So I found an Avengers/Young Wizards crossover. (I found several actually Of varying quality.) One in particular kind of annoyed me. Okay writer, from your responses to various comments to the fic you wrote, you seem to think that Tony Stark is a terrible, awful person who is only a hero for self aggrandizment purposes and arrogance. Fine. Whatever. You're team cap, Tony bad, Steve good, we get it. However, I do not feel that this makes Tony literally the goddamn Devil. Also, in your hatred for Tony you've forgotten some of the key features of the series you're crossing The Avengers over with. A) One of the main themes of the Young Wizards series is the eventual redemption of the Lone Power. IT'S A MAJOR PLOT POINT OF SEVERAL OF THE BOOKS, INCLUDING THE FIRST ONE. B) Nita and Kit clearly recognized that something weird was going on with Tony. It was very clearly implied with the heaviest hand possible. And they didn't say or do anything about it. I don't feel this was in character. C) Captain America's Ordeal was put on hold so he could fight and presumably kill Tony Stark? CA would not need the kind of power boost a young wizard has to kill Tony, even if Tony were overshadowed by the Lone Power. Wouldn't it have made more sense to have Cap be overshadowed by the Michael Power instead if a power boost was apparently required? (I'm not even sure Cap would GET the damn power boost, he's too old.) Finally, if you're going to write hate fic, could you have an actual plot with a decent encounter/confrontation instead of a bullshit non-plot and a bullshit encounter confrontation that just ends on the goddamn bullshit confrontation? Steve isn't going to mumble "fairest and fallen greeting and defiance" like he isn't sure if he's right. Tony/The Lone Power isn't just going to throw lasers at Steve. Good grief.
Hell, the Lone Power generally doesn't huck lasers around anyways, that's just...tacky. It'll create armies of mooks, sure, if it needs them - but it'd rather talk the heroes into siding with it, because it gets way more power out of the whole thing that way. Its thing isn't "blow things up", it's "talk the other side into agreeing that its way is so much better and more logical and slide entropy into the system once it has that agreement". Especially the first one, actually! The first one is where Spoiler: spoips Nita inserts the clause that the Lone Power even can be redeemed, because prior to that Ordeal, it just flat-out wasn't doable - the book that had the coding for All The Things Ever just didn't have a line that included the option for the Lone Power to change. Even after that Ordeal, it's still a long process and frustrating since the Lone Power doesn't adhere to linear time (although it will always know you), so you can be dealing with an iteration of it that's well prior to when it started the path to redemption. (Which I think, although I don't really have any evidence towards it, might be a riff off of 'recovery/redemption is not a linear path'. idk) 1) You're right. Unless there were really good reasons to not mention it or do anything about it, they'd have at least asked someone "hey, is this normal behavior? does anything feel off about him?" and tried to clue other people in to the fact that, uh, Tony isn't really acting of his own free will here. 2) Uhhh. Uhhhh. Uhhhh. First off, I'm pretty sure there's damn little that'll have an Ordeal put on hold; active interference with it, maybe, or something preventing the Ordeal from being completed. Definitely not "I need to go punch someone the Lone Power is overshadowing", since that's one of those things that can often be solved by completing the Ordeal. Also, 99% sure that Cap (and p much any other member of the Avengers) wouldn't be getting any kind of power boost from going on Ordeal as adults. Spoiler: It's not a free power-up The whole 'power boost' thing is, if I remember right, there to help the kids survive their Ordeals - meaning that an adult is less likely to need that power boost to begin with anyways, because they've got age and wisdom over youth and power. (Plus, there's also the whole issue with 'the bigger the power boost you get during your Ordeal, the harder and more dangerous your Ordeal is going to be'. Nita's younger sister gets a massive power boost, leaving her one of the most powerful human wizards in their sector after her Ordeal, but the trade-off is that her Ordeal deals with creating a new race and explaining the whole thing with the Lone Power to them (and having to argue with the Lone Power) and eventually kick-starting a race of machine wizards that can fight entropy at scale. And she consistently gets handed problems that require massive amounts of power to solve afterwards, whereas Nita trends towards problems that can be resolved with cleverness, bravery, and effective use of resources to hand ("convince fellow-wizard to let her species move on to the next stage of existence so that a new species can rise and create a civilization that will replace them") instead of ones that need power overwhelming ("keep the sun from exploding").)
I’m pretty sure there isn’t a single member of the Avengers who would have significant difficulty with the purely physical aspect of killing Tony Stark if they decided it needed to happen and things like morals and friendship weren’t a factor. Even if he had a magical boost, that’s kinda what they do for a living? Even with various technological and other enhancements, he is a middle aged human with crippling personal issues. His greatest survival asset is probably his ability to appeal to other people’s greed. I can’t imagine that working on Captain fucking America. Steve is only notable for not vigorously killing people because he’s more than capable of it. If he weren’t extremely able, nobody would think that was particularly interesting. He gets in long, protracted fights with ridiculously lethal people when he’s trying to convince them that they don’t need to kill each other. Otherwise he has tremendous upper body strength, an instinctive understanding of the geometry of ricochets that might rival Scott Summers’, and a very large vibranium disc.
tony’s a poor choice for devil, too. his leveragable flaws are scrupulosity and distractability. he’s appallingly self-centered, but in a childlike way; he doesn’t want to rule people or mess them about, he just forgets they exist. he would be a singularly lousy villain.
Honestly I'm just appalled at this hack job on the Lone Power, and I haven't even read Young Wizards since I was about 13.
It’s been so long that I literally remember nothing of the book but the vague appearance of the cover, but uh. That’s exactly the kind of villain that Tony Stark is particularly good with handling, and the kind that’s particularly useless against Steve Rogers. Tony’s the one who excels at talking himself around moral gray areas and navigating slippery slopes. That’s not interesting with Steve unless there’s one hell of a clever hook, because it’s such a foregone conclusion that the villain will fail that there’s just no traction.
... how is Steve Rogers' ordeal not World War II? Like, if you're the Powers, outside time, looking at the shape of his whole life... isn't that obvious?
"Team Cap" tends to feel that the self-centeredness is what makes him a villain, and therefore, apparently in this fic, exactly like the Devil. And just. No?
I'm still mad on the Lone Power's behalf. It's a classy Devil, not an avatar of vice. It's not the person doing bad things, it's the little voice in the back of your head saying to do the easier, happier thing even though you know it'll make the world that tiny bit worse. Which I guess is a complicated way of repeating what Verily said and adding that the obvious story involving Tony, Steve, and Young Wizards cosmology is Tony being tempted by the Lone Power and Steve having to talk him down.
yeah, i find that the whole team cap, team tony thing is just... a huge misunderstanding of the character of the conflict to begin with. like, i personally tend to agree completely with cap's decisions, as in i would make those same decisions if i were in his place, but even so i find 'team cap' fics pretty awful. tony is a douche. that's a fact. tony would agree, he knows it, he owns it. that doesn't make him a villain. that makes him a relatable everyman hero. cap is bigger than life, he's the hero we aspire to be, but tony is the hero we know we probably would be. and demonizing him just shows a real lack of empathy, imo. i think what's going on there is that fans who polarize it that way, they have that anti-shipper style of black and white thinking. they can't allow themselves to like or identify with a character who's not above reproach. so when they do like a character, they have to erase his flaws, and demonize anyone who dislikes or opposes him. when the thing that makes the story worth telling is that both sides are simultaneously admirable and flawed, it just... ugh, please pick something else to fan. you don't deserve civil war.
So I don’t know much about the MCU specifically (but I’ll take y’all’s word re: the way the characters are treated by fic authors), but sadly this is a trend in a lot of fandoms, I feel like. :( #i demand more Messy Complicated But Well-Intentioned Disaster Rose Quartz okay
I knooow, if you're going to have Steve get offered wizardry as an adult, World War II makes way more sense than "Tony is the Lone Power because writer hates him."
I know, and it's completely aggravating that someone could forget those key themes. As near as I could tell from the fic, Tony wasn't technically doing anything evil-ish. The author was just putting a very heavy handed ominous spin on everything, and Nita and Kit backing away and acting like Tony had evil cooties.
Seconded! Spoiler: more spoips Hell, Nita has dealt with people who were overshadowed by the Lone Power, and she couldn't tell anything until the Lone Power decided to show its hand, because the person was just a little odd and she assumed it was just that they were a new acquaintance who was a bit bad at interacting with humans. Granted that she was also under stress at the time (she was trying to find a way to keep her mom from dying of cancer), but this person was also walking around a whole group of wizards and none of them noticed either. Hell, one of the others was the one to suggest 'maybe just a bit socially awkward or stressed'! The Lone Power is perfectly capable of being subtle, it doesn't exude an aura like Evil Toxic Slime that any wizard can pick up on unless it's decided to ditch being subtle and hang out the flag saying "come at me, bro".
i read quickly and automatically enough that it’s almost impossible for me to stop midsentence, but the phrase “now imagine the Doctor is a human-” will absolutely do the trick
This isn't precisely a gripe, but it's a quirk. I noticed in my old writings, and sometimes still today in my idfic stuff, I had/have a tendency to have teenage characters boss around or otherwise act like equals to adults, including adults old enough to be their parents, and not get in trouble. Is that a thing anyone's noticed in other teenagers' writings? I don't recall any specific incidents but I'm sure it must happen.
Seems like a power fantasy yeah? Since youths get looked down on or not respected by ppl older than them, wouldn't it be nice if the youths could be on equal footing with adults?
i’m pretty sure cutting your pubes is an american millennial thing. maybe europe too, idk. but nobody did it ten years ago. so it’s really really unnecessary to remind the reader that every character who gets naked has “neatly trimmed” pubes in stories set in the past, in fantasy worlds, or on other planets. especially characters who don’t have a lot of sex. and are very busy, and not vain, and probably have a bathroom the size of a goldfish cracker because they live on a goddamn spaceship. teal deer: general hux doesn’t manscape. stop that.
