Sophinisba Solis (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sophinisba) wrote2020-02-01 07:34 pm
sophinisba) wrote2020-02-01 07:34 pm
Entry tags:
I <3 Irondad
A while back I mentioned that I'd been reading a lot of Irondad hurt/comfort fic and a friend asked if that was a fandom or a pairing or what, and also a friend on Twitter who is more familiar with MCU fandom thought it was Tony/Peter but it's not that (that ship is called Starker), and I'm still pretty into it but also fascinated and occasionally annoyed that it's such a big thing, so here is a post about that.
Irondad is what the kids call the gen ship that is Tony Stark (that's Iron Man you guys!) mentoring or acting like a dad or even actually being a dad to Peter Parker (that's Spider-Man!). Or like, I guess it could technically be Tony parenting someone else but it's almost always Peter. As I write this there are 5520 works tagged Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure on the AO3 (of which two are podfics I made) (whoops no now it's 5521) and 7930 with Irondad or some other variation of Parent Tony Stark.
And like, those tags didn't exist yet but I remember coming across this back in 2012, before Tom Holland's Peter Parker had even appeared as a character in the MCU. I'd loved Andrew Garfield as Peter and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man and went looking for fics to podfic but most of the Peter Parker fic I could find was about him interacting with Tony Stark. Friends, I was so confused! And annoyed that so few people were interested in Gwen!
And to an extent my annoyance continues because! You guys! I ship Tony with his movie canon girlfriend Pepper Potts so much! And his daughter is the cutest and I want fanworks about him being a dad to her! And Peter's canon girlfriend MJ is so fucking amazing?! And like there are a lot of works tagged as Tony/Pepper or Peter/MJ but those ships are usually in the background and the real intimacy is between Tony and Peter because it's like large masses of fans can only get behind intimacy between two white dudes and it kind of makes me despair sometimes?!
BUT ALSO the intimacy between Tony and Peter is so fucking awesome I could cry?!
And to be honest I feel MJ and Morgan and especially Pepper typically fare better in these works than in other shippy ones where the canon girlfriends have to disappear or to have broken up with the dudes and moved on or whatever. It's true authors sometimes kill off Pepper and especially Peter's Aunt May (so that he can be adopted by Tony, natch). There's also like, fics where Tony and Steve are together and Peter is their son and Pepper doesn't even exist, or Pepper was their surrogate but she and Tony are just friends or whatever. Idek it's tricky but it's also beautiful okay.
So yeah I came across the whole Tony & Peter phenomenon again last summer after I saw Avengers: Endgame, because I had an all-consuming hunger for fic about hurt Tony Stark but the Hurt Tony Stark tag doesn't get used that consistently so I started hanging out on the Tony Stark tag filtered for hurt/comfort. And friends, SO MUCH of that is Irondad, and it's so great. At first I was disappointed that it's more often Peter as the hurt one but I've really come to love that too (I mean who would say no to Peter Parker?).
HERE IS HOW A TYPICAL IRONDAD FIC GOES! Peter has admired Tony from afar all his life and has recently come to know him! Tony helps him with his suit and helps him pretend he has an internship at Tony and Pepper's tech company Stark Industries, which serves as a convenient cover for Peter's Spider-Man activities. THEN Peter confronts some bad guys and is injured OR starts to come down with the flu. He thinks about calling Tony but thinks, no, Mr. Stark is so busy and this thing Peter's dealing with is probably not that big a deal, Peter will handle it himself and not bother Mr. Stark. Then the problem gets worse and Tony flies in and rescues him! AND THEN Tony reassures Peter that he is not bothering him, that Peter is important to him, that Tony loves him and will do whatever it takes to keep him safe. :D :D :D :D Often he is still doing it in his faux-casual way and calling Peter "kid" and sometimes "buddy" and that is my preference. It is also pretty common for fic authors to have Tony explicitly saying "You're my son" and I'm not into that but it doesn't really make me stop reading.
To me it is pretty hilarious how many of these fics have to do with Peter getting the flu, considering how many other hurts that kid goes through in the movies. But I am not complaining!
Then also sometimes Tony gets sick or injured and Peter takes care of him and that is possibly even more by jam.
(It seems to me that a lot of Irondad fic is written by British people who aren't aware of or don't care about dialectical differences, so there are a lot of sentences that to me don't sound right for Tony and Peter but I mostly find that pretty charming. I mentioned this to another friend who reads the ship a lot and they hadn't noticed it so it could be my imagination that there's more there than with other ships.)
My favorite Irondad author is![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
sahiya. Most of their Irondad fics are set after Avengers: Endgame and a lot of them are parts in the same universe or a couple of different universes where Tony and Morgan and sometimes Pepper and sometimes Peter live in the lake house and Tony has some lasting health problems from Endgame and everybody has trauma. They are pretty much all fics about a bunch of people who love each other and are used to taking care of each other, and some of their problems are temporary and some are ongoing and they keep helping each other through. To me it is so beautiful.
I haven't podficced much of this ship at all, and I haven't tried to write any. And that's pretty consistent, really, I've been an avid h/c reader throughout my fifteen years in fandom but I've only written or podficced it a few times. Somehow I've become much more comfortable making really explicit sexy podfic but not so with h/c.
And then I'm also a fan of Tony/Peter aka Starker and sometimes I feel a little funny about that. Like there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap among those fan groups and I think hmm is it pervy for me to ship them in a sexy way when I also ship them as mentor&mentee? But to be honest a lot of Starker fic is pretty pervy, with one or both characters worrying a lot about the age difference and how inappropriate it is for them to be even thinking about each other that way, and that is part of what's appealing about the ship, so I guess it's okay. *warm memories of LOTR Interspecies slash fandom*
Thank you for listening, I hope my old friends continue to find my MCU obsession amusing and not too tiresome!
Irondad is what the kids call the gen ship that is Tony Stark (that's Iron Man you guys!) mentoring or acting like a dad or even actually being a dad to Peter Parker (that's Spider-Man!). Or like, I guess it could technically be Tony parenting someone else but it's almost always Peter. As I write this there are 5520 works tagged Tony Stark Acting as Peter Parker's Parental Figure on the AO3 (of which two are podfics I made) (whoops no now it's 5521) and 7930 with Irondad or some other variation of Parent Tony Stark.
And like, those tags didn't exist yet but I remember coming across this back in 2012, before Tom Holland's Peter Parker had even appeared as a character in the MCU. I'd loved Andrew Garfield as Peter and Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy in The Amazing Spider-Man and went looking for fics to podfic but most of the Peter Parker fic I could find was about him interacting with Tony Stark. Friends, I was so confused! And annoyed that so few people were interested in Gwen!
And to an extent my annoyance continues because! You guys! I ship Tony with his movie canon girlfriend Pepper Potts so much! And his daughter is the cutest and I want fanworks about him being a dad to her! And Peter's canon girlfriend MJ is so fucking amazing?! And like there are a lot of works tagged as Tony/Pepper or Peter/MJ but those ships are usually in the background and the real intimacy is between Tony and Peter because it's like large masses of fans can only get behind intimacy between two white dudes and it kind of makes me despair sometimes?!
BUT ALSO the intimacy between Tony and Peter is so fucking awesome I could cry?!
And to be honest I feel MJ and Morgan and especially Pepper typically fare better in these works than in other shippy ones where the canon girlfriends have to disappear or to have broken up with the dudes and moved on or whatever. It's true authors sometimes kill off Pepper and especially Peter's Aunt May (so that he can be adopted by Tony, natch). There's also like, fics where Tony and Steve are together and Peter is their son and Pepper doesn't even exist, or Pepper was their surrogate but she and Tony are just friends or whatever. Idek it's tricky but it's also beautiful okay.
So yeah I came across the whole Tony & Peter phenomenon again last summer after I saw Avengers: Endgame, because I had an all-consuming hunger for fic about hurt Tony Stark but the Hurt Tony Stark tag doesn't get used that consistently so I started hanging out on the Tony Stark tag filtered for hurt/comfort. And friends, SO MUCH of that is Irondad, and it's so great. At first I was disappointed that it's more often Peter as the hurt one but I've really come to love that too (I mean who would say no to Peter Parker?).
HERE IS HOW A TYPICAL IRONDAD FIC GOES! Peter has admired Tony from afar all his life and has recently come to know him! Tony helps him with his suit and helps him pretend he has an internship at Tony and Pepper's tech company Stark Industries, which serves as a convenient cover for Peter's Spider-Man activities. THEN Peter confronts some bad guys and is injured OR starts to come down with the flu. He thinks about calling Tony but thinks, no, Mr. Stark is so busy and this thing Peter's dealing with is probably not that big a deal, Peter will handle it himself and not bother Mr. Stark. Then the problem gets worse and Tony flies in and rescues him! AND THEN Tony reassures Peter that he is not bothering him, that Peter is important to him, that Tony loves him and will do whatever it takes to keep him safe. :D :D :D :D Often he is still doing it in his faux-casual way and calling Peter "kid" and sometimes "buddy" and that is my preference. It is also pretty common for fic authors to have Tony explicitly saying "You're my son" and I'm not into that but it doesn't really make me stop reading.
To me it is pretty hilarious how many of these fics have to do with Peter getting the flu, considering how many other hurts that kid goes through in the movies. But I am not complaining!
Then also sometimes Tony gets sick or injured and Peter takes care of him and that is possibly even more by jam.
(It seems to me that a lot of Irondad fic is written by British people who aren't aware of or don't care about dialectical differences, so there are a lot of sentences that to me don't sound right for Tony and Peter but I mostly find that pretty charming. I mentioned this to another friend who reads the ship a lot and they hadn't noticed it so it could be my imagination that there's more there than with other ships.)
My favorite Irondad author is
I haven't podficced much of this ship at all, and I haven't tried to write any. And that's pretty consistent, really, I've been an avid h/c reader throughout my fifteen years in fandom but I've only written or podficced it a few times. Somehow I've become much more comfortable making really explicit sexy podfic but not so with h/c.
And then I'm also a fan of Tony/Peter aka Starker and sometimes I feel a little funny about that. Like there doesn't seem to be a lot of overlap among those fan groups and I think hmm is it pervy for me to ship them in a sexy way when I also ship them as mentor&mentee? But to be honest a lot of Starker fic is pretty pervy, with one or both characters worrying a lot about the age difference and how inappropriate it is for them to be even thinking about each other that way, and that is part of what's appealing about the ship, so I guess it's okay. *warm memories of LOTR Interspecies slash fandom*
Thank you for listening, I hope my old friends continue to find my MCU obsession amusing and not too tiresome!