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Okay, I have more to say about Age of Ultron
There are two things I wanted to talk about in more depth, one thing I liked and one I did not.
Things I liked: Wanda!
It took me a little while to warm up to her, but by the end, Wanda was one of my very favorite things about the movie, possibly my single most favorite thing, and I was so shocked by that! I went into the movie feeling very uncomfortable and weird about the movie aging her down to barely-out-of-her-teens, and making her the victim of skeevy experiments to boot. It just felt kind of icky and awful. And she wasn't even a character I was particularly attached to in the comics, so basically I went in without much interest in her, and expecting to feel uncomfortable with a lot of what the movie did with her.
But Wanda in the movie was SO GREAT! I loved that ultimately, her arc was so central, and she got so much agency in it. It's all about HER choices and what SHE wants. She starts off letting her hatred of the Starks rule her, and kicks Tony off onto his creation-of-Ultron path because of it. She and Pietro get to have revenge on Strucker for torturing them (off camera, but still). And then she's the one who recognizes what Ultron really is, and has a change of heart, and goes to stop Tony and then ends up reluctantly working with him. (On the same side, at least.)
Then during the battle, she ends up getting overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what they're up against, when Clint finds her hiding and offers her an "out", and then she makes that choice to be an Avenger, and gets her wonderful hero's entrance with the dramatic mood wind, flinging Ultrons left and right. And at the end, she loses the thing that's most important to her, and she's prepared to go down with the ship, but the Avengers won't let her. It almost breaks her, but not quite, and somehow she gets back up and she's ultimately part of the new team, moving forward with the new SHIELD.
I wish we'd gotten to see more of her at the end of the movie, after Pietro's death. But the movie gave her really excellent, solid characterization, and set her up beautifully for exactly the kind of "rising from the ashes" character story that I adore.
Like I said in my last post, I want all the Wanda fic now. ALL THE WANDA FIC. Because there is so, so much story to tell with her! She's only ever been a weapon, and she's only ever been close to one person, and now she has to learn to live without that person and to be something more than a weapon.
And I want ALL the fic about Natasha helping Wanda because she's been there herself, and Wanda making friends with the Avengers and learning how to be part of a team, and Wanda taking college classes to try to figure out if maybe being an Avenger is just a stop along the way instead of her end goal, and Wanda and Vision figuring out how to person together, and Wanda bonding with Bucky over their shared background as Hydra experiments, and Wanda and Tony learning how to be proper allies. Wanda fic! Wanda vids! Pretty much just ALL THE WANDA FOREVER. (Also a Scarlet Witch movie, plz. MARVEL, HERE IS MY MONEY.)
Things I did not like: the Natasha/Bruce storyline.
Which I only disliked mildly while I was watching the movie (aside from a moment or two of pure knee-jerk DO NOT WANT during the scene in which they talk about having babies) but the more I think about it, the more my hatred for it grows. Like I said in a comment to the last post, really the only things I liked about Natasha in the movie were the Natasha + Clint stuff (which nailed my Natasha-Clint headcanon dead on) and the little bits of Natasha + Steve we got. And that's so frustrating! I love Natasha, in both the MCU and the comicverse. But her storyline with Bruce ended up being all the worst things that a canon romance can be. It felt terribly shoehorned in, flat, and graceless. Even her final scene with Fury is about Nat and Bruce, not about Nat and Fury, who really need some closure on their relationship but ended up not really getting it BECAUSE BRUCE. And it ended up sticking Nat into a stereotypical female role -- she's literally the person who is responsible for calming his rage, and she's suddenly out of nowhere torn up about not having kids ... and the thing is, THIS COULD ALL WORK, for a different character or with some graceful tweaks to Nat's existing characterization, but the way it came across in the movie, for me anyway, was just a general pile of awful and DNW.
It's sort of like ... I can see how, with different writing, it could have worked? Like, maybe Nat has worked through enough of her childhood trauma, thanks to her friendship with the Avengers and slowly stabilizing self-concept, to the point where suddenly she's getting hit with a whole new set of trauma, previously obscured by the rest of it, wherein she's realized that she wants all the things she was denied (children, a family, a stable life). But we never got the setup for that. Or maybe getting into her first serious relationship since changing sides has made her want things she never wanted before. But she and Bruce aren't even really a couple yet!
Not to mention the sheer ick of having the Red Room's "graduation ceremony", the thing that all the girls' training is pointed towards, being ... taking away their ability to reproduce. Not that forced sterilization isn't awful, because it is! But there's just something about the way the movie made it central to the Red Room, and to Natasha's memories of the Red Room, that I absolutely hated. I generally dislike plotlines that center around reproductive horror, and while the existence of Red Room-related reproductive horror is entirely in keeping with both the comics and the whole Red Room concept, the sudden central-ness of it is not.
And aside from all of THAT, I am still deeply, deeply frustrated about the scene between Natasha and Bruce in the Bartons' home. Spun in a slightly different way, it could have genuinely hit the notes of poignancy and healing that it was apparently going for. A lot of the emotional notes from that scene are the exact ones that Steve and Tony's final scene at the end is actually hitting, with Steve talking about how he is no longer really the person who wants stability and family. And yet, it was such an amazingly tone-deaf scene. What possible reason has Natasha EVER given Bruce to think that she cares about having babies except that she's female? For a different female character, that's entirely something that might be a central issue with the relationship. But nothing in Natasha's past characterization even hints at it. And, speaking as a woman who worked through a lot of ~feelings~ about infertility and never being able to have kids, I can't quite do justice to the gut-punch of Natasha's "We're both monsters" to Bruce. Her later dialogue softens the blow a bit, talking about her fear that she'll never be more than what the Red Room made her -- because that, that is the Natasha we've been given in previous movies. These are concerns she has! But the whole scene just came across so, so ... aargh. It's like MCU!Natasha, as established, has been replaced by a pod person whose life suddenly revolves around relationships and kids. The thing is, you could put her into situations where those things come up for her, or gently lead her there with subtlety and restraint, but this had all the subtlety of Thor's hammer to the face.
Aargh.
On the bright side, the movie did nothing irredeemable to destroy Nat for me, and since the relationship never really got off the ground and they're separated at the end, it can easily be handwaved or ignored if future writers don't want to deal with it. Which I rather hope they don't, at least if they can't do it in a way I'm more comfortable with.
Things I liked: Wanda!
It took me a little while to warm up to her, but by the end, Wanda was one of my very favorite things about the movie, possibly my single most favorite thing, and I was so shocked by that! I went into the movie feeling very uncomfortable and weird about the movie aging her down to barely-out-of-her-teens, and making her the victim of skeevy experiments to boot. It just felt kind of icky and awful. And she wasn't even a character I was particularly attached to in the comics, so basically I went in without much interest in her, and expecting to feel uncomfortable with a lot of what the movie did with her.
But Wanda in the movie was SO GREAT! I loved that ultimately, her arc was so central, and she got so much agency in it. It's all about HER choices and what SHE wants. She starts off letting her hatred of the Starks rule her, and kicks Tony off onto his creation-of-Ultron path because of it. She and Pietro get to have revenge on Strucker for torturing them (off camera, but still). And then she's the one who recognizes what Ultron really is, and has a change of heart, and goes to stop Tony and then ends up reluctantly working with him. (On the same side, at least.)
Then during the battle, she ends up getting overwhelmed by the sheer magnitude of what they're up against, when Clint finds her hiding and offers her an "out", and then she makes that choice to be an Avenger, and gets her wonderful hero's entrance with the dramatic mood wind, flinging Ultrons left and right. And at the end, she loses the thing that's most important to her, and she's prepared to go down with the ship, but the Avengers won't let her. It almost breaks her, but not quite, and somehow she gets back up and she's ultimately part of the new team, moving forward with the new SHIELD.
I wish we'd gotten to see more of her at the end of the movie, after Pietro's death. But the movie gave her really excellent, solid characterization, and set her up beautifully for exactly the kind of "rising from the ashes" character story that I adore.
Like I said in my last post, I want all the Wanda fic now. ALL THE WANDA FIC. Because there is so, so much story to tell with her! She's only ever been a weapon, and she's only ever been close to one person, and now she has to learn to live without that person and to be something more than a weapon.
And I want ALL the fic about Natasha helping Wanda because she's been there herself, and Wanda making friends with the Avengers and learning how to be part of a team, and Wanda taking college classes to try to figure out if maybe being an Avenger is just a stop along the way instead of her end goal, and Wanda and Vision figuring out how to person together, and Wanda bonding with Bucky over their shared background as Hydra experiments, and Wanda and Tony learning how to be proper allies. Wanda fic! Wanda vids! Pretty much just ALL THE WANDA FOREVER. (Also a Scarlet Witch movie, plz. MARVEL, HERE IS MY MONEY.)
Things I did not like: the Natasha/Bruce storyline.
Which I only disliked mildly while I was watching the movie (aside from a moment or two of pure knee-jerk DO NOT WANT during the scene in which they talk about having babies) but the more I think about it, the more my hatred for it grows. Like I said in a comment to the last post, really the only things I liked about Natasha in the movie were the Natasha + Clint stuff (which nailed my Natasha-Clint headcanon dead on) and the little bits of Natasha + Steve we got. And that's so frustrating! I love Natasha, in both the MCU and the comicverse. But her storyline with Bruce ended up being all the worst things that a canon romance can be. It felt terribly shoehorned in, flat, and graceless. Even her final scene with Fury is about Nat and Bruce, not about Nat and Fury, who really need some closure on their relationship but ended up not really getting it BECAUSE BRUCE. And it ended up sticking Nat into a stereotypical female role -- she's literally the person who is responsible for calming his rage, and she's suddenly out of nowhere torn up about not having kids ... and the thing is, THIS COULD ALL WORK, for a different character or with some graceful tweaks to Nat's existing characterization, but the way it came across in the movie, for me anyway, was just a general pile of awful and DNW.
It's sort of like ... I can see how, with different writing, it could have worked? Like, maybe Nat has worked through enough of her childhood trauma, thanks to her friendship with the Avengers and slowly stabilizing self-concept, to the point where suddenly she's getting hit with a whole new set of trauma, previously obscured by the rest of it, wherein she's realized that she wants all the things she was denied (children, a family, a stable life). But we never got the setup for that. Or maybe getting into her first serious relationship since changing sides has made her want things she never wanted before. But she and Bruce aren't even really a couple yet!
Not to mention the sheer ick of having the Red Room's "graduation ceremony", the thing that all the girls' training is pointed towards, being ... taking away their ability to reproduce. Not that forced sterilization isn't awful, because it is! But there's just something about the way the movie made it central to the Red Room, and to Natasha's memories of the Red Room, that I absolutely hated. I generally dislike plotlines that center around reproductive horror, and while the existence of Red Room-related reproductive horror is entirely in keeping with both the comics and the whole Red Room concept, the sudden central-ness of it is not.
And aside from all of THAT, I am still deeply, deeply frustrated about the scene between Natasha and Bruce in the Bartons' home. Spun in a slightly different way, it could have genuinely hit the notes of poignancy and healing that it was apparently going for. A lot of the emotional notes from that scene are the exact ones that Steve and Tony's final scene at the end is actually hitting, with Steve talking about how he is no longer really the person who wants stability and family. And yet, it was such an amazingly tone-deaf scene. What possible reason has Natasha EVER given Bruce to think that she cares about having babies except that she's female? For a different female character, that's entirely something that might be a central issue with the relationship. But nothing in Natasha's past characterization even hints at it. And, speaking as a woman who worked through a lot of ~feelings~ about infertility and never being able to have kids, I can't quite do justice to the gut-punch of Natasha's "We're both monsters" to Bruce. Her later dialogue softens the blow a bit, talking about her fear that she'll never be more than what the Red Room made her -- because that, that is the Natasha we've been given in previous movies. These are concerns she has! But the whole scene just came across so, so ... aargh. It's like MCU!Natasha, as established, has been replaced by a pod person whose life suddenly revolves around relationships and kids. The thing is, you could put her into situations where those things come up for her, or gently lead her there with subtlety and restraint, but this had all the subtlety of Thor's hammer to the face.
Aargh.
On the bright side, the movie did nothing irredeemable to destroy Nat for me, and since the relationship never really got off the ground and they're separated at the end, it can easily be handwaved or ignored if future writers don't want to deal with it. Which I rather hope they don't, at least if they can't do it in a way I'm more comfortable with.
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and while the existence of Red Room-related reproductive horror is entirely in keeping with both the comics and the whole Red Room concept, the sudden central-ness of it is not.
Thiiiiiiis. Like yes it absolutely makes sense that the Red Room sterilizes its tools. But it would just be . . .a thing that happens at some point. It would not be a Big Deal and it would not be about ~*severing their connection with empathy*~ or whatever, it would just be about the fact that any other form of birth control (not to mention pregnancy termination) is riskier, more complicated, a bigger pain in the ass, and more likely to damage their assets. A single surgery on the other hand and suddenly neither that nor menstruation is ever a problem again.
But, like.
The one really unfortunate way that Nat/Bruce is in character is if Insight-mess knocked her security back so much that she feels like she HAS to have a handle on the Hulk (who scared her so badly last movie) and has decided that the best way to get it is how she controls so many of her marks.
It's just . . . that's the ugliest, least-healthy shape of Natasha ever and I don't want her to be there. And otherwise, hello pod person what?
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Like yes it absolutely makes sense that the Red Room sterilizes its tools. But it would just be . . .a thing that happens at some point. It would not be a Big Deal and it would not be about ~*severing their connection with empathy*~ or whatever
RIGHT???? It makes sense as a thing they would do, but it should just be a routine aspect of the girls' assassin preparation, not a huge deal (and I'd forgotten the empathy thing, BRB HEADDESKING FOREVER).
I don't think it's impossible for Bruce and Natasha to develop genuine feelings for each other. I could even see it starting out as Natasha's people skills giving her above-average Bruce-handling skills on missions, so they end up spending a lot of time together because of that. IF IT HAD BEEN SET UP LIKE THAT. Or if we'd been given IC reasons for it. Or, like, anything. But as presented in the movie, it's just so completely out of left field; it's like there are supposed to be a bunch of intermediate steps that were never shown.
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Just ONCE I want a barren lady character who just shrugs and figures that, in this case, the bad guys have accidentally done her a favour - not because she's a monster who shouldn't have children, but because she's dedicated her life to stopping monsters and kids don't really fit well with that. I love it when characters get to redefine things that were done to them (or accidents of fate, whatever) and claim them in powerful ways! I do not love it when characters are denied agency and the narrative explicitly supports the idea that they have been permanently damaged by it.
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The infertility scene is awful, but I don't think it necessarily has to overshadow what's good about the movie; I really did, by and large, enjoy the movie despite it. YMMV, though.
I love it when characters get to redefine things that were done to them (or accidents of fate, whatever) and claim them in powerful ways!
Yeah, and Natasha already has elements of this in her character! This would have made about a bajillion times more sense than what they actually went with! And I don't even think this is me talking as a disgruntled Natasha fan; it just doesn't seem to be set up at all by anything that's gone before. Blargh. :P
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Yessss! That element is very much one of my favourite things about Natasha! It makes me sad to see it ignored.
Who are our unattached guys? *rolls dice*
Too accurate! :P
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I will say as one with a hormonal IUD, that whole not bleeding thing has been very convenient, and I can't imagine the Red Room wouldn't want to eliminate all that messy cramping and bleeding.
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An agent who bleeds randomly is an agent who is just that much more likely to leave a DNA sample at the scene. This is Not Good, if you're in the business of creating infiltrator/stealth agents.
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... that said, there are some other options for what they did to Natasha. They might have done an endometrial ablation on her, for example, in addition to a tubal ligation -- that is, burned off the uterine lining. (I know about the existence of this as a thing because it was suggested to me as a solution for my particular problem -- I have recurring issues with heavy bleeding, and if we weren't able to control it hormonally, which so far we have been, endometrial ablation was the next suggested step, being less invasive and less likely to cause menopause than a total hysterectomy. Ectopic pregnancies are still a risk, however.)
I guess it's not out of the question that she might have actually had a hysterectomy, or even had EVERYTHING removed. I'm not actually sure if the health issues would be that bad? Hysterectomy is a thing that women have done, after all -- and it's not like the Red Room is that concerned about the long-term health of their graduates. (Though it seems like a ridiculously huge step when a much simpler tubal ligation would do it.)
/is probably overthinking this
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The problem with a hysterectomy, even if the ovaries are left in, is that it speeds up menopause (and if they remove the ovaries it's immediate menopause), and the way they were training Natasha it sounds like there was a lot of sexpionage involved - they're going to want to keep their agents looking young as long as possible. And that amount of training looks like they're planning to have them operative for more than a few years.
/is also probably overthinking this
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Serious question here: how much of an effect would early menopause have? My general impression, I guess, is that the effects would be fairly subtle -- bone loss, for example, which would suck for someone in an active physical occupation but wouldn't start showing up for awhile. Would it actually be more dramatic than that? I guess I'm wondering whather it would be that obvious if Natasha actually did have a hysterectomy or complete ovarian removal. (Not that I'm trying to argue. Just genuinely curious!)
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If she had a complete hysterectomy including ovaries, yes, it should be fairly obvious to a close observer within a few years - skin elasticity, breast shape/firmness and texture/thickness are affected, as well as muscle strength and bone strength. It also means a higher risk of heart attack and stroke. Menopause symptoms start immediately. I just can't see the Red Room doing this when they've trained them so thoroughly.
If she still has ovaries, the effect is usually much slower, more like a normal menopause, but she has a 50% chance of undergoing menopause (chemically defined, not by the usual "no periods in a year" of course) within four years and an 90% chance within 10 years. 8% of women undergo menopause immediately even with one or both ovaries left intact. A small percentage go through menopause and then their ovaries spontaneously start working again for no apparent reason. So she could have had this procedure and not had menopause, but again I think the odds of the Red Room doing this as a standard procedure are fairly low.
And do I think the movie writers thought about this for more than two seconds? Nope!
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I've seen plenty of fics and meta based on the "scan" image of Bucky which suggest that Bucky has similar implants, generally containing adrenaline and/or incapacitating drugs; why can't the Red Room adapt that to keep their sexpionage agents looking young and sexy? (We pretty much have these now, as birth-control implants! So why can't the Red Room have a more advanced version and have it much earlier? The MCU clearly has a technological development timescale that differs significantly from our universe, so it works for me.)
Or, if we're going with the comics-canon where the Widows have had some serum-esque enhancements, then that's enough handwavium for me. If Steve can freeze solid without suffering cellular destruction and Bucky can fall of a thousand-foot cliff without dying, Natasha can lose a uterus without hitting menopause.
And do I think the movie writers thought about this for more than two seconds? Nope!
Heh, yes, this is ultimately my suspicion, too! :D
Ultimately,
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For that matter, there's every likelihood that the Widows have the same kinds of implants that fans have speculated about Bucky, e.g. adrenaline/endorphin bursts, and/or "emergency shutdown" drugs/kill switches, and/or tracking devices, in addition to a basic hormone delivery system; clearly Hydra and the Red Room have some overlap, given the way the Winter Soldier is associated with both, so why not assume their technological researchers are sharing useful tips? :D They have similar levels of time and training invested in them, so it makes perfect sense to me that their owners wouldn't shy from amplifying them in every possible way... and guaranteeing their compliance.
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That's actually one more reason I lean toward a hysterectomy being more likely. If the Red Room feels so strongly (in this canon) that infertility is key for their operatives that they deliberately induce it, I'd expect them to take a draconian approach to it - no matter how advanced the tech a Widow can bribe or steal or con her way into acquiring, it's going to be a lot harder to replace an organ on the sly (involving major abdominal surgery) than to undo a relatively minor amount of damage to part of an organ (as with a tubal).
An external piece of tech, along the lines of the uterine replicator in the Vorkosigan series, would probably be the easiest solution for a Widow in that case; I'm sure there are plenty of shady supervillain-esque organisations willing to create an embryo from your stem cell/ovary/DNA sample for the right price, and then you just have to hide the replicator somewhere innocuous for nine months. I don't think such a thing has ever come up, though, even in the comics? I'm not super-familiar with them, but nobody has even mentioned it in all the discussions lately.
the comics the version of the Super Soldier serum they gave to Natasha directly caused her infertility
I really prefer this explanation! It's so much more interesting to me if the serum itself resulted in infertility (and Natasha isn't much fussed), not least because it gives me lots of delicious fic ideas about Steve's possible infertility... But then, I also totally dig the suggestion I saw in a meta discussion about 1940s eugenics notions: that sterilisation was included as a part of the 'deal' that resulted in Steve receiving the serum! Because I have a whole lot of complicated feelings about infertility and voluntary sterility and "voluntary" sterility and societal notions of what people are supposed to want and value. It's like catnip to me, but it's so rarely explored in fic beyond the most shallow and typical approaches, alas.
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Or, if it's a consequence of the serum rather than deliberately engineered, I love the layers and layers that adds to the story, because it's the Super Soldier Serum; what does that say about the concept of "soldier", in the Watsonian and in the Doylist perspective?
I love the idea of "what if the subject had children before being enhanced", but am not so much a fan of the idea that a blood transfusion can pass on the serum! If that were the case, surely there would be a lot more supersoldiers running around, given how much blood they appear to have drawn from Steve in Agent Carter. Not to mention - how often does Steve get captured? And Hydra had Bucky for decades, and yet never drew blood from him? You could argue that maaaaybe the SSR was too squeamish to draw transfusion-quantity samples from Steve, but Hydra wouldn't have had any such qualms, especially not when they could draw it over a period of time that wouldn't endanger the subject. It just doesn't hold up for me. :P
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...I may have basically prompted that on a kinkmeme, once upon a time. :D
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It's also not how they dealt with it in the comics, where it was just a handy side-effect of all the other things they did to the Red Room girls, so it was totally unnecessary unless you are making some explicitly gross point (with her attempts to fail so she wouldn't graduate) about motherhood defining womanhood.
The whole scene was just poorly written and awful.
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There was telling going on instead of showing. Clunky, clunky telling.
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About Wanda, I really loved her in the movie, but I have problems with her backstory. I loved that she decided to work against Ultron when she found out what he plans to do. But she was voluntarily working for Hydra, who were planning to kill thousands if not millions with project Insight and generally rule the world - and Wanda had to know that, because she's a telepath, and she doesn't strike me as the type of person who wouldn't read her employers' minds out of respect. And she was fine with that, and with Hydra's other plans? It's only killing absolutely everyone that's going too far for her?
One possible explanation is that the movie suggests that her and Pietro's powers are still quite new, so maybe when they volunteered they didn't know about Hydra's plans, and when they found out they were just waiting for a good moment to leave. Idk, I'm still not completely happy with it.
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But that is just me.
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I don't disagree that it'd take longer, but he did have them for a number of years. *hands* YMMV
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I do think her telepathy powers are rudimentary at best -- she doesn't seem to be able to do more than one person at a time, or read/manipulate them from farther away than touching distance. And she seems to be quite limited in how much she can actually get from them, as well as the amount of manipulation she can do; she can send people into a dream state, or pull up memories/skim off surface memories, but it appears to be pretty crude, more on the level of "now you're stuck in a memory" than "now shoot your friend". Though she's probably going to be getting better as she practices.
Which does raise the question of how much Strucker knew about her (
I also wonder if SHIELD could possibly have some experience already with telepaths. I haven't seen enough of AoS to know if we've ever seen any antagonists, in the Vault or elsewhere, who have telepathy, but it's not out of the question that they might have been developing something to counter it even before Strucker's experiments.
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It's possible that her telepathy was still so rudimentary that she didn't find out about things like project Insight. (Though I would be very surprised if anti-telepathy shielding existed already.) But at the very least she definitely knew that whoever she was working with was doing experiments on humans that were extremely unsafe and that killed several people. Even if they were volunteers, that seems like a huge warning sign. But she and Pietro were willing to put up with that if it meant revenge on Stark.
(Why did the others volunteer? What were they told was the goal of the project?)
(Sidenote, I think it's strange that they focus their hate on the guy who built the weapons and not on whoever actually attacked their country...)
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I also kinda feel like there was probably an element of "our world and family are here" -- Strucker was the known evil, and the twins may have had friends and allies among the workers in the lab, so it wasn't until the Avengers basically blew up their world and Ultron offered them another "out" that they started looking beyond it.
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But we don't know, because we don't know Sokovian history. Was Sokovia part of Yugoslavia? What happened during the Yugoslavia wars? I read that the writing in the village was Serbian Cyrillic, which pretty much makes it impossible that it was not involved in the Yugoslavia wars. A SHIELD base in the Balkans in the 90s seems surprising, it was such an unstable region and nobody would have been happy to have them there. Hydra having a long-term base in that region on the hand makes more sense, because they thrive on chaos; on the other hand it means that they have to have not insignificant influence in the region and be involved with the conflicts there to ensure their survival. Was Hydra secretly allied with Milošević? Did they supply weapons for the Serbian army in exchange for being able to conduct their experiments without any oversight? What happened after the wars?
I would love to read fic about Wanda and Pietro as Serbs. If Hydra was allied with the Serbs they could also have appealed to Wanda and Pietro on those terms: it's not too far from Nazi racism to the sort of ethnic racism that was/is present in this region, and as kids it's no surprise Wanda and Pietro couldn't see through it. There are examples of European far-right parties today trying to appeal to some Eastern European ethnicities, Serbs in particular, to gain voters, implicitly supporting the idea that they are better than others.
Here it becomes very important that the movie erased Wanda and Pietro's Jewish and Romani backgrounds, which I really really hate. Because as Jews and Romani Wanda and Pietro would have grown up faced with so much prejudice that I don't see how they would ever ally themselves with Hydra. It makes them completely different characters, and it would be so important to have these characters. Instead they are "generic" Eastern Europeans, as if something like that existed.
ETA: Maybe Sokovia is such a small nation (when did it become independent?) that it wasn't actively involved in any war, but it was bombed during the NATO intervention because Serbian troops used it to retreat and resupply (and also because of the weapons they got there, though Hydra managed to intervene so the castle wasn't bombed directly.) But because Sokovia wasn't actively at war its citizens blamed only the UN and NATO for attacking them. Maybe that could work.
(Still doesn't explain why Wanda and Pietro focus their hate on the guy who built the weapons instead of whoever fired them, but whatever.)
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Sterilization as the Red Room graduation is so... it's a very male idea, and I hated that scene because it reinforces the falsehood that a woman's value lies in her reproductive abilities. She can save the world but if she can't push a baby out of her yaya, she's worthless and not a 'real' person. Just no. Women do not have to want kids. Not having them, by choice or not, doesn't make a woman less. Horrible message. (Aside from the biological fact that if they took her ovaries she'd have gone into early menopause which has physical effects that would be detrimental to her effectiveness as an operative, so I don't buy that she doesn't have ova that could be salvaged, there's adoption.) A more likely Red Room graduation would have involved the ones who made the grade executing the failures, as proof they're cold enough and obedient enough to kill people they know and to eliminate potential bitter failures turning on them at later dates.
Arrgh.
At least the real Natasha showed up when she pushed Bruce over the edge because they needed the Hulk.
With you on the Wanda love, though, that was a huge and happy surprise in the movie. On the question of the twins knowledge of Insight, I would think Hydra operates in cells, thus the chop off one head, another springs up thing and Strucker's cell might not even have been privy to what Hydra in America was up to. A telepath can only glean what's there to read.
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YES. I think this is one aspect of what I've been poking at lately with a lot of canons' lack of narrative empathy with their female characters, because they can have all the pieces in place, and lots of screen time for the women, and yet come at the whole thing from a point of view that is just, in very subtle ways, wrong. And I think this is a good example of that! It's taking the whole nightmare scenario of the Red Room, and the loss of bodily autonomy there, and distilling it down to a shorthand involving reproductive parts. It's not that reproductive horror/bodily horror wouldn't be part of the Red Room -- actually, it quite likely is -- but it just feels ... well. Like you said, very male -- like a guy's idea of what women would be afraid of in those circumstances, which isn't actually quite what we are afraid of.
Natasha did get some excellent scenes in the movie, though, including the one you mentioned! I just wish I didn't have so much "nope" over a lot of the romance. Ah well.
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I mean, honestly, in Natasha's situation, I personally would be more afraid of NOT being sterilised/openly told that fertility was out of the question; otherwise the idea of being a broodmare for the people who control me would be a very obvious interpretation! And I can think of few more horrifying ideas than that one - imagine having to assume that your one-day daughter would be held as a guarantee of your behaviour... not to mention she'd be put into the same murderous training and abuse that you've undergone.