would not have been allowed to have a redemption arc, as a fallen woman. Cynthia Glass died after her change of heart; killing their one female character would have looked awful. Because obviously once a woman is a traitor she can’t be allowed to live. If she was true she would have been good all along right? And have nothing to do as the result.
When a story goes off the rails there are usually a lot of reasons for it in the background, and I can’t help but wonder if this is one of the reasons why. Wanting to avoid the appearance of sexism (the same way they completely sidestepped racism in CAtFA) by just treating it like a non-issue.
I can just imagine the steps happening in the writing room. We need to include Cap’s first loves because we must affirm his hetero prowess. We want to have his current love interest in the present, right? I mean, why bother having two women in a story because you need only one love interest and this is comics and a WAR story baby! But we can’t have Cap’s girl die, that would get the feminists angry, besides we’re already killing Bucky. So just mash them together and not add any other women to the story!
I do not know if I was the only one, but when I first watched CATWS in theaters in 2014, I genuinely thought that they were using the scene in the nursing home as foreshadowing for the Zola reveal and I thought it was brilliant. I even excused Steve blaming Nick Fury at the end for Hydra being inside SHIELD as a knee-jerk reaction to him processing the events of the last couple of days. I was sure the follow up to this movie would be this huge issue Steve had with the founders. I’ve even said before that I thought this was a great basis for a civil war storyline within the MCU rather than it following the superhuman registration storyline. It would have pit Steve and Bucky, the victims of the choices the founders had made during their tenure at SHIELD, against Tony and Sharon, the beneficiaries of the choices the founders had made during their tenure at SHIELD. It’s honestly still a really cool storyline that is only made more interesting in hindsight with Sharon being revealed to be the Power Broker.
I just saw the 2nd trailer for “Picard” and I got salty over Steve’s ending in Endgame all over again.
Specifically those two assholes Markus and McFeely and how they sent Steve back into the past “to rest” and “finally come home”
Because like. Picard takes place 20 years after Star Trek: Nemesis. In fact I think that according to some spoilers that have come out recently, there was an incident which occurred, approximately 15 years ago. (Something possibly to do with the largest rescue armada- and then something happened, which made him leave Starfleet.)
But here’s where I get salty ( and before you come at me, because I know the point you’re all going to make, and I’ll address that I promise) - because when someone- Dahj- turns up seeking his help, he immediately ( after being rebuffed by people at Starfleet headquarters), sets up his own crew, and finds a ship to help her.
And that’s 15-20 years after he *left*. Not to mention it’s implied that he has been going on secret missions in his time away.
Now for the words you’re all probably yelling at for comparing this to Steve’s ending in Endgame, and his overall arc- you’re probably yelling that what happened 15-20 years ago, was Picard’s TWS moment, and this is- again with the implication that he’s been going on secret missions since then, in an elderly Nomad phase.
Which yes. Sure. Fair point
The bigger issue however is that Picard *can’t* not do anything when he sees a situation that needs his help, and who does that sound like I wonder?
Ah yes: If I see a situation pointed south, I can’t ignore it. Sometimes I wish I could
That guy. Who apparently, according to Markus and McFeely decides to become a stay at home dad, in our timeline, while his wife’s agency is infiltrated by HYDRA, and Bucky’s brain is put in a blender for 70 years.
(And let’s not talk about the idea that the very Irish Catholic Steve Rogers, would be able to ignore the events of Bloody Sunday- and it’s aftermath)
Look I know that they are two different characters, but they are the in the same, character archetype, and well, it’s frustrating to me see people who treat a character well, and seem to understand his core, versus people who ignore the character arc they’ve been writing over the course of five movies, for the sake of a pretty picture to end his story on.
At the risk of jumping down a conspiracy rabbit hole- what do you want to bet that Cynthia Glass was who they had in mind when hiring Atwell, but changed the script later so that the romance could be “real”?
Ooof you know you’re poking the bear asking me about Saint Margaret don’t you?? 😅
I’ve got to say, when you look at them: there's no ambiguity there.
HA looks more like Cynthia than Cynthia does.
And there's physically no way to mistake this ^
(A brown-eyed brunette Englishwoman, doing an English accent...)
For a blonde, blue-eyed, American Southerner, is there?
I mean, they would never have even looked at someone like HA or Emily Blunt in casting, if that was the case, would they?
If they wanted Peggy in a Rebirth comic arc all they had to do was get a blonde American and put her in Cynthia's place, and not include everything else that made her Cynthia-ish.
They could've still had her being a Virginian, later embedded with the French Resistance, wearing the beret, etc.
There was no reason to keep any Cynthia traits at all unless they started out with a Nazi and made a swap at the last minute, but were just too damn lazy to do a proper job of it.
If the looks were just meant to be an Easter Egg, there’d be no need for the English accent, either.
(And the guy who directed CATFA was also involved in the Indiana Jones movies, which include a... female Nazi spy love interest... who switches at the last minute. Hmm...)
If Peggy was originally meant to be revealed as a Nazi, it would even explain why Steve seems so un-bothered about her during CATFA (and why Cevans seems to pull so hard for Stucky in comparison).
If would scan, if Steve’s indifference was originally in the script to make it deliberately ambiguous and distance him from any later claims to loving a Nazi (while, of course, simultaneously allowing nutjob rightwingers to imagine that Captain 'Murica would love a Nazi, so the Rat can still take their money.)
You don't even need to change anything about MCU!Peggy’s personality in the scripts to turn her into full blown Nazi Cynthia, either.
You could keep her ironclad belief in her own worthiness despite repeated incompetence, her violent jealous temper, the fact that she interacts with Hodge (who was a Nazi defector in the same comic!), her friendship with the self-interested scientist, repeated wilful endangerment of her own allies, the fixation on blonde blue-eyed ubermensch (viz: Aryan wet dream) Steve, the hiring of Zola...
All of it would dovetail exactly with actually being a Nazi; if she was secretly a bad person and only playing at being a liability.
All you'd need to add is her saying 'I'm a Nazi' at some point and all the rest of her characterisation would fit?
Since we have recognised that she is morally charcoal, fandom acts as if it comes down to a choice between ‘knowingly complicit with Nazis’ or ‘aiding Nazis through criminal negligence and wild incompetence.’
But, actually, it doesn't?
Because there’s no way even an incompetent person could be hoodwinked into believing Zola was trustworthy.
He may have been a genius, but there's no way he would've been able to convince anyone at the SSR or the government that he was a meek, terrified desk jockey who didn't do anything noteworthy.
He was a voluntary foreign member of the Nazi party, (Swiss), responsible for designing the Tesseract bombs to be dropped on America.
He was torturing members of the 107 (and the Howlies were still around to say this, don't forget!) with his supersoldier experiments, without orders to do so from Red Skull, while Red Skull wasn't even there, and while he (Zola) was the only man in charge.
So the Nuremberg Defense would not have saved him. There would've been witnesses (the Howlies) and records (the Valkyrie base) to prove his cruelty.
In other words: the very deeds which made him of interest to the SSR in the first place (and which he'd be boasting about if he wanted to convince them to hire him and not kill him), are the same things that he'd have to be denying having a hand in, if he wanted to pass for a trustworthy person?
He could not have downplayed his own villainy; and he would not, if he wanted to get the SHIELD job. So it's not possible that Zola even pretended to try to pass for good.
The only way Peggy could've hired him and thought it was an okay decision (and then taken no steps to do away with him, let alone gifting him immortality!) is if she was rotten herself.
And the other reason why it isn't an either/or decision between bad or incompetent for Peggy: is because it's both.
Peggy can be a deluded villain who wholeheartedly believes she is Good and Decorous and Nobly-Motivated and Basically Irreproachable...
...and also completely useless at her job.
I have been thinking lately...
(more in this ask here)
...That there is much in-film evidence to support the idea that she is either nowhere near as important as she claims (and therefore not culpable) or just staggeringly inept, at every turn, and yet has an ironclad belief that she's not.
This arrogance carries through to her show, where they try to patch every hole in her previous characterisation (turning her into HA’s Creators’ Pet).
But thereby they inadvertently reveal that they know exactly how deeply she was flawed in CATFA.
Suddenly she’s neither ignoring nor competing with other women, she’s a feminist who stabs waitress-harassers with forks, and gives the fat security guard a chance! She’s not the person carrying a clipboard and pushing flags around a map; she’s a field agent! She’s not getting jobs above her skill level; she’s been downgraded to a secretary! (Uhh, except her brother got her the job at SOE and Stark gave her the SHIELD position. Hmm.)
Men aren’t letting her get away with dangerous erratic behaviour; they’re ignoring her (GASP) unless she’s got coffee or their lunch! (Except actually she’s still getting away with shit; which is fine for a comic book character, but not if they’re simultaneously complaining that they’re undervalued and overlooked?)
She’d never lose her head over a handsome blonde blue-eyed American war hero with a broken nose; she thinks that Jack Thompson guy is a boor! She’d never make a WWII veteran amputee’s life worse, she’s dating one! She wouldn’t shoot a man in jealous rage, she’d be nice to the other woman!
She wasn’t only interested in Steve after he looked like Cevans, she has a photograph of pre-serum Steve!! She’s not ambiguously linked to Howard Stark, it’s Edwin Jarvis she’s mostly working with!!!
It bends over backwards to desperately pretend that everything we were shown of her in the movies didn’t happen.
At one point Edwin Jarvis said to her 'I can't tell if you're being arrogant or ignorant,' and I feel like that is the only time any person in-universe has ever looked at Peggy with clear eyes, even if he was only joking. Natasha once said 'I only act like I know everything.' Peggy acts like she knows everything because it appears she genuinely believes it.
But here’s the real kicker about Peggy...
If we say, for argument’s sake, that despite the movie’s claim she was Director and Founder of SHIELD, of equal power with the two men...
If we say, instead, that she was only ever a secretary, and therefore not culpable for things like Zola’s employment.
That still doesn’t make her a good person.
Y’know why?
Because if she was small, if she was the underdog.
If she was not powerful, but powerless.
And she knew there was a Nazi torturer of the Howling Commandos, in her workplace.
Imagine what Steve would’ve done in that scenario.
You see?
CATFA shows us that it’s guts, not power, which makes you a hero.
If she was powerless, Zola’s rise (while she lives to old age) means Peggy must have done nothing to stop that. Nothing gutsy.
And if she’s not gutsy, according to CATFA, then she’s not a heroine.
This is what I thought this movie was about when I saw it! Aren’t I the foolish one? I thought they were being clever in having the scene with Peggy foreshadow the reveal when they met Zola and when they were contrasting Peggy and Bucky with their memory loss. Alas, I was wrong. It would have been so good.
Warning: Don’t read YouTube comments for videos of Tony trying to kill Bucky. Every single one of them is them saying Steve and Bucky are wrong for their SELF-DEFENSE fighting. They all say Tony is justified in trying to kill Bucky. To be fair, his angry feelings ARE justified, I’d be pissed too. But I’m better than Tony, he DID NOT CARE THAT IT WASN’T HIS FAULT. He literally said “I don’t care” There’s no excuse for trying to murder him. There’s a difference between being pissed someone killed your parents, and backing down when you find out it wasn’t them (look at T’challa) and then being so fragile you try to murder them when you KNOW they aren’t to blame. It was heat of the moment for the revelation and he has every right to be upset, but there’s no excuse for murder. If it was a couple punches, I’d excuse it. But no, he was ACTIVELY trying to kill him for almost five minutes, and told Steve to “stand down”. The Russos in the commentary said “Tony really wants to murder Bucky with his own hands in this scene. He wanted to hear him admit that he did it, and he wanted to see him suffer. He also wants to hurt Bucky to hurt Steve at this point. Because you know…Steve’s failed him”
Just now saw this in my inbox so whoever sent it, I love you
This feels like a perfect time to publish this ask because I AGREE with everything written here. All of it. And I stand by this opinion tenfold.
Those comment sections makes me lose braincells whenever I try to read them. They also replace those braincells with pure rage. So for my own sanity I try to stay away.
Also, I’ve been thinking about this lately (I think too much about these random things for my own good).
The point of incarceration these days is that criminals are given a chance to reform and rehabilitate so they can reintegrate into society without reoffending. It’s not about punishment because otherwise we’d just be dealing out the death penalty to everyone who’s ever killed or raped anyone. It’s supposed to be more humane, because it gives everyone a chance to learn the error of their ways, repent, and make good in whatever way possible (whether or not this is successful won’t be the topic of this discussion).
This is why T’Challa is leagues above Tony in his response. Zemo made the conscious choice, planned and carried out the murder of T’Challa’s father. His response is to let Zemo live in order to give him a chance to learn.
Bucky on the other hand, did not have a conscious choice in the matter. This means that even if you want to reform him, there is nothing you can do because the real Bucky didn’t want it to happen, he already knows it’s wrong and he wouldn’t have done it if he had the choice. Which is why T’Challa offers him asylum, as well as a solution - of actually removing the brainwashing, which is the only thing that will stop Bucky “reoffending”.
Tony’s response of punishing Bucky for being used as a weapon will NOT redress what has happened (because it wasn’t Bucky who chose to kill his parents), it will also not stop this from happening again because Hydra (if it still existed) will have other assassins to do the job. It is pure personal vendetta, against someone who didn’t want to do it…and it’s ironic that people see Zemo as a villain but not Tony, because they’re both driven by the exact same thing.
Even Zemo had a better justification, because Tony built Ultron and they had to destroy Sokovia to beat Ultron. And even Tony built Ultron partially because Hydra (who Wanda was working for at the time) manipulated his fears.
Tony should have focused all his resources on wiping Hydra off the map. But nooo
Just wanted to add that Strucker was a SHIELD employee. The experiments he was conducting were sanctioned by SHIELD. Ultron seemed to also be a project that Tony was already working on with the drones that he had already built by the beginning of their raid of the SHIELD/Hydra base in AoU. He just wanted to integrate the stone into his AI because he figured out that the stone was also kind of an AI (something they never picked up again). But yeah, my point is that Ultron was built under Stark Industries. And so was EDITH, btw. The drones she controlled came out of the SI satellite.
To the point above about CACW: the line of logic people bring up to defend Tony is that Bucky killed his mom and she was innocent. Was she, though? How is it that no one asks why Maria was in the car? Howard and Maria were headed off to SHIELD with the serum. Why would he have brought her if she wasn’t involved? And since Bucky was a sniper and the Winter Soldier was so good that he was considered a ghost story, he could have just killed Howard if he wanted to. Emotional outburst aside, Tony should be asking a lot of questions about his parents’ involvement in experimenting on people like Bucky and why they were targeted by Hydra. He went after the wrong guy, but then all the creators hold Bucky responsible for what he was made to do while he was brainwashed.
amarriageoftrueminds: Yes @tastelessnostalgia I just saw on twits that AC and the other shows prior to WandaVision have been declared not-canon by (was it) James Gunn!
Ugh. It’s exhausting.
[ see original post here: trimmed for length ]
I don’t think it would have been impossible for her to have been sent on missions when she was young. I just think that she would have had to have training and wouldn’t have been alone in doing it. I can understand why they’d want to make her seem more gallant. According to Wikipedia, female SOE agents ranged between 20 and 53 years of age.
The reason I don’t think she was a field agent was because Phillips said that he took a chance on her. I think we only see her interact with Steve and outside of him, we only see her overseeing the men’s training. Well, there is Hodges, but that punch they had her give him seemed just another scene that was supposed to make her seem like she was no nonsense by using violence. For me this comes off as someone who has more arrogance than her station deserves which fits along with the arrogance requires in recruiting Zola. I think they did all get guns, actually. That said, every time she had a gun in this movie, it wasn’t done in a functional way. It was to show us that she’s badass and can handle a gun. The flamethrower at the end and her presence in the battle in general was overkill, especially since we only otherwise see her with a clipboard, next to Phillips watching a newsreel or moving flags on a map while doing her job during this movie. Basically, she was there in the battle because they needed her to cry over Steve in the scene where he puts the plane down and they couldn’t think of any other way to bring her into it. As for the scene where she was trying to gun down Hydra!Richard Armitage, I think that scene shows her to be wildly incompetent. She stands in the middle of a street while a car speeds at her and tries to shoot through the windshield with her pistol. She even yells at Steve when he saves her from being run over by the car she has failed to stop with her tiny gun. The other shooting scene shows she’s not mature enough to use a gun at all. In fact, after Hydra!Richard Armitage, why was she not immediately apprehended and thrown in a cell?
Re: the mission to rescue Bucky, I agree. The mission is foolhardy, but it shows the essence of Steve and Peggy’s character. This mission shows that Steve is willing to put himself in danger to rescue Bucky and no one else. His plan involves him going alone in a car after having seen the map and the terrain. Peggy, on the other hand, is willing to put Steve in danger. On top of that, she had no reason to be involved, but the moment he asks her to let him go, she gets this glint in her eye that suggests she’s just doing it for the excitement. Steve has a goal and it’s a noble one. Hers is not. (Howard might have been there to supply his tech).
I’m not sure if she did know about Zola before the 107th returned. It’s possible their efforts to recruit him began with word of his experimentation on Bucky and the other POW. Erskine could have told them about the man he worked on the serum with under Red Skull. It would only make sense they’d want to recruit him if they found out that he was continuing Erskine’s experiments.
It should also be noted that Peggy is based on Cynthia Glass more than Peggy Carter from the comics. The arc where she drops Steve off and then ends up shooting him is ripe for a juicy story of a double agent.
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Wow wow you’re blowing my mind, excellent points!
that [Hodges] punch … seemed just another scene that was supposed to make her seem like she was no nonsense by using violence. For me this comes off as someone who has more arrogance than her station deserves which fits along with the arrogance requires in recruiting Zola.
In another meta somewhere or other, I pointed out that this punch is treated as if it’s a mirror of Bucky punching Steve’s bully in the alley.
But in fact it isn’t, because Peggy is punching someone who is annoying her, personally, but no one else, whereas Bucky was punching someone who had just swung at him and was bullying someone else.
When Hodges later bullies Steve, right in front of her, Peggy does nothing.
This puts Steve on the one end of the spectrum from Selfless to Selfish (since he’s willing to get punched by someone who’s bullying strangers); Bucky a little further nearer to selfish than him (since he is defending his personal friend and himself), and Peggy aaaall the way down the other end.
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every time she had a gun in this movie, it wasn’t done in a functional way. It was to show us that she’s badass and can handle a gun.
Yeah you’re right I mean hard not to contrast that with sniper Bucky who is shown having real, useful, tactically-successful ability with a firearm.
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her presence in the battle in general was overkill, especially since we only otherwise see her with a clipboard, next to Phillips watching a newsreel or moving flags on a map while doing her job during this movie. Basically, she was there in the battle because they needed her to cry over Steve …
I think maybe the big thing that gets people thinking of Peggy as competent (before AC) is that she has a really competent air.
Like we assume she’s putting on a persona that reflects her true abilities, whether or not the movie actually bears that out.
I guess it’s like if Howard Stark acted the same way but no inventions of his were ever shown on screen?
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As for the scene where she was trying to gun down Hydra!Richard Armitage, I think that scene shows her to be wildly incompetent. She stands in the middle of a street while a car speeds at her and tries to shoot through the windshield with her pistol.
Well now what gets me about that moment is:
it’s exactly the same as the Winter Soldier standing in place while Nick Fury’s SUV flies at him.
I don’t know what that says about Peggy, though.
Does that make her competent or arrogant? Brave or self-destructive?
Is it a chilling hint that TWS has been trained by some of the same people?
It’s interesting that supersoldier Steve doesn’t seem to think she can survive what she’s doing, but that could be period-appropriate sexism, ONLY, the next person seen doing it is also enhanced, which implies that only an enhanced person could/should Try That At Home.
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The other shooting scene shows she’s not mature enough to use a gun at all… why was she not immediately apprehended and thrown in a cell?
Yeah this seems like a 1,2,3 punch for the male power fantasy, showing how she’s Badass without exercising any common sense about the consequences.
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The mission is foolhardy, but it shows the essence of Steve and Peggy’s character. This mission shows that Steve is willing to put himself in danger to rescue Bucky and no one else. […] Peggy, on the other hand, is willing to put Steve in danger.
That’s an excellent point. Like letting someone else endanger themselves is a brave and bold choice. Ugh!
I always felt like they were trying to use this to say ‘See, She’s Not Like The Other Girls!’ to make her seem more Special and therefore worthy of Captain America, by contrasting her with (for example) Pepper; since female love interests are more usually shown being the the ones who nag the male hero not do go and do X heroic thing.
What’s interesting is, her help really does look more like proving herself to Steve rather than caring about helping him; she says he’s meant for ‘more than this’ and then immediately ‘I can do more than that’ (eg. more than just letting him go.) Arrogance, like you said.
And Steve asking if she meant what she said about him; it’s supposed to be read as romantic but feels more like him forcing her to put her money where her mouth is, and get out of his way; not like he gives a damn about the answer.
Bucky helped Steve because he cares about helping him, not because he felt like he was being undervalued if he didn’t. .
Steve has a goal and it’s a noble one. Hers is not.
🎯
It’s punching bullies all over again.
I’m not sure if she did know about Zola before the 107th returned.
What we do know for certain is that she knew it was a factory. Her initial reluctance to let Steve go attack the place might have (also) been because she was worried about him potentially damaging any materiel there was inside?
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It should also be noted that Peggy is based on Cynthia Glass more than Peggy Carter from the comics. The arc where she drops Steve off and then ends up shooting him is ripe for a juicy story of a double agent.
Right?? That astonished me, when I first found out about it - a Nazi spy! And Peggy would’ve been amazing at that arc. Like if Bucky had ‘died’ because of a last minute betrayal? Oof! Big Indiana Jones vibes!
#listen I don’t know if it’s because I read the comics in this decade and not the previous one #but I do not see Steve feeling anything but constantly pissed off at spies #they’re constantly betraying him #and I don’t know if another actress could have made me like Peggy #but she’s played with so much arrogance when she’s so messy #that it makes me roll my eyes into the next hemisphere every time anyone comments on how competent she is #she is not #this girl and guns do not go together #she should have spent the rest of that movie in a military prison after she shot him
And I’ve spoken before about the massive gender double-standard there; if a man did that to a woman he was interested in…
A lot of people really seem to like HA (hence her being given a series) and I don’t mind her, but she always reminded me of Jennifer Saunders doing a parody in her comedy show French & Saunders (especially in the second bar scene. Something about her eyebrow… 🤔)
It’s weird how stilted English people can sound when they’re doing a posher-than-theirs accent.
P’s grasp of gun safety is definitely worryingly tenuous; it’s probably a miracle she did actually hit that guy with the flamethrower and not Steve by mistake.
And when you consider that she cannot have known for certain that the vibranium shield would stop the bullets 100%. Even if Stark had mentioned within her hearing that he was working on a bulletproof shield, and had succeeded in making one, or if he’d said that all his prototypes were successful, with all the shields in the lab she cannot have known that that specific one was one of those safe ones, ready to be shot at!
Stark was surprised Steve picked that round shield, no way was he showing that specific one to Peggy. She can’t have known! It’s- well, it’s like Indiana Jones picking the holy grail cup.
I know it’s another part of the male power fantasy woman to show her being violent when angry and therefore physically ‘powerful’ and attractive (because she’s man-like!)
But anyone who raises a gun in anger, is not agent material.
I try and imagine, eg. Bucky, doing something like that.
Not even the Winter Soldier would!
And the only other character who does that in that movie is Redskull!
That’s an interesting parallel between Bucky and Peggy. It kind of seems like she’s been unintentionally set up as Bucky’s foil in the story, but it works very well.
The thing about Howard Stark is that we do see his inventions shown onscreen. He’s the one who created the space ship/coffin thing Steve goes into in during the PR experiment. At the beginning of the movie, they’re at the Stark Expo. He’s already famous enough that his inventions bring in an audience. In IM, we see he’s invented the Arc Reactor. In IM2 he created a new element. We know Howard is a genius and is competent even if he’s not a great person. His arrogance, while annoying, stems from his competence. What we see with Peggy are illusions of success because the audience has expectations of a love interest and that supersedes what is actually onscreen.
I don’t think Steve pushing her out of the way is sexism. I think he genuinely saved her life because she was too stubborn to move out of the way. You don’t have to do kinematic equations to know it would have ended badly for her and other people on the street even if she had succeeded. That car had momentum and she was trying to kill the person with his foot on the gas. This was not bravery. It’s not comparable to Steve throwing himself on the grenade because Steve’s intentions were to save as many people as possible. Peggy’s were single-minded and she did not care if anyone actually got hurt. Those bullets were bouncing off that car. What if they had hurt bystanders because her approach is to always shoot first and think later? What if the car veered off and hit a bunch of pedestrians? I think this and almost every other scene we see with her defines her lack of common sense. It’s interesting you drew the parallel between her and the WS because even with the brainwashing, the WS exhibits this common sense which is possibly what made him effective. Even Steve, while giving chase, in fury, takes the time to save her before he chases after that car.
I think in 2015, there was a craving for more female representation in the MCU so any form of criticism was not taken well. I watched a lot of footage of cons and interviews of the actors during the AC era and it informed my decision to try to not pay attention to celebrities who play characters in things I like to watch because it did not help my already sour feelings about the show being so revisionist about Steve’s story.
It’s interesting because I feel like her hotheadedness and her willingness to act without thinking is why Phillips took her under his wing. I imagine a lot of people who thought a bit about the things they did may have taken issue with them.
do p*ggy-apologists not get that if bucky had been standing 3 paces back, it would’ve been STEVE who got blasted out of the train?
it would’ve been HER toyboy that zola was torturing, on her dime?
steve in an electric chair while ‘arnie’ plays science-bro with howard stark?
I feel like a lot of people haven’t put together the fact that the train heist at the end of CATFA was actually part of the plan for them to capture Zola to recruit him a few months down the line (which is what they did). And by Steve’s declaration that he wouldn’t rest until all of Hydra were dead or captured, it seems like he wasn’t in on that plan. CATFA and CATWS together paint a pretty solid story about what the founders of SHIELD were doing without Steve’s knowledge and CATWS also tells us how he reacts to the knowledge that Hydra were a part of SHIELD (“We’re not salvaging anything, Nick. Hydra, SHIELD, it all goes.”).
The people who say that she didn’t have the power to make the decision to recruit Zola and work with Hydra forget that she very much had the power to leave if she was so morally opposed to it. Endgame shows us that she was Director by 1970 with Zola still working under her. She certainly had the power to something about it then. It wasn’t a situation where they made one in unchangeable decision. They effectively continued to choose to work with him everyday for the 25+ years after the war.
It makes the way she approaches him seem… more than a little suspect.
Only after he’s proven he’s a viable subject for the serum.
Given SHIELDra’s later M.O. of sending pretty women to recruit men they want on their side, even under Fury: they sent Nat to Tony and Steve, and also Peggy’s niece.
It looks a lot more like ‘send Carter to entice Rogers.’
If they didn’t want him to remain a showgirl; they wanted him out in the field, where he could help them capture useful scientists (the way they captured Erskine*), and also nearby so his body could be accessible to their scientists (i.e. Stark).
The idea that Peggy didn’t have the power to recruit or refuse to recruit Zola (saw one idiot on twitter claiming that anti-P’s are acting like she’s entirely responsible for Operation Paperclip when it was POTUS’ idea. Uh, yeah, she doesn’t need to be responsible for the entire operation to take part in it??) It’s nonsense because:
1) You don’t get to hold this character up as a feminist girlboss with one hand while pushing down her power with the other; what, she’s only an Helpless Female when it suits you? (This is all of a piece with the ‘she didn’t know’ defense. She didn’t see Nazis as unemployable and couldn’t predict they would prove untrustworthy? So she’s an idiot, then?)
2) She’s the co-founder of SHIELD. Even if she wasn’t actually a director before the 70s, she was a co-founder, and she’s close personal friends with Stark, the other founder, upon whom she had so much influence he appeared as a reoccurring character in her show. Even if she didn’t have the actual written power to refuse Zola a job, all she’d have to do is say ‘actually Howard I don’t want him here’ to her buddy Stark and he’s gone!
3) as you said @tastelessnostalgia she was Director two years before Zola died and did nothing to get rid of him. All she had to do was let him die, but instead she oversaw the turning of his brain into a computer, effectively making him immortal, able to exert an influence on SHIELD long after she was no longer director. That is canon trusting of a known-Nazi; it’s tantamount to handing him the keys to her house while she’s out of town. CANON.
4) Even the idea that she could’ve left if she didn’t like it: it wouldn’t even have to be that extreme an ultimatum!
She could’ve just threatened to resign to block the appointment. She could’ve pretended to be okay with him, but actually just used him for intell. and inventions and then had him killed or imprisoned. Or killed him herself; and made it look like an accident, if actively killing him would’ve caused her problems with other people on her side.
All it would’ve taken is one throwaway line saying she tried to get at Zola while he was at SHIELD but was prevented, and we could’ve said there was at least a single piece of evidence she wasn’t okay with it. But there isn’t.
There are a wealth of possible actions a competent agent in her position could have taken to prevent Zola having any influence. But she didn’t do anything, in fact she made it worse.
And another thing:
Operation Paperclip did not (as that same idiot on twitter claimed) begin after 1945.
It began during the war, but in secret, because the Allies were already plotting how to handle (their then-ally) Stalin and the Soviets after the end of the war: they had to race to begin before the war finished, as they were already working on the Manhattan Project, and knew they needed to get scientists in that field away from the USSR.
The people then best placed to help with that, since they had been allied with Stalin, living in Eastern Europe, were high profile Nazis.
If SHIELD was part of OP, then their involvement couldn’t have begun only after the war, because that would’ve been useless; it had to have begun while Steve was there, and behind his back. SHIELD just happened to be called the SSR at the time.
(And that argument which suggests it’s okay for Peggy to do the wrong thing because Steve wasn’t there to stop her. Which, again, a) sexist patronising conveniently-not-a-girlboss-when-it-suits-you, b) if she only does right under supervision then she’s not a good person.)
The proof that OP was going while Steve was there?
Peggy’s presence.
What is a British intelligence agent doing in an American Strategic Scientific Reserve?
Science is not her area of expertise.
She’s a code breaker and a field agent. In other words, a spy.
But not just any spy; a pretty spy.
The kind of spy you could send (like SHIELD did to Steve) to recruit a reluctant man.
There would’ve been agents older than Peggy, with far more experience and knowledge, but Peggy specifically was chosen.
Why?
The answer is clear from her own TV show: multiple times she uses her own looks for an advantage, plays The Pretty Girl when she needs to get to a man, and the tie-in comics show her doing the same thing while undercover and retrieving *Erskine: a scientist of “strategic value” (that’s Nat’s wording from TWS), during the war.
Why do we think Peggy learned how to do this? What use would it have been at Bletchley Park?
Allies + scientists + espionage + honeytrap + WWII = Operation Paperclip. Literally why else is she there? She’s not working on the Manhattan Project, she’s not a scientist!
Even if she was such an idiot that she could be involved in all this without knowing it, or without realising the moral implications, if she was that incompetent, but later saw the error of her ways and apologised (which she didn’t). That still means she was lying to Steve, and to the Howlies, for the whole time he knew her.
Steve absolutely abhors deception and dishonesty, and hates, hates, hates being manipulated (to the point of storming into Fury’s office to shout at him when he did this with Natasha).
His chances of friendship with Nat were almost destroyed just because she lied one time, on one mission, when it affected only them, and then briefly withheld information at a later time (in the hospital). Steve only warmed up to Nat once she started being honest. (IMO, they were only able to be friends at all because she was at least honest about being dishonest, and was doing so under Fury’s direction.) And that was over one lie.
Peggy was the overseer of SSR Operations. She was the Fury in that scenario, not the Natasha. She would’ve had to been telling Steve multiple lies, over months, about something far worse, and about something that directly injured Bucky, and she knew it. If Steve was in character, even if he forgave Peggy, if she was just an incompetent, he 100% would not want to date her after this.
And another thing:
Operation Paperclip did not (as some idiot on Twitter claimed) begin after 1945.
This is correct. It began in 1944, which is why I mentioned that the train heist was most likely part of OP.
What is a British intelligence agent doing in an American Strategic Scientific Reserve?
Science is not her area of expertise.
She’s a code breaker and a field agent. In other words, a spy.
So not to get nitpicky, but her background as a code breaker and a field agent come from Agent Carter, which is no longer canon. From CATFA, all we know about her is that she’s overseeing operations for the SSR which seems to be headed by Phillips and a group or scientists that include Howard. The SSR does not seem to be a big operation according to CATFA. They don’t have funding for their projects. The experiment on Steve wasn’t the landmark ending of Project Rebirth. He was the working prototype that they wanted to show the Senator that was present so that they could get funding to continue Project Rebirth (the same Senator that had him go on the SSO tour). All the men at Camp Lehigh were supposed to go through this experiment had Erskine not been killed.
Another interesting thing that gets skipped over quite a bit is that Phillips tells Peggy that her actions in dropping Steve off over the border might get the SSR shut down. During this interaction, we learn many things: she eventually came back from her date with Stark and confessed that she had the bright idea to drop the only successful supersoldier right on Red Skull’s doorstep without telling anyone (tbf, Steve was taking a car and he most likely wouldn’t have alerted everyone to his presence had he gone alone on foot), she didn’t establish a rendezvous point to meet Steve in case the single form of communication she gave him was compromised, and finally, she mentions that they had done multiple aerial reconnaissance flyovers of the site of the Hydra base and somehow missed the almost 400 men walking on foot back to the camp where they were standing. She is not a field agent. At the very least, she’s not a good one.
The answer is clear from her own TV show: multiple times she uses her looks for an advantage, plays The Pretty Girl when she needs to get a man, and the tie-in comics show her doing the same thing while she’s undercover and retrieving *Erskine: a scientist of “strategic value” (that’s Nat’a wording from TWS), during the war.
Why do we think Peggy learned how to do this? What use would it have been at Bletchley Park?
Like I said, Agent Carter has been officially declared not part of the MCU canon, but it wasn’t canon to begin with. In the show the SSR was a huge operation where Peggy was the bottom of the totem pole. So she went from overseeing operations of the SSR to being a castaway? Where did these other dudes come from? And that’s not even touching the fact that it retconned Zola’s entire monologue. It also basically gave Peggy all of Bucky’s service history, his background with Steve and just straight up pretended he didn’t exist. Even that radio show that’s supposed to allude to Cap rescuing his girl that’s supposed to be a fictionalized version of Peggy is reflecting Steve’s rescue of Bucky.
The tie-in comic does a lot of work for CATFA because the entire movie is just two giant montages that don’t give a background to any character. The tie-in comic adds scene that should have been in the movie when it comes to Bucky and Steve (the fact that Steve’s mom died before he met Bucky is retconned in CATWS and tbh I take the movies as canon and not supplementary content) and Bucky and the Howling Commandos. And on a final not, it presents this idea that a 19 year old Peggy single handedly rescued and recruited Erskine. Sometimes you have to ask if something makes sense when you read it. I don’t suppose they did much research into the code breakers at Bletchley Park or how important the work they did was to ending the war, but regardless, none of this is mentioned in the movies because while the Peggy in CATFA is consistent with the Peggy in CATWS, she is not at all consistent with the one in the supplementary material. What CATFA and CATWS tell us for sure: she was an agent from British Intelligence who was overseeing operations of the SSR and founded SHIELD along with Phillips and Howard before the official end of WWII. The creators invoked OP and that informs exactly what these founders did. There’s no way around it. What the supplementary material tell us: she was awesome because she’s a girlboss, don’t question it.
Yes @tastelessnostalgia I just saw on twits that AC and the other shows prior to WandaVision have been declared not-canon by (was it) James Gunn!
I don’t think it would have been impossible for her to have been sent on missions when she was young. I just think that she would have had to have training and wouldn’t have been alone in doing it. I can understand why they’d want to make her seem more gallant. According to Wikipedia, female SOE agents ranged between 20 and 53 years of age.
The reason I don’t think she was a field agent was because Phillips said that he took a chance on her. I think we only see her interact with Steve and outside of him, we only see her overseeing the men’s training. Well, there is Hodges, but that punch they had her give him seemed just another scene that was supposed to make her seem like she was no nonsense by using violence. For me this comes off as someone who has more arrogance than her station deserves which fits along with the arrogance requires in recruiting Zola. I think they did all get guns, actually. That said, every time she had a gun in this movie, it wasn’t done in a functional way. It was to show us that she’s badass and can handle a gun. The flamethrower at the end and her presence in the battle in general was overkill, especially since we only otherwise see her with a clipboard, next to Phillips watching a newsreel or moving flags on a map while doing her job during this movie. Basically, she was there in the battle because they needed her to cry over Steve in the scene where he puts the plane down and they couldn’t think of any other way to bring her into it. As for the scene where she was trying to gun down Hydra!Richard Armitage, I think that scene shows her to be wildly incompetent. She stands in the middle of a street while a car speeds at her and tries to shoot through the windshield with her pistol. She even yells at Steve when he saves her from being run over by the car she has failed to stop with her tiny gun. The other shooting scene shows she’s not mature enough to use a gun at all. In fact, after Hydra!Richard Armitage, why was she not immediately apprehended and thrown in a cell?
Re: the mission to rescue Bucky, I agree. The mission is foolhardy, but it shows the essence of Steve and Peggy’s character. This mission shows that Steve is willing to put himself in danger to rescue Bucky and no one else. His plan involves him going alone in a car after having seen the map and the terrain. Peggy, on the other hand, is willing to put Steve in danger. On top of that, she had no reason to be involved, but the moment he asks her to let him go, she gets this glint in her eye that suggests she’s just doing it for the excitement. Steve has a goal and it’s a noble one. Hers is not. (Howard might have been there to supply his tech).
I’m not sure if she did know about Zola before the 107th returned. It’s possible their efforts to recruit him began with word of his experimentation on Bucky and the other POW. Erskine could have told them about the man he worked on the serum with under Red Skull. It would only make sense they’d want to recruit him if they found out that he was continuing Erskine’s experiments.
It should also be noted that Peggy is based on Cynthia Glass more than Peggy Carter from the comics. The arc where she drops Steve off and then ends up shooting him is ripe for a juicy story of a double agent.
I feel like a lot of people haven’t put together the fact that the train heist at the end of CATFA was actually part of the plan for them to capture Zola to recruit him a few months down the line (which is what they did). And by Steve’s declaration that he wouldn’t rest until all of Hydra were dead or captured, it seems like he wasn’t in on that plan. CATFA and CATWS together paint a pretty solid story about what the founders of SHIELD were doing without Steve’s knowledge and CATWS also tells us how he reacts to the knowledge that Hydra were a part of SHIELD (“We’re not salvaging anything, Nick. Hydra, SHIELD, it all goes.”).
The people who say that she didn’t have the power to make the decision to recruit Zola and work with Hydra forget that she very much had the power to leave if she was so morally opposed to it. Endgame shows us that she was Director by 1970 with Zola still working under her. She certainly had the power to something about it then. It wasn’t a situation where they made one in unchangeable decision. They effectively continued to choose to work with him everyday for the 25+ years after the war.
It makes the way she approaches him seem… more than a little suspect.
Only after he’s proven he’s a viable subject for the serum.
Given SHIELDra’s later M.O. of sending pretty women to recruit men they want on their side, even under Fury: they sent Nat to Tony and Steve, and also Peggy’s niece.
It looks a lot more like ‘send Carter to entice Rogers.’
If they didn’t want him to remain a showgirl; they wanted him out in the field, where he could help them capture useful scientists (the way they captured Erskine*), and also nearby so his body could be accessible to their scientists (i.e. Stark).
The idea that Peggy didn’t have the power to recruit or refuse to recruit Zola (saw one idiot on twitter claiming that anti-P’s are acting like she’s entirely responsible for Operation Paperclip when it was POTUS’ idea. Uh, yeah, she doesn’t need to be responsible for the entire operation to take part in it??) It’s nonsense because:
1) You don’t get to hold this character up as a feminist girlboss with one hand while pushing down her power with the other; what, she’s only an Helpless Female when it suits you? (This is all of a piece with the ‘she didn’t know’ defense. She didn’t see Nazis as unemployable and couldn’t predict they would prove untrustworthy? So she’s an idiot, then?)
2) She’s the co-founder of SHIELD. Even if she wasn’t actually a director before the 70s, she was a co-founder, and she’s close personal friends with Stark, the other founder, upon whom she had so much influence he appeared as a reoccurring character in her show. Even if she didn’t have the actual written power to refuse Zola a job, all she’d have to do is say ‘actually Howard I don’t want him here’ to her buddy Stark and he’s gone!
3) as you said @tastelessnostalgia she was Director two years before Zola died and did nothing to get rid of him. All she had to do was let him die, but instead she oversaw the turning of his brain into a computer, effectively making him immortal, able to exert an influence on SHIELD long after she was no longer director. That is canon trusting of a known-Nazi; it’s tantamount to handing him the keys to her house while she’s out of town. CANON.
4) Even the idea that she could’ve left if she didn’t like it: it wouldn’t even have to be that extreme an ultimatum!
She could’ve just threatened to resign to block the appointment. She could’ve pretended to be okay with him, but actually just used him for intell. and inventions and then had him killed or imprisoned. Or killed him herself; and made it look like an accident, if actively killing him would’ve caused her problems with other people on her side.
All it would’ve taken is one throwaway line saying she tried to get at Zola while he was at SHIELD but was prevented, and we could’ve said there was at least a single piece of evidence she wasn’t okay with it. But there isn’t.
There are a wealth of possible actions a competent agent in her position could have taken to prevent Zola having any influence. But she didn’t do anything, in fact she made it worse.
And another thing:
Operation Paperclip did not (as that same idiot on twitter claimed) begin after 1945.
It began during the war, but in secret, because the Allies were already plotting how to handle (their then-ally) Stalin and the Soviets after the end of the war: they had to race to begin before the war finished, as they were already working on the Manhattan Project, and knew they needed to get scientists in that field away from the USSR.
The people then best placed to help with that, since they had been allied with Stalin, living in Eastern Europe, were high profile Nazis.
If SHIELD was part of OP, then their involvement couldn’t have begun only after the war, because that would’ve been useless; it had to have begun while Steve was there, and behind his back. SHIELD just happened to be called the SSR at the time.
(And that argument which suggests it’s okay for Peggy to do the wrong thing because Steve wasn’t there to stop her. Which, again, a) sexist patronising conveniently-not-a-girlboss-when-it-suits-you, b) if she only does right under supervision then she’s not a good person.)
The proof that OP was going while Steve was there?
Peggy’s presence.
What is a British intelligence agent doing in an American Strategic Scientific Reserve?
Science is not her area of expertise.
She’s a code breaker and a field agent. In other words, a spy.
But not just any spy; a pretty spy.
The kind of spy you could send (like SHIELD did to Steve) to recruit a reluctant man.
There would’ve been agents older than Peggy, with far more experience and knowledge, but Peggy specifically was chosen.
Why?
The answer is clear from her own TV show: multiple times she uses her own looks for an advantage, plays The Pretty Girl when she needs to get to a man, and the tie-in comics show her doing the same thing while undercover and retrieving *Erskine: a scientist of “strategic value” (that’s Nat’s wording from TWS), during the war.
Why do we think Peggy learned how to do this? What use would it have been at Bletchley Park?
Allies + scientists + espionage + honeytrap + WWII = Operation Paperclip. Literally why else is she there? She’s not working on the Manhattan Project, she’s not a scientist!
Even if she was such an idiot that she could be involved in all this without knowing it, or without realising the moral implications, if she was that incompetent, but later saw the error of her ways and apologised (which she didn’t). That still means she was lying to Steve, and to the Howlies, for the whole time he knew her.
Steve absolutely abhors deception and dishonesty, and hates, hates, hates being manipulated (to the point of storming into Fury’s office to shout at him when he did this with Natasha).
His chances of friendship with Nat were almost destroyed just because she lied one time, on one mission, when it affected only them, and then briefly withheld information at a later time (in the hospital). Steve only warmed up to Nat once she started being honest. (IMO, they were only able to be friends at all because she was at least honest about being dishonest, and was doing so under Fury’s direction.) And that was over one lie.
Peggy was the overseer of SSR Operations. She was the Fury in that scenario, not the Natasha. She would’ve had to been telling Steve multiple lies, over months, about something far worse, and about something that directly injured Bucky, and she knew it. If Steve was in character, even if he forgave Peggy, if she was just an incompetent, he 100% would not want to date her after this.
Operation Paperclip did not (we some idiot on Twitter claimed) begin after 1945.
This is correct. It began in 1944, which is why I mentioned that the train heist was most likely part of OP.
What is a British intelligence agent doing in an American Strategic Scientific Reserve?
Science is not her area of expertise.
She’s a code breaker and a field agent. In other words, a spy.
So not to get nitpicky, but her background as a code breaker and a field agent come from Agent Carter, which is no longer canon. From CATFA, all we know about her is that she’s overseeing operations for the SSR which seems to be headed by Phillips and a group or scientists that include Howard. The SSR does not seem to be a big operation according to CATFA. They don’t have funding for their projects. The experiment on Steve wasn’t the landmark ending of Project Rebirth. He was the working prototype that they wanted to show the Senator that was present so that they could get funding to continue Project Rebirth (the same Senator that had him go on the SSO tour). All the men at Camp Lehigh were supposed to go through this experiment had Erskine not been killed.
Another interesting thing that gets skipped over quite a bit is that Phillips tells Peggy that her actions in dropping Steve off over the border might get the SSR shut down. During this interaction, we learn many things: she eventually came back from her date with Stark and confessed that she had the bright idea to drop the only successful supersoldier right on Red Skull’s doorstep without telling anyone (tbf, Steve was taking a car and he most likely wouldn’t have alerted everyone to his presence had he gone alone on foot), she didn’t establish a rendezvous point to meet Steve in case the single form of communication she gave him was compromised, and finally, she mentions that they had done multiple aerial reconnaissance flyovers of the site of the Hydra base and somehow missed the almost 400 men walking on foot back to the camp where they were standing. She is not a field agent. At the very least, she’s not a good one.
The answer is clear from her own TV show: multiple times she uses her looks for an advantage, plays The Pretty Girl when she needs to get a man, and the tie-in comics show her doing the same thing while she’s undercover and retrieving *Erskine: a scientist of “strategic value” (that’s Nat’a wording from TWS), during the war.
Why do we think Peggy learned how to do this? What use would it have been at Bletchley Park?
Like I said, Agent Carter has been officially declared not part of the MCU canon, but it wasn’t canon to begin with. In the show the SSR was a huge operation where Peggy was the bottom of the totem pole. So she went from overseeing operations of the SSR to being a castaway? Where did these other dudes come from? And that’s not even touching the fact that it retconned Zola’s entire monologue. It also basically gave Peggy all of Bucky’s service history, his background with Steve and just straight up pretended he didn’t exist. Even that radio show that’s supposed to allude to Cap rescuing his girl that’s supposed to be a fictionalized version of Peggy is reflecting Steve’s rescue of Bucky.
The tie-in comic does a lot of work for CATFA because the entire movie is just two giant montages that don’t give a background to any character. The tie-in comic adds scene that should have been in the movie when it comes to Bucky and Steve (the fact that Steve’s mom died before he met Bucky is retconned in CATWS and tbh I take the movies as canon and not supplementary content) and Bucky and the Howling Commandos. And on a final not, it presents this idea that a 19 year old Peggy single handedly rescued and recruited Erskine. Sometimes you have to ask if something makes sense when you read it. I don’t suppose they did much research into the code breakers at Bletchley Park or how important the work they did was to ending the war, but regardless, none of this is mentioned in the movies because while the Peggy in CATFA is consistent with the Peggy in CATWS, she is not at all consistent with the one in the supplementary material. What CATFA and CATWS tell us for sure: she was an agent from British Intelligence who was overseeing operations of the SSR and founded SHIELD along with Phillips and Howard before the official end of WWII. The creators invoked OP and that informs exactly what these founders did. There’s no way around it. What the supplementary material tell us: she was awesome because she’s a girlboss, don’t question it.
I feel like a lot of people haven’t put together the fact that the train heist at the end of CATFA was actually part of the plan for them to capture Zola to recruit him a few months down the line (which is what they did). And by Steve’s declaration that he wouldn’t rest until all of Hydra were dead or captured, it seems like he wasn’t in on that plan. CATFA and CATWS together paint a pretty solid story about what the founders of SHIELD were doing without Steve’s knowledge and CATWS also tells us how he reacts to the knowledge that Hydra were a part of SHIELD (“We’re not salvaging anything, Nick. Hydra, SHIELD, it all goes.”).
The people who say that she didn’t have the power to make the decision to recruit Zola and work with Hydra forget that she very much had the power to leave if she was so morally opposed to it. Endgame shows us that she was Director by 1970 with Zola still working under her. She certainly had the power to something about it then. It wasn’t a situation where they made one in unchangeable decision. They effectively continued to choose to work with him everyday for the 25+ years after the war.
Do you headcanon Bucky as bisexual or gay? Honestly I headcanon him as gay (Steve is the bisexual one), he’s just got this energy… He likes men and men only
Tbh I vacillate with Bucky but I’ve never bought Steve as bisexual because:
1)
He’s never been the instigator with women, it’s always them pawing at him, them pulling him into a kiss (or Looking Significantly at him, forcing him to kiss them; rapey), them expressing their expectations of romance from him, etc.
Even Natasha does it, albeit for a mission; with zero return in interest (ScarJo! Uninteresting to a man?! )
ed: And this is me realising Natasha's entire job in CATWS is to no homo Steve's interactions with Every Male. Literally why else was she in that movie.
And every time a woman initiates, Steve just turns into a plank; takes no steps to advance the contact and/or then allows it to be interrupted without any visible signs of disappointment (he seems embarrassed to be caught with Lorraine but not like he’s annoyed or distraught).
Even if you adopt a Doylist view and put this down to Cevans’ clear discomfort with doing these kinds of scenes, Steve’s actions (not just his manner) connote discomfort, too. On the occasion with Nat the word ‘uncomfortable’ is literally spoken on camera.
ed: further point about Lorraine (viz. the claim that Steve kisses her back). The kissing-back is only visible in the reverse-shot Peggy-POV coverage (ie. when they have to reshoot the same thing from a different angle). Which means Cevans & Dormer had to start kissing, and then wait for Atwell to speak (their cue to break apart) as they both had their eyes shut at the time.
On Cevan’s coverage, when he was thinking about his own character, not his fellow actors, he didn’t do this. Ergo, they are only prolonging the contact for shooting (as opposed to character) reasons; ergo it is NOT indicative of character or a desire in Steve to keep kissing her.
Furthermore, the ‘But he-’ attitude to this and other moments is an attempt to sidestep the very obvious point that this, just like Peggy touching his chest, is a form of sexual assault. The fact that Steve didn’t say ‘no’ does not mean he would’ve said yes (or would’ve wanted to).
The name for a bisexual man who seems uncomfortable, bewildered, and blindsided by sexual situations with women (even after we’re lead to believe he knows what he’s doing... not his first kiss since 1945) is... ‘gay’.
*or possibly demi-sexual ... and gay
ed: Also that meta I just rebagelled about how transgressive/feminised Steve is, and that other meta about how St*ggy reads (and how little changes) if you genderbent him n’ her; change the pronouns and Steve reads just like a straight woman Mulan-ing her way into WWII (who despite appearing male is also repeatedly objectified by even straight men?)
.
2)
We’re supposed to infer his interest and instigation, from certain things he does (with Peggy):
Smiling at her punching Hodge,
asking whether she believes in him,
smiling when she calls him perfect,
denying entanglement with Lorraine,
asking about her and Stark,
asking what she thinks of the shield.
But each of these has alternative motives:
He’d smile to see any bully knocked down;
he’s reasoning her into (putting her money where her mouth is and) helping him rescue Bucky;
he’s gratified and relieved not to be in trouble for not memorising enemy intell. more accurately;
he’s defending his besmirched honour and calling out her hypocrisy;
(plus it’d be weird not to ask about Stark when he’s just dropped the ‘fondue’ bomb right into the middle of their conversation);
it’s clearly a friendly overture to try and mollify her after the fight they’ve just had.
And, significantly, the one time he does overtly compliment Peggy it is clearly an accident, a slip of the tongue, while actually talking about something else (why she’d want to join the army -- really? Steve...? of all people, doesn’t get it?).
And he immediately tries to backpedal to clarify his lack of intent.
In-character for small diffident Steve, yes; but she sneers at it.
And look at how many overt compliments Peggy drops, which Mr Polite doesn’t return...?
.
3)
The only time Steve ever does seek out female company ... is with the specific goal of providing platonic comfort to a woman, because he’s the team leader and has noticed she needs it.
(He does it to both Nat and Wanda, more than once; and to Old Peggy.)
In doing so, he is apparently unaware that this action could be misinterpreted, or seen as the opening salvo of a romantic relationship (Nat has already been flirting hard, after all); as if the thought never even crossed his mind.
If the writer’s intent is to signify romantic interest, are we supposed to ship Steve with 17 year old girl Wanda? Or Old Lady Peggy?
It’s caring, certainly; it’s dutiful, but it’s not sexual or romantic.
The very fact of his friendships with women itself is significant, too, when you consider the generation he comes from and how very very unusual that would’ve been for a straight man back then; and still is. Much more common for a gay man, especially in showbusiness.
Also note the significance of ‘with-it’ Old Peggy dispensing sage advice, with a distinctly motherly air; but as soon as she becomes confused, Steve confirms their relationship is romantic; like humouring a sleepwalker.
I know at this point that Age is a barrier to a real romantic relationship, for them, and this is the second time Steve makes overtures (to satisfy Peggy’s very-obvious interest in him), but I think it’s significant that both times he only does so with a gun to his head.
He has the air of a man who is indulging her, rather than himself, because the spectre of death is looming; both times immediately framing it as part of an absurd, bittersweet joke, and once linking it intrinsically to Peggy being (literally) demented.
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4)
The only people Steve does seek out (for non-providing-platonic/dutiful-comfort reasons), the only people he initiates physical contact with, are all male.
And with an obvious desire to do so (you can see him looking at the places he’s going to touch Bucky before he does touch him there, for instance).
He initiates with Sam and then physically helps him up. Ditto with Thor.
(On multiple occasions, women - Peggy and Nat - seek him out to provide comfort, but Steve is surprised by their presence every time; he clearly hasn’t even thought of going to them, despite needing consolation very badly.)
You can say ‘oh but it’s a double-standard to say this interaction isn’t platonic but his interactions with women are.’
But if we’re supposed to see him seek out contact with women (which he actually doesn’t, ever; emotionally or physically) and leap to conclusions, why not when he does it with men?
ed: we’re also supposed to see Steve’s kiss with Sharon as instigated by him, but once again Sharon Looks At Him Significantly, having just done Steve a favour; you can see the wheels turning and Steve realising she is expecting a physical reward, which he then provides.
- Number one, it’s rapey as hell.
- Number two, he clearly isn’t expecting it (just like his kisses with Lorraine and Peggy and Nat).
Needing to be blackmailed and prompted into touching women = not very straight or bi of him. (More on Sharon below).
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5)
While discussing dating women, Steve demurs and corrects Natasha to insist he only wants to date- “someone with shared life experiences”.
First of all: someone...?
Why so non-specific, Steven?
And shared life experience- like, uh, gender?
This is the same movie that he’d just met Sharon in, had multiple theoretical women love interests offered, when Nat (the womanest woman) has been flirting with him relentlessly, but he doesn’t specify women as his type?
At the very least, saying ‘someone’ comes across as if he’s avoiding Spelling Something Out clearly for Nat... who appears to be wondering why this guy seems so disinterested...
This guy who lives in... Dupont Circle.
(Could support an asexual read, I guess, if Disney were capable of such subtle rep; only that Steve says it isn’t his first kiss, rather than dismissing the whole possibility of kissing. And why is there something off about Steve’s kiss, to make Nat (expert in seduction etcetera) grill him about it? Does that sound like it’s hinting at a bisexual?)
You could say correcting pronouns but not specifically stating that there’s only one pronoun of person you’re attracted to is more of a ‘bi’ thing, except...
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6)
The only people with shared life experiences with Steve are all male.
Bucky? Sam? Isaiah?
Tellingly, Chris Evans himself explicitly linked this dating concept to Bucky (not Peggy or any female character) during the Beijing Civil War press tour, years later, by echoing the phrase:
There you have it! Straight from the horse’s mouth!
ed: Peggy’s claims to have experienced discrimination, like Steve, are an example of backstory being Told Not Shown (bad writing practise).
It’s belied by her class and age and even her obvious physical vigor. She cannot have advanced to be the vice-head of the SSR, in her early 20s, as a well-fed woman in the 1940s, if she had had to contend with serious discrimination (on the basis of sex or class) on the way up. There simply isn’t the time for her to have done so; it isn’t physically / temporally possible.
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7)
Other characters’ views on Steve’s interactions with men (men only) as if it’s romantic or sexual.
(Immediately upon meeting him) Nat talks about Coulson’s crush on him; and about him and Tony being lost in each others’ eyes; how much Bucky means to him; Sam takes Steve’s connection to Bucky so seriously he gives up his normal life to help Steve search for him; Tony and Scott and even Steve himself comment on his body and his ass; Sharon calls Bucky ‘Mr America.’
And if you consider the homoerotic subtext of Steve’s repeated, super charged (heh! electricity) contact with Mjolnir, while Thor is watching, and the way their signature combo is for Thor to pound his weapon on Steve’s non-penetrative shield- I mean- do I even need to say it.
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8)
Contrast this with all the discussion of possible women Natasha listed, who would be interested in dating Steve, whom Steve dismisses out of hand.
(He never contradicts or dismisses it when someone links him to a man, though).
ed: originally I thought Nat’s flirting with Steve was a kind of bluff, because she knows he won’t ask her to deliver on it.
(Protip kids, expressing obvious interest in the state of someone’s love life is flirting, even if you pose as a matchmaker; interesting that Steve memorised the details of Bucky’s lovelife and Bucky played matchmaker for him. Hm...)
NB: Steve confirms that Nat was flirting with him, in AOU, by explicitly stating it.
(So how does Nat know that Steve won’t bite? that a red-blooded man won’t be interested in ScarJo?! SCAR.JO. Again, if her interest in him is genuine then that only tells us her orientation, not his; or, since this is ~The Black Widow we’re talking about, what she wants us to think her orientation is.)
Then I thought Nat’s flirting might've been a deliberate ploy to keep the rest of Strike Team Alpha off her back, since they can clearly overhear her; to keep them from trying their luck themselves, if they think she’s Cap’s Girl.
But now that I’ve noticed Natasha’s role as Pro Cockblocker / No Homoer for Steve, I’m realising her flirting is actually there so they can have Rumlow & Rollins admire Steve jumping out of a plane, without having to get gross gay cooties all over their subtext. Ugh...
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9)
And then, Steve only makes a half-hearted play for Sharon...
who has gone out of her way to just happen to be passing when he’s around (usually a subtle sign of interest and expectation, which gallant Steve is obviously going to satisfy) and whose very persona has been tailored to seem familiar/echo his mother, seem appealing, and therefore manipulate him into trusting her...
...After he has been playfully told to do so by Nat, and without seeming disappointed when he is rejected.
(In fact he seems more upset about finding out that she’s a plant).
ed: the fact that Sharon is dressed up like a modern version of Steve’s Ma, even right down to the kind of nurse she is, and that’s the only woman he makes a move on??
Paging Dr. Freud, ur Gay Mama’s Boy is here and he’s ~Confused.
Another example of this overtly prompted, half-assed attempt at heterosexuality is the deleted scene in A1 where Stan Lee tells Steve to ask for Beth the waitress’s number; mirroring almost exactly Bucky’s experience with Yori and Leah in TFATWS.
There, Stan Lee calls Steve a himbo moron.
The implication is that, even though he would undoubtedly succeed, chatting up this woman has clearly not even crossed Steve’s mind.
So much so that it’s obvious even to a total stranger!
(I’d love to say they’re maintaining ‘Steve is still small on the inside and doesn’t realise he’s hot’ characterisation, but, I don’t think they deserve so much credit. I mean, they cast Chris Evans...)
Which again rather begs the question:
what kind of bi or straight man has to be constantly reminded to express interest in women?
And only does so under duress?
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10)
Look at Steve’s habit of homoerotic interaction with the male villains, too; the body language, the content.
On his knees with Red Skull, gets the Hydra spy on his back in Brooklyn; kneeling again in his fight with Loki (who seems to enjoy impersonating him); having his physical prowess remarked on by Rumlow and Rollins; the fight where Batroc goads him into removing a piece of clothing; the elevator fight (Rumlow again!) where a gang of men moves on him and they’ve brought handcuffs; being straddled by the Soldier, grappling on the floor, choked by the Soldier (more than once!!); having his eyes remarked upon by Zemo; him straddling Tony- the list just goes on and on!
(You don’t catch camp Tony doing this with his villains; not even when he’s literally zip-tied to a bed, as he is in IM3).
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There are three moments where Steve appears to be appreciating how a woman looks, 2 in CATFA, 1 in A1: once where he is dazzled by a woman asking for an autograph, once in the Valkyrie battle, once while sketching.
BUT.
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11)
In the first instance he also seems shocked that the women is speaking to him at all, and it coincides with a camera-flash going off.
So, maybe his dazed expression is more because he hasn’t got used to any women speaking to him, let alone looking happy?
Our inner auto-hetero-filter is clearly supposed to read the camera flash as pathetic fallacy; the environment reflecting Steve’s bedazzlement by her...
But you cannot avoid the possibility that maybe he is literally just dazzled by a camera-flash?
The second case is him looking appreciatively at Peggy, right after- IIRC -she had just gunned down a guy with a flamethrower who was about to crispify him.
This is in Peggy’s only big battle scene, where she is very obviously filling in the role just conveniently vacated by Bucky (the sharpshot who protects Steve’s dumb ass?) So, again, if could be simple ‘thanks for the save, you’re a great person’ appreciation, which Steve would express to any person who did him that solid.
(Like he did when he saluted Bucky! If doing so means he’s attracted to the person doing it, then...?)
But because the person in this example happens to be female, and because of our inbuilt auto-hetero-filter, both times we assume...
ed: this moment specifically mirrors all the prior moments where Peggy got up in Steve’s personal space, at an inappropriate moment and in an inappropriate way. So, again, Steve’s reciprocation could be gallantry or merely following her lead. He has a track record of going along with women; he can deadlift 2000lb but he can’t stop Pvt. Lorraine maneuvering him around by the tie, or Nat planting one on him in TWS. Again, the absence of an explicit no is not an enthusiastic yes.
Third occasion: the waitress Beth.
We’re supposed to read into the way the camera lingers on her; to assume that the camera’s male gaze is Steve’s male gaze.
BUT: the director’s views are not Steve’s.
(It’s Joss Whedon. 😬)
Beth has just smiled at something Steve said (him failing to get what ‘wireless’ is) so he could be staring after her, as I originally thought, because he’s wondering what reference he just missed.
(The fact that Steve is surprised by Stan Lee’s assumption he is eyeing her up for another reason seems to support this innocent explanation. Let’s pass over the tired implication, in the middle of his Sadness Errands, that Steve is only down because he doesn’t have a Good Woman in his life. Ugh.)
Also, this interaction occurs immediately after Steve is shown sketching Stark Tower; a building he later calls ‘that big ugly building’. So the film itself establishes that Steve will purposefully stare at that-which-he-does-not-find-attractive.
Ergo, him staring after Beth is not automatically a sign of sexual/romantic interest.
(And to add in a Doylist point: Beth has another cameo later on, so the camera has to linger on her long enough to make sure we remember her. It’s like that one-glance-back shot of the Dragon on the bridge in Shrek, to draw a bizarre parallel.
As with Lorraine, it’s indicative of shooting rather than character motivations, and it’s a deft bit of misdirection, too; because our inbuilt-het-filter means we’ll miss that Exposition Is Happening, since we’ll assume it’s Something Else...)
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Ed: On the subject of inbuilt het filter, I almost lost my damn MIND on twitter recently because we were discussing the red-dress moment in CATFA and how it totally gaslights you into thinking Steve is checking Peggy out, giving her the ol’ lingering up-and-down, when in actual fact:
He isn’t even looking at her!!??)
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12)
We’re supposed to assume women’s interest in Steve means he is capable of reciprocation.
This is actually a very sexist view of sexual orientation; typically misogynistic.
‘I am attracted to you, and therefore you must have wanted it.’
Sound familiar??
But women only start on Steve after he has assumed a form that is more ‘straight’ (because more hyper-masculine and therefore attracted to women, is the assumption); once he has become less effeminate looking.
We’re supposed to believe it’s still really little-Steve on the inside all along, who as Peggy herself twice points out, has no idea how to talk to women...
(Despite being raised by a single mother? having a lady-killer best friend? being friendly with serial philanderer Howard Stark? having just spent months on the road with a whole troop of showgirls?? when he has a photographic memory???and looks so much like a Tom of Finland illustration that he has women literally throwing themselves at him???? Hmm, okay.)
So if the real Steve on the inside is one that is more queer-coded (he’s slight, he’s bookish, he’s a Mama’s Boy, he’s ‘artistic’, he’s Not Like The Other Boys Somehow), who continues to fail to sexually or romantically interact with women despite looking like Chris Evans, and whose only loved one is another man (who might be gay)...
What does that tell you?
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Now, Bucky...
1)
Like Steve, as the Winter Soldier he is objectified in a violent way that women often are, by straight men; but again, like Steve, I don’t count ‘people of X gender being interested in him’ as evidence of his interest in them.
2)
The evidence for Bucky being gay (as opposed to bi or pan or w/e) is much more in the source material than it is in the MCU.
ed: I’m dismissing the blatant no homo of him dating/flirting with women in FATWS because it’s so clangingly obvious a #nohomo; it’s a whole DeanWinchester’s worth of gay panic.
The source-material evidence for gay is:
expy of a gay character (Arnie Roth; who played the ladies man cover)
named after a (prolly) gay president
played by actor previously known for angsty gay roles.
3)
However, I can’t help feeling people read/cast SebStan this way specifically just because he has that slightly campy drawl in his voice and mannerisms?
Like if you heard he was gay you wouldn’t be surprised.
Add on the fact that he’s half an inch shorter than Steve, usually slimmer, dresses well, has long hair, his voice isn’t as deep; and that’s before you get into the campy-kid sidekick angle and fanon’s tendency to ukefiy / de-age / effeminise the shorter half of a ship to make them more of a straight-woman’s stand in.
Oof. It’s like ‘oh if you twist him a little he conforms to these aspects of a (stereotype of a) gay man, so therefore...’
It does squick me out a bit tbh; but hey my kink is not your kink, etc.
4)
In CATFA Bucky didn’t seem to be dating women just to keep up appearances; he seemed, genuinely, extremely cheerful about seeing his date (contrasted with Steve who looked absolutely miserable, lol.)
Also there’s his quick deliberate jump into flirting with Peggy... (albeit with other motivations for doing so).
I mean, you’ve got multiple instances there of Bucky happily and smoothly instigating with women, pre-TFATWS (and hence pre #givecapaboyfriend panic).
I’d say there’s more on-screen evidence for Bucky being bi than there is for Steve, (which isn’t to say that it couldn’t be a smokescreen).
One thing that skews the results, (and which I think people in fandom are a bit blind to), is how people are influenced by the traditional roles assigned to heroes and villains.
You know how villains and sidekicks are coded as queer and effeminate? Weaker than the hero?
(To the point where people will swear up and down that Bucky’s serum is weaker than Steve’s for some reason despite the movies actually showing us the exact opposite of this?)
Well for the same reason they’ll look at Bucky and be like ‘hmm about this villain-sidekick guy, I just have this feeling that he is definitely gay for some reason, he just gives off this vibe, can’t quite put my finger on it-’ 🤔
(And the flipside, of course, is ‘this manly heroic muscular noble handsome protagonist character with the main part I feel like he's attracted to women for some reason idk he just gives off this aura guys.’ HMM. REALLY. Shocking. Mysterious. Groundbreaking.)
Anyway, it’s kind of a poison chalice either way with Bucky, because if he’s gay then he’s a campy gay stereotype and if he’s bi then he’s the sleazy bisexual stereotype who’ll flirt with anyone (on twitter the other day I called him the Jack Harkness of the MCU and, I mean, if the shoe fits...)
All this is muddied by the fact (which has no bearing on the films or the writers, but hey) that such labels were not mutually exclusive back in his day (especially in cruising mecca Brooklyn).
You had men who were overtly, effeminately gay; but you also had men who were straight and occasionally had sex with men, and yet continued to be seen (and identify as) straight.
Gay sex acts were viewed as very much separate from a gay label (and that you couldn’t be gay unless you were the stereotype of a gay), so bisexuality as a concept wasn’t really a thing. (The whole notion of gay as a concrete ‘identity’, independent of stereotype, and that any gay contact meant you were gay, didn’t come in until the 1950s on).
So Bucky could’ve been happily batting for both teams all his life without ever identifying / being identified as anything but straight.
I also have to take into account the fact that all the people writing Steve and Bucky in the MCU want you to see every male character as being attracted to women exclusively, and expect you to infer/fill in the blanks with heterosexuality; it’s such an assumption that they’re often baffled to hear they’ve written something open to interpretation.
Once they know, they have to keep dragging that shit up or dropping reminders whenever things are in danger of being ambiguous.
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Prime example for Steve: Sam’s Meetcute.
I mean, Jesus.
But at the end, to ‘fix’ that, they had Sam mention the girl on the reception desk; who NEVER APPEARS IN THE MOVIE. Thereby ‘proving’ that Sam is only flirting with Steve to get her attention-
*oh,yeah, fellas, that’s how that works*
-and then... the real proof of a Man: they have ScarJo show up for no damn reason and have Sam say ‘hey’ to her.
OKAY, yeah they’re straight now, sure...
ed: cue Pro Cockblocker Nat smashing her corvette right through their gay subtext. She even does this to Aaron the Apple Guy.
I mean Sam could just be appreciating the car (an Acceptably Hetero activity) but what is VA-counselor-Sam’s continued dislike of Bucky if not gay jealousy persevering?
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So maybe they only dropped that ‘Bucky is genuinely glad to see a female love interest’ scene in CATFA (which appears to prove his, by modern parlance at least, bisexuality) because they knew he was going to be playing the role of the feminised damsel-in-distress for Steve later on, and just wanted to make absolutely sure nobody read anything into that?
It may seem like a double-standard; to dismiss Bucky’s shown interest in women as proper evidence, but, I mean, he’s an expy of a gay character, named after a gay president, they cast Sebastian Stan who has been specifically chosen in prior works because he can pass for gay. So...
To argue against my own taste...
Bucky’s apparent- what can I call it -suavity? with women...
(He has similar vocal inflection flirting with Peggy as he did saying yes to dancing with Connie & Bonnie at the Stark Expo; it’s enough to establish a pattern of behaviour, I’d say)
... elsewhere he does seem a bit more heartfelt; so if you take that smooth snake-oil salesman guy as an assumed persona, rather than his genuine self, then it could connote gayness (rather than bi- or straight-ness).
(Only that a lot of straight men do act that way around women; they do put on an act, especially in those days; their very interest in women is the motivation to cultivate such a high-maintenance persona.)
It is difficult to avoid the fact that he speaks exactly the same way to Steve, while discussing how Steve’s looks in his ‘outfit’ (and Steve gets all bashful about it, like he’s reading something non-innocent/platonic into the interaction). If the Steve-voice (male) flirting is genuine then it suggest the identical Peggy-voice flirting (female) is also genuine.
It’s simply impossible to tell whether the assumed-persona with women is aligned with Bucky’s genuine orientation or not.
(If it weren’t for us knowing gay Arnie Roth was putting that persona on, there’d be no reason to question it at all...)
As far as personal taste goes: maybe it’s only because I’m bloodyminded about not conforming to stereotypes that I like the idea of stoic Steve as gay and metrosexual Bucky as bi.
There’s something satisfying in a character way about Steve retaining this aspect of little-Steve’s life; not getting the attention he wants. The serum hasn’t made everything perfect for him...
Also, if I’m brutally honest, the way it means Peggy and all the other presumptuous women pawing at Steve (poor guy), were deluded about the extent of his interest; it was only and always just Bucky he was interested in... is 😩 Unf! Chef’s kiss.
From a purely self-serving stucky shipper’s POV, Bucky being bi (or even pan), rather than gay, would allow him to be equally attracted to opposite body types; like Steve pre- and post- serum.
ed: and tbh my experiences IRL have always been with camper guys actually being almost-insanely straight, absolute girl-nip, and the ‘you’d never know until he told you’ guys being gay, so that may influence me too? 🤷♀️
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So, er, to get to the actual fuckin point before we're old:
Steve = attracted to men; definitely not any kind of attracted to women; possibly ace or demi.
It’s interesting that so many people don’t clock Project Rebirth as being a eugenics experiment. It seems almost undeniable after the introduction of Isaiah Bradley. So, with this in mind, did Steve truly consent to the experiment that took place exactly one week later?
every time i see a gifset of endgame steve i'm like why did he look so aged in this movie sdkjfkjs like chris doesn't look like that irl but the way they styled his hair and the clothes just everything.....it is all Tragic
I don’t actually think it was because of the five-year jump though I do agree he looked terrible - it was deliberate to make him look completely out of place in the 21st century and prepare the audience for the mindfuck of him going back to the forties and staying there.
We set the stage with him shaving his beard and digging out his dumb compass, then after the time jump it’s Grandpa Steve - quick to assure gay joe Russo that he too has lost someone, but it was a female woman who died of old age, lol I’m straight!
His only friends in this future are Nat and Tony, and they’re both dead by the end of the movie. Bruce is unrecognisable and Thor fucks off with the Guardians.
What about Sam and Bucky, you ask? Lol, I answer. There’s no interaction between them before Steve leaves (oh sorry, forgot the dialogue between severely depressed but still glowing Bucky and walking corpse Steve, how could I) and Steve’s constipated expression during Tony’s funeral is yet another ‘there’s nothing here for me now’ hint.
The whole movie was an exercise in negating the entirety of Steve’s character (comics included), and one very important visual referent was making him look tired and out of place in 2023.
Every time I think about this, I also think about how MM said that Endgame was their What If…and that they deliberately made these characters do the opposite of what they’d actually do because they wanted a laugh on their way out and just didn’t care. It’s interesting that fandom came up with the concept of AU’s to explore things like this and the writers of the canon didn’t understand how shoving an AU into canon and pretending it’s canon compliant within the universe would be unsatisfying to anyone that thought about it for more than 30 seconds.
funny story but I’ve never heard anyone criticize liking Thor by saying “but he killed people” or “he attempted genocide” or “he tried to conquer a realm” :/
#im just saying#Thor’s on-screen kill count is higher than Loki’s#¯\_(ツ)_/¯#and Thor has been the one saying he’ll slay all the jotuns since he was 7 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯#he also then went on to try and proclaim a war to “break their spirits” after his failed coronation because “as king of asgard”#that#that’s what conquering is#he wanted to take the armies and beat up an already put down planet#even though he was already all set to rule nine realms he thought it necessary that his first act as king be establishing military dominance#might I add that Loki attempted genocide under extenuating circumstances? and for the purpose to prove himself? and end a war?#Thor was just doing it for fun#“but Thor changed his mind at the end of the movie!” mhm ok when. and how. tell me how a day in Jane’s presence taught him worth of life.#because Asgard views Midgard and Jotunheim *very* differently so even if Thor values humans after becoming one for a while#how does that relate to the Jotuns? which he’s been raised on war stories on since he was a kid?#and I’m not saying that Thor’s more easily influenced but Loki spares Jotun lives where he can in the opening of Thor 1#even though they’ve both been raised on the same stories and with the trademark Asgardian god complexes#and while Loki is allegedly the one who lets the frost giants in at the beginning he’s also attempting damage-control the entire way#Thor is painfully unsuited to a throne let alone the one to the nine realms at that point and Loki is the reasonable one who is also ignored#yeah he resorted to letting 3 jotuns into the vault and he stretches the truth to thor about odin’s sleep and#he also sets things up so he can be a hero by making a deal with the enemy BUT you know what? it WAS the most effective way to solve things#there was a war? ok cool if Laufey tries to kill Odin and Loki kills him it’s fair game#problemo solved war over Loki’s done crisis management and doesn’t need to worry about having another father either#then THOR comes along with his treasonous friends and spills the beans and Loki#Loki’s going to have to prove himself again for real when he TRIED to avoid the war and unleashing the bifrost? most efficient way to do it#Odin had already left the planet to a slow death and all Loki did was try and do what Thor had failed at#if you’re not criticizing Thor for a failed attempt at genocide why criticize Loki for being a bit more successful?#they’re in the same boat here except Loki has reasons behind what he was doing that wasn’t his ego and that goes for New York too#check and mate#for real though I don’t think i have ever heard anyone argue that Thor killed people :/ everyone is on about him being a himbo sweet bean :/#I must find out where so I can determine whether cultural differences are being infantalized or it’s the fight:non-fight-time ratio (tags via @worstloki )
I love how Thor Ragnarok tried to tackle all this, with my favourite: “Where did you think all the gold came from?” speech. I say tried because obviously the speech was given to the villain who has no problem absolutely massacring people, which sigh. You tried, Taika. (and then the following movie undid everything he accomplished, in taking Thor down a peg or two without in any way diminishing his heroism, and the movie following that turned him into a figure of fun. Thanks, I hate it)
every time i see a gifset of endgame steve i'm like why did he look so aged in this movie sdkjfkjs like chris doesn't look like that irl but the way they styled his hair and the clothes just everything.....it is all Tragic
I don’t actually think it was because of the five-year jump though I do agree he looked terrible - it was deliberate to make him look completely out of place in the 21st century and prepare the audience for the mindfuck of him going back to the forties and staying there.
We set the stage with him shaving his beard and digging out his dumb compass, then after the time jump it’s Grandpa Steve - quick to assure gay joe Russo that he too has lost someone, but it was a female woman who died of old age, lol I’m straight!
His only friends in this future are Nat and Tony, and they’re both dead by the end of the movie. Bruce is unrecognisable and Thor fucks off with the Guardians.
What about Sam and Bucky, you ask? Lol, I answer. There’s no interaction between them before Steve leaves (oh sorry, forgot the dialogue between severely depressed but still glowing Bucky and walking corpse Steve, how could I) and Steve’s constipated expression during Tony’s funeral is yet another ‘there’s nothing here for me now’ hint.
The whole movie was an exercise in negating the entirety of Steve’s character (comics included), and one very important visual referent was making him look tired and out of place in 2023.
Every time I think about this, I also think about how MM said that Endgame was their What If…and that they deliberately made these characters do the opposite of what they’d actually do because they wanted a laugh on their way out and just didn’t care. It’s interesting that fandom came up with the concept of AU’s to explore things like this and the writers of the canon didn’t understand how shoving an AU into canon and pretending it’s canon compliant within the universe would be unsatisfying to anyone that thought about it for more than 30 seconds.
Do you headcanon Bucky as bisexual or gay? Honestly I headcanon him as gay (Steve is the bisexual one), he’s just got this energy… He likes men and men only
Tbh I vacillate with Bucky but I’ve never bought Steve as bisexual because:
1)
He’s never been the instigator with women, it’s always them pawing at him, them pulling him into a kiss (or Looking Significantly at him, forcing him to kiss them; rapey), them expressing their expectations of romance from him, etc.
Even Natasha does it, albeit for a mission; with zero return in interest (ScarJo! Uninteresting to a man?! )
ed: And this is me realising Natasha's entire job in CATWS is to no homo Steve's interactions with Every Male. Literally why else was she in that movie.
And every time a woman initiates, Steve just turns into a plank; takes no steps to advance the contact and/or then allows it to be interrupted without any visible signs of disappointment (he seems embarrassed to be caught with Lorraine but not like he’s annoyed or distraught).
Even if you adopt a Doylist view and put this down to Cevans’ clear discomfort with doing these kinds of scenes, Steve’s actions (not just his manner) connote discomfort, too. On the occasion with Nat the word ‘uncomfortable’ is literally spoken on camera.
ed: further point about Lorraine (viz. the claim that Steve kisses her back). The kissing-back is only visible in the reverse-shot Peggy-POV coverage (ie. when they have to reshoot the same thing from a different angle). Which means Cevans & Dormer had to start kissing, and then wait for Atwell to speak (their cue to break apart) as they both had their eyes shut at the time.
On Cevan’s coverage, when he was thinking about his own character, not his fellow actors, he didn’t do this. Ergo, they are only prolonging the contact for shooting (as opposed to character) reasons; ergo it is NOT indicative of character or a desire in Steve to keep kissing her.
Furthermore, the ‘But he-’ attitude to this and other moments is an attempt to sidestep the very obvious point that this, just like Peggy touching his chest, is a form of sexual assault. The fact that Steve didn’t say ‘no’ does not mean he would’ve said yes (or would’ve wanted to).
The name for a bisexual man who seems uncomfortable, bewildered, and blindsided by sexual situations with women (even after we’re lead to believe he knows what he’s doing... not his first kiss since 1945) is... ‘gay’.
*or possibly demi-sexual ... and gay
ed: Also that meta I just rebagelled about how transgressive/feminised Steve is, and that other meta about how St*ggy reads (and how little changes) if you genderbent him n’ her; change the pronouns and Steve reads just like a straight woman Mulan-ing her way into WWII (who despite appearing male is also repeatedly objectified by even straight men?)
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2)
We’re supposed to infer his interest and instigation, from certain things he does (with Peggy):
Smiling at her punching Hodge,
asking whether she believes in him,
smiling when she calls him perfect,
denying entanglement with Lorraine,
asking about her and Stark,
asking what she thinks of the shield.
But each of these has alternative motives:
He’d smile to see any bully knocked down;
he’s reasoning her into (putting her money where her mouth is and) helping him rescue Bucky;
he’s gratified and relieved not to be in trouble for not memorising enemy intell. more accurately;
he’s defending his besmirched honour and calling out her hypocrisy;
(plus it’d be weird not to ask about Stark when he’s just dropped the ‘fondue’ bomb right into the middle of their conversation);
it’s clearly a friendly overture to try and mollify her after the fight they’ve just had.
And, significantly, the one time he does overtly compliment Peggy it is clearly an accident, a slip of the tongue, while actually talking about something else (why she’d want to join the army -- really? Steve...? of all people, doesn’t get it?).
And he immediately tries to backpedal to clarify his lack of intent.
In-character for small diffident Steve, yes; but she sneers at it.
And look at how many overt compliments Peggy drops, which Mr Polite doesn’t return...?
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3)
The only time Steve ever does seek out female company ... is with the specific goal of providing platonic comfort to a woman, because he’s the team leader and has noticed she needs it.
(He does it to both Nat and Wanda, more than once; and to Old Peggy.)
In doing so, he is apparently unaware that this action could be misinterpreted, or seen as the opening salvo of a romantic relationship (Nat has already been flirting hard, after all); as if the thought never even crossed his mind.
If the writer’s intent is to signify romantic interest, are we supposed to ship Steve with 17 year old girl Wanda? Or Old Lady Peggy?
It’s caring, certainly; it’s dutiful, but it’s not sexual or romantic.
The very fact of his friendships with women itself is significant, too, when you consider the generation he comes from and how very very unusual that would’ve been for a straight man back then; and still is. Much more common for a gay man, especially in showbusiness.
Also note the significance of ‘with-it’ Old Peggy dispensing sage advice, with a distinctly motherly air; but as soon as she becomes confused, Steve confirms their relationship is romantic; like humouring a sleepwalker.
I know at this point that Age is a barrier to a real romantic relationship, for them, and this is the second time Steve makes overtures (to satisfy Peggy’s very-obvious interest in him), but I think it’s significant that both times he only does so with a gun to his head.
He has the air of a man who is indulging her, rather than himself, because the spectre of death is looming; both times immediately framing it as part of an absurd, bittersweet joke, and once linking it intrinsically to Peggy being (literally) demented.
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4)
The only people Steve does seek out (for non-providing-platonic/dutiful-comfort reasons), the only people he initiates physical contact with, are all male.
And with an obvious desire to do so (you can see him looking at the places he’s going to touch Bucky before he does touch him there, for instance).
He initiates with Sam and then physically helps him up. Ditto with Thor.
(On multiple occasions, women - Peggy and Nat - seek him out to provide comfort, but Steve is surprised by their presence every time; he clearly hasn’t even thought of going to them, despite needing consolation very badly.)
You can say ‘oh but it’s a double-standard to say this interaction isn’t platonic but his interactions with women are.’
But if we’re supposed to see him seek out contact with women (which he actually doesn’t, ever; emotionally or physically) and leap to conclusions, why not when he does it with men?
ed: we’re also supposed to see Steve’s kiss with Sharon as instigated by him, but once again Sharon Looks At Him Significantly, having just done Steve a favour; you can see the wheels turning and Steve realising she is expecting a physical reward, which he then provides.
- Number one, it’s rapey as hell.
- Number two, he clearly isn’t expecting it (just like his kisses with Lorraine and Peggy and Nat).
Needing to be blackmailed and prompted into touching women = not very straight or bi of him. (More on Sharon below).
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5)
While discussing dating women, Steve demurs and corrects Natasha to insist he only wants to date- “someone with shared life experiences”.
First of all: someone...?
Why so non-specific, Steven?
And shared life experience- like, uh, gender?
This is the same movie that he’d just met Sharon in, had multiple theoretical women love interests offered, when Nat (the womanest woman) has been flirting with him relentlessly, but he doesn’t specify women as his type?
At the very least, saying ‘someone’ comes across as if he’s avoiding Spelling Something Out clearly for Nat... who appears to be wondering why this guy seems so disinterested...
This guy who lives in... Dupont Circle.
(Could support an asexual read, I guess, if Disney were capable of such subtle rep; only that Steve says it isn’t his first kiss, rather than dismissing the whole possibility of kissing. And why is there something off about Steve’s kiss, to make Nat (expert in seduction etcetera) grill him about it? Does that sound like it’s hinting at a bisexual?)
You could say correcting pronouns but not specifically stating that there’s only one pronoun of person you’re attracted to is more of a ‘bi’ thing, except...
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6)
The only people with shared life experiences with Steve are all male.
Bucky? Sam? Isaiah?
Tellingly, Chris Evans himself explicitly linked this dating concept to Bucky (not Peggy or any female character) during the Beijing Civil War press tour, years later, by echoing the phrase:
There you have it! Straight from the horse’s mouth!
ed: Peggy’s claims to have experienced discrimination, like Steve, are an example of backstory being Told Not Shown (bad writing practise).
It’s belied by her class and age and even her obvious physical vigor. She cannot have advanced to be the vice-head of the SSR, in her early 20s, as a well-fed woman in the 1940s, if she had had to contend with serious discrimination (on the basis of sex or class) on the way up. There simply isn’t the time for her to have done so; it isn’t physically / temporally possible.
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7)
Other characters’ views on Steve’s interactions with men (men only) as if it’s romantic or sexual.
(Immediately upon meeting him) Nat talks about Coulson’s crush on him; and about him and Tony being lost in each others’ eyes; how much Bucky means to him; Sam takes Steve’s connection to Bucky so seriously he gives up his normal life to help Steve search for him; Tony and Scott and even Steve himself comment on his body and his ass; Sharon calls Bucky ‘Mr America.’
And if you consider the homoerotic subtext of Steve’s repeated, super charged (heh! electricity) contact with Mjolnir, while Thor is watching, and the way their signature combo is for Thor to pound his weapon on Steve’s non-penetrative shield- I mean- do I even need to say it.
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8)
Contrast this with all the discussion of possible women Natasha listed, who would be interested in dating Steve, whom Steve dismisses out of hand.
(He never contradicts or dismisses it when someone links him to a man, though).
ed: originally I thought Nat’s flirting with Steve was a kind of bluff, because she knows he won’t ask her to deliver on it.
(Protip kids, expressing obvious interest in the state of someone’s love life is flirting, even if you pose as a matchmaker; interesting that Steve memorised the details of Bucky’s lovelife and Bucky played matchmaker for him. Hm...)
NB: Steve confirms that Nat was flirting with him, in AOU, by explicitly stating it.
(So how does Nat know that Steve won’t bite? that a red-blooded man won’t be interested in ScarJo?! SCAR.JO. Again, if her interest in him is genuine then that only tells us her orientation, not his; or, since this is ~The Black Widow we’re talking about, what she wants us to think her orientation is.)
Then I thought Nat’s flirting might've been a deliberate ploy to keep the rest of Strike Team Alpha off her back, since they can clearly overhear her; to keep them from trying their luck themselves, if they think she’s Cap’s Girl.
But now that I’ve noticed Natasha’s role as Pro Cockblocker / No Homoer for Steve, I’m realising her flirting is actually there so they can have Rumlow & Rollins admire Steve jumping out of a plane, without having to get gross gay cooties all over their subtext. Ugh...
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9)
And then, Steve only makes a half-hearted play for Sharon...
who has gone out of her way to just happen to be passing when he’s around (usually a subtle sign of interest and expectation, which gallant Steve is obviously going to satisfy) and whose very persona has been tailored to seem familiar/echo his mother, seem appealing, and therefore manipulate him into trusting her...
...After he has been playfully told to do so by Nat, and without seeming disappointed when he is rejected.
(In fact he seems more upset about finding out that she’s a plant).
ed: the fact that Sharon is dressed up like a modern version of Steve’s Ma, even right down to the kind of nurse she is, and that’s the only woman he makes a move on??
Paging Dr. Freud, ur Gay Mama’s Boy is here and he’s ~Confused.
Another example of this overtly prompted, half-assed attempt at heterosexuality is the deleted scene in A1 where Stan Lee tells Steve to ask for Beth the waitress’s number; mirroring almost exactly Bucky’s experience with Yori and Leah in TFATWS.
There, Stan Lee calls Steve a himbo moron.
The implication is that, even though he would undoubtedly succeed, chatting up this woman has clearly not even crossed Steve’s mind.
So much so that it’s obvious even to a total stranger!
(I’d love to say they’re maintaining ‘Steve is still small on the inside and doesn’t realise he’s hot’ characterisation, but, I don’t think they deserve so much credit. I mean, they cast Chris Evans...)
Which again rather begs the question:
what kind of bi or straight man has to be constantly reminded to express interest in women?
And only does so under duress?
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10)
Look at Steve’s habit of homoerotic interaction with the male villains, too; the body language, the content.
On his knees with Red Skull, gets the Hydra spy on his back in Brooklyn; kneeling again in his fight with Loki (who seems to enjoy impersonating him); having his physical prowess remarked on by Rumlow and Rollins; the fight where Batroc goads him into removing a piece of clothing; the elevator fight (Rumlow again!) where a gang of men moves on him and they’ve brought handcuffs; being straddled by the Soldier, grappling on the floor, choked by the Soldier (more than once!!); having his eyes remarked upon by Zemo; him straddling Tony- the list just goes on and on!
(You don’t catch camp Tony doing this with his villains; not even when he’s literally zip-tied to a bed, as he is in IM3).
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There are three moments where Steve appears to be appreciating how a woman looks, 2 in CATFA, 1 in A1: once where he is dazzled by a woman asking for an autograph, once in the Valkyrie battle, once while sketching.
BUT.
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11)
In the first instance he also seems shocked that the women is speaking to him at all, and it coincides with a camera-flash going off.
So, maybe his dazed expression is more because he hasn’t got used to any women speaking to him, let alone looking happy?
Our inner auto-hetero-filter is clearly supposed to read the camera flash as pathetic fallacy; the environment reflecting Steve’s bedazzlement by her...
But you cannot avoid the possibility that maybe he is literally just dazzled by a camera-flash?
The second case is him looking appreciatively at Peggy, right after- IIRC -she had just gunned down a guy with a flamethrower who was about to crispify him.
This is in Peggy’s only big battle scene, where she is very obviously filling in the role just conveniently vacated by Bucky (the sharpshot who protects Steve’s dumb ass?) So, again, if could be simple ‘thanks for the save, you’re a great person’ appreciation, which Steve would express to any person who did him that solid.
(Like he did when he saluted Bucky! If doing so means he’s attracted to the person doing it, then...?)
But because the person in this example happens to be female, and because of our inbuilt auto-hetero-filter, both times we assume...
ed: this moment specifically mirrors all the prior moments where Peggy got up in Steve’s personal space, at an inappropriate moment and in an inappropriate way. So, again, Steve’s reciprocation could be gallantry or merely following her lead. He has a track record of going along with women; he can deadlift 2000lb but he can’t stop Pvt. Lorraine maneuvering him around by the tie, or Nat planting one on him in TWS. Again, the absence of an explicit no is not an enthusiastic yes.
Third occasion: the waitress Beth.
We’re supposed to read into the way the camera lingers on her; to assume that the camera’s male gaze is Steve’s male gaze.
BUT: the director’s views are not Steve’s.
(It’s Joss Whedon. 😬)
Beth has just smiled at something Steve said (him failing to get what ‘wireless’ is) so he could be staring after her, as I originally thought, because he’s wondering what reference he just missed.
(The fact that Steve is surprised by Stan Lee’s assumption he is eyeing her up for another reason seems to support this innocent explanation. Let’s pass over the tired implication, in the middle of his Sadness Errands, that Steve is only down because he doesn’t have a Good Woman in his life. Ugh.)
Also, this interaction occurs immediately after Steve is shown sketching Stark Tower; a building he later calls ‘that big ugly building’. So the film itself establishes that Steve will purposefully stare at that-which-he-does-not-find-attractive.
Ergo, him staring after Beth is not automatically a sign of sexual/romantic interest.
(And to add in a Doylist point: Beth has another cameo later on, so the camera has to linger on her long enough to make sure we remember her. It’s like that one-glance-back shot of the Dragon on the bridge in Shrek, to draw a bizarre parallel.
As with Lorraine, it’s indicative of shooting rather than character motivations, and it’s a deft bit of misdirection, too; because our inbuilt-het-filter means we’ll miss that Exposition Is Happening, since we’ll assume it’s Something Else...)
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Ed: On the subject of inbuilt het filter, I almost lost my damn MIND on twitter recently because we were discussing the red-dress moment in CATFA and how it totally gaslights you into thinking Steve is checking Peggy out, giving her the ol’ lingering up-and-down, when in actual fact:
He isn’t even looking at her!!??)
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12)
We’re supposed to assume women’s interest in Steve means he is capable of reciprocation.
This is actually a very sexist view of sexual orientation; typically misogynistic.
‘I am attracted to you, and therefore you must have wanted it.’
Sound familiar??
But women only start on Steve after he has assumed a form that is more ‘straight’ (because more hyper-masculine and therefore attracted to women, is the assumption); once he has become less effeminate looking.
We’re supposed to believe it’s still really little-Steve on the inside all along, who as Peggy herself twice points out, has no idea how to talk to women...
(Despite being raised by a single mother? having a lady-killer best friend? being friendly with serial philanderer Howard Stark? having just spent months on the road with a whole troop of showgirls?? when he has a photographic memory???and looks so much like a Tom of Finland illustration that he has women literally throwing themselves at him???? Hmm, okay.)
So if the real Steve on the inside is one that is more queer-coded (he’s slight, he’s bookish, he’s a Mama’s Boy, he’s ‘artistic’, he’s Not Like The Other Boys Somehow), who continues to fail to sexually or romantically interact with women despite looking like Chris Evans, and whose only loved one is another man (who might be gay)...
What does that tell you?
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Now, Bucky...
1)
Like Steve, as the Winter Soldier he is objectified in a violent way that women often are, by straight men; but again, like Steve, I don’t count ‘people of X gender being interested in him’ as evidence of his interest in them.
2)
The evidence for Bucky being gay (as opposed to bi or pan or w/e) is much more in the source material than it is in the MCU.
ed: I’m dismissing the blatant no homo of him dating/flirting with women in FATWS because it’s so clangingly obvious a #nohomo; it’s a whole DeanWinchester’s worth of gay panic.
The source-material evidence for gay is:
expy of a gay character (Arnie Roth; who played the ladies man cover)
named after a (prolly) gay president
played by actor previously known for angsty gay roles.
3)
However, I can’t help feeling people read/cast SebStan this way specifically just because he has that slightly campy drawl in his voice and mannerisms?
Like if you heard he was gay you wouldn’t be surprised.
Add on the fact that he’s half an inch shorter than Steve, usually slimmer, dresses well, has long hair, his voice isn’t as deep; and that’s before you get into the campy-kid sidekick angle and fanon’s tendency to ukefiy / de-age / effeminise the shorter half of a ship to make them more of a straight-woman’s stand in.
Oof. It’s like ‘oh if you twist him a little he conforms to these aspects of a (stereotype of a) gay man, so therefore...’
It does squick me out a bit tbh; but hey my kink is not your kink, etc.
4)
In CATFA Bucky didn’t seem to be dating women just to keep up appearances; he seemed, genuinely, extremely cheerful about seeing his date (contrasted with Steve who looked absolutely miserable, lol.)
Also there’s his quick deliberate jump into flirting with Peggy... (albeit with other motivations for doing so).
I mean, you’ve got multiple instances there of Bucky happily and smoothly instigating with women, pre-TFATWS (and hence pre #givecapaboyfriend panic).
I’d say there’s more on-screen evidence for Bucky being bi than there is for Steve, (which isn’t to say that it couldn’t be a smokescreen).
One thing that skews the results, (and which I think people in fandom are a bit blind to), is how people are influenced by the traditional roles assigned to heroes and villains.
You know how villains and sidekicks are coded as queer and effeminate? Weaker than the hero?
(To the point where people will swear up and down that Bucky’s serum is weaker than Steve’s for some reason despite the movies actually showing us the exact opposite of this?)
Well for the same reason they’ll look at Bucky and be like ‘hmm about this villain-sidekick guy, I just have this feeling that he is definitely gay for some reason, he just gives off this vibe, can’t quite put my finger on it-’ 🤔
(And the flipside, of course, is ‘this manly heroic muscular noble handsome protagonist character with the main part I feel like he's attracted to women for some reason idk he just gives off this aura guys.’ HMM. REALLY. Shocking. Mysterious. Groundbreaking.)
Anyway, it’s kind of a poison chalice either way with Bucky, because if he’s gay then he’s a campy gay stereotype and if he’s bi then he’s the sleazy bisexual stereotype who’ll flirt with anyone (on twitter the other day I called him the Jack Harkness of the MCU and, I mean, if the shoe fits...)
All this is muddied by the fact (which has no bearing on the films or the writers, but hey) that such labels were not mutually exclusive back in his day (especially in cruising mecca Brooklyn).
You had men who were overtly, effeminately gay; but you also had men who were straight and occasionally had sex with men, and yet continued to be seen (and identify as) straight.
Gay sex acts were viewed as very much separate from a gay label (and that you couldn’t be gay unless you were the stereotype of a gay), so bisexuality as a concept wasn’t really a thing. (The whole notion of gay as a concrete ‘identity’, independent of stereotype, and that any gay contact meant you were gay, didn’t come in until the 1950s on).
So Bucky could’ve been happily batting for both teams all his life without ever identifying / being identified as anything but straight.
I also have to take into account the fact that all the people writing Steve and Bucky in the MCU want you to see every male character as being attracted to women exclusively, and expect you to infer/fill in the blanks with heterosexuality; it’s such an assumption that they’re often baffled to hear they’ve written something open to interpretation.
Once they know, they have to keep dragging that shit up or dropping reminders whenever things are in danger of being ambiguous.
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Prime example for Steve: Sam’s Meetcute.
I mean, Jesus.
But at the end, to ‘fix’ that, they had Sam mention the girl on the reception desk; who NEVER APPEARS IN THE MOVIE. Thereby ‘proving’ that Sam is only flirting with Steve to get her attention-
*oh,yeah, fellas, that’s how that works*
-and then... the real proof of a Man: they have ScarJo show up for no damn reason and have Sam say ‘hey’ to her.
OKAY, yeah they’re straight now, sure...
ed: cue Pro Cockblocker Nat smashing her corvette right through their gay subtext. She even does this to Aaron the Apple Guy.
I mean Sam could just be appreciating the car (an Acceptably Hetero activity) but what is VA-counselor-Sam’s continued dislike of Bucky if not gay jealousy persevering?
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So maybe they only dropped that ‘Bucky is genuinely glad to see a female love interest’ scene in CATFA (which appears to prove his, by modern parlance at least, bisexuality) because they knew he was going to be playing the role of the feminised damsel-in-distress for Steve later on, and just wanted to make absolutely sure nobody read anything into that?
It may seem like a double-standard; to dismiss Bucky’s shown interest in women as proper evidence, but, I mean, he’s an expy of a gay character, named after a gay president, they cast Sebastian Stan who has been specifically chosen in prior works because he can pass for gay. So...
To argue against my own taste...
Bucky’s apparent- what can I call it -suavity? with women...
(He has similar vocal inflection flirting with Peggy as he did saying yes to dancing with Connie & Bonnie at the Stark Expo; it’s enough to establish a pattern of behaviour, I’d say)
... elsewhere he does seem a bit more heartfelt; so if you take that smooth snake-oil salesman guy as an assumed persona, rather than his genuine self, then it could connote gayness (rather than bi- or straight-ness).
(Only that a lot of straight men do act that way around women; they do put on an act, especially in those days; their very interest in women is the motivation to cultivate such a high-maintenance persona.)
It is difficult to avoid the fact that he speaks exactly the same way to Steve, while discussing how Steve’s looks in his ‘outfit’ (and Steve gets all bashful about it, like he’s reading something non-innocent/platonic into the interaction). If the Steve-voice (male) flirting is genuine then it suggest the identical Peggy-voice flirting (female) is also genuine.
It’s simply impossible to tell whether the assumed-persona with women is aligned with Bucky’s genuine orientation or not.
(If it weren’t for us knowing gay Arnie Roth was putting that persona on, there’d be no reason to question it at all...)
As far as personal taste goes: maybe it’s only because I’m bloodyminded about not conforming to stereotypes that I like the idea of stoic Steve as gay and metrosexual Bucky as bi.
There’s something satisfying in a character way about Steve retaining this aspect of little-Steve’s life; not getting the attention he wants. The serum hasn’t made everything perfect for him...
Also, if I’m brutally honest, the way it means Peggy and all the other presumptuous women pawing at Steve (poor guy), were deluded about the extent of his interest; it was only and always just Bucky he was interested in... is 😩 Unf! Chef’s kiss.
From a purely self-serving stucky shipper’s POV, Bucky being bi (or even pan), rather than gay, would allow him to be equally attracted to opposite body types; like Steve pre- and post- serum.
ed: and tbh my experiences IRL have always been with camper guys actually being almost-insanely straight, absolute girl-nip, and the ‘you’d never know until he told you’ guys being gay, so that may influence me too? 🤷♀️
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So, er, to get to the actual fuckin point before we're old:
Steve = attracted to men; definitely not any kind of attracted to women; possibly ace or demi.
