#allofthereplies

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

As a casual nat stan, i feel a little bit weirded out the amount of genuine smiling throughout the snippets i've seen--to the point where i thought it was uncharacteristic. Not that i think nat is incapable of basic human emotions, but i guess i'm used to her being so stoic? Weirdly, her stoicness is what drawn me to her bcs i too am a very guarded person. How do you think the film portray her in this department?

I have been sitting on this one since before the movie came out because I couldn't figure out how to answer it in a way that wasn't spoilery.

Let's gooooo.

I am ALSO seriously into Nat's guardedness. I think that media very rarely knows what to do with women who aren't either great at emotions or complete robots, and in past movies Natasha has given us just enough to show that she's neither. And Nat's reliance on performativity, in particular, has always worked for me; I grew up with the belief that you have to behave in certain ways for people to accept you, and seeing characters get emotional with very little provocation makes me actively uncomfortable as a viewer, like I'm seeing something private I shouldn't.

Nat's emotions in this movie worked for me for a few reasons.

One is one of my favorite details of the movie: Natasha (and Melina) were psychologically conditioned, while Yelena (and the other Widows in her cohort) were brainwashed. The conditioning required the Widows to be extremely carefully controlled, because of the negative consequences if they didn't. The brainwashing removed the ability to control, because it was never their choice. So we see that in Morocco Yelena is extremely controlled, and then right after that we see her expressing emotions far more freely than we ever see from Nat (even ten-year-old Nat) or Melina. She doesn't have the instincts to not.

Another is that in most of the scenes where we see Natasha showing strong emotions, positive or negative, it's with people she was only close with from ages seven or eight to ten or eleven. There's an element of Nat unintentionally regressing and needing to consciously regain her Adult In Control Of The Situation approach, repeatedly; we see it most clearly in the "don't slouch" scene but for me her first scenes with Yelena are that much more telling. She's metaphorically an adult staying in her childhood bedroom at her parents' house and trying to figure out why the bed doesn't feel like she remembers.

A third is one that I didn't actually realize until thinking more about this movie: yes, Natasha is smiling sincerely more here. But she's also angry more. It wasn't until I had seen this movie a few times that I started to think of all the times I've identified Nat as angry in other movies. I still think she HAS been angry, but she's grit her teeth and she's smiled a very tight smile and she has done everything in her power to defuse the situation. (I can't help but think of how Carol's anger got so many fanboys to be like "Why doesn't she smile more?" while Natasha's anger has passed by them entirely unnoticed.) Her smiling, to me, is connected to her ability to express her rage: to try to drown Yelena before offering a truce and drinking together; to yell at Alexei rather than coquettishly convince him to find the Red Room; to call Melina a coward to her face.

Compare it to her conversation with Ross; her tone never wavers. When she has her first conversations with Mason, even though he can tell she's run-down, she's presenting Public-Facing Natasha, who just wants to Get Shit Done. When she thinks Taskmaster is sent by Ross, her ONLY emotional reaction is to say that she's a better shot when she's pissed off. It's only once the Red Room is brought in, and her history is part of things, that her emotions show more on her face.

I don't think Natasha lost all her levels of guardedness in this movie- I think comparing her to Alexei and Yelena is proof of that, as is, frankly, the number of critics who didn't seem to understand what I saw as an extremely clear emotional arc- but I think this movie is a lot closer to the nerve, and as a result we're seeing more get through her mask than we usually would. If that were only positive emotions, I don't think it would work for me. But the film's active choice to give Natasha greater capacity to show her anger made her visible happiness feel more earned, and both parts together made Nat feel like a more complete person to me.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow movie spoilers #BW spoilers #Natasha Romanoff #smiling #anger #psychological conditioning #brainwashing

[allofthefeelings]

that post you reblogged about someone keeping all the assassins that are sent after them and 'subtitle: The Clint Barton story' just makes me think that if Clint had been there, 'Winter Soldier' would have been a very different movie

To be fair Steve Rogers has the exact same “Trying to kill me! Friend? :D?” mindset, so probably not THAT different.

Meanwhile, Nat, who has BEEN the adopted assassin, is like “are you aware... murder?”

And her closest people are like “Yes! Murder FRIEND.”

#allofthereplies #tygermama #Marvel Cinematic Universe #asassins #Clint Barton #Steve Rogers #Natasha Romanoff #Bucky Barnes #I still can't tell if the plot of #Black Widow (2021) #is going to be 'Murder Friends?' #or #'I DON'T TRUST YOU BECAUSE OF ALL THE PAST MURDERS: A MEMOIR' #I like that I don't know #keeps things fresh

[alloftheendgamefeelings]

Scarlett can easily be filming flasbacks or scenes from the past. She looks still young, pretty much like before Iron-Man 2. So, no Natasha is not coming suddnely to life no matter what people think. It cheapens her acrifice, maybe few years down the line but not like few months after it happened. I know people are sad for her story to end like this but they're doing a prequel, how she grew up to be an assassin. One set of photos doesn't prove she is back.

Look. Let me start by saying that she’s very likely not brought back to life, or if she is, it’s probably with a caveat- one last thing to do. If I had to bet, I’d go with the idea that this is her in the soul stone, reliving her most important life experiences.

That said. (And I’m assuming you found this from a reblog and aren’t following me, so if I’m wrong, apologies for repeating points.)

(1) ScarJo is certainly still attractive, and she doesn’t look drastically different, but she has absolutely aged in ten years, the way human beings do. She does not look the same as she did 1/3 of her life ago, which is when pre-IM2 would be. Moreover, for the movie to be set in the early 2000s, which is what the original rumors were, she would have been a teenager, which is stretching the bounds of credulity beyond their breaking point.

(2) The articles about the movie’s timeline have shifted from “the movie is entirely a prequel” to “the parts of the movie that are a prequel.” This speculation isn’t coming out of nowhere.

(3) The movie did not remotely provide closure to Natasha’s arc, and when asked about that, MMRR pointed to her movie. It is not unreasonable to think, then, that this movie will, in fact, provide closure to Natasha’s arc, which is not possible to do if it’s entirely not contemporary.

(4) I get the idea that bringing her back could cheapen her sacrifice, but the problem is that the movie itself cheapened her sacrifice, to the point that it was not hers. Clint is the one who got rewarded with the stone, which the movie explicitly said is given to the person who made the sacrifice. Nat was willing to give up her life, but the film is telling us that the sacrifice is Clint’s. I’ve tossed out a lot of ways they could have made her sacrifice about her in a way that would have been rewarding; the filmmakers did not make that call.

(5) I really can’t emphasize enough how gross it is that in the IW/EG duology, the first female Avenger and the first female Guardian were the two characters who weren’t just killed, but had their existence negated. They aren’t just dead; they’re trapped in the soul stone. Tony gets to rest but Natasha and Gamora don’t even have the opportunity for whatever the MCU’s’ version of the afterlife is (which we know has to exist, because we’ve seen the Wakandan spiritual plane). It is not unreasonable to think that the BW movie and GOTG3 will, at absolute minimum, bring them to someplace where they can have peace, because this is fucking horror movie bullshit otherwise.

(6) Look, I realize this is kind of whiny and unreasonable, but just. Could you let us have this? Could you let us have a little bit of hope, a little bit of gloating that there’s evidence she’s not 100% wiped off the map, even if it’s going to get crushed in eleven months? If Nat’s not your character or you’re not invested in her, that’s totally cool, but she was fucked over hard by canon and given how many people are fanwanking the future of basically every other character, I don’t see how it’s out of bounds for us to be excitedly figuring out how this could work to give Nat a future at all.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Endgame spoilers #Natasha Romanoff #Black Widow movie #where is my black widow movie #Avengers Endgame

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Love that it's now 100% confirmed canon that Natasha spends her free time watching over the top Cold War era spy fiction/techno-thriller movies like James Bond and WarGames, and she's a gleeful little geek that gets a kick out of quoting the dialogue.

I love so much that we spent years assuming Nat would mock the shitty spycraft in movies, but actually she's enthralled every time. Like, a five-year-old seeing Frozen? That's Natasha any time these movies are on the screen. Yes she's seen them a million times, but when your entire life is dangerous spy hijinks it must be so nice to see stuff that you do in a context where no one you love is in danger at any time.

Also the thing that's so nice about her being a geek is that the movies have tried so hard to make us think she's a badass. And, I mean, she is totally a badass! But "Do you want to play a game?" could have been a one-off thing, a way to tease Steve and integrate Steve and make her own fun while on the run. Instead it's become a running part of her personality, which takes how the Red Room used popular media as indoctrination and turns it into something she can relax with and make into something that's her own.

Like I feel at this point if we found out that Clint used to call Nat every week after Dog Cops finished airing to dissect the plot, it would not feel out of character, and that is beautiful.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow movie spoilers #BW spoilers #Natasha Romanoff #James Bond #War Games #Clint Barton #Dog Cops

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

I liked getting to see more of Nat's "just for her, not trying to project an image for others" approach to clothing. We got it in Endgame too, but the original implication there was that she cared less about how she looked Post-Snap. BW shows us that it was already a go-to style for her. Of course she still loves a leather jacket, but the overall look is less skin tight & polished, not so obviously gendered, more comfy & practical. Which also connects closer to her tomboyish look as a kid.

One of the things I like most about this movie is that it DOES recontextualize Nat in IW/EG so much. Fitted but comfortable clothing isn't her disregarding standards like Endgame wanted us to think; it's what she likes.

Actually, that's true going all the way back, really. We can reevaluate some of her earlier non-mission outfits, like the leather jacket outfit when she first meets Steve on the helicarrier in Avengers or her on-the-run look in Winter Soldier. Throughout her first seven movies, we've seen Nat putting on different outfits and different roles as the situation demands. What Black Widow does is give us a better sense of which of those were closer to performance and which were Nat as Nat. She likes keeping her hair out of her face; she likes leather jackets and hoodies, she likes form-fitting but comfortable. We know what's best for when she's working- when she has to be undercover, or she has to be in her suit- but now we have enough context that we're not just seeing her choices now, we're realizing her choices in retrospect, the ways she let her self shine through the layers of costuming, and I really kind of love that.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #BW spoilers #Black Widow movie spoilers #costumes #I don't know anything about costuming #but I refuse to let that stop me

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Kid Natasha stalked away looking upset when Melina was comforting Yelena. What did you make of it? Was she shrinking away from Melina's gentleness? From the always present knowledge it was part of an act, even if it felt so real? Or was she reacting to Yelena's vulnerability, so easily on display, so unacceptable in the Red Room? Was there some resentment that she wasn't treated so kindly at the same age?

I feel like I keep saying this about this movie, but this is another one of those situations that I love because every read is awful but also every read informs Natasha's adulthood differently.

I'm gonna go into detail with each of these, and a few more besides, because it's so bad and that makes it so good.

The one thing I think we 100% get from it is how each of them has adjusted to living as a family: Melina knows how to play her part well (with an asterisk). Yelena accepts this as the norm. And Natasha is in that awful in-between place, where she knows she's living in a lie but everything around her insists it's true and even if she has three years of proof of consistency, she doesn't trust it- which, later that day, she's shown to be right not to trust.

Is Melina a good mom? She definitely plays the part of a good mom. She definitely knows how to put on the performance of being a good mom. I don't know if that's the same thing, and more importantly, don't know if Nat or Yelena would think it is; pretty much everyone i know who has significant trauma struggles to reconcile the facade presented to the world against what really went down, and that has to be even harder when the facade was presented even to them. Alexei and Melina both insist they played their roles to perfection, but they were roles. Part of that seeps in. At the end of the day, Natasha was willing to pick up a gun to protect Yelena, while Melina and Alexei were both just fine putting Nat and Yelena in a plane to be shot at.

How did Melina feel about all of it? We know she couldn't have kids of her own (she's been cycled through 4x); we know she doesn't want to go but not only does so anyway but also tells Yelena they're going "home" (echoed, obviously, later with the pigs- "go home where it's safe" even though the home she took them back to was anything but). Was being a parent an act for Melina the way it was for Alexei? Was she comforting Yelena because she was supposed to? Or was she offering what she'd never gotten but wished she had? Natasha said that what Melina had given them was what got them through the Red Room, but how much was intentional parenting and how much was performing and how much was playing house in between experiments in the SHIELD labs? Melina says she didn't raise them to be weak; how much was involved in that?

(The girls do backbends for fun in the backyard; we know gymnastics and ballet are part of Red Room training for Widows. How much of Melina's parenting was preparing them for the world and how much was preparing them for the Red Room? Was it to help them or because she had to?)

After at least two years in the Red Room (because we know Nat was younger than six when she started and this mission has been three years), it's pretty amazing she's able to respond to gentleness as well as she does. How could it not seem like a trap? Yelena isn't a spy; she's living the life the family set up. But Natasha is old enough to see the cracks and know she has to pretend not to.

And seeing Yelena's vulnerability, as you said, must have been terrifying, because vulnerability came with consequences. We see in Cuba that Nat wants to protect Yelena; it must seem like Yelena, crying just from falling down, is painting a giant glowing neon target on her own back. Or is this the RIGHT way to behave? If being better at undercover means showing weakness, what is a baby Widow supposed to do? And how does this reflect in how Natasha as an adult responds to vulnerability, when she needs to offer it and when she needs to (but often can't) accept it?

There's also the theory that she felt responsible for hurting Yelena- did she not want to get in trouble? Did she not want to deal with her guilt for harming her? Did she just not want to see Yelena hurt? Or was she remembering a time when hurt children did not get kisses and firefly lectures, when girls face off in a ring and snap each other's necks?

I feel like all of these are very real possibilities and all of them are terrible but fascinating to explore, and the only thing they have in common is that Natasha, especially as a kid, has absolutely no sense of what is a logical consequence of any given act. The same things that were unacceptable in one context were encouraged in another. The Red Room clearly got under her skin but then she had to spend three years pretending it didn't, and then get right back into it. I mean, shit. It was, what, twelve hours between being encouraged to call their "mom" about Yelena's scraped knee, and Alexei telling her to not try to protect her sister from being kidnapped to the Red Room, which Nat knows for a fact is an abusive murder factory because she's lived there and doesn't want to go back?

Yeah, there's no read here that doesn't hurt.

And I can absolutely understand people who see this as the text not committing to a single read, but to me, it's the text allowing for all the reads at once. This movie had to straddle the line of being a PG-13 movie about severe child abuse, and it leans heavily on giving us just enough to make any read we could figure out feel horrifying.

I think I might feel differently if Nat had more of a future in the MCU, which- as far as we know at this point and hopefully subject to change- she does not. For me it's a kaleidoscope of pain, and every possible twist reveals new ways for us to interpret Natasha. And if we're not going to get new things to interpret, I like that we have this many lenses to use on what we've already got.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow movie spoilers #BW spoilers #Ohio 1995 #Melina Vostokoff #Natasha Romanoff #Yelena Belova #cw: abuse

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

I feel like we should talk about Nat's tendency of allowing herself to be physically harmed to achieve her goals in situations where there are arguably other options that don't involve her getting beat up.

Anon, this has been straight-up murdering me for the past two weeks, and I love it.

(Content warnings for self-harm and suicidal ideation, because I think when we’re talking about the Widows’ self-preservation instincts that can’t b e left out of the discussion.)

Because it’s not just Natasha. All the Widows prioritize their own safety significantly underneath the mission. Their objective is more important than them personally. And while it’s easy to point to what was done to them- how Dreykov’s control meant he determined it, as epitomized by the Widow who had to self-terminate- we also see it elsewhere, from Melina not wanting to leave Ohio but going anyway to Yelena being willing to sacrifice her own life to kill Dreykov.

We see that they’re all kind of cogs in a machine, at least in the mind of Dreykov and his associates. They seeing the girls as interchangeable and only valuable insofar as they’re useful. The Morocco mission shows how much the Widows don’t even blink at unpleasant tasks, right up until being forced to actually self-destruct. It’s that ingrained in them.

As much as I’ve always argued that Nat’s primary motivator is protecting people, especially girls, it’s striking to see how MUCH they show that here, how she is happy to repeatedly put herself in harm’s way if it means that someone else doesn’t get hurt, or at least she’s not responsible for hurting them. The scenes with the Widows where they’re going for lethal and she’s desperately trying not to, they have the Steve-in-Winter-Soldier parallel but they’re also somehow even worse because Steve is making a conscious choice, even if it’s a bad choice- shout-out to everyone who remembers the “was Steve suicidal at the end of WS?” discourse- and I don’t know that Nat does fully realize the choice she’s making there.

And the thing this does for me is cast so much of what we know about Nat from earlier in a different light. All the things she’s done that were dangerous but heroic- I don’t doubt that it was her wanting to do good, but how much was also her not remembering (or not even realizing) that she’s allowed to have regard for her own safety too?

And I don’t think the other Avengers, or SHIELD, know. It’s so much better and hurtier if they see Natasha how we did, foolhardy but brave. When Nick says that Romanoff is comfortable with everything, he thinks she is, and she thinks she is, and they don’t realize the chasm between what they mean by it, and honestly the more I think about this the more I am in agony. Because how much did they ask her to do because they thought she was normal-human-levels of okay with things when she was actually just not aware that not-okay-with-things was even an option for her?

When she faces off against Loki or Hammer or Pierce, when she lets the Hulk come after her, when she stands on Sokovia and comments on the view- this is all stuff she can do, because the only thing at stake is her health and her life, and how much or how little does she value that? When have we seen her prioritizing in a way that puts her needs first? Because the closest I can come is in Civil War, when she wants to protect the family despite none of the family being willing to protect alongside her. (In a lot of ways this makes BW the conclusion of her unfulfilled goal in CW; Nat’s biggest concern is that family can stay together, and even though it’s a different family, she does eventually manage it with someone.) Even there, it’s Natasha attempting to prioritize the group; I’m not sure if Nat even knows how much she wants them okay for the well-being of the group versus how much it’s for herself until she figures it out at the end of BW- and even there she only uses a parachute to get YELENA to safety and then puts herself in freefall!

And to be clear here I don’t think she actually DOES realize the extent of this by the end of the movie. I don’t think if you went to Natasha and were like “so how about that behavior that amounts to passive self-harm because you will always prioritize someone else?” she wouldn’t even acknowledge it, because it’s just What Heroes Do, and while we in the audience have seen the internal conflict that prompts in most MCU protagonists I don’t think Natasha has. And I don’t think she realizes the impact of not having a serum or a metal suit or magic. I think- and I feel like her conversations with Yelena support this- that Nat sees heroism as atonement and doesn’t realize that there are kinds of selfless heroism that don’t involve fully disregarding the self as anything but a symbol for other people to use, the one who does the poses to be on the magazine covers to show that there’s good in the world, rather than being someone whose life is worth living just because she’s her.

Like I have spent so much time being angry over the five years in Endgame, where we saw so many Avengers give up while 3.0 were the only ones who kept working, and I did not remotely understand what MMRR said they were going for, with Natasha not realizing what was happening and just throwing herself into it. And to be clear, the idea that she was pathetic for not moving on from heroism after the snap is still crap. But the idea that it’s yet another manifestation of Natasha not realizing that her life is not just there to be used but also there to be her life, that she doesn’t need to keep bleeding to stop others’ pain? That’s the good stuff and I wish they’d put it in there, because it puts so many new spins on her sacrifice and make it so much more about Natasha than about a plot hole that needed filling.

Anyway I’m still a fucking wreck over this and I love it, thank you for opening these wounds!

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow movie spoilers #BW spoilers #Natasha Romanoff #Black Widow #cw: self-harm #cw: suicidal ideation

[allofthefeelings]

Hey! I saw your awesome meta about the Nat deleted scenes. One thing I've been thinking about lately is that line from the CW junior novel where Nat talks about getting dumped in the middle of siberia with her Red Room classmates. One impression that I think a lot of fans get of the mcu Red Room because of this and also a tweet from the Agent Carter set is that only one girl ends up surviving her Red Room "class". (Yelena most likely wouldn't count bc she's younger than Nat and part of a different class) But in BW we clearly see an entire team of widows that were trained together. Any thoughts?

So I have spent WAY too long thinking about this, and based on what we know from various interview snippets from the past two years I think there’s a way to fanwank it all together. If I’m remembering things correctly. Which, to be fair, I may not be.

This gets long. (CW for brainwashing, indoctrination, and abuse- the usual Red Room and Bucky mixture.)

Didn’t they start the movie discussion with talk about the Red Room being re-created to make the current Widows? That could mean new policies, and honestly, “training 32 girls but only keeping one of them” seems like a much less efficient policy than “train all the girls and use them til they die of their own accord.”

(I mean, the metaphor of only one girl surviving is great, and the girls having to kill each other to survive is a perfect way to use brutality to train away their emotions and attachments, but from an Effective Evil Organization standpoint, it’s an unforced expenditure of resources.)

This would allow both the technically-canon we have to stand (because I’m pretty sure both the novelizations and Agent Carter can be seen as TECHNICALLY not the MCU if they’re directly contradicted; only the movies are 100% canon, and as we know even that can be flexible) and create an army of Widows for Nat and Yelena to fight.

There’s also the possibility that killing the girls off IS a slow lifelong thing, like all the Red Room alums are being useful as long as they can but only the one in each class who survives the longest gets the title of Widow. And I know Black Widow is for the deadly spider but that would also play well into the idea of a widow being the one who outlived her companion(s). So then the scenes like in Agent Carter where preteen girls fought to the death wouldn’t be unheard of but also wouldn’t be the norm; the girls would know it COULD happen at any moment but it would be rare.

I can fanwank that a lot better than I can fully square Agent Carter with what we’ve seen from the trailers of Nat and Yelena. I mean, it makes sense that if they need to go undercover as a family they would take children they already had in the murder factory, but it didn’t seem like Dottie and her cohort were going on missions; they were just training and being indoctrinated 24/7. I think there’s so much that could be so interesting if Nat was subjected to similar- did she have to watch Beauty and the Beast the way Dottie watched Snow White? (someone write that Bruce/Nat right now)- but we can’t ignore that she and Yelena had three years OFF from indoctrination. Working with Melina and Alexei would obviously be considered an honor, but would it set them behind in their murderstudies? “Is it better to be taken out of the Red Room and returned or just left there permanently” is more than just a “is it better to know freedom and lose it or never have it”; did Nat and Yelena always have to play catch-up? How does that impact who they are today?

And how much does Bucky-was-taken-by-Hydra apply now? Like, he still has the red star on his arm and Alexei’s costume is damn similar; can we assume Department X was somewhat involved in Bucky’s training as well as the Red Room’s? Because that would mean that in the decade or so after Dottie’s class was indoctrinated they developed actual brainwashing abilities, and would that have been used on the Widows, or was that considered more expensive and less efficient than the indoctrination, especially if the girls didn’t know any different? Bucky had memories of another world that needed to be wiped away, but we saw Dottie didn’t.

Did Yelena and Natasha getting exposed to three years as normal kids change whether the Red Room thought they needed brainwashing versus indoctrination versus both?

And what is the organizational structure of the Red Room by the time Nat and Yelena are there? In Age of Ultron we had Madame B but here we have Dreykov; do we know if Madame B is even in this? Given how many of the visions in Age of Ultron were symbolic rather than literal memories, are we sure that Madame B was ever real, or was she a construct meant to represent all of the authority figures of the Red Room in Natasha’s psyche? If the heads of the Red Room are men- and we know that Dreykov is a Red Room authority figure and that Melina has been through the Red Room several times herself- why was that symbol a woman? (I mean, yes, I know, it’s Joss, but how do we square this in-universe?)

To be clear all of these are terrible options, every last one of them, but I am so excited at all the different flavors of terrible we will get to explore.

#allofthereplies #bolshoiromanova #Black Widow #Black Widow movie #Red Room #Natasha Romanoff #Yelena Belova #Bucky Barnes #wild speculation #*aggressively headcanons*

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Thinking about Natasha and Wanda in the context of Natasha and Yelena. Yelena and Wanda are even about the same age. Did Wanda make Nat think of Yelena? Did she easily embrace a big sister instict towards Wanda, or was it too complicated and painful and she kept her emotional distance, at least a first?

I feel like the existence of Yelena- both when they were kids, and during the time of the BW movie- recontextualizes a LOT for us, for how Nat interacts with all of the Avengers. We see her so frequently as the Responsible One, joking about "always picking up after you boys" but also frequently put into the position of being the one who has to get shit done while everyone else is allowed their personal hang-ups and distractions. I've always seen it as the role the token girl has in the text, because in all likelihood that was the entirety of the motivation behind it, but I feel like with our current context we can easily reframe that as Nat defaulting to being the big sister no matter how much she tries to pretend that was never who she was, especially given how much we saw that their situation in Ohio basically necessitated her parentification because no matter what roles they played, one else was going to actually protect Yelena.

I think even if the Yelena parallel didn't ping for her with Wanda before Civil War, spending time with Yelena during this movie would have sparked something, and explains why in Infinity War she's at least trying to establish boundaries with Wanda and keep her safe rather than the kind of laissez-faire approach she's had elsewhere. I don't think that their relationship in IW is different enough from AoU/CW that it needed an explanation, but this one works for me nonetheless.

But also, the parallel I kept coming back to was STEVE and Yelena. Blonde, mouthy, formerly tiny but now fully able to defend themselves, more committed to ideals and big gestures than Nat's practicality. Also, steals a car and Nat ribs them for it. No wonder SJ's talked in interviews about seeing Steve as a younger sibling; Natasha in Winter Soldier was at least in part replicating the dynamic she never fully got to have with Yelena.

I want to go back at some point and do a deep dive for how much of Natasha we can see in these terms; how much she was- consciously or subconsciously- trying to fix the wrongs from two decades earlier. I'm not sure I have a strong opinion in any particular direction yet. But I love that this is an option now for how to read them- it gives us so much more to play with.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow movie spoilers #BW spoilers #Wanda Maximoff #Natasha Romanoff #Yelena Belova #Steve Rogers

[allofthefeelings]

the whole double agent thing, IT REALLY STICKS IN THE DNA doesn't it Nat. Love IS for children. And how Fury and Hill not trusting her in CATWS was probably a reinforcement of the recurring motif in Nat's life that people she cares about are only in it for the job. And again in Endgame when everyone else disbanded. And even in Civil War? Nat's arcs are always about trying to KEEP EVERYONE TOGETHER and it's never worked out in her life, we have what we have when we have it, indeed.

No wonder she's married to the job. No wonder she couldn't let go of keeping things running during Endgame. The job is in the only context in which she's known family, yet every member of those families consistently reinforces that the family, to them, is a part of the job, it's not real. They have other, real families- Peggy, Laura and the kids, Pepper and Morgan, Loki, Vision and Pietro- and what she views as a family they view as work buddies.

And you know what else. I'm retconning AOU. I bet she was already seeing signs of fracturing within the Avengers, with Tony's ego and Steve's stubbornness, and out of everyone Bruce is the only one without a fixed family outside the Avengers. I think she latched onto him to keep someone for herself who would actually be hers, hers in the way that even Clint turned out not to be during those five long years.

Hey, anon, JSYK, you fucking WRECKED me with this. Way to COMPILE ALL THE PAIN IN A SET OF MESSAGES.

(I have never been happier to see a stack in my inbox after work. Seriously, you MADE MY FUCKING DAY. I mean you made it miserable but in the best way? I DON’T KNOW HOW TO SAY THANKS FOR MAKING ME SAD, BUT THANKS FOR MAKING ME SAD.)

So there are two parts of this that hit hardest, right? (I mean, all of it hits hardest, because Nat omg, but.) That moment in the trailer where Nat and Yelena get forcibly pulled apart, which recontextualizes Nat trying to keep everyone together at all costs (especially Civil War), and the overall concept of Natasha finding security with a group of people only to find that people just considered it a job and they could stop it at any moment, which colors everything, I guess, but especially the Five Years. And BOTH point to why, in Endgame, everyone else in the OG6 goes their own ways but Natasha will stay on forever, because for all that she can slip on identities like costumes, for all that everyone sees her as the most changeable of all of them, Natasha wants to be the stability she never had- she changes the decoration, not the foundation, and those five years must have felt like everyone else saw the foundation as not worth holding on to.

(Also I love the idea of Nat looking for not just normality or stability through romancing Bruce but also trying to find a place that’s hers in Ultron, even though you have only given me MORE reasons to be disappointed that Bruce/Nat could have been great in like 40 different ways and Joss Whedon has never met any of them.)

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow #Black Widow movie #Natasha Romanoff #meta #ANON I WANT TO HANG THIS IN THE LOUVRE

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Is there a universally accepted idea of how old Natasha was when Budapest happened?

I haven't found one, and I can't parse one out.

I was hoping an answer might show up on commentary but the blu-ray doesn't have commentary. So I assume that if we get that information, it will be in the Art of the Movie book, which BN.com indicates comes out in August of 2022.

That said, here is some pointless and unfounded math:

Natasha's ID in the openings give her a birthday of December 3, 1983. Accepting that as accurate for now (which means believing SHIELD had the wrong birthday for her, which is... hilarious and great, tbh), and assuming release dates of non-flashback-movies are accurate in-universe, that means she was 26 in Iron Man 2. Budapest was Nat proving her loyalty to SHIELD; by IM2 she's seen as loyal enough that she's in Fury's inner circle.

Coming at it in the other direction, while we don't have a date for her Red Room "graduation," the opening credits do give us more of a sense of Nat aging. We know how she looks at eleven (like Ever Anderson); we see teen Widows who look very clearly younger than Nat did in the Ultron flashbacks, when she was getting her hysterectomy.

(Two things I should note here: I assume the red-haired girl with a gun in the BW credits is Nat, but we don't actually know that; for the sake of argument, it could just be a different Widow. And due to Wanda's magic, it's very possible that Scarlett-As-Nat is how Natasha remembers herself but she actually looks like Ever Anderson or the red-haired girl in the credits.)

From a different angle: Young Antonia was played by Ryan Kiera Armstrong, who was born in 2010, so when it filmed she was presumably about 9 or 10, so say Toni was that age. But then we'd need to math to get to adult Antonia, who is played by Olga Kurylenko, who was born in 1979, which means she would have been about 40 when it filmed, which is older than Scarlett when we know that Nat was much older than Antonia, so that helps us literally not at all. But for math purposes, it's important to note.

Also, I know nothing about costuming, but I didn't notice anything in the Budapest outfits that help us place it in a specific year.

We also know that the timeline is murky, because- again, if we accept all on-screen film canon as equally accurate canon- Nat says in Avengers she was making a name for herself as a mercenary before Clint was sent to kill her and saved her instead, but in Black Widow she says that killing Dreykov was her final act of separating from the Red Room. Nat's loyalty to SHIELD would be less suspicious the farther out she is from defecting, but we don't know if that's measured from when she first left the Red Room or when she tried to take out Dreykov.

(Full context here is also important because we know that after Nat's defection is when Dreykov started using Melina's techniques on the other Widows; I had been assuming that was right at Budapest, and Toni was the first attempt, but could it possibly have been earlier and Toni only got the implant after Dreykov decided her disfigured body was fundamentally broken? There's no good answer here but there are a LOT of intriguingly bad ones.)

So IF we accept all of those givens, which I am not fully ready to do but for the sake of argument will do anyway, I think Budapest had to happen sometime between 2002 and 2009, and I think I would place it around 2007, but I am not particularly confident in that assessment and am quite happy to be proven wrong.

#allofthereplies #beholdthethunder #BW spoilers #Black Widow movie spoilers #MCU timelines #AND THIS ISN'T EVEN GETTING INTO HOW THE MULTIVERSE FUCKS EVERYTHING UP

[allofthefeelings]

Little baby Nat with her shaggy disaster-dyed blue hair and red roots coming through! I love her. I will protect her. I want to see her grow up healthy.

I spent so much time assuming she was never able to express herself so not expressing was just what she knew, but it turns out she had a time when she was able to express herself and did it with a terrible blue dye job, like this is somehow even better than I’d imagined.

Like we know that grown-up Natasha uses her hair and makeup and fashion to tell stories to make people see what she wants them to see but tiny Nat was also doing that but with completely opposite goals and in an extremely teenagery way, I feel like my heart’s going to explode into rainbows that are crying.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow movie #Black Widow movie trailer #Black Widow #Natasha Romanoff #I'M SO WRONG AND I'M SO HAPPY ABOUT IT

[allofthefeelings]

So far we know BW is about systematic abuse, trauma and healing, that Scarlett finds it interesting what each director chooses to focus on with Nat and with Cate it was the vulnerability and the embarrassing, uncomfortable parts. Every interview I read seems to show that they've really, really thought about Nat as a character and what defines her and

this is a character who has had like, zero actual dedicated character growth other than to act as a foil for the leads, so maybe I might disagree with an assessment of character here or there because everyone's really just sort of filling in a lot of blanks and doing it differently

but just basic insight like 'post-cacw was the first time Natasha has ever been working truly alone without a larger organization behind her' which like, duh, but them just having thought about her enough to realize that is so huge. whatever this movie is, I'm glad Nat gets the respect of being considered in detail

Anoooooooooon I want this ask injected directly into my veins.

The truth is, in some ways it makes me furious, if I really think about it: How this movie was not at all conceptualized when Civil War was filmed, and somehow everyone there just missed how many characters' arcs end abruptly in the middle. (It's telling how much of the 2021 MCU is filling in the blanks from Civil War: how Wanda and Vision came to love each other; where Sharon went after giving Steve his shield; what happened to Bucky in Wakanda; everything that happened with Natasha.) The things you point out should be obvious to anyone putting together a narrative. But since it wasn't, I'm grateful it is now.

I am so fucking glad that, even though clearly not enough of them could control Civil War (or anything after it, for that matter), enough people still existed who could say "Hey, Natasha doesn't stop existing the second she's outside a man's focus" and more than that, who is Natasha outside their focus? And that they found answers, that- from everything we can tell- pulls together bits and pieces from Nat's seven appearances to make a patchwork that forms a complete whole.

It's canon fanfic. I can live with this.

Like you said, Natasha has always been defined in opposition to whoever the important character of the moment is, so we mostly know her as a series of absences: the ways she is not Tony, not Steve, not Clint. I've filled in so many details for myself, pulling from different places, and as I read press about this movie I have to keep reminding myself that even the things I think I know I really don't; I've made educated guesses, based on the absence, but this is the first time canon is defining Natasha wholly by her own presence.

And I agree with you; I'm surprised at the idea this is the first time Nat's working alone (didn't she have time between the Red Room and SHIELD when she was a mercenary, based on the history she shared in Avengers?), but I'm happy to sacrifice that guess for an answer, especially when they story they seem to be promoting feels so ridiculously relevant to my interests.

(I can't bring myself to believe it's a coincidence, either, that the publicized villain of her movie is a literal mimic, a human mirror, whose face they're making sure we don't know; if it's just a happy accident that this is what Natasha is fighting on her one solo outing, it's a hell of a good one.)

Kind of along the same lines, I'm not surprised this is the first press junket that's explicitly acknowledging how Natasha was objectified in her earlier appearances (it's not like they were ever subtle with that), but I am glad, because you don't bring that up when you plan to continue it, you bring it up when you're presenting a rebuttal.

It feels like in a lot of ways this entire movie is refuting the ideas that most of the audience- and, frankly, most of the writers and directors- had about Natasha, and I am so excited to see that she's finally getting a solid focus and a clear foundation. I can't wait to learn where I got her right and where I have new places to explore.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow #Black Widow movie #Natasha Romanoff #don't mind me i'm just erupting with emotions #cw: abuse

[allofthefeelings]

Cate Shortland talking about Lorne Balfe's score for Black Widow: "He said, 'I want to earth her, because she's been unearthed in the movies in the past. I want to give her this flesh and blood.' And he's created this soulful score that is really Russian." I'm so used to giving and now I get to receive!

I have been terrible about being on Tumblr lately but the press for the BW movie is literally so good. I feel like every other day I get a new piece of information that- doesn't clarify what the movie's going to be about, exactly, but it settles me, because the things that I'm most worried about seem to be things that they've been thinking of. I don't know that that means they'll handle it like I want them to, but they're thinking about it, which is miles ahead of anything we've gotten before.

I particularly love this quote because of the term "earthing", because it makes me think about how so much of Natasha's story has been without a foundation. Periodically I notice that someone reblogged one of my posts about how the MCU has never established exactly what Natasha's "red in [her] ledger" is and get frustrated anew; we know she has a past she's ashamed of and we know she was raised in a murder factory, but we don't have any of the details, so we can't fully contextualize any of her behavior. It seems from all the talk about this movie that what they're doing is providing the soil so that we can see Natasha with roots, and I am so extremely here for it.

(Also, this is not at all the point, but while I know that that's become a meme, "I'm so used to giving and now I get to receive" is from Big Brother (season 16, to be specific) and it delights me every time it's used on the internet because Big Brother was my primary fandom before I got into Avengers and I actually got into Avengers because I saw it with people I knew from reality TV fandom and this just feels very nice and full circle, so thank you for that too.)

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow #Black Widow movie #Lorne Balfe

[allofthefeelings]

Because he can talk to birds, Sam finds out through pigeon networks that Bucky is tending to a rooftop coop. Bucky very much wanted to keep this secret.

Bucky still does not believe Sam can talk to birds (Sam has told him but Bucky is convinced he’s just fucking with him) so he’s started combing everything in his building for bugs, getting increasingly stressed.

His building has never been more secure and Sam still knows things about his life. Bucky is going to have to up his game.

#allofthereplies #cosmictuesdays #Sam Wilson #Bucky Barnes

[alloftheblackwidowfeelings]

Consider Natasha helping Steve break their friends out of the Raft, and seeing the way Wanda was restrained and treated like a weapon more than a human, after having just dealt with all this renewed Red Room trauma.

Gee, thanks, Satan.

I love that we have official canon confirmation that Nat was part of the Raft breakout (although, honestly, Civil War not making that clear from the get-go was a fucking PROBLEM but I digress), but like, honestly? Let's just go through the list of pain that we now have context for.

Let's start with the whole group. Assuming they have no more information than the audience, they have no idea where Nat is.

--Oh no. They probably don't even know what side she's on, right? She helped Steve escape with Bucky but the only people who saw that were Steve and Bucky, and then the people on Team IM, who think she betrayed them. The people she put herself out there for don't even know she put herself out there for them.

And now they're in extrajudicial sea prison and- if I'm remembering the third act of CW correctly, which to be fair I may not be because I usually quit after act 2, and I assume someone will correct me if I'm wrong- while they wonder about whether Steve might come save them, no one even considers Nat would. Because they think she was on the other side? Because they think she wouldn't care? Because they know she's a regular human being and that makes it damn hard to take down governments? Because they assume she'd keep her circle small? Like every single possible reason behind that assumption is a world of pain directly contradicted by the events of BW, which they will never know about. Which hurts.

And at the beginning of the movie, she didn't seem to want to break them out! Like, she kept insisting she was better without a team. Obviously, she was denying her emotional attachments to make things hurt less- and obviously she has a lot of baggage around what it means to be a team and what it means to be family and whether any of them would look for her- but she was in fact actually kind of being the person they thought she was. Like it sucks when people have a bad view of you but it sucks in an entirely different way when their negative view of you is based in reality. It's a brutally harsh look in the mirror.

(And I think this is where the events of BW most change Natasha; I think that any belief she might have had that if she could get out of situations anyone could if they really want to got a rude awakening when it turned out her escape from the Red Room directly led to the other women not being able to, and I think that's shock to her system that she desperately needed. This movie more than anything showed me some of Nat's flaws and I love it for that.)

And then you have to consider that, at least 2 weeks before this (because the jet scene was 2 weeks after the Red Room takedown), she broke Alexei out of the gulag. Like, she did what she had to to take the Red Room down, there's absolutely no faulting her for that, but imagine seeing all your friends stuck in high-security prison and knowing that you had the capacity to break people out of those, in fact did it less than a month ago, but left them there. Again, this is not me saying that she did the wrong thing, but imagine the guilt on her end!

We have Wanda, who's about Yelena's age, the only woman on the Raft, being forcibly restrained far more than any of the men are- how does that not conjure up memories? And then on the other hand it's Wanda, who has the ability to manipulate memories and impulses, who is basically the organic version of what Dreykov did! AND she's the one who brought back Red Room memories Nat clearly didn't want to deal with during Ultron and clearly hadn't processed by this point! How fucking confused must Nat's feelings about Wanda be at this point? She's simultaneously what Nat wants to protect and what Nat wants to protect from, and she's sitting there immobilized in prison in a fucking straightjacket.

And then we have Clint and Scott, which, OKAY. I was talking to @sidewaystime about which Avengers Alexei and Melina mirror (it was an EXCELLENT conversation, it gave me a lot of feelings, but I digress), and she pointed out that Alexei considered himself trapped during the assignment with Nat and Yelena and was complaining about how terrible it was even after (we assume) over a decade in a literal Russian gulag, while we know that Steve and Nat rescued Wanda and Sam but Scott and Clint were both willing to stay behind and deal with the government because they'd rather risk jail than not see their kids again. Like repeatedly through the MCU, Clint and Scott explicitly and repeatedly choose family over everything, immediately after Nat had to confront the people who threw her and Yelena away two decades ago and also had to confront the fact that she essentially did the same thing to Yelena. And here's Scott and Clint representing exactly what she wishes had been done to her, and/or that she'd done!

And all of this, all of this, is stuff none of them know. Given that in Endgame both Steve and Clint assert her only family was the Avengers, she never let them know the foundation of her world had been this shaken and they were all embodying parts of that to her! And she was presumably just putting those feelings in the Feelings Box where we work very hard to pretend they don't exist, while she's piloting a plane and waiting for a group of superheroes to re-board it from the prison, which has to bring back feelings from both Yelena holding the plane while she gets Alexei and from when she was fucking ten years old flying to Cuba with her dad surrogate on the wing with a gun and her mom surrogate bleeding out.

Even Sam, who probably prompts the least trauma for Nat (his closest mirror is Yelena, not Alexei or Melina) and who has the best idea of how to interact with other human beings, who would probably be respectful of triggers, has no idea she even has these triggers! So it's not like anyone can protect her, because she's not giving them the necessary information to do so and so it's all just ENDLESS MINEFIELDS.

Literally everything from the end of Civil War hurts more now!

Just imagine if any of that had been intentional.

#allofthereplies #Anonymous #Black Widow movie spoilers #BW spoilers #Cap3 spoilers #The Raft #Natasha Romanoff #Cap3 critical