#iceman x maverick

[military-newsboys]

Ice: Mav, I need your location! Mav: I'm by the cloud that looks like a deer! Ice: *sigh* Can you be more specific? Mav: Bambi Ice: I hate you.

[duckthello]

saw this somewhere in relation to a different ship, but seeing as top gun lives in my head rent free 24/7, my immediate thought was icemav. because this could be so mav&ice.

maverick is obviously the 'goofy' one (or at least, he’s the one who appears goofy and careless most of the time, because he does have a tendency to act on impulse, not think just do, and says the first thing that comes to his mind and has a general disregard for regulations and all the unspoken rules of the world around him, resulting in him sometimes acting, well, dumb, and wholeheartedly owning it. (but it’s all actually the result of his life growing up, when he learnt that everything and everyone in his life would always be against him, and that life would never be fair. so why even try to be proper and flawless when it would never be enough, with everyone already having an opinion on him - the orphan, the Duke Mitchell’s son, the uneducated troublemaker that didn’t even go to Annapolis, - before even meeting him. can't destroy your reputation if you don't have one to begin with so might as well have some fun while at it.)

and while for ice it wouldn't necessarily be 'catholic guilt' (on account of him being jewish), i imagine it would be a sort of mixture of having grown up in a very traditional household (where anything new or just simply different, that didn't fit into their pre-established routine and worldview was not acceptable) and in a religious family. and, on top of all of that, most of his relatives are military, meaning he's been surrounded by written and unwritten rules and regulations and expectations of how things should be his whole life, resulting in him turning out the way he did - cautious, waiting out making any difficult decisions, aware of the weight of expectations, reputation and years of traditions resting on his shoulders.

[hugh-lauries-bald-spot]

“you just find gay subtext in everything” no the fuck i dont the gay subtext was presented to me on an ornate silver platter

[enthyrea]

icemav doodles and dumb memes

[whohasthecards]

Bring your grandpa/dad to work day, but Jake got attached to this old man named Tom.

Tom was some old guy he snarked off at a coffee shop once and was pleased when the older man calmly gave a witty retort.

He keeps on bumping into the man in the same coffee shop, but he bumps into the old man at the park and grocery place at well.

Surprisingly they hit it off, and Jake looks forward to seeing Tom even though he'll never admit it. Tom's getting fond of the boy. Especially when he realized 3 months in that this was the same Jake "Hangman" Seresin who saved his husband and Baby Goose.

One day there was a bring your dad/grandpa/son to work day. Jake was talking about it to Tom, sad that he doesn't really have anyone to bring and was planning to call out because even tho Mav is great and Javy's family always welcome him, he feels like an outsider in those events. Tom hesitantly offered to come, not wanting to overstep, and Jake looked overjoyed.

Tom comes to the event and Jake was showing him around the base, and the shenanigans he gets into with his squad (Tom is delighted to gain some more blackmail against Mav). He also starts introducing Tom around, and some people are staring wide-eyed or straight up choke when they see Tom.

Why the fuck is the COMPACFLT here and in civvies!??? AND HANGMAN IS CALLING HIM, TOM???

Iceman makes sure to give his trademark glare to everyone who even thinks about mentioning his title or saying something to Jake. Everyone just snaps their mouths shut and smiles awkwardly.

It continues with Jake dragging THE ICEMAN around like an excited puppy, and Tom looking fond and ruffles Hangman's hair every few minutes. The base didn't realize how young Hangman really is until that day.

Eventually Tom and Jake run into Mav and Bradley and both have their mouths wide open as Jake introduces Tom to them.

Eventually ends with Mav saying, "Hey! I adopted him first!" While pouting.

"He takes after me more," Ice says giving Mav a grin as he slung an arm around Jake's shoulder to pull him against his side.

[bo0tleg]

One thing I like about Top Gun (1986) is how believable the development with Ice and Mav's dynamic is.

I've seen a lot of the "Rivals suddenly become buddies after traumatic event together" in media, but I don't think I've seen it done better than in Top Gun. Mostly, I attribute it to how much build up it has.

Most of the time, the 'Rivals' hate each others guts throughout the entire movie/series and then they go through an extremely traumatic event that binds them for life and shifts their entire concept of each other. Ice and Mav never once changed how they saw each other, it just changed their understanding of it.

Ice saw Maverick as dangerous and Mav saw Iceman as stuck-up and commanding. And they weren't wrong, by any means.

From the beginning, they have tension between them because of how different they are. And it ends up in the audience seeing Ice as the 'Antagonist' because that's how Mav sees it, and we're seeing it from his perspective as the protagonist. But Ice was never inherently wrong, in fact he was right.

Other than his first scene, Iceman always has a point in what he's saying. He's criticizing Mav, not insulting him. Sure, he does it in a brash way because masculinity, but he's not trying to insult him, he's trying to knock him down a peg and wake him up to reality. All Ice wants is that he starts to act as a team player, start caring about everybody's safety AND his own, rather than being reckless for the sake of being reckless. But Mav sees it as an insult because he can't process criticism in a healthy way (due to how he grew up). The same thing happened with Charlie, for the record.

And so the strife between the two begins. What I like about it is how it bleeds out of them over time, becoming more settled as the movie goes on. In the locker room "You're dangerous" scene, the tension is palpable. It's obvious they're agitated by each other, and feel the need to prove they're the correct one.

If you pay attention, this whole... demand for superiority goes away as time progresses. They're fine with each other's presence, it's not like they're constantly at each others throat all the time. In the shower scene, Ice dropped all of the aggression and competitiveness from his tone and is instead just laying out what he thinks. He's not undermining Maverick, he's not lecturing him like a child. Iceman is just telling Maverick exactly how he sees the situation in hopes that it would make him realize what the fuck he's doing, but with little hope that it'll actually work.

That doesn't mean Ice is always correct either, he doesn't understand why Mav acts the way he does, thus fails to take into consideration the emotional trauma behind it. Which only causes even more strife.

The entire time, Iceman isn't being a dick for the sake of it, he just wants Mav to stop being stupid (by his standards). And Maverick doesn't understand it because all he gets from what Ice says is insults.

Maverick isn't good at understanding what people mean to say if it's implied, you need to say it to his face. This is the reason he stayed quiet in the shower scene, because Ice finally laid everything out in simple words that he can understand without making it sound like a dick-measuring contest.

Thing is, the tension mellows out. At the beginning, you could see the tension and cut it with a knife. By the middle you can see them getting used to each other without jumping to constantly trade jabs (namely: the volleyball scene, it's just a bunch of guys being dudes, and the scene where Charlie says that Mav flew recklessly in front of the whole class, Ice doesn't comment on it in any way). Over time, they've settled down into their tension without needing to address it all the time.

Then Goose dies.

And the tension between them is still there.

Just because Goose isn't there anymore, doesn't mean their whole dynamic vanishes all of a sudden. You can see their hesitation towards each other (especially Ice), and that's great! It demonstrates that Goose dying doesn't magically resolve their problems with each other in solidarity.

Ice tried to give his consolations to Mav, and is awfully awkward about it. You can see on his face that he wants to say more, but doesn't because he knows it's not his place given their history. And not much is said, but a lot it communicated. (Val Kilmer is a killer actor for this, OH MY FUCKING GOD BLESS THAT MAN)

Even in the graduation scene you can see how out of their depts they really are with each other. A stilted congratulations, that was it. But they're trying, and that's what matters.

A scene I think gets overlooked a lot is the scene right before the Layton, where Ice expressed his worries about Mav to Stinger, and Mav heard him. Because I feel like that was a shift that was more drastic than the Layton itself for them.

What Ice was doing in that scene wasn't doubting Maverick's flying abilities, it was his mental health. Sure, he passed the psych eval, but that means next to jack shit when in a real combat situation so close after his backseater dying. And Ice might be worried that he's gonna be left hanging, but with the way he was speaking I'm more inclined to believe he was more worried about Maverick's wellbeing than himself. Ice almost looked resigned. He knew it was gonna get dismissed because that's the military for you, but he still wanted to try to vouch for Mav to stay groundside, if only to keep his mind at bay.

But Maverick heard him, and as usual, he read it as an insult. He wasn't wrong to assume Ice didn't believe him capable of flying the mission, which wouldn't be a lie, but failed to realize that he had more than one reason to want Maverick on the ground rather than in the air. And for the first time, Maverick believes him.

Up until this point, Mav dismissed all of Ice's so called 'insults' because he was certain in and of himself. But now he isn't anymore.

And it affects his performance in the air. I'm not saying he was as shitty as he was at the start of that combat because of what he overheard, but I am saying that it certainly didn't help matters in the slightest.

So their weird 'stepping-on-eggshells' situation is all over the place by that point. Because they started to care about each other despite not being what one would call proper friends yet. It's establishing a potential friendship by implying that 1. Ice cares about Mav's wellbeing and 2. Mav cares about what Ice thinks.

On the ground, they have the wingman exchange, and their suddenly buddy buddy. Thing is, it wasn't sudden at all.

They've been setting this up the entire fucking movie.

Going back to what I said at the beginning: Ice thinks Mav is dangerous and Mav thinks Ice is stuck-up and controlling. After the Layton, they still think those things because they weren't wrong to begin with. What changed was that instead of seeing it as something that pitted them against each other, it was seen as something that simply was about the other, and that there was no changing it. It could be good.

Mav being dangerous could be good and Ice being stuck-up and controlling could be good, because those were just traits of who they were. By the end of the movie they didn't change how they saw each other, just how they interpreted each other.

And it was built up during the entire fucking movie.

There was a reason to why they acted the way they did with each other because of the stilted interpretation they had of each other. From rivalry to friendship (and perhaps more later down the line), it's glaringly obvious throughout that it wasn't a sudden shift, it was exponential.

That's why I think it was so well developed, because you could see it coming.

[misaothewitch]

[k9effect]

First private kiss, letting themselves take their time and enjoy it

[Click for better quality, reblogs and tags appreciated]

[foreveraweirdoneslife]

How come I've never noticed this before?!

Look at this scene first:

-> Ice is looking at Mav's eyes first but then his eyes flicker down to Mav's mouth for a tiny moment.

Then look at this scene:

-> Roo is looking at Hangy's eyes first but then his eyes flicker down to Hangy's mouth for a tiny moment.

IT'S THE SAME!!! Like literally the same!

[lemeduartes]

Something about Rooster admiring so much his parents relationship and aspiring to have a love so beautiful as theirs, sweet and romantic and truly a fairy tale that would warm his heart forever

And ending up with the asshole who can't be nice to save his own live, that chews on a toothpick 24/7 and makes his life a living hell for the fun of it while looking so smug NARCISSUS HIMSELF would be jealous

He wanted a love like his parents had, and he got it! Unfortunately he had 2 set of parents and the love he ended up having was similar to the WRONG ONE

[maverickazansky]

thinking about kid logic and how to kids, everything is black and white for the longest time. they don’t have critical thinking skills and its easy for them to just accept things because they have no reason to question it. 

therefore, thinking about bradley’s family realising it one day when he’s with carole and maverick, and bradley just pipping up with,

“uncle mav, when you marry uncle ice, does that mean you’re gonna be maverick man too?”

and (after maverick’s brain stops short circuiting because marry ice marry ice marry ice marry ice marry ICE?!) he just calmly swallows, and asks in an incredibly high pitched voice because he’s still in shock,

“why would i be maverick man?”

and bradley, giving him the obvious look of ‘don’t be silly uncle mav…’ tells him, “well if uncle ice’s surname is man, when you marry him, you gonna be like momma and copy his name. like how momma is momma goose. and i’m baby goose. so you gotta be maverick man like uncle ice is ice man.”

and naturally, once carole and maverick have caught on to his child logic, carole is just cackling in the corner, and maverick is incredibly red because he’s still not over bradley’s incredibly calm assessment that his uncle mav and his uncle ice are going to get married one day (they’ll save explaining why that won't be happening (anytime soon) until he’s older), and maverick has to explain that uncle ice’s surname is actually kazansky and his full callsign is iceman, not just ice. they just call him ice because it’s easier, like how bradley calls him mav because its easier than maverick. 

carole is still no help because she’s already planning the icemav wedding in her mind because ‘excellent idea baby goose!!!”, and maverick then has to explain that actually, bradley’s surname isn’t goose, it’s bradshaw. and momma and daddy’s names aren’t momma and daddy goose, it’s carole and nick bradshaw. 

bradley’s exclaimed shock of WHAT still echoes in maverick’s ear 30 years later whenever he thinks about how he had to explain to a 5 year old bradley that his surname isn’t a cool one like goose, but rather just a normal surname like bradshaw, and that momma and daddy have different names. 

rumour has it adult bradley is still feeling betrayed to this day. 

(slider exclusively refers to maverick as mr man once him and ice do get married purely to be annoying for a long time.)

((maverick does kick him in the shins at least twice.))

[military-newsboys]

Mav: You’re cute when you’re worried about me. Ice: Then I must be cute 24/7. Mav: You are.

[blazingstar29]

Ice knows he's going to lose his voice. They say that they'll do their best to leave him with something to work with after the surgery, but call it pessimism or just gut feel, he knows he's going to lose it.

It's the beginning of the modern digital age and he takes full advantage of it. He buys a video camera, top of the range so the video would still be good for years to come. (None of them knew how good technology would become in just a few short years, how fast those videos will become dated.)

He records short videos and long videos.

"I love you."

"I'm proud of you."

"Don't forget to write a grocery list or you'll forget milk and buy a fridge."

"Ron, you're my best friend, I love you. Thank you for saving me at the academy."

"Maverick, no."

"Pete I love you."

"Yes Rick, Leo is a pain in the ass."

"Yes Leo, Rick is a pain in the ass."

"Thank you."

"I love you Mav, with everything I have and everything I don't."

[streetsweepershenanigans]

Maverick is 100% one of those people who memorized how to solve a rubix cube and can do it behind his back in like 5 seconds and refuses to tell Ice how he does it just to see his face. (He does teach Jake, though, and the cycle only continues.)

[enthyrea]

smoke break

[bo0tleg]

Slider is SO done with their shit.

Colored version and original below the CUT!

I genuinely saw the image below and was like I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT WE'RE DOING TODAY FERB!