This a real question, not a complaint: how do you still ship Steve and Tony after Civil War? I used to love it, but now I cant forget that CW made it clear Steve doesn’t care about Tony or even the Avengers very much. I always wonder if The Letter TM was supposed to be a real apology and the screenwriter was just a sociopath, or if they were making him a dick on purpose. Anyway, I’d love to know how you reconcile all of that because your characterizations of them are so beautiful. I want to enjoy the ship again, so I’d love to hear your take on it.
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The funny thing is, Civil War is what made me ship Steve and Tony again, and I feel like how people engage with CW's take on them depends on where their feelings already were when that movie came out. I'm speaking broad strokes but not to universal experiences, plus shipping is subjective. Thoughts behind the cut.
I got into Steve/Tony as a ship around the time the first Iron Man movie came out (thanks, zen-ish!) and most of the fic back then was comics-based and focused on a deep, years-spanning friendship with bumps between them. Understandably, a lot of these feelings got projected forward into the fresh potential of the MCU's new versions of the characters, and in my memory, a lot of fic post-The Avengers predicated a future friendship dynamic not too far from from what the comics had established.
Now, a lot of people thrived then and still thrive now in that post-2012 The Avengers time of rich possibility. I know I had joined that high with tremendous excitement. But my investment in them as a ship took a sharp blow when Age of Ultron came out, because (not knocking those who get stuff out of it) the team dynamic was not working for me. Workmates instead of teammates, Steve wasn't even living in the tower (WHY?) and though there were some nice moments, Steve and Tony's main interactions were plot-driven instead of character-driven, and coolly semi-antagonistic. And by 'cool' I mean impersonal, which comes back to the workmates vibe.
The Avengers didn't need to show them as a tight team, but it teased the possibility. AOU, in my opinion, didn't follow up on possibility, and as a result I lost interest. I know a lot of people filled in the blanks and used the 2012-team-as-family momentum to keep going, but I couldn't get into that.
Now Civil War. Oh boy. I understand why people like yourself have strong negative feelings about it, but when Steve and Tony fight in this movie, it's personal. It's also plot-driven, but in my opinion the character beats are stronger in how the conflict is depicted. It fills in the negative space in AOU of two people who should know each other well by now -- Tony knows how Steve's going to react to the Accords, and Steve knows that Tony's already made a decision. Tony gentles himself, and uses a personal touch to try to convince Steve to change his stance. Steve outright yells at one point, which he rarely does. When Tony learns about Zemo, he goes to help Steve without hesitating -- that's a ride-or-die that's too late, and gets turned on its head at the last moment. When Tony learns about his parents, Steve stops trying to justify his actions, because he knows Tony's pain is too great and in this, without question, Steve was wrong and he can't defend himself in any way, it's done, it's over, all he can do is stand his ground and not let Tony hurt anyone.
It hurts because they care. As opposed to AOU, where when they fought the dialogue could've come from anyone and the movie refused to address the fallout afterward, or in The Avengers they barely knew each other and (you guessed it!) the movie refused to address the fallout afterward.
Would it have been nice for them to show Steve and Tony as good friends? Definitely, I'm upset about AOU to this very day. Is Steve's letter at the end of CW weird? Yes, and I won't bother justifying it.
But to me, CW built up a storm of emotion between them where previously there was (again, in my personal opinion) barely anything at all, and as long as there's something, that's something I can work with. (And I thought it was delicious.) A lot of how I write Steve and Tony is influenced by CW and its fallout, especially in how I'd build their friendship backwards in their timeline (through the post-2012 Avengers and AOU era) knowing what we know about them and how they strongly affected each other in CW and after.
From the (very little) amount of Marvel comics I have read, if you told 616 Steve Rogers that Tony Stark died to save the universe, and when his alternate self had a chance to go back in time, he went back to the 1940s to live out his life, Steve would have lost his shit in epic proportions.
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