many will tell you that the dog motif is passé and cliché and overdone . don't listen to them. keep chaining that fictional man to a fence
Steve has lived through a world-ender before. At least, it was the end of the world for him. Everyone he knows and loves, gone in an instant. The ones who aren’t dead, warped by time and age.
It was not so simple as an instant this time.
the hip holes are just very Kate Bishop [x]
bonus: Yelena over here trying to keep her shit together-
Can we talk about how Steve Rogers would probably fight to keep abortion legal and safe, because he saw how many people used to die back in the day because all abortions were illegal and unsafe and he knows if a person is pregnant and don’t want to be pregnant they will find a way to not be pregnant?
Can we talk about Steve Rogers telling off right wing politicians who say minimum wage isn’t supposed to be a living wage? Can we have him saying ‘No, I remember when it was instituted. It was supposed to be a living wage, senator.’
Can we talk about Steve Rogers supporting a raise in SNAP benefits, because he knows how it feels to go hungry?
Can we talk about Steve Rogers having problems with this country’s military industrial complex?
So I wrote up all this stuff weeks ago and drafted it and forgot about it until I seen these tags from @kahuna-burger
And they are absolutely right. And I’m so glad someone agrees with me on this analogy, because this is EXACTLY how I see him, and exactly what I get into below. This is the whole thing I was writing up previously:
“The winter soldier was treated like a living weapon.”
Mmm, yes. The whole living weapon thing is not a wrong metaphor. But I’d argue that there’s something else far more accurate (aka what the now added tags say).
He wasn’t their weapon. He was their dog. In such an uncanny way, almost literal sense. I wouldn’t even say a guard dog, I’d actually say he was Hydra’s hunting dog.
I mean think about it. Really. They actually treated him like a dog.
He wears a harness. He wears a fucking muzzle for gods sake.
But that’s just the bare minimum of similarities.
What do they do when he gets out of line? To punish him, to put make him obey and learn to fall back into good behavior? They shock him. Just like how people have always used shock collars and electric fences for dogs. When he’s been “bad”, when he does something he’s not supposed to, he gets shocked to correct that behavior.
They also smack him and get physical. People don’t do that with weapons. There’s no point in that. And you wouldn’t wanna damage or harm a weapon. But people do smack dogs. They hit their dogs when they don’t behave or do something wrong because harm, pain, and damage will teach it. Just like it teaches him. And they’ll heal so it’s not a concern.
He was trained to obey commands. Just like dogs. He does any little thing he’s told because he’s conditioned with a rewards system. He even has specific command words that trigger compliance. Just like you teach a dog to sit or roll over with trigger words, he has em too. I mean literally, he has a Pavlovian response to said words. And what was the original Pavlov experiment done on? A dog. The only difference is he doesn’t get physical treats. His treat is praise, which they manipulated him into being desperate for. They even go as far to incentivize him with this praise (think about the bank scene, where Pierce praises him), just like you would present a dog with a treat when you want it to do a trick. Hell, actually praise is a way you reward dogs too, because they listen and learn when you tell them they’re a “good boy, good dog”.
Hydra asserts their dominance over him just in case he turns on them, just to remind of who’s the “alpha”. Because they know (just like big dog owners) that he can tear them up, he can attack and shred them to pieces, but if he thinks he’s not the “alpha” then he’ll back down.
And yeah, he’s protective and reliant on his “owners” like most dogs would be. But like I said, not just a guard dog. A hunting dog. Because just like people teach their dogs to track down and go after bears, squirrels, dear, etc. he was also taught how to track down stuff to kill. Stuff that his owner wanted dead. That’s his whole purpose, to hunt for them.
Also, think about how Hydra obtained him. It’s like if a person saw an injured dog in a ditch, brought it to a vet to heal up, then took it home to have as their own pet. Because that’s exactly what they did with him. It’s just the owner was an abusive one.
He wasn’t treated like some expensive tank or powerful arsenal of guns. He was treated like well trained hunting dog.
things i never expected to learn through a tedtalk but now am glad to know:
the founder of Sirius XM radio is a sapphic trans woman and is currently trying to preserve her wife’s consciousness in a digital file so her wife can be immortal in the body of a robot.
There are very few constants in Agatha Harkness' life. The grief. The cycles of power, losing it and taking it.
And this.