I don't wanna time-travel no more

[lotesse]

some things make a post!

i. I had a lovely encounter with a little old lady outside of the Uni library this afternoon, I was picking up a book and on a meter so couldn't stay long to talk to her, but she was handing out informational flyers about the fact that in Indiana 17.3 percent of girls in grades 9-12 have been raped. The woman must have been 75+, and there was something beautiful about the interactions I saw taking place between her, earnestly handing out her flyers, and the teenaged students she was reaching out to her. I admire the hell out of her dedication, drive, and chutzpah.

ii. on a less good note: I wish my extended family could grok that the way to help your introverted grandkid is not to poke her about her lack of a social life until she feels completely crushed by social expectation and her failure to measure up. I hate my patterns of response to that sort of thing, because I also recognize that I do need to keep trying to be social, especially in the collapse of a lot of my support structures after The Breakup last fall. But the overwhelming fear and self-hatred that inevitably swamps me in the aftermath of those conversations makes it difficult for me to do anything but retreat to the safety of my room & my computer & my cats. Just. Not helpful, you guys. I love you, but not helpful.

iii. on a more geeky note: 12:30 am last night, while hiding from social anxiety with help of internet, I had a brainwave. Steve/Tony = a more sexed-up, contemporary, potentially-edgy rendition of a lot of the things I loved as a kid in Sam/Frodo. Strong fairhaired earnest genuine do-gooder paired with angsty cerebral guilty-about-the-past, not to mention physically damaged by past contact with objects of mass destruction. No wonder this ship is eating my life. It's like a whole bunch of my favorite tropes have grown up with me, and started critiquing heteronormativity and the military-industrial complex.

Comments

[yatima]

It's like a whole bunch of my favorite tropes have grown up with me, and started critiquing heteronormativity and the military-industrial complex.

What a beautiful sentence. I get that a lot.

[lotesse]

And it's such fun!

[msilverstar]

I think they have grown up with you, the good fic has the meta knowledge! But there's tons of Steve/Tony badfic, I'm sure.

[lotesse]

badfic is, alas, eternal.

[amelia-petkova.livejournal.com]

You have my sympathy. Social anxiety bites at the best of times and others (even if they are well-meaning) can make it so much worse by pressuring you.

[lotesse]

I wouldn't mind half so much if I didn't know they meant well, you know?

[ilthit]

There's a way to be social that doesn't require you to hang around people who hurt you, whether they mean to or not. :I Family is high-pressure socializing - friends and workmates and fellow enthusiasts are usually not, not as much, anyway.

On iii. I... would never have thought of that, and I still don't quite think it fits. I haven't seen the Avengers movie, of course but while Steve is an absolute sweetie judging by the Captain America movie, Tony Stark is... not... I mean... I wouldn't wish him as a boyfriend to my worst enemy. Frodo may be distracted and scholarly and consumed with addiction and PTSD, but he's always been gentle, kind, and self-sacrificing. Whereas Tony Stark - he's selfish, destructive, ungovernable, smug, reckless, downright abusive towards Pepper (I have a lot of feelings about Pepper/Tony), and if he's a philanthropist it's because it doesn't pain him to be - he likes being a hero and he's got enough money to spend. He's not sacrificing anything.

The Steve/Tony pairing is intriguing, though, because of the heteronormativity in the military-industrial complex you mentioned, because of the virginal ideology of the 1950s and its opposite in Stark's party boy lifestyle, and in general because they are such contrasts to each other. I think Steve might be able to handle Tony, though, because he wouldn't be in any way dependent on him, like Pepper is.
/way too much meta for characters I have never yet seen interact

[lotesse]

I guess - okay, here's a take on it. I know that LotR is famously NOT about the a-bomb, but despite its roots in 19thc literary realism and medieval legend, it's also part of a 20thc tradition of novels that try to make sense of war - along with TH White & Kurt Vonnegut, turning to the imagination in the aftermath of World War.

Captain America dates to about that same era, without Tolkien's roots in the Victorian and, you know, in the US, but I think he's the more obvious fit because of the period resonance. But Tony Stark - Tony is a product of the Cold War and then, I think crucially, Vietnam. I'm no comics expert, but it seems to me that a lot of Tony's key negative characteristics come from Vietnam-era characterization - & reflect a different generation's struggle with a very different kind of warfare. Post-atomic warfare, which is where Howard Stark slots in, but also post-"war." The US doesn't really have distinct/declared wars anymore, just perpetual semi-covert violence that keeps cascading from one conflict to another.

So, long story short, I think that Tony and Frodo ARE attempts at working through the same issues: what happens to human beings when they get too close to the Heart of Darkness, so to speak. But the chronological disparity between them, heightened by the fact that even though LotR is 1950s its roots are in the first War, and Tolkien was born a Victorian. Tony is oversexed and involved with commodity and directionlessness and existential angst, but that's exactly expressive of the post-Vietnam moment, the generation that couldn't become war heroes because they figured out that they couldn't support the war.

/similar excess, idek

[ilthit]

The US recent war history does seem to be all about fighting a war on somebody else's terrain, with the attacks against the U.S. on U.S. soil focused on rare terrorist attacks, which I've thought for a while must make American relationship with war rather unique. (I have only ever known peacetime myself, and grandparents' stories don't resonate all that much - they're just stories. I know I should, but I'm not able to imagine Finland at war.)

I think I read somewhere that Tony Stark was created to be everything hippies hate? It may not have been a reliable source, though, meaning that I think it might have been Cracked.

If the only similarity between Frodo and Tony is that they relate to war, then you may as well compare either of them to Achilles or Private Ryan or Captain Kirk. I just don't see anything similar in Frodo and Tony's characterisation. Aside from not being kind, self-sacrificing, or gentle, Tony also doesn't suffer from PTSD, magical or otherwise, his addiction patterns are more complicated, and he's technology-oriented rather than a scholar of history and literature.

Which doesn't mean that you're not right about being attracted to the pairing because it, like Sam/Frodo, is a pairing of fellow soldiers in wartime, wrapped in themes of war, injury and trauma, I'm just saying that then the similarity is more situational than a question of characterisation, though I can agree about Steve's uncomplicated bravery and sweetness of nature resonating with Sam's.

[lotesse]

Well, okay, so the weird thing about US hippies is that they were the children of veterans who spent their youth as peacenik radicals and then somehow turned around and voted for Ronald Reagan and have been trashing the country ever since. I mean, not all of them, but a lot. The same Baby Boomers who protested the war are the generation driving the dismantling of the US social safety net, the deregulation of banks, ect ect ect. So the whole thing gets weirdly self-hating, because either you'd have to hate your youth or hate your age.

Also, year more situational than characterological - Tony obvs has a VERY different relationship to his darker side than sweet Frodo does. But I guess what I find interesting is the way that situations mold characters: Tony is what we need him to be, just as Frodo was what Tolkien needed. Swap backgrounds/time periods/general narrative ethos, and -

It's the balance of the pairing more than anything, setting up slightly different kinks (self-harm, guilt, culpability, shame vs. service, power differentials, duty, and shyness) in similar patterns/rhythms, circling around similar problems/traumas. If that makes sense.

[ilthit]

It's not necessarily pacifists turning into autocrats, though that happens too, but that there were young conservatives and soldiers existing alongside the high profile peaceniks, and due to a general swing towards conservatism the other side of the population has gained in power.

Mmm yes. The storytelling potential in the situation is so rich.

[lotesse]

To my eternal shame, my own maternal grandparents voted for Reagan. They're lifelong liberals - I don't know what the hell they were thinking. Stuff got weird around that.

[ilthit]

A successful smear campaign of the opposition, perhaps?