#I think people often get caught up in Tony's hero narrative and forget how it began

[purgatoryandme]

Part of the reason people are taken his monologue as negative is Pepper and him are over. She does not love Iron Man and Tony will always be Iron Man so he is reflecting on two sides of him that will not work out.

Huh, ok, that is a fandom opinion that could lead to that interpretation. Long character relationship analysis below. There’s gonna be a TLDR. 

While I don’t think the Iron Man movies and subsequent films have done a great job with Pepper and Tony’s romance, I don’t really think it is entirely fair to represent Pepper’s actions as not loving Tony’s heroic side/thinking it is reckless endangerment/thinking Tony should be a normal person because she can only love a normal person. First off: Pepper Potts fell in love with the CEO of one of the world’s largest tech companies who has been in the limelight since birth. She fell in love with him KNOWING him as a reckless irresponsible man with a (secret) heart of gold and an issue with alcoholism. He was not a normal man. The only barrier between them starting a relationship is that Pepper didn’t believe Tony would be willing to be monogamous and to be more honest with her - a barrier that was resolved (at least partially) by Tony’s willingness to expose his vulnerabilities to the world through Iron Man and his weapons shutdown AND his willingness to expose his vulnerabilities to her. This leads into a second point: Pepper got into a relationship with Tony because of his heroic side. That side of him was truer to his heart than he had previously been and it was enough to push the two of them together. Now, as for ���reckless endangerment’…The reason Pepper moves Tony away from Iron Man AT FIRST is because she’s terrified of him dying. Which, tbh, is totally fair of her and doesn’t make their romance a bad or tragic one - at the time, Tony is a little too gungho about dying himself. Their romance opened on the note of him being kidnapped and tortured. It continued on countless people making an effort to kill him for being Iron Man or trying to kill Pepper for it. She manages to hold on here (despite having some fights which is normal when your SO is barely surviving) and stay with him when these were not things Tony ACTIVELY pursued, then begins to lose it when Tony courts death and she suffers consequences for it, then finally crumbles entirely when, as a direct consequence of his mental health issues due to being Iron Man, Tony nearly destroys himself and an entire country. This clearly shows that, despite being afraid of Tony dying in the line of fire, she was willing to stand by him and support him as long as Iron Man was doing Tony some good. Once that good dried up, Pepper leaves him (which she is very well within her rights to do and it doesn’t make this relationship unhealthy - if anything it makes Pepper an incredibly good influence on Tony). She gets her own emotional health together, then comes back to find Tony continuing to struggle with guilt, his own severely compromised health, and crippling loneliness while simultaneously trying desperately to take some of the responsibility for heroism in general off of his own shoulders. There is a cry for help there that has been overwhelmingly ignored.When Pepper re-enters a relationship with Tony, it is with a Tony who has tried to change, tried to get better, is succeeding in delegating his responsibilities in a way that is making him a happier (re: Homecoming) man…and what is getting in the way of that happiness are the expectations of other people through Iron Man.

Pepper is Tony’s CEO, but before that she was his PA. She is a person who has long-since been tasked with the job of keeping Tony ALIVE and WELL despite his best efforts. She’s seen him constantly run himself into the ground for things worth LESS than this. She’s seen Tony Stark allow GUILT to be his driving force for countless years and now…now she wants him to be ABLE to retire because keeping Tony from destroying himself is hardwired into her relationship with him. She wants to be the one person to give him an out because she’s the person who understands Tony, the vulnerable person, best. Pepper understands what Iron Man means to Tony in a way that none of the other heroes quite get. Pepper, as a ‘normal’ person, understands that Iron Man is Tony’s apology to the world - it is his guilt personified and it is every single one of his hopes of becoming a better person attached to that guilt. It’s a noose around his neck that gets tighter every year. 

Tony in the MCU is getting old. He has begun, in varying stops and starts, to recover from his past traumas despite being retraumatized more than once. He is beginning to move closer to a simple life - everyone forgets that Tony in one of the first avengers films admitted that he has ALWAYS wanted that. To move out to a farm on the countryside and to be, essentially, a nobody with a family. Tony Stark wants to be a house husband - he just doesn’t feel he CAN be. Tony doesn’t keep going back to being Iron Man for any ///healthy/// reasons, y’all. He goes back because he’s traumatized, terrified that if he quits the world will implode, and because he hates himself. Tony keeps trying to quit NOT because he loves Pepper and she is making him, but because he loves her and agrees with her on some level. 

Tony has never been a character to do what someone else asked just because they asked for it (Stane having to lie and manipulate him, Rhodey admitting he’s never been able to control Tony despite being a major part of his life, Tony defying Howard constantly once he was old enough to do so, Tony defying Steve and Nick Fury directly despite liking both of them, Tony buying Pepper presents she doesn’t want because HE thinks it’s the right thing to do, etc). He’s always been a character who makes changes when someone has a POINT. Pepper has a point! A point that Rhodey can’t/won’t make without being a hypocrite. Ultimately, Pepper represents the life Tony wants to have and would have if he wasn’t so incredibly invaluable to world security. I’d argue till I’m blue in the face that Tony Stark loves Pepper Potts in the MCU /because/ she wants him to retire and live a simple life, guilt be damned, world be damned, because she cares about him first and foremost. And while that may be a tragedy as long as Tony is still needed…This is the Endgame. And I’d still say Tony’s monologue is hopeful because after this? After this he might finally be able to entrust the world to other people. After this he’s not carrying the fear of space alone. His worst nightmare has been realized and other people are actively working to stop it. Maybe he’ll be able to retire. He certainly hopes so. 

TLDR: Pepper Potts understands Iron Man better than anyone else and is the one person in Tony’s life willing to give him the chance to quit and live a normal life. She is willing to alleviate the guilt that weighs him down. Pepper is a healthy force for him in the MCU and, knowing this, Tony hopes that after this final battle that he will be able to settle down with her for good, making his trailer monologue remain as something hopeful + highlighting the difference between himself and the other Avengers. 

[trueishcolours]

3, 4, 13, and 18 for the fic asks?

3. How do you know if your writing is “in character”?

Hard one! I spend a long time thinking about characters I like, and discussing them with friends, to get a pretty good read on what motivates them and the kinds of things they would do. If I can’t figure a character out, they’re unlikely to become a favourite of mine. And then story ideas tend to come to me in terms of a string of things I’d like to see the characters do, so the character acting in character or not is kind of inseperable from the tissue of the story. E.g. in one of my fics about teen spy Alex Rider, an assassin called Yassen Gregorovich has Secret Personal Ties to Alex, and his clashing commitments to his villainous job and to protecting the hero are a major driver of the plot. His being in character is what causes the story. So I guess my answer is I keep my writing in character by making my stories character-driven.

What’s harder is keeping my characters in-character, not in terms of their big narrative choices, but in terms of their behaviour moment-to-moment, and ESPECIALLY in their speech. I spend a lot of time trying to differentiate characters’ ways of speaking.

This is making me soul-search now, because it’s possible to get a character’s surface-level behaviour right while totally misreading their core motivations, or to have a different reading of their core motivations from another fan’s, or to just forget to give them consistent motives at all. A good example is when Tony Stark in Civil War is first motivated to accept government restrictions on the Avengers after a woman shows him a photo of her son, who died during the Battle of New York, then shows up in Peter Parker’s bedroom to ask him to help apprehend Captain America. He’s horrified at a teenager being caught in the crossfire one minute, willingly recruiting a teenager the next, because those are the actions the plot requires him to take. And you can easily miss that on a first viewing, because all the while Robert Downey Jr is delivering his lines in that Tonyish way that makes you think, ‘ah, he’s in character.’ I’m now wondering where I’ve made my characters’ motives wildly inconsistent for the sake of the plot.

4. Where do your story ideas come from?

Aw man, this one is really hard. I can’t have ideas on purpose. Often I’ve got no ideas and feel really stupid and uncreative, but... /gestures at gallery of fanfics/ they must come from somewhere. They’re often things I would enjoy reading, and they often come out of conversations with friends. My latest Descendants fanfic, a rope that wears thin, went something like this:

‘Imagine if Ben (the hostage) hadn’t got rescued right away? What would have happened?’

‘Well, if he stayed trapped on the Villain Island for any length of time, I expect rival villain gangs would start trying to double-kidnap him for themselves!’

‘Oh dang, then the villains who were holding him hostage in the first place would have to protect him, and the dynamics would get super ambiguous.’

‘What if one of them got hurt defending him? How would he feel and what would he do?’

At this point, you’ve got most of a story. And the whole idea came out of something I disliked in canon, namely that Ben got rescued so quickly without doing anything to help the people holding him hostage.

13. I suffer. I look for a theme in the fic. I fail to put that theme into words. My friend tells me to go on a quote website and search for quotes relating to ‘guilt.’ I eventually pick something. Seriously, I hate all my titles.

Apart from ‘The Locker Room,’ which was all about a man who couldn’t admit his feelings for the man he was fucking because of toxic masculinity and just titled itself.

18. I’ve been very lucky and only received a tiny number of negative comments, and only a couple of those were downright mean. I think the best one has to be way back when I was like 15, and my 13yo sister and I wrote a Star Wars fanfic in the style of Molesworth. Things you need to know about Molesworth: he’s got terrible spelling and satirises institutions. Another user thought the bad spelling was for real, flamed us and called us ‘teenyboppers.’ According to his profile he was a grown adult and in the military...

This got long. Thanks for asking!