I have another question, this time a relationship kind.
Tony and Steve have “main” love interest in their comics (quotations for Tony because the writers either kills or spirit away his supporting casts). For the purpose of this ask, we’ll focus on Steve rogers/sharon carter and Tony stark/fujikawa Rumiko, and then we’ll get to the part of shipping Steve rogers/tony stark.
First part: in canon, Steve and Tony being a pair romantically won’t happen (I hope they will tho😮💨) and they’ll likely be with Sharon and “Rumiko” respectively. In fanon however (and as Stony lovers), we can make it so that there’s a possibility of Stony happening, granted that both have broken up with their girlfriends and are single. Now, the question is, what canon basis would lead to them breaking up with their girlfriends or their girlfriends breaking up with them? I wouldn’t want them to break up just for the sake of it, you know?
Second part: as stated previously, both Steve and Tony have love interests. What part of Steve/Tony ship is compelling for you that you ship these two characters and not their canon ones? And if there was a canon basis that lead to them breaking up with Sharon and Rumiko, will they be able to avoid the same fate with each other?
Thanks for answering in advance! Have a good day!!
Thank you for asking! These are fun questions! Sorry it is taking me so long to get around to answering them!
So I'm going to start here by cordially disagreeing with your premise -- because, speaking for myself, I don't actually want Steve/Tony to become 616 canon. I'd be happy to have it in an AU, although ideally a gayer AU than 3490 and something that is more than one panel. Like, a miniseries, or a nice Ults-sized universe. But not 616. Would I be happy if they were canonically queer? Hell, yes. Do I want them together? Probably not.
Look, I know what happens to canon Marvel couples. We all know what happens. If they got together in 616, if we were lucky, maybe we would get a nice special commemorative issue, but probably only if they actually got married. Then we would get, like, six months of them being happy and then Tony would start cheating on Steve with Hydra Steve and we would probably hold Civil War III: Now With Real Divorce and then Tony would sell their entire relationship to Mephisto. Sure, if you like darkfic, you might enjoy reading that fic. But then you'd close the AO3 tab and go back to your much happier canon. Except then this would be canon and we'd be stuck with it until they got back together in ten years. For like a year. Then they'd do it all again.
(Plus, if they put them together in a miniseries or small spin-off universe, they might actually get a shot at staying together for the length of the series, and Marvel editorial might actually let someone do it in the first place. Especially with Steve, who would I think be the sticking point here. I feel like the odds of them being okay with canonically queering up any version of Tony (who is, let's be honest, like 75% of the way there already) is, like, a thousand times higher than the odds of them letting Steve fall in love with a man because blah blah Captain America blah.)
While, since Ed Brubaker's run, Steve/Sharon has basically been Marvel's default pairing for Steve -- although Sharon was dead for, like, fifteen years and they didn't date again for ten more years after that -- I would, sadly, have to say that Tony probably doesn't have a canonical pairing in the same way, given that Rumiko has been dead for over twenty years, has been mentioned maybe once since then, and no writer has ever indicated that they want to bring her back, as far as I know. The current IM writer says he has no plans. So I think Ru means more to fandom than she does to Marvel.
Anyway, in both of these cases, the thing that has canonically led to both of these relationships breaking up is Sharon and Rumiko dying. Sharon eventually came back; Rumiko never has, and for maximum tragedy, Tony was going to propose to her and also she was murdered by someone in Tony's armor so she presumably died thinking Tony killed her.
Superhero comics generally tend to just… be that dramatic. Either that or the hero's girlfriend just, you know, says "ok bye" in about the span of a page (looking at you, Cantwell tanking Tony/Jan) and the hero is now conveniently single and ready for his next girlfriend. Steve also tends to canonically ruin his relationships by prioritizing superheroing over them and/or generally alarming the civilians he dates by being in a lot of danger all the time. Tony also dates straight-up villains more than once and that doesn't… work out. Because they usually try to kill him. So I think Steve/Tony would avoid several of those pitfalls by probably not dying permanently, probably not trying to kill each other (again), and also understanding that being a superhero is a priority.
I do want to clarify that I also enjoy reading about their canon relationships. Sure, yeah, Steve/Tony is my OTP, but that doesn't mean that, like, I wasn't having fun reading all the Tony/Jan in the Slott run, or all Tony/Emma in Duggan's IM run (the fact that Tony has dated multiple telepaths is really fascinating to me) because I absolutely was enjoying this. (Or Steve/Bernie, my favorite Steve canon relationship. I also find Steve and Sharon's relationship fascinating because they seem to have almost no emotional intimacy and yet it's clearly working for them.) So it's not so much "why do I ship Steve/Tony and not their canon relationships" because I like their canon relationships too. But if I want their canon relationships I can… read canon. If I want Steve/Tony, I can't just pick up a comic book about them dating (and, again, I wouldn't really want to).
But why do I ship Steve/Tony? I don't know what to say, really. I read The Confession and got to the end of it and I was like "oh, they love each other. That's why people ship it."
I like stories about queer relationships. I think Steve and Tony are interesting because they understand each other well and have a lot of similar values and at this point a lot of shared history (like, they are committed), and they have a lot of very strong feelings about each other (I mean, not always good, but that makes it fun) as well as an amount of emotional access that they don't really give other people; they clearly get to see each other's real selves, not just the public persona. And this is a combination of things they don't have with other characters, even their other friends. Like, with their other friends, if they get upset with each other, they will probably stop talking for a bit, take a break, think things over. Exhibit reasonably normal behavior. Steve and Tony? They need to be in the same room even if they can only scream at each other. They just… feel compelled to keep offering each other their personal feelings, even when they really should not. They are just massively intensely into each other.
Again, I think if canon tried to interpret this in a romantic way, it would involve breaking them up a lot and making them not… be with each other. Which is not how this dynamic actually works when they don't get along, but, like I said, a lot of Marvel characters' romantic relationships fail in similar ways, which is why this is a thing I don't want canon to do, because I think they'd try to fit them into that mold. Fandom can make them have all the emotionally messy romance! Canon can just write them as emotional messes who can't stay away from each other. We can do the rest.
So the emotional access/intimacy isn't always good, but it's absolutely fun to read. I'm thinking of in early v4 when Steve and Tony are barely speaking to each other and not on the same team but Tony makes a special point of having someone tell Steve he of course already has the password for this drive full of instructions for how to deactivate Tony's RT. Like, these guys are barely talking and Tony thinks it is absolutely perfectly normal and a good idea for Steve to be able to turn off Tony's autonomic nervous system. No one else has this ability. No one at all really should have this ability and, yet, here they are. Meanwhile, Steve is not on Tony's team because he's off doing black ops -- he refused to be on the Avengers -- but yet he cannot stop showing up to Avengers missions and having a terrible relationship with Tony. They can't talk to each other but they also can't leave each other alone. It's fascinating.
Plus, there's so much canon that you can basically have your pick of character dynamics -- whatever the hell that was in v4 is canon, and them being BFFs is canon, and so on. As I think I have said, I love this thing they have going on a lot -- you can see it in the azure eyes issue -- where they have this mutual admiration society and mutual inferiority complex going on where they both think the other one is so great and they can't understand what this person who is so great sees in them. But they both believe this! I love it. So, yeah, if you want to see them as being totally happy, I would absolutely read that, and there are eras of canon where I would buy that; I think it just depends where you want to go with them. I mean, I also obviously write super sappy fic in addition to stories that are miserable piles of pain. But whatever happens, Steve and Tony are clearly not leaving each other for good.
I have a question that’s been burning in my mind for a bit now, so I just want to ask something. But first, let me preface: if Tony had a superpower, it would be his mind (and his heart of gold, but Steve is more associated with “heart” motif, I think, though they can be both its representative—it’s not an either/or situation I believe—but I digress, it’s not the point, so thank you for your patience as I struggle to get my point across😖🫣). Tony is smart, ingenious, resourceful, and other things basically describing him as a super genius. The matter is that there are multiple characters who are super geniuses too, like: reed, Bruce, t’challa (comics; doesn’t seem to have the same level of intellect (feets) in the movies), shuri (movies; I’m not familiar with the comics), etc.
My question is, what separates Tony’s “brain” superpower from these other characters? What is he better at than them? (Like, his brain processes information faster, can multitask and run “programs” in parallel, etc.—these kinds of things involving how his brain processes works compared others.)
A follow-up question would be, in terms of work (like engineering, biology, physics, chemistry, and so on), what is he better at than others? Cause from my last reading of comics (now I’m unfamiliar so I may be incorrect with my assumptions), it seems everyone is doing everything now. There’s no “division-of-labour according to skill set ” so to speak, I think. I understand that these characters have their own runs but they team up as well. So I’m just wondering, if they do team up, what kind of works/tasks will Tony spearhead as the authority even when compared against other super geniuses?
I’m a new user of tumblr so I’m not familiar with the etiquette (made the account finally, after reading many of your fics in ao3🫣😖😆). If your answer to each question is long, it’s fine to answer them as if they’re separate asks. Long answers doesn’t deter me. In fact, I’ll enjoy reading it. Otherwise, if you prefer to answer both in one go, that will be fine as well! ❤️❤️
Have a good day/night!!!
Hi! Sorry it took me so long to get back to you; I had to think about this a bit.
The way Marvel handles intelligence is, I think, peculiar to superhero comics. Because the fandom attracts and thrives on fans who practice curative fandom to a degree that is stereotypically pretty large, there are some quirks you don't get in other fandoms. Basically, comics caters to the kind of people who are like "who would win in a fight" and then like to argue about it. So a lot of elements that in most other fandoms would just be elements of characterization are ranked and measured. In most fandoms, if you had two smart characters, or two strong characters, it would just be enough to know that about them. But it's superhero fandom, so you can look up lists of the Ten Smartest Characters, as if there is only one kind of intelligence and one domain of intelligence and it can be measured accurately and quantified, which is not a thing that is true about the real world.
(Incidentally, last I checked, the smartest character was Lunella Lafayette (Moon Girl). I feel like this is a sign that these lists are maybe not all that useful, because even if she is the best at figuring things out, she's still, like, eight years old, and there are a lot of problems to solve where no matter how smart you are, it would really really help to have more life experience and emotional understanding than an eight year old. I also think this about Franklin and Valeria Richards.)
In actual stories, Tony and the various genius heroes tend to just show up and be there to serve the narrative. They are as smart as the story needs them to be, and they are there to do what the story needs them to do, and very little of this is real science anyway. So if Tony's better at something it's because he's the guy the author wants to be able to solve the problem; it's hard for me to treat this question as if they were real people, because they're fictional geniuses solving completely fictional problems with fictional science. It's not like deciding who should be on the competitive math team. They'd probably all be good at it.
In terms of canonical powers, Tony is no longer using Extremis, so his processing power is back to that of an unassisted human. I don't think any of the other genius characters are similarly augmented, so they're all even there.
If you put Reed and T'Challa and Tony in a room -- well, you've got like half of the original Illuminati, for starters. (I'm leaving Bruce out of this because Bruce as a character who interacts in any way with the Avengers is basically a MCU thing which occasionally now shows up in comics because of the MCU.)
Anyway, of those three guys, Reed is the theoretical scientist. If you need someone who will do all the math, that's Reed. He will calculate whatever needs calculating.
Tony is the engineer. He can figure out how to take the calculations and turn them into a physical thing that does the thing that needs to be done. And, sure, Reed builds stuff too, but certainly not to the degree that Tony builds stuff. He is dogged and persistent and willing to put things together and see what happens and fail and fail and fail until he gets it right. Tony is 100% the guy I would want on my team in Junkyard Wars. Is Junkyard Wars still a thing? It should be a thing again, and if he were real he should definitely compete on it.
T'Challa is kind of a combination of both of them -- theoretical and practical -- but what he really brings to the table is being the king of Wakanda. He can put the resources of an entire country -- the richest country in the Marvel world -- into building stuff. Tony builds things personally. Hands on. One at a time. Even though he often has companies that could presumably do this for him, he's not manufacturing anything at scale (exceptions made for things like getting into clean energy). He is building bespoke, one-off, world-saving solutions. T'Challa has the resources to take things like Tony's one-off builds and make lots more -- like how he designed the Quinjets and the Wakanda Design Group built them. Reed probably wouldn't have designed them -- although if they needed some new scientific theory to make them work, he could come up with that. Tony could probably design one and build you a working one in 48 hours without stopping to eat or sleep, but he probably wouldn't have built more than one of them. But T'Challa can make them and get you a small fleet of them. Because that's what he actually did. He's got the resources and the leadership.
I don't know that I would call any of these kinds of things better than the other -- I think they're all necessary parts of the process. Since most of the world-saving solutions are generally one-off builds, T'Challa's specific strengths don't usually come into play as much, at least in most of the events. But Tony usually gets to be a hero, unless he's evil or the writer hates him or something.
I would rec Empyre if you want a relatively recent event where the geniuses all have to work together -- and, to an extent, AXE Judgment Day -- as well as the Dark Ages miniseries, which is set in an AU where Apocalypse had mind-controlled geniuses working for him for eight years and somehow no one built the thing to solve the problem he had until Tony got there and did it in a few days. Which doesn't really make sense to me, but, uh, go, Tony, good job trying to destroy the world.
