JUST NOTICED LAST NIGHT THAT BUCKY WAS ALSO ON A DRIP IN THE ENTIRE CHAIR SCENE
I know it’s a fucked up scene, I do, but that to me just is nOPE. What the fuck are they putting into his system on top of the mind wiping and the physical abuse and the conditioning.
wait, what?
THE TUBE ON THE BACK OF HIS RIGHT HAND, IS THAT A DRIP?
Dr. Cyan calling in here, and yes, that is absolutely a peripheral IV cannula on his right hand. Watching the scene carefully you can see the IV stand on his right, with two infusion bags attached (sorry for the crappy images, maybe someone can grab a better screenshot if they have the DVD):
If you watch frame by frame, you can see that Bucky pops the connection tube off when he attacks the med tech; it dangles freely from the IV bag when the guards move to point their guns at him. In real life he’d probably have torn the cannula out of his hand entirely; it happens all the time with little old ladies in my ER so I was disappointed the directors didn’t draw on that particular body horror/’ouch’-factor here.
The infusion bags appear to be one 1,000 mL isotonic saline or D5W/D5NS (dextrose/glucose in a saline solution) for tissue rehydration, and one 500 mL isotonic saline, most likely a diluent for injectable/parenteral drug administration:
Which drug? Well, it could be any HYDRA concoction, but I’d put my money on the tried-and-true fallback of some benzodiazepine. BZDs/derivatives are anxiolytic (anxiety-reducing), hypnotic (sedative/sleep-inducing), anticonvulsant (good for when you’re electrocuting someone’s brain), amnestic (affecting memory), and myorelaxant (muscle-relaxing), a nice cocktail for working with the Winter Soldier – and hey! paradoxical BZD reactions include aggression and violence (such as attacking attending medical staff), and it may also cause anterograde amnesia as well as internalised feelings of turmoil, anxiety, depression, and loss of the ability to experience and/or express feelings. Plus, withdrawal can cause depression, depersonalisation, derealisation, hypersensitivity, psychosis, and suicidal ideation – sounds like a lot of Bucky-in-from-the-cold fanfics, am I right?
Seriously, writing this, I’m wondering where the withdrawal!Bucky fanfics are – the fics I’ve read all focus on his mental issues, but what about the physiological ones? I’d really like to read a fic about Bucky coming off whatever HYDRA pumped him full of – now that’d make for some neat hurt/comfort (and a lot of curling up on Steve’s bathroom floor shaking and puking his guts out).
(When I get my hands on a HD copy of the movie I’ll have a look at the rest of the medical setup in that scene. I’m especially interested in the screens behind the chair – maybe some more medical meta to be explored? Please send any screenshots my way if you have them!)
Hey, zooeyscigar – angsty fic reference here!
Tag: meta
Ok, I’m probably the last one to notice this, but even if I am, I’m bringing it up again bc it’s very important and very sad and I need to cry about it.
I’ve seen this scene about 50 times now and not once did I bother to take a closer look at Bucky. Specifically, his eyes. I always thought he was looking at Schmidt or in the general direction of the two while I focused on Steve’s face and what was happening. Now, obv, Steve is looking at Schmidt bc he’s being confronted and all that. But look at Bucky. Compare his gaze in the 3rd gif to Steve’s. It’s not trained on Schmidt. He’s looking directly at Zola and his face looks like a mixture of fear, anger and like he’s gonna puke. All of which would make sense after you imagine the shit Zola put him through on that table before Steve showed up. Just try to imagine one scenario that could be happening in his head here. Like reliving the parts where they tortured him and experimented on him, slowly took away the control of his own mind, tried to take his memories so he had to keep reminding himself who he was and began the process of turning him into god only knew what. When Steve found Bucky, he looked like he had no idea what was going on around him. No awareness that the alarm went off, soldiers abandoning their posts, the doctors scurrying off to safety. He didn’t realize he was alone in the room and no one was looking after him anymore. He just repeated his name and number over and over again and if Steve hadn’t found him, he’d have went down with the building while completely lost to his surroundings. After Steve got him out I imagine he didn’t have much time to dwell on the things they did to him. Until now. Until he saw Zola’s face and it hit him like a truck and the result was that face above.
Little did he know that even if they do get out of here alive, he was eventually gonna end up right back where he was and Zola would get to finish what he started and if that doesn’t fuck you up…i don’t even. fuck this movie and fuck these characters i did not sign up for this pain
[From Captain America #15, 2003.]
But seriously though, this is always something I’ve thought about a lot in relation to Steve. Because Steve is super-committed when it comes to almost EVERYTHING. Justice, freedom, equality, civil rights, doing the Right Thing, trying to be the best person he can be, trying to see the good in all people, to being Captain America, and an Avenger, and leading by example. Steve generally doesn’t do anything by half-measures. When he’s in, he’s ALL IN.
Except when it comes to romantic relationships, which he has an oddly casual go-with-the-flow approach to. Which has always struck me as odd considering the rest of Steve’s personality. But he keeps having all these on-and-off relationships where he’s together with whoever for a couple weeks/months and then for whatever reason they amicably part ways, and he’s not overly bothered by it other than perhaps a bit of melancholy. He’s got a very ‘oh well, maybe next time will work?’ attitude and doesn’t fight tooth and nail to try to keep relationships together like he does with, well, everything else in his life.
Instead Steve is like ‘ok, if we’re not working, we’re not working. It was nice being together. Good luck on whatever you choose to do after this, I wish you all the best.’ (Which, don’t get me wrong, it is great that Steve can be on good terms with basically every ex he’s ever had). And that his rationale for dating some of the people he’s date who haven’t been long-term love interests, (like Sharon or Bernie,) seems to boil down to ‘they seem like a nice person, maybe I will give this a go again’. Which is a pretty wishy-washy reason for dating someone, IMO. ‘You are a non-objectionable, caring person, (who is hopefully not a super-villain,) ok, we can give this a go’. Really?
Like where is the spark and the passion? (I will give Bernie credit here, because I could really feel the love when they were together, but even other long-term love interests like Sharon and Rachel seem like just something that is convenient for both them and Steve at the time, as opposed to something that either of them are really committed to actually making last).
And from all of this I’ve always kind of gotten the feeling that Steve dates most of the people he dates based on what he THINKS he should want as opposed to what he ACTUALLY wants. So he has this ideal image of the kind of person he should fall in love with…which is not necessarily the type of person that work well as his partner long-term. And that, because he can’t have that white-picket-fence dream that he has the image of in his mind, he isn’t going to have anything/get to be happy at all? Without really considering that he could have something different, and it may be just as good or better. Its one of the times where I see Steve’s tendency to get really set in his ways is just sabotaging himself.
Then combine this with the fact that Steve has this kind of casual disdain/self-hate for himself back when he was tiny and weak and sick, (any arc where Steve is de-serumed or something similar make this REALLY obvious,) and this goes into some really interesting territory. Because on one hand, Steve really wants, desperately, for people to see him as Steve, as just another guy, not Captain America: larger than life patriotic symbol and hero. But he also kind of dislikes who he was before the serum when he didn’t have the physical strength to fight for everything he believed like he does now, along with the isolation, the bullying, having doors slammed in his face, stuck with dreaming because he couldn’t be DOING. And so I think he actually kind of dismisses a lot of the ‘tiny Steve’ thoughts, (which to me ARE the wistful dreams, the doubts, the insecurities, and all the creativity,) in favour of the ‘big Steve’ thoughts, (which covers all his morals, beliefs, and convictions. the ‘big picture thoughts’ that are bigger than one man and have to be stood up for,) in his head. Because the ‘big Steve’ thoughts are so much more important, and the ‘tiny Steve’ thoughts…well, he was kind of pathetic back then. (The storyline in Avenging Spider-Man #5 is like the PERFECT example of this to me). which leads to this disconnect between who Steve sees himself as and what he’s actually FEELING. Because ‘big Steve’s views/desires and ‘tiny Steve’s views/desires do not overlap all the time.
So, I can’t help but think that it’s ‘big Steve’ that’s the half that makes all the relationship decisions, and then wonders when he just keeps drifting away from partners and nothing really lasts. Because I think ‘tiny Steve,’ not ‘big Steve,’ is actually the part of him that knows what would REALLY make him happy. But he hasn’t really been listening to ‘tiny Steve’ for a long time, in any situation where ‘big Steve’ and ‘tiny Steve’ actually disagree. So he just ends up feeling confused and not being able to figure out what it is that he’s really searching for.
And, well, it’s kind of hard to figure out what will make someone else really happy when you can’t figure out what makes YOU really happy.
I also think this is a not-small factor in Steve’s often STAGGERING tendency to be completely oblivious to the emotions/distress/love/stress that the people around him are going through until things just blow up.
Oh, god, thank you for this post. I have the similar thought, but I also draw the line bitween Steve Rogers and Captain America. Captain doesn’t act as he wants, he is acting as it should be, as others expect.
Like with Falcon:
He is passive in relationships with women – Bernie and Sharon have always made the first move. Hana didn’t -> nothing happened.
The only time (or one of the few), when Steve first kissed Sharon and decided to try them again, suprise Sharon a lot.
Anyway, totally agree with post.
(sorry for my English)
I’m pretty sure I’ve reblogged this at some point, but I felt the need to do so again because of the new run of Captain America:
Sharon blatantly points out that she had to ask him otherwise Steve probably never would.
And this, this is what bothered me the most: not the fact that he’s thinking of saying “yes” to Sharon, but his whole attitude about marriage. It really is strange that someone, like Steve, who is usually so proactive and committed isn’t that way when it comes to relationships. If anything, those values are made most evident in relationships. Personally, I don’t think much good can come from a marriage that he thinks “might not be so bad,” but I guess we’ll see.
#ugly sobbing #why #who gave you the right to make me remember this
#please take a moment to realize what this means#bucky was already ‘dead’ when shield was founded by peggy and howard#but they included him anyway#they decided to call him a shield agent#and to put his name on a memorial#he was probably the first name up there since he was dead before shield existed#shield was founded after steve took out hydra#he started that with bucky#he finished it for him#so to peggy and howard bucky was a shield agent#in every way that mattered (via thewinterwizard)
actually, i’m pretty sure his name was listed as one of the SSR agents who were memorialized — they had a different insignia, followed by a few variations of shield’s insignia, probably because of different eras or possibly subsections of shield.
(and this either means that they either put bucky’s NICKNAME (not “james buchanan barnes”) up there, or that skye is a huge bucky fangirl and knows a ton about him and looked for his name.
i’m going for both.)
Yeah, that wall lists both SSR-era agents, as well as SHIELD-era agents.
This screenshot I took below is kinda crappy – there’s a much better version here – but you can see the SSR logo to the left, in the 1941-1965 section.
Also, I think Bucky’s nickname was pretty well known.
The Smithsonian memorial lists his full name, including the “Bucky” nickname, and at the very bottom he’s referred to as just Bucky Barnes. The narrator also calls him “Bucky Barnes.”
But, you know. Her mentor is Phil Coulson. He might have tried to downplay the obsession some, but you know she got some Howling Commandos history lessons at some point, even if she’d never heard the name before in her life. (Which she had, obviously. Not only is it American history, she is an Avengers fan.)
Which just makes me think that at some point Coulson started giving some lecture about Cap history and relating it to something current, and Skye was just all, “We know, Coulson, jeez. The raid took place without official sanction and saved the lives of over a hundred men. Got it. In history class. And at the Smithsonian. And, you know, the last two times you’ve talked about it.”
I just suddenly made this connection. Maybe heaps of people got there before me, but if not, here it is.
In The Incredible Hulk, though it’s the Army hunting Bruce, there’s a moment where SHIELD is very blatantly referenced, which in the past I thought was a bit of a ham-fisted way of reinforcing that Hulk was taking place in the same universe as Iron Man.
But I just realised, what they’re using? It’s Zola’s algorithm.
Though the Army and the FBI (whose logo is also present in that scene, potentially placing the actual computer at an FBI base) no doubt have their own monitoring stuff, Major Kathleen Sparr, Ross’s right hand, is using SHIELD’s proprietary algorithm to skim millions of emails to find the right phrasing, the right target. To find Bruce, and make the connection to Sterns. It has to be a pretty intelligent (or even, dare I say, sentient?) piece of coding to take what on the surface are fairly generic, common words and only return one hit, the correct hit, to point Ross and his team so precisely to Bruce and Betty’s rendezvous with Sterns. I mean, it’s not like the email says, “hey, I’m the Hulk, I’m on the run and the Army is looking for me.” There’s really not much for a standard search algorithm to work with, even if you’re smart about it and use things like Boolean terms.
Bruce was one of the people Sitwell listed on the roof as a Hydra target. Maybe he’s been one for a lot longer than we realised.
Would you mind expanding a bit on your Howard Stark hulk rage feels? :)
I’m gonna keep this to the MCU because thinking about 616 Howard Stark (who is a drunk, unpredictable, abusive asshole who belittles Tony and fucking threatens him with violence what the fuck) makes me foam at the mouth in rage.
Let’s pick this one quote from IM2:
“He was cold, he was calculating. He never told me he loved me, he never told me he liked me so it’s a little tough for me to digest when you’re telling me he said the whole future was riding on me and he’s passing it down. I don’t get that. We’re talking about a guy whose happiest day was when he shipped me off to boarding school.”
This meta hits all the right notes for me. And I’d like to add that when Steve is on the table, about to undergo a procedure that will likely kill him, Howard doesn’t even say a single word to him, just looks him up and down with this cold, removed stare like Steve is just another component in a machine. And all props to Dominic Cooper for that look, too, because I find that moment the most chilling of all.
Bucky Barnes and dating in the 40’s.
So, wow. Yeah. Another one of those “I’ve been reading a lot of.. and.. (insert my opinion here).”
So, yes, I keep reading about Bucky as the ladies man: all sexed up and such. It’s a bit baffling to me, as this is a very modern way of thinking. Dating – or courtship – was very different in the 30’s and 40’s than it is today!
For example, take this excerpt from A Brief History of Courtship and Dating in America, (Part 2):
Beth Bailey and Ken Myers explain in the Mars Hill Audio Report, Wandering Toward the Altar: The Decline of American Courtship, before World War II, American youth prized what Bailey calls a promiscuous popularity, demonstrated through the number and variety of dates a young adult could command, sometimes even on the same night.
In the late 1940s, Margaret Mead, in describing this pre-war dating system, argued that dating was not about sex or marriage. Instead, it was a “competitive game,” a way for girls and boys to demonstrate their popularity.
This describes a situation in which dating was more about one’s reputation than any sort of romance. It was very important not only to be seen with many dates, but with the proper people. This explains why Steve would have had such a difficult time securing a partner: being seen with someone unpopular was worse than not being seen at all. However, this gives us a clue as to how popular Bucky must have been! If he was able to leverage himself in order to get Steve dates, Bucky must have been pretty high-ranking on the dating scale.
For men, desirable dating traits included a good personality and dance skills, as well as being “tactful, amusing, well dressed, prompt, and courteous” (Great Depression and the Middle Class…). Lasciviousness was not a good quality! Women communicated with one another concerning a man’s suitability, so for Bucky to have been popular he couldn’t have been the sex-centric playboy that fans like to imagine. It’s far more likely that he was well-spoken, funny, charming, and a great dancer. Remember, Bucky was from the lower classes, so he wouldn’t have had the money – despite the Depression, it was expected that men pay for the entire date (barring Sadie Hawkins themed events and once a couple started to go steady) – to impress women with a car and fancy clothes, nor would he have been able to take them out to dinner, so his dance skills would have been pretty important!
In fact, dancing was such a popular form of entertainment that, in one year, the University of Michigan fraternities held over 300 evening dances!
According to this web page “young people in the 1930s dated and double-dated by going to movies, getting something to eat, going for ice cream, driving around, spending time with friends, going to dances, and even ‘necking.’” That’s right folks, necking. Not fucking.
Women were expected to straddle a fine line between being too forward or too “frigid,” both of which could harm their reputations. Young people engaged in kissing, necking, and petting (meaning anything short of full intercourse). Petting was becoming more common – due, in part, to rising automobile-culture – as was sex itself; heavier petting typically came from going-steady, and engagement “came… to mean that partners would at some point ‘go all the way’” (Teen Culture in the 1930’s). Ladies who were known to be free with their sexuality prior to commitment were in danger of being known for exactly that, and could easily become popular merely as a means to an end (the wrong kind of popularity).
So, it likely wouldn’t have been hard for Bucky, as a popular young man, to find a willing partner (and I’m certainly not suggesting that he was virginal). However, if he were the sort of man to focus on easy women, it’s not likely that he would maintain his own high rating (which, again, we can guess at by the fact that he was able to not only secure himself dates, but Steve as well).
This is a really quick and dirty run-down of dating and sex during the 30’s into the early 40’s, but there is a lot of information available out there. Bucky is presented as a stand-up guy, so I don’t really understand why so many people seem to view him as some sort of a man whore. I sincerely doubt that he was entirely chaste (particularly once he went into the Army, a topic which I avoided on purpose), but I imagine that he was a desirable companion for his charm and dateability far more than for his sexual prowess.
Note also how these same qualities (“tactful, amusing, well dressed, prompt, and courteous”) are very attractive today, too, and regardless of how well the filmmakers did their research, that’s exactly how Bucky comes across at the start of the film. Depending on his background, he might or might not be a man you’d seriously consider marrying, but he would definitely be someone to recommend to a friend as good company for an evening. (This means that a writer can plausibly interpret Bucky as anything and everything between virginal to modern serial monogamist -level of sexual experience or even very experienced – consider, if you will, the attractions of a charming man with an absolute sense of discretion.)
And then contrast this with pre-serum!Steve, who comes to their double date dressed – the best you can say is that he tried (and remember, he’s literally coming there after a fight in a dirty alley), is nearly silent, awkward almost to the point of tactlessness, and generally projects an air of wanting to be anywhere else but there, up to and including the trenches getting shot at.
It’s no wonder that his date is so upset, because pre-serum!Steve might be a doll once you get to know him, but as a blind date, he is an utter and total tragedy.
It also underlines how far from OK Bucky is after his rescue – he’s scruffy, unkempt and his uniform is a mess, he’s drinking hard liquor alone, and his attempt to channel the old charming Bucky at Agent Carter falls flat. He does get somewhat better later, as we can tell from his improved appearance in the new blue uniform jacket, but there’s a sharp edge there that wasn’t before. On the other hand, this is no longer New York with is dates and dances; Bucky wouldn’t be the only man on leave who’d lost the bright easy shine.
War changed a lot of things, and that includes the attitudes of women. Before, Private Lorraine probably wouldn’t have dreamed of ambushing a man with a kiss in a public place, no matter how handsome or heroic, but in wartime, people occasionally reconsidered the rules. (I’m not sure what the rules were for dating in England, but I do wonder if a part of the confusion between Steve and Peggy might stem up from different cultural approaches to dating between Britain and USA, in addition to the difficulties that a romance with a fellow soldier could cause her professionally.)
But to get back to Steve – consciously or unconsciously, who do you think he’s trying to emulate in company now that his body, fame and military rank have suddenly bumped up his social rating, if not Bucky-from-before?
(Side note: of the rest of the Howlies, Monty probably did respectably well for himself in his elevated social circles, which IIRC worked a bit differently; as for Dum-Dum, I doubt he ever even tried to play the game Bucky used to excel at; Jim probably was okay, but he doesn’t strike me as a man with the patience for being a social butterfly. Gabe Jones? He must’ve gone to all of the dances. All of them. Remember that suit from the very end? Now, there is one dapper gentleman with savoir-faire.)
Thank you for all this awesome information! 😀 I already knew that, while post-WS Bucky can easily be portrayed as a bit of a “bad boy”, he definitely wasn’t BEFORE that, bit it’s cool to have some insight into what dating was like back then!
Polite, dapper, dashing gentleman Bucky Barnes and his questionable, fight-picking punk of a best friend Steve Rogers is my fave thing.
why deaf clint barton is important
ok, all you boys and girls who read comics, listen up.
if you read matt fraction’s hawkeye comics, you know that clint barton has been stabbed in the ears with arrows, and as a result, is now deaf. furthermore, if you read the comics, you know that today was the release of the asl issue.
in case you don’t know me, i’m hard of hearing. i grew up hearing, and my hearing wound up getting fucked up the older i got. now i’m 20 years old and wear hearing aids. my signing isn’t as good as it could be since i’m surrounded by hearing people who won’t learn asl to communicate with me, but i use it as often as i can.
when i read the asl issue, i found a superhero that i could actually relate to, an actual, real, human being, flawed superhero that d/Deaf/hoh people can relate to and understand, particularly those people who have lost their hearing as they’ve gotten older the way i have. this asl issue speaks more than anyone can understand.
admittedly, the issue didn’t quite use proper signs all the time, and the grammatical structure was more english than asl (asl has a very different grammar syntax), but for now, it was enough. it was representation. it was a step forward. (and why was clint talking on the phone if he’s deaf? honey, if you deaf, you deaf. i’m hard of hearing, and i can’t hear shit on the phone. like, i get he was letting jess know that it was him talking, but son, you are deaf and cannot hear her response. but that’s ok, it’s just details.)
so marvel, you don’t know how much your asl issue meant to me, but i’d like to thank you, matt fraction, and everyone else involved with this from the bottom of my heart. thank you for giving representation to a group of people who don’t really get very much representation at all. thank you for for showing me a superhero who gets it.
deaf clint barton is important.
disabled superheroes are important.
disabled superheroes getting back on their feet when their disability makes things rough for them is important.
disabled superheroes trying to figure out how they fit into the abled world around them is important.
deaf clint barton is important.
This. All of this.
Protestant Steve Rogers v. Catholic Steve Rogers and why that matters
[I’ve been sitting on this post for about three weeks, trying to decide if I wanted to make it or not. I’ve finally decided it’s time to put it out there, so.]
This essay was originally going to be added to this post about Steve’s dog-tags, but I apparently have a lot of feelings about this and it ended up being ridiculously long and sort of tangential to the original post, so I’m simply linking the two. I’ve divided the essay into three parts: church history, immigration history, and speculation.
Disclaimer: I was raised Protestant (in a non-denominational Stone-Campbell church), and I attended undergrad at a Protestant Christian liberal arts college (also Stone-Campbell). My undergraduate degree included church history, but I am definitely not an expert, so I’ve included lots of Wikipedia links to compensate. I am currently attending a Catholic university for my masters, but again, the focus has not been church history (although I have interviewed and transcribed interviews with Catholic priests from the Brooklyn Diocese as part of my classes). I know enough about church history to feel comfortable making this post, but not enough to go into further detail than what is laid out here. If I have made any egregious errors in regards to either branch’s history, please drop me a note so I can correct them.
knitting in the dark 
