i'm new to this fandom but i've been following you ever since I decided to get myself into comics which is actually not quite a while back. i've seen ppl from this fandom calling stevetony abusive and i just want to know what's your take on that (you don't need to answer if it makes you uncomfortable) I used to only watch the movies but the hype for aou and civil war made me want to dig into the comics and watch the cartoons as well
i think you should absolutely read the comics and watch the cartoons. especially before whatever ca: cw does with stevetony actually happens. not only are the cartoons and (most of) the comics a thousand times more successful at portraying the relationship, they’re actually a lot more enjoyable, too.
[clears throat]
no matter where you go or what you ship in fandom there’s always going to be people who want to characterise a ship as being abusive because that’s usually the fastest way of invalidating a ship and encouraging others to hate on it. but look man i have zero time for double standards where steve and tony is problematised and steve and [insert character here] doing the exact same thing is romanticised.
it’s a double standard furthermore applied by people who don’t give af about looking at the complexity and nuance of their relationship which you can’t do if you want to pretend to talk about them in any meaningful way.
it’s also typically used in a way that lays the blame at the feet of only ONE guilty party (surprise surprise who) and that’s…….. really not how you should be going about a deconstruction of a relationship bc last time i checked a friendship takes two people to break down.
steve and tony’s relationship has been characterised by certain levels of unhealthiness ever since circa 2007 when civil war occurred. but part of the reason for their subsequent conflicts is because neither of them gained actual closure from civil war. steve apologises in the last issue of frontline for his role in civil war but never to tony’s face, and then tony’s brain is mindwiped and civil war is never brought up again between them. it’s danced around and the aftermath of it with osborn and dark reign is mentioned but they never sit down at any point like they did in casualties to acknowledge they both fucked up and how they can learn and grow from this mistakes. nearly every single one of their communication failures in their latter conflicts with the illuminati, the infinity gems, the incursions, can be related back to the first breakdown in their relationship in civil war.
(more to come on this soon in a meta post that deals with the aftermath of civil war and how that’s literally colored every one of their subsequent conflicts.)
the fact that steve and tony suffer from trust issues, lack of communication, unrealistic expectations of each other does not invalidate their history of love, loyalty and faith in each other. the bad doesn’t cancel out the good and the good doesn’t explain away the bad. they exist in tandem. and if marvel were capable of letting them grow and develop from it, they would’ve learned from those mistakes and become stronger for it. but as it stands, marvel fucking sucks at that.
the main points i have to say in response characterising this relationship as ‘abusive’:
1. ‘critics’, we’ll say, of the ship naturally don’t care about looking at the ship as a whole –– flawed and imperfect and with an extremely long history –– and will cherrypick whatever moments they see fit to demonstrate their point. for every moment of grief and rage and bitterness between steve and tony i could give you a dozen where there is love and affection and trust. the whole point of the existence of a friendship between them means that yes there were bad memories but there were also many, many good memories. it’s bizarre to pretend that their relationship can only be characterised as either perfect or flawed.
i’m guessing avengers vol. 5 and the original sin and time runs out events are the ones usually pointed to as evidence of unhealthiness in their relationship. and i won’t deny that, but this is also the farthest extreme they’ve ever been pushed to. this the world ending. this is everything as the avengers know it coming to complete an utter disaster. characters that are actually married (reed and sue richards) are having their marriages destroyed by the fallout of the incursions, it’s not just steve and tony who are suffering.
both original sin and civil war were events where the very real facet of their relationship where ‘they bring out both the best and the worst in each other’ is emphasised against the extremely high stakes and total loss they’re faced with.
it’s highly disconcerting and disingenuous that the stevetony dynamic is reduced to the worst moments of their history when in relationships such as stevebucky, bucky nearly beating steve to death is romanticised and shown as an epic revelation of love over and over again in fandom. you wouldn’t point to that event and call it abusive because there is more at play than the surface layer of ‘bucky is beating steve to death’.
2. i have a feeling that people who characterise it this way are also very very quick to cast the role of perpetrator to only one character and this is patently biased when fandom already has a tendency to elevate one character to a certain golden pedestal and crushing the other one into the dirt. i don’t even have to say their names and you know exactly who is who in the roles i’ve mentioned.
to pretend that tony is the only one who has made mistakes is extremely reductive and a complete injustice to their relationship. last time i checked, it takes two people to form a friendship and two people to break it as well. i’m not here for analysis of a stevetony dynamic where only one person’s flaws are ever judged and criticised and the other person gets a free pass.
3. i’m overall just…. very wary of people leaping to use the word ‘abusive’ like it’s the ultimate justification for hating on a ship and discouraging other people from enjoying it. just because a relationship is flawed does not automatically make it abusive. yes, the stevetony dynamic is riddled by moments of unhealthiness and toxicity but that does not make it abusive.
it completely invalidates the fact that a relationship can be flawed and the two parties in the relationship can make mistakes and communication failures can happen because hey, wow those people are human. and in moments of enormous pressure and sacrifice, they’re prone to fucking things up.
people need to st o P with the double standard of romanticising certain behavior in one ship and denigrating it in another.
if you don’t like the ship, that’s fine. but pl e a se don’t throw labels at it and pretend you’re willing to engage in meaningful discussion about their flaws if you just want to hate on it, it’s transparent af.
