#film: the winter soldier

[avengerscompound]

Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes My favorite look in each show

[thatsbucknasty]

I am so proud of him 🥹🖤

[chrisquartet]

Ten years of Captain America: The Winter Soldier (Released in America on April 4, 2014)

Cinematography by Trent Opaloch

[marvel-lous-guy]

Tony: here, hold this *hands Peter a wrench*

Peter: *now holding 17 wrenches* I think I'm gonna drop it

Tony: You're fine

*loud clang and crash*

Peter: I dropped it

Clint: *from the vents* 16! I repeat, he can hold 16 wrenches! Who had the bet for 16?

Tony: Damn it! You couldn't have held one more wrench, kid!?

Peter: ...what is going on?

Steve: *from upstairs* BUCKY WON! AGAIN!

Clint: DAMN YOU BARNES!

Tony: Thats 4 rounds Barnes has won now! How does he do it!?

Bucky: *from upstairs* I'M JUST A REALLY GOOD GUESSER

Clint: This is bullshit! He's cheating!

Peter: Not that I understand remotely what's going on... but how would he cheat?

Clint: Well I dont know that! If I knew how you could cheat at this bet dont ya think I'd have won by now!

[lefthandarm-man]

Steve Rogers // Captain America Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)

the way he looks at bucky (part 1, part 2, part 3)

(bucky vers.)

[marvelsgirl616]

…gotta be one of the funniest deaths in the mcu 😭💀

[kaysteahouse]

Mcu Steve Rogers is so insanely queer it enrages me

"I'd figure I'd wait...for the right partner."

"Kinda hard to find someone with shared life experience."

"Even when I had nothing, I had Bucky."

Stf up and go kiss your best friend

[iam93percentstardust]

one of the things that really bothers me about modern franchises, and in particular over the last 5 years or so, is their refusal to commit. what i mean here when i say this is that it's not uncommon for a major franchise to make a decision, whether about the plot or the characters, that should have had huge, world-changing consequences... and then just never address that again or worse, immediately go back and undo it. and i'm gonna pick on star wars and the mcu here because those are the two big franchises i'm into at the moment (and i think they're kind of the worst at this), but i don't want you to walk away from this thinking that this is solely a disney thing. i've seen this happen with game of thrones and supernatural and plenty of other non-disney franchises. spoilers ahead, you've been warned:

in ant-man & the wasp quantumania, scott and hope make the life-altering decision to stay behind in the quantum realm and defeat kang instead of going through the portal to return to their world. this should have been a huge meta decision for the mcu, and when i first saw it in theaters, my immediate thought was wow, what is this going to mean for the mcu going forward? are we going to get a movie/miniseries about scott and hope helping to rebuild the quantum realm? how are cassie, janet, and hank going to react to the losses of their loved ones (in some cases, for the second time)? is cassie going to become the "first" young avenger because she has to take her father's place among the team lineup (and i only say first because as of this moment, none of the other young avengers introduced to the franchise are official avengers yet)? except nope, because less than 2 minutes later, cassie had fixed the portal that had broken way back at the beginning of the movie and brought scott and hope back.

and it felt like such a cheat. i was so disappointed in that theater, not as someone who was invested in these characters on a personal level (because yay, cassie gets her dad back!), but as someone who has spent years investing themselves in the story of the mcu. what was the point of wasting screentime on scott and hope accepting their new lives in the quantum realm if it was just going to immediately be undone? the entire scene could have been cut to scott and hope making it back bare seconds before the portal closed and it would have had the same emotional impact. there was nothing added by making scott and hope (and us) think that there was no way back only to rip the rug out from under us and go "gotcha! you really thought we were gonna give this movie a sad ending? haha! you're so dumb!"

and this isn't the first time the mcu has done this. one of the biggest complaints about endgame was the decision to set it five years in the future with no consideration for how that would actually change the setting of the mcu. characters were brought back to the exact place they disappeared from with no consideration for how things might have changed in the interim five years (like planes that weren't in the air anymore, buildings no longer standing, even just something as simple as a chair being unoccupied). and then the mcu didn't even really have the courage to address how this would have shaped the world other than a few jokes and making the bad guys in the falcon and the winter soldier people who cared about how the world had screwed them over during the blip.

and things like this happen over and over and over again. the accords are put into place in civil war, but by the time we get to she-hulk, they're gone with no explanation because, as best as i can tell, the writers didn't want to have to deal with the worldbuilding that went into the accords. gamora is killed in infinity war, but heaven forbid quill not have an emotional investment in a film he appears for maybe 10 minutes in so now she's back in endgame. steve got to go live in the past with his ex-girlfriend (which is in itself a refusal to commit after the mcu both gave her a different husband and had the woman herself tell him to move on) but we need to establish that messing with timelines is bad because that's what the entire next phase hinges on so actually his ending was predestined and it's only everyone else who can't change time. whoever took this entire town and also wanda hostage and forced them to live out a sitcom fantasy is bad and needs to be stopped but wait, it's actually wanda and she can't be the bad guy yet, we need her for doctor strange 2, so actually everyone's going to defend her now and say that no one else could ever possibly understand her grief. thor has decided to accept responsibility as king of asgard, but we can't use him for any more movies if he's stuck in asgard, so actually he's decided to pass it on to someone whose entire leadership capability is developed offscreen. i could list more examples but this is making me angry, so let's move on to star wars instead.

with star wars, i look at first the oft-quoted meme, "somehow palpatine has returned." yeah, i shouldn't really need to go into detail on how that counts as a refusal to commit but. the last jedi was a study in how johnson refused to commit to anything that abrams had laid down in the force awakens, but rise of skywalker was almost like abrams had looked at the franchise and said "screw you for taking it away from me, i'm going to come up with the most bullshit stuff just to spite you for doing that in the first place. and i'm going to start by undoing the most important plot point of the first trilogy: the emperor dies." and yeah, disney's kind of tried to salvage this by dropping hints into the bad batch and the mandalorian about cloning, but that only really works if you're watching the franchise chronologically and not considering that both of those series came out after rise of skywalker.

and then there's the mandalorian, my sweet summer child, who is, in my opinion, the worst at backtracking their plot points. i'm not entirely convinced that any of the higher ups for this show really knew what they were doing when they started working on it and i'm not convinced that they know what they're doing now. yeah, there's the tie-in to the last season of clone wars, but the mandalorian has managed to walk back pretty much every single major plot point it's had. din is this legendary warrior who can't be beat, but no one will watch this show if he defeats everyone too early, so he's constantly getting beat up (tbf, sometimes some of the fights he loses makes sense like the krayt dragon and the mudhorn, but a lot of them don't. at all). moff gideon is dead, no wait no he's not, now he's imprisoned, no wait no he's not, now he's definitely dead, you can totally believe us this time guys. grogu can use the force and must be placed with the jedi, but wait, the only person still actively teaching the way of the jedi is luke and all of his students will be brutally murdered ten years from now, and we can't have that, everyone will be mad at us for killing off such a cute character and no one will buy baby yoda dolls (and also we have to set up luke's character degradation from hopeful, believes-in-love cinnamon roll to "i'm going to kill my nephew") so in between seasons let's have grogu decide to go back to din (and don't even get me started on how frustrating it is that a casual mandalorian watcher also had to watch book of boba fett to understand why grogu is back). din has the darksaber now which makes him king of mandalore, that's totally going to be important and what the entire series has been building up to, right? wrong! he might have spent the first two seasons making connections, learning about the world outside his sheltered upbringing, and demonstrating the various qualities that would make for a good leader, but the entire third season will be about din realizing that actually he's super unworthy and the darksaber should actually go to someone who... saw an animal in the water.

and it's really, really frustrating as a viewer! because how am i supposed to get invested in any of these plot decisions when they almost always get reversed? why should i care that mj and ned have forgotten peter when ant-man 3 has shown me that they'll remember him the next time they're all on screen together? why should i care that tech is dead when half of the last season of clone wars was about how echo was actually alive? if none of these decisions have any permanence, then where are the emotional stakes? why should i watch your movie if all you're going to tell me is that nothing matters?

[beheworthy]

Pepper's necklace made out of the shrapnel removed from Tony's chest in Iron Man 3 (2013)

Natasha's 'arrow' necklace in Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Endgame (2019), and Black Widow (2021)

Jane's 'thunder' necklace in Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

[green-ajah]

[avengerscompound]

Sebastian Stan as Bucky Barnes Captain America: The Winter Soldier

[levelofyoureye]

my friend innocently mentioned to me that they’d never seen the captain america trilogy, so naturally as someone who used to be a devoted stucky shipper i kidnapped brought them over to my house and forced showed them all three movies. and holy shit y’all…

i literally forgot that half of these lines are actual lines canonically said in the mcu. like, they don’t come from an ao3 fic. they’re not something that i just imagined happening. they happened. “even when i had nothing, i had bucky” are you serious??? “rumlow said bucky and suddenly i was a 16-year old kid again in brooklyn” wow ok catch me crying. “i’m with you til the end of the line” WHY WOULD THEY DO THIS TO ME. in retrospect it will forever be a good thing that marvel was too cowardly to make them canonically in love because i literally do not think i would’ve been able to handle it. i would’ve died and imploded on the spot. the mcu now wants us to forget how much they meant to each other BUT I NEVER WILL. as steve rogers once said SOME PEOPLE MOVE ON BUT NOT US!!!

[stuckyrogersbarnes]

imagine hugging them tho 💌

[imposterogers]

I will never stop thinking about this scene bc this is the moment that steve realizes that his sacrifice did nothing to stop hydra. if anything, it made them stronger. howard stark and peggy carter --two of his closest confidants-- named an organization in his honor but they also recruited hydra agents to work for them. they let arnin zola (the man who experimented on bucky, the person the howlies were hunting when bucky fell from the train, and the person steve would later find out created the winter soldier) into their organization. howard stark was assassinated because he was on his way to deliver a formula of the super solider serum to the pentagon to use in war. ‘your death amounts to the same as your life -- a zero sum’ steve died believed hydra was gone, just to find out they not only grew but flourished. and their starting point was shield.