Stark Raving Mad (language advisory)

(Psst. If you don’t care about the Marvel Comics Universe, or fan fiction, don’t read this post. It’s okay, I don’t mind.)

So, I don’t blow a lot of my spare time on Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook, because there are just not enough waking hours in the day, or scientific equipment that can measure precisely how little I care about 99% of the content posted online. Even, quite often, mine. I’m not being snobby, just realistic. I’m on deadlines, I’m under stress, I’m too old to delude myself into thinking I can multitask for shit, and I can’t drop everything for lolcats. No matter how cute they are.

But I have friends who just seem to know when I need cheering up. And when one of them says ‘stop writing, Crane, and go look at this Avengers fan fic right now,’ I’ll at least look.

Bear in mind, I am still crushingly disappointed at the travesty that was ‘Iron Man 3’. Not quite to the level of my disgust toward ‘Highlander 2’ or ‘Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull’, but nearer my low regard for ‘Phantom Menace’. (Which should say something right there, because the three weeks in May of 1983 that I had to wait to see ‘Return of the Jedi’ probably imprinted more on my little mind than the prospect of actually getting the hell out of high school. And honestly, who knew that ‘Willow’ was a warning sign and not an unfortunate aberration?)

So my friend gave me a link to a 7299-word Avengers fan fic story called ‘Stark Raving Mad’, from an author whose screen name is Unadulterated. There’s no unsettling slashy homoerotic stuff in it to squick the squeamish. It’s just a funny, frank, poignant, and chillingly gorgeous character study of what Tony Stark would probably really be like, given his canon backstory. It’s about a man owning his unique brand of insanity, without being one iota of pitiful or weak.

The blurb says enough: “Tony didn’t make it out of Afghanistan in one piece. (In fact, he left a couple important pieces behind.)”

It’s also another in my list of reasons why fan fiction can be a good thing. ‘Stark Raving Mad’ takes a side step away from Marvel canon and expands a character in interesting ways. Ways that ever after stick with a reader. I won’t see RDJ playing Iron Man again without assessing the type of smile on his face, or applying it to what just became my own headcanon for the character. I can’t look back at the previous movies or animations without noticing the same things.

To apply broader writing terms, this highlights the uneasy margin authors face between ownership and fandom. We certainly don’t like writers squatting in our territory, stealing our works, and running away to profit from it. But when we build worlds, and welcome readers into those worlds, sometimes we benefit more from letting the readership do a tiny bit of redecorating here and there, under carefully controlled situations. Their efforts will draw in more people, and make the party just a little bigger and more exciting. This does not excuse all fan appropriations. Some pieces are just a sad mess.

Some are genius.

Social-media marketing experts are always hounding authors to ‘build your brand and platform’. Like it or not, fan fiction can be a part of that platform.