Just thinking about another detail regarding Bucky that, to me, is incredibly heartbreaking... Bucky and Steve grew up in the 1940s, a decade when the stigma surrounding mental health was brutal, especially within the military. What we now recognize as PTSD was then called *combat fatigue* or *exhaustion*, and was often interpreted as weakness, cowardice, or a “lack of character.” Talking about how you were feeling wasn’t really an option: it could mean being seen as a burden by your peers, receiving a stigmatizing discharge (the infamous Section 8), or ending up in an institution where treatments like electroconvulsive therapy—or, in more extreme cases, lobotomy—were used. That’s why it’s particularly cruel to watch Bucky in 1943, right after Steve rescues him from the Hydra camps. His personality is clearly no longer the same as it was before deployment: he drinks alone at a bar, his uniform and once-neat hair are now unkempt, he’s quieter, more distant, clearly scarred. And no one—not even Steve—noticed or mentioned this. And then there’s that scene on the train, when Hydra ambushes them. Bucky leans against the wall with trembling hands and an expression of pure horror. It’s a full-blown panic attack—the kind of reaction that, back then, would have been interpreted as a personal failing, not for what it really is: his nervous system trying to survive something he shouldn’t have had to endure. That invalidation not only exacerbates the symptoms (we now know that stigma and self-blame worsen trauma), but it also overlaps in a particularly tragic way with what Hydra did to him afterward. The very same tool used in hospitals at the time to “treat” those supposed defects—ECT—is the one they systematically employed to erase his identity, memory, and agency until he was turned into a weapon. What was already an institutional threat in Bucky’s world becomes, in their hands, an instrument of absolute dehumanization. And there’s another aspect that’s often overlooked. Bucky grew up in an environment of very rigid masculinity, where men were taught that showing vulnerability was a sign of weakness and that they had to endure in silence. That socialization doesn’t disappear just because the world changes. It’s very likely that it has left him with an internal barrier that’s difficult to break down: the idea that the symptoms of complex trauma (hypervigilance, dissociation, difficulty trusting others, the fear of “breaking”) are his own fault, rather than survival mechanisms his brain developed to keep going. That belief can make any attempt at real therapy feel, deep down, like confirmation that you’re “broken,” rather than a safe space to understand what happened to you. It's not just that Bucky carries a tremendous amount of trauma. It's that he grew up in a world that taught him that trauma was, at its core, something to be ashamed of. And Hydra made sure that lesson was driven home in the most violent way possible 😭💔