The Falcon & the Winter Soldier
I had almost forgotten that I had a Bucky icon!
We watched it this past week, but I'm just now finding time to write something about it. My feelings are mixed, but there was a lot that I liked.
Things I liked:
- ZEMO. Okay, so there's something
rionaleonhart wrote in a post a little while back that has stuck with me because it's so me, which was - paraphrased from memory - something like "I find the worst character in a canon and make a beeline for them." It me. It so me. Also, as well as being super weak for a redemption arc, I am weak for the trope of a villain working with the heroes for reasons and being reluctantly dragged into liking them and doing good things even when they just want to go on being villains. I saw it described on Tumblr once as villains being domesticated and that made me laugh and is also ... yep. And this came with a whole side order of domesticity and cohabiting/space-sharing, and that was how this show came for me. I CAN'T BELIEVE I FELL LIKE THIS FOR HELMUT FUCKING ZEMO, a character I didn't care about in the slightest in Civil War and in fact had largely forgotten. While I was watching the show,
sheron was the recipient of many sobbing emoji in Discord as I tried to cope with my newly discovered Zemosexuality. I swear every time I have found the worst possible character to fall for, my brain is like "hold my beer, I've found someone worse."
Also, I have fallen for characters in the past who had terrible names for writing about (Yon-Rogg; the Raza crew; everyone on Dragonball Z) but ... Helmut. HELMUT. Pity me.
It's really not Zemo by himself; it's the entire Zemo + Sam + Bucky (+ sometimes Sharon) thing that the show had going on. I loved it. I would have watched 400 episodes of it.
- Sam & Bucky's everything. They had a lovely arc, individually and together, and were also astonishingly similar to how I used to write them when I was writing them. The voices are a little different, especially Bucky's, and there's more overt abrasiveness as opposed to the way I used to write them, which was more understated and cautious, but in general they were really close to my headcanon, and that was great to see onscreen. And Sam taking up the shield was gloriously triumphant, something I wasn't sure they were going to be able to pull off given the mixed feelings leading up to that, but they did and it was great.
- Sam's family. They were delightful, and so was all the family domestic stuff.
- Dark Sharon. The final plot twist about being the Power Broker made zero sense plotwise, and I wish they'd left her as a shady art dealer in Madripoor because I liked her best that way, but it was basically love from start to finish. I obstinately liked her before because the fandom hated her and I'm stubborn that way, but I flat-out love her like this.
I have gathered that fans generally hate this and want goodguy!Sharon back (too bad, you should have appreciated her more, she's evil now) but I've also seen a truly incomprehensible and stupid take, which is that this somehow retroactively taints Peggy. Okay, first of all, THEY'RE DIFFERENT PEOPLE. I think fandom has always struggled with this (see also: the "Steve dating her is incest" thing), but the idea that anything Sharon does reflects on Peggy, a woman who is dead in canon and had her active working years decades before Sharon came of age, is just bonkers to me.
But also, it's like people are discovering for the first time that Peggy was an espionage agent during the Cold War who we KNOW was involved with Operation Paperclip and presumably got up to other shady shit, and ... yes?? The Agent Carter fandom has been talking about this for years. Where were you? I mean, it is true that the MCU wants to have its cake and eat it too with Peggy, and SHIELD in general, who are sometimes the super-shady Men In Black and sometimes Our Heroes, but this isn't exactly new. I don't know why evil!Sharon is suddenly a bridge too far after SHIELD was used to cushion Hydra, tried to nuke New York, etc. You can argue that it doesn't fit Sharon's past characterization, but I mean!! She worked for the CIA! They're not known for being soft and fluffy! And unlike some retcons where it does kind of retroactively ruin the character, I could very easily see most of Sharon's previous canon as playing nice to climb the power ladder and then going a little bit off the deep end after the running series of betrayals and moral crises she's had to deal with.
Anyway, I love her.
- Seeing the Dora Milaje was great! The fight scene with the Dora and Walker with Bucky's running commentary and Zemo sipping a drink in the background was amazing.
- I really liked that nearly everyone (except the Flag-Smashers, RIP, I don't care, and I guess Lemar) got a happy or at least satisfying and appropriate ending. The show ended on a note that just felt good. I was totally expecting Torres to die and was amazed that he lived. He's sweet and he should come hang out at Sam's place with everybody else. I was also fully expecting Zemo to die, and while I didn't get my dream ending for him (on the loose, capable of popping up again at any time to cause trouble) I have no doubt that he could be broken out of the Raft VERY easily, I'm just saying.
Things I didn't like:
- The entire Flag-Smashers plot was total nonsense on every level. I heard that they had to cut some of it because the pandemic happened during production and parts of it were too similar to real life events, so I can only assume that they cut the parts that would have made the rest make sense. There was one particular point when I felt like there was a visible hand of writerly meddling, and that was Karli & co. blowing up the warehouse with the workers inside. Based on how casually they did it and how everyone else reacted, I felt like there was supposed to be a whole lot shadier stuff going on inside that warehouse than some random workers at a refugee supply storage depot. Unfortunately after that point, every time someone who should know better (usually Sam) would say something about how she was just misguided and we need to listen to her, I'd yell at the screen, "She literally killed a bunch of innocent people! She's basically Zemo! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU."
Orion said that it was like they took Greta Thunberg and made her evil, and that was kind of what it felt like. SO that was a choice.
The Flag-Smashers being way more murdery than the show appeared to recognize also meant that Walker spent a lot of time actually being right, which I don't think was what they were going for.
- The political stuff in general was like ... gold star for effort, the show nailed some things and missed others completely and was massively ham-handed about some of the things they sort of got right. Basically, I'm glad they tried to go there, and some of it actually did work (everything with Isaiah was very well handled, imho, and I also really liked that he and Sam had differing viewpoints on the entire shield/Cap/etc thing, and the show gave weight to both POVs with neither of them being presented as wholly right or wrong). Stopping the show for Sam to give a 5-minute Very Special Lesson after a giant bombastic fight scene ... maybe not so much. The clumsy attempt to comment on the refugee crisis using superheroes ... please don't. But I mean, You Tried™. And in general the show had a lot of characters of color doing stuff and being central and heroic and having inner lives, to a much greater extent than I was expecting, so props to them for that. YMMV on all of this, obviously.
- I guessed the Sharon-as-Power-Broker twist a couple episodes ahead of time because it was clearly important and she was literally the only suspect not otherwise accounted for, but I am just going to try not to think about what that does to the rest of the plot.
Basically, the show did what it said on the tin, and I enjoyed it a lot as long as I didn't think about it too much, and came out of it mainly wanting fic about Zemo and Sharon, which was really not what I was expecting. (Not together, necessarily, although now I'm imagining the two of them teaming up for some purpose without the relatively moderating influence of Sam and Bucky, and the mind boggles. Just for my own tastes, though, I don't think I'd want that much unrestrained villainny in one place without some hero moderation to balance it out.) Mostly I just want the Sam-Bucky-Zemo road trip to go on FOREVER.
It occurs to me based on a conversation with
snickfic on Discord that the main thing is that to me, everything else feels tied up, and it's the Zemo and Sharon parts of the show that feel the most unresolved (to me). Apparently a big part of me getting fannishly invested is feeling that something is missing - unresolved, open-ended, just not there enough for me - and this show basically gave me all of it in canon. I mean, there is still "further adventures of" (or getting together fic, etc) and I may want it later, but I think right now I just feel kind of satisfied with where the show left most of it.
Narratively, of course, this is good! This is what a show should do! It makes me wonder if I would have gotten as heavily invested in some of my other major fandoms (Agent Carter, say) if they'd actually had an opportunity to wrap things up in canon. Maybe sudden cancellations can be a blessing in disguise.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1390422.html with
comments.
We watched it this past week, but I'm just now finding time to write something about it. My feelings are mixed, but there was a lot that I liked.
Things I liked:
- ZEMO. Okay, so there's something
rionaleonhart wrote in a post a little while back that has stuck with me because it's so me, which was - paraphrased from memory - something like "I find the worst character in a canon and make a beeline for them." It me. It so me. Also, as well as being super weak for a redemption arc, I am weak for the trope of a villain working with the heroes for reasons and being reluctantly dragged into liking them and doing good things even when they just want to go on being villains. I saw it described on Tumblr once as villains being domesticated and that made me laugh and is also ... yep. And this came with a whole side order of domesticity and cohabiting/space-sharing, and that was how this show came for me. I CAN'T BELIEVE I FELL LIKE THIS FOR HELMUT FUCKING ZEMO, a character I didn't care about in the slightest in Civil War and in fact had largely forgotten. While I was watching the show,
sheron was the recipient of many sobbing emoji in Discord as I tried to cope with my newly discovered Zemosexuality. I swear every time I have found the worst possible character to fall for, my brain is like "hold my beer, I've found someone worse."
Also, I have fallen for characters in the past who had terrible names for writing about (Yon-Rogg; the Raza crew; everyone on Dragonball Z) but ... Helmut. HELMUT. Pity me.
It's really not Zemo by himself; it's the entire Zemo + Sam + Bucky (+ sometimes Sharon) thing that the show had going on. I loved it. I would have watched 400 episodes of it.
- Sam & Bucky's everything. They had a lovely arc, individually and together, and were also astonishingly similar to how I used to write them when I was writing them. The voices are a little different, especially Bucky's, and there's more overt abrasiveness as opposed to the way I used to write them, which was more understated and cautious, but in general they were really close to my headcanon, and that was great to see onscreen. And Sam taking up the shield was gloriously triumphant, something I wasn't sure they were going to be able to pull off given the mixed feelings leading up to that, but they did and it was great.
- Sam's family. They were delightful, and so was all the family domestic stuff.
- Dark Sharon. The final plot twist about being the Power Broker made zero sense plotwise, and I wish they'd left her as a shady art dealer in Madripoor because I liked her best that way, but it was basically love from start to finish. I obstinately liked her before because the fandom hated her and I'm stubborn that way, but I flat-out love her like this.
I have gathered that fans generally hate this and want goodguy!Sharon back (too bad, you should have appreciated her more, she's evil now) but I've also seen a truly incomprehensible and stupid take, which is that this somehow retroactively taints Peggy. Okay, first of all, THEY'RE DIFFERENT PEOPLE. I think fandom has always struggled with this (see also: the "Steve dating her is incest" thing), but the idea that anything Sharon does reflects on Peggy, a woman who is dead in canon and had her active working years decades before Sharon came of age, is just bonkers to me.
But also, it's like people are discovering for the first time that Peggy was an espionage agent during the Cold War who we KNOW was involved with Operation Paperclip and presumably got up to other shady shit, and ... yes?? The Agent Carter fandom has been talking about this for years. Where were you? I mean, it is true that the MCU wants to have its cake and eat it too with Peggy, and SHIELD in general, who are sometimes the super-shady Men In Black and sometimes Our Heroes, but this isn't exactly new. I don't know why evil!Sharon is suddenly a bridge too far after SHIELD was used to cushion Hydra, tried to nuke New York, etc. You can argue that it doesn't fit Sharon's past characterization, but I mean!! She worked for the CIA! They're not known for being soft and fluffy! And unlike some retcons where it does kind of retroactively ruin the character, I could very easily see most of Sharon's previous canon as playing nice to climb the power ladder and then going a little bit off the deep end after the running series of betrayals and moral crises she's had to deal with.
Anyway, I love her.
- Seeing the Dora Milaje was great! The fight scene with the Dora and Walker with Bucky's running commentary and Zemo sipping a drink in the background was amazing.
- I really liked that nearly everyone (except the Flag-Smashers, RIP, I don't care, and I guess Lemar) got a happy or at least satisfying and appropriate ending. The show ended on a note that just felt good. I was totally expecting Torres to die and was amazed that he lived. He's sweet and he should come hang out at Sam's place with everybody else. I was also fully expecting Zemo to die, and while I didn't get my dream ending for him (on the loose, capable of popping up again at any time to cause trouble) I have no doubt that he could be broken out of the Raft VERY easily, I'm just saying.
Things I didn't like:
- The entire Flag-Smashers plot was total nonsense on every level. I heard that they had to cut some of it because the pandemic happened during production and parts of it were too similar to real life events, so I can only assume that they cut the parts that would have made the rest make sense. There was one particular point when I felt like there was a visible hand of writerly meddling, and that was Karli & co. blowing up the warehouse with the workers inside. Based on how casually they did it and how everyone else reacted, I felt like there was supposed to be a whole lot shadier stuff going on inside that warehouse than some random workers at a refugee supply storage depot. Unfortunately after that point, every time someone who should know better (usually Sam) would say something about how she was just misguided and we need to listen to her, I'd yell at the screen, "She literally killed a bunch of innocent people! She's basically Zemo! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU."
Orion said that it was like they took Greta Thunberg and made her evil, and that was kind of what it felt like. SO that was a choice.
The Flag-Smashers being way more murdery than the show appeared to recognize also meant that Walker spent a lot of time actually being right, which I don't think was what they were going for.
- The political stuff in general was like ... gold star for effort, the show nailed some things and missed others completely and was massively ham-handed about some of the things they sort of got right. Basically, I'm glad they tried to go there, and some of it actually did work (everything with Isaiah was very well handled, imho, and I also really liked that he and Sam had differing viewpoints on the entire shield/Cap/etc thing, and the show gave weight to both POVs with neither of them being presented as wholly right or wrong). Stopping the show for Sam to give a 5-minute Very Special Lesson after a giant bombastic fight scene ... maybe not so much. The clumsy attempt to comment on the refugee crisis using superheroes ... please don't. But I mean, You Tried™. And in general the show had a lot of characters of color doing stuff and being central and heroic and having inner lives, to a much greater extent than I was expecting, so props to them for that. YMMV on all of this, obviously.
- I guessed the Sharon-as-Power-Broker twist a couple episodes ahead of time because it was clearly important and she was literally the only suspect not otherwise accounted for, but I am just going to try not to think about what that does to the rest of the plot.
Basically, the show did what it said on the tin, and I enjoyed it a lot as long as I didn't think about it too much, and came out of it mainly wanting fic about Zemo and Sharon, which was really not what I was expecting. (Not together, necessarily, although now I'm imagining the two of them teaming up for some purpose without the relatively moderating influence of Sam and Bucky, and the mind boggles. Just for my own tastes, though, I don't think I'd want that much unrestrained villainny in one place without some hero moderation to balance it out.) Mostly I just want the Sam-Bucky-Zemo road trip to go on FOREVER.
It occurs to me based on a conversation with
snickfic on Discord that the main thing is that to me, everything else feels tied up, and it's the Zemo and Sharon parts of the show that feel the most unresolved (to me). Apparently a big part of me getting fannishly invested is feeling that something is missing - unresolved, open-ended, just not there enough for me - and this show basically gave me all of it in canon. I mean, there is still "further adventures of" (or getting together fic, etc) and I may want it later, but I think right now I just feel kind of satisfied with where the show left most of it.
Narratively, of course, this is good! This is what a show should do! It makes me wonder if I would have gotten as heavily invested in some of my other major fandoms (Agent Carter, say) if they'd actually had an opportunity to wrap things up in canon. Maybe sudden cancellations can be a blessing in disguise.
This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1390422.html with
comments.