schmevil | three posts in one day? I know, I know.

Thinking about why Tony lives as he does, I'd say his future-manse would have to be impressively snazzy with all the comforts, on the bleeding edge of the latest tech (so I'd say also mobile, since part of a good defense is the ability to be elsewhere), and contain workspaces all tricked out for producing his latest works-of-genius.

What counts as impressively snazzy depends on what your far flung future cultures look like.

~

This was a really helpful comment. Thanks!

I'm thinking Death Star, in red and gold.

Perfect.

Depends how far-future, really! And whether he inherited it like Avengers Mansion or built it himself like the penthouse.

Also, as Fury already has a Helicarrier, Tony might consider a sky castle not awesome enough. Personally I would probably pick a ship that he can park in geosynchronous orbit over his home-city, preferably in low enough orbit people can see the Stark logo on it, or a space station that he can move when he feels like it. (These are pretty overlapping concepts though.)

Alternatively, the same side of the Moon is always visible from Earth. He could terraform that shit.

I'm considering making Tony completely non-Terran. I'll have to work out the socio-political stuff though, to see what maps best to contemporary Tony.

SPACE BASED SOCIETY. Tony doesn't have to come from a planet. :D Fleets or a privately owned space station - depending on how advanced your tech is, entirely self-contained post-scarcity society! or mobile platform that stops at worlds to restock! or mobile platform that stops to slurp up suns to power itself! or perhaps Howard Stark built Death Stars and Tony's quit that and wants to build a Dyson sphere!

It's also true that in a lot of Earth-origin space empires Earth is positioned as the heart of Empire and an incredible high-status location - like the Beverly Hills of the universe. So... it depends on which aspects of his character you're emphasizing. Futurist!Tony might be a space-native, even genetically altered to be more tolerant to zero-g etc. Privileged!Tony, from Earth, the political centre of human society. *shrug* SO MANY OPTIONS. I love sci-fi.

(also, space-ship building space-dock! for ships that never enter atmosphere!)

The first scene is Jan seeing off Steve, from the SHIELD Station Alpha docking ring. There are like, drop ships, and gravity wells, and Tony has actual robot babies. I should work out the details of the society before I get any further, even though this isn't going to be longfic, lest I contradict myself.

It's up in the air, but I think I'm going to go with Tony being born on Earth, or a nearby station, so I can maintain that old money-new money thing he's got going on. He should have a strong connection to the old guard, while also representing the somewhat terrifying future. He's almost certainly going to be a GMO/cyborg of some kind.

I love sci-fic too!

What, like, he gives birth to them? Or AIs start as 'infants' and are raised like human babies to make them 'people' with proper social adjustments? Are AIs citizens?

Perhaps Howard created Tony in some dramatically weird clone-y modified way way, and everyone was WTF no and he was 'suck it this is my weird son now' and then just when society had gotten used to Tony having tentacles and such he cyborged himself and the whole thing started up again and now he's doing it again with robo-babies Tony not everything should be allowed to vote. Pushing the boundaries of what human means! And and and feel free to tell me not to leap on your story bits and claw frantically at them, I know some people don't like it and I won't mind. I just seem to be babbly today. :)

What kinds do you like? My hands-down favourite is the Culture; I also love the Vorkosigan series. There was an ace space-hospital series that was fantastic for giving a real sense of galatic scale - instead of doing medicine by species names, they had to classify species with a four-letter code, depending on a number of physical qualities, so you'd have an idea of what you were dealing with, and the hospital (a giant space section) had all kinds of bits with different atmospheres etc. I've been reading far too little fiction recently.

No, I'm pretty relaxed about people having opinions on my stories, and my ideas in progress. In fact I always welcome pre-writing confabs, and as I'm going along. World building and hashing out the details is a huge part of the fun for me. Especially since my actual writing process involves obsessing over word choice and imagery and shit. Which, you know, is fun also, but a lot more draining than plotting. It's that side of things that derails me a lot of the time.

I hadn't thought to go actual MPREG with the robot babies, but now I can see an angle for it: Tony's consciousness is in the fabricator, so he experiences their construction as gestation. And if I run with Tony as a gmo/cyborg from birth, or just very early on, then that kind of split consciousness and machine consciousness would be natural to him--thus, MPREG.

Your ideas wrt the robots are similar to mine. I was kind of thinking that he builds the Martian Space Castle, or a ship, because he needed at one point to circumvent Earth law regarding his precious astro-babies, and non-corporeal AIs. Hank is also ~out there, doing his thing. Maybe Latveria is now a creepy station-colony, and Doom's doing something similar.

I love soft SF that does weird stuff with culture. I also love hard SF that explores contemporary science. And just straight up space opera as well. I love it all!

World building and hashing out the details is a huge part of the fun for me. Especially since my actual writing process involves obsessing over word choice and imagery and shit. Which, you know, is fun also, but a lot more draining than plotting. It's that side of things that derails me a lot of the time.

IDK if you saw, some of us are writing about our writing, I would love to see you post in more detail on your methods. :)

ahhh yes, that's a good point on the circumventing law! (And it makes one think about independent planetary law, and the interstellar equivalent of international waters.) The idea of Tony being integrated with machinery is shades of Extremis - and if Howard altered his child to be like that, no wonder people saw it as fucked up.

Tony is very hands-on; mpreg is not so odd, actually, I recall playing with an mpreg idea where Tony was all, I made new tech! and now I must test it! look at me building another human this is amazing. Mpreg where Tony is part-machine, well, if he is a machine who builds machines, and an intelligence who creates intelligences, constructing them out of his own matter is - interesting. Especially if they can interface through their machine aspects from the babies' creation. (It reminds me of Ivanova from B5, talking about her telepath mother - what it was like to feel your mother's love for you.) Given how possessive Tony is of the armour, I can't imagine how protective he'd be of his robobabies. Attempts to commandeer his little potential weapons would go down very badly.

Oh man, a world where Mad Scientists can go away and create their own strange worlds. For some reason, I see Doom as a planet kind of guy. IDK. Maybe I'm just associating him with the natural drama of mountains and thunder?

I definitely rec the Culture if you haven't read it - Banks is just hnrgh from a technical perspective, just. The last one I read was Matter which is... soft, social SF that's a deconstruction of epic fantasy tropes?

Oh, very cool. I will definitely write something. I'm flattered that you're interested, despite my utter lack of output. ;)

Doom can have Pluto. It's a planetoid, sure, but it's in the middle of nowhere and that's Gothic, right? Very dramatic. His spacesuit can have a cape.

Harm to Tony's robobabies would be grounds for interplanetary war, I think.
Oh man, just think of people's first reaction to his robobabies. "You... made yourself an Astro Boy?" "He's prefect, right?" "..."

So what do you think of Tony as a parent? My headcanon is that he'd be extremely Winchester (SPN). Weird combination of obsessive and hands off, not all bourgeois in parenting style, prone to creating a bubble around his family, much like movie Tony's inner circle.

Ugh, picking this up again way late, due to things.

(Also, having seen Tony/Astro Boy porn... eyebleed.)

People would be weirded the hell out, but even in movieverse, Tony is clearly more than usually attached to his creations - he's kept Dummy around for what, 25 years? Tony does not find it hard to form attachments to things that respond to him, although he shows little sign of caring about material possessions. (Specific ones, I mean, he obviously likes being rich and having nice things in a general sense.)

As a parent? Erratic. He was really sweet with Cassie, and she seemed genuinely fond of him, so I'm inclined to believe he's not incompetent with children, but he's going to constantly second-guess himself over the emotional shit. If he's got a co-parent to reassure him, I think he'd do better, but he's so unused to being anyone's primary support. He might well back off when he's needed for fear of making things worse.

three posts in one day? I know, I know.

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