I’m Going To Post Separately Because I Don’t Want To Keep Hijacking The Interview Quote That Someone

I’m going to post separately because I don’t want to keep hijacking the interview quote that someone who clearly loved the show posted.

When TFATWS first ended I was disappointed, but not resentful. Sam and Bucky got where they needed and Anthony and Sebastian looked like they genuinely enjoyed the time making it. There was healing, albeit a bit awkwardly rushed in episode 5, but it got both the characters to a better place than at the start.

Then I watched interviews about the creative process and I haven’t stopped fuming since. Skogland freely admits that she had no idea about the characters or the story before she came in to pitch her idea, which was simply “this is the most important story of the century”. Which of course it is, but her wording gives a sense of how she approached the telling - she is using the characters to tell a particular story, rather than telling a story about the characters while addressing those same issues they want to convey.

Now there’s nothing wrong with writing a story around the portrayal of a social issue, particularly one as topical as TFATWS did. But crafting a story around an idea, then using established characters takes a level of finesse that neither Skogland nor Spellman had - as well as a level of love and respect for the characters’ histories that neither of them cared about.

The level of pain on Sam’s face when he heard about Isaiah being imprisoned and experimented on for 30 years is completely undermined by his lack of empathy for Bucky - who was imprisoned and experimented on for 70 years. We can meta the heck out of those scenes (and I have - check my AO3/shameless plug) but it doesn’t change the sense that the intention of the creators was to make us horrified at the the prolonged victimisation of a black man, while at the same time minimising a very similar victimisation of a white man. Throughout the series, Sam empathises immensely with Isaiah and Karli, but barely sympathises with Bucky and John Walker - while pre-TFATWS Sam definitely would because managing vets with PTSD was his line of work.

As someone who enjoys writing stories, I know how hard it is to use the "connect the dots" method of story writing, because it's always hard to connect dramatic scenes in a logical way that works within the world and for the characters. Civil War did it with some success, but here the creators were barely trying. I also know that as a writer you need to be very cautious about your biases, because it's so tempting to always keep your favourite character in the best possible light which inevitably means another character will have to do all the problematic things to push the plot along or create conflicts. This is the sense I'm getting with TFATWS and that's what irks me the most. It just reeks of lazy, biased writing, because half the time it completely broke Bucky's character and didn't make sense for his motivations. Keeping Sam "in the best possible light" also meant he avoided conflicts at all costs which ironically made him come across like a pushover who sympathised more with his enemy than his friends and allies.

I might come across sounding like I hate Sam but I don't - otherwise I wouldn't have just written 16k words from his POV. I hate what they've turned both him and Bucky into for TFATWS, by using him to sell a particular story without making the story about him, as it really should have been. And let's face it, Sam-Bucky only worked because of Stackie's amazing chemistry, because as much as Anthony waxes lyrical about the "tenderness" and "bro code" between Sam and Bucky, I definitely couldn't see it on screen for the first 4.5 episodes until they suddenly became a married couple in episode 5.