#i don't understand how people can say that they'd hate to look at engineering references all day when they do art -

[grison-in-space]

Oh, absolutely. And while I'm Here for like, a story that delves into Peter bouncing off Tony and going "what the actual fuck that is a Terran" and Tony likewise being this massive fish out of water and adapting while they work out how to get him home and whether or not Peter can be coaxed to even get near Terra....

Those are not the gists I have gotten off these stories.

Thinking on it, apparently I do in fact want this premise--the Guardians pick up Tony sometime after he gets stuck in Chitauri space--but I want it totally fucking gen (plus or minus Peter/Gamora, sure), and I want Tony and Rocket in particular to fucking hate each other. Because they would! A lot of fic seems to think they'd be bros because they're both snarky, insecure tech freaks who are emotional minefields, but look...

They're emotional minefields, which makes both of them easy to set off. Rocket in particular has a particular sore spot about being a raccoon, and Tony is proper North American Terran and much, much less likely than Peter to let that go. For his part, Rocket likes to needle people to see if he can make them squeak, and Tony squeaks so appealingly that even Cap will prod at him. Both of them tend to overreact when hit in a sore spot, and Rocket in particular is, horrifyingly, a nasty combination of relatively emotionally perceptive about where sore spots are and having a habit of reaching out and saying the most hurtful things he can find when he's upset or panicking.

They are both also competitive little shits who do not actually handle other people being good at tech all that well, particularly Rocket, so it's hard to see them bonding over that--and hell, in comics canon we know they don't!

So you take that, you take Peter's really deep ambivalence about Terra given his association with it with his mom's death, you take Tony's inability to communicate with literally anyone else to this point and tendency to stick his foot in his mouth, and you have a great story!

It's just. It's not a story that involves Tony having a great time, is my point. It's actually a considerably worse story than what actually happens in canon, from Tony's PoV, especially at first: which would you rather at the end of that battle, a nice meal of shawarma and a heaping plate of NYC's adoration or being dumped straight into a war zone having barely survived a nuclear detonation? And then you finally find someone who understands your language assuming you haven't been forcibly language chipped, which given Tony's trauma about bodily control and his general control issues goes over great... and he turns out to be this dude who hasn't been to Earth since he was eight, apparently doesn't even use the word Earth to properly refer to it anymore, lives in a technological wonderland and obsessively clutches tech that's been obsolete on Earth for decades and (from Tony's perspective, Tony being Mr. "Black Sabbath rules" and a fairly clear metalhead) probably has awful taste in music...

This is not a recipe for happiness for Tony fucking Stark even before you factor in Rocket, cybergenetically engineered to be Stark's worst enemy without giving you any excuse to kill him.

I want to read this story, you understand, I don't want to write it. But the summaries I've seen that tackle this premise mostly seem to assume that Peter and Tony will hit it off and/or bone, and as you say, there's a lot of Cap bashing. So. Yeah. Yeah.

I’m not sure why, but the Guardians section of AO3 seems to attract a lot of Steve-bashing Tony fic.