(no subject)

[alexseanchai]

I know jack shit about Marvel movieverse, except that it's eaten fandom, but I think this should be required reading for anyone writing Steve/Tony: It Would Be Remarkable if Steve Rogers and Tony Stark Did Get Along. Putting the characters in their historical context is important.

Comments

[redsixwing]

Wow. Can I read THAT fic? The one where the two of them get in a political debate and maybe just possibly point out that the lousy solution of throwing up your hands and hanging people out to dry isn't actually a partisan thing, but rather a failure of imagination and surely as Captain America and Iron Man, they can both do better?

Because that would be awesome.

I still need to see that movie; I keep hearing it's very good.

[alexseanchai]

I actually want to read that fic too, and I haven't seen any of these movies.

[melannen]

Hmmm. See, while I agree with him entirely in the general (and that's part of what makes Steve/Tony a fun pairing) I think I disagree with him entirely in the specifics.

I mean to start with, Tony Stark was never going to end up rotting in a tenement, no matter when he was born, so the comparison he's set up is really not comparable.

But also, if Tony had been born when Steve was, but still as Tony Stark of Stark Industries, his family would have hated FDR. I think with the current Great Recession there's been some rose-colored recollections of the New Deal, but the technoindustrialist autocrats hated the New Deal back then just as much as they hate any hint of a new New Deal now, and they hated it even more once it started working (and in fact a lot of them continued to deny it had worked up to their dying day, and their heirs continue to do so now, and claim that all of its benefits were the simple result of war spending.) Tony's dad was Cap's generation, and no way in hell did he and Cap ever agree politically on anything (except beating the Nazis.)

Contrariwise, if Cap had been born when Tony was, but still as Steve Rogers of the working-class New York, his family would have hated Reagan. Reagan's Morning In America helped a lot of people, but it left a lot of the long-term poor behind, and Steve's kind of people - urban working-class, recent immigrant history, strong ties to unions and unionism but also liberal-political connections to art and academia - hated Reagan's trickle-down economics, they hated it then as much as liberals hate it now, they hated it even more once it started working (and in fact a lot of them continue to deny that it ever worked at all, or claim that all of its benefits came from New Deal-style policies put in place by Reagan's Democratic Congresses without his support.)

...which is just to say that the reasons Tony and Cap have for disliking each other go a lot deeper than generation gaps.

[alexseanchai]

*nods*