rosmarinblooms

[rosmarinblooms]

Changes

So, in Doomstike Bucky:

1) has a holy war and a personal vendetta with Victor von Doom (the fucker hurt his cat!!! also blew up his town)

2) willingly takes on a role of a leader

3) being accepted as a leader by none other than Steve Rogers

4) has enough self-confidence to growl at Stave Rogers and defend his own decisions

4) finally explains what The Revolution moniker means to him…

5) … accidentally inspires a man with this explanation to change sides and become a good guy

6) inspires a lot of people, it seems.

Then we blink.

And in The New Avengers he:

1) refuses to be called The Revolution anymore

2) forgets about the holy war and tries to piss von Doom by destroying local businesses owned by jerks

3) lives in hiding and is horrified by a perspective of such an awful thing as “a team”.

Marvel always be Marvel, I guess. No change is permanent. Everyone should return in their default mode. Sad. But at least Alpine seems to be in good health.

[rosmarinblooms]

Chapters: 3/3 Fandom: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thunderbolts (Movie 2025) Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Yelena Belova, James "Bucky" Barnes & Sam Wilson Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes, Yelena Belova, Sam Wilson (Marvel) Additional Tags: (presumed) major charcter death, Siblings, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, alternative universes Summary:

Bucky has a job, a friend and a cat. Until he falls into another world. Yelena doesn’t think Bucky is her brother. She has lost one sister. Enough with older siblings for her. Until Bucky dies protecting Ava and John, and another - wrong – Bucky appears in his place.

[rosmarinblooms]

[rosmarinblooms]

Fire

Thunderbolts: Doomstrike, a variant cover

[rosmarinblooms]

Well yes, we NEED Alpine, but this killer cat would end all the baddies singlehandedly singlepawly. With whom then the heroes would fight?

Yes!

[rosmarinblooms]

The gang goes cliff diving

[rosmarinblooms]

Only those who know and appreciate Natasha could give her a New Hat

[rosmarinblooms]

Thunderbolts: Doomstrike and the Revolution (but probably not the one you were expecting)

When Bucky become The Revolution, it didn't occur to me that it would be the Russian revolution movement of the 19th-early 20th centuries.

Ok, let’s start with the first issue of Thunderbolts: Doomstrike.

Victor von Doom seduces Bucky, comparing him, for some obscure reason, with Sergey Nechayev. Nechayev was a Russian anarchist and nihilist, the author of Catechism of a Revolutionary. He was not a person particularly loved by his contemporaries, and not without reason.

The “beloved assassin” with whom Doom compares Natasha is probably Vera Zasulich, a revolutionary. How did Doom conjure this “love” I could only guess. He probably took it from the English Wikipedia page. The only source I’ve found is Zasulich’s memoirs. She recollects one day Nechayev, out of the blue, said he’s in love with her. She was confused with such a confession, she felt really uncomfortable. But Nechayev never mentioned this again. Zasulich, knowing his questionable relationships with women, understood that he declared his love for her only to use her in his own interests.

Natalie Herzen, the other woman of the revolution who received a confession from Nechayev, came to the same conclusion. Nechayev apparently counted on Herzen’s unpaid help (as a potential wife) in publishing his newspaper.

For what reason Doom is obsessed with Russian revolutionaries, I have no clue.

But it’s interesting how Bucky answers him three issues later.

Doomstrike #4. The second round of seduction. Doom could easily kill Bucky, but he wants Bucky on his side. The old pervert.

Now, Bucky gives a short yet incendiary speech while “Vic and Val” are torturing him. And the speech is really, really, really funny when you keep a Russian revolution in mind.

Bucky’s words are almost a direct quote from the famous poem by Alexander Odoevsky.

«Из искры возгорится пламя»

One spark will start a flame

Odoevsky was an important figure in the Decembrist revolt of 1825.

The spark line became well-known through the next two centuries. It symbolized the growth of the revolutionary movement. Later, Lenin’s propaganda newspaper was named “Iskra” (Spark), the line from the poem was “Iskra’s” motto.

The word iskra itself became a revolutionary symbol cultivated in the USSR. Faithful communists named their daughters Iskra.

So, the image, the quote are extremely recognizable to anyone who lived in the USSR… as Bucky did. If he was indoctrinated with Russian ideologies in Soviet years, as fandom wiki puts it, he had no chance not to know the words.

[rosmarinblooms]

Even she thinks that's unoriginal.

[rosmarinblooms]

a fencer

[rosmarinblooms]

Genuinely, hear me out, I think thunderbolts woulda been a perfect movie if they’d removed Bucky and his story line all together, and instead used that extra time to focus on Ghost and Taskmaster. Bc being real, Bucky did nothing, didn’t really even add much to the plot. You could remove his whole subplot (idek if it’s big enough to call it that) and the movie would still make sense, arguably it’d make more sense. If they weren’t gonna do anything interesting (or in character lol) with him anyways, why not use that time on two other characters that has a lot of potential?

[rosmarinblooms]

I have no idea if this “earlier version of Taskmaster’s storyline” is true, but a) it doesn’t contradict what Eric Pearson says in his interviews; b) I simply like it. The movie could have been so much better.

1. Antonia lives! A disabled and disfigured character. A girl learning to live after being treated as an instrument. Yay! Good! She has an arc here.

2. Ava too has an arc, becoming sisters with Antonia. Also, Ava has a past between «Ant Man and the Wasp» and «present days». She was busy learning to live after years of captivity. She made mistakes (working for Val), but she’s trying. She has a story!

3. The relationship between Antonia and Ava could have been a nice reflection of a connection between Yelena and Bob.

4. Antonia vs Bucky fight sounds delicious! This scene might have been cool and extremely funny at the same time. Also, Bucky uses his brains here. His most potent weapon is not a cyber-arm but his mind. (In the real movie he is uncharacteristically not the brightest bulb in the area).

5. Bucky interacts with Antonia, he has an emotional reaction! He connects with other human being!

6. And he actively decides to help the team, to become a part of it.

(In the actual movie he sort of goes with the flow. He does the things he had been told to do. His big motivational speech is so vague and obscure, that I’m lost for definite meaning of it).

7. At this point it seems Antonia is the glue keeping the team together. The heart of it.

8. Why did they cut her? The director’s explanations are… Well, I'll just cite them from the EW:

"And when we all got back in the room, once the strike was over, and we were thinking about how to improve it, it really felt like the movie seemed just a little bloodless."

"For who these characters are, it should live up to those movies that have attention to 'em, where you really don't know who's going to survive it," Schreier says. "I know that's tricky in today's era where things get out before movies, but within the context of the film, it felt like we needed to take a swing like that so that you didn't really know who was going to make it, and also so that it was clear that it could have been any one of them."

"The decision to do it when we did it, we went through a lot of different versions of that, and we thought very carefully about it," the director explains. "And it felt like, while it would've been very nice — and Olga is a wonderful actress — to have her on the team for longer, that death would've kind of reverberated a lot harder and made it harder to find our tonal balance if it had happened later in the film."

He continues, "And it would've occupied such a kind of more emotional space that would've stepped on what we really need to be building. And we have so little narrative real estate to do it, which is the connection between Yelena and Bob, and the movie is really going to hinge on that. And so in order to keep our tone and to build that team together, it actually felt best, even if it feels a little cold-blooded, to have that happen early."

I see a contradiction. They killed Antonia after 1 minute just for cheap shock. To raise the stakes, to show no one is immune to utter destruction, and… they killed her early, so it wouldn’t be really important for the viewers?

So did they want a shock or not?

If they did, they chose the least known character to tell “anyone could die”. The audience had no time to get used to her, to know her, so her death doesn’t really raise the stakes. They could have killed Bucky. Now THAT would have been a shock.

OR if they didn’t want Antonia to make an impact… Why is she even in this movie? Why do you create a story, consciously making part of it not worthy “the emotional space”?

This is such a bitter irony. Oh, we have so many girls, so we’ll just kill one of them (preferably the disfigured one) pointlessly for viewers to gasp for half a second. Hurra! Now we have more time to explore insecurities of BOYS, precious white boys of bad behavior.

Erasing girls and, with them, erasing human interactions. Who cares.

[rosmarinblooms]

What pains me the most about Thunderbolts is that Yelena was reduced to a role of carer.

She’s no more the leader of the team than a kindergarten teacher is a leader of a group of children. Right from the start, she stops fights and sympathizes with others. She even sympathizes with John, who scared away his wife and child. Yelena, who herself was abandoned as a child!

At the same time, she keeps her distance. There’s no feeling she’s becoming close with anyone apart from Bob. And then suddenly she speaks about how good it is to spend time with people.

All the comfort she gets is a short (if nice) speech from her father. Even The Hug was left out of the screen.

 Some kind words are enough to swith on her heroic mode. And she goes to save Bob. Alone. Of course, she’s a woman, she must be a mother/older sister, she is the one who takes care of a troubled white boy.

(On the good side, in the trauma-darkness Yelena starts to take care of herself, protecting her younger self from shame).

Yelena is suicidal… but not really.

For some reason they’ve given her alcoholism, of all the possible things. The scene with a bottle is disgusting = it works, it’s good. But apart from that, alcoholism doesn’t affect Yelena. Her movements are precise, her thoughts are not clouded, she doesn’t smell bad.

She’s half a character.

She was such a living being in Black Widow. She had choices, inner conflicts. By the end of the movie she was a hero saving her sisters from captivity. She wanted things for herself, she had a whole world to explore.

And now we’ve been given so little new information about her, and her storyline revolves around a boy.

I feel so frustrated.

[rosmarinblooms]

Small places on the outskirts

[rosmarinblooms]

A loveletter

What I love about MCU is its fandom.

I watched my first Marvel movie not because it seemed intriguing, far from that, but because fan art was so damn good.

I dislike some characters, but I’m in love with their fan art versions.

I’ve read fanfiction so psychologically deep and accurate that it transformed my understanding of trauma, human interaction, myself.

There are really good movies, there are bad ones. Many of them lack in one way or another: not enough character development, actors have literally no script to act, the themes are not as deep as they could’ve been. But fandom invents such rich and elaborate backgrounds, transforms every little detail into a fascinating complex story. It seems some MCU-things exist more in fans' minds than on screen.

And there are fan discourses, ideas so popular that it becomes necessary to write fanfiction on them to explore and dissect the fanon ideas, to overthrow them.

At this point I’m sure I like fanon more than canon (except for TFATWS and Black Widow, my true loves, I barely know what fandom discourse is around them, they are universes in themselves for me)

[rosmarinblooms]

Thunderbolts and the return of the Winter Soldier

It always ends in a fight

So after that,

after him preventing others from using weapons,

after him being clever,

after him trying so hard to use peaceful methods, though he’s confused by the bureaucracy,

after all

it ends in a fight.

The frightened little girl called him and asked him to become the Winter Soldier again. And he yields.

It might be beautiful, powerful. Not HYDRA using the Winter Soldier for horrifying things, but Bucky using the skills, the power given him by the evil guys - using it to protect people.

He could pity the Soldier, just like Yelena embraces and protects her younger self in a Shame Room.

But we see only Bucky lowkey returning to the Winter Soldier mode. The looks, the weapon, the cracks in the asplalt —so many callbacks. At least he tries not to kill his adversaries, shooting at their wheels, not their faces.

But he so obviously doesn’t enjoy this.

HE LOOKS SO UNHAPPY.

He tries to return to a normalcy: evidence, the trial…

Then the frightened girl he has promised protection calls him again to plea for help.

So, no clever tricks, no wise words. He is needed as a blunt force.

He’s so tired. He stops smiling. He reacts a bit slowly.

When The Team is on the verge of a collapse, he barely speaks to them. Not a leader he seemed to be in trailers. Even his “We can’t call themselves (the Thunderbolts)” is lost, there’s no more “we”. His authority in a Team is based on his power and experience (which are both parts of the Winter Soldier), the Thunderbolts don’t know him as Bucky, except for Walker.

And in a post-credit scene, Bucky is even more UNHAPPY.

Oh, I just can’t. 

(Ok, the good thing is the Thunderbolts win with the power of love and acceptance, not the brute force. But two minutes later they become a team of fighters!)

[rosmarinblooms]

I’m no one and I fall…I’m Steve and I fall

Devil’s Reign: Winter Soldier

This is the saddest, truest thing concerning Bucky I’ve ever seen in comics.

Here, a fragment from the other story, the one with a multitude of Caps.

Every second person around Bucky is a self-proclaimed Captain America. Still, Bucky is reluctant to claim the title one more time. No wonder. Everyone else is smitten with the idea of Cap. And Bucky? He tried to be “Steve”.