Relationship Spotlight: Capt. Steve Rogers & Bucky Barnes (The Avengers)

Possibly my favorite of Marvel’s numerous incredible friendships, which include the likes of Jessica and Trish from Jessica Jones, Matt and Foggy from Daredevil, and Peggy and Jarvis from Agent Carter (man, the TV shows are just on fire!)  This one is undoubtedly the most intense – it’s not for nothing that they have so many shippers – and it’s one that I come back to time and again (spoilers for all the Captain America movies.)

In the first Captain America, Steve and Bucky’s relationship has a somewhat similar dynamic to Matt and Foggy, in that Bucky starts the film as the “stronger” one, the friend who looks out for the more vulnerable Steve and worries about his well-being but doesn’t patronize him, but that dynamic shifts when Bucky realizes Steve has been made into a superhero (although, in Foggy’s case, Matt is already Daredevil at the start of the series – Foggy just doesn’t know about it yet.)  It kills Steve that Bucky goes off to war without him, both because Steve wants to join up himself and because he knows the danger Bucky will be in.  When the initial results of the supersoldier program aren’t what Steve hoped for, learning that Bucky may have been captured is the push he needs to step up and be the hero he was made to be, dropping his war-bond shilling and mounting an unauthorized rescue operation.  It’s when Bucky is broken out of his Hydra prison that he learns about Steve being Captain America.

What I really love about this is that there’s not even a hint of Bucky being jealous or wrongfooted about this.  Having been used to being the alpha male in the friendship – particularly in the ‘40s – it would have been easy for him to feel displaced and struggle to figure out where he fits now that Steve doesn’t need Bucky looking out for him, but we don’t get that at all.  After a groggy “Were you always this tall?” reaction upon first seeing Steve, Bucky immediately gets behind the new Steve, working alongside him to escape the Hydra facility and leading the cheers for Cap when everyone gets to safety.  When he joins Steve’s Howling Commandos, he makes it clear that he’s following, not the famous Captain America, but “the little guy from Brooklyn,” his lifelong best friend.

No wonder it completely wrecks Cap when he sees what’s become of Bucky in The Winter Soldier.  Here’s his best friend, who most likely would have been dead by now even if he hadn’t seemingly been killed in the war, and he’s been twisted and abused, fashioned into a weapon for the enemy.  Shock, relief, and elation that Bucky is still alive, still in the world, one of Steve’s final tethers to his old life, but visceral horror at how he’s been victimized.  How his mind has been ravaged and he doesn’t even know himself, let alone Steve.  How Steve’s other friends tell him that Bucky is too far gone, and the only option is to put him down before he kills them.

But of course, this is Steve and Bucky we’re talking about here, and Steve’s unconquerable faith in his friend is able to break through Bucky’s programming enough for him to gain a foothold, to painfully start figuring out who he is and what’s happened to him.  Their friendship makes Steve stand beside Bucky when the entire world sees him as a monster and a terrorist, it makes Steve risk everything to keep Bucky safe from those who would kill him for the crimes his hands were forced to commit, and it brings Steve to blows with his other closest friends, all in the name of giving Bucky the chance to be his own person once more.  They don’t make many like these two these days.