Bucky: Who the hell is Bucky?
Bucky: The man on the bridge; who was he?
Bucky: I knew him.
Bucky: But I knew him.
Bucky: No I don’t!
Bucky: No I don’t!
Bucky: Shut up!
Bucky: You’re my mission. You’re. my. mission!
[That’s it. That’s literally it. That’s the whole of it.]
ARE YOU FUCKKIINGGG KIDDING ME HE LITERALLY JUST STEPS IN FRONT OF THE CAR THAT IS ON FIRE AND COULD CRUSH HIS BODY AND NONCHALANTLY MOVES ASIDE LIKE ITS NOTHING I MEAN WHATS GOING THROUGH YOUR MIND BUCKY LIKE OH IM GONNA WAIT TILL THE LAST SECOND TO MOVE BC I FEEL LIKE BEING THEATRICAL
things that are both attractive and terrifying: people who are SO SURE of where they are and where everything else is such that they can do shit like this with zero chance of being crushed by a flaming SUV.
The longer he watches it head on, the better idea he has of exactly how it’s going to land, and how likely he is to have to take additional steps to make sure Fury is Actually Dead after it comes to rest. (Especially since from that position he can see THROUGH the front windshield and thus can see what’s happening to Fury in the seat.)
1. LOOK AT THAT FAMILY RESEMBLANCE, NO ONE SPEAK TO ME OR MY HANDSOME BIRD SON EVER AGAIN
2. Re: Bucky. I’m honestly not sure when Buck would’ve actually killed more people, tbh. Most soldiers in WWII would have been individually responsible for a fairly low number of deaths, if any, but I think that Cap 1 implies that Bucky’s numbers would’ve been much higher that the norm. While he was the Winter Soldier iirc canon says he was used for something like a few dozen assassinations, but idk whether that would include any collateral damage (if he shot THROUGH Natasha to get to a target then surely he took out plenty of other innocent bystanders as well).
I have to say that I think he was really, really messed up by the war and his time as a POW/torture victim long before he fell off the train, and his time as the Soldier probably just made a deeply fucked-up mental health situation much worse. HOWEVER, I don’t necessarily think that he has a worse shot at a happy ending as a post-Winter-Soldier Bucky than he would have if he had made it home after the war. Men of that generation didn’t talk about or seek treatment for mental health issues, and even in the extremely unlikely event that he did try to get help for his PTSD the available resources would have been … not great. Like, Freudian analysis or electroshock, maybe? All of my headcanons for a survives-the-war Bucky are pretty grim, tbh. But post WS Bucky in 2018 is going to A. have his trauma and guilt taken fairly seriously and not be expected to pick up exactly where he left off in 1939 as carefree charming Bucky Barnes, and B. realistically be expected to seek some kind of therapy or counselling or SOMETHING before he attempts to return to any kind of active duty (Not that Marvel would ever actually show one of their characters seeking therapy, God forbid, WOULDN’T WANT TO SET SOME KIND OF WUSSY CRYBABY GIRLY-MAN EXAMPLE FOR THE 13 YEAR OLD BOYS WHO ARE OUR TARGET DEMOGRAPHIC). So like, best case scenario 2018 Bucko has enough trauma to float a barge, a Steve Rogers with some VA meetings under his belt and access to Google, a therapist, a support group and maybe a giant floofy service dog named FUBAR (@yawpkatsi), while best case scenario 1947 Bucko has enough trauma to float a slightly smaller barge, a totally at-sea Steve Rogers, a parish priest, and a bottle of whiskey.
… that was a pretty long and overly elaborate answer to your straightforward question, whoops
The more I see comparison gifs like these, the more I think – you don’t carve the out the person and leave the skills – that is not what they did at all. They kept everything of the person (even gave him some more skills) and took the memories. What you have left is a being who is a hunter, who is a killer, who is loyal, who is protective, who is sassy and talks back, etc, and who is up for grabs. Without the memories to inform WHO to protect, WHO to be loyal to, WHO (and what) it is worth killing for, they can manipulate the character traits into being protective of them, of being loyal to them, of killing for them.
In some respects, that may be even worse, when he regains his memories. Because everything he did as Winter Soldier is still him. He can not look at those events and say – that was not me – because it was. He was not a robot acting on programming – he was him, acting on false information.
The way he twirls the knife as he fights, it’s so obvious he’s had years of training. Years of killing. It’s natural to him while something as easy as human speech and emotion is foreign to him. It shows how Hydra treated him like a war machine rather than a human.
Gonna have to disagree with this. Yes, you’re completely correct about the way he fights. It’s completely natural, but there’s nothing we see that says he doesn’t talk or feel emotion.
When Steve calls him ‘Bucky’, he doesn’t speak with a voice that sounds unused, he speaks easily and colloquially–’Who the hell is Bucky?’
He doesn’t just look puzzled or grunt out a partial question. It’s fluid, it’s normal and it’s in the syntax of a man who’s verbally at ease.
He gives the Hydra soldiers orders with equal ease in Russian. Not only is he at ease with human speech, he’s at ease in multiple languages.
We also see him feeling emotion. He feels when Natasha shoots him in they eye, breaking his goggles. He feels when she immobilizes his arm. He feels when Steve stops him from killing Natasha and they fight. He feels when he remembers Steve–to the point that his brain is so busy trying to put the pieces together that everything Pierce says to him feels unimportant. He feels when he falls on the helecarrier, and feels even more when he’s trapped and thinks Steve will kill him as he lies there.
Yes, the Winter Soldier is all about self control. He understands the value of fear as a weapon. He understands that not letting your enemies see what you’re thinking and feeling gives you an advantage, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t feel, or is a machine. It means that he’s very good at his job and very used to controlling the stray thoughts and memories that (if his actor is correct) frequently go thorough his mind, inexplicable and distracting.
To consider the Winter Soldier a machine removes the most poignant part of his story–that while Bucky had no memories of who he’d been, he was still there. He wasn’t a machine, a computer programmed to kill. He was a man whose mind was so twisted that he wanted to do it.
They weren’t overwriting him with a new personality, they were continually wiping resurfacing memories of who he’d been and the values he’d had. They were erasing choices he made as the Winter Soldier while on missions, because learning from past choices and results is how we form individuality and personal ethics. They were making sure his loyalties didn’t change from the one’s they’d given him, because he was capable of both having them and change.
Pierce speaks of ‘one last mission’ because they didn’t plan on him surviving Washington, so apparently controlling him had become more trouble than it was worth, which is really saying something, given his level of skill.
The tragedy of the Winter Soldier isn’t that he was an unfeeling machine–it’s that he wasn’t.
Tumblr Exodus 