Hi! A thing that makes it difficult for me to enjoy SteveTony in the Ults universe is how casually aggressive Steve can sometimes be with Tony, or at least my perception of it as aggressive. IDK, it's likely projection, but there are moments where Steve can come across as too inconsiderate? What do you think? How do you deal with that in fiction and when you're trying to write SteveTony? I ask because you write them as these complex and flawed individuals who don't always come together neatly.
Hello! I’m glad my Ults characterizations come off as nuanced — that’s definitely the stuff I want to come across!
With respect to Steve’s aggression, I think a really important element is that while Steve is a dangerous person — good lord the man is violent — he’s not manipulative. He’d absolutely punch a dude’s face inside-out in a bar fight, but I can’t imagine him as the abuser in a romantic relationship. That’s a super important distinction to me. It’s the difference between a big dog that’s been trained to attack intruders (terrifying) and a lap dog that wags its tail until suddenly its teeth are sunk into a toddler’s arm (vile).
In Ults canon, I feel like Steve and Tony are pretty decent to each other. Compared to 616, they’re wildly functional! They don’t interact a whole bunch, but when they do it’s generally caring: Steve comforts Tony while he throws up into the toilet from chemo; Tony gives Steve his old helmet; Steve frets beside Tony’s hospital bed. They’re good fighting partners, and while Steve isn’t jazzed about Tony’s drinking problem, he’s not a giant asshole about it.
However, Ults Steve is a giant asshole. (This is part of why I love him so much.) He’s swimming in a sea of self-righteous toxic masculinity. He has no control of his temper. Under all the crankiness, he’s alone and grieving for a past he can never get back. Ults Steve is not an easy person.
And goddamnit, he tries so hard. Ults Steve has good intentions! But then he does fucking infuriating things because of the above massive character flaws and unaddressed issues, and handles the consequences poorly. Ults Steve does one thing with fear: he turns it into violence and anger. And in my interpretation, he gets scared a lot. He’s scared he’s not good enough, and that he’ll never adapt to the modern world.
Tony is a purposely provocative motherfucker. He’s the apex of modernity. He could be very threatening to Steve’s soft spots, if he wanted to be. And Ults Tony is also full of vulnerabilities and bad coping mechanisms. He falls in love too easily and has watched a lot of people die right in front of him. He’s a killer and he hates it. Tony hides all his hurts behind a glitzy facade, which means someone blunt like Steve is never going to notice the places where he’s raw ahead of time. And Tony strikes back, because he has a temper too, and that’s when he goes for vulnerabilities, the emotional chinks in someone’s armor.
So in Ults fic there’s a lot of opportunities for explosions between them. I can really see Steve coming in, doing his difficult-bastard-best, and kicking one of Tony’s well-concealed hornets nests, followed by Tony cutting back, because his reflex is to be a sharp knife of a person, and Steve losing his temper because the only way he knows how to deal with emotions is by kicking someone in the head, and — well.
I really like this kind of volatility. It’s a cool dynamic with lots of opportunities for high drama. And Steve’s motivations aren’t gross. His clashes with Tony tend to stem from a clumsy effort to do the right thing or self-defense, which are reasons for interpersonal violence that don’t squick me.
It’s also very important that he’s fictional. I would not be friends with this Steve in real life. He’s fucking terrifying! You do not get to be a man that strong with that much of a temper and hang out with me and mine. But in fic, I think he’s super interesting and it doesn’t bother me. If you have a lot of experience with a real life man who is too much like Ults Steve, I can understand why he’d be off-putting, and I definitely have sympathy for that. For me, Steve being objectively a huge dick just makes him a more complex as a character and more fun to write/read about.
…that was a lot of words, damn. I care a lot about my big stupid violent darling. Hope that hit on at least some of what you wanted me to explain!
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