lupin5th

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theactualcluegirl:

So.  I’ve been getting comments lately on some of my older works – specifically, on the Scatterlings and Orphans series.  This is even one of those rare jems of a reader who takes the time to share the benefit of their opinion after every chapter, which, make NO mistake, I fecking LOVE, even when it’s nothing more than a “Oh wow, Jerry’s a douche and needs to die!” kinda comment.  Still the best.  Just awesome when readers take that kind of time.

And, as I will often do when people comment on my older works, I’ve been going back to those works myself and revisiting the passages they comment on, reminding myself what my voice was like then, what it is they’re reacting to when they say how much they’re enjoying it.

And in doing that – specifically with that particular series, as contrasted with the work I’ve been doing since about the drop of CA:CW, I’ve noticed something… telling.  Not just telling in my own work but telling in how it reflects on canon, and my personal relationship with the character of Tony Stark:  I stopped loving his movies, and started struggling to love the character at all, when he stopped ever being happy in his films.  Because Tony is kind of a mean sufferer, and when he’s sad, scared, brooding, resentful, and hateful, he’s taking it out on the world and the people around him, and I HATED being asked to watch that, being asked to root for that, being asked to sympathize with that.

Where was the sense joyful discovery balancing out horror and betrayal of Iron Man 1?  Where was the heart and wit and courage that came together with the team in  Avengers 1?  It stewed in unrelenting self pity and toxicity for all of IM2, and that meanness only ramped up for IM3, to the point where he was actually being pretty directly nasty to Haley in some of the scenes.  AoU was another Joss Whedon movie, so at least to a certain extent some of the lightness that had once made me love the character returned, but it wasn’t allowed to stay long, because apparently GrimDark is about all the Hero Industry can figure out how to do with a Leading Man anymore.  I guess.  And of course, that bitterness ripened fully by CA;CW, leaving almost no trace to be found of the Tony who nearly crashed his maiden flight in the armor, but went whooping with delight all the way.

The fic I wrote early on had that delighted, In Love With Life Despite Life’s Being A Bitch Sometimes Tony.  He’s got his scars, and he’s got his hangups, and things definitely freak him out and make him less than awesome sometimes, but the JOY is intact in there – the character vibrates with it, even when he’s feeling rough and struggling.  

But in And Miles To Go Before I Sleep, I had to struggle to find a way to bring some of that joyfulness back to the character; or rather, to bring the character back to his Joy.  There was just so much cunresolved anon SHIT I had to shovel out of the way to get him back around to being a guy I WANTED my favorite to be with – and before you yell, antis, Steve did quite a bit of work, and took his fair share of lumps in that story too.  I’m proud of how the story turned out, but I won’t pretend it was anything like the delight to write that Scatterlings and Orphans was.

In Nights When the Wolves Are Silent, and Only the Moon Howls, the whole scenario gave me the leverage to get some of that old, joyful, happy Tony back into frame.  The brainfuck of discovering that werewolves are a real thing, have always been a real thing, and physics doesn’t seem inclined to stop it, is a handy palate cleanser for all that grimdark toxicity.  But even then, because of the weight that canon left blocking the street, I couldn’t leave it all behind.

I don’t know exactly where I’m going with this.  I guess I just needed to put into words why it was – WHERE it was that Marvel lost me on Tony.  It wasn’t WHAT he did, though yeah, I will always have problems with a lot of that – it was the fact that they made him a transmission vector for pain and misery when once, and seemingly only once, he had been so damned joyful.

And that, my friends, is just a fucking shame.