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[claudiapriscus]

It's so kind of weird to have a character pairing that I like and find interesting but that the fanon for is so much DNW for me. I was sold pretty well on the idea of Natasha and Bucky as cold war lovers. And I think a lot of it is more then the chemistry (or that one gorgeous comic summarizing their backstory), but also the element of agency it

Comments

[franztastisch]

See, I don't really like Bucky/Nat for several reasons, all of them little odd and not really based on comics

[claudiapriscus]

The memory erasure thing was horrible, and was basically the antithesis about everything that made them an interesting relationship. (However you want to slice it- platonic, romantic, whatever

[snickfic]

I was being kind of facetious when I described him as the sad confused zombie killer man, but that's pretty much it, isn't it?

And there's why I can't ship Bucky/Nat in canon, at least not for the WS as we last saw him. FOILED AT EVERY TURN.

[claudiapriscus]

....maybe he's only turned into a sad zombie killer man after he was showing too much life and personality earlier in the cold war?

*clings to that, until jossed*

Actually, apropos of nothing, I am really, really, really leery of what Joss is gonna do with Natasha and the whole possible red room thing, because Joss has his strengths (giving female characters actual personalities) and his weaknesses (broken waif girls). Also not particularly anticipating his scarlet witch (considering his penchant for broken waif girls, Ophelia-ing it up)

[snickfic]

I have such a weird relationship to Bucky/Nat, because I loved the idea of them before I ever read the comics, for reasons similar to yours - they're two people who have over time found agency for themselves, but also understand each other better than anyone else because of the victimized past they both share. Plus, I was also most excited about them back I had heard about but not read the brainwashed!Natasha retcon from the Morgan minis, and the prospect of them understanding that aspect of each other's pasts as well really appealed to me

[claudiapriscus]

The single issue + Liu's mini basically is my canon. (Well, to be fair, I really liked the rest of the mini that the panel is from, for general Bucky reasons). What I mean is, those things are what sold me on it as an interesting dynamic, and as a result, when I read the Brubaker stuff I tended to just project it in there. (There's so little substance to Brubaker's depiction of their relationship that it's pretty easy to do that without thinking about it much.) Though yeah, the frickin' brainwashing retcon. Urgh. I hate fridging. And in this case, it was kind of even worse than your standard fridging, because dead main characters in comic books come back to life, but it was SUCH a violation of Natasha, who has got giant issues about exactly that kind of violation...which would have been bad enough, except it was never acknowledge as something that affected *her* first and foremost. It was all about how other people felt about it. The thing final straw for me was the fact that not only was Bucky the one to say "no, don't try to get her

[snickfic]

Well, the Natasha brainwashing I was referring to was actually from Richard K. Morgan's two Natasha minis, which were really gross in a lot of ways, for example the idea that Natasha was keyed to submit to certain pheromones and that Fury had been using them to keep her in check. Fortunately no one seems to have made any use of that idea, but that was also the series that introduced the idea that Natasha had been brainwashed into a spy at a very young age, a la what we see of Dottie in Agent Carter, and that her memories of the ballet and her childhood were fake.

So in terms of Bucky/Nat, I kind of liked the idea that they'd both been brainwashed into what they'd done, and in fact had begun a relationship at a time when neither of them was themselves. However, I became a lot less enamored of that idea once I actually read the Morgan minis and hated everything else in them, and Bucky being involved in a modern-day brainwashing of Natasha didn't help, either.

It's not really about OTPs or shipping, but I really love the dynamic and I

[claudiapriscus]

urgh, urgh, urgh, urgh, I am erasing that forever from memory.