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If you could write an official Cap or IM run right this second, what would you write?
Thanks for asking!
I had to give this a bit of thought, actually, because my instant answer to this question used to be "a Cap/IM team-up book" but, uh, that's actually happening. Hooray. In my dreams it would be an ongoing, though. And also in my dreams it would be named Tales of Suspense because... well... yeah.
I am assuming Marvel wouldn't let me make them bi. Either of them. I'd settle for just Tony being canonically bi. Alas.
I feel like I'm pretty transparent in my Iron Man desires, which is that, basically, I want an Iron Man book about Tony Stark -- someone else can even be Iron Man! I'm not picky! he just has to be alive and in the book! -- where Tony is a good and kind person and people like him. I miss when he had friends and not just one randomly selected redheaded woman as a sidekick and also now the entire world hates him for existing. I'd have Rhodey around more consistently. I'd probably put Pepper back in the book. I would, actually, bring Happy back to life, because he's been dead since Civil War and everyone else gets to come back so why not him? Also then I'd get Happy and Pepper back together.
I feel like a lot of Iron Man writers are determined to make their mark on the character, which means that something big and transformative happens and Tony gets massively injured, usually. I might give him a heart problem again, though. But I feel like I wouldn't want to go as far as, like, killing him again and I'd just write something with a lot of nice character moments and settle for making a mark on the character as "writing an Iron Man comic that the people who haven't liked an Iron Man comic since Director of SHIELD will enjoy."
I would pull, like, the most obscure one-off Silver Age villains I could find and put them in. Because why not. It doesn't really matter to me who the villain is -- although, yes, there are certainly characters I always like -- but I feel like upping the stakes by adding bigger and more destructive villains doesn't up the stakes as much as Marvel thinks it does, and I'd be happy with someone who just wants to completely wreck Tony's life on an emotional, personal, individual level (this is probably why I like Ty and Whitney as much as I do), probably with some punching included somewhere because I bet editorial makes you include some punching. The stakes just have to be big to him, I think.
I think it's harder for me to say what I'd do with a Cap run because I feel like Marvel comes up with way more Iron Man runs that are not to my taste than Cap runs that are not to my taste. There are a lot of Cap runs that aren't my absolute favorite but mostly they aren't terrible, either. They're just... there. I also think Marvel has been generally more consistent about Steve's personality traits over the years than they've been about Tony's.
In terms of things I'd like to see in a Cap run that I've never seen much of, I think I would like for Steve to be wrong about something and apologize for it. A lot of times, everyone in canon treats Steve as an infallible moral authority and he's... just a guy, you know. A really great guy, but he's still human. I just want to see him make a mistake and deal with it. I think that would be fun. I think he'd learn something. I'd like to see it. I still want him to be a good and kind person too! I just want him to learn to deal with doing something wrong! It would be a learning experience for everyone. Tony gets to make massive mistakes pretty frequently! Why not Steve?
I think that any comic book about a guy whose name is "Captain America" is of necessity going to be political in some sense whether or not certain segments of fandom like it. And I think Steve is at his best when he earnestly, though not uncritically, believes in the dream. I guess I'd like him to embody America the same way I'd like canon to treat Steve's character -- aware of flaws and injustices and problems and things that could stand to be improved, but with hope that things can be better for everyone someday. I would like both Steve and America to recognize their problems and work to correct them, I guess. I want Captain America to stand up for everyone and I want him to be compassionate and understanding about the problems that people who are not cis straight extremely-able-bodied Christian white men face. I think the feeling I would most like to feel from a Cap book is optimism about the future, honestly. That always makes me happiest.
I don't think I am necessarily the person I would want to write this, because I feel completely unqualified, but I sure want to read it.
(While we're at it I'd like a Captain America book that is really, really clear that fascism is not good, and I don't mean, like, putting him up against Hydra and calling it a day. I would like it to be explicitly clear what fascism is about and how to recognize it (like, more than "Hydra wears fancy uniforms") and who exactly fascism is against (and I mean real people and not, like, Inhumans -- sure, yeah, we all like a good Mutant Metaphor sometimes, but I don't think this is the place for that) and that all of this is Really Bad. And I don't think this is a big ask for a character who was introduced punching Hitler in the face. They used to have Cap comics about this all the time! I think now would be a great time to do that again.)
In terms of villains, they're not all necessarily villains all the time, but I have always thought that it's really fascinating that there are so many characters in Steve's orbit who can basically be described as "Steve But What If He Were A Bad Person." William Burnside. John Walker, to an extent. Frank Simpson. Hydra Steve. There are also people who ended up with the serum (or variants) who did not end up Bad, and I'm thinking of, like, Isaiah Bradley and also people like Brian Falsworth. And I would honestly be really interested in seeing a Cap run that tackles all of this and is like, okay, why did some of these people turn out this way? Why is Steve different? How does he feel about all of these people? Do they make him feel differently about being Captain America? How does he understand being himself? What does the shield really mean to him? I think it would make a change from "Wow, the Red Skull is alive again and he wants to take over America again and he's probably got a Cosmic Cube again. You don't say."
Anyway. Yeah. That's never gonna happen. But it'd be nice.
Hi dear!!
🧑Favorite character to write?
Uhhhh this is hard I don't know if I have a fave in general
I like to write dialogue for ults!Tony I think he's very funny.... also Janet is a pleasure to write.
🏆Fic you're most proud of?
i think fun & games i think it's my most cohesive longfic & i'm really happy with how i finished it
🎁Quote from a WIP?
IDK if this is quite the intent of the question but I wrote some voice messages for Cap's hotline and these were really fun to write sooo. I will share them.
might end up using this for something in stevetonygames ;)
Ooh, expand on Museum of Thought and Minds cape Thing? 👀👀👀
“Museum of Thought” is a Star Trek AOS Kirk/Spock thing. The current title is taken from a song of the same name and is in reference to mind melds. This thing is like, 30,000 words already, maybe 33% drafted and I have it 90% outlined but I haven’t worked on it in awhile. Title subject to change.
The plot is like... Farscape’s “Nerve (Part 1)” / “The Hidden Memory (Part 2)” meets TOS’s “The Enterprise Incident,” “The Naked Time,” and “The Conscience of the King” meets Voyager’s “The Q and the Grey” meets “The Voyage Home” meets Star Trek [SPOILER REDACTED] plus a lot of mind-melds. There are two heists, Spock seduces a Romulan commander, Kirk pretends to be seduced by a woman of Alien Species I Made Up to save his crew, Kirk gets sexually harassed a lot, Kirk and Spock get captured by three different villains (once due to a misunderstanding), they’re stranded on a planet briefly, a “Kodos was right” group is hanging around, there are Romulans, Klingons, and Alien Species I Made Up after them, Q is there a couple times, consequences from “Into Darkness” show up and hopefully it’s a slight fix-it for one of my least favorite things about that film, they meet space whales, the Enterprise disobeys direct orders from Starfleet, and the climax is when nearly everyone converges on [SPOILER REDACTED]. There might be a “Turnabout Intruder” bit. There will probably be an “Operation -- Annihilate!” bit happening, to some extent.
The “mindscape thing” is 616 Steve/Tony. I’ve barely started it. It’s after Civil War and Tony and Carol are in some kind of alternate universe or illusion without knowing how or why they got there. The only difference between where they are and their universe is that here, Steve is alive and he and Tony are in an established romantic relationship. EXCEPT, lol, my filename is actually a spoiler because... that is not what is actually happening. In reality, post-brain-wipe Tony is mid-brain-download and trapped in a recursive mindscape thing and Steve goes into his mind to try to get him out.
(this is in reference to this post, send me an ask or leave me a comment if you want to know about any of my other WIPs!)
if this is a question that interests you-- if you had to ship one of tony's exes with one of steve's exes, who would you ship?
Huh!
The thing is, I feel like most of Steve's exes are Good People who for the most part don't deserve to have most of Tony's exes happen to them. Lemme think.
The most disaster pairing I can think of is Cynthia Glass/Indries Moomji. Disaster in the sense that everyone else would be suffering.
I think Bernie/Rumiko would actually be pretty fun; they seem like they'd get along well. Well, have gotten along well, anyway.
I don't know who I'd put Rachel with. Jan, maybe. Not as wild as Ru, no, but I think Rachel would enjoy Jan's lavish lifestyle. I mean, okay, yeah, Rachel/Ru would be fun too.
There's Nat/Sharon, I guess. I feel like people ship the two of them anyway. Same for Maria/Sharon. Assuming that we're counting "people who slept with Tony a couple times" as exes, and in that case I also want Emma/Rachel.
(Emma/Marianne seems like kind of a gimme. Telepaths forever.)
In the "people who discovered they don't want to be dating Steve and/or Tony because they morally object to them" I think Roxanne Gilbert (who Tony stopped making weapons for because she was a pacifist and then she didn't date him) and Connie Ferrari (who as far as I can remember was super not a fan of Steve being Captain America) would get along or at least swap terrible "wow you dodged a bullet there" stories.
I don't think Whitney wants anyone but Tony anymore.
(@blossomsinthemist has suggested Bernie/Shulkie. Lawyer power couple!)
You asked in your other ask about Steve's perspective on Tiberius Stone in the DreamVision AU.
One of my favorite things to do in Steve/Tony fic, apparently, is "Volume 3 but make it gay" -- I have this, a Manhunt AU, and a massive fic I still haven't posted that's set during the Avengers/Thunderbolts crossover The Nefaria Protocols. Steve does actually appear in DreamVision in canon to defend Tony from Ty's allegations on TV, and it's a very sweet scene, but I figured he'd have a lot more to say if Tony was also dating Ty at the time and Steve was secretly in love with Tony. I mean, he doesn't even meet Ty in this arc! I can do better than that!
So I wanted to take Steve on a journey from "I viscerally dislike this guy" to "I'm jealous but I'm going to try to be happy for Tony because Tony loves him and at least he definitely isn't trying to murder Tony like everyone else Tony dates" to "oh, wait, he's actually trying to murder Tony and Tony doesn't believe me."
One of my favorite things to do with Steve, actually, is put him up against Tony's villains. Steve's villains are for the most part basically Nazis and basically punchable, whereas very few of Tony's villain problems can be solved by punching. Can Steve punch the Mandarin? Ghost? Tony's self-hatred and alcoholism? Probably not. And even punching the people he can punch -- say, Whitney or Ty -- isn't really going to solve Tony's problems with them. So Steve doesn't actually have an immediate plan and we can enjoy feeling his despair.
Ty was actually tricky for me to write because he's smart. And he has to be smart. And everything he says has to be something Tony will believe so it has to be something that makes sense, or at least sounds like it makes sense, in that you can understand how Tony would believe it. He can't just be a villain that wants to explode the moon or something. He's a villain Tony has to actually love. And Steve has to try to come up with counterarguments even though he knows he's better at punching.
Steve also has a tradition in canon of, let's just say, giving Tony really bad advice about a certain subset of his personal problems -- Steve trying to get Tony to stop drinking in Iron Man #172 comes to mind. So Steve is absolutely going to confront Tony directly about Ty even though this is not the right move and will accomplish nothing except making Tony mad at him, because Steve is the kind of guy who just has to try.
I think Ty is probably one of Steve's least favorite of Tony's villains, in the universe of this story. Just because he fucks with Tony's head very, very thoroughly. If I ever end up writing any sequels/codas to this one I am sure they are definitely going to incorporate the impact Ty has had on Tony's life, even though Ty himself probably will not appear. (There is one I might actually write, which would have no actual on-page Ty in it, and one I definitely will not.)
If Marvel let me write an Iron Man comic I would absolutely put Ty in it. There are several barriers to this dream, including the fact that I don't have a professional writing career.
for specifics, director's commentary on tony's culture journey in breaker of horses would be so lovely!! or steve's perspective on tiberius in your most recent ty fic for blossom ^^ (and also star emoji star emoji star emoji)
Ooh! Two in one!
Tony's culture journey in Breaker of Horses was dictated mostly by his name journey, which in turn was dictated by me being extremely pedantic. Breaker of Horses was a RBB for art of Centaur Steve and Retiarius Tony. So obviously Tony's name was going to be Antonius, except how does anyone in the gens Antonia end up a professional gladiator when that's not a thing that citizens can do? So that meant that Tony had to not be a citizen but had to somehow end up with the proper Roman tria nomina, and the way I could think of to get him to do that would be to make him, basically, from another country (client kingdom? I forget what the exact status was?) and have him sent to Rome and raised there and have him take the name of his foster-father, and then make him rebel against Rome (Tapae was an actual historical battle), get captured, get enslaved, get sold to the arena, and then fall in love with a centaur. You know, the usual.
I picked Dacia, as far as I can remember, because Dacians had a reputation in the Roman auxiliaries for being good cavalrymen and I thought it would be fun to give Tony an existing love of horses so that he could admire Centaur Steve, uh, professionally. I probably should have picked someplace there was more linguistic/cultural work on; you can tell that mostly what I was able to find about Dacia was the material culture stuff. I would have liked to have been able to include more of the actual Dacian language. (I have seen professional fiction that subs in modern Romanian but that wasn't a route I wanted to take.)
I feel like the status of non-citizens in Ancient Rome is a really interesting area of study, and so, fictionally, I wanted to put Tony somewhere he didn't quite belong. Where he would have grown up with freeborn Roman citizens who by accident of birth got to be everything he couldn't be, even if he had the same education as the rest of them (to the point where he doesn't know how to fight with Dacian weaponry; I think the falx is the other thing people can tell you about when Dacia comes up). And he probably learned to admire Rome, and then he learns that no matter how much he admires Rome, Rome doesn't, uh, admire him back.
And Rome sure Does Some Problematic Things, amirite? I mean, they also write the history books so they tend to make themselves look good, but even in the history books I feel you get the sense that they did, uh, actually very much know what the people they conquered thought of what they were doing when you read the bits where they attribute speeches to the barbarians. We all like Tacitus' "they make a desolation and they call it peace," yeah?
So I really wanted to tap into that. Problematize the Roman Empire! Why not? Tony goes to Rome, he goes back to his people, and then he goes back to Rome again and he's lost everything he had and he's much more aware of who he is that isn't Roman, and then he can finally fall in love and be happy etc etc and feel comfortable taking his actual Dacian name back.
(I mean, we all like stories where Tony Loses Everything, right? I just combined it with Cultural Conflict With The Roman Empire.)
I'm going to answer your other question on your other ask because this is already long enough.
This is also from the Madame Masque story. Tony is just... having a very, very, very bad day. And he is making some bad decisions. So, yes, a liquor store is one of the bad decisions.
Reality was a little more sharp-edged than Tony's fantasies. Wasn't it always? The store was tiny, and the clerk regarded him from the other side of the too-close counter. The selection wasn't great, and everything Tony was interested in was on the shelves behind the clerk. If he was going down, if he was doing this, he was going to commit to something quality. No nip bottles of terrible flavored brandy for him. No cheap malt liquor. He still had the money. He might as well get to enjoy the ride to hell.
The clerk's bored gaze roved over him, and Tony saw the precise moment when the clerk realized that Tony's shirt was soaked with what was really a rather astonishing amount of dried blood... and decided not to say anything about it.
Oh, New York. Never change.
"Can I help you?"
Tony glanced at the rows of bottles. "I'd like some alcohol."
The clerk's raised eyebrow eloquently conveyed the sentiment you're in a fuckin' liquor store, pal. "Any particular kind?"
The disdain and utter boredom on his face made Tony want to snap back with a vicious surprise me, but it wasn't like the clerk knew or cared what Tony was doing. What this meant to Tony. What he was ruining.
...so, yeah, this story is Full of Angst.
Believe it or not, this story actually has a happy ending.
