Barney and Clint’s signing is superbasic and poorly taught (by a hearing person) ASL augmented with a fuckton of homesign they just made up, so when Clint’s using ASL with a regular deaf person it’s pretty normal, if stiff and antiquated with weird grammar, but his sign with Barney is the sign equivalent of a madeup language like Klingon. They’re the only two speakers of it in the world, which makes for its own subset of weird pun-signs, creative swearing and invention.
OKAY but do you think Nat and/or Bucky learn formal ASL to speak with Clint, or do they pick up his random excited, pun-filled babble he has with Barney?
I think Nat picked up Clint’s unique sign SUPER FAST, after the first few times Clint got wasted with her and started making jokes in sign rather than speech. (*tries to explain joke* “Oh, wait, that doesn’t work in words, let me teach you this in sign so you understand why it’s hilarious.” etc) Clint has absolutely given her a namesign that he is under orders from her never to explain to hearing people.
I think Bucky also picked it up fast, but he mainly uses it to come up with new ways of telling Clint what a dumpster fire and dumbass he is, and also to trash talk when they’re using the range together with ear defenders on (or while in actual combat situations).
(I may have an interest in sign language and have written a Clint/Phil series that heavily deals with Clint’s deafness and deaf identity.)
I kinda created my own small tradition of three annual illustrations I try to keep up with: Jack o’Lantern for Halloween, She-Hulk for X-Mas and Black Widow for the start of the year. Sadly I had no opportunity to draw Jack and She-Hulk last year, but I won’t skip on Widow this time!
No one is allowed to have an opinion about this post until they have carefully read the “Ethnic groups in Russia” Wikipedia page
Nobody really familiar with Russia or the USSR (who isn’t a racist) would blink an eye that she could be Tatar or Bukharan Jewish or whatever else you could ask for here
There weren’t many ethnic minorities in the KGB but it makes sense for minority groups to be targeted for physical reconditioning and brainwashing and so on, especially if it meant they couldn’t have children due to the Soviet Russian strategy of flooding regions with ethnic Russians in order to drown out the indigenous non-Russian populations, so who really cares
Plus her patronymic – meaning she has a part in her name that means ‘the daughter of Alian’ – isn’t Russian, Alian is definitely not a Russian name. I think her father has an Arabic name (according to googling around on runet it’s from Arabic) and many Muslims in Russia are Asian. Whoever her father was he wasn’t 100% ethnic Russian and his family did not identify with Russian culture.
In fact if I were told I was going to meet someone called Natalia Alianovna I would actually expect an Asian (or someone like Azerbaijani) to walk out
(Although I wouldn’t really be surprised by someone who is white passing either, people from Asian groups in Russia can look very diverse – but if she were played by an Asian actor it wouldn’t be pandering or erasure or nonsensical)
(yeah some ethnicties like Bukharan Jewish are extremely small in population but my opinion on this is if a single person could fit the bill it’s completely normal to have such a character)
This is a really cool and informative addition to this post, thank you!
[Image: Bucky Barnes, Natasha Romanoff, Steve Rogers, and Sam Wilson sitting with their backs to the viewer; Bucky, Steve, and Sam are wearing shirts that say “if lost return to Natasha” and Natasha is wearing a shirt that says “I am Natasha.”]
honestly i was just planning on doing this with steve and bucky but then i was like “let’s be serious they would both get lost and sam would be dragged along somehow and natasha would have to bail them out” so then this happened
[MY ART] More stevebuckynat. My ot3. So it’s going to be 2 years between cap 2 and cap 3, both in the real world and the movie timeline. Where was Bucky hiding (or rather why…)
and because my handwriting is terrible, the bottom thought bubbles say: “I mean I did shoot both my exes…AWKWARD. Even thought it was Hydra that made me do it. I’d never choose to, didn’t know if you’d understand that… This is still too awkward. I want to hide for 2 more years…”
Natasha Romanov is an Avenger, an Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. and an ex-KGB assassin, but on her own time, she user her unique skill set to atone for her past. She is: BLACK WIDOW
knitting in the dark 