#obsessed w the angst and repression and desperation and adoration

[gild-and-fire]

oooooh my gosh charlotte x colbourne is everything to me

[isocrime]

okay so this may just be me assuming - but you generally write top!tony in ults and top!steve in 616 so i was wondering how you would see the flipside come out in both those verses i.e. top!steve in ults and top!tony in 616. do you think (based on your preferences/characterisation) that the former is more natural/preferable/interesting for you to write, or is it just whatever suits the idea you have? curious because you seem a lot more lax re the top/bottom discourse that stevetony is cursed w/

I’ll write either tony and steve topping/bottoming (meaning who’s in the driver’s seat, not who’s pitching/catching) either way depending on what suits the story, but I do definitely have preferences!

For ults, I do indeed tend to write top!tony/bottom!steve I like that dynamic a lot. Steve is so stiff and repressed, desperate for human intimacy and afraid to ask for it. I want to watch him release that and let his walls down, but in a sexy way. Also, Big Buff Sub is one of my kinks, and ults Steve is the biggest and buffest. Tony knows he doesn’t have to hold back, because Steve is superhuman — he can do things he’s fantasized about that would be too unsafe to do with a normal person. Meanwhile Steve could throw Tony off so so easily, but he allows it, even when it makes him squirm with humiliation, which is some intense, sexy submission. Plus he hates himself for wanting it; it means he’s not a real man. He’s not just gay, he’s gay AND he loves to be called a slut and take it up the ass. All the tension and denial!

For top!tony in ults it’s like — he’s such a hedonist and a maximalist (I love his stupid ornate bedroom and his four-poster bed), so I can really imagine him wanting to own Steve for himself and get to do whatever he wants. He lives his social life playing games and obfuscating the truth, wearing these different personas that are all exaggerated and campy and flirty, which makes me think he’d be really good at making the theatrical parts of kink feel real and hot instead of kind of awkward and made up. Tony commits to the bit and doesn’t care if he looks silly — he’s confident he can pull it off so he does. So you have Tony, who’s incredibly deft and motivated and greedy and powerful, and pair him with Steve — clumsy and earnest and so so so needy underneath all the ways he’s denying it — and it’s just delicious.

Then there’s 616, where I like to read things a little differently. Tony is so tightly wound in 616 I want him to let go and let himself have something nice that he doesn’t have to obsess over and make all the choices perfectly or else everything will go wrong forever. Tony needs to turn off his brain and let someone else be in charge. Additionally when Steve and tony are really fucked up and bad for each other (weirdly, I don’t have dysfunctional headcanons about ults steve/tony. i write them as a mess while they’re getting together but long-term I think they do pretty well) I think Tony wants to make up for all the things he feels guilty about, and having Steve fuck him and hurt him and tell him what to do makes him feel better.

Steve, meanwhile, is so earnest and confident and he loves to lead well, so I headcanon that he would find it really natural and satisfying to take charge in bed. I think also all the natural strength and body control makes Steve generally hot as a top. He can really properly overpower anyone and do exactly what he wants to them if he decides to. Hot hot hot. Less healthily, I think Steve yearns to get Tony under control and topping is a way for him to live that fantasy. When Tony submits to Steve, he stops pushing back and doing manipulative shit that drives Steve up the wall. Sometimes Steve just wants to grab Tony and shake him, and kinky sex lets him take some of that frustration out on Tony.  At their most functional, Steve wants to care for Tony and help him be the best version of himself. At their most dysfunctional, Steve wants to punish Tony and force him to do what Steve thinks is the right thing to do.

So, how would I do them the opposite way around? (I am aware this is already super long, I have feelings on this subject apparnently!) For bottom!tony in ults, I think he’d love the game parts of it. There’s a reason kink is called play, and Tony’s all about pretending. Like 616 tony, he’s very tightly wound and could stand to be taken out of his head and given a space where he’s free from responsibility. There’s grief and lousy pain he wants to forget, and Steve is really hot and he wants it, he wants to indulge in something a little taboo that he can make into a joke afterwards, haha you plowed me good, being crude to cover up how much he liked it. (I’m realizing that I tend figure out the dynamic starting from the character who’s bottoming.  Huh — start with what you know I guess!)

Ults Steve as a top is sort of volatile and inexperienced, which makes being helpless around him is sort of risky, and I bet Tony would eat that up. The possibility that it could be a disaster — that he could cause his partner to lose control and get more intense than expected — is titillating.  I think ults Steve wants terribly strongly. And if Tony is the thing he wants, especially if the thing he wants to do to Tony is hurt him, which is a kinky and perverted and bad want to have, Steve would torture himself with guilt and denial and desperate, pent-up lust. Repressed yearning for DAYS. And when Steve snaps and fucks tony the way he wants to, it’s hot and perfect and Steve hates himself for loving it and the more he hates himself the more he’s fucking desperate for it, this thing that’s wrong, he’s not supposed to want to hurt anyone, he’s a good man but he looks at Tony and he wants to take him and leave him wrecked and gorgeous and bleeding.

I actually have an ults sub!tony one-shot on the to-write list, so this is useful brainstorming!  For 616 I don’t have anything planned, but it’s fun to think about how top!tony/bottom!steve would work.

Healthy bottom!steve in 616 is full of love and adoration. He’s given his life to helping people, and I think he’d bring that into the bedroom, this intense desire to serve and give the person he’s in love with all of their favorite things. When everything’s not filled with angst, Steve is a super super sweet sub, eager and earnest and pretty good at communicating what he likes once he gets the hang of it. Also, serum-enhanced cock: Tony can order him to come over and over again, or he can edge him forever and torture him with overstimulation and all of that is hot. Dysfunctional bottom!steve is more like “you betrayed me, you used me, I hate you — do it again.”

Top!tony in 616 has taken his control issues and turned them outward, so instead of wanting to let go instead he loves to orchestrate sex just like he likes to orchestrate solutions to world problems. Plus he’s got the same generosity that Steve has, so he likes being able to give his partner what they want in bed and set things up perfectly so they can feel nice. He brings his natural suave composure to topping, but it’s cut with a sort of soft wonder that Steve’s trusting him with this because his self-esteem is garbage and he can’t possibly deserve someone as good as Steve submitting to him. Then when things are not so pleasant between them, tony uses sex to punish both Steve and himself, taking the thing he wants and beating himself up with it afterwards. He’s addicted to Steve and doesn’t care what’s good for them, he’s going to actively ruin it all.

Obviously some of these elements can be applied to both universes (Steve is always big and buff, yum). There’s a lot of juicy stuff to explore with either top!tony or top!steve, which is why I like both types of fic! The thing that really decides if I like a fic or not is how well the characterization is done and how well it explores a facet of Steve and Tony’s personalities.

I do get a bit bristly about a certain type bottom!tony fic, and about some bottom!pre-serum Steve fic (though the latter isn’t very common in comics universes), but that’s mostly because I find it really infuriating when a fic takes all the agency away from the bottom and replaces their personality with “eager-to-please horny bimbo who’s all weak and fragile.” I’m a contrarian, too, and since there’s more top!steve than top!tony (a quick ao3 tag search gives about a 2:1 ratio for top!steve:top!tony), I like writing the latter. Otherwise, I aspire to be cool, even though I have my favorite dynamics. I love me a wide variety of kinky smut -- the discourse is exhausting and i have bascially infinite salt about how dumb it is.