#the cops being shitty to him to try to provoke him because well. they’re cops and they Can

[miabucky]

YESSS exactly. marvel greatly underestimates just how many people give a shit about the mcu Because of bucky. we put more care into the depiction of bucky barnes for unpaid fan content than the multi billion dollar corporation does. there have been so many fics that i thought were based on canon material but they’re just… that thoughtful and accurate, while marvel has provided only the vaguest of details.

like in civil war, there was so much coverage about him being a threat, exposing his identity, and then it completely glosses over how his name got cleared. tfatws felt like there had been a massive time jump where they just erased all of the winter soldier/bucky drama that they had created entire movies around. part of it can be blamed in general on the shit show that was endgame, but i don’t think that’s an excuse to throw out the storylines from the previous movies. it’s honestly ridiculous that he wasn’t in jail after endgame, given that the most influential avenger (tony) and the ones who were willing to fight for him (steve, nat) were dead/gone. sam wasn’t exactly in an ideal position to defend his innocence, and bucky wouldn’t have expected him to.

i would’ve loved more of the political/societal drama from civil war, and the public debates like at the end of the first avengers movie. there should’ve been an absolute frenzy. bucky can’t have a phone because he was getting called nonstop by reporters. he has to use his skills more than he expected he would, losing tails and moving around a lot to avoid being found. he can’t even have a regular coffee shop without it getting out to the media somehow, which just makes him more isolated. he talks to a journalist on one occasion, thinking they’re trustworthy, and it ends up even worse than before. hydra fanboys/neonazis using images of his old metal arm like a flag. leftists wearing grey/red cap shield pins to support him. student protesters laughing in the face of people who call them unamerican for not wanting a PoW/american hero behind bars. heated debates on tv by non-experts that people take at face value. bucky being torn between these two images of him that just feel shallow, and knowing that no one on earth cares what he thinks about it. every time people get distracted, there’s some new horror being uncovered from an old commanders most private safe. bucky doesn’t even want to be too honest with his therapist, because this government can pick through his brain as much as they want, too. he’s free from hydra, but he’s not free.

i want so much minutiae about bucky as the winter soldier… i want all of those classified files to be real so i can read them. i wanna know every single thing they documented… how long it took to break him and how long to put him together, how they trained him, how they punished him, what they experimented on him, how they attached the arm, how sensitive it was, what they fed him, how they kept him clean, how much he was allowed to speak, how many missions did he actually have, how much would he remember between missions, how many languages he knew and how he learned them, how much was he even aware of while he was doing it, did he even know he was human or did he think he was something else, how the soviets treated him compared to the americans, how many handlers he had, which one was his favourite, did he have favourites. did he like things and just know not to mention it or was he unable to even access whether he liked or didn’t like something.

i want fake journalism about this. i want medical journals about prosthetics and philosophical debates about agency and history books needing to be revised. whistleblowers exposing decades-old corruption in europe and investigative documentaries exposing the truth about the winter soldier and horror thrillers depicting a young soldier being captured and brainwashed. warring op-eds calling him a monster and a traitor vs those calling him a hero and a tragedy, and bucky thinking he’s probably all of the above. strange stories told by retired military officials from china and civilians from cuba, about a blue-eyed man who spoke their languages perfectly, who didn’t know how to smile but who gave scraps of food to stray dogs. stories their families had chalked up to trauma or old age or exaggeration, that when all pieced together create a very different picture of the man the media was calling a terrorist.

like bucky deserves privacy but the world would not give it to him. the winter soldier being a headline and an academic issue and a medical wonder and a folk tale and a ghost story and then maybe, eventually, a person.