i honestly…have no words…for what markus & mcfeely, captain america movies writers, say about bucky & the postcredit in this interview. the part i’m talking about starts at about 5:30.
Q: Why was it necessary to put the winter soldier back on ice?
A: Well because, I mean for one thing he is, give or take his intellectual capacity, 100% guilty. And to have Steve just running around getting free salads with him on some island, it’s a little too unpunished, in a way. This is not a guy who should be running around happily. He may not be 100% guilty, but he’s damn sure not 100% innocent.
Q: Why does that not apply to Wanda Maximoff?
A: Wanda…
Q: You think she suffered enough?
A: I don’t think she did anything near as bad […] None of those things were terribly interesting to us, the punishing of nice people, who already feel guilt. In the Bucky issue is…it was a bridge too far I think.I’m going to throw up. This confirms everything I felt when I watched that fucking scene. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely are literally, blatantly, intentionally punishing Bucky by fridging him. These writers consciously chose to freeze his arc, nullify any possible background interaction with Steve or T’Challa or with absolutely anyone else, because he will be frozen out of the action for the foreseeable future until he is useful again to the plot.
Bucky will NOT recover any further, he will not regain his arm, autonomy, freedom of choice, self confidence or anything else, he will not have a life again offscreen or anywhere until they deem it convenient again, and this was done deliberately to punish Bucky for the actions he committed under literal torture and mind-control by someone else’s orders and for someone else’s gain. Meanwhile, literally no other character in the MCU, hardly even the villains, have been thus punished out of the narrative for actions they consciously chose to do which caused massive amounts of damage and death, because apparently only Bucky doesn’t deserve to have a life.
I’ve already read all kind of headcanon-y rationalizations and justifications for that scene: that this was Bucky’s choice and thus acceptable since it’s his first choice. That this was a selfless act that proves Bucky’s worth. That Bucky’s recovery will be better with T’Challa. These are all fan interpretations that sure sound nicer, there to try and fill blanks to make sense of the decision in-universe, but here we have literal fact from these creators themselves:
Bucky will remain frozen out of the action, because the writers have deemed him culpable and in need of paying for his crimes. He’s being “punished” by being denied any character development or actual help in universe.
Take yourself out of the Marvel universe for a minute, and see this wasn’t Bucky choosing anything,
because these are characters on a page that don’t possess
self-determination. Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely wrote Bucky as a plot device, backed him into a
corner, and left him there.This was a choice that these writers, who have creative license and power, who could have written him a way out of his ‘controlled by codewords’ predicament they put him in, who could have given him (and us, his fans) at the very least the peace of mind that he was protected with Steve and healing somewhere in the background after an entire movie of playing everyone else’s plot device, chose to deny him.
So the truth of the matter is that, not only did Bucky Barnes not get his own arc in Cap 3, didn’t get autonomy or decision making power, didn’t get any real, deep insight into what was going on in his mind or where he was at in his recovery (other than the fact the he does remember and he does feel guilt, both of which were things Bucky himself acknowledged verbally during the film), but Bucky was deliberately denied progressing beyond this stalemate and sidelined from everyone’s lives, his own included, once he was done being useful to others’ narrative and would have needed his own. He was fridged as “punishment”, because he’s seen as guilty, and will be the only character who’ll be in exactly the same place the next time we get to see him.
“None of those things were terribly interesting to us, the punishing of nice people, who already feel guilt. In the Bucky issue is…it was a bridge too far I think.”
What the fuck. What the actual fuck. People like Tony and Wanda, whose mistakes have killed a lot of people, are allowed to live their life because they feel guilt, but Bucky Barnes, who was forced to kill, who didn’t make his own decisions that ended in innocent people dying, and who feels a tremendous amount of guilt holy shit did you even watch the movie you wrote?, he gets to be punished some more??? Where the fuck is the logic in that?
I’m so angry I wanna kick them in the balls and then tell them it was their fault and they deserved to be kicked in the balls some more what the fuck
WHAT THE ACTUAL GODDAMN FUCK
ealdor 