I feel
like Hawkeye has never gotten quite a fair shake from me, and that’s in large
part due to the first Avengers
movie. It was my introduction to his
character, and it’s pretty lacking to say the least. Even though he’s been given more
characterization in subsequent movies, it still sort of fights with the
blankness of my first impression of him (a few Hawkeye-related spoilers.)
True, I
came to the MCU a bit backwards. The Avengers is actually Hawkeye’s
second film appearance, but even if I’d seen his cameo in Thor first, I still wouldn’t have had much sense of him. Between the couple of minutes of screentime
there and his first few minutes of The
Avengers before Loki puts the whammy on him, there’s time to figure out
that Hawkeye 1) is great with a bow and arrow and 2) seems to enoy deadpan
snark. That’s not a lot to go on, and
putting characters under a spell is always going to resonate more when we
actually know who they are and care about them.
(Granted, going into The Avengers,
I only knew Tony and Pepper, but if I’d seen it as intended, Hawkeye would have
still been the Avenger I’d known the least about. By the time that movie hit, we’d met everyone
else in more than just cameos – even Bruce had had the sort-of-canon(?) Edward
Norton movie, not to mention the Hulk is much more of a pop culture figure in
general.) As it was, the main reason I
cared about what happened to him the first time I saw it was because I saw how
important he was to Natasha, and I cared about her. Nothing to do with who he was, because I
didn’t know.
That was
a tough position to put Hawkeye in for his first big rodeo, and for me, he’s
never quite recovered from that. Every
other MCU hero has made a bigger impression on me, including newcomers like the
Vision, supporting heroes like Rhodey, and briefly-appearing ones like Pietro. Because it isn’t like we haven’t gotten a
better sense of who Hawkeye is since then – wry humor and a wicked shot, sure,
but he’s also a competent agent, a loyal friend, and a (secret) family man with
an apparent obsession with home renovation.
It’s just that that filled-in-later characterization can’t supplant the
cipher I initially saw him as, and that’s a problem.
What I do
like about Hawkeye is mainly how he relates to other characters. I like his friendship with Natasha,
especially in the last part of The
Avengers; the “do you know what it’s like to be unmade?” conversation
between them on the Helicarrier is particularly good. I also enjoy their traded comments as they
fight in Civil War. But even more, though, I think I like his
interactions with the Maximoffs. His
running feud with Pietro is great – despite what we know in hindsight, I still
love that moment in Age of Ultron
when he’s grumbling to himself about how he could shoot Pietro right there and
no one would ever know – and it’s cool to watch the evolution of the
quasi-mentor-thing he has going on with Wanda.
After being the only one not to get hit with her mind mojo and in fact
giving her quite a good hit himself, he eventually becomes the person who helps
her collect herself during the attack on Sokovia, giving her the focus she
needs to use her powers for good and help protect the city. The main reason he joins Team Cap in Civil War is because he finds out Tony’s
keeping Wanda under house arrest at the Avengers base, and I like that.
Although
I’ve come to enjoy him more than my first exposure to him as a Loki brain
puppet, I feel like Hawkeye will always be near the bottom rung in my
estimation of Avengersverse characters, and that’s a shame. Because really, it’s about what was written for him rather than who he actually is
as a character.
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