cashew | OK, MCU has a Bucky problem (Reply)

Binge-watched The Falcon and the Winter Soldier last night. Did not get enough sleep. Anyway, after said binging, I've come to a conclusion: MCU doesn't know how to handle Bucky.

See, in Winter Soldier, Bucky was established as a fearsome assassin who can go toe-to-toe with Steve Rogers after he had received formal combat training. The cinematography depicted a Steve Rogers who is an almost unmatched hand-to-hand combat artist who has a very intelligent combat-oriented tactical mind, and despite all of this, he was still forced onto his back foot when fighting the Winter Soldier. Before he knew the Winter Soldier was Bucky.

In other words, a Steve Rogers who was holding nothing back and going all out against the Winter Soldier still needed help. This is clearly meant to establish the difficulty of overcoming the Winter Soldier as an adversary, but this presents a problem: The Winter Soldier is better at combat than Steve Rogers. This is the baseline that the story has set.

Now that Bucky is on the protagonist's side, the writers can't just ignore the baseline power dynamic. Regular combat common sense doesn't apply to Bucky because he basically breaks them. At the same time, he is supposed to be a side-kick to the current Captain America, Sam Wilson, who has been established that on a combat level, while he is quite capable, is nowhere near the level of a super-soldier.

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier tries to get around this problem by setting up Sam with more gadgets to augment his performance and use the fact that Sam is a modern day soldier with modern day understanding of modern warfare compared to Bucky's more outdated understanding of the world to give Sam the edge. Furthermore, Bucky is hampered by his guilt and desire to avoid harm. However, this explanation falls flat when the scenario is "Bucky and Sam go up against a super-soldier that's killing people with Captain America's shield". Now there's absolutely no reason why Bucky should be holding back and not going into all out attack; and it doesn't make much sense why the two of them would be having a hard time against a lone super-soldier.

Now it makes sense that Captain America (Sam or Steve) has to outshine the Winter Soldier. However, in the movies, Steve is usually able to get the upper hand on the Winter Soldier through cooperation, not sheer physical combat, because, as established before, Steve will ultimately lose if he goes one-on-one with Bucky. But The Falcon and the Winter Soldier seems to not know how to demonstrate that while Bucky is the superior combat character, Sam still is superior to Bucky in other ways thus deserving of the role as the main character, like Steve was in the movies. Instead, it chooses to power-down Bucky to hilariously pathetic levels (e.g., gets ass handed to him by a super-soldier teenager) that completely goes against prior canon.

So...the MCU has a Bucky problem. They can't make Bucky outshine Sam, but prior canon established Bucky as the better combatant and the writers don't know how to demonstrate Sam's strengths through anything other than physical combat. Which leads to Bucky getting powered down to levels that don't make any sense.

...And that's why I'm going to have to ignore the canon of TFatWS. Which doesn't even begin to get into the muddled politics of TFatWS.