#alice1939 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

sineala · 3 months

Note

Hi there. Thank you for answering my question last time. This time, I just want to ask something about your opinion. When I scroll through Stony community, it seems like there's some people think that Hickmanvengers has destroyed Stony, and they can never come back to what they used to be. What do you think about that? Also, what do you think about Stony's dynamic recently?

Hi! So you sent me this ask approximately two months ago, and I started writing an answer then, and I wrote what appears to be approximately 50% of an answer and then Life Happened. And I am back but I have literally no idea where I was going with the rest of this answer.

So, here is approximately 50% of an answer to your question! I figured you might prefer having half an answer to zero answer. It's like the "in this essay I will" meme except I attempted to start the essay.

Thanks for the question! I really appreciate getting asks like this.

Has Hickmanvengers destroyed Stony? This is a really interesting question, though admittedly I'm not quite sure how to answer it, both because I think it assumes an amount of… emotional continuity… that I don't think really exists in these comics, and also because in another sense I think it's a question that canon has already answered, although admittedly canon's answer was kind of unsatisfying.

If you'd asked me this in 2015 -- say, right after Avengers #44 had come out -- and I'd just read the very last page of this very long run which ends with Steve and Tony in a fight to the death, I would definitely have had my doubts. I mean, yeah, it's a run that opens with the immediate aftermath of Tony betraying Steve, although we don't know that at the time, and over the course of the run we find out that the Illuminati wiped Steve's mind, that Steve holds Tony personally responsible for this, and that after Steve finds this out, he spends the last third of the run trying to hunt Tony down and murder him. Steve doesn't ever stop or forgive him, and Tony never apologizes. They just beat each other to death (and then get squashed by a falling helicarrier, which kills them first). That's… a lot, you know? It seems reasonable to think that they'd have difficulty coming back from that. I certainly wondered how they were going to come back from that.

I figured Secret Wars was going to do something about that. That didn't end up happening.

But it's also not 2015 anymore, and we have had nine years of canon to decide whether or not Hickmanvengers has destroyed Stony, and the answer seems to be "no, because canon has acted like none of this ever happened." We've seen them. They're friends again. They seem to be doing all right, as friends. And not only are they friends again, they've never mentioned any of this.

So, I have to say, it doesn't look like it destroyed them, otherwise we wouldn't have had things like the team-up miniseries, or that Avengers Annual from a couple years ago, or AXE Judgment Day.

For something like Civil War, we had a bunch of resolution, and while some of it (cough World's Most Wanted) may not have been what fandom would have preferred, we've also had things like Avengers Prime, and then Bendis' subsequent Avengers run, where we see Steve and Tony work through their feelings about Civil War as much as they can, and it's clear that they've dealt with it, at least to some degree, although maybe not as much as we would have wanted. Prior to that, we've had Cap #401, which featured Steve and Tony having a heartfelt conversation and making up in the wake of Armor Wars and Operation Galactic Storm.

For Hickmanvengers? We got nothing. Steve and Tony weren't in Secret Wars, they came back to life afterward, and everything was fine. The only time they have ever mentioned the incursions was in one of the Civil War II tie-ins, Captain America Steve Rogers #6, in which Steve is secretly Hydra Steve and he's trying to put Tony off-balance, and he's asking him why he's on his side now. That's it. And that wasn't even the real Steve. The real Steve's never mentioned it. So as far as we know, they've never talked about it. They've somehow just gotten over it.

Should it have destroyed Steve and Tony? Maybe. I think it depends on how much you feel comics should resemble reality. Because, I mean, obviously, in real life, if your BFF tries to murder you they are definitely not going to be your BFF anymore and also should probably be arrested and you probably don't want to see them again ever in your entire life. So if they were real people, yeah, of course, that would obviously be a dealbreaker right there. Definitely a relationship-ending move.

But comics aren't reality. And I don't just mean that in the same way that any fictional story isn't reality. Comics have had decades to establish their own reality. And that means that totally bizarre things that would never, ever happen in the real world just happen all the time in comics. New York gets routinely destroyed by supervillains and people still live there! Superheroes come back to life every week! The US government keeps building giant robots that will capture, imprison, and usually torture or murder their own citizens if they happen to be mutants! So there's a sense in which you can't expect characters in comics to have the same reactions and attitudes as people in our world, because they're not living in our world. They're living in a world where you can literally be murdered and wake up the next day, 100% fine.

So you're talking about two characters who have tried to murder each other on multiple occasions -- but in a world in which being dead is a very temporary condition. You're talking about two characters who have, at the very least, deeply wounded each other -- but they're also characters who are committing, essentially, state-sanctioned vigilante justice. They solve most of their problems by punching, and what with the mind control and villain AUs and whatnot going around, it's also the case that a lot of superheroes, including Steve and Tony, have just basically hurt each other a lot. These are pretty well-established conventions of superhero comics. They live in a world where the stakes are very, very different than they are here.

I suppose what I'm arguing here is that you can't just straight-up apply our standards of morality from here on Earth-1218 to Earth-616. Obviously the same sorts of things are still wrong, so this was definitely not a great thing to do to a friend and/or loved one, but there's a sense in which it's hard to say that killing a superhero in comics -- or trying to kill them -- has anywhere near the same actual impact as it would in our world, where you don't get to come back to life, period. Which is kind of a problem, because these standards are the ones we would use to judge whether characters have acted in an ethical matter toward each other, and how seriously it is that they've hurt each other.

So how can you actually evaluate, say, how badly Steve and Tony have hurt each other, according to the standards of their world? Well, okay. So Tony wiped Steve's mind. This isn't the first time this has ever happened in comics. This isn't even the first time Tony has done this to Steve; he made Steve forget he was Iron Man in the 1998 Annual. So how bad is mindwiping, as a transgression? And that's kind of interesting, because there's a fair amount of canonical evidence to suggest that the answer is "not very." In the most recent Fall of X comics, Emma Frost mindwipes Kamala Khan's family so they won't remember that she died, so they won't be sad about it. This is presented, in context, as a nice thing to do. A merciful thing. Not, say, a wrong and invasive thing. Here she is offering this at the beginning of the Hellfire Gala:

You wouldn't know this from this Hickmanvengers run, but, historically, Stephen Strange -- who actually did this particular mindwipe -- has a habit of mindwiping people like it's going out of style. It doesn't seem to be a big deal. Not to him, and not even to the people he mindwipes. In the classic arc Avengers/Defenders War, Strange concludes the fight in Avengers #118 by wiping Tony and Thor's knowledge of each other's identities, which they didn't ask for, but which no one seems to be all that fussed about. No one says anything in protest.

Then, as an encore, in Defenders #11, which is the next issue, he mindwipes Nick Fury's knowledge of the Defenders' identities, and then mindwipes the entire world about the same thing, except the Avengers.

For this, Tony calls him honorable. No one is mad. Mindwiping seems… mostly okay, actually?

And even in the 1998 Annual, Steve and Tony make up. Tony makes Steve forget Tony's secret identity. Steve is a little mad about Tony mindwiping him, but he totally forgives him by the end of the issue. They're good. They shake hands. They're friends.

So Hickmanvengers is kind of the odd one out, here. There doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence for "mindwiping someone on Earth-616 is a terrible crime for which the guilty party deserves death." And there is, in fact, evidence that Steve has personally been willing to forgive Tony for this in the past. But here in Hickman's run, for some reason, Steve is much harsher than he or anyone else has been in a comparable situation. So it's very bad within the context of the run, but once you get out of the run and think about it by the standards of the rest of the Avengers comics, it seems like mindwiping Steve… shouldn't be that bad? It should probably at least be forgivable. Steve has previously demonstrated that he can, in fact, forgive Tony for this. It seems reasonable that he could do so again.

Is Steve attempting to hunt down Tony and murder him bad? I mean, yes, but how bad it actually is does kind of depend on how you view death in superhero comics, as above. You'd think that at this point people would suspect that some of these deaths might not permanently stick.

Aaaaand... I think that's all I got. Sorry. I have one more paragraph in my draft: Building on that, the other thing you can do to figure out how bad something is for Steve and Tony is look at how, specifically, the two of them feel about this particular incident. Because that's the thing about superhero comics. The events are unrealistic, larger than life battles that could never happen. But the feelings? The feelings are real.

I have no idea where I was going with this, but maybe I was going to talk about whether Being Really Mad counted for something.

There you go!

#replies #alice1939

18 notes · View notes

sineala · 7 months

Note

Hi there. I don't know if anyone has asked this before, but can you recommend some Captain America/ Iron Man tittle that you find actually good, ones that characterize Steve and Tony right? I just love them both and want to know about them.

Do you mean Steve and Tony together in the same comic, or Steve and Tony separately as individuals? If you mean the two of them together, I have a relatively recent post listing what I feel like are the important Steve/Tony comics.

If you mean the two of them separately... I can recommend that.

I think for Tony, if you want to know about him as a character, I would say you should start at the very beginning and read some of his appearances in Tales of Suspense, starting with #39. You don't have to read all of it, but I think reading at least some of it would give you an idea of who he's intended to be.

The idea behind the character is that he was meant to be a tragic figure -- he's this rich, powerful, brilliant, handsome guy who everyone envies, but he secretly has a heart condition that he's pretty sure is going to kill him, that puts significant limitations on his life and causes him a lot of pain. But he goes to a lot of trouble to make sure everyone he knows thinks he's just this carefree playboy enjoying the good life, and then he goes home alone and usually ends up crawling across the floor while clutching his chest in agony so that he can get to the wall to plug in his chestplate and charge it up so maybe he won't die today.

And, y'know, he's also secretly a superhero, so he's also out there nearly killing himself while trying to save the world, which is a thing that no one knows he's the one doing, but he's just doing it because it's the right thing to do. He's also using his money to save the world in a different way, just helping people, because that's also the right thing to do.

For me, Busiek's Iron Man's run (IM v3 #1-25) is one of the runs that best captures this about Tony. He is a genuinely good human being. He also gets beaten half to death by most of his villains, so it captures that element of the character, but he is a good and kind person who knows how privileged he is and he genuinely wants to help people in any way that he can. The very first issue of the run -- which is generally an issue where the writer wants to establish what they're doing with the character -- features Tony ditching the fancy gala he's at to go do something really important, which is go check out one of the construction projects the Foundation is working on, something that's really going to help people.

Like, that's who Tony is. He's a good guy. He also knows the security guard's name. That wouldn't be a thing you'd expect someone in Tony's position to know, and he absolutely does. He always knows his employees' names. He really does care.

Obviously Tony's characterization has changed over the years, depending on the writer, but this is really who he is, to me. (I also think the current Iron Man run is doing a really good job conveying this about him.)

Steve is a little different, because I think he's often written at either end of a continuum, where they're both still him, but they're him in very different ways. Steve's Captain America, and there's a sense that when he's at his best he's embodying everything about the ideals of an entire country, everything people would want America to be. So a lot of his comics will often feature him earnestly making speeches about liberty and freedom and patriotism and so on, and this is what you'll see him doing in a lot of classic comics.

Like, one of everyone's favorite Cap moments is this speech in What If #44, which is a universe where Steve wakes up much later than he does in canon, only to find that there is a false Captain America turning people against each other. And he makes a speech that convinces everyone he's the real one.

So there are a lot of classic Captain America comics where Steve does and says things like this. Off the top of my head, if you want a quick sampling of classic Cap, I'd recommend the Stern/Byrne Cap run. It's only nine issues (#247-255) and features Steve fighting some classic villains in his usual style, as well as the milestone issue #250, in which he explains that it would be wrong for him to run for president.

More modern Cap runs have often opted to focus on the more human side of Steve Rogers. And while there were certainly a lot of classic Cap comics that focused on Steve's World War II adventures punching fascists, the more modern take is that Steve is a soldier who has definitely Seen Some Things and experienced the horrors of war. The modern run in this vein that is probably the best regarded is Ed Brubaker's run -- Steve is dead for about half of it, but don't let that stop you -- that brings back Bucky and introduces him as the Winter Soldier and generally is a comic that puts Steve through a lot of pain (and then, you know, murders him).

So it's a good run (although in fairness I suppose I should say that I skipped the middle of the run where Sharon got tortured a lot) and I think it's a good characterization of Steve in a way that's maybe a little more realistic as the psychological state of a human being who has lived the life that Steve has, than some of the earlier Cap comics.

But, like, I also like a Steve who looks like he has ever smiled a day in his life, you know?

So for me, personally, I like to split the difference, and I really like Mark Waid's Cap run. Waid wrote the Captain America: Man Out of Time miniseries, as well as a mid-90s Cap run (Cap v1 #444-454, Cap v3 #1-23, Captain America: Sentinel of Liberty v1 #1-12) and then came back after Secret Empire in our hour of greatest need for a little more Cap (#695-704, although I'd recommend stopping at #700). I feel like Waid's Steve is a Steve who can give speeches without sounding corny about it, and when I read his run I understand why people follow him, and he's serious, but also he clearly knows how to lighten up.

This is Steve sacrificing himself to save the world in #700:

(Don't worry, he's fine. Well. Not this version of him. But generally speaking, he's fine.)

But he also seems like he knows how to have a good time and be happy; here, I just grabbed the first fun panel I found, in Cap v3 #2, with Steve talking about how much he loves his shield:

So, yeah, that's my pick.

I think the moral here is that I think 1998 was a good year for Avengers comics. Which is kind of funny, because in 1998 I was actually only reading X-Men.

#replies #alice1939

15 notes · View notes