IronStrange Trash @drstephenstrangestark - Tumblr Blog

Tony: I relate to blenders because I too scream while doing my job

Tony, absentmindedly singing as he works because he’s on his fifteenth cup of coffee and -12th hour of sleep: Mama... just killed a man

Stephen, mumbling along from where he’s hovering above the sofa upside down reading a book: Put a gun against his head pulled my trigger now he’s dead

Peter, from the ceiling: Mama... life had just begun but now I’ve gone and thrown it all away

Harley, dropping to his knees and dramatically screaming: M A M A-

Everyone mumbling halfheartedly: OooOOooh-

Harley: DIDNT MEAN TO MAKE YOU CRY IF IM NOT BACK AGIAN THIS TIME TOMORROW

Peter, as he stares into the void: Carry on carry on

Everyone, muttering: As if nothing really matters

Rhodey, who just walked in the room: What the fresh f u c k

tinynebula

can we collectively take a moment to appreciate rdj’s disaster 80’s gay phase

like

honestly breathtaking

lesbiansassemble

robdowneyjr

What do you mean disaster?

drstephenstrangestark

How is this a disaster this is the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen.

twoofcups

dc literally has better villains than marvel because marvel antagonists are always like “i wear ALL BLACK and THREE PIECE SUITS and i kill people because i’m SAD inside” meanwhile everyone in gotham just be off the shits and have an actual aesthetic and presentation

wherewhywhat

The villain’s in Gotham are better because no one can out do Bruce Wayne in “i wear ALL BLACK and THREE PIECE SUITS and i beat up people because i’m SAD inside” so they had to come up with something else.

ghostclvb

I post for the bitches that used to get in trouble for reading under the desk during class in elementary school

eucalyptus-sage

confetti cupcakes

“Honey?”

Tony’s voice comes through the speaker in the room, startling Steve awake.

“You up?”

“I’m up,” Steve mumbles, rubbing his eyes and sitting up on the bed. The room’s dark, and his phone lies beside him, screen bright.

“Oh,” Tony says, his voice still sleep heavy, “Well, in that case, happy birthday, baby. I’m sorry I couldn’t be there to celebrate, but I promise as soon as I get back, we’re throwing a party. Fireworks, cake, you know, the whole shebang.”

Steve smiles to himself, the phone pressed up against his cheek. “I don’t need a party, Tony.”

“Oh? Well then, what do you want? Pie? I think people would go for pie.”

“How about,” Steve says slowly, “You get back and we spend a weekend together. You and me.”

“Clothing optional?”

Steve chuckles a little, and shifts the phone to his other hand. “Clothing optional,” he agrees.

On the other side of the phone, Steve can hear the smile in Tony’s voice. “Alright then, it’s settled. You, me, a lazy weekend in. Sounds good to me.”

“Sounds good to me too.” And then, a second later, “I wish you were here.”

Tony sighs, and the sound is crackly through the speakers. “I know honey, and I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. I just miss you.”

“I know. But hey, just another few days, baby. Then we’ve got a whole weekend.”

“Okay,” Steve says, already wishing for the next few days go by faster. “Do you have to go? I can hear people saying your name.”

Tony winces through the phone and shuffles a little. “Yeah, darling, I’ve gotta go. But I’ll see you in a couple of days, okay?

“Okay. Love you.”

This time, Steve’s sure of what Tony looks like when he responds, eyes bright, a sharp suit, and the softest, kindest smile. “I love you too. And baby?” Tony asks.

“Yeah?”

“Happy birthday.”

salty-ironstrange-shipper

all ironstrange fans be like Stephen and Tony argue and kiss and we’re right

duskyironstrange

and also rescue each other in between the other bits. as a value add.

funkylittlebidiot

*During a battle*

Villain!Stephen: excuse me, I am in fact religious

Steve: how can you when you do these atrocities? What would your god say?

Villain!Stephen: Oh he yells at me about it. It’s our foreplay

Steve: *glares suspiciously at Tony who’s trying his hardest not to look at Stephen’s ass*

salty-ironstrange-shipper

Thor: Earlier, Bruce explained to me that homophobia is a thing that exists, and I only have one thing to say about that-

Thor: *confused and disgusted face*

sassystephden

Ransom - Part 8

My Contribution to Whumptober 2019. Prompt 27 - Ransom.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8

WARNING: This is angst, and it will have an angsty ending. The following chapters (although not this one) will have brief descriptions of torture.

IronDad, IronStrange in later chapters.

Peter gets kidnapped, and Tony finds out too late.

\///\///\///\///\///

“Boss.”

“FRIDAY.”

“Boss.

“FRIDAY.”

Keep reading

drstephenstrangestark

I have a new account now (it’s a main, not a side-blog like this one) so the rest of ‘Ransom’ and also any and all future fics will be posted there. @sassystephden

Changed My Account

Now my IronStrange account is my main *happiness*

New account is @sassystephden

and before someone asks why there’s a d, it’s because of a post I saw a few days ago which was pretty much:

Stephen ordering a coffee

STARBUCKS BARISTA: Stephen with a ph?

STEPHEN, crying with tears of happiness: No, it’s Stephen with a PhD

STARBUCKS BARISTA, 5 minutes later: Iced latte for... Stephden?

I’m thinking of starting a different account w/ this blog as my main because right now this is only a side blog and it’s bugging me. Thoughts?

prokopetz

It just kills me when writers create franchises where like 95% of the speaking roles are male, then get morally offended that all of the popular ships are gay. It’s like, what did they expect?

veteratorianvillainy

#friendly reminder that I once put my statistics degree to good use and did some calculations about ship ratios#and yes considering the gender ratios of characters#the prevalence of gay ships is completely predictable (via sarahtonin42)

persephoneshadow-deactivated202

I feel this is something that does often get overlooked in slash shipping, especially in articles that try to ‘explain’ the phenomena. No matter the show, movie or book, people are going to ship. When everyone is a dude and the well written relationships are all dudes, of course we’re gonna go for romance among the dudes because we have no other options.

prokopetz

Totally.

A lot of analyses propose that the overwhelming predominance of male/male ships over female/female and female/male ships in fandom reflects an unhealthy fetishisation of male homosexuality and a deep-seated self-hatred on the part of women in fandom. While it’s true that many fandoms certainly have issues gender-wise, that sort of analysis willfully overlooks a rather more obvious culprit.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that we have a hypothetical media franchise with twelve recurring speaking roles, nine of which are male and three of which are female.

(Note that this is actually a bit better than average representaton-wise - female representation in popular media franchises is typicaly well below the 25% contemplated here.)

Assuming that any character can be shipped with any other without regard for age, gender, social position or prior relationship - and for simplicity excluding cloning, time travel and other “selfcest”-enabling scenarios - this yields the following (non-polyamorous) possibilities:

Possible F/F ships: 3 Possible F/M ships: 27 Possible M/M ships: 36

TOTAL POSSIBLE SHIPS: 66

Thus, assuming - again, for the sake of simplicity - that every possible ship is about equally likely to appeal to any given fan, we’d reasonably expect about (36/66) = 55% of all shipping-related media to feature M/M pairings. No particular prejudice in favour of male characters and/or against female characters is necessary for us to get there.

The point is this: before we can conclude that representation in shipping is being skewed by fan prejudice, we have to ask how skewed it would be even in the absence of any particular prejudice on the part of the fans. Or, to put it another way, we have to ask ourselves: are we criticising women in fandom - and let’s be honest here, this type of criticism is almost exclusively directed at women - for creating a representation problem, or are we merely criticising them for failing to correct an existing one?

observethewalrus

YES YES YES HOLY SHIT YES FUCKING THANK YOU!

ainedubh

Also food for thought: the obvious correction to a lack of non-male representation in a story is to add more non-males. Female Original Characters are often decried as self-insertion or Mary Sues, particular if romance or sex is a primary focus.

slitthelizardking

I really appreciate when tumblr commentary is of the quality I might see at an academic conference. No joke.

lierdumoa

This doesn’t even account for the disparity in the amount of screen time/dialogue male characters to get in comparison to female characters, and how much time other characters spend talking about male characters even when they aren’t onscreen. This all leads to male characters ending up more fully developed, and more nuanced than female characters. The more an audience feels like they know a character, the more likely an audience is to care about a character. More network television writers are men. Male writers tend to understand men better than women, statistically speaking. Female characters are more likely to be written by men who don’t understand women vary well.

But it’s easier to blame the collateral damage than solve the root problem.

destinationtoast

Yay, mathy arguments. :)

This is certainly one large factor in the amount of M/M slash out there, and the first reason that occurred to me when I first got into fandom (I don’t think it’s the sole reason, but I think it’s a bigger one than some people in the Why So Much Slash debate give our credit for). And nice point about adding female OCs.

In some of my shipping-related stats, I found that shows with more major female characters lead to more femslash (also more het). (e.g. femslash in female-heavy media; femslash deep dive) I’ve never actually tried to do an analysis to pin down how much of fandom’s M/M preference is explained by the predominance of male characters in the source media, but I’m periodically tempted to try to do so.

olderthannetfic

All great points. Another thing I notice is that many shows are built around the idea that the team or the partner is the most important thing in the universe. Watch any buddy cop show, and half of the episodes have a character on a date that is inevitably interrupted because The Job comes first… except “The Job” actually means “My Partner”.

When it’s a male-female buddy show, all of the failed relationships are usually, canonically, because the leads belong together. (Look at early Bones: she dates that guy who is his old friend and clearly a stand-in for him. They break up because *coughcoughhandwave*. That stuff happens constantly.) Male-male buddy shows write the central relationship the exact same way except that they expect us to read it as platonic.

Long before it becomes canon, the potential ship of Mulder/Scully or Booth/Bones or whatever lead male/female couple consumes the fandom. It’s not about the genders involved. Rizzoli/Isles was like this too.

If canon tells us that no other relationship has ever measured up to this one, why should we keep them apart? Don’t like slash of your shows, prissy writers? Then stop writing all of your leads locked in epic One True Love romance novel relationships with their same-sex coworkers. Give them warm, funny, interesting love interests, not cardboard cutouts…

And then we will ship an OT3.

kyraneko

I’m going to bring up (invent?) the concept of subjectification.

As in, people gravitate to the characters given the most depth, complexity, and satisfying interactions for their shipping needs, because those characters are most human, and we want the realest characters to play with.

In a lot of media, the most depth gets handed to male characters.

And, oftentimes, even when the screentime and depth and interactions are granted equally well to female characters, there can be a level of, for lack of a better word, dis-authenticity to those female characters: they are pared down, washed out, or otherwise made slightly less themselves than they could be, in the interest of making them decorative, or likeable, or “good,” or keeping them from upstaging or emasculating their male companions, or just that the writer whose job it is to write them doesn’t know how to write women the way they write men.

And you get the characterization equivalent of that comparison chart where so many animated female characters have the same facial features because the animators and designers are so worried about not letting them be ugly.

When you have a group that’s allowed to be themselves, warts and all, and another group that has to be decorative at all costs, the impression given on some level is that the decorative quality is making up for a shortcoming. That they wouldn’t be enough in their own right.

And sometimes that cost is authenticity. The interesting, striking, awe-inspiring, bold and glorious unapologetic selfhood that draws the viewer most particularly to those characters who are unapologetic in their particular existence, standing clear of the generic and bland and unchallenging “safe” appearances.

It is authenticity, not beauty, which powers subjectification. The love for a character, not because they are perfect, but because they are them.

They can be pretty, sure. They can be sweet. But being pretty and sweet is not a replacement, and too many female characters have been written by writers who think it is, while the interest—in appearance, in personality, in interactions, in plot development—goes to the men.

And when that happens, well. Surprise, surprise, that’s where the shipping goes.

whetstonefires

Yeah I don’t really ship but I do write a fair amount of fanfic, and in most franchises working with the female characters is a chore.

You have to do so much of the work yourself, because the canon left them unfinished, with huge gaps or unexplored contradictions that you have to somehow resolve. Every female character you decide to integrate into your fanwork in some major role constitutes an undertaking in her own right as you patch together an understanding of her sufficient to model a consistent set of reactions and priorities &c.

The dudes just get handed to you. Even the ones whose canon is a mess have properly developed character cores.

That you don’t have to unearth and piece together like some sort of volunteer archeologist coming up with theories way more complex than the available artifacts truly support.

headspace-hotel

Guys read this this is an amazing breakdown of it

Ransom - Part 7

My Contribution to Whumptober 2019. Prompt 27 - Ransom.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7

WARNING: This is angst, and it will have an angsty ending.

CW: BRANDING

IronDad, IronStrange in later chapters

This will be uploaded in many parts, so let me know if you want to be added to a tag list.

As whump-y as this chapter is, I’m really proud of it, but please, please don’t read anything that you are not comfortable with.

Peter gets kidnapped, and Tony finds out too late.

\///\///\///\///\///

Tony didn’t realize exactly how long he had been in the lab until his phone chimed with another message. At this point, Peter had been with the kidnappers for 2 days. This was video 24, and he really didn’t want to open it.

For the last 6 hours, he had been going through every single possible tracing route he could think of for the IP address, and had (successfully) hacked into the FBI database to scan the masked man’s eyes, ears and tongue. After six hours of extensive work, he had found absolutely nothing. Nada. Nothing at all tracing the villain, and he hadn’t slept in about 45 hours.

With shaking hands and burning eyes, Tony opened the video.