allofthefeelings: sidewaystime: allofthefeelings: linzeestyle: livebloggingmydescentintomadness: brb
allofthefeelings: sidewaystime: allofthefeelings: linzeestyle: livebloggingmydescentintomadness: brb-reclaiming-erebor: #i love how terrifying her face is in the second gif#like she’s all flirty#very similar to how she talked to sam that morning#but her demeanor is completely fucking different#like with sam and steve she’s natasha#she’d eat them alive but in the good way#which baddies she’s the black widow#where she will flirt and then murder them#and idk just the fliry greeting and the terrifying grin was such a good connection to her codename#i just#i love this movie so much#natasha (via buckysexual) that guy is pissing his pants over that smile this kind of fear is what i aspire to inspire Okay no but real talk, this was the moment. This was the moment in Cap 2 where I knew the Russos got Natasha. The costuming and everything else, yes, good, on-point, but this is the first time we’ve really seen the Black Widow at her most terrifying. Tony touches on it, certainly, in IM2 - she’s a double, triple imposter; she’s figuring him out, keeping an eye on him (does he need help? Does he need to be taken down?) while disarming him by being the kind of woman he’d bed and discard, has a hundred times…but those weren’t weaponized moments, they were strategic. But on the Lumerian Star, we see Natasha in action in much the same way we see Steve in action, sliding easily from one performance to the other. The first is that of watching Steve for cracks that might appear – trying to set him up, trying to keep him in a world he’s very clearly denying, not unlike what she was sent to do with Tony. And the second (which, notably, is a version of herself she shuts her comm off before producing) is this: deadly, dangerous, and terrifying; playing the role that was placed on her as an insult, a joke, and that she reclaimed as an honor and a horror story against the people that tried to make her a monster. Because this is what Age of Ultron got wrong. We already know damn well that Natasha is competent; that’s never been a question. But TWS is the first time we begin to see the underpinnings of that competency: where they come from; what they cost her. The Red Room tried to make Natasha into a weapon – they tried to take her body, her sexuality, her agency away from her; tried to make her the “femme fatale” in every stereotypical sense of the term. The Black Widow title was meant to be very much literal: no man could resist her, much less survive her (to paraphrase Bucky in 616). But Natasha saw that; she always understood that. And Natasha was always more than they believed of her. She took the training; she took the mantle. She took the pain and the suffering and the torment that created the Widow, and she took the rage that came with having the name made into a joke, a pejorative at her expense, the “whore-slut-spy” she never was. It’s the same reason Bucky remains the Winter Soldier, despite the fact that his life and body was taken from him in its creation. Because the Soldier, like the Widow, is a legend. And legends are valuable; legends don’t die. Legends grow, and they transform, and they become bigger, and scarier, and more terrifying than any one human being can become. Natasha Romanoff never believed herself to be any of the things the Red Room reduced her to. But the Red Room gave her a weapon that they couldn’t take away; that they never had control of, for all of their arrogance in believing they did. This is Natasha Romanoff, Black Widow. But it’s also Natasha Romanoff, the survivor. She knows what they say about her – and as long as she knows who she is; as long as she knows she’s worth more than the pejoratives, the slurs, and the attempts to cage her in…well, then those things, those things are only a weakness to them. Legends are so often warnings, after all. Oh, but the turning off her comms is so significant to her character too. Not because of what it says about her as the Black Widow, but what it says about her as Nat. Natasha wants to form relationships so desperately. She guards it well, but you can see it; a lot of it is in deleted scenes, but it’s pretty close to the forefront of her motivation in both Cap2 and Cap3. Cap2 is Natasha trying to make Steve her friend, and she’s genuinely hurt when he doesn’t trust her. I’d argue that’s partly because she’s been making a concerted effort to NOT show her the depths of who she can be. She’s been presenting in a way that shows herself as incredibly competent, but not as dangerous. She’s been showing him the soldier aspects of herself, rather than the spy ones- the parts she thinks he’ll find palatable. To me this scene always has a sense of letting go. She’s not performing the Black Widow, trusted member of the Avengers and elite Agent of SHIELD. She is BEING the Black Widow, with all the dark aspects she normally tries to hide. Her smile is almost feral. Natasha makes a conscious choice to not let Steve see the full extent of the Black Widow, because she doesn’t think it fits what he wants. And I think that’s part of why she’s visibly disappointed- her face falls, despite how adeptly she normally masks her feelings- when Steve is annoyed with her. She was showing him the quippy, friendlier version of the Black Widow, and it still wasn’t enough to be trusted. Do we ever see her show this side of herself in front of Steve? Do we see her show it in front of any of the Avengers? Or is this something that only the audience knows about her? There’s such an interesting duality to Natasha – specifically one that she shares with Bruce and which is what made Natasha/Bruce really interesting to me – in that Natasha and the persona of the Black Widow aren’t really separable in a lot of the same ways that Bruce and the Hulk aren’t separable (and, realistically, for a lot of the same reasons). And a lot of her struggle is about trying to thread the needle between who she wants to be vs who she thinks she is vs who other people think she is and Cap2 is about throwing all those things at each other and putting them in conflict until the only resolution is her stripping off the mask and (metaphorically) turning the comms on when she does that file dump and then stays to face the consequences of all of it. The interesting thing about the file dump is that it’s a really detached way to share things. Or, rather- she shares the information. But there’s a visceral part of seeing it. I think we get that as viewers; Avengers has Loki listing all the things Nat has done, but that’s very different from seeing her training in action, not against faceless aliens but against people. One of the things that disappoints me most about the franchise is that we’ve never really seen the Avengers’ reactions to Nat’s history. We see them seeing her as Good Now, but they don’t really seem to reckon with her viciousness. This is where the comparison to Bruce is such a good one, because for him they have to; the Hulk’s rage can’t be contained, and they have no choice but to be aware of the consequences of invoking him. But Natasha’s can be hidden, and she chooses to hide it. -- source link
#natasha romanoff