such_heights | Why I loved Natasha in Age of Ultron

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Why I loved Natasha in Age of Ultron

Everyone's reactions to Age of Ultron are pretty much the epitome of 'mileage varies', not to mention that we all watch different things and take away different things. That's great, and I don't want to tell anyone that their opinions are wrong, but I do find myself in disagreement with many of them. See, I loved Natasha's arc in Age of Ultron, and here's why.

You know, I get it. I completely understand that we as Natasha fans feel defensive of her. She's hugely popular but still doesn't have her own film, there's barely any tie-in merchandise for her compared to the others, Scarlett Johansson gets plagued by ridiculous and gross questions about her character, and now apparently even her co-stars get in on the act sometimes. And it makes us feel wary of the trajectory of her character in the films and resistant to the idea of her being subjected to tropes we don't like.

"Then here comes this guy, who's not like anyone I've ever met."

I know the Bruce/Natasha romance wasn't to everyone's taste, but so help me I will die on this hill, I thought it was awesome. This is Natasha's fourth film in the MCU, and during that time we've seen a lot of different sides of her. Undercover agent in Iron Man 2, the instigator of the Avengers, on the run with Steve in Cap 2. We've seen her be badass, smart, vulnerable, competent, scared, funny, warm, manipulative and generally amazing. The Natasha we meet in Age of Ultron is, I think, the most defences-down version of her we've seen to date. She's comfortable with her teammates, who are giving her a sense of a place in the world after the events of Cap 2. And for the first time, we see her toy with the idea of being selfish, of going after something -- someone -- she wants for herself. Their first scene, flirting in the bar, she tells Bruce exactly how she feels, why she's interested, and what she sees in him. Then she runs with it. It's a fascinating match because I think they feel exactly the same way about themselves and each other - 'this person's amazing, but I'm a monster, I could never give them what they want'. Which makes me want to keysmash a lot and hug them both.

It all starts so well - gets the Steve stamp of approval, and we say how well Natasha and the Hulk work together in the field, which shows what a long way they've come since the Avengers and how much they must have worked together to make that possible. But once Scarlet Witch gets into the mix, she brings them right back to their worst selves. The Hulk causes horrible, pointless destruction among civilians, and Natasha gets a real whammy of a traumatic flashback to one of the worst points of her life.

"What did you dream?"
"That I was an Avenger."

So then we hit their scene in the farmhouse. And yes, absolutely the 'infertility / monster' line is badly done and needed to be written really quite differently to work, but if I can set that aside, everything else about that scene is amazing. Bruce retreats, like he always does, full of self-loathing and generally miserable after a particularly terrible Hulk experience. Natasha, amazingly, doesn't. Natasha beating up a billion bad guys with a shoe is a day at the office. But Natasha deciding to open up about her feelings to someone who she wants to think well of her is incredibly brave. It adds depth and range to her character, it shows her differently from how we've seen her before, it's awesome. We've seen her have a similar conversation with Steve, but something at play there was that she wanted him to trust her - she was being honest, but with a goal in her mind. Here with Bruce, she opens up to him just because she wants to, because she trusts him, and because she wants this for herself. She's having a moment of crisis about who she is, whether she can be an Avenger, but her trust in Bruce doesn't waver. Her choosing to make that disclosure to him is a powerful moment for her, something I doubt she'd imagine doing in a million years back around the time of her first appearance, not with someone like Bruce. I loved it.

Bruce and Natasha are the two Avengers who didn't choose to be what they are. Their origins are full of pain to themselves and others and red in their ledgers. They both consider themselves to be monstrous, to have horrors in their past they can never make up for. I find it compelling stuff, and it really lets us see into the heart of Natasha in a direct way that we haven't quite before. We know some of this, of course, but seeing her fear and doubt for real, not weaponised, not for show, just her, is powerful.

(Sidenote: we get a a lot about Steve and Tony's conflicts and journeys about their identities as heroes, and there's some of that in this film with Clint, about choosing to be an Avenger and the significance of that. What it means to be an Avenger is significant for all five of them! Then there's Thor. And *Thor's* conflict is over whether or not to be King of Asgard while he defends the Nine Realms, and I feel like him being an Avenger is his community outreach volunteering project at the weekends. Go see Jane, volunteer with the locals, that's a lovely day off from saving the universe. God love you, Thor, you rainbow-infused space unicorn.)

Then there's the moment of temptation for Natasha, that tantalising thought of what if they did just go, just quit, draw a line under it and go somewhere else and be someone new. The end of Cap 2 already started Natasha off on something of an identity crisis, with every cover blown and the ideals she was working for destroyed with the downfall of SHIELD. I think it's more than understandable that there's something appealing in just letting it all go and starting over. It's often Bruce's MO, after all, and it's a fantasy with power.

"I adore you. But I need the other guy."

But of course it's just a fantasy. Because Natasha Romanoff is a big damn hero and she's going to save the world, no matter what the cost. So she does something awful -- she takes away Bruce's choice. And she knows what a betrayal that is, and it's amazing. She could have tried to persuade him, they could have had a long drawn out argument, but there isn't time, so she does what she has to do. She knows there's no way back, that even after the fight is over and even if they both survive, he might never forgive her for this. She does it anyway.

She chooses, and it has real consequences - there's no happy reunion, at the end of the film the Hulk's just gone who knows where, and Natasha stays behind so she can train the next generation of Avengers, because that's who she is. It's really, really sad. It makes me really love her a lot.

You know, I get it wasn't to everyone's taste! That's cool! But I think there's a lot of great stuff to be mined there for fanworks and I hope that people will, rather than that sad thing that often happens where we as a fandom talk about the ladies a bit but then go back to making things pretty much exclusively about the dudes. Give me Natasha fic, internet!

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God love you, Thor, you rainbow-infused space unicorn.
<3

All Leslie Knope compliments apply to Thor. :D He is, in a way, a very fertile government employee indeed!

Heheh. Indeed.

Thanks for this review, Amy. Very illuminative.

*applause for days* Joss is lazy to use her sterilization as a shorthand for all the rest of the things that happened to her and caused her to be the person she is (unlikely or unable to make emotional connections to other people, unable to stop evaluating every situation as a potential combat, unlikely or unable to trust others, unlikely or unable to do anything in life except what she does, despite her many skills), but in a way it works. They're at Clint's secret farm, with Clint's secret and how-the-hell functional family, and that's something neither of them could have, and it's hard to know anybody else's endgame when it comes to relationships. It makes sense that Joss and his found family feels would make that the symbol of romance (but again, kind of lazy).

Yes, absolutely. I would have done it differently if it were me, but I think there's a lot of interesting stuff to take away and run with there.

It was lazy, but I also think that in the context of that conversation it was very clear to me that the argument being (untidily) made was not, "I am a monster because I cannot have children," but rather, "I cannot have children because I am a monster." I'm sort of befuddled that so many people where I am looking appear to have seen only the former, even though I know that the actual line as written made me wince and made my son lean over to me and say, "really? THAT was the... okay."

Yes, exactly. Excellent point. There were also several other conversations about the other members of the team being monstrous, especially Steve. Steve is a monster for letting the government experiment on him. Tony is a monster because Tony. Thor is literally an alien demigod. Wanda and Pietro are monstrous. Clint is the only one who isn't monstrous, and in the last movie, he was adjacent to monstrosity and controlled by it, so it comes out to a similar thing. But it was poorly phrased for Nat.

Firstly: I'm glad the movie made you happy with this! The following is explanation why it still doesn't work for me.

See, the bones of it, the way you describe it? Sure, that would actually be really appealing to me, and adorable. Still not my ship, but very cute.

For me, the details of how the script presents it turn both Bruce and Natasha into pod people in a way that lessens them to me. A lot. The details matter, and for me the details take it from adorable to "who are these people, even?"

(I also literally can't set aside the infertility line. And I can't set aside Bruce leaving it, not challenging it.)

That's fair enough! And I'm bummed out on your behalf, that sucks that it jarred so badly for you.

One of the things I was actively reading up on, ironically, was the history of sterilization used against unwanted groups (disabled women, ethnic minorities, religious minorities) and how starkly the justification was honestly that they were subhuman anyway so removing their ability to breed (which is the kind of wording used) wasn't a big deal.

I'm also way too personally familiar with how badly women who are infertile can be treated, the way it's genuinely used as a short-hand for "and this is why this person is evil/crazy", and how women I know and love who WANT to sterilize themselves are treated like they're trying to cut out their soul.

So it's way too personal, way too painful and way too fraught.

(Which, again: not everyone has to feel that way! there are things in other movies that I can get past that other people hit red-mist seethe over. Just, I feel like it's worth noting that this is a super-super-ugly-fraught subject for a lot of people, and the vehemence of the reaction is not coming from nowhere.)

Just curious what you would want Bruce to say in challenge to that line. It seems to me a moment when only listening is important.

I'm replying because I don't want to seem like I'm ignoring you, but I've had to comprehensively nope out of discussing this for my mental health. Sorry.

Yeeeesssssssss, I really loved how they handled it too! I liked that it was Natasha, after working with Bruce for a while, seeing parts of herself and things she liked and related to, and going for it. Like, I've heard people whining that it makes Natasha nothing more than a love interest but............did they see the rest of the movie? If anything, I think Bruce is more in the "love interest" role than anyone, but honestly, the romance takes up such a little part of the movie--it's not like either of them didn't have a zillion other things to do.

(This is still Kait, still having problems logging in.)

Absolutely. And I mean, romance in the MCU is not a new thing, it's an important plot point in almost all other outings apart from I guess Avengers 1 and Cap 2. Four films in, I figure it's all right for Natasha to get in on it!

THIS POST IS GOOD AND YOU SHOULD FEEL GOOD.

We've seen her have a similar conversation with Steve, but something at play there was that she wanted him to trust her - she was being honest, but with a goal in her mind.

seeing her fear and doubt for real, not weaponised

I really really like these two points -- they bring home for me that we have seen pretty much everything Natasha does with Bruce before in some other context. We've seen her use her sexuality as a tool/weapon, we've seen her use brutal honesty to get a job done, we've seen her use (often weaponise) every part of herself: vulnerability; playfulness; everything. And here we see these things from her not as a tool/weapon/mission-function, but as something she is doing for the thing itself. She is probably still assessing and evaluating the situation and seeing what tools will get her what results, she's still her, but instead of using these moments as tools, she is actually living them, she's actually being in them.

being an Avenger is his community outreach volunteering project at the weekends

I love you.

She chooses, and it has real consequences - there's no happy reunion, at the end of the film the Hulk's just gone who knows where, and Natasha stays behind so she can train the next generation of Avengers, because that's who she is. It's really, really sad. It makes me really love her a lot.

MMMM ACTIONS WITH CONSEQUENCES MY KRYPTONITE. But yes, so much this, Natasha knows EXACTLY BUT EXACTLY the full reaches of the choice she's making, but she has to make it, because in Natasha's world the only way she can contain her own monstrosity is to always always always choose to save innocent lives. If the price of her soul is her happiness, she'll pay it a million times over and still stand up and deal with the next task when it comes.

If the price of her soul is her happiness, she'll pay it a million times over and still stand up and deal with the next task when it comes.

*sniff* I love herrrrrr *_*

Aww, I am really glad that you wrote this! I had been feeling v down about the Bruce/Natasha, because I wanted to ship it SO BAD and then I felt like Joss ruined it with his creepy sterilization line and with the moment where Natasha kicks Bruce into the well because she needs the other guy Basically For Plot Reasons. But I really, really like your re-reading of the moment where she betrays Bruce's consent -- it's absolutely a hero moment, and it is terrible, but it comes from exactly the same place that made her kiss Cap on an escalator and upload her own aliases to the web. It's really her--not just the needful thing for the plot--and that's the tragedy. AUUGH.

(I think I still want some fix-it fic / sequel fic for this where she follows Bruce to Fiji or he texts her or something. Because for all that we got Bruce saying Let's disappear over and over in this movie, I just have no idea what that means to him or why he thinks it's a good plan. Why is this Bruce's oNLY m.o.? Idk maybe I will add this to my list of fics to write!)

(PS I think maybe Thor needs one of these stuffed Pusheenicorns.)

I think I still want some fix-it fic / sequel fic for this where she follows Bruce to Fiji or he texts her or something.

This a million times! Maybe where she doesn't follow because she respects his choice too much but she sets out fixing all the damage that the Hulk has ever caused as a little side project which is her way of making (very partial) amends without ever intruding on his life? And she rebuilds and repairs and seeks out people who were collateral damage and tracks down the last details of things that went wrong to make sure no one is missed, and always conceptualises itself as her selfish project that she is doing for selfish reasons of selfishness.

And meanwhile Bruce is building a quiet life for himself out in Iceland* and volunteering lots with orphans and generally trying to push himself down into something smaller and smaller until there's nothing left that can be hurt like that again, and pretty obviously Tony knows where he is and keeps doing him Really Subtle Favours by buying shit to solve problems that Bruce didn't even mind (why yes, "I bought the airline. It seemed simpler," is my blueprint for billionaire love) but doesn't tell anyone, and lets Bruce do his own thing, because he's earned his retirement.

[*Because why not?]

And, I don't know, Nat and Bruce both write letters to the other that they don't send, and have long arguments with each other in their head, and one day Tony sends Bruce an untraceable phone and a list of the Avengers' contact details and a note saying, "Cap misses your cooking," and Bruce starts texting them again, just little things, mainly to Tony, and a bit to Cap and Pepper, and occasionally to Thor because Thor is fucking awesome, and suddenly he's got Jane's number too and Jane is the greatest, so he's texting her as well, and there's this copious blank space where he could be texting Nat, but.

And Nat knows what's going on, but she's not going to think about it, because she made her choice and no one ever got anywhere by regretting things they couldn't change, so she just thinks about the texts she would send him, along with the letters she would write and the arguments she would have and the things she would show him and the jokes she wishes he was there to not laugh at when she didn't make them and she spends so much time on that farm with Clint and Laura and the kids, any moment she's not working for the Avengers or on that side project she's with the kids, letting them jump on her and tell her stories and remind her how to pretend to be human, but still her phone never beeps.

And then, I don't know what breaks that silence finally, I want it to be something small, something petty, something so far from the big world-changing shit they normally deal with that it's kind of ridiculous, but something, hmm, like maybe one of the children Bruce volunteers with doesn't bite anyone for a whole week and gets a certificate, or maybe Nat sets up a college fund for someone who was injured by the Hulk and finds out that the kid in question wears the same glasses as Bruce and just can't not send him a photo, or whatever, something small but beautiful, and they start texting.

AND THEN.

And then they talk about monstrosity and ethics and fear and vulnerability and trust and truth and also how to get chewing gum out of a radiator valve and Clint's hair first thing in the morning and motorbike maintenance and 6000 reasons why Tony Stark will never be president and never do they ever talk about I miss you because no but that's in all the empty spaces and all the photographs of a dog wearing a Captain America onesie and all the everything.

...but how to get from there to a happy ending?

OH

THIS IS BEAUTIFUL AND I CRIED

...and, I mean, I think you found the happy ending! Or you found the inevitability of the happy ending. Because their story was never going to end in love as long as they were trapped in this Beauty and the Beast narrative about monsters and horrors and a magic spell that suddenly fixes everything and restores the order of the world. But once you find the right story, you know everything will be all right. They're not monsters. They've become real. And once you're real, you can never be ugly again, except to people who don't understand.

So they don't say I miss you. But Natasha maybe says to a picture of one of Bruce's volunteer kids at a recital, I used to do ballet like that, and Bruce says to a long hilarious tumblr thread of hamsters dressed as Lord of the Rings characters, I always wanted to be a wizard. And they don't say I love you, but they do text each other at all hours of the night to say Don't disappear on me and I won't. And then one day Clint is having a barn-raising (because he never did stop finding new projects) and it's the dumbest, most pointless event ever--or maybe Steve is celebrating his 100th birthday--or Nick is having a Memorial Day barbecue. And like magic (okay I lied, there's one magic spell, every story gets one magic spell) they both show up.

And then it's easy, because once you do the worst thing you can do to another person and they become your best friend anyway, you never have to hide from it again.

(At least, I think that's what happens. Probably also Steve makes several inappropriate comments about corn cobs at the barn-raising, and Jane co-authors a few papers with Bruce, and maybe Natasha has been looking at some land a few miles over t'other side of Clint's farm, and maybe Bruce likes having a lot of acreage to run in, but those are the minor details, really.)

Edited 2015-05-04 04:32 (UTC)

Aaaaaaaah yessssss this! There are probably stupid novelty hats and balloons. And pie! Maybe they see each other for the first time and they both have a mouthful of pie?

*Nods sagely* Yes, I think pie is very important to this process. Especially if it is sticky and all over their beautiful faces.

Oh yay, I'm glad this helped a bit! If it helps anyone write any fic I'll be totally thrilled. And omg, that pusheenicorn, that's amazing and I want twenty.

Natashaaaa, ugh I have so many emotions I love her so much.

Thank you for this! I'm still really unhappy with what we got in the movie, but you make some great points here, especially re Natasha's deliberate vulnerability/openness that I hadn't considered. I think AoU's execution of all this was sorely, sorely lacking and that it frankly did way more telling than showing, but the way you lay it out here goes a long way towards fixing that. As ever, fic is gonna have to fix canon, and I'm cool with that.

Thanks! I'm glad it helped a little with your unhappy feelings, that's really nice to hear.

This is awesome, and I agree one million percent. I agree the infertility line was badly written, but I was not one of the people who felt she was suggesting she was a monster for being barren. I understand how it can be read like that and sympathize with the people who read it that way - but my reading was that Bruce was saying, "I can't have this fantasy, we can't be like Clint, I can't even physically have the children to populate this mythical Bruce/Natasha farm" and Natasha was responding, "So what, I can't either, the red room made me barren because a child might mean more to me than a mission some day. But our happiness isn't dependent on fertility, dude. We can still be happy." It was badly said, all of it, and on the charge of bad writing for that scene I find Joss guilty, but that doesn't invalidate the rest of what was done with this relationship in the film.

I loved it, and I say that as a dedicated Science Boyfriends girl. I felt like this is a relationship that strengthened Natasha in being Natasha, it made her MORE badass that she was willing to risk and try for something she wanted for herself. Bruce, not so much, because in the end he let his fears and his self-hatred rule him. But Natasha? This wasn't "reducing" her to anything, it was building her into someone who can be an emotional badass as well as a physical one. <3 <3 <3

Edited (words) 2015-05-03 23:44 (UTC)

Aughhhh, yes, exactly, Natasha/emotions is a combo designed to reduce me to a puddle I love it so much. :D

As you know, Bob, I agree with all of this :-) <3 I'm finding some of the internet's reactions very interesting. For me, it’s the *details* that really make me believe in Bruce and Natasha and in Bruce/Natasha. And I would have believed in it a little less if Bruce had challenged that infertility line. (I agree with you that that line was badly done, but actually I think it still works.)

If you watch that scene, as I have just done multiple times, Scarjo’s acting is just outstanding. If you watch her, you can see that Natasha is really struggling to *force* herself to make and maintain eye-contact with Bruce. As you very insightfully point out, *this* is Nat’s version of being brave. Beating up bad guys is her day job, capitalising on the emotions of those around her to get what she wants is a particular skill, but revealing her own emotions? For her own reasons? That’s HARD, and absolutely NOT what she was trained for. As she goes on to say. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t HAVE emotions, or complicated feelings about her past. Just because her modus operandi is to weaponise her body and her emotions to manipulate those around her, does not mean that she is a robot who is completely immune to all feelings. We've seen her express vulnerability in the past - see her visceral reaction to the Hulk in the first Avengers movie, or that little hesitation before she presses the button in Cap2. This is just the most of it we've seen in one go, which I'm taking as excellent character and relationship development. As you say, this is because she finally has more of her defences down.

Just watch her face in that scene. Watch her look down and to the side, watch her really struggle to look Bruce in the eye. Watch her wobble her head from side to side when she says 'You still think you’re the only monster on the team?’ - the way a person does when they’re making a joke. She is trying her best to make light of this, to use that wonderful dry wit of hers, but she can’t quite manage it. And when Bruce says ‘shall we disappear?’, she looks straight up at him and almost smiles, soothed, relieved that he’s understood her.

Yes, perhaps it's jarring that Bruce doesn’t challenge the infertility line. He doesn’t respond with some mundane obviousness like ‘being sterilised doesn’t make you a monster’ because (a) OBVIOUSLY NOT and he and Nat and the audience all know that, and (b) Bruce knows that’s not her point. It’s a sign that he *gets* her. Someone who *doesn’t* know Natasha might respond to that brittle revelation about her past with ‘it’s not your fault’, or ‘it’s ok that you can’t have kids, that doesn't make you a monster’ or some other platitude that doesn’t address what she’s really saying.

Nat thinks of herself as a monster not because of what she biologically can or can’t do, or even because of what was done to her - she thinks of herself as a monster because of who she is. Listen to her speak and watch her face and listen to the exact words she uses - she is forcing herself to be brutally honest. Her initial inclination is to refer to the Red Room as ‘where I was trained’ - that’s quite cold almost clinical. It detaches her personal life from her work. But no, she forces herself to amend that to ‘...where I was raised’. That’s infinitely more personal. That shows that the Red Room has had a profound bearing on her earliest years, on a formative time of her life. The Red Room did not just ‘train’ her to Do, but ‘raised’ her to Be.

Moving on - “They have a graduation ceremony. They sterilise you.” You. Not ‘They sterilised me’. They sterilise you. She switches person. This whole conversation is so raw and painful for her, that her resolve fails and she can’t quite make herself talk about it as it happened to her - she uses the second person to distance herself, ever so slightly, from something she can scarcely even think about. Something she has maybe never even said out loud before. This is the script showing not telling - pronoun usage as a clue to deeper feelings.

But even then, she carries on. She gets to the heart of it - why they sterilise you. ‘Makes everything easier. Even killing’. That’s when she finally comes back to the ‘monster’ issue - and so it’s clear that she’s referring to the fact that she was physically and mentally moulded to be a killing machine. She’s not saying ‘I can’t have biological children therefore I’m a monster’; she’s not even saying ‘I was tortured and surgically altered and therefore I’m a monster’, she’s saying ‘I was created to be a monster and to treat everything as secondary to my mission and I still struggle to see myself as anything else’. And Bruce understands that. He understands it because that is how he sees himself, and because he has got to know Natasha. And so he doesn’t respond to her words with ‘being sterilised doesn’t make you a monster’, he responds to the feelings underlying her words with ‘shall we disappear?'

And yes, it absolutely could have been written better. Of course it could. The script could have unpacked Nat’s words just a little more, just one or two more lines to put some distance between the words ’sterilised’ and ‘monster’. To spell it out in big bold capital letters for the audience. But instead the film goes here for a ’show, not tell’ approach. And, as you say, I think that we have to work with what we’ve got. We have to be willing to interpret things in the same way as we do for male characters. How is it, exactly, that some people are able to read all sorts of inflections and emotions into six seconds of purely functional dialogue between Clint and Coulson, but are not willing to put the same time and effort into looking beneath the surface of Natasha’s heartfelt conversation with Bruce?

Anyway, look you made me have feelings. <3

. . . I'm sure you don't mean to be incredibly insulting at the end there, but as someone who has devoted hundreds of thousands of words to analyzing Natalia Romanova down to eyelines and still hates this plotline, I do actually find it kind of insulting.

People can have different opinions than you for reasons other than being lazy watchers who only care about the boys. Believe it or not.

+1, sadly.

This is a great reply to a great post.

Awww, thank you! <3 It is indeed a very great post -

such_heights is brilliant and smart and good at using her words.

Anyway, look you made me have feelings. <3

\o/ My life's mission!

This is all amazing, and I shall reread before I go see it again on Tuesday. NATASHAAAA!

Yes, this!

:-) <3

As you say, this is because she finally has more of her defences down.

Reading this, something clicked for me -- all the things she's doing that make her vulnerable are normally her defences . So it's not just that she's not using them as weapons, it's that she's taking the very things that normally make her safe and protect her and letting those be vulnerabilities instead.

Ooooh, that's a very good point!

Natashaaaaaaaaaaaa *flails* <3

How is it, exactly, that some people are able to read all sorts of inflections and emotions into six seconds of purely functional dialogue between Clint and Coulson, but are not willing to put the same time and effort into looking beneath the surface of Natasha’s heartfelt conversation with Bruce?

Anyway, look you made me have feelings.

Yeah, this part of your comment made me have feelings too, and not in a good way. It's incredibly patronising to say that someone who disliked this scene just needed to have the real point spelled out to them "in big bold capital letters". And I say this as a woman who adores Natasha as a character, who has written about her lots, and who is infertile. My read of that scene is neither irrational nor invalid.

Oh thank God, I thought I was the only person on the Internet who 1) liked the Bruce/Natasha 2) did not see that scene as Natasha saying "I am infertile therefore a monster" but as saying in quick succession, "I was made infertile as part of begin an assassin. As an assassin I've been a monster. I empathize with your feelings of being a monster." (That said any competent fanficcer could've written that more clearly than the movie dialogue conveyed it.)

*hugs this meta to my heart*

♥

She chooses, and it has real consequences - there's no happy reunion, at the end of the film the Hulk's just gone who knows where, and Natasha stays behind so she can train the next generation of Avengers, because that's who she is. It's really, really sad. It makes me really love her a lot.

I loved that she made that choice. Maybe not the whole romance, but that was powerful!

Interesting read <3

FWIW, I liked Natasha and the Natasha/Bruce romance too. You articulate really well why though, when I hadn't thought much about it.

Yes, *thank you*.

Without the infertility/monster thing, I definitely would have liked it much more. I've read good fanfic with that pairing.

What bothered me (aside from the whole film being an unenjoyable mess, imo) was that the characters and the film seem to be encouraging us to view what Bruce is and what Natasha is as somehow equivalent. Bruce experimented on himself and made himself a monster, Natasha was recruited as a child and made into a monster against her will. Bruce can't can't have children (which is a weird fixation to have with everything else going on with both of them, but okay) because he turns into a giant green man, because he experimented on himself. Natasha can't have children because she was forcibly sterilised as a teenager. Even if the writing was better, and I was more kindly disposed, I don't think I would have been happy with that.

And it was weird that Bruce kept inexplicably making intelligent robots, but Natasha had nothing else going on. Not that anyone but Tony really had a lot to do.

This is a good point also.

Thank you. I love Natasha and I found that scene very poignant. You've nailed the scene perfectly!

May we link this on

metanews? We also post on LJ and Tumblr.

No thank you on this occasion - appreciate you asking!

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Why I loved Natasha in Age of Ultron

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