Tag Archives: Tony Stark

Tony/Steve Fanfic: An Introduction

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A couple of months ago, I was nattering on about various amazing Tony/Steve stories, as you do, and Noah asked me to write about it a bit, as he does.  I demurred, being busy with something-or-other, but, in the fullness of time, he asked me again, and this time, I caved.

So.  What’s so interesting about a couple of characters from a movie over two years old?

Especially since it includes a guy who wears tights and another guy who wears iron pants?  (OK, before anyone says, yes, they’re actually titanium-gold alloy pants, thank you, yes I know.  Ahem.)

As of today, there’s over nine thousand fanworks with the pairing Steve Rogers and Tony Stark on the A03 (the most popular fic archive).  Not nine thousand stories that include Steve (twenty-nine thousand stories) and Tony (thirty thousand stories)  as characters, but nine thousand stories that pair them together.

So what’s the appeal?

For me, the appeal is mostly Tony Stark.

In Iron Man 1, Tony’s kind of a womanizing, warmongering drunk.  (What?  He totally is.)

It’s also clear that Tony was raised by wolves (if wolves were bitter, distant alcoholics who felt threatened by their kid’s achievements).  And no, being raised by lousy parents isn’t an excuse for growing up to be an asshole.

But here’s the interesting thing about Tony.

In Iron Man 1, you see Tony make his obnoxious and loud weapons presentation to a bunch of generals and war secretaries.  When he rides back to the camp, he rides with the soldiers.  Tony’s far more friendly to the soldiers.  He jokes with them, tries to get them to laugh, and while he’s brash and obnoxious, he’s actually paying more attention to them than he did to the bigwigs.

And then Tony watches his own weapons kill them.

What I find interesting about the character of Tony is that he makes mistakes.  Often.  Loudly.  Fatally.

Tony generally spends his movies fixing mistakes (his own or other people’s).

When he’s dying, he doesn’t run around trying to arrange for the betterment of mankind (well, actually, he does, yes, but he doesn’t just focus on making the world better).  He gets shitfaced drunk.  That’s, well, kind of human, isn’t it?

Then, when he wakes up, he drags his sorry, sick, hungover ass to get donuts.

It’s good to have stories about people who do right, but it’s also good to have to stories about what happens when we fuck up and have to find a way out through the ashes of our accidentally destroyed life.  Life is complicated, life is messy, and I don’t know about you, but I enjoy watching someone who has the guts to look at their life’s work and say, ‘Oh shit, all of this was a huge fucking mistake.’

There is more to Tony’s character than that, of course.

I’ll let you in on a secret.

The real reason I like him is that Tony Stark reminds me of the girls I hung out with in middle school.  There’s the unkempt hair, the ratty band tee shirts mixed with high fashion, the too-loud music, the driving like a bat out of hell.

But mostly?

It’s that Tony Stark’s still talking to his imaginary friends.

DUM-E might as well be a woodland animal instead of an arm on wheels.

The trappings are science-y, but the core story is about a poorly socialized introverted weirdo who wears a flashy, sexy, extroverted mask.  More than anything else, Tony is a maker.  A creative person who literally builds life, who talks to his imaginary friends, who refuses to be the person everyone else wants him to be, who throws himself into building and fixing and creating.

OK, so that’s a pretty good reason to like the character, sure.

But why fanfic, and why pair Tony with Steve?

Because I want Tony to have a happy ending, and in the movies, his human friends spend time with him because they’re paid.  Someone should want to be with Tony because they like him as a person, not just for what he can do for them (whether it’s money or inventing).

The general appeal of Steve is that he’s a genuinely good guy.  He became a superhero by being good.  His power is the power of loyalty and gentle friendship, of affection and teamwork and hope.

So, here’s the fun part.  I’ve created a list of some of my favorite stories, with links.  This is an enormous fandom, and there’s a little something for everyone.  I’ve included a helpful glossary at the bottom of words that may be unfamiliar.

Classics

The Act of Creation Will Be Your Salvation byscifigrl47  “When Tony Stark was seventeen years old, he built his first AI. On that day, he ceased to be his father’s creation, and became a creating force in his own right.”  My favorite version of this story is the podfic read by reena-jenkins.

and

Some Things Shouldn’t Be a Chore

Average Avengers Local Chapter 7 of New York City by 

 
 

Idea stories.  You know, old-fashioned ‘what if?’ stories:

The Twice-Told Tale by  (very clever story)

slipping through the years by 

The Last Love Song of Anthony E. Stark by  (Tony begins to lose his memory)

Ironsides by  (always-female Tony)

Living In The Future by  (18 year old boy-genius Tony defrosts Steve)

When I Think (Oh, it Terrifies Me) by  (Look, some mornings you wake up and little green men are invading New York City; some mornings you wake up and you can hear Captain America’s voice in your head. Tony has been an Avenger long enough that he saves his freakout for important things.)

Kapitan Amerika and the Iron Man by ,  (The Red Son reboot, in which Steve Rogers’ childhood heroes were aviators and polar explorers, and Tony Stark grew up reading Captain America comics in Siberia.)

 
 

DUM-E and Jarvis centric stories  Often from the ‘bots own perspective

The Act of Creation Will Be Your Salvation byscifigrl47

Run Program: DUM-E by 

Rom-Commed By Fate (Or JARVIS) by 

The Butterfingers G. D. I. Stark Guide to Problem Solving by  (not a Steve/Tony fic per se, but I don’t care–it’s still damn great)

 
 

Romantic Comedies

Love among the Hydrothermal Vents by 

Team Building Activities by 

Bulletproof by 

Semaphore by 

Ready, Fire, Aim by 

99 problems (and the dice ain’t one) by 

 
 

Stories about gender or sex

You’re Not Stubborn (Just Impossible) by  (I always start with the second chapter, omega-verse highschool AU)

Born from the Earth by 

 

Given the size of this fandom, there’s a little something for everyone, as well as some truly inventive crazy-wild stories.

There’s also certain sub-categories that are particularly popular.  Stories about the Avengers all moving into Tony’s tower, Tony getting turned into a cat, and Steve taking a stand against modern homophobia ( the reason you ruminate the shadowy past by ).

I’d rec some fan-art, too, but most of that is on tumblr, and I’m too old to play well with tumblr.

I’m happy to custom-rec stories, discuss themes or favorites, answer questions, etc.  I also have a bunch of favorite podfics, should anyone have a burning desire to listen to Tony/Steve stories on audio.
 
Some useful terms, if you decide to go looking for some fic:

AU: Fan shorthand for alternate universe.  This is not used in the X-Men or Marvel parallel universe sense, but in the story sense.  You take the same characters but pop them in a different situation.  There are certain classic AU tropes: high school, coffeeshop, race track, in space, are werewolves, etc.

BDSM verse: a fandom AU where the world publicly incorporates certain BDSM tropes, such as Dominants and Submissives.  Sometimes these stories are wank fodder, and sometimes these stories are complex explorations of sexuality, gender, power, and societal norms.

Omegaverse or A/B/O: a world where humans have alternate sexes.  Alphas (dominants; males can often knot), betas (moderate, usually like our standard males and females), and omegas (usually submissive, males can get pregnant, often go into heat).   This particular trope has been around at least a decade, but has become more popular recently.

Stony: a fandom nickname name for the ‘ship (relationship)

MCU: Marvel Cinematic Universe

Superhusbands: another fandom nickname of the ‘ship, usually focusing on the happily ever after marriage part of the story, often involving kids.

Canon: the story as told by the official version.

Fanon/fannon: a kind of generally agreed upon version of the story.  Back in the day, it was fannon that Draco Malfoy wore leather trousers.  In MCU fannon, it is generally agreed upon that the Avengers all move into Stark Tower, where they congregate for movie night to catch Steve up on popular culture.

Podfic: a combination of fanfic and podcast.  Podfics are audio recordings of fanfiction.  There are also some genuine weekly podcasts in various fandoms.

Vids/Fanvids: These are fanworks made from video clips, combined, re-edited, and so on to create a new story.

A03: Archive of Our Own.  A fan-run fanworks archive.  A03 is my favorite archive, and the main host for good Steve/Tony fics.  Years ago, Fanfic.net randomly and with no warning deleted a whole bunch of m/m fanfic, resulting in much ire.  A03, while sometimes slow to load and with a bit of a clunky interface, was created for the sole purpose of being a true long-lasting archive.  As with any organization, it’s not perfect, but it does well enough.

 

A Theory of Why the Two Iron Men Became One

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The index to the Comics and Music roundtable is here.
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I’m just going to say up front that I find Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man” to be one of the creepiest songs in the history of the world. I knew I was going to have to listen to it to write this post and I picked the brightest part of the morning to do it in. And even then, I kept catching myself moving to stop the song, so I wouldn’t have to keep listening to it. I don’t think I’m alone. That song is just objectively, deliciously, scary.

It’s creepy from its opening moments, starting with just the thud of the bass pedal. Now, you can’t possibly know that there’s something just a little bit off about the timing of those thuds—since there’s no other accompaniment to compare it to—but even with nothing else going on in the song, those thuds don’t sound right. It’s hard to tell right at the beginning if Bill Ward is hitting each beat in a very slow four beat measure or hitting every other beat in a rather quick four beat measure (though later on, when you hear some actual quarter notes four in a row, I think it’s apparent that he’s doing the latter). But it leaves me feeling like the beats are somehow coming too fast and not fast enough.

Then comes the dissonant guitar riff, with the notes that refuse to differentiate themselves from one another, but just slide all over the place bearing bad news. And I don’t even have to tell you what comes next—that creepy voice, sounding like it’s rattling out of a metallic graveyard. It never fails to scare the shit out of me.

The lyrics themselves adhere to the first rule of good horror—don’t let your audience get a clear look at what’s going wrong. The longer the audience can’t tell what’s happening or why, the scarier the thing remains. Once there are clear answers, the scariest part is over.

There aren’t really clear answers in “Iron Man.” A man goes to the future to save mankind, though we don’t know from what. There’s some kind of accident and he’s turned to iron—somehow—in the magnetic field. And then he comes back to earth, gets propped up somewhere, and plots his revenge, though what he needs revenge for is also unclear. A third of the song is just unresolved questions about the iron man. And then there’s the killing.
I think this song is brilliant and I love it. But it is, to me, scary as hell.

Which is why I find it baffling that it’s kind of been adopted as the unofficial anthem of Iron Man, the superhero. “Iron Man” plays in the last Iron Man movie. Tony Stark wears a Black Sabbath t-shirt in The Avengers. When you look at lists of songs adapted from or influenced by comics, every single one of them both includes “Iron Man” and concedes that it doesn’t originally have anything to do with Iron Man.

They share a name, but that wouldn’t necessarily seem to lead so many people to connect the two, especially when they’re otherwise so diametrically opposed. But it’s that opposition that I wonder about. After all, if you think about it, “Iron Man” would make the perfect nemesis for Iron Man. “Iron Man” seems to have had some great scientific skill—since he travelled through time—which Stark could appreciate. But “Iron Man” is isolated from people where Tony Stark, though somewhat misanthropic, is in community. We know Iron Man by his intellect and quick wit. It’s not even clear that “Iron Man” thinks about much but revenge. And, of course, Stark is looking to save humanity while “Iron Man” is bent on destroying it.

I’m not a Jungian, but it seems like we’ve, weirdly, decided that Tony Stark needs a pseudo-Jungian shadow, a part of himself that he doesn’t acknowledge, but which we, as the audience, all know is there—and that shadow is “Iron Man.” It’s not him, it’s not even about him, but, in our minds, it can’t be separated from him. Now, the thing that makes this weird (and not Jungian) is that it is us, the audience, who has given Stark this alternate “Iron Man.” And yet, of course, if he’s going to have one, we have to give it to him. Who is there who can give a fictional character a shadow aspect if the artist creating him has not? It has to be the audience.

We have linked Iron Man so closely to “Iron Man” that it would, then, seem to be Tony Stark’s most secret identity—even though we’ve never seen it acknowledged in the Marvel Universe, we suspect he’s the lonely tin man slowly going crazy enough to destroy us all. He just doesn’t know it.

It’s kind of like fan fiction in which we’ve merged these two characters to see what would happen. But no stories have come out of this merger. Except that, clearly, the narrative of “Iron Man” itself is different, even though nothing changes, when it’s Stark who didn’t come back through the magnetic field the same guy he left Earth as.

Here’s what I wonder: Even now, is “Iron Man” so strange and terrifying that we link Iron Man and “Iron Man” not to improve Iron Man, but to give “Iron Man” some context, some way of being easily known and understood? Now, instead of asking, “What the hell happened? Who is this thing and why is it killing everyone?”, we get to pretend that it makes a certain kind of sense—“Oh, it’s Tony Stark! And he’s gone mad, finally.” If figuring out what’s happening makes a horror story less frightening and more manageable, I think the Iron Man/”Iron Man” merge is about making “Iron Man” less terrifying. It gives the song a context in which to understand it that the song itself refuses.

Linking “Iron Man” and Iron Man gives Tony Stark a much darker subtext, but it also gives “Iron Man” a less-frightening context. And more than a darker Stark, I think we crave a less-scary “Iron Man.”
 

Tales_of_Suspense_39

Tales of Suspense #39 (March 1963): Iron Man debuts. Cover art by Jack Kirby and Don Heck.

 

Perverse Iron Frechman

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This piece first ran on Comixology.
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iron_man_posterI’m the last person in explored space to see the first Iron Man movie. I watched it this month and am pleased to report that it hasn’t dated a moment. We’re still wandering around Afghanistan haplessly blowing and being blown up; arms traders are still sexy/cool; bad boys with hearts of plutonium still get the girl; Gwyneth Paltrow is still frighteningly thin and brittle, with little flecks of poisonous spittle flicking out from behind her girl-next-door façade. Also, random Westernized foreigners with doctorate degrees are always happy to sacrifice themselves for the callow American so that said callow Americans can continue to be callow but with a mission; black guys are sidekicks; male womanizers are rakishly hot/forgivably flawed, but women who open their legs are trashy bitch sluts. Also Americans save all the brown people. Or maybe kill them. It’s hard to tell.

You probably know that though. After all the film is two years old. And superheroes are, what, going on 80? There’s been some finessing of the template, of course. Semi-socialist Superman beat up crooked industrial robber barons on behalf of the working man. In the post-Marvel age of superhero realism and relevance, Iron Man beats up crooked industrial robber barons on behalf of crooked industrial robber barons who have had a change of heart. But the main point is truth, justice, the American Way, and uber-violence on behalf of peace. The gods are us and we like to hit things — but in a good cause.

It’s not just sanctimonious Americans who find this sort of thing appealing, though. Perverse Frenchmen want to be superheroes too. Or at least that’s what I’ve gleaned recently from reading some of the poems of Georges Bataille. Bataille, like Robert Downey, Jr.’s Tony Stark aka Iron Man, is obsessed with sex and pleasure — surely Stark, for example, would appreciate a poem titled “I Place My Cock…” Like Strark, too, Bataille dreams of being more than human:

the glory of man
no matter how great
is to desire another glory

I am
the world is with me
pushed outside the possible

I am only the laughter
and the infantile night
where the immensity falls

I am the dead man
the blind man
the airless shadow

like rivers in the sea
in me noise and light
lose themselves endlessly

I am the father
and the tomb
of the sky

the excess of darkness
is the flash of the star
the cold of the grave is a die

rolled by death
and the depths of the heavens jubilate
for the night which falls within me.
(from “The Tomb,” trans. Mark Spitzer)

The poem almost makes more sense if you decide it’s about Iron Man than if you don’t. Even all the talk about death — “I am the dead man/the blind man/the airless shadow” — fits, since Stark is essentially a walking corpse, his heart powered by the same technology that runs his suit. His weakness is his strength as he pushes outside the possible, in a hyperbolic apotheosis of noise, light, and self-dramatization.

In another poem Bataille declares, “I fill the sky with my presence.” And that does seem to be the point for ecstatic modernity, whether pop dreck or snooty highbrow philosophizing. Presumably it’s Nietzsche’s fault that God is dead and all we’re left with is the will to power of arms traders and self-proclaimed radicals. Or maybe Jung’s right and it’s just a mythopoetical heroic something — though it seems telling that we’ve only recently decided that we require one hysterically hyperbolic hero with a thousand faces rather than making do with all the dinky little heroes with one face each.

In any case, theirs is undoubtedly a thin poignancy in the desperation on display. It’s not enough to be Robert Downey, Jr., not enough to be Robert Downey, Jr. and a genius — you’ve got to be Robert Downey, Jr. and a genius and have enough fire-power at your fingertips to make Afghanistan right. Or, if you’re Bataille, it’s not enough to fuse romantically with nature, you have to actually fuck nature to death and tramp on her corpse before stabbing yourself in the eyes with Christ’s nails. When Paltrow, as Stark’s assistant Pepper Potts finds her boss fooling around with his armor, Stark laughs it off by commenting wryly that it’s not the most embarrassing thing she’s ever caught him doing — but I’m not so sure about that.

Tom Crippen had an article in The Comics Journal sometime back in which he referred to Superman as Siegel and Schuster’s “big dumb dream.” That dream is alive and well, but I’m not so sure it was Siegel’s and Schuster’s, or at least not theirs exclusively. Superheroes are just one, somewhat popular way to wrap the world around man or man around the world like some clunkily gaudy suit of CGI armor. As Bataille says, “the universe is within me as it is within itself/nothing separates us anymore/I bump against it in myself.” You can hear the dry “thunk” of his head on the inside of the helmet before he powers up and goes off to deface some idols or beat up some bad guys, whichever comes first.