wintercyan:

gemfyre:

No but, HYDRA, a generally covert operation goes full on overt with the attack on the causeway.

I was thinking about post-recovery Bucky trying to get back into the ‘real world’, but everyone recognises him because he can’t hide that damn arm ALL the time.

But before the causeway incident, hardly anyone would have known about the Winter Soldier.  He could have spun some story about his prosthetic and people would have had to have shrugged and accepted it.  But the causeway was all over the news – AND they sent him out with that arm in full view, something to remember him by.  Every man and his dog has now seen that masked man bristling with knives and guns and a very distinctive metal arm.

So now they all know who he is, and that’s gonna make it so much harder to integrate back into normal society.

And I think HYDRA possibly did that on purpose, their intention was to dispose of the Asset once he’d killed that pesky Captain America and Project Insight was launched, but just in case he went rogue again, here’s something for EVERYBODY to recognise him by.

I think this is a point fanfiction authors should take note of, because this is one major difference between the comics and the movies. In my experience, post-CA:TWS fanfiction tends to fall into one of two categories:

1) The Winter Soldier is a ghost story and civilians don’t know who he is–this is true for the comics but not for MCU.

2) When Natasha leaked S.H.I.E.L.D.’s files in MCU she also leaked HYDRA’s files and somehow this means everybody knows everything the audience does about the Winter Soldier, including that he was brainwashed and/or that he’s Bucky Barnes.

However, #2 fails to take into account that there’s no way HYDRA kept all–or even a significant percentage–of its secret files on S.H.I.E.L.D. servers where anyone could stumble across them. Apart from a few S.H.I.E.L.D. mission reports, S.H.I.E.L.D. probably didn’t have any information on the Winter Soldier–they didn’t even know he was working for HYDRA (otherwise the HYDRA reveal after his first appearance wouldn’t have surprised anyone, they’d just gone “oh, the Winter Soldier is here, must be HYDRA again;” presumably, the S.H.I.E.L.D. agents who knew he was real believed he was Soviet). All S.H.I.E.L.D. had on the Winter Soldier was an impossibly long casualties list and a big red DO NOT ENGAGE THIS OPERATIVE stamp, and that’s what the public got with the S.H.I.E.L.D. leak.

In MCU, unlike the comics, the Winter Soldier is no longer a ghost story. Everyone has seen him on TV–there were news helicopters hovering over the causeway and people everywhere with smartphones and YouTube accounts, and you can bet that as soon as the media realised Captain America was involved every frame of every video and every pixel of every photo were endlessly scrutinised. They’d have spotted the Winter Soldier’s cybernetic arm and the red star (Fox News: “PUTIN DECLARES WAR ON US,” CNN: “COLD WAR ISN’T OVER”), and post-S.H.I.E.L.D. leak they’d instantly make the connection (Fox News: “SOVIET SUPERSOLDIER CONFIRMED FOR HYDRA TERRORIST,” CBS: “WHERE IS HE NOW? MANHUNT FOR HYDRA’S SUPER ASSASSIN,” PBS: “FBI WARNS PUBLIC: DO NOT APPROACH HYDRA SUSPECT”). Photos and descriptions of the Winter Soldier would be circulated everywhere, everyone would recognise the metal arm, and everyone would be convinced he’s still working for HYDRA and/or the Soviet Union. Cue mass panic every time someone recognises him because TERRORIST.

As for why HYDRA dispelled with the secrecy, though, I think the Winter Soldier was meant to be a distraction. First HYDRA needed to convince the World Security Council to resume the launch of Project Insight postponed by Fury, and they did this by framing Fury’s death as a shady deal gone wrong–meaning they couldn’t make his death look like an accident or natural causes, they needed to make a public display of it. Secondly, HYDRA didn’t know who Fury might have told about their impending takeover. Sending the Winter Soldier to very publicly execute the two main candidates meant 1) Steve and Natasha weren’t working 24/7 to unlock the USB drive because they were too busy not dying, and 2) anyone else Fury might’ve given the information would assume they were next and hide from the Winter Soldier rather than interfere with HYDRA’s plans. While everyone’s attention was on the Winter Soldier, HYDRA could quietly continue working towards launching the helicarriers. And once the helicarriers were in the air, HYDRA would have no further need for secrecy (killing 20 million people is about as unsubtle as you can get). HYDRA sacrificed Zola to distract Steve, and they sacrificed the Winter Soldier to distract everyone else.