opinions-about-tiaras:abigailnussbaum:august-walker:The Falcon And The Winter Soldier (2021)Thoughts
opinions-about-tiaras:abigailnussbaum:august-walker:The Falcon And The Winter Soldier (2021)Thoughts on this scene in roughly the order they occurred to me:I totally buy Bucky as an SFF fan, though it should be noted that for someone reading in the 20s, 30s, and early 40s that would probably mean mostly pulp stuff. Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, E.E. “Doc” Smith, maybe Fritz Leiber. Some non-pulp writers would probably have also been on his radar - there is simply no way that a science fiction fan born in 1917 wouldn’t have read H.G. Wells, for example - but would he have been aware of writers like Olaf Stapledon or Aldous Huxley? No idea.That being said, The Hobbit was published and reviewed as a book for children, and I’m having trouble imagining a twenty-year-old Bucky, in 1937, running out and buying the year’s hottest YA novel. Maybe if one of his younger siblings read it, but not on his own.Either way, I’m a bit skeptical that a working class kid in Brooklyn could get his hands on a copy of The Hobbit in the very year it was published.Frankly, I think a much better version of this story is that Bucky happened across a copy of The Hobbit while stationed in Europe in the 40s. A tired soldier sinking into a well-crafted children’s book on his downtime is a more plausible - and more evocative - story, even if doesn’t lend itself as easily to a snappy comeback to Sam.Whenever he read The Hobbit, it seems a bit dubious to me that Gandalf would be Bucky’s go-to example of a wizard. Doesn’t Merlin make more sense for someone who lacks 21st century pop culture knowledge? The first three volumes of T.H. White’s The Once and Future King were published, as separate volumes, between 1938 and 1940, and even without having read them, Bucky would have been aware of the Arthurian myths.Finally, this isn’t relevant to the plausibility of this scene, but I also want to point out that if Bucky read The Hobbit before being abducted by Hydra, then he read the original edition in which Gollum is not a villain, and gives the ring to Frodo freely after losing the riddle game. The second edition, in which Gollum is the character we know, wasn’t published until 1951.This is an oblique comics reference, I think. It was STEVE who was a fan of the Hobbit, despite being outside the age range of it; that’s been a comics plot point for awhile. Bucky would have picked it up from him.The first American edition of the Hobbit was a hardback in 1938. So he would have had to get it in 1938. -- source link