30 Days of Fandom Meme: Day 7

[osprey_archer]

7 – Have you ever had a fic change your opinion of a character?

Ha, yes! I think most recently sineala's Tony fics have moved me from finding Tony Stark irritating to finding him...well, still a little irritating sometimes, but also sad and uncertain and concerned that he might be inadequate and generally in need of a hug.

Her fics are comicsverse, which has a fairly different Tony Stark characterization than movieverse - IIRC sineala summed it up as "Comics Tony hates being himself. Movie Tony loves being himself" - but they still made it easier to see the vulnerability behind Tony's general facade of dickishness.

And I'm going to link the fic where Tony really won a piece of my heart: snow.txt, where Steve stumbles upon the old self-insert hurt-comfort epics Tony wrote as a teenager, wherein Tony writes himself as the indispensable stoic woobie of Captain America's team.

Comments

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

Ok, snow.txt is adorable, but why would Tony make the Invaders fic directory accessible to the team in the first place? Oh, well, the heart has its reasons.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think that falls under "shhhh, if you say that too loud you might wake the story" logic. Maybe he just uploaded all his directories and forgot that one. Or maybe he was secretly hoping all along that Steve would find it.

Although if the second one is the case, I kind of hope Natasha or someone else found it first and teased him about it for days. Because really, Tony, there are better ways to confess your love.

[sineala.livejournal.com]

I was going for "Tony uploaded everything once upon a time and has since forgotten about it, and also the directory permissions are probably set so only he can see them." Which would make it fairly unlikely that anyone would be able to see it, but in the course of the story Steve ends up having to login as Tony... and, yeah, okay, it is contrived. Pfft.

[evelyn-b.livejournal.com]

"Better ways to confess your love" does not seem to be Tony's strong point, it's true.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I think this is a universal Tony trait. This is the guy who bought Pepper a giant stuffed bunny with enormous breasts in the apparent belief that this would make a charming present that demonstrated his affection.

[sineala.livejournal.com]

I win! I win!

I think 616 Tony won me over when I discovered his vast depths of self-loathing, because, really. No one hates Tony like Tony hates Tony.

[osprey-archer.livejournal.com]

I feel like Age of Ultron would have worked a lot better with at least a smidgeon of this ported in. If he'd actually seemed pained by the Maximoff twins' comments about his weapon-mongering past, say. A little bit guilty about building a death robot that decided to nuke the planet. It would have given the movie a bit more emotional heft.