By way of a gifset
showing off Daniel Bruhl's puppy eyes in one particular Civil War scene (the rational part of my brain: let's not forget there's a dead body in the bathtub throughout this scene, however) I ended up rewatching the Zemo scenes in
Civil War tonight, as you do ...
(How is this my life now.)
... and thinking about something that
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sheron and I were talking about recently, which is that while he is absolutely ruthless about his goals, and there are certain categories of people that he seems to kill without remorse (supersoldiers, Hydra, people who are actively trying to kill him), he actually seems to try to go out of his way
not to kill, hurt, or even attack most people if he doesn't have to. This is underscored much more heavily than I remembered in his establishing scene with the Hydra guy:
Zemo: Hydra deserves its place on the ash heap, so your death would not bother me. But I'd have to use this book, and other, bloodier methods to find what I need. I don't look forward to that.
It's really interesting to me that they went with this method of introducing him, where it's true that his introduction is ruthless and brutal, but also he appears to be trying to avoid what he considers unnecessary bloodshed or collateral damage, and the plot of the movie is actually his backup plan when the first one doesn't pan out. At the end of that scene, if anything, he looks resigned and unhappy - as he said, he doesn't mind killing the Hydra guy, but he really
didn't want to have to do the rest of it.
(There's a deleted scene with an alternate method of Zemo acquiring the book, which appears to involve
Zemo killing a room full of people - possibly only knocking them out, but that really didn't look gentle. Anyway, it's one of those narrative decisions where it turns his arc into something very different than if gassing a room full of people and then moving on to terrorism was actually his plan A.)
On the other hand, this rewatch impressed on me all over again how absolutely batshit his Plan B is.
Presumably his original plan - while obsessive, ruthless, and
not how we handle emotional trauma, Zemo - was relatively straightforward, with a minimum of collateral damage aside from wrecking the lives of a handful of people he blames for his family's deaths: Interrogate the Hydra guy for the information he needed, fly to Siberia and kill the other Winter Soldiers and get the video, and then, idk, perhaps mail the video to Tony and off himself in Siberia.
But no, that didn't work!
Then he had to go to plan B, which was more like:
"Step 49 of 1107: create a realistic Bucky face mask."
(I mean, it's in character, but also,
why are you so extra, Zemo.)
Anyway, I really like how consistent the CW part of his character development actually is with the TFATWS part, allowing for the fact that he's obviously unhinged with grief in 2016 and by the Falcon & Winter Soldier time period, has had some time to deal with it and develop a new Reason For Living (at least 50% less unhinged, though still kinda fanatic).
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