Formed in 2009, the Archive Team (not to be confused with the archive.org Archive-It Team) is a rogue archivist collective dedicated to saving copies of rapidly dying or deleted websites for the sake of history and digital heritage. The group is 100% composed of volunteers and interested parties, and has expanded into a large amount of related projects for saving online and digital history.
Rachel at Hamlette's Soliloquy and Jim at The Midnite Drive-In are currently hosting a blogathon celebrating favourite movie/TV onscreen critters who are pets, friends or companions to us humans.
Today's post concerns ROCKET RACCOON of the MCU's Guardians of the Galaxy superheroes franchise. Starship captain, enhanced warrior and blackmarket purveyor of stolen goods, Rocket Raccoon travels the galaxy with his compatriots, fighting on the side of Truth and Justice. Well, mostly.
In a scenario that is not as unlikely as one might think, Rocket Raccoon is also an ally of Bucky Barnes the Winter Soldier, fighting by his side (literally) during the Battle of Wakanda in Avengers: Infinity War (2018).
The similarities between Rocket Raccoon and the Winter Soldier are not hard to see -- they are both implacable fighters with lots of fur/hair and black raccoon mask/warpaint around their eyes. Each of them adores big weaponry and they tend to be equally armed to the teeth. Plus, the Winter Soldier has a prosthetic cyberarm and Rocket would dearly love to have it for his blackmarket side hustle.
And of course eventually he does, in The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special (2022).
But the connection between Rocket Raccoon and the Winter Soldier goes much, much deeper than that. Each has a tragic and incredibly dark backstory with many parallels. Scarred in body and soul, they were both made into what they are against their will and without their consent. Experimented on, surgically altered, genetically engineered, tortured, created simply to be controlled and used. (Their respective horror stories are told in Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3 (2023) and Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014).
I tend to see the Guardians of the Galaxy characters as kind of a satirical, almost goofy, spin on the more serious, straight-laced Avengers. Yet there's nothing satirical or goofy about the abused antiheroes at their centre. Rocket Raccoon and the Winter Soldier essentially embody the same tragic trope about the evils of science without morality and the denial of free will. Despite being different species, Rocket Raccoon and the Winter Soldier are true brothers.
