What Happened In The MCU Is That They Made Bucky Unquestionably A Victim And Then Did Not Know How To

What happened in the MCU is that they made Bucky unquestionably a victim and then did not know how to handle it.

In the comics, Bucky’s brainwashing leaves him with enough agency that his past as the Winter Soldier is absolutely comparable to Natasha’s. Both were used and abused and manipulated, but they maintained enough control over their own actions that it is reasonable to question whether it mattered that they didn’t know who they truly were because they were still people. In the MCU, they specifically wrote Bucky Barnes as a character whose agency was not just compromised but actually removed. It’s not just torture and coercion, though there are 70 years’ worth of explicit torture and coercion, it’s that for him to act as the Winter Soldier they have to cauterize out what makes him a person. In the MCU Hydra/the Soviets have not one but two ways to do it: the chair and the activation words. The Winter Soldier does not comply without them. This is not a question of a prisoner breaking after years of enslavement. This is explicitly shown as a mechanical way of erasing Bucky’s consciousness and capacity for consent. And it was a choice by the MCU to characterize his captivity like that, much like it was a (subtle) choice to make Bucky a man who was drafted rather than a man who enlisted. And up to Phase 4 that had played out alright; the characters who see him as culpable are also shown to not be objective (Tony, for example, or Bucky himself). The audience knows better, though, because we are privy to all of the flashbacks and the medical torture and the him being bodily dragged out of cryo to be activated. But then the MCU actually had to confront its choices in TFATWS and they did it in the worse possible manner because they both chose to reinforce the narrative that Bucky was a powerless victim during his enslavement while making his recovery conditional on accepting responsibility for it. They pretend to sell Bucky along with the activation codes. There’s a whole pivotal scene by the firelight where Bucky finally does not respond to the activation codes and Ayo tells him he’s free and that’s because he was not free beforehand. In a storyline which places explicit moral value on refusing the serum, never once was it mentioned that Bucky did not consent to being injected with it in the first place. His situation obviously parallels Isaiah’s, not Steve’s.

But now the audience is being asked to see Bucky as someone who needs to make amends, not just because his therapist says so but because the moral compass of the series, Sam, makes it explicitly clear that what Bucky needs to do is “do the work”. And this is INSANE. It’s insane. To have Bucky weep when the trigger words wash over him and still, still, try to have the audience buy into the narrative of his recovery as one where he needs to admit wrongdoing is absurd. It would be normal and expected of Bucky to feel wretched guilt over his past but the recovery is overcoming that, not reinforcing it. Bucky admits, word for word, that he had no choice and that would be bad enough, but the Winter Soldier was made to not even conceive of the possibility of choice.

There can be no culpability without agency and guilt is not a measure of responsibility.

Bucky Barnes has, for ten years of MCU canon, been written as a man who was powerless to stop the abuse that was inflicted on him and now that they have to cash that check the MCU cannot handle it. I don’t even know if it’s because they, like society in general, cannot abide the concept of men - masculine men, especially masculine leading men - as victims but the end result is that TFATWS is an explicit exercise in victim blaming.

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