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stellar_dust came home for the holiday last weekend!

So Friday we went to meet some friends for dinner in DC after work. Saturday, we went out to lunch, went window-shopping for garden plants, and then I had an OTW meeting in chat. Sunday we went to the Easter service, then did dinner and egg-hunting at my aunt and uncle's, then came home and watched Cosmos. Monday I worked; I thought we were going to go do Interrobang Studios work in the evening, but it was cancelled, so instead we put on Neil deGrasse Tyson's podcast and played SolarQuest for about four hours accidentally (SoloarQuest turns out to be way more fun than an elderly Monopoly variant about prospecting the solar system deserves to be, even if I did keep getting stuck on %$& Triton with no launch fuel left.)

Then on Tuesday morning we met up with old family friends for brunch before I had to go to work, and then a class at the community college that led to me getting home even later than usual.

I don't remember Wednesday at all. Presumably I did something other than work. Thursday I did a whole shift at work and then went to see Captain America with internet people again (no regrets!) and then Friday, which was a day off, I helped mop the floors at church, went out to lunch with family friends again, took a nap and then made up the interrobang studios workday. Oh, also got a passport photo taken for a trip out of the country that might happen soon if I get it together in time, and tried to give myself Bucky feels.

Today I'm at work again. I plan to go home and do absolutely nothing until Monday morning. (This isn't going to work because there's a week's worth of backlogged chores waiting but I will TRY MY DARNDEST.)

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I found that the comics we downloaded last weekend were somewhat helpful in generating Bucky feels.

I put some real effort into it, and have managed to start having movie!bucky feels.

Unfortunately they mostly consist of "get the hell away from Steve, Barnes, you and Rogers have always been terrible for each other and you know it even if he's still pretending everything was perfect" which probably still doesn't help me sympathize with all the Bucky fans ....

yes after hours of ~~productive work~~ ~~procrastinating~~ reading the comics I can't shake the notion that Steve & Bucky are a slightly less dysfunctional/codependent version of Dean & Sam ... so maybe there's hope?

I still haven't read many of the comics, but I think movie!Steve and Bucky have a differently dysfunctional relationship than the comics version (if nothing else, because Comics Steve had a lot longer to manage without him than Movie Steve, and more of a support structure otherwise). So, uh, there may be more hope for the comics version than the movie version....

I think that's probably true re: comics (also because they have a totally different 1940s history and dynamic in the comics - and it depends on what you mean by "hope" because I really don't see them ever having a meaningful conversation, just a ton of fraught subtext, hence the Winchester parallel) but iirc they didn't actually interact much in the movie, aside from like beating each other up a lot? Bucky was like "grrr kill I don't remember anything" and Steve was like "NOOOOOOOOOoooooooo!" and .. that's the extent of it really? Maybe a smidge of eye contact. So they could have literally any kind of post-movie relationship you want them to have. It's possible you've been reading too much fic? (I haven't ventured into it yet, too busy with comics. ~~and writing papers.~~) Also I have only seen the movie once so it is possible I forgot some important interaction, but I don't think so...

That's why the movie didn't give me Steve/Bucky feels; there's nothing to hang it on until Bucky starts getting some of his memory back. Meanwhile comics have turned me into a James/Natasha shipper....

Well, the advice I was given on how to get Movie!Bucky feels, despite the fact that he did nothing but grunt and punch things in the movie, was to spend a lot of time thinking about Cap 1 Bucky? And there's a fair amount of pre-superehero interaction between them in Cap 1.

Unfortunately it consists mostly of a) them lying to each other, b) Bucky trying to manipulate Steve into doing things he wants and Steve weaseling out of it; c) Bucky reminding Steve that he's too weak to do the things he wants to do and needs to let Bucky take care of him instead, and Steve transferring his resentment by starting fights with strangers; d) Steve clinging to Bucky because he's convinced that Bucky is the only person who will ever care about him, and Bucky congratulating himself because he's the only one who knows how special Steve is; e) both of them completely forgetting each other when something shinier (girls, the Army) is nearby. (The flashback in Cap 2 is basically this same pattern - Steve saying he wants to try to stand on his own two feet, Bucky convincing him to come get smothered some more instead.) (I am exaggerating for effect here - there's lots of good stuff in the relationship too and they do really care about each other and I have put everything in the worst possible light - but the foundation is rotten, and I think that's a deliberate part of the way Cap 1 was structured.)

I think when they meet up again in Europe, Bucky has actually grown out of this a little? He's got a few moments of resentment about the way things have changed, but I think he's actually sort of recognized that their old patterns had issues, and is kind of relieved at being forced to change them. I don't think Steve is even ready to admit that their old friendship *had* any issues, though. And then they ran out of time.

...and now everything is totally screwed up and I kind of just want Bucky to run away and find himself on his own (....or with Natasha) without having to deal with Steve's crap at the same time.

Haha yep you could do a find/replace with Sam and Dean in that paragraph, they're so screwed.

I need to watch Cap 1 again I think. But they should use this opportunity to start fresh! Especially with the Winter Soldier crap, Bucky is not going to be the same person Steve remembers. In the comics Steve forcibly returned his memories to him by Magic (*cough*dean*cough*) but it's going to take a lot longer and be a lot more piecemeal in movieverse.

Also we need a Black Widow movie.

...they're not as screwed as Sam and Dean, okay, nobody's as screwed as Sam and Dean.

And I dunno, I think one of the things that's been bothering me as I read the fic is that there's a lot of "Bucky is not going to be the same person Steve remembers", but not a lot of "even if Bucky does get restored to original condition by Tesseract/Cube wishes, he's not going to be the person Steve remembers, because the person Steve remembers never actually existed, and the new Bucky is not going to have the same motivation to pretend to be someone else for Steve that the old Bucky had".

See above re: Yankees fans but multiplied x everything.