Fandom Meme, 11

[osprey_archer]

11. Ships that you currently like a lot. (They don’t have to be OTPs because not everyone has OTPs.) Friendships, pairings, threesomes, etc. are allowed.

I’m probably going to go down with the good ship Steve/Bucky, which is unfortunate given Marvel’s… everything. It’s like they smashed together everything that I like into one epic ship. World War II! Childhood friends to lovers! The Soviet Union! Fish out of water stories! (They played Steve’s man out of time thing mostly for laughs, but it has great tragic potential.) Characters who were friends ending up on opposite sides of a fight, where one character refuses to fight the other, and their love and self-sacrifice bring the other character back to the light!

My ur-pairing for that particular plotline is Jaina Solo/Zekk from the Young Jedi Knights series. Zekk is Jaina’s street urchin friend, who gets recruited by the Shadow Academy after the regular Jedi Academy inexplicably fails to notice his talent with the Force, and then Zekk leads the Shadow Academy’s attack on the Jedi Academy on Yavin 4, which culminates with Zekk facing Jaina for a one-on-one duel. Jaina apologizes for past mistakes and asks him to stop fighting. When he refuses, she throws aside her lightsaber, and stands there with open hands as Zekk raises his lightsaber so close that she can feel it crackling alongside her neck…

God, that’s the good stuff. Of course he can’t kill her. The power of her love and faith in him draw him back to the light, and then he joins the regular Jedi Academy and they go on adventures together, presumably, it’s been probably twenty years since I read the books and the rest of it didn’t stick with me quite like the crackling of Zekk’s lightsaber beside Jaina’s neck.

(One of the more exasperating features of The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was the fact that it had Sam try this sacrifice move on the Flag Smashers’ leader Karli without setting up the necessary groundwork between the characters. This kind of scene only works if the characters have some powerful prior connection. Sam and Karli had a single conversation one time which got cut short in a way that made Karli think Sam was just stalling for time to capture her.)

Comments

[kore]

....also, I just realized that (I am slow) that moment when Yelena and Nat are fighting in the safehouse is almost like when Steve and Bucky are fighting (except Nat isn't intruding as badly as Steve was) but since Yelena was already un-brainwashed without Nat, when she killed Oksana, there's no question of them teaming up and running off and then we get all the great moments with the vest and Dreykov's daughter and "Where did you think I was all this time?" It's so prickly but they're so deeply bonded. It was like the BW filmmakers looked at Steve and Bucky being kept apart in CW and were like "TIME TO FIX THAT," lol. Altho they could have kept Yelena more ambiguous and less open (I think a lot of that was due to the choice of actress tbh -- Florence Pugh is great but she's not opaque at all, rather the opposite, and two opaque lead ladies would probably have been too much). But they wound up giving most of that to Melina. I was really fascinated at how much of Melina is a callback to very early Nat, sort of -- not the sex bomb, but the utter pragmatism, detachment, willed unflappability ("Slight change of plan, I have just had to blow up the engine," that was great). The comics have more of the destructive side of the sibling dynamic, where Yelena never quite stops wanting to be the Black Widow (she's suddenly the "White Widow" in Nat's current book, which is kinda weird. Jason Aaron also invented a "Red Widow" for his terrible Avengers storyline, who's a total brainwashed robot). Natasha-imitating-Melina is also great -- on first viewing I thought she was so stiff because she was conflicted, but no! it's Nat trying to imitate her previous self. I loved all the doubling and mirroring in this movie.

I also said to T when "Melina" first walks past that studio full of Black Widows doing their deadly combat dance (not en pointe! Hallelujah!) "They know who THAT is," but on second viewing, they don't know who that really is -- and Nat's caught with Yelena squared, all the other sisters she abandoned to save herself, who wound up being drawn even more tightly in because she escaped, and then there's her ultimate double -- Antonia. The true daughter, the one with no sisters to save her, the one who could never get away. (Did I SOB when the other Widows came back to help her up after the big fight? MAYBE)

[osprey_archer]

Yeah! And it IS great that we get to see Nat and Yelena bonding - that's exactly the sort of thing I'm always complaining Marvel movies need more of. CW would have been slightly more functional as a movie if the previous movies had actually established the friendship that this conflict was supposedly destroying, for instance. I just would have liked Nat and Yelena bonding AND ALSO they have a big knock down drag out fight at the end until Yelena realizes she just can't kill Nat now that they're all bonded and stuff.

Also, because Florence Pugh does come across as so open, the moment of betrayal ("I was bonding with you to lure you back into the Red Room!") would have extra oomph. The way she makes fun of Nat's fighting pose! Her enthusiasm about her vest! All designed to put Nat off her guard and make her easier to ensnare!!!

[kore]

YES, it was like they put the big knock-down drag-out fight (it was brutal!) right at the beginning, almost like ritual combat? a dominance thing? (Did they see each other at all in the Red Room after Ohio?) -- in BW the Bucky role is kind of split between Yelena and Antonia, Yelena is the childhood friend with the sibling dynamic (only maybe more like Steve? lol) and Antonia took Bucky's place in that final shattering fight at the end of TWS. And they're not writing Yelena in the MCU this way, but a pretense of being open would also be very Widow, very Red Room -- like Nat constantly luring male attackers in by acting like prey, only to turn the tables and destroy them. (That happens even with Alexander Pierce in TWS, when he thinks he'll use her as a hostage because he's got that mini-bomb planted on her. Never think you've gotten the best of the Black Widow; that's when she's won.) And that would echo the opening of the film, too, where the fake intimacy still had emotional resonance for the whole "family." Is it all a calculated lie? That's what people are always asking about Natasha, less so in the movies than the comics (in the movies she's way more young, and not as isolated, and very American, and without the whole Cold War background). She knew the boxes were empty but she still wanted to open them, just so it would feel real for a moment. That was like the whole key to the movie, for me. (And of course Nat's also using her actual emotions in that moment to manipulate Melina. I would LOVE to see Yelena doing something similar to Nat.)

[osprey_archer]

My impression is that they didn't see each other in the Red Room after Ohio, but it's not super clear, and I feel like their reconnection makes more sense if they did at least occasionally. Yelena in particular would probably have VERY hazy memories of Natasha if the last time they saw each other was when Yelena was six.

And yes! It would be such a classic Black Widow/Red Room move for Yelena to draw Natasha in by pretending to be all vulnerable... except this time the vulnerability, although calculated, is not totally fake, and against her will she finds real feelings of old hurt and betrayal and also love welling up as she spends more time with Natasha. What's real and what's fake? Until the final confrontation, even Yelena's not quite sure.

And when Natasha's realizes it was a blind to draw her in, she's betrayed but also kind of admiring: like, damn, Yelena played a player! I feel like this works best if Yelena was at least partially successful, if Natasha didn't foresee *every* part of her plan, although of course she should have put in some failsafes to protect against at least some of it.

...then they have a vulnerable-off by screaming about their feelings as they also try to kill each other.

[kore]

Well hell, I liked the movie, but I would have LOVED this. And Natasha's always blase about being able to suss everything out, it would be almost a welcome surprise that someone was able to fool her!

"What's real and what's fake" was such an enjoyable subthread in the whole movie, the best parts maybe being when Aleksei starts singing and Nat pounces on that photo album which Melina TOLD HER TO LEAVE BEHIND. Which means at some point, Melina must grab it (unless Nat grabs it and I missed it, but somehow it's more fitting she grabs the real photobooth pix of her and Yelena and Melina saves the fake photos). I LOVED the pain when I realized the shots of Wee Nat in the Red Room credits are her and Yelena during that photoshoot. I think maybe even the bunny you see in those shots is the toy Yelena's carrying when they flee, but I'm not sure. (That could be just wishful thinking.) Maybe Nat and Yelena have fun dreaming up a kind of green card wedding album of them taking vacations together as grownups. "You didn't like Spain. You hated the bullfights." "You got food poisoning there. But we loved Portugal." "The beaches in Lisbon....Lisbon has beaches, right?" "I looked it up, they have five kinds of beaches. You went surfing." &c &c

[kore]

Also, Melina gets carried off pretty fast once they get to Cuba, and I bet they have her working for Draykhov pretty soon after that, so that's when the whole family splits up. How do they save the photo album? Maybe Aleksei has it, the way he's still holding Yelena's stuffed rabbit (I think it's a rabbit). I can see him being ordered to burn them, or something, but maybe he hides them and looks at them occasionally. Remembering his fake family. I bet he mails the photo album to Melina or gets it to her somehow -- she saves his suit! Maybe they had a little bit of contact after Cleveland and that was one reason why Aleksei got sent to prison? Heh.

(I did think it was a little weird the girls were outright named Natasha and Yelena in mid-nineties Ohio, since Natasha was a little old-fashioned by then -- it was most popular in the eighties -- and Yelena seems very "foreign." Maybe they lied with the truth and said Melina's parents came from Russia or something.)