have you ever considered writing more about icemav's respective childhoods? i'm always thinking about val kilmer saying in his memoir and documentary that he had obsessive dreams about ice's father who made him feel he had to prove himself as The Absolute Ideal Man and that the interactions he dreamt about between ice and his dad surely "imbued ice with greater fury" and his obsession with perfection made him arrogant.

yeah i go into ice’s childhood a little in my slider one shot since they’re right out of high school when they meet. But val and I took it in two completely different directions. Val’s ice has daddy issues and a poor relationship with his father (extrapolating from excerpt above); my ice has lack-of-daddy-issues and NO relationship with his father. No dad = no man to model himself on = overcompensating. When I said, in mavericks POV (debriefing), that ice “clearly doesn’t know how to talk to other men,” I meant that with my whole chest.

i appreciate Val’s insight, and I’m not sure when his memoir was published, but i think TG86 Ice is complicated DEEPLY by his plot-necessary accession to COMPACFLT in TGM22. At least for me, his end rank of O-10 casts him in a totally different light. It implies that what he wants is not necessarily to be “The Ideal Man,” he wants to be The Ideal OFFICER. And there’s a lot of data to back up that claim in Top Gun 86, too: he’s so gentle with Maverick, even when he’s trying to intimidate him (take the intonation of “I heard that about you. You like to work alone,” for example—is that how you’d say that if you were trying to piss someone off?); and there’s also the fact that two of the five times Ice talks directly to Maverick are explicitly about his safety practices and how they affect the safety of the TEAM (“Who was covering Cougar while you were showboating with this MiG?” / “I don’t like you because you’re dangerous.”). I said in a post last week that I don’t think Ice is a team player—but a good OFFICER doesn’t have to be a team player to make sure that the rules are followed and everyone stays safe. I think if Ice were trying to be The Ideal Man, he’d look a lot more like super-cool bad-ass rule-breaker MAVERICK (the buff daredevil male protagonist of a pro-military propaganda movie), who is canonically overcompensating for HIS relationship with his father/his incredibly unhealthy toxic masculinity.

So, yeah. that’s just how i see it. Again, idk when Val’s memoir was published—the writers of TG and TGM treat Ice as a character very differently, and both characterizations necessarily reflect on the other. I did not get the sense that TGM Ice was “imbued with fury,” for instance. So I think Ice trying to be/feeling pressured to be the best OFFICER makes more sense in light of TGM than Ice trying to be/feeling pressured to be the best MAN.

I feel very shrug about mav’s childhood. Kinda seems like he got over that in TG86. He got to save his team the way his dad did, AND lived to tell the tale. Yay. His development’s pretty much done for the franchise.