#eiselin

IM ALIVE AND BACK with a commission! 🔥⚔️👑

Happy holidays to you too!

You are very sweet! Before I ended up writing Breaker of Horses I had been tossing around the idea of writing a Steve/Tony Ancient Roman AU (where everyone is human). But -- and I’m pretty sure I’ve talked about this before -- I feel like it’s kind of hard to do because Captain America is not a very good Ancient Roman superhero because his origin story is very... American. He started off poor, had nothing, and became a super-soldier. That’s rags to riches, the American dream, very much about individualism and so on and so forth. And it’s hard to translate that, culturally.

Like, I think if you asked the Romans who they thought was the best Roman, embodying the very best Roman virtues, I think they’d probably name someone like Cincinnatus -- and Cincinnatus was appointed dictator and basically just did the job, went home, and became a farmer again. And that’s what they like about him! And that’s not really who Captain America is. So while you can write a story that directly translates Steve’s background -- dirt-poor kid enlists in Army, somehow becomes amazing and strong, fights evil -- that’s not really a story about who Captain America would be in Ancient Rome because that’s not a story the Romans would tell.

Having said that, I did end up outlining the bare bones of an Ancient Roman AU the only way I could see Steve being a hero -- which is that he’s a mythic hero (probably a demigod, because why not, mythic heroes can totally be the son of Mars, right?) from early Rome who ends up committing an act of devotio (sacrificing himself to chthonic deities to ensure victory) and heading down to one of the entrances to the underworld (where, you know, it’s very cold) and basically getting himself frozen. (Yes, yes, I do think I’m clever.) I think “epic mythic hero from early Rome” is really the closest I can get to putting Captain America in a Roman context. Like Horatius Cocles or Mucius Scaevola or whoever, only even more badass.

And then several centuries later a ragtag band of rebels named the Avengers find him and want him to help bring down... oh, I don’t know, a terrible emperor, I forget which one. And poor Steve has massive amounts of culture shock (and probably finds their Latin very hard to understand) but is absolutely down for starting a revolution because he is pretty sure Rome wasn’t supposed to have any kings.

I don’t know if I’m ever going to write it because it would involve writing an entire imperial Roman revolution just to make Steve and Tony fall in love. But, hey, it’s an idea.