Anonymous asked: "she can only love Bucky because she loved Clint." Not to be confrontational, but I kinda take issue with that. Though the Bucky relationship is a retcon, it's one that actually WORKS. It was quite literally a forbidden affair, as she was promised to Alexi at the time. To say that she can only love Bucky because of Clint is BS. She loved Bucky before she even MET Clint. It's sort of like she was reunited with her long lost, and truest, love. If anything, she loved Clint at the time cause of Buck
You’re kinda missing the forest of what I was saying for the trees of it. Yes, sure, she could only love Clint because of Bucky, and vice-versa, and because of Alexi, because of Nikolai, because of her dead baby, because of so many other names whose stories have not yet been told. Because it isn’t really about Clint, or Bucky, or Alexi, or Nikolai: it’s about Natasha. And the parts of herself that she’s struggled to keep safe, the compassion she chose not to starve. If she had killed Clint like the KGB ordered, she could not be the person Bucky is in love with now.
There’s no “working” retcon that reinvents Natasha’s entire tumultuous history as an aching longing to be reunited with a single man. You can ship what you want (and please, ship what you want!) without making it “truer” than all other ships, because the honesty of one love doesn’t actually put the lie to all others. And if your reaction to me saying this is: nuh-uh!! and continuity pendantry, then idek what to say, except that kind of reflexive shipper defensiveness is something that makes fandom a lot less fun for me.
Oh, yeah, and that if you want to play continuity pendant, Natasha didn’t remember Winter Soldier when she first met Clint. Brubaker has straight-up said that they tried to erase her from his mind, after, and that it was only after seeing him again that she strung it all back together. Those flashbacks in issue #27 were her remembering again for the first time— that’s why she never told Steve about the rumors the Russians were keeping his dead best friend naked in the freezer aisle.
