Iron Man historical AU
May. 21st, 2013 09:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethThe Iron Man and War Machine armours seem to translate real easy to historical AU, being visually reminiscent of traditional plate armour, so fitting in with the 13th through 16th century. But I'm having trouble translating their role on the battlefield, especially their weapons. The mobility seems like mounted troops, except if you put mounted knights vs longbows they are not going to stand there looking invincible, and then there's the rise of gunpowder, and basically in the long running battle of tanks vs weapons, the weapons spent many centuries winning.
Actually even now the Iron Man armour seems to spend most of the time getting blown to bits or having holes knocked in it or falling apart so Tony can stick out looking vulnerable. Armour is not invincibility.
So say there's AU Tony and Rhodey in full plate armour (and AU historical Rhodey can be a black guy in many eras, there were black people all through history, I know this, I've read about Arthurian black people and all sorts). They're vulnerable, but not as much as the guy next to them, so they're up front protecting people.
So, what weapons are they using?
Modern Iron Man and War Machine have guns, rockets, lasers, huge great tube things sticking out, all that ranged stuff. Historical weaponry did not tend to combine the plate armour and the ranged weaponry. Did it? If you just decide for reasons of style you don't want to play with gunpowder, there's bows and crossbows, and if you want the lots of shots per minute you use a bow, but then you're Hawkeye with the ridiculous lack of armour, or the English longbow lines making all that investment in plate seem a bit inadequate. (Hawkeye is Best once you go historical AU. You don't really have to change him. He's just going to kick all the arse.)
So what are Tony and Rhodey doing?
Cap has a shield and is acting strange in any era, but the shield can fit anywhere from the bronze age on up, and the magic metal can be any number of elements to seem invulnerable next to local weaponry.
Anyone playing with lightning before the invention of tasers (which can be steampunk but cannot go much earlier than that) is basically playing with magic. Also it would combine poorly with plate mail.
Do I give the Iron Man and War Machine the alchemical secrets to make them actual tanks, gunpowder in an age of bows? That would fit the tech level disparity that Tony and his inventions always manage, but like I said, I don't want boom sticks, just for reasons of style.
Are ranged weapons a necessary part of the concept level of the suit? Or can he just walk up and punch people and still basically be Iron Man?
*ponders*
Also today I'm vaguely wondering what happens if you stand in front of a bonfire in plate mail. Like, on a sensation level. I know bonfires from bonfire night, and that weird hot/cold thing they do where one side is toasty to a nigh dangerous level and the other side is freezing. If you're wrapped in metal at the time does the sensation differ, is it slower to start and go away, can your outsides get dangerous to touch with your insides still being fine? I'm just wondering and I don't know how one would find out. LARPers? Armoury re-enactment dudes?
If I file the serial numbers off I know what my Tony-alike uses for weaponry. He's a smith, so he uses hammers. But then there's his best friend he builds armour for.
Weapons are important. Tell you so much about how someone approaches a problem. Snipers and tanks just don't think the same way.
How I invent characters: Shoes and sword. That started in Highlander fandom, so for other fandoms it's a more general 'Shoes and whatever they'll primarily use to solve problems and/or how they fight' but that takes longer to say. Highlander though, the sword tells you a little about when and where they come from, how they learned and who from, how they'll fight. Rapiers, katanas, and European two edged blades just don't lend themselves to the same basic approach. Richie with that fancy basket hilt rapier he couldn't use without putting gloves on just wasn't a good fit, Richie in my head always has the bastard sword because really, he's not a fiddly precision kind of guy, he's a head on and no backing down kind.
Shoes are also important. Especially on TV. I saw the promo picture for Agents of SHIELD and there are almost certainly no high heels there and I was just :-D because making every woman do it all backwards in high heels should be outdated. But you still see them. And sometimes it's for pure practicality in framing shots - if your lead male is meant to be 6'4" (see Captain America) and your only woman is 5'4" on a good day (see Black Widow) then getting them both in the frame requires a certain distance or messing around with boxes or getting Cap to slouch and Widow to wear heels. Since camera eye lines tend to stay level with the men (and how annoying is that? the camera is male identified just by the height it is at. I only notice when that isn't true, like Doctor Who seeing the world through Rose's eyes.) the women can end up dissapearing off the bottom edge. I can see how that's a problem for directors that don't want to be stuck at funny angles or middle distance forever. But still, as soon as you put a woman in high heels, you are saying something about her activity level and willingness to hamper herself, and it's frequently an inappropriate something.
Putting Tony Stark in heels - I can only find behind the scenes pictures, but I'm sure they show on screen at some point, I'll have to rewatch - that says something about activity, willingness to make things more difficult, and adherence to gender codes. I was going to say 'something else', but really, pointy high heels are coded feminine and being a certain height is coded masculine, so it's effort towards gender conformity either way. If Tony Stark feels the need to be taller and wears particularly unbendy trainers or those shoes that go with suits with square but tall heels, he's investing time, effort, and changes to his posture, all to code more masculine. All to look other guys in the eye and not look up to them, because there's a weird metaphor realm that makes that about power and gender and all that stuff where guys can't back down, and when did up and down get to mean strong and weak? How daft is that? But so much effort goes into making guys tall, and taller than women, and it's daft that an average is suddenly a rule that can't be varied from.
Tony's 5' 8", or RDJr is. I looked up the heights of pretty much all the actors I fancy most and there's a weird tendency to be 5'8". From 5'4" maybe that seems like about the perfect height, much taller than that and I'm talking to armpits. I quite like shorter, but there's very few bloke actors who admit to being shorter, until they're like 5'2" and making a career of it. And this is all weird, because 5'4" is around global average height for a woman, and 5'8 is pretty much average height for a man, or at least in the middle of the mess of stats available, but it's not on TV. On TV nobody can be average, let alone below average.
Creepy and weird.
But, shoes. Shoes decide where you stand. To gender, to class, to activity level, to comfort, the shoes say so much. Some characters wear good solid boots, because in a survival situation you last as long as your feet (Captain Jack Harkness, ironically enough). Some wear fancy office shoes even when their jobs are somewhat more active than those are good for (Ianto Jones, see complaints about sliding around in them... er, I think in my con notes, not on the net). On Doctor Who you need shoes that let you run. Rejecting that necessity is like rejecting the whole lifestyle. Shoes are harder to read in various bits of history though, like when high heels were a masculine thing because they were cavalry shoes. No, really. Some of the vastly impractical fashion choices at least started as practical on horseback.
Once I'm making up historical characters, I can say much less with their shoes, for I understand them much less well. Even in the here now I'm not big on the subtleties, but I don't even know what the broad types were once you're back past the 20th century.
Swords I have more knowing of. More books on them.
It's still a big decision though. What tools to give a character, and how they stand.
Actually even now the Iron Man armour seems to spend most of the time getting blown to bits or having holes knocked in it or falling apart so Tony can stick out looking vulnerable. Armour is not invincibility.
So say there's AU Tony and Rhodey in full plate armour (and AU historical Rhodey can be a black guy in many eras, there were black people all through history, I know this, I've read about Arthurian black people and all sorts). They're vulnerable, but not as much as the guy next to them, so they're up front protecting people.
So, what weapons are they using?
Modern Iron Man and War Machine have guns, rockets, lasers, huge great tube things sticking out, all that ranged stuff. Historical weaponry did not tend to combine the plate armour and the ranged weaponry. Did it? If you just decide for reasons of style you don't want to play with gunpowder, there's bows and crossbows, and if you want the lots of shots per minute you use a bow, but then you're Hawkeye with the ridiculous lack of armour, or the English longbow lines making all that investment in plate seem a bit inadequate. (Hawkeye is Best once you go historical AU. You don't really have to change him. He's just going to kick all the arse.)
So what are Tony and Rhodey doing?
Cap has a shield and is acting strange in any era, but the shield can fit anywhere from the bronze age on up, and the magic metal can be any number of elements to seem invulnerable next to local weaponry.
Anyone playing with lightning before the invention of tasers (which can be steampunk but cannot go much earlier than that) is basically playing with magic. Also it would combine poorly with plate mail.
Do I give the Iron Man and War Machine the alchemical secrets to make them actual tanks, gunpowder in an age of bows? That would fit the tech level disparity that Tony and his inventions always manage, but like I said, I don't want boom sticks, just for reasons of style.
Are ranged weapons a necessary part of the concept level of the suit? Or can he just walk up and punch people and still basically be Iron Man?
*ponders*
Also today I'm vaguely wondering what happens if you stand in front of a bonfire in plate mail. Like, on a sensation level. I know bonfires from bonfire night, and that weird hot/cold thing they do where one side is toasty to a nigh dangerous level and the other side is freezing. If you're wrapped in metal at the time does the sensation differ, is it slower to start and go away, can your outsides get dangerous to touch with your insides still being fine? I'm just wondering and I don't know how one would find out. LARPers? Armoury re-enactment dudes?
If I file the serial numbers off I know what my Tony-alike uses for weaponry. He's a smith, so he uses hammers. But then there's his best friend he builds armour for.
Weapons are important. Tell you so much about how someone approaches a problem. Snipers and tanks just don't think the same way.
How I invent characters: Shoes and sword. That started in Highlander fandom, so for other fandoms it's a more general 'Shoes and whatever they'll primarily use to solve problems and/or how they fight' but that takes longer to say. Highlander though, the sword tells you a little about when and where they come from, how they learned and who from, how they'll fight. Rapiers, katanas, and European two edged blades just don't lend themselves to the same basic approach. Richie with that fancy basket hilt rapier he couldn't use without putting gloves on just wasn't a good fit, Richie in my head always has the bastard sword because really, he's not a fiddly precision kind of guy, he's a head on and no backing down kind.
Shoes are also important. Especially on TV. I saw the promo picture for Agents of SHIELD and there are almost certainly no high heels there and I was just :-D because making every woman do it all backwards in high heels should be outdated. But you still see them. And sometimes it's for pure practicality in framing shots - if your lead male is meant to be 6'4" (see Captain America) and your only woman is 5'4" on a good day (see Black Widow) then getting them both in the frame requires a certain distance or messing around with boxes or getting Cap to slouch and Widow to wear heels. Since camera eye lines tend to stay level with the men (and how annoying is that? the camera is male identified just by the height it is at. I only notice when that isn't true, like Doctor Who seeing the world through Rose's eyes.) the women can end up dissapearing off the bottom edge. I can see how that's a problem for directors that don't want to be stuck at funny angles or middle distance forever. But still, as soon as you put a woman in high heels, you are saying something about her activity level and willingness to hamper herself, and it's frequently an inappropriate something.
Putting Tony Stark in heels - I can only find behind the scenes pictures, but I'm sure they show on screen at some point, I'll have to rewatch - that says something about activity, willingness to make things more difficult, and adherence to gender codes. I was going to say 'something else', but really, pointy high heels are coded feminine and being a certain height is coded masculine, so it's effort towards gender conformity either way. If Tony Stark feels the need to be taller and wears particularly unbendy trainers or those shoes that go with suits with square but tall heels, he's investing time, effort, and changes to his posture, all to code more masculine. All to look other guys in the eye and not look up to them, because there's a weird metaphor realm that makes that about power and gender and all that stuff where guys can't back down, and when did up and down get to mean strong and weak? How daft is that? But so much effort goes into making guys tall, and taller than women, and it's daft that an average is suddenly a rule that can't be varied from.
Tony's 5' 8", or RDJr is. I looked up the heights of pretty much all the actors I fancy most and there's a weird tendency to be 5'8". From 5'4" maybe that seems like about the perfect height, much taller than that and I'm talking to armpits. I quite like shorter, but there's very few bloke actors who admit to being shorter, until they're like 5'2" and making a career of it. And this is all weird, because 5'4" is around global average height for a woman, and 5'8 is pretty much average height for a man, or at least in the middle of the mess of stats available, but it's not on TV. On TV nobody can be average, let alone below average.
Creepy and weird.
But, shoes. Shoes decide where you stand. To gender, to class, to activity level, to comfort, the shoes say so much. Some characters wear good solid boots, because in a survival situation you last as long as your feet (Captain Jack Harkness, ironically enough). Some wear fancy office shoes even when their jobs are somewhat more active than those are good for (Ianto Jones, see complaints about sliding around in them... er, I think in my con notes, not on the net). On Doctor Who you need shoes that let you run. Rejecting that necessity is like rejecting the whole lifestyle. Shoes are harder to read in various bits of history though, like when high heels were a masculine thing because they were cavalry shoes. No, really. Some of the vastly impractical fashion choices at least started as practical on horseback.
Once I'm making up historical characters, I can say much less with their shoes, for I understand them much less well. Even in the here now I'm not big on the subtleties, but I don't even know what the broad types were once you're back past the 20th century.
Swords I have more knowing of. More books on them.
It's still a big decision though. What tools to give a character, and how they stand.
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Date: 2013-05-21 09:31 am (UTC)Standing in front of a fire might be relatively tolerable for an extended period, given the amount of padding that was typically worn underneath the armor to make it bearable. Facing it might not be, if your visor is down though.