#i have many thoughts about his time as ronin too but different essay i may never write

[theragamuffininitiative]

Has anyone else written the essay on how MCU Clint is actually canonically better at combat than Natasha or Yelena?

This is not an opinion piece, and it actually goes deeper into who they are as characters than what their skillsets specifically are. This is also MCU specific, and not comic comprehensive, which is fine. Natasha was ok with hurting someone if it meant saving them. She had a brutal upbringing and training, and she's not afraid to break things in order to fix them. Clint on the other hand goes out of his way to avoid hurting.

In Budapest, Clint refused to take Natasha out. He didn't take the shot. However, based on everything we know of Natasha, she wasn't about to just let him walk up and talk to her. Whether the arrow marks in her apartment are from an initial confrontation or made during their later escape (or them being chaotic and bored), at some point Clint managed to get her to not fight him long enough for him to offer her a way out.

In The Avengers, Natasha goes after Clint to stop him from bringing down the helicarrier. It's a crude, no rules style fight that lasts only a few seconds, and Nat knocks Clint out. This is the only time she actually bests him, and he is 1) being mind-controlled and 2) clearly exhausted to the breaking point. An argument may also be made that he was even holding back, based on Selvig building in a backdoor to shut down the portal while being controlled by Loki, and Clint purposefully failing to kill Fury by shooting his vest - there was some awareness of who they were underneath the scepter's power.

In Civil War, Clint and Natasha spar for a moment, though neither one of their hearts are in it. We can't be certain what the outcome of this fight would have been, as Wanda interrupted it. But, based on Clint's reaction - taking offense that Wanda went after Nat and could have hurt her - he wasn't concerned about that outcome. Wanda even accuses him of pulling his punches, which Clint does not deny. We could of course say that Natasha was pulling her punches too, which may very well be true...but that inevitably leaves us with the same conclusion.

[Clint as Ronin, aka Clint hurting, is another essay for another time, but I think it's significant how much of a polar opposite his actions as Ronin and his actions as Hawkeye are to each other.]

On Vormir (sob) Clint actually gets the better of Natasha. This isn't directly hand-to-hand combat, but he surprises her and pins her one time, and then knocks her aside with an explosive arrow the second time. Again, specifically making an effort not to hurt her, but to get her out of the way. Clint later struggles with the fact that Nat was better than him, and that it should have been him. But the only reason it was Nat is because she ran after him - after he had stopped her and jumped off the mountain's edge.

Fast-forward to the Hawkeye series. Clint's first fight with Yelena is a mess. He's unprepared, and also trying to keep Kate safe while dealing with both Yelena and Maya. We don't see much of Clint and Yelena's actual fight here, but one move that is highlighted for us is when Yelena gets the draw on Kate. Rather than taking her out while her attention is distracted, Clint steps between them to protect Kate without hurting Yelena. Interestingly, here it's Kate who shows she's not afraid to hurt (shooting Maya), and the encounter ends with all parties retreating.

[Related note: Clint also makes a visible effort not to truly hurt Maya, despite knowing she wants to kill him and is fairly capable of doing so.]

Lastly, we have Yelena fighting Clint in the finale. Her sole mission is to kill him and again he knows this. Yet during their entire fight, Clint does not make a single offensive move against her. He has her by the back of the neck and merely uses the moment to speak to her. She comes at him and all he does is put his hand out to ask her to stop. He holds her in a potential stranglehold and again spends valuable seconds telling her about her sister, until she frees herself.

Yelena then comes after Clint with her baton. And he lets her. This is the one that gets me. Clint makes no effort at this point to defend himself. Talking about Natasha, seeing Yelena's pain, has brought all of his survivor's guilt to the front. Yelena told Kate that actions matter more than words. In this scene, Clint first tells Yelena he doesn't deserve what Natasha gave him, and then also shows her that he believes it. There is calculation to Clint's actions here, taking Yelena's punishment until she exhausts herself and draws her gun. Then he uses Yelena and Natasha's whistle, and it takes all the fight out of her.

There are many complicated layers to this - Yelena and Clint's grief, her rage, his guilt, and the clear role of his over two decades of experience. Clint lets Yelena get the better of him because he can't bring himself to fight her, and yet he's still controlling the fight the entire time. I think at the end there was a fifty-fifty chance he was going to use the whistle or choose to stay silent and let her kill him. I also think his family and Kate are what tipped the scales. When Yelena says "I loved her so much" and Clint says "me too" and then places his hand on Yelena's shoulder, he's offering Yelena the very same thing he offered Natasha: Not a fight. A way out.

TLDR; Clint Barton in the MCU is canonically a better fighter than the black widows, and yet he chooses repeatedly not to hurt them, but to help and save them.