sizeofyourbaggage | canon update for thegames

name| Bri
fandom| Marvel Cinematic Universe
character| Sam Wilson
old canon point| Post Captain America: the Winter Soldier
new canon point| Post Avengers: Age of Ultron
in-game development| Sam's been through three arenas at this point and gotten himself prettily heavily involved in rebellion stuff. It was a little reluctant, but after getting close to Capitol citizens like Porrim and starting to get glimpses into 13 though Panem!Bucky and Albert and even Hannah a little bit, Sam is pretty committed to seeing out this war. Through the friendships he's made and the things he's learned about the Capitol and the Districts, his motivations have shifted from just getting him and his friends back home to taking down the Capitol and putting a stop to the arenas. He still more or less wants to go home, at some point, but it's complicated by the fact that some of his closest relationships are with people who aren't from his world, and he doesn't want to leave them.

The other major development is the fact that Sam actually has a lot of close relationships. At his previous canon point, his close friends are really only Steve and Natasha, and he hadn't even known them for very long. Through his time at the Games, he's developed a number of casual friendships and formed some very strong bonds with a handful of people, some of whom are from his world and some who aren't. He's been battle-tested here, in a manner of speaking - he's gone through losing people he didn't think he could stand to lose and come out on the other side of it, and he knows that what he learned when he lost Riley is sticking with him. Where he was kind of on the outskirts of the Avengers before, through getting to know them in the Games he's started to feel like part of the team - maybe not the original Avengers, but a new team with additional members formed on a similar basis.

Canon updating Sam is going to push him even more towards feeling like part of a team. He'll be from a point where he is officially Avenger, and he's accepted that his life has gone in a direction that he hasn't expected but wouldn't trade for the world. At his previous canon point, he was right on the edge of uprooting his life to go off with Steve looking for Bucky, and it wasn't a stretch to uproot his life to get invested in the war in Panem. At his new canon point, he'll have a team he's committed to, he'll have spent over a year with Steve as his partner, and he'll be a lot more invested in his purpose as an Avenger. It'll cause even more conflict between the life he'd started to make for himself back home and the life he's started to make for himself in Panem.

At the same time, it'll make him more invested in his CR at the Games, both the ones from his world and the ones not. He'll have memories of investing a year of his life on the hunt for Bucky when he didn't even know him, and that's highly likely to just make him consider his current personal investment in both of the Buckys even more worth it. He'll be even more connected to Steve and the rest of the Avengers after having spent longer being a part of their world. And he'll be unsettled by just how the hell the mechanism that brings them here works, and a little less confident in his vague plans of just bringing all of his CR with him when the war is over - which is eventually likely to motivate him to figure out some way for all of them to stay together, whatever it is. It'll weird him out that he has additional memories without the people he's met in Panem who mean a hell of a lot to him, and he'll be invested in making sure he doesn't have to live without them like that.

new history| In the year between Winter Soldier and Age of Ultron, Sam spent most of his time working with Steve to try to find the Winter Soldier, or Bucky Barnes, or whoever he was nowadays. When Steve got called for Avengers related stuff, Sam continued to investigate leads on Bucky Barnes without him, checking in with him and updating him as they went. Sam'd made his choice to stay off the frontlines and to help out soldiers back on the home front, and he stuck with that. The Avengers were well equipped without him, but as far as he could tell, there weren't a lot of people looking out for the traumatized super soldier on the run. That changed after the Avengers defeated Ultron, when they lost some members and gained some new ones. Steve asked him, they talked it over, and then Sam was signing up to be an Avenger - though of course, they didn't stop looking for Barnes, either.
anything else| At Sam's new canon point, he'll be coming in with his wingpack for the Capitol to grab.