#DOES GALE EVER HAVE A FLINT-ON-THE-CLIFFS MOMENT

[meyerlansky]

i'm very 👀 about what bucky's family situation looks like, actually. historically, his dad died in nov '42, so he's only six months out from it at the start of the show, but it never really comes up—he doesn't flinch or offer anything back when gale talks about his dad, which... maybe he had a good relationship with his dad, so he doesn't have anything to offer. but he doesn't look at gale like he's surprised at cleven sr being a bad dad the way i'd expect a character with a fairly happy, uneventful home life to react to "my dad left me sleeping on benches"-level bad parenting. and if he DID have a shitty relationship with his dad, that's the perfect moment to empathize and bond over it. but he doesn't take it.

and then we get the revelation that he doesn't get any letters in the stalag. obviously he's not getting romantic letters, but one of the other guys mentions a letter he got is from his mom, with equivalent relief and comfort to gale's reaction to marge's letters. in so doing the show establishes that letters from family presumably count for the conversation the bucks have wrt having someone to get letters from. bucky's mom is still around. why doesn't he at least get letters from her? he's got two sisters, historically—one's three years older and the other's six years younger. both ages that wouldn't exactly hinder sending letters to your POW brother. but nothing.

initially i was gonna say i have trouble believing that bucky—who wears every emotion he has plain on his face, who's so stupidly easy to read that everyone thinks they know exactly what's going on with him in every scene, and who has a hugely visible downward spiral when his preferred options for coping with STUPENDOUS AND COMPOUNDING traumas are taken away from him—either:

has so solidly processed his dad's recent death inside six months that he doesn't need to externalize any reaction to it, or

is somehow better at keeping the details of how he feels about his family close to his chest than he is about basically every other feeling he's ever had

and it's still possible that his relationship with his family is simply unremarkable and there's nothing deeper to it. or that he had a bad relationship with his dad, but not any worse than your average "my dad and i didn't get along great" kind of deal, not cleven-level bad. but... i dunno, man, i have trouble buying THAT, more than i have trouble buying that the situation is deeper than bucky lets show.

his MOTHER doesn't even write to him. and we don't find this out until he's been stalag'd for over a year. so he... does actually keep it pretty close to his chest. more importantly, he keeps it close to his chest when it's something he could use to strengthen his relationship with gale. that doesn't really fit with the read of bucky as an open book looking for anything he can get from gale. like... it doesn't fit with that read of him at all.

it feels way more likely to me that there's Bad Shit there, and that that Bad Shit extends beyond bucky's relationship with his dad, into his relationship with his mom and even into coloring his relationship with his now-adult sisters. something like being kicked out, or disowned, or bucky deliberately going no-contact. and that's interesting on its own—what could he possibly have done to lose his entire family like that? my personal guess is he got caught with a boy and got kicked out over it, but it could be hetero slutting around too; it could be the drinking or the gambling or not going to school or his parents just fucking suck absolute ass, or any number of things that aren't Picturesque Rural Wisconsin Family appropriate

but also. i'm really fascinated by the sense of... isolation, i guess? that this confers on him as a character. he's such a loud, eye-catching presence In The Moment, and i wonder how long it takes the people around him to realize that he only seems to exist In The Moment, and doesn't have a past he's anchored in enough to discuss it even with the people he's closest to.

like how long does it take gale to realize he's spilled his guts about his dad to bucky, in a way that very clearly carries some level of "i'm letting you see something no one else has seen" feeling with it... and he got nothing back of equivalent weight wrt bucky's family, not just in that conversation but at any point that we see on screen? months? years? does gale EVER realize bucky's hidden/neglected to share his past even after gale's given bucky his?