Tag: bucky barnes

verysharpteeth:

What kills me about this is Bucky doesn’t WANT to die. That look isn’t rage or defiance or even resignation, that’s legitimate fear. The man who was broken and turned into death itself doesn’t want to die. This isn’t the reaction you expect from someone who has up to this point been a killing machine. He looks trapped and scared and YOUNG. It’s a look you didn’t even seen on Bucky when he WAS young. He thinks Steve is coming over to finish him, I mean it’s what HE would do. But for someone so intimately acquainted with death, he’s scared of it. Because all he’s known of people for the last 70 years is pain and abuse and it’s a look that expects more from Steve because that’s what people DO to him. People hurt him when he doesn’t function right and he KNOWS he’s not functioning right and if Steve doesn’t kill him, HYDRA will because he’s past his expiration date of usefulness and he’s failing…

But Bucky’s a survivor. He’s got more resilience than any other character is asked for. His drive is to live. When the machine is broken enough that a little bit of Bucky can get back through, even in the midst of an existential crisis and confused and frustrated, that bit of Bucky wants to live.

That’s what Sebastian brought to the character. He brought the humanity in the machine. The victim trapped in metal and leather who doesn’t WANT to be there. Who’s NOT a stone cold assassin. Who was kind and gentle and protective, not a death weapon. The part who has no idea why this was done to him and didn’t deserve any of it and is so confused as to why people are HURTING him.

The Winter Soldier is terrifying because Sebastian let you see the humanity in him. The part of him that we know would never be choosing to do what HYDRA made him do. They broke him and twisted him and he had no choice in the matter. Nothing that was done to him was deserved. Bucky’s tragic because he was the innocent victim who wasn’t just abused and had terrible things happen to him, but who was literally turned into his worst nightmare and who couldn’t do anything about it.

Tell me again that Bucky was the villain.

Here is the thing for me though – you can’t discount what the war did to him.  You have to go back further.  You have to go back to the kid in Brooklyn who made a choice to defend those unable to defend themselves. That kid went to war (setting aside the argument of drafted versus enlisted). He went to war well enough with his skills that he was a sergeant before he entered an active European campaign. He did well enough in Europe that he became a squad leader which means he was still that kid from Brooklyn who takes care of others and does what needs to be done.  

The US Army and the War and the Life Before twisted James Buchanan Barnes into a shape that was ripe for cracking open by HYDRA. The potential was there all along.

The Winter Soldier was always in Bucky and Bucky was always inside the Winter Soldier.

Life, After (losing an arm)

An accident in February cost the TV reporter Miles O’Brien his left arm. He soon discovered that every movement, no matter how small, requires rethinking.

Amazing article from NY Magazine about life after.

A quote: But here are two things you need to know about life after an arm amputation: First, your center of gravity changes dramatically when you are suddenly eight pounds lighter on one side of your body. Second, while my arm may be missing physically, it is there, just as it always has been, in my mind’s eye. I can feel every digit. I can even feel the watch that was always strapped to my left wrist. When I tripped, I reached reflexively to break my very real fall with my completely imaginary left hand. My fall was instead broken by my nose, and my nose was broken by my fall.

Lying on that sidewalk, moaning in pain, I reached the end of Denial River and flowed into the Sea of Doubt. It finally dawned on me in that instant that I was, indeed, handicapped. That may not be the term of choice these days – “differently abled” or “physically challenged” may be de rigueur – but as I touched my bloody face, feeling embedded chips of concrete in the wounds, “handicapped” sure seemed to fit.

The woman I was passing on the sidewalk when I fell took one look at me and cried out in panic to her husband: “My God, what’s happened to his arm?” “It’s gone,” I said. “But don’t worry, that didn’t happen today.”

Life, After (losing an arm)

vylla-art:

He was the one who would always have her back, not because he thought she needed any help, but simply because it made her happy.
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She was the one who always found him in his darkest moments and understood. She didn’t try to rationalize it, didn’t try to belittle it, she just accepted all the worst… and stood next to him anyway.
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In the end, they’d always find their way back.