northisnotup:fuck-me-barnes:OK, but let’s talk about how “Dottie” is trying on an identity here. Thi
northisnotup:fuck-me-barnes:OK, but let’s talk about how “Dottie” is trying on an identity here. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen her staring at herself a little oddly in a mirror, but in this scene, it’s even more pointed. When she opens her mouth, she speaks in Peggy’s British-accented voice - “Hello. I am Peggy Carter” - and it’s replicated perfectly, to an eerie degree.Let’s recall that the girls in the Red Room are finely made weapons. They don’t have identities, they don’t have personalities, they are tools in a box forged explicitly for the glory of the motherland. We watch one of the little girls best another in hand-to-hand combat and, with an approving nod from the handler, breaks her neck - a punishment for failure. Those girls grew up together. They are not friends. Personal connections are unnecessary distractions.A sense of self is unnecessary, as well. If the entirety of your existence requires you to forge a new identity, whole-cloth, in order to go undercover and infiltrate operations, what’s the point of knowing yourself, who you really are?This is how “Dottie” was raised. Thus, the mirror is fascinating, every time. Who’s in it? Who shows up this time, or the next, or the time after that? She’s been trained to be in a state of constant dissociation. What reflects in a mirror when a mirror is empty? The only logical response is to try on the persona of the one who’s supposed to be reflected in it. “Hello. I am Peggy Carter.”This is also how Natasha was raised. “Who do you want me to be?” The most chilling line in that entire movie IMO, it was so raw. Even after several years of working with SHIELD, and presumably going through intense deprogramming, Natasha still tends to default to mirror-mode, reflecting back what she expects others want to see from her.Where else might this apply? Let’s recall that, while these girls are being molded and shaped into Black Widow agents, there’s an American who the Soviets and Hydra are attempting to mold and shape as well.Except it didn’t work like it ought to. For starters, he wasn’t raised in the Program. He came already having a sense of self, an identity, and a hell of a lot of unnecessary, distracting ideas about “friends” and “freedom” hard-forged into his neural connections. Harder to break, harder to shape. Hence the wipes, the drugs, the brutal conditioning. They tried to do to him what they did with the girls, but it was too late, their techniques flawed and imperfect on someone who had already developed a concrete self. I just - god, I could talk about this for HOURS.I would also love to talk about how this works for Gamora and Nebula too. Expected to call each other sister, and family while brutally tearing one another down in the hopes that this time it will be her that father punishes. Their entire bodies rewritten over and over to be faster, stronger, the perfect daughter, the perfect tool. -- source link
#dottie underwood#natasha romanoff#black widow#agent carter#marvel