So Steve in Endgame?
May. 6th, 2019 04:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pigtailed_goddessI just can't with people going it's a happy ending or he deserves to be selfish for once. Selfish = Happy? What a fucking horrible message.
Or being with a lover at the expense of everything else = happy and a good end? Again, fucking horrible message.
What are we selling as heroes? As romantic and life goals? As good for people?
It's Smallville. I'm pulling my hair out like it's 2004 Smallville.
Heroes are moral tales for me. Don't give me bad morals and intentionally call them good.
Here is some thoughts from real smart people that nail how much this fucks me up in all the small and big thought ways. I highlighted what really hit me but read the whole things at the links.
This one summarizes my inability to explain or justify this ending:
https://missaphelion.tumblr.com/post/184611622584/endgame-thoughts
And this is the kindest interpretative collection of befuddled anger I feel:
Fact is? They didn’t think about it outside of, “We wanted that dance, so we got that dance.” It’s the worst kind of writing: fan service without examination.
iamnmbr3.tumblr.com/post/184676509818/kitcat992-starkravinghazelnuts#notes
But here is the meat and potatoes arguements.
here’s what i want: i want to watch my favorite character go on a journey, one that has challenges as well as joys, and i want them to have a real arc. i want to see them changing and growing as a person, while they retain their core. i want any conclusions to that arc to be satisfying and coherent: i want it to be a reflection of the journey, of the person they’ve become, everything they’ve learned. and if one of the biggest lessons they ever learned, delivered straight out of the mouth of someone they loved and respected and were deeply inspired by, was “we can’t go backwards, we can only go forward,” well, then maybe, possibly, i am going to feel a little conflicted about them literally fucking going backwards.
....
it’s a strange ending, to have a character leave conflict “behind” in the present and “escape” to the past. i realize it’s not about “the past,” it’s about peggy, but still. as if the past were simpler, less complicated, as if the past offered more space for joy and freedom and peace. have the writers ever read a history book? (have they watched agent carter???) what a strange theme for our present moment. it’s a fantasy, going back. sometimes it’s a dangerous fantasy, and it’s one that steve has called out at times: the myth that the past was better, the longing to return. there’s a difference between missing someone, missing lost time, and actually working to relive or rewrite the past.
“we can only move forward” is one of the wisest things these movies ever tried to say, and in the end even they didn’t understand it, or didn’t care.
robotmango.tumblr.com/post/184485217059/endgame-spoiler-below#tumblr_notes
steve had a whole and full life in the present day. he didn’t get to ever fucking enjoy it but if he got an actual ending where he learned he didn’t have to sacrifice himself all the time… he could have? if he was allowed to retire and work at the VA with sam and do his bucket list of “things to watch from the last century,” he could enjoy the life and love he carved out for himself in the 21st century.
but heterosexual love proved more important than his love for sam, his love for bucky, his love for modern culture, his love of helping, his love of everything… because heterosexuals lack the understanding of anything other than the nuclear family. they have no sense of a larger sense of community, of found family, of an existence fueled by love of self instead of love of procreation and a household.
bicappy.tumblr.com/post/184444651717/karolinamean-karolinamean-heterosexual#notes
i even find the thought of it completely unsettling, like playing pretend. that’s not his life anymore, that’s the life of the other steve, the one who’s still frozen.
...
He decided to go live in an alternate reality, in a void, in the past. As if these years never happened, as if he hadn’t changed. That’s not his life, there’s already an another Steve there.
...
Being happy means moving forward and opening yourself to others and working on healing from your wounds.
I’ve said it in another post but I’ll say it again because I’m genuinely disturbed by this thing: going back in time to live through a different timeline is a depression fantasy. A depression fantasy isn’t a happy ending. Healing from depression is a happy ending. And to heal from depression - as apparently Steve Rogers himself told others for 5 years - you need to make peace with the past, and start living your future.
What Steve did at the end of the movie was giving up. Because refusing to move forward means to give up.
I don’t want a beloved character to get an ending where he gives up on living his actual life, on actually healing, and that the narrative frames as a good thing.
stevenbuckys.tumblr.com/post/184469388705/theres-something-thats-been-on-my-mind-with-this
monardammm.tumblr.com/post/184507985551/postmodernmulticoloredcloak-shipsfandomspain
My main beef is that I don’t think the Steve Rogers that fell in love with Peggy is the same Steve Rogers who we saw in Endgame, and he’s being extremely naive if he thinks he can just go back and live like none of anything that happened to him these past ten years has happened.
He’s naive to think he can fit into old skin and expect it to fit just the same.
jayleeg.tumblr.com/post/184532019587/the-russos-seem-to-intrepret-steve-as-first-and#tumblr_notes
JUST ALL OF THIS CHARACTER ANGER
tarth.tumblr.com/post/184494824958/what-science-post-and-i-kinda-want-to-hear-your
Unlike so many of the other important MCU dynamics who were ripped apart by Thanos' snap, Steve and Bucky's reunion happens off-screen, seemingly deemed not important enough to merit even a quick aside during the climactic battle, as, for example, Tony Stark and Peter Parker or Rocket and Groot do.
When faced with a finite amount of narrative space, of course storytellers must make choices about which stories and characters they want to prioritize. However, in Endgame, the relationship between Steve and Bucky—one that has been very important to three of the most popular MCU films thus far—falls frustratingly low on that list, and it's hard not to wonder if that decision is at least partially motivated by the franchise's own discomfort with the Stucky shipping fandom.
...
Male intimacy seems to be OK, up to a point and only as long as the powers that be have yet to hear about the fandom's shipping of the characters. (Bad news bears: There is a shipping fandom for pretty much every dynamic. Please continue to let male characters hug and be emotionally vulnerable with one another, storytellers.)
...
Are franchise storytellers so afraid of shippers that they would undercut the characters and dynamics they have worked so hard to build and obviously care about?
www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/280702/why-avengers-endgame-sidelining-stucky-matters#disqus_thread
There’s not really an angle to enjoy from if you enjoy good story telling. Liked him with Sharon? Well, that’s his niece and he’s old now. Liked him as a man who stands up for what he believes in? Nah, he let his wife employ nazis and probably did jackshit about political issues considering none of that was mentioned in the museum that said he was actually assumed dead when that was happening. Liked him for his bonds with Sam and Bucky and his commitment to his found family? Nah, he had like one line about Natasha dying and barely cared about Bucky and Sam. Maybe you’ve lost your first love and can relate to his story of moving on and finding life beyond romantic pursuits? SIKE MOTHERFUCKER.
Not even exaggerating, this movie made him an incel obsessed with reuniting with a woman he kissed once and knew was happily married. Makes him a coward who ran away from rebuilding the world after the apocalypse who let awful shit happen to his loved ones and let his wife employ nazis who tortured his loved ones. He’s a dick friend who didn’t even say goodbye to anyone else including the ppl he spent five years with post snap?? Didn’t even rly say goodbye to Sam and Bucky. He abandoned the support group he was running—you don’t think the dude with the dead husband who you encouraged to move on who was trying to date again is without mental turmoil now that he has a boyfriend and his husband is back from the dead?? SOUNDS LIKE HE NEEDS SUPPORT (and like you could actually help with that sort of thing).
I don’t know what audience this was for besides people who have an extremely shallow understanding of his character and will coo at anything they’re told is a happy ending.
karolinamean.tumblr.com/post/184454771225/the-more-you-think-about-it-the-more-laughably
AND THIS ARTICLE IS JUST PERFECT
In Infinity War, it is Bucky that Steve sees disintegrating in front of his eyes, a position that is occupied, contextually and narratively, by the most important person a hero could lose. But for Steve, unlike any of the other heroes who lose their loves, this is not the first time he has watched Bucky slip from between his fingers, it is not even the second, it is not even the third. Time and time, movie after movie, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes battle fiercely for each other, defend each other, protect each other, and always, always, lose each other, and yet it is Peggy that Steve mentions in his therapy group as the loss that haunts him. Peggy who has been dead for almost eight years now. in Steve Rogers’s life. Peggy, who has nothing to do with the snap at all. Peggy, when it is Bucky who blew into the wind.
This repeats, egregiously, as the team suits up to fight Thanos for the first time in the movie, with Steve looking at Peggy’s picture in his compass before telling Nat that “if this doesn’t work, [he] doesn’t know what he’ll do.” But if it does work, it’s Bucky he’ll be getting back. Peggy has nothing to do with this narrative moment, and yet she stands in, where, for every other hero, the person they saw vanish, or whose vanishing they feel the most, is featured.
...
Bucky and Steve have battled together for a century, have been at each other’s sides fight after fight. Not even a thousand years of torture or Steve’s love of his new family prevented that in the other Captain America movies. And yet here, the full circle of Steve seeing Bucky vanish into dust never comes. They don’t find each other, they don’t look for each other, they don’t speak to each other. The movie tells us that narratively Doctor Strange and Tony have more of a relationship than Bucky and Steve.
...
And in ten seconds, Endgame relegates her to “Steve’s wife,” showing her as an object of his affections, merely there to fulfill some strange, domestic fantasy which neither one of them has ever expressed an interest in living out. Peggy has no lines in Endgame, she is there to be peered at and held by Steve. She is not a real character. She has not even had any meaningful character evolution with Steve. She is a woman he kissed once, and now she is his wife. And that’s all she is allowed to be.
...
Bucky is sad in the last scene of Endgame, which is a confusing choice if the audience is meant to believe that what Steve is doing is just dandy. He seems reluctant, tired, and upset in the ten seconds of interaction they have, he tells Steve he will miss him, he barely makes eye contact. And Steve. Steve doesn’t really seem to care. He doesn’t seem to understand that he’s dooming his best friend to what his own worst nightmare was, being alone in the present without anyone who could understand what that is like. This desire to have shared experience is one of the main reasons Steve is so desperate to get Bucky back in his movies, and all at once, he can’t remember that at all. Perhaps viewers are meant to believe Bucky is no longer alone, and yet, Wakanda aside, where potentially he is friends with Shuri, Steve aside, Bucky has spent no meaningful time, no time at all, with the rest of the remaining team, none that we’ve seen and none even that the storyline set up allows for.
...
Why was even a second of closure too much for Endgame to hand over?
The answer lies in Marvel’s inability to process the way the relationship between Steve and Bucky has played out, even as they themselves created it. Bucky’s pain is alien to them. His vulnerability, his arguably feminine role as the damsel, always in distress, as the weapon, an object to be used not heard, as a man whose trauma is so ingrained into his character that it can’t be turned into stoic snark, like Tony’s is, or humor, like Thor’s, and instead sits bright on the surface, are all beyond the scope of understanding. And the notion that it is not a woman who takes him into her arms and heals him, but Steve, drives it to unshowable.
As others have written, there is such a deep intimacy between Steve and Bucky, such a powerful love and an intensity of loss, that if they are together, they must express it, and that expression is taboo. For the fans to like it, is taboo. And the only way to deal with it is to separate them.
https://bamsmackpow.com/2019/04/30/avengers-endgame-lack-of-closure/
Or being with a lover at the expense of everything else = happy and a good end? Again, fucking horrible message.
What are we selling as heroes? As romantic and life goals? As good for people?
It's Smallville. I'm pulling my hair out like it's 2004 Smallville.
Heroes are moral tales for me. Don't give me bad morals and intentionally call them good.
Here is some thoughts from real smart people that nail how much this fucks me up in all the small and big thought ways. I highlighted what really hit me but read the whole things at the links.
This one summarizes my inability to explain or justify this ending:
https://missaphelion.tumblr.com/post/184611622584/endgame-thoughts
And this is the kindest interpretative collection of befuddled anger I feel:
Fact is? They didn’t think about it outside of, “We wanted that dance, so we got that dance.” It’s the worst kind of writing: fan service without examination.
iamnmbr3.tumblr.com/post/184676509818/kitcat992-starkravinghazelnuts#notes
But here is the meat and potatoes arguements.
here’s what i want: i want to watch my favorite character go on a journey, one that has challenges as well as joys, and i want them to have a real arc. i want to see them changing and growing as a person, while they retain their core. i want any conclusions to that arc to be satisfying and coherent: i want it to be a reflection of the journey, of the person they’ve become, everything they’ve learned. and if one of the biggest lessons they ever learned, delivered straight out of the mouth of someone they loved and respected and were deeply inspired by, was “we can’t go backwards, we can only go forward,” well, then maybe, possibly, i am going to feel a little conflicted about them literally fucking going backwards.
....
it’s a strange ending, to have a character leave conflict “behind” in the present and “escape” to the past. i realize it’s not about “the past,” it’s about peggy, but still. as if the past were simpler, less complicated, as if the past offered more space for joy and freedom and peace. have the writers ever read a history book? (have they watched agent carter???) what a strange theme for our present moment. it’s a fantasy, going back. sometimes it’s a dangerous fantasy, and it’s one that steve has called out at times: the myth that the past was better, the longing to return. there’s a difference between missing someone, missing lost time, and actually working to relive or rewrite the past.
“we can only move forward” is one of the wisest things these movies ever tried to say, and in the end even they didn’t understand it, or didn’t care.
robotmango.tumblr.com/post/184485217059/endgame-spoiler-below#tumblr_notes
steve had a whole and full life in the present day. he didn’t get to ever fucking enjoy it but if he got an actual ending where he learned he didn’t have to sacrifice himself all the time… he could have? if he was allowed to retire and work at the VA with sam and do his bucket list of “things to watch from the last century,” he could enjoy the life and love he carved out for himself in the 21st century.
but heterosexual love proved more important than his love for sam, his love for bucky, his love for modern culture, his love of helping, his love of everything… because heterosexuals lack the understanding of anything other than the nuclear family. they have no sense of a larger sense of community, of found family, of an existence fueled by love of self instead of love of procreation and a household.
bicappy.tumblr.com/post/184444651717/karolinamean-karolinamean-heterosexual#notes
i even find the thought of it completely unsettling, like playing pretend. that’s not his life anymore, that’s the life of the other steve, the one who’s still frozen.
...
He decided to go live in an alternate reality, in a void, in the past. As if these years never happened, as if he hadn’t changed. That’s not his life, there’s already an another Steve there.
...
Being happy means moving forward and opening yourself to others and working on healing from your wounds.
I’ve said it in another post but I’ll say it again because I’m genuinely disturbed by this thing: going back in time to live through a different timeline is a depression fantasy. A depression fantasy isn’t a happy ending. Healing from depression is a happy ending. And to heal from depression - as apparently Steve Rogers himself told others for 5 years - you need to make peace with the past, and start living your future.
What Steve did at the end of the movie was giving up. Because refusing to move forward means to give up.
I don’t want a beloved character to get an ending where he gives up on living his actual life, on actually healing, and that the narrative frames as a good thing.
stevenbuckys.tumblr.com/post/184469388705/theres-something-thats-been-on-my-mind-with-this
monardammm.tumblr.com/post/184507985551/postmodernmulticoloredcloak-shipsfandomspain
My main beef is that I don’t think the Steve Rogers that fell in love with Peggy is the same Steve Rogers who we saw in Endgame, and he’s being extremely naive if he thinks he can just go back and live like none of anything that happened to him these past ten years has happened.
He’s naive to think he can fit into old skin and expect it to fit just the same.
jayleeg.tumblr.com/post/184532019587/the-russos-seem-to-intrepret-steve-as-first-and#tumblr_notes
JUST ALL OF THIS CHARACTER ANGER
tarth.tumblr.com/post/184494824958/what-science-post-and-i-kinda-want-to-hear-your
Unlike so many of the other important MCU dynamics who were ripped apart by Thanos' snap, Steve and Bucky's reunion happens off-screen, seemingly deemed not important enough to merit even a quick aside during the climactic battle, as, for example, Tony Stark and Peter Parker or Rocket and Groot do.
When faced with a finite amount of narrative space, of course storytellers must make choices about which stories and characters they want to prioritize. However, in Endgame, the relationship between Steve and Bucky—one that has been very important to three of the most popular MCU films thus far—falls frustratingly low on that list, and it's hard not to wonder if that decision is at least partially motivated by the franchise's own discomfort with the Stucky shipping fandom.
...
Male intimacy seems to be OK, up to a point and only as long as the powers that be have yet to hear about the fandom's shipping of the characters. (Bad news bears: There is a shipping fandom for pretty much every dynamic. Please continue to let male characters hug and be emotionally vulnerable with one another, storytellers.)
...
Are franchise storytellers so afraid of shippers that they would undercut the characters and dynamics they have worked so hard to build and obviously care about?
www.denofgeek.com/us/movies/280702/why-avengers-endgame-sidelining-stucky-matters#disqus_thread
There’s not really an angle to enjoy from if you enjoy good story telling. Liked him with Sharon? Well, that’s his niece and he’s old now. Liked him as a man who stands up for what he believes in? Nah, he let his wife employ nazis and probably did jackshit about political issues considering none of that was mentioned in the museum that said he was actually assumed dead when that was happening. Liked him for his bonds with Sam and Bucky and his commitment to his found family? Nah, he had like one line about Natasha dying and barely cared about Bucky and Sam. Maybe you’ve lost your first love and can relate to his story of moving on and finding life beyond romantic pursuits? SIKE MOTHERFUCKER.
Not even exaggerating, this movie made him an incel obsessed with reuniting with a woman he kissed once and knew was happily married. Makes him a coward who ran away from rebuilding the world after the apocalypse who let awful shit happen to his loved ones and let his wife employ nazis who tortured his loved ones. He’s a dick friend who didn’t even say goodbye to anyone else including the ppl he spent five years with post snap?? Didn’t even rly say goodbye to Sam and Bucky. He abandoned the support group he was running—you don’t think the dude with the dead husband who you encouraged to move on who was trying to date again is without mental turmoil now that he has a boyfriend and his husband is back from the dead?? SOUNDS LIKE HE NEEDS SUPPORT (and like you could actually help with that sort of thing).
I don’t know what audience this was for besides people who have an extremely shallow understanding of his character and will coo at anything they’re told is a happy ending.
karolinamean.tumblr.com/post/184454771225/the-more-you-think-about-it-the-more-laughably
AND THIS ARTICLE IS JUST PERFECT
In Infinity War, it is Bucky that Steve sees disintegrating in front of his eyes, a position that is occupied, contextually and narratively, by the most important person a hero could lose. But for Steve, unlike any of the other heroes who lose their loves, this is not the first time he has watched Bucky slip from between his fingers, it is not even the second, it is not even the third. Time and time, movie after movie, Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes battle fiercely for each other, defend each other, protect each other, and always, always, lose each other, and yet it is Peggy that Steve mentions in his therapy group as the loss that haunts him. Peggy who has been dead for almost eight years now. in Steve Rogers’s life. Peggy, who has nothing to do with the snap at all. Peggy, when it is Bucky who blew into the wind.
This repeats, egregiously, as the team suits up to fight Thanos for the first time in the movie, with Steve looking at Peggy’s picture in his compass before telling Nat that “if this doesn’t work, [he] doesn’t know what he’ll do.” But if it does work, it’s Bucky he’ll be getting back. Peggy has nothing to do with this narrative moment, and yet she stands in, where, for every other hero, the person they saw vanish, or whose vanishing they feel the most, is featured.
...
Bucky and Steve have battled together for a century, have been at each other’s sides fight after fight. Not even a thousand years of torture or Steve’s love of his new family prevented that in the other Captain America movies. And yet here, the full circle of Steve seeing Bucky vanish into dust never comes. They don’t find each other, they don’t look for each other, they don’t speak to each other. The movie tells us that narratively Doctor Strange and Tony have more of a relationship than Bucky and Steve.
...
And in ten seconds, Endgame relegates her to “Steve’s wife,” showing her as an object of his affections, merely there to fulfill some strange, domestic fantasy which neither one of them has ever expressed an interest in living out. Peggy has no lines in Endgame, she is there to be peered at and held by Steve. She is not a real character. She has not even had any meaningful character evolution with Steve. She is a woman he kissed once, and now she is his wife. And that’s all she is allowed to be.
...
Bucky is sad in the last scene of Endgame, which is a confusing choice if the audience is meant to believe that what Steve is doing is just dandy. He seems reluctant, tired, and upset in the ten seconds of interaction they have, he tells Steve he will miss him, he barely makes eye contact. And Steve. Steve doesn’t really seem to care. He doesn’t seem to understand that he’s dooming his best friend to what his own worst nightmare was, being alone in the present without anyone who could understand what that is like. This desire to have shared experience is one of the main reasons Steve is so desperate to get Bucky back in his movies, and all at once, he can’t remember that at all. Perhaps viewers are meant to believe Bucky is no longer alone, and yet, Wakanda aside, where potentially he is friends with Shuri, Steve aside, Bucky has spent no meaningful time, no time at all, with the rest of the remaining team, none that we’ve seen and none even that the storyline set up allows for.
...
Why was even a second of closure too much for Endgame to hand over?
The answer lies in Marvel’s inability to process the way the relationship between Steve and Bucky has played out, even as they themselves created it. Bucky’s pain is alien to them. His vulnerability, his arguably feminine role as the damsel, always in distress, as the weapon, an object to be used not heard, as a man whose trauma is so ingrained into his character that it can’t be turned into stoic snark, like Tony’s is, or humor, like Thor’s, and instead sits bright on the surface, are all beyond the scope of understanding. And the notion that it is not a woman who takes him into her arms and heals him, but Steve, drives it to unshowable.
As others have written, there is such a deep intimacy between Steve and Bucky, such a powerful love and an intensity of loss, that if they are together, they must express it, and that expression is taboo. For the fans to like it, is taboo. And the only way to deal with it is to separate them.
https://bamsmackpow.com/2019/04/30/avengers-endgame-lack-of-closure/
