Dumpster #3: The Great Pacific Garbage Patch

[trashmod]

Holy shitballs, look at us go. Welcome to Captain America fandom's resident wretched hive of scum and villainy: ROUND THREE. AKA Bad Guys Do Dirtybadwrong Things To Your Faves, AKA the Hydra Trash Party kinkmeme. As usual, BLANKET NON-CON AND NSFW WARNINGS apply: just assume going in that everything in this landfill is unfit for human consumption.

Rules in brief: don't be a jerk except to fictional characters, warnings for particularly fucked-up garbage are nice but not required, thou shalt not judge the trashiness of thy neighbor's kinks unless thy neighbor is trying to pass off their rotting banana peels and half-eaten pizza crusts as a healthy romantic dinner for two, off-topic comments may be chucked out of the dumpster at management's discretion, management's discretion decrees that omegaverse, soulbond AUs, D/s-verse, non-superpowered AUs, and dark!good guys AUs are off-topic.

[Round 1] [Round 2] [Fill post] [Chatter post] [hydratrashmeme Pinboard archive (maintained by greenkirtle)] [Round 3 in flat view (comments in non-threaded chronological order, most recent last)]

Round 3 is closed; comments and fills in existing threads are still welcome, but all new prompts go to Round 4.

Comments

Re: Mini-fill: Out of Focus [Epilogue]

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, actually the drawing dissociated images thing was what really attracted me to this prompt. Here's some shameless copy-pasting of commentary I wrote on my tumblr:

"So yeah one thing I really enjoyed about this fill is getting to bring in the whole “Bucky’s mind is everywhere” flashback thing that Bucky does in the vault scene in the movie. I LOVE the idea of these scattered, disconnected, and uncontextualized mental images that keep haunting Bucky. As he’s recovering, he can slowly piece them together, but more likely than not, it’s just confusing and unsettling. A flash of a location – is that a place he was before the war, during the war, with the Soviets, or with HYDRA? A flash of a face – is that someone he killed, someone he worked with, or a random civilian? THERE’S NO CONTEXT.

And so I loved the proposal to get Steve to draw the particularly persistent ones. I can image the two of them studying the sketch afterwards, trying to place the image to a specific time and place. :) “Ah yes, these rooftops are clearly Eastern European pre-1990, but there’s some Italian influences as well as some Austrian influences, so I’m going to guess… Croatia.”"

And re: your second point about selfhood as defined by other people -- OH MAN that is SQUARELY in my Bucky feels. And I admit part of this is because sometimes I draw from the very Confucian perspective where you are defined by your actions in relation to others. But for Bucky in particular, I think his primary struggle has always been about how he defines himself in relation to others' expectations. Pre-war, he's the popular kid, the good student and the ladies' man -- because that's him performing up to societal expectations. And the special thing about Steve is that Steve gets to see him when he's NOT that. But then it's also easy to fall into being what Steve sees in Bucky: the good, loyal friend, the tease. Then during war, Bucky breaks a bit, and the tragic thing there is that Steve doesn't really notice, and still expects Bucky to be the same as pre-War. So Bucky performs as the Sergeant and Best Friend who always as Steve's back. It's easier to trust Steve's vision of him than his own. But then after the fall ... what then? What does Bucky Barnes mean to HYDRA? Nothing. They just want his body as a weapon, an asset. And I think that Bucky *does* think that being Bucky has intrinsic value, it's just that in the face of all those externalities -- it's just SO MUCH EASIER to let go. Put it on hold. No one else cares anymore, and it's just SO MUCH EFFORT to maintain all the bits that make up a Bucky Barnes. So in a way, erasing himself is Bucky's ultimate performance.

Relatedly, I think you see a little of this "no one around knows the real me" thing from Steve in the beginning of CATWS, too -- the subsequent muting of personality can be attributed to depression, but also the fact that there isn't anyone around who can be like "you're a little punk who doesn't know when to stop". When everyone else treats you as Cap, you lose a bit of the Steve.