Bucky Barnes ☆ adorable trainwreck manpain (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
soldieronwards) wrote2014-10-13 08:00 pm
soldieronwards) wrote2014-10-13 08:00 pm
question meme redux.
Sometime shortly before heart games, Bucky hit 10,000 comments posted, and now he's at 11,018.
Ask me questions about him and how I play him--why he does this in Aather or that, what he thinks of insert topic or character here, how a relationship functions, whatever. This time I'll try to get to everyone's.
Ask me questions about him and how I play him--why he does this in Aather or that, what he thinks of insert topic or character here, how a relationship functions, whatever. This time I'll try to get to everyone's.
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One is the projection, which Bucky is not at all subtle about! He'll admit fairly freely that he wants to help the Personae because he knows what it's like to "not be yourself."
Tangent: I actually find it kind of interesting, here, how different in certain key ways his viewpoint is from Van's, because you might notice he almost never talks about "free will." He doesn't really understand free will as a concept (although he's slowly working on it here in Aather). He just sort of assumes that everyone wants to try to do good things, and the distinction of wanting to be free to choose to do good things eludes him. This is a big part of why his own past hits him so hard--deep down, all he can see is, "I did terrible things," not, "Other people violated my own agency and will to make me do terrible things."
He does, however, very personally understand the concept of having your own identity destroyed or submerged and covered up by something else, something that makes you terrible or monstrous when the "real you" strove for very different ideals. So naturally, that's what he sees as having happened to the Personae. This also means he's a lot more sympathetic to villainous or formerly villainous Personae (there's a reason he's Onyx...) than to Personae with noble roles, because what the hell do the good guys have to complain about? It's a shame they can't be themselves, but their current position is hardly a tragedy, to him.
The other big thing going on here is one he almost never admits when not under some kind of status effect. He might pretend otherwise sometimes, but Bucky definitely sees the Personae as authority figures, and he has big-time authority issues--he desperately craves approval and validation from those he sees as having the power to grant it to him. Viewing the Personae as authority figures despite their flaws is also a major reason he continues to do his best in games despite not wanting his memories. He wants to impress them--especially Maleficent, who, as I mentioned in the heart writeup, is doing a bit of standing in for Steve at the moment in Aather.
Now, seeing the Personae as authority figures doesn't necessarily mean he'll obey them--he can be very stubbornly defiant at times, even with people whose approval he craves (see: Steve's constant "BUCKY, NO! DON'T DO THE THING!" and Bucky's response of "I'M DOING THE THING ANYWAY!" in the comics). But it does mean he's pretty hung up on them. Combine that with his identification with their situation and you get his current investment in helping them push back against their roles.
As a side note, though, he doesn't actually want to straight-up overthrow the Story: he took it to heart when Maleficent explained to him ages back that the Story and the Darkness need to be kept in balance. He just wants to find a way to free the Personae from the roles the Story has imposed on them.
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He definitely sees him as a kid to be watched out for and guided. While Bucky isn't really a mentor type in canon, he does try to protect and reach out to younger superheroes when he can--and Aather, with its many teens and pre-teens in close proximity to the adults, really brings that side of him out.
At the same time, though, he knows that Spider Eagle is troubled by his memories (although he doesn't know how much just yet) and by his vampiric nature, and he has no idea how to communicate to him that it's okay, nobody in Aather will judge you for that, and if they do I'll beat them up!! All he can do is keep helping him with animal blood quests and putting on a brave face for him.
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Part of that is that she is younger--she's not much older than he was at the end of his stint as a sidekick. But a lot of it is that she comes across to him as someone a bit like him in that she's a stubborn fighter, but she's also a lot more wholesome and innocent. She seems to have bad memories, but she still fights hard to always be kind to people and carry out her duties all the same.
He tried pretty hard to avoid sharing his past with her because of this at one point, but he lost that battle in a fit of temper after he took the "who the hell's Bucky?" memory, so now he just tries not to talk about it too much with her. It's not that he thinks she would judge him, it's just that he thinks she's too good for that sort of thing.
So, he wants to protect her. He wants to see her continue to be good despite her bad memories; he wants her to be more confident where he's not sure that he can.
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The insight into Maitimo's mental state was here, and it ties into something he's been grappling with in Aather: namely, the idea that people can lose their true selves and their way in life without necessarily actually being mind-controlled, brainwashed, possessed, or what have you. When Maitimo mentioned that he was "lost" and had to be pulled back to himself, Bucky had a bit of a start as he realized that he'd lashed out earlier at a man in the depths of despair.
He's starting to learn that things aren't so black-and-white as "there are good people, there are bad people, and there are good people who've had bad things imposed upon them." Which is a bit of a simplification of his viewpoint anyway--he's generally willing to accept people who've done terrible things in the past so long as they show that they've forsaken those things now, but at this point it's occurring to him that some people may need help forsaking their dark past.
So, as for the Silmarils in particular, he now knows that Maedhros swore an oath to retrieve them--an oath that puts his very soul at stake. While he still doesn't condone the terrible things he vaguely knows were done for it, he can at least begin to understand. If he'd sworn an oath to some kind of ultimate authority, he probably would have done some terrible things for it too (but that awareness is more subconscious than anything).
That said, he doesn't get at all that the Silmarils are just shiny gems that everyone wants. He thinks they must be corrupting artifacts of some kind and that the problem is they weren't destroyed sooner--which is him projecting his experience with the cosmic cube in his own canon.
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I'm going to back up for a minute and detour into Bucky's sexuality and romantic inclinations in general. Canonically, he is pretty obviously written and assumed to be straight, because haha, that's how the majority of superhero comics and indeed mainstream stories in general go: male protagonist is shown to have relationships with women, he must be straight. But the actual textual evidence for this as an absolute is kind of thin on the ground. Yes, he flirts and talks about liking the ladies, but in context this is a part of the mask he wears: he wants to show himself off as a carefree, confident ladies' man rather than an awkward and troubled person. In actuality, there are exactly two people he ever shows romantic interest in over the course of his canon so far. One is a one-shot deal from a flashback--he fell for a German resistance member on a mission during World War II. Notably, he shows no interest in her at first and only makes a move after he's gotten to know her, worked together with her on the mission, and been impressed by her competence and determination.
The other is Natasha, and while his initial relationship with her is very passionate and sexual from the images and flashbacks we're shown, again it's notable that he never describes it that way himself. When he's being serious, he never talks about how beautiful she is or how physically attracted to her he was. He says, "She touched what was left of my humanity under all the programming." He talks about the two of them sharing a connection. He says, "She always amazes me." And when they rekindle their relationship decades later, it's not a whirlwind of sexual passion but something grounded in companionship and being partners--he refers to her at least twice as "my best friend."
My take on this is that Bucky is someone who bases his attraction much more on personality and emotional connection than on physicality, and while he definitely prefers women, it's not necessarily an absolute.
Also, in general he's bad at forming deep connections with other people because of how much he relies on masks. So when someone does connect with him deeply, he doesn't really know what to do with the bond.
In Aather you have a lot of people challenging his tendency to avoid deep connections, but most of them are not true romantic prospects for various reasons. Dick Grayson, on the other hand--
Well, he and Dick get each other. They understand a lot about each other's life experience while still being very different people. Dick impresses Bucky with his competence, his stubborn determination to hold to his principles, and his emotional depth. And he's consistently held onto an emotional connection with Bucky despite attempts to push him away.
All of this means that Dick doesn't really fit into the typical place Bucky puts his platonic friends (note the way he confessed: "I see you as something other than a friend" rather than "I like you" or "I have feelings for you"). He also isn't really an authority figure of any kind from Bucky's perspective, and there's no familial edge to their relationship. He's an equal and a friend, and that runs deeper than usual for Bucky.
Because of all this, at some point Bucky's subconscious shifted Dick Grayson into the role of potential romantic prospect. I'm not sure when exactly it happened, but it was before Lorelei's kissing game, because you'll notice Bucky got slightly flustered at kissing Dick there when he was unfazed by kissing Maitimo or Selenia. At that point, he probably consciously realized what had happened to his perception of Dick and proceeded to try to repress it again.
Why did he try to repress it? The obvious answer is that he doesn't want to admit that he might not be 100% heterosexual, but that's actually not the main factor at play. I mean, it has a little bit of influence--he does try to uphold a stereotypically masculine image to an extent (although he's much more concerned with the deeper emotional aspects of that than outward indicators like aggressive heterosexuality). But in the comics he actually adjusts to the twenty-first century pretty quickly, and considering that his role model is noted bleeding heart liberal Steve Rogers, I doubt he's that hung up on it. Ultimately, all he really cares about is whether he'd disappoint Steve, and Steve doesn't care who he falls for so long as they're happy together, and he knows it. So while he certainly told himself, "I can't be into Dick because we're both guys," that was totally an excuse to avoid thinking about the deeper reasons. The truth is pretty much exactly what he told Dick when he confessed: he doesn't think he's good enough, he doesn't know if he even deserves romance and tenderness at all when he still isn't sure if he's a human being or a weapon.
In another setting, he probably would have succeeded in his attempts at denial! He might never have consciously noticed the change at all, even (that's if it even grew that way in the first place; with all his memories, he's pretty damn hung up on Natasha). I suspect in real life a lot of people have occasional flickers of, "You know, I think I could see this person in a romantic light even though I wouldn't normally be attracted to them--" and then shut them down and go about their lives.
But Aather is really bad at letting people squash unexpected feelings. The kissing game happened, and then the heart game happened. While the feelings existed before the heart game, various people (Dick himself, young Dick, Nagisa) peeled away the layers of repression and denial over them and put Bucky in a place to actually admit to and act on them. When his internal filters and capabilities for fronting repair themselves in a couple of IC days, he'll go back to Dick to apologize for the way he confessed--specifically, for bringing up his self-esteem issues, because that's awful and manipulative in that context (though he didn't intend it that way) and he doesn't want Dick feeling pressured to date him in order to validate his self-worth.
But he won't take back the confession. It's out there in the open now and he's surprisingly okay with that. So I guess current relationship status is "in progress."
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