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I'm in the mood for meta, apparently. This is sort of a follow-on from the Spock/McCoy meta last night, prompted along similar lines of thought. This one though is more honour/expediency than emotion/logic.
I'm picking Thor vs Tony as the angle of attack on this, but it actually spreads out across the movieverse, so I'll be taking the whole team as we move on. They actually divide relatively neatly into opposing pairs by cast-herd: Thor vs Loki, Steve vs Tony, Clint vs Natasha, Bruce vs Hulk, but Thor vs Tony has the advantage of an almost carbon-copy narrative to highlight the contrast, so it makes a good starting point.
And, um. I mostly started thinking about this because I was trying to figure out why I can get into Tony's head all damn day, but I haven't written a single piece from Thor's POV, alone among the entire Avengers cast (seriously, Maria gets more POV time from me and she was only barely in the movie). So. Thor vs Tony is pertinent, yes?
I'm picking Thor vs Tony as the angle of attack on this, but it actually spreads out across the movieverse, so I'll be taking the whole team as we move on. They actually divide relatively neatly into opposing pairs by cast-herd: Thor vs Loki, Steve vs Tony, Clint vs Natasha, Bruce vs Hulk, but Thor vs Tony has the advantage of an almost carbon-copy narrative to highlight the contrast, so it makes a good starting point.
And, um. I mostly started thinking about this because I was trying to figure out why I can get into Tony's head all damn day, but I haven't written a single piece from Thor's POV, alone among the entire Avengers cast (seriously, Maria gets more POV time from me and she was only barely in the movie). So. Thor vs Tony is pertinent, yes?
Tony vs Thor: the Scientist vs the Warrior in the MCU
The seeds for this started in a conversation I had with a commentator on one of my stories: Words On The Backs Of Our Hands (which is one of the few stories I've written which has Tony and Thor interacting meaningfully). What they said was: "I will never understand why people don't write scads of fic taking advantage of all the fifty bazillion parallels between Thor and Tony (betrayed by someone who was like family to them? Check. Having to stop said someone from doing almost the same things they would've done themselves earlier in their lives? Check. Former reckless xenophobic imperialistic warmongers? Check. Learns humility and responsibility in a comparatively primitive place far from home while stripped of all their usual power? Check. Wields highly destructive weapons that only they can use? Check. Heirs to their fathers' legacy with all the baggage that attends that? Check. Leans on old friends who have been with them even back when they were arrogant spoiled brats? Check.)"
And, you know, they have an excellent point. Tony and Thor's narratives in the movieverse are pretty much direct carbon copies of each other, at least at the origin phase. They occupy more or less the exact same social position within their societies (Crown Prince vs Heir to Corporate Empire), they have the same trouble with authority (Thor vs Odin, Tony vs Howard/Obie), they have the same history as imperialist warmongers, etc, etc, etc. They also have broadly similar personalities and interactions with people (see Thor & Sif vs Tony & Pepper, their acceptance of someone else gaining personal power and respect in an arena where they personally never had to fight for it, also both of them regarding being non-politically minded people in positions of political responsibility, also both of their tendencies to showboat like there's no tomorrow). Thor and Tony are actually incredibly similar people in a truly astounding number of ways.
But for some reason, the audience reacts to them as though they were utterly different. Look at the fandom, for example. You're more likely to see people comparing Tony to Loki and Thor to Steve that comparing them to each other. Or, for that matter, comparing Steve to Loki. Because those two actually have shockingly similar origins too.
Lets see. Physically underwhelming member of a predominently warrior culture/era, gets beaten up/mocked a lot for their physical shortcomings. Undergoes massive and traumatic physical metamorphosis (Steve with the serum and Loki when his Jotun heritage is revealed) in connection with a prevailing on-going conflict between their culture and another. Subsequently decides to enter that conflict and prove their worth as a warrior, while at the same time having significant similarities to the visible face of the enemy (Steve & Schmidt, Loki & the Jotun).
Steve vs Loki is actually a good indicator of where the divide starts. Because while their motives and starting-points are largely the same, it's their methods, their mental framework for action, where the differences start to show. And it's the same between Thor and Tony. Because despite personal similarities and similar social positions, the primary functional divide in the MCU is as follows: Warrior vs Scientist, Brawn vs Brain. Or, slightly more accurately, Duelist vs Analyst, arguably Tactician vs Strategist.
Steve is different to Loki for two reasons, one mental and one emotional (or, one professional and one personal):
First, he can prove his worth as a warrior more easily because Steve actually has a warrior's outlook on life, he just didn't have the body to back it up before. Steve always was a soldier at heart, he just now physically matches his internal self. Whereas Loki, on the other hand, never was. Loki is, at heart, a scientist (well, mage, but same difference on Asgard). And while Steve entered his people's conflict as a soldier and fought with honour on a personal level, Loki tried the scientist's approach and (almost successfully) invented a giant doomsday weapon to wipe them out in one sitting. They actually had the same overall goals in terms of the war: defeat the enemy, prove worth to warrior society, but they had completely different ideas of how to go about it.
And then the second factor. Not morality, that's a very complicated question, especially when we take other characters into account, but hate. Their methodologies differed, but so did their emotional reactions to the enemy. Loki, because of a lifetime of internalised racism and a sudden traumatic identity loss caused by his transformation being forced on him, reacted to his enemy with overweaning hatred, whereas Steve chose his metamorphosis and was allowed to specifically because he didn't react to his enemy with hate. There was a difference of both circumstance and personality in play as well. So there is some baseline personality/emotional difference.
Overall, though, the divide between Warrior and Scientist holds true between them, the way we code them as one or the other, and also holds across the movieverse as a whole.
[Just as an aside regarding Loki: it actually looks like he's the other way around, an excellent tactician but a pants strategist, but if you look at what actually happens: he loses all his one-on-one tactical attacks, failing against Thor physically and Natasha & Bruce personally, losing the battle of Manhattan. But his longterm plans actually worked out pretty well: while everyone on the Helicarrier is distracted by his tactical failures, his longterm plan of getting the Tesseract set up is actually going swimmingly in the background and overall, while he lost the battle catastrophically, there are several viable longterm benefits resulting from his actions. He's still alive, he's back on familiar territory, he's free of Thanos, he's pointed Thanos' vengeance at Earth instead of himself, he's now still in the vicinity of a massive powersource in the form of the Tesseract, and he's managed to enact a fairly spectacular personal vengeance in the process. For someone who finished Thor tumbling through the void to land in the power of a crazed galactic conqueror, Loki's still operating on an overall net gain by the end of Avengers. The only things he lost were things he never really had to start with].
If we look at the Avengers cast as a group, and their favoured approaches, you can see that some of them routinely choose methods similar to Loki's, and some of them routinely choose methods similar to Steve's. Natasha prefers to interact with the enemy just long enough to get an overview of the situation, and then goes for the weak spot that will kill the situation dead in one shot (Vanko, Chitauri). Tony is physically underwhelming but regularly invents technology that, again, will kill the situation in one sitting (he privatised world peace, and took out the Chitauri mothership in one hit). Bruce doesn't want to be there at all, but he was also the one going mentally against Loki and figuring out the misdirection away from the Tesseract. Thor likes going head to head with people, one on one for preference, the grand fights with monsters (Hulk, Leviathans). Clint also prefers dealing with people one on one (bringing Natasha in rather than shooting her, personally infiltrating things). The Hulk is a brawler and, while probably the single most powerful member aside from Thor and Iron Man, is also limited to what he can physically reach.
Basically it shakes out into: Clint, Steve, Thor, Hulk - professional soldiers/warriors, people who use primarily one-on-one and primarily physical/interpersonal methods to deal with conflicts. Tony, Natasha, Loki - professional army killers/analysts, people who use an analysis of the situation and then a tool to try and solve it impersonally in one stroke. Bruce, poor baby, is a scientist and a civilian and unlike everyone else isn't really there by choice at all, but he still favours analysis and long-distance methods overall. They shake out according to their methodology and their outlook on the various conflicts they are entered into.
Now, there's functionally a lot of crossover, since they're all deadly across multiple fields. Thor, for example, is perfectly capable of killing large sections of a situation in one hit, as evidenced by the lightning strike from the Chrysler Building. Steve and Clint are both excellent battlefield-level strategists, Clint as eye-in-the-sky and Steve as tactical commander. Tony invented the suit specifically to make sure he can go toe to toe one-on-one as easily as launch broad-scale artillery strikes, and Natasha is physically as well as tactically lethal. Loki because of his heritage and his training is physically dangerous to anyone not Thor/Hulk level, he just usually doesn't like to use it unless he's trying to prove a point.
(Bruce, again, is unusual in that he's both of them rolled up into one person and then divided back out into two personas. He's also complicated because he's unwilling and torn between both sides of himself and the situation. You can also argue that Fury is functionally both as well, without the personality split that Bruce suffers from. At heart, he's basically a Warrior and prefers to put his trust in people, but because of his position in SHIELD he's also perforce an Analyst. Thing is, Fury is mostly a Warrior in large-scale conflicts and only an Analyst in one-to-one confrontations, pretty much the inverse of most people here).
Now. This all might seem fairly straightforward and self-explanatory. And, largely, it is. What fascinates me about this divide, though, about the whole Warrior vs Scientist thing in the MCU, is that it's actually one of the primary divides along which interpersonal conflicts happen, both between characters and in the audience's reaction to the characters. You can get people of utterly similar backgrounds (Tony & Thor), people of surprisingly similar personalities (Bruce & Natasha), people of broadly similar ideologies/goals (Loki & Steve), and have them be completely opposed to each other in certain circumstances because of their positions relative to this divide. It's how the movies present them, and it's how the audience reacts to them.
Tony vs Steve is the obvious example. Almost all of their differences of opinion relate to methodology, not ideology. They both have the same goals, they just have completely opposite outlooks on them. Hence we get the sceptre confrontation scene, we get Tony's impassioned "We are not soldiers." vs Steve's "He laid down his life." over Phil's death. The bulk of their confrontations are visibly along these lines.
We get Natasha vs Bruce. While she shares many traits with Bruce's Scientist persona (snark, cynicism, weariness, analytical ability, tendency to troll people), as soon as Bruce switches over to his Warrior, brute force persona of the Hulk, Natasha is shit scared and almost completely unable to deal with him. She only works properly with him when Bruce manages to marry both personas to an extent in the final battle.
We get Thor vs Loki, again obviously. We get Loki trying to one-hit-kill an entire civilisation in the earnest belief that this will be exactly what Thor/Odin wants, only to run afoul of the completely different mindset the warrior Asgardians have. We get Thor trying to get his brother to abandon 'this poisonous dream' and engage with people one-on-one because of Thor's earnest belief that this will cure his brother, only to run afoul of Loki's completely alien mindset and need to come up with a single solution that will fix all his individual relationships at a stroke.
We also, to an extent, get Fury vs the Council, with Fury as the Warrior depending on individual people and the Council as the Scientists trying for a broad-scale, one-hit-kill solution to the problems. SHIELD is complicated in this, yes?
On an interpersonal level, we generally divide the cast into two broad camps. We think Natasha is more like Tony is more like Loki, while we think Thor is more like Steve is more like Clint. Because, in terms of outlook, they are, though they might be more similar outside those groups in other ways. We also group Bruce into those groups depending on which persona he's in, showing scientist!Bruce interacting almost completely with Tony and Natasha, while Hulk!Bruce is mostly shown with Thor (though still reacting to the other two, antagonistic to Natasha and protective towards Tony). By the audience and often in the script, they're divided into Brain vs Brawn.
Now, this isn't true across the board. We get interpersonal conflicts within the groupings too: Natasha vs Tony on their trust issues, both of which mostly stem from their shared knowledge of their own abilities in this regard. We get Natasha vs Bruce the same, complicated by both of their instinctive aversions to Bruce's warrior aspect. We get Thor vs Hulk, because put two massively over-powered and impulsive warriors in an enclosed space, they're gonna end up fighting. Personalities and shared histories are still very much in play, because these people are more than just archetypes and the conflicts in the movies take place across more than just this axis.
However, it's at the strategic level were the inter-group conflicts show most clearly. In the overarching physical conflicts, people are divided according to what threats they can best deal with. Which is why, in the final battle, we get our four Warriors containing the situation on a one-on-one physical basis (Steve & Clint vs Chitauri, Thor & Hulk vs Leviathans), with Natasha and Tony helping them in the initial phases (Natasha to the ground forces, Tony to the aerial), but then on the broader strategic levels, it's Tony & Natasha (& Bruce) vs Loki, and Tony & Natasha vs armies in one-hit-kill situations. It's warrior vs warrior and scientist vs scientist (or, really, tactician vs tactician and strategist vs strategist).
Essentially, if you're on the same side of the personal conflict (ideologies, war) but the opposite side of the professional one (scientist/warrior, brain/brawn), most of your conflicts will be professional in nature. If you're on opposite sides of the personal conflict but on the same side of the professional one, most of your conflicts will be personal in nature. (Which, now that I look at it, basically just means that people and characters will disagree with whoever's closest to them according to whatever area they've most difference in).
But it's borne out in the movies. On a personal level, most conflicts are across the professional line. On a narrative one, most of them are along it. You get Tony & Natasha's one-hit-kills vs Loki & the Council's. You get Steve vs Fury because Steve thinks Fury has betrayed the Warrior ideal and gone over to the Council's 'nuke 'em first and let god sort 'em out' methods (not that he thought of it that way, Steve isn't that pretentious, but it was Warrior vs Warrior because one thought the other had become the dark side of the Scientist equation). You also get Fury vs Tony from the other side of that, in that both Steve and Tony think that Fury's more Analyst than Warrior, and both of them feeling betrayed because he seems to be going for the worst aspects of both. Fury, meanwhile, is rapidly losing patience with these idiots who think this is an binary situation when in point of fact it involves both sides of the binary on both sides of the conflict and can we please get with the programme already?
Which is, of course, the other overall theme of the movieverse, and I think probably the reason so much of the focus is on powerful personalities from both sides of the line. The point being, of course, that both Warriors and Scientists/Analysts are on all sides of all the conflicts. We've got Thor & Tony on the same side of the war, while being on opposite sides of the divide. We've got the Hulk and Natasha on the same side. We've got the Hulk and Bruce on the same side. We've got Loki & the Leviathans opposing them. In the backstories, we had warriors opposing them (Iron Monger, Abomination, Hydra ground forces) and also scientists/analysts (Vanko, Loki, Schmidt, General Ross).
The whole point of the Avengers movie was the main characters learning to cross the Warrior/Scientist line in order to better work together to defeat threats that work with both and require both to defeat. You've got Bruce vs Hulk, Natasha vs Hulk, Tony vs Steve, Avengers vs Fury, all more or less being forced to resolve themselves by the ending battle because their professional differences in ideologies/methodologies were less important than the overall personal/emotional goal of stopping the destruction of everything they cared about.
It's surprisingly balanced, in many ways. You're shown both good and evil examples of both types of outlook: Tony and Natasha vs Loki and the Council on the issue of one-hit genocidal KOs (Tony does pretty much the exact thing to the Chitauri that Loki tried to do to the Jotun, just on a smaller scale and basically in defense rather than aggression). You're shown the Hulk vs the Abomination, you're shown Thor's initial brawling without care and his later realisation of cost.
And you're also shown that trying to change your entire nature and outlook to try and match the culture around you isn't necessarily the way to go. Steve was always a warrior by nature, he just needed the physicality to back it up. Tony and Loki, though, were never warriors, and both of them are shown to be at their worst when trying to be (Tony vs Thor, Loki vs Thor) and their best when using their own methodology to accomplish goals (Tony & the bomb, Loki on a strategic level). Natasha struggles in a purely physical conflict (see her vs the Hulk, her visibly struggling on the ground against the Chitauri), but once she has a strategic window to enact large-scale plans, she's lethal (her vs Chitauri, her vs Vanko's drones). Her physicality is purely a means to get her close enough to bring her analytical skill-set to fruition. And, on the other side, Steve is shown to be at his best on a tactical level, making sure people are where they need to be to get the immediate situation under control, while usually leaving the larger plans and concerns to other people (Fury, army command, Natasha, etc). Clint is again excellent at pointing out pertinent tactical concerns (gates open both ways, him as eye-in-sky for the battle), but again he tends to leave overall strategy to other people. And Thor ... bless him, Thor's not at his best when dealing with conflicts that can't be solved by hitting something with a hammer.
Essentially, the overall effect of the MCU so far has been to show up the differences and potential conflicts between a qualitative and a quantitative outlook on things, and then show how they might work together to solve shared problems regardless, without necessarily changing their intrinsic natures in the process.
However, in terms of the fandom ... I have noticed that people tend to stick to one side or the other, primarily? Not uniformly, of course, you get people pick'n'mixing according to personal preference and other deciding factors like personality and history of the characters. But quite often people tend to a) pair either across the line (Tony/Steve, Thor/Loki, Clint/Natasha, Clint/Loki, Steve/Natasha) OR along it (Tony/Bruce, Steve/Thor, Natasha/Loki, Tony/Loki), and b) work primarily with one group OR the other as viewpoint characters (Tony, Natasha, Loki, Bruce vs Steve, Thor, Clint).
In terms of favoured viewpoint characters, this definitely holds true for me. I tend to favour the scientist/analyst characters for POV, which explains why I've written a gazillion fics from Tony's POV and exactly none from Thor's, despite their having much the same background and narrative. I just find it so much more difficult to get into Thor's head, or Clint's (Steve's is slightly better but not much, and I think mostly to do with his adaptative/underdog origins). Pairings are slightly more mixed (both Steve/Natasha and Tony/Loki, for example), but then my pairing tendencies tend to be a bit hit and miss at the best of times. I think I tend more towards along the line in general (gen combos I like include Tony & Bruce, Tony & Natasha, Steve & Thor, Tony & JARVIS, etc), but I'm just more fluid on that one than I am on the viewpoint issue.
A lot of the major pairings in fandom as a whole are across the line (Thor/Loki, Steve/Tony, Clint/Natasha) but a couple are along it (Tony/Bruce, Clint/Phil). I think a lot of people also tend to favour the scientist POV set, possibly because there's a touch of underdog going on there (Loki vs warrior Asgard, Natasha & Tony against people who physically outclass them, Bruce being split within himself) and also possibly because they tend to get a lot of the big actions/decisions (again, Natasha & Tony vs Loki for the major decisive actions of the battle), but I don't really have enough of a fandom barometer to judge that.
I just ... it seems to be the axis along which people most pick their favourites? Brain vs Brawn is the way it's usually stated, although if you look at how it's actually presented in the movieverse it's slightly more complex than that (I'd say tactician vs strategist is maybe most accurate?). I find it interesting that despite the fact that two characters may be almost completely similar in other ways (Tony vs Thor: Steve vs Loki is complicated by moral difference and Loki's villain status), we still often see them as different and choose them as favourites primarily by where they fit along this binary. I don't know. Is this just a value axis that's particularly encoded, or something? *shrugs, shakes head*
Anyway. Since this entire thing was basically an extended attempt on my part to figure out why I was being attracted to Tony over Thor despite their similarities, and I've done that well enough to be going on with, perhaps this is the point where I leave this. *grins sheepishly*
The seeds for this started in a conversation I had with a commentator on one of my stories: Words On The Backs Of Our Hands (which is one of the few stories I've written which has Tony and Thor interacting meaningfully). What they said was: "I will never understand why people don't write scads of fic taking advantage of all the fifty bazillion parallels between Thor and Tony (betrayed by someone who was like family to them? Check. Having to stop said someone from doing almost the same things they would've done themselves earlier in their lives? Check. Former reckless xenophobic imperialistic warmongers? Check. Learns humility and responsibility in a comparatively primitive place far from home while stripped of all their usual power? Check. Wields highly destructive weapons that only they can use? Check. Heirs to their fathers' legacy with all the baggage that attends that? Check. Leans on old friends who have been with them even back when they were arrogant spoiled brats? Check.)"
And, you know, they have an excellent point. Tony and Thor's narratives in the movieverse are pretty much direct carbon copies of each other, at least at the origin phase. They occupy more or less the exact same social position within their societies (Crown Prince vs Heir to Corporate Empire), they have the same trouble with authority (Thor vs Odin, Tony vs Howard/Obie), they have the same history as imperialist warmongers, etc, etc, etc. They also have broadly similar personalities and interactions with people (see Thor & Sif vs Tony & Pepper, their acceptance of someone else gaining personal power and respect in an arena where they personally never had to fight for it, also both of them regarding being non-politically minded people in positions of political responsibility, also both of their tendencies to showboat like there's no tomorrow). Thor and Tony are actually incredibly similar people in a truly astounding number of ways.
But for some reason, the audience reacts to them as though they were utterly different. Look at the fandom, for example. You're more likely to see people comparing Tony to Loki and Thor to Steve that comparing them to each other. Or, for that matter, comparing Steve to Loki. Because those two actually have shockingly similar origins too.
Lets see. Physically underwhelming member of a predominently warrior culture/era, gets beaten up/mocked a lot for their physical shortcomings. Undergoes massive and traumatic physical metamorphosis (Steve with the serum and Loki when his Jotun heritage is revealed) in connection with a prevailing on-going conflict between their culture and another. Subsequently decides to enter that conflict and prove their worth as a warrior, while at the same time having significant similarities to the visible face of the enemy (Steve & Schmidt, Loki & the Jotun).
Steve vs Loki is actually a good indicator of where the divide starts. Because while their motives and starting-points are largely the same, it's their methods, their mental framework for action, where the differences start to show. And it's the same between Thor and Tony. Because despite personal similarities and similar social positions, the primary functional divide in the MCU is as follows: Warrior vs Scientist, Brawn vs Brain. Or, slightly more accurately, Duelist vs Analyst, arguably Tactician vs Strategist.
Steve is different to Loki for two reasons, one mental and one emotional (or, one professional and one personal):
First, he can prove his worth as a warrior more easily because Steve actually has a warrior's outlook on life, he just didn't have the body to back it up before. Steve always was a soldier at heart, he just now physically matches his internal self. Whereas Loki, on the other hand, never was. Loki is, at heart, a scientist (well, mage, but same difference on Asgard). And while Steve entered his people's conflict as a soldier and fought with honour on a personal level, Loki tried the scientist's approach and (almost successfully) invented a giant doomsday weapon to wipe them out in one sitting. They actually had the same overall goals in terms of the war: defeat the enemy, prove worth to warrior society, but they had completely different ideas of how to go about it.
And then the second factor. Not morality, that's a very complicated question, especially when we take other characters into account, but hate. Their methodologies differed, but so did their emotional reactions to the enemy. Loki, because of a lifetime of internalised racism and a sudden traumatic identity loss caused by his transformation being forced on him, reacted to his enemy with overweaning hatred, whereas Steve chose his metamorphosis and was allowed to specifically because he didn't react to his enemy with hate. There was a difference of both circumstance and personality in play as well. So there is some baseline personality/emotional difference.
Overall, though, the divide between Warrior and Scientist holds true between them, the way we code them as one or the other, and also holds across the movieverse as a whole.
[Just as an aside regarding Loki: it actually looks like he's the other way around, an excellent tactician but a pants strategist, but if you look at what actually happens: he loses all his one-on-one tactical attacks, failing against Thor physically and Natasha & Bruce personally, losing the battle of Manhattan. But his longterm plans actually worked out pretty well: while everyone on the Helicarrier is distracted by his tactical failures, his longterm plan of getting the Tesseract set up is actually going swimmingly in the background and overall, while he lost the battle catastrophically, there are several viable longterm benefits resulting from his actions. He's still alive, he's back on familiar territory, he's free of Thanos, he's pointed Thanos' vengeance at Earth instead of himself, he's now still in the vicinity of a massive powersource in the form of the Tesseract, and he's managed to enact a fairly spectacular personal vengeance in the process. For someone who finished Thor tumbling through the void to land in the power of a crazed galactic conqueror, Loki's still operating on an overall net gain by the end of Avengers. The only things he lost were things he never really had to start with].
If we look at the Avengers cast as a group, and their favoured approaches, you can see that some of them routinely choose methods similar to Loki's, and some of them routinely choose methods similar to Steve's. Natasha prefers to interact with the enemy just long enough to get an overview of the situation, and then goes for the weak spot that will kill the situation dead in one shot (Vanko, Chitauri). Tony is physically underwhelming but regularly invents technology that, again, will kill the situation in one sitting (he privatised world peace, and took out the Chitauri mothership in one hit). Bruce doesn't want to be there at all, but he was also the one going mentally against Loki and figuring out the misdirection away from the Tesseract. Thor likes going head to head with people, one on one for preference, the grand fights with monsters (Hulk, Leviathans). Clint also prefers dealing with people one on one (bringing Natasha in rather than shooting her, personally infiltrating things). The Hulk is a brawler and, while probably the single most powerful member aside from Thor and Iron Man, is also limited to what he can physically reach.
Basically it shakes out into: Clint, Steve, Thor, Hulk - professional soldiers/warriors, people who use primarily one-on-one and primarily physical/interpersonal methods to deal with conflicts. Tony, Natasha, Loki - professional army killers/analysts, people who use an analysis of the situation and then a tool to try and solve it impersonally in one stroke. Bruce, poor baby, is a scientist and a civilian and unlike everyone else isn't really there by choice at all, but he still favours analysis and long-distance methods overall. They shake out according to their methodology and their outlook on the various conflicts they are entered into.
Now, there's functionally a lot of crossover, since they're all deadly across multiple fields. Thor, for example, is perfectly capable of killing large sections of a situation in one hit, as evidenced by the lightning strike from the Chrysler Building. Steve and Clint are both excellent battlefield-level strategists, Clint as eye-in-the-sky and Steve as tactical commander. Tony invented the suit specifically to make sure he can go toe to toe one-on-one as easily as launch broad-scale artillery strikes, and Natasha is physically as well as tactically lethal. Loki because of his heritage and his training is physically dangerous to anyone not Thor/Hulk level, he just usually doesn't like to use it unless he's trying to prove a point.
(Bruce, again, is unusual in that he's both of them rolled up into one person and then divided back out into two personas. He's also complicated because he's unwilling and torn between both sides of himself and the situation. You can also argue that Fury is functionally both as well, without the personality split that Bruce suffers from. At heart, he's basically a Warrior and prefers to put his trust in people, but because of his position in SHIELD he's also perforce an Analyst. Thing is, Fury is mostly a Warrior in large-scale conflicts and only an Analyst in one-to-one confrontations, pretty much the inverse of most people here).
Now. This all might seem fairly straightforward and self-explanatory. And, largely, it is. What fascinates me about this divide, though, about the whole Warrior vs Scientist thing in the MCU, is that it's actually one of the primary divides along which interpersonal conflicts happen, both between characters and in the audience's reaction to the characters. You can get people of utterly similar backgrounds (Tony & Thor), people of surprisingly similar personalities (Bruce & Natasha), people of broadly similar ideologies/goals (Loki & Steve), and have them be completely opposed to each other in certain circumstances because of their positions relative to this divide. It's how the movies present them, and it's how the audience reacts to them.
Tony vs Steve is the obvious example. Almost all of their differences of opinion relate to methodology, not ideology. They both have the same goals, they just have completely opposite outlooks on them. Hence we get the sceptre confrontation scene, we get Tony's impassioned "We are not soldiers." vs Steve's "He laid down his life." over Phil's death. The bulk of their confrontations are visibly along these lines.
We get Natasha vs Bruce. While she shares many traits with Bruce's Scientist persona (snark, cynicism, weariness, analytical ability, tendency to troll people), as soon as Bruce switches over to his Warrior, brute force persona of the Hulk, Natasha is shit scared and almost completely unable to deal with him. She only works properly with him when Bruce manages to marry both personas to an extent in the final battle.
We get Thor vs Loki, again obviously. We get Loki trying to one-hit-kill an entire civilisation in the earnest belief that this will be exactly what Thor/Odin wants, only to run afoul of the completely different mindset the warrior Asgardians have. We get Thor trying to get his brother to abandon 'this poisonous dream' and engage with people one-on-one because of Thor's earnest belief that this will cure his brother, only to run afoul of Loki's completely alien mindset and need to come up with a single solution that will fix all his individual relationships at a stroke.
We also, to an extent, get Fury vs the Council, with Fury as the Warrior depending on individual people and the Council as the Scientists trying for a broad-scale, one-hit-kill solution to the problems. SHIELD is complicated in this, yes?
On an interpersonal level, we generally divide the cast into two broad camps. We think Natasha is more like Tony is more like Loki, while we think Thor is more like Steve is more like Clint. Because, in terms of outlook, they are, though they might be more similar outside those groups in other ways. We also group Bruce into those groups depending on which persona he's in, showing scientist!Bruce interacting almost completely with Tony and Natasha, while Hulk!Bruce is mostly shown with Thor (though still reacting to the other two, antagonistic to Natasha and protective towards Tony). By the audience and often in the script, they're divided into Brain vs Brawn.
Now, this isn't true across the board. We get interpersonal conflicts within the groupings too: Natasha vs Tony on their trust issues, both of which mostly stem from their shared knowledge of their own abilities in this regard. We get Natasha vs Bruce the same, complicated by both of their instinctive aversions to Bruce's warrior aspect. We get Thor vs Hulk, because put two massively over-powered and impulsive warriors in an enclosed space, they're gonna end up fighting. Personalities and shared histories are still very much in play, because these people are more than just archetypes and the conflicts in the movies take place across more than just this axis.
However, it's at the strategic level were the inter-group conflicts show most clearly. In the overarching physical conflicts, people are divided according to what threats they can best deal with. Which is why, in the final battle, we get our four Warriors containing the situation on a one-on-one physical basis (Steve & Clint vs Chitauri, Thor & Hulk vs Leviathans), with Natasha and Tony helping them in the initial phases (Natasha to the ground forces, Tony to the aerial), but then on the broader strategic levels, it's Tony & Natasha (& Bruce) vs Loki, and Tony & Natasha vs armies in one-hit-kill situations. It's warrior vs warrior and scientist vs scientist (or, really, tactician vs tactician and strategist vs strategist).
Essentially, if you're on the same side of the personal conflict (ideologies, war) but the opposite side of the professional one (scientist/warrior, brain/brawn), most of your conflicts will be professional in nature. If you're on opposite sides of the personal conflict but on the same side of the professional one, most of your conflicts will be personal in nature. (Which, now that I look at it, basically just means that people and characters will disagree with whoever's closest to them according to whatever area they've most difference in).
But it's borne out in the movies. On a personal level, most conflicts are across the professional line. On a narrative one, most of them are along it. You get Tony & Natasha's one-hit-kills vs Loki & the Council's. You get Steve vs Fury because Steve thinks Fury has betrayed the Warrior ideal and gone over to the Council's 'nuke 'em first and let god sort 'em out' methods (not that he thought of it that way, Steve isn't that pretentious, but it was Warrior vs Warrior because one thought the other had become the dark side of the Scientist equation). You also get Fury vs Tony from the other side of that, in that both Steve and Tony think that Fury's more Analyst than Warrior, and both of them feeling betrayed because he seems to be going for the worst aspects of both. Fury, meanwhile, is rapidly losing patience with these idiots who think this is an binary situation when in point of fact it involves both sides of the binary on both sides of the conflict and can we please get with the programme already?
Which is, of course, the other overall theme of the movieverse, and I think probably the reason so much of the focus is on powerful personalities from both sides of the line. The point being, of course, that both Warriors and Scientists/Analysts are on all sides of all the conflicts. We've got Thor & Tony on the same side of the war, while being on opposite sides of the divide. We've got the Hulk and Natasha on the same side. We've got the Hulk and Bruce on the same side. We've got Loki & the Leviathans opposing them. In the backstories, we had warriors opposing them (Iron Monger, Abomination, Hydra ground forces) and also scientists/analysts (Vanko, Loki, Schmidt, General Ross).
The whole point of the Avengers movie was the main characters learning to cross the Warrior/Scientist line in order to better work together to defeat threats that work with both and require both to defeat. You've got Bruce vs Hulk, Natasha vs Hulk, Tony vs Steve, Avengers vs Fury, all more or less being forced to resolve themselves by the ending battle because their professional differences in ideologies/methodologies were less important than the overall personal/emotional goal of stopping the destruction of everything they cared about.
It's surprisingly balanced, in many ways. You're shown both good and evil examples of both types of outlook: Tony and Natasha vs Loki and the Council on the issue of one-hit genocidal KOs (Tony does pretty much the exact thing to the Chitauri that Loki tried to do to the Jotun, just on a smaller scale and basically in defense rather than aggression). You're shown the Hulk vs the Abomination, you're shown Thor's initial brawling without care and his later realisation of cost.
And you're also shown that trying to change your entire nature and outlook to try and match the culture around you isn't necessarily the way to go. Steve was always a warrior by nature, he just needed the physicality to back it up. Tony and Loki, though, were never warriors, and both of them are shown to be at their worst when trying to be (Tony vs Thor, Loki vs Thor) and their best when using their own methodology to accomplish goals (Tony & the bomb, Loki on a strategic level). Natasha struggles in a purely physical conflict (see her vs the Hulk, her visibly struggling on the ground against the Chitauri), but once she has a strategic window to enact large-scale plans, she's lethal (her vs Chitauri, her vs Vanko's drones). Her physicality is purely a means to get her close enough to bring her analytical skill-set to fruition. And, on the other side, Steve is shown to be at his best on a tactical level, making sure people are where they need to be to get the immediate situation under control, while usually leaving the larger plans and concerns to other people (Fury, army command, Natasha, etc). Clint is again excellent at pointing out pertinent tactical concerns (gates open both ways, him as eye-in-sky for the battle), but again he tends to leave overall strategy to other people. And Thor ... bless him, Thor's not at his best when dealing with conflicts that can't be solved by hitting something with a hammer.
Essentially, the overall effect of the MCU so far has been to show up the differences and potential conflicts between a qualitative and a quantitative outlook on things, and then show how they might work together to solve shared problems regardless, without necessarily changing their intrinsic natures in the process.
However, in terms of the fandom ... I have noticed that people tend to stick to one side or the other, primarily? Not uniformly, of course, you get people pick'n'mixing according to personal preference and other deciding factors like personality and history of the characters. But quite often people tend to a) pair either across the line (Tony/Steve, Thor/Loki, Clint/Natasha, Clint/Loki, Steve/Natasha) OR along it (Tony/Bruce, Steve/Thor, Natasha/Loki, Tony/Loki), and b) work primarily with one group OR the other as viewpoint characters (Tony, Natasha, Loki, Bruce vs Steve, Thor, Clint).
In terms of favoured viewpoint characters, this definitely holds true for me. I tend to favour the scientist/analyst characters for POV, which explains why I've written a gazillion fics from Tony's POV and exactly none from Thor's, despite their having much the same background and narrative. I just find it so much more difficult to get into Thor's head, or Clint's (Steve's is slightly better but not much, and I think mostly to do with his adaptative/underdog origins). Pairings are slightly more mixed (both Steve/Natasha and Tony/Loki, for example), but then my pairing tendencies tend to be a bit hit and miss at the best of times. I think I tend more towards along the line in general (gen combos I like include Tony & Bruce, Tony & Natasha, Steve & Thor, Tony & JARVIS, etc), but I'm just more fluid on that one than I am on the viewpoint issue.
A lot of the major pairings in fandom as a whole are across the line (Thor/Loki, Steve/Tony, Clint/Natasha) but a couple are along it (Tony/Bruce, Clint/Phil). I think a lot of people also tend to favour the scientist POV set, possibly because there's a touch of underdog going on there (Loki vs warrior Asgard, Natasha & Tony against people who physically outclass them, Bruce being split within himself) and also possibly because they tend to get a lot of the big actions/decisions (again, Natasha & Tony vs Loki for the major decisive actions of the battle), but I don't really have enough of a fandom barometer to judge that.
I just ... it seems to be the axis along which people most pick their favourites? Brain vs Brawn is the way it's usually stated, although if you look at how it's actually presented in the movieverse it's slightly more complex than that (I'd say tactician vs strategist is maybe most accurate?). I find it interesting that despite the fact that two characters may be almost completely similar in other ways (Tony vs Thor: Steve vs Loki is complicated by moral difference and Loki's villain status), we still often see them as different and choose them as favourites primarily by where they fit along this binary. I don't know. Is this just a value axis that's particularly encoded, or something? *shrugs, shakes head*
Anyway. Since this entire thing was basically an extended attempt on my part to figure out why I was being attracted to Tony over Thor despite their similarities, and I've done that well enough to be going on with, perhaps this is the point where I leave this. *grins sheepishly*
