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
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.
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.
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
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?
#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)
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
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.
Once again, he was met with a view of the cold, steel doors that he had become intimately familiar with while scanning almost all the infrastructure he could think of, and within a few moments the camera panned to the middle of an empty room.
“Mr Stark, I’m afraid once again Mr Parker is indisposed, but I thought this may be a good time for us to chat.”
The man’s voice made bile rise up in Tony’s throat.
“It has been two days. That’s 48 hours, and you still haven’t found your precious Spiderling. I think he’s beginning to lose faith in you.” He lowered his voice. “And I think I can prove that.”
The camera followed the man as he walked into an adjoining corridor, eventually turning the corner into a small side room.
Immediately, the camera focused on the roaring fire in the center of the room, burning red-blue, and Tony could almost feel the onslaught of heat. It took a few moments for the camera to adjust, and it gently settled on Peter, who was bending over a small stone desk in front of the fire.
Peter was pale, sweating profusely and his eyes were sunken and drowsy. Thankfully, his bruises had healed from the beating, but Tony could still see the faint bump from his broken collarbone.
“Little Spider, tell Mr Stark how you are feeling.”
Peter didn’t answer at first, and the man stalked forward.
“Now, now. You know what happens when you don’t speak. Answer me Mr Parker.”
Peter didn’t even move his head, and Tony could barely hear his reply over a dull chinking from the corner of the room.
“Please, Mr Stark.”
It was little more than a whisper, but Tony’s heart sunk into his stomach. Peter’s voice was hoarse and scratchy from disuse, and he looked seconds away from fainting from the heat of the fire.
The masked man gave a satisfied smirk, and Tony saw the outline of a shadow in the corner of the room.
“Your gift is finally ready Spiderling. Are you ready to accept it?”
“Please, no.” Peter whimpered, and looked up, drawing Tony’s eyes with his.
A red hot branding iron in the shape of a decorative ‘A’ entered the camera frame, hissing with heat and giving off steam.
“Please, please no.”
The man laughed softly. “Come Spiderling, you know we wouldn’t be unfair to you. I do not want to have to use this on you.” He gently picked up the iron. “You only have to do one, simple thing.”
Peter softly whimpered.
“What was that? I don’t think Mr Stark can hear you.”
“Anything. Please, please I’ll do anything.”
Upon closer inspection, Tony realised with a start that the band was made of Vibranium – Peter wouldn’t be able to heal from this. He watched with rapt attention as the man walked towards Peter with the brand, reaching down to card a hand through his hair. Tony winced as Peter was sharply tugged up, and the man leaned down to face him.
“All you have to do, little Spider, is admit Tony isn’t coming for you.”
Peter and Tony stilled.
“Think about it, Spiderling. It’s been two whole days, and he still hasn’t come to get you. You and I both know that if he wanted to find you he could have.”
Peter slowly shook his head.
“I urge you to consider your choice very carefully, Spiderling. If you believe Mr Stark is coming for you, do you really believe he would want you back with this hideous scar?”
The man twirled the iron in his hand, and Peter looked down, tears softly falling down his cheeks onto parched lips.
“He’s coming for me, I know he is.” Peter spoke so softly Tony could barely hear it, but the man’s responsive growl was more than loud enough to be heard over the roar of the fire.
“Come, little Spider. I only have to do this if you don’t do as I say. You could stop this.” The man raised the brand marginally closer to Peter’s skin, and Peter frantically shook his head, pursing his lips.
The brand got so close that it was casting a red shadow on Peter’s skin, and Tony could almost feel the heat on his skin. He watched with bated breath as Peter got increasingly frantic, writhing under the hold of two of the men’s goons when the brand got close enough to start blistering.
“You know what to do little Spider.” The man rested the brand above Peter’s skin, but Peter was still silent. “Very well.”
Tony watched as the man better positioned the brand atop of Peter’s torso, preparing himself to press it in before –
“Wait... Wait!”
The man cocked his head.
“He’s… He’s not coming… Mr Stark isn’t coming.” Tears were streaming down Peter’s swollen face onto his bruised torso, and the man gave a satisfied smile.
“Very good little Spider. That is correct.” The man paused and sighed. “But, you know what happens when you don’t obey fast enough.”
Tony and Peter screamed in unison as the man plunged the iron deep into Peter’s stomach, the hissing sound of flesh mingling with Peter’s wails.
He was hysterical, writhing on the floor and jerking in pain any time his torso moved, the blood on his stomach still cauterizing when the man stood and threw the iron to the side.
“I didn’t want to do this, Spiderling.” He reached down to run his knuckles along the brand, and Peter scrambled away from his touch, crying out in pain. “I did warn you.” He nodded to the goons. “Take him back.”
Two men stepped forward, and Tony watched as they hoisted a writhing, crying Peter over their shoulders and carried him out the door.
The man turned back to face the camera.
“I have to confess Mr Stark, I am disappointed. However, I’m not surprised. The press and the public have known for years that you don’t care about other’s lives. I just wanted to make sure.” He paused. “I just hope you remember this video every time you try to go to sleep.”
The video cut to black on the masked man’s Cheshire grin, and Tony rose from his seat on steady feet, crossing the lab to the bar.
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.
This chapter has descriptions of a beating.
IronDad, IronStrange (in this chapter)
This will be uploaded in many parts, so let me know if you want to be added to a tag list.
Peter gets kidnapped, and Tony finds out too late.
\///\///\///\///\///
A knock from the side of the penthouse window drew Tony out of his thoughts, and walking over his shoulder, he saw the shadow of a deep red cloak.
“FRI, open the windows.”
She did so, and Stephen floated into the penthouse, landing softly on the floor, turning to Tony.
“Tony –”
“It’s Peter… He – he.” Tony let out a sob, and collapsed into Stephen’s arms, heaving cries wracking through his entire body.
Stephen enveloped him, hands cradling through hair.
“Tones, it’s okay. It’s okay. This isn’t your fault.”
Tony stilled.
“This is on them, Tony. You’re not the one that took him.”
Stephen barely heard Tony’s response. “I was meant to be the one that protects him.”
Gently lifting Tony’s head, Stephen looked him in tear stained eyes.
“We all were. JARVIS as well. These people evidently know what they’re doing Tony. You’re one human man, you can’t put it on yourself to protect a family of superheroes.”
“He’s a kid.” The following sob Tony gave echoed around the room, and he collapsed into Stephen’s arms. He pulled Tony onto the couch.
“We’re all doing everything we can, Tones. You’re not any help to Peter dead though. Sleep. I’ll wake you in an hour.”
Expecting interruption, Stephen ignored Tony’s shuffling and continued.
“FRIDAY and JARVIS are on this Tony. This is quite literally what they were made for. Sleep.”
Stephen was met with silence, and he gave Tony a chaste kiss on the lips before sitting back, resting a hand on Tony’s head.
A few moments later, the phone rung with a new message, and Tony bolted upright.
The video opened on Peter, still bruised from the beating only 15 minutes ago.
“You called a friend, Mr Stark.” The masked man stepped into the camera shot. “Did you forget our rules?”
A violent wave of nausea rushed over Tony as he watched the Switch-Knife-Man approach Peter with a large bat, his eyes shining.
He brought the bat down on Peter with a flat crunch, and Tony watched as Peter jerked limply on the floor. Silent, but moving to cover his new wounds.
Stephen flinched when the bat came down again, hitting Peter right on the stomach and forcing Peter upright to throw up sickly green bile.
They watched as the goon brought the bat back on Peter again and again, getting increasingly excited every time Peter bit his lip with a desperately concealed moan. By hit five, Peter’s clothing was fully torn, and half his torso was black and blue. Tony was sure he had broken at least three ribs by this point, and the man kept hitting.
After ten hits, there was barely a part of Peter’s body that wasn’t black and blue.
The man’s voice rang out from the phone.
“A dozen more for every two hours your friend is by your side, Mr Stark. You have been warned.”
The video cut, and Tony turned to Stephen.
“Out.”
“Tony – ”
“OUT.”
Stephen slowly turned as the cloak wrapped around his torso, looking back when at Tony standing resolutely in the middle of the penthouse before stepping out into the air, the window closing behind him on the way out.
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