I never understood trying to make tony a father figure anyways for peter. He doesn’t need one he has a gaurdian, aunt May, and tony is a big ass weirdo. Cap saying “Brooklyn” to Peter is more fatherly than all of Tony’s behavior
Tony is every immature, irresponsible white asshole man in his forties who never had his privilege checked and so never actually grew up. Also, how can he be anyone’s father figure when he has worse daddy issues than anyone in the Marvel Universe?
Captain America: Civil War Commentary (Joe Russo, Christopher Markus, Stephen McFeely)
Well there you have it. He wanted to murder Bucky. And he wanted to do it not only because he wanted retribution for his parents’ deaths but also to hurt Steve. That’s literally canon.
Also describing his mindset as “you love this thing so much, I’m gonna take it away from you,” is really horrifying because Bucky is not a thing. He’s an innocent person who’s been hurt and dehumanized and treated like an object for decades.
On the bright side, it’s canon that Steve loves Bucky.
Ive tried not to be angry. Bc this really is consistent characterization for Tony. And Ive been here before. But let’s review.
Obadiah Stane:
– Masterminded an extensive betrayal of Tony and his father
– Chose to try to kill Tony multiple times
– Tried to destroy the Stark legacy for evil means
Steve Rogers:
– Had murky intel on the worst thing to happen in a friend’s life
– Was in a shitty position with no right answer
– Would have brought discord into the Avengers anyway telling Tony this in the first place
– Was already repeatedly incurring tonys wrath for the sin of having met his father
– Had not one goddamn piece of good intel he could give Tony on the people who woke up one day and actually decided howard and maria stark needed to die and acted on that
– Made a single decision that SHOULD have had literally no real world repercussions besides tonys hurt feelings
– Kept Tony from murdering Bucky
But in Tonyland, these lists are absolutely indistinguishable from one another. Its been TWO GODDAMN YEARS but he has clearly not found one iota of empathy for Steve – not for his original no-win situation, and none for the shameful situation TONY put Steve in where he REPEATEDLY TRIED TO MURDER HIS FRIEND.
And its his CONSCIENCE that won’t let him call Steve??? Right.
See: abusers reshaping reality to center their own desires
NO ONE TALKS ABOUT HOW AT THE END OF HOMECOMING TONY WAS GOING TO KIDNAP PETER; HE HAD IT IN HIS HEAD THAT PETER A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD CHILD WOULD LIVE WITH HIM, A STRANGE MAN, MILES AWAY FROM HIS LEGAL GUARDIAN, HIS AUNT AND IT BOTHERS ME SO FUCKING MUCH
u know what really pisses me off… i was just thinking about all the jokes about peter’s youngness in CACW and somehow i only just now remembered the part where rhodey says ‘how young is this guy’ or something and tony says “i don’t know, I didn’t carbon date him”
tony lies to rhodey about how old the child he brought to this big ass super hero fight is.
not only does team cap not know they are fighting a 15 yr old… team iron man doesn’t know either. tony does not tell anyone. what a fuck head. unbelievable.
“Tony Stark is a walking bank bailout. His bad means everyone else pays, and he’s still in charge.”
Deep-DEEP feels for this thread. Been an Iron Man stan since the late ‘70’s. HATED where the MU went with him during the original Civil War, was NOT digging’ the ‘Illuminati’ deal in ‘World War Hulk’ and the whole ‘Extrimis’ Armor/not Armor/Intelligent/extradimmensiinal/whatever-the-fuck-it-was, thing. And the glittery shine of seeing a Live-Action Iron Man on a movie screen, brought to us by MCU? That wore off pretty quick. IM’s gone from a character with ingenuity, fallibility, and a genuine desire to do good, to a character I REALLY wanna see get his ass handed to him by Thanos. I mean, at this point? Just kill Tony Stark already. No clones, no ‘It was REALLY a Life Model Decoy’, no alternate-timeLine/Reality replacements. Dead. Maybe, put some REAL effort into starting over from scratch with Riri Williams…
This is the fourth time Ive seen this or had it sent to me. And Ive avoided reblogging for a couple reasons. But sometimes you gotta talk about whats wrong. And Tony’s behavior is a major problem.
I’m prepping for IW and I’m honestly just so sad that I cannot bring myself to watch Homecoming a second time. I want to, because everything else about it is so so wonderful. But Tony’s “parenting style” reminds me and reminds friends of mine of painful family of origin abuse that we just shouldnt have to sit through from a “hero” in a goddamn superhero movie tbh.
Im seeing more and more people on multiple platforms done with MCU Tony. The consistency of the character’s faults across multiple directors, the realism in his narcissism and its integration into dynamic plots makes me think that the actor is driving a lot of this, and that there isnt much room to shape him differently. I hope the MCU understands they need to wrap him up and move on.
He’s established to be massively profiting from cleaning up the mess of his own battles. The injustice of this arrangement along with the carelessness in the actual management of this damage control provides the motive and means for the Vulture to become a villain, making this yet another marvel villain created by Tony Stark. Not that Stark is responsible for Toomes’s choices–but his own choices have consequences and this is one of them.
In fact Toomes directly parallels Tony Stark by scavenging the wreckage of Avenger’s battles and becoming an arms dealer. (Think–Tony creating Ultron out of Chitari tech).
He made a sexual comment about Peter’s aunt, which clearly made him uncomfortable.
He leaves Peter, a child who he has just equipped with a weapons-grade super-suit, to his own devices (under the light supervision of Happy Hogan to be fair) without communicating to Peter his actual expectations for him. He leaves him with the inaccurate impression that he might be called to join the avengers at any time, so when he is silent and distant, Peter, a child, naturally concludes that he must simply “work hard enough” to get his approval.
When Peter starts tracking the weapons and trying to tell him about it, Tony acts dismissively–he tell’s Peter to drop it, but gives no indication that he takes Peter’s concerns seriously or will follow up on the problem. He states that the weapons–which come from tech that he is responsible for–are “below the Avenger’s pay grade.”
He did send the FBI, but honestly he sent those agents to their deaths at the hand of futuristic tech (again, tech he is responsible for safely disposing of!!) if Peter hadn’t been there to save them.
He put a tracker in Peter’s suit without his knowledge or consent–yes, to be able save his life but also to monitor if/when he left the city. When Peter first asks about it, he distracts and evades the question. When Peter makes it clear he objects later, he is told that the choice is not up to him. At no time do they have an honest conversation about how closely Peter is or should be watched—this encourages Peter to keep his own secrets and to go behind their back.
He programs suit he gave Peter to default to insta-kill mode at the drop of a hat. This feature was, admittedly deactivated under the “training wheel’s protocol,” but this only makes it clear that Tony’s idea of who Peter will become and grow into with experience is basically a killer who works for him on his Avengers team.
So Peter get’s in over his head, and people could have died of the Ferry if Stark didn’t come save the day. Is it time for a lecture? yes. It’s time to finally communicate to Peter that he is being heard, explain what his expectations for Peter’s behavior are, encourage him to ask for help when he needs it. It is not time to shame Peter, to place the guilt of all those endangered lives upon his (young) shoulders, to remove all the support he had initially given him, fire him with no warning or second chance, and tell him “I was the only one who believed in you–the other’s thought I was crazy for recruiting a kid” (as if??? everyone criticizing Tony’s Choice to recruit a kid into Civil War meant that they didn’t think that the kid had talent or potential?!?!)
There is zero (0) indication that that lecture and firing was the “tough love moment he needed to pull through” that Tony later spins it as. Nothing about that lecture inspired or motivated; Peter lost the will and the means to continue searching for the Vulture until it literally smacked him in the face by pure coincidence. Instead, it is pretty clear that in the wake of loosing Stark’s support Peter gains confidence in his identity as Spider-man and a hero independent of Stark’s validation and technology.
So Peter saves Tony’s butt by preventing all his crap from being stolen and this earns him back Tony’s favor. So what does Tony do?? Well, he arranges to make Peter, a minor, a part of his team and move him up state away from his aunt and school without his aunt, his legal guardian’s, knowledge or permission.
So yeah. you know in the end, even if Tony Stark is, like, the worst superhero out there, I actually think he is an interesting character if his flaws are actually treated like flaws. My reading of Spider-man Homecoming is that the movie is actually pretty honest about Tony’s character flaws while preserving many of the things people actually like about the character–so I really appreciate the movie for that. Spider-man’s ultimate rejection of Stark’s offer to join the Avengers was sweet, sweet music to my ears lol.
So, I’ve ranted a lot about T/ony recruiting a 14 year old Peter Parker to fight in his personal war with Steve, and how in the process he literally kidnapped said 14 year old (because yes that is absolutely what taking a minor to another fucking country without his legal guardian’s knowledge or permission is, like lol, there are no extenuating circumstances which make that okay, if she wanted to May Parker could press criminal freaking charges against Tony for that and she’d be one hundred percent in the right and warranted for that).
And how since then, T/ony has not only enabled Peter’s crime-fighting and the amount of physical danger it puts him in (at least when it suits T/ony’s mood), but has also enabled Peter keeping this a secret from his legal guardian, up to and including giving him a cover story of having an internship to explain his absences. Again, this is only for when it suits T/ony’s personal agenda and moods to do so, as we all know at other times he’s perfectly willing to play the “I’ll tell your aunt” card to get Peter to fall in line or do what he’s told. The spokesperson for oversight and accountability has actively and with deliberate intent circumvented the legal guardian of a 14-15 year old boy and made it physically impossible for her to fulfill her moral and legal responsibilities to her nephew and make decisions about his physical safety.
I mean, I’ve ranted about all that before, yeah?
But you know what I personally haven’t seen anyone talk about in regards to Spiderman: Homecoming yet?
Peter’s suit.
I want to talk about the suit T/ony designed for Peter and gave to him, without any kind of official overview of the suit’s capabilities or you know, an instruction manual. I want to talk about how Homecoming showed that the suit had built in LETHAL CAPABILITIES that Peter had absolutely no knowledge of, whatsoever. T/ony designed a suit that could literally kill people, and then gave it to a teenage prodigy with no warning. For as long as Peter’s had that suit, he’s been walking around with the equivalent of a loaded gun, and absolutely ZERO idea he was doing so. Not to mention, he also had no idea that along with all the tracking and surveillance capabilities S/tark had built into it to let him know where Peter was and what he was doing, there was an AI built into it as well. The very same technology that has in the past massively backfired and either been hacked by villains or hell, evolved to BECOME the villain, was literally laced into the very fiber of Peter’s suit without his knowledge. His suit could have been hacked, its weapons capabilities subverted and used to harm someone without Peter having any way to prevent it, because Peter didn’t even know TO prevent it.
But that didn’t happen, you might say. Just hypotheticals, you can do that with anything. Of course T/ony installed safeguards, took preventative measures to make sure no one could do that, because he’s learned from his mistakes, its not like he was going to make something that could evolve into Ultron again, that someone could hijack again like any of his own villains. You just hate T/ony, you might say, and so you’re coming up with imaginary worst cast scenarios to vilify him. Sure, that COULD have happened, but it didn’t. Right?
Umm.
Except, y’see.
It DID happen.
PETER hacked his own suit. Peter undid the safeguards T/ony installed, found a way around them, because not unreasonably, once he knew there was more to the thing he was literally wearing on his body, he wanted to know what the fuck it was. T/ony’s own fifteen year old protege hacked through his safeguards and unlocked his suit’s deadly capabilities because it never occurred to him to let him know why that might possibly be a terrible idea.
And sure, if you were really determined, you could argue Peter shouldn’t have done that. That he should have trusted that those safeguards were there for a reason and left them alone until T/ony saw fit to tell him about them. I mean, I personally think that’s a completely fucking stupid argument, because if you’re going to give someone a suit you wear like a literal second skin and make it capable of killing people, that’s absolutely something the person wearing it has a right to know, so he can like, decide if he even fucking WANTS it at that point.
But all that aside, even with you making that argument about how Peter was wrong to hack it or whatever, it still misses the point. That point being, that if Peter hacked it, then ipso facto….IT COULD BE HACKED. T/ony’s vaunted safeguards were once again not up to the task, just like they haven’t been each and every time before when his technology has been turned to criminal enterprises. And this is why some of us say he hasn’t evolved at all, has never learned a damn thing. Because he’s still making the exact same mistakes he made in his first solo movie. He’s still utterly convinced of his own genius to the point where he’s confident he has accounted for the various possibilities and made sure they won’t be an issue. He decides what he wants to do without informing others, even when they have a personal stake in whatever it is he’s doing, and then rests confident in his own plans and countermeasures despite the fact that they have been proven insufficient in literally every single one of his previous experiences.
T/ony designed a suit with lethal weapons capabilities and put it in the hands of an underage teenager who had absolutely ZERO idea he had lethal ordinance literally at his fingertips. He designed his own safeguards to keep those capabilities from being unlocked until he decided Peter was ready to access them – when Peter hadn’t even expressed that he wanted them in the first place – and then relied on Peter’s ignorance of his own suit’s potential to keep him from messing with it. His entire ‘make sure this lethal suit doesn’t accidentally kill people’ stratagem was based on the idea that no one, let alone Peter himself, could find a way around his safeguards – even though that was proven untrue, just as anyone whose seen every I/ron M/an movie ever could have predicted.
It never occurred to T/ony to use the actual superhero-in-training’s own morality as a safeguard to keep its harmful potential locked for the time being. Like, maybe if he’d ever actually told Peter what the suit was potentially capable of, Peter, being a pretty fucking brilliant kid and someone who absolutely does not want to hurt people, could’ve been trusted not to mess with it. He was extremely quick to shut down any chance of his suit killing someone once he knew that capability was there, after all. And yeah, granted, its not like Peter is a mindless automaton who blindly does everything T/ony tells him to throughout the movie, so maybe you could argue that there was no guarantee that if T/ony told him about the suit’s potential, he wouldn’t still try and hack it out of curiosity.
But again, that misses the point by a mile. Because hey, thought – but if I’m T/ony S/tark, super genius, and I don’t completely, one hundred percent trust that this superhero in training is up to the responsibility of respecting this suit’s awesome deadly potential….MAYBE I SHOULDN’T FUCKING GIVE IT TO HIM IN THE FIRST PLACE. If he’s not ready for some of its capabilities yet, here’s an idea….don’t build them into the suit, just upgrade the suit once he IS ready.
But there’s absolutely no justification for sending a fifteen year old out onto the streets with an actual arsenal of deadly weaponry at his disposal, when he has zero idea he’s toting around that arsenal at all. It was only Peter’s own quick thinking and reflexes that kept him from accidentally killing someone with his suit once he unlocked features he had no way of being prepared for. Again, if you’re like, SUPER DETERMINED to hold a fifteen year old more accountable than a forty something billionaire super genius with actual experience, then you could potentially argue that if Peter had accidentally killed one of the robbers at the gas station, it would have been his fault for hacking the suit.
But even with that, the majority of the responsibility must still lie with the dude who put a loaded gun in the hands of a minor and then essentially told him ‘oh by the way, that’s a water pistol’.
Like, imagine if the worst had happened there. If Peter had (in his eyes) found himself responsible for killing a man by virtue of technology he didn’t even know he had. What do you think that would have done to him?
And that is why all of T/ony’s extended introspective mea culpa scenes in AoU, CW, and any other movie mean jackshit to me, because he never learns. He’s still doing the same thing, making the exact same mistake, making decisions for other people he has no right to be making for them, and refusing to acknowledge that even when he is willing to admit some small measure of responsibility after things go wrong, that isn’t exactly a big fucking comfort to the people who are made unwitting accomplices to his ego and end up shouldering a hell of a lot more of the burden when all’s said and done.
Tony Stark
• manufactured weapons and profited off people’s deaths
• decided to stop only when his own safety was disrupted
• made fun of Bruce turning into Hulk, knowing it was not the kind of a joke Bruce would enjoy
• made fun of Steve being frozen for 70 years, knowing it was not the kind of a joke Steve would enjoy
• made fun of the fact that Nick Fury had only one eye, knowing it was not the kind of a joke Nick would enjoy
• made a rape joke
• created Ultron
• kept the fact that he was creating Ultron in secret, although the Avengers deserved to know it
• laughed when it turned out that Ultron was about to destroy the world
• after his first attempt at creating Ultron had gone horribly wrong, he decided to create another, more powerful version of Ultron, having no idea whether it would be on their side
• and he did it in secret again
• after the creation of Ultron resulted in many deaths, it took a woman to confront him about it for him to start feeling guilty about it
• instead of owning up to his mistake and trying to make up for it properly, he guilt trips Avengers into “being responsible” and signing the Accords (as if it weren’t him and only him who continuously messed everything up and who needed supervision)
• called Wanda Maximoff a weapon of mass destruction
• locked Wanda Maximoff in the house with Vision, preferring not to ask for her consent or even warn her beforehand
• brought Peter Parker, a 14 year old child, into a fight with highly skilled adults who could have easily killed him
• didn’t even tell him what the fight was about and purposefully manipulated him into not listening to Steve or anyone else on his team by saying that they’re just wrong
• ignored Steve’s warning about Zemo’s plan and about many more Winter Soldiers out there
• started the fight with Team Cap, yet acted like he was betrayed
• blasted Sam Willson away after his team tried to kill him and accidentally hurt Rhodey, when Sam got down to say he was SORRY (for not dying?)
• yet wasn’t shown to be even remotely angry at Vision
• fought so hard for the accords (which even led to Avengers being imprisoned in the Raft under horrible conditions), broke the rules in about three days to go after Steve and Bucky
• knowing that Bucky was brainwashed and tortured and didn’t control himself when he killed Tony’s parents, still tried to kill him
• after he blasted Bucky’s arm off, and Steve picked him up to leave, he started screaming about how “his father made that shield” and how “Steve didn’t deserve it” (when from the very beginning it was Tony who was starting things, and Steve was defending himself and his friend)
• made sexual comments about Aunt May in front of Peter to make him uncomfortable
• after giving Peter hope that he’d become an Avenger one day, Tony ignored him and didn’t show any interest in what he was doing, letting Peter, a CHILD, think that he’d just have to be “good enough”, which was the reason Peter got into a lot of dangerous things
• installed an instant kill mode in Peter’s suit
• installed a bud into Peter’s suit without his permission or knowledge
• gave no indication that he actually listened to Peter when he told him about the villains, sent FBI to fight against Chitauri weapons (which would have been a suicide mission) and later, finding out that it didn’t work out, showed up, blaming Peter that he didn’t have faith in him
• took away Peter’s suit for no reason but the fact that Peter didn’t think Tony would have listened and decided to save hundreds of lives himself (what a hideous thing to do)
• later wanted Peter, a 15 year old, to join the Avengers and live with him, obviously hiding the whole thing from his legal guardian.
tony stark works in a vaccuum. he isolates himself and acts unilaterally because he believes he knows better than all the people who surround him. (for example, ‘i didn’t tell the team because i didn’t want to hear the man wasn’t meant to meddle medley’). t’challa works collaboratively, listening to his fellow council members, his family, and his community. t’challa doesn’t shut shuri out; he accepts her help and her good natured teasing.
tony stark only does things that benefit him in some way. tony does not have an overarching moral compass. he is not altruistic. tony supports the accords not because he believes its best for the world; he does it because he thinks it will help him get pepper back. we can take it back to literally the core of the creation of ironman. tony does not stop dealing weapons until that dealing had a direct negative effect on his life. tony does not build ironman out of altruism. he does it because he wants revenge. tony tries to kill bucky, knowing bucky’s actions as the winter soldier were coerced through mind control, because his need for revenge is more important.
t’challa is the opposite. t’challa has spent his entire life training to be a good man and good ruler for his people. t’challa does initially go after bucky and is motivated by revenge, but t’challa ends up literally taking bucky in as a refugee. and when t’challa finds the man responsible for his father’s death, he does not let revenge consume him. he takes zemo in alive to be held responsible for his actions. t’challa’s story arc in black panther is in many ways about t’challa fearing that he is not ready to lead his people, learning terrible things about his family history, working through it, and coming out on the other side confident and ready to use wakanda’s resources as a force for good across the world.
and let’s just talk about tony and t’challa’s relationships with women. tony repeatedly lies to pepper. tony puts pepper in danger. tony hits on his female employee at first sight (natalie/natasha). let’s not even talk about maya hansen. he bangs christine (reporter) and has pepper toss her out the next morning saying ‘i also take out his trash’. he hit’s on peter’s caretaker. what other interactions does he have with women for more than a few sentences? and, to be clear, all of these interactions are sexualized. he does not treat any of these women as his peers.
the contrast with t’challa is astonishing. t’challa’s closest confidantes are primarily women including his sister Shuri, his mother, Okoye, and Nakia. Only Nakia is a love interest, and he listens to her and ultimately follows her advice to use wakanda’s resources to help the world. he is surrounded by women who excel in their fields and he treats them, their opinions, and their bodies with respect.
i just don’t understand how people are trying to draw positive comparisons between tony and t’challa. if you respect t’challa’s values, then tony stark should disgust you. and dear jesus fucking christ if i see one single goddamn tony stan saying ‘tony should adopt shuri’ or ‘tony can teach shuri’ i swear to god i will find u and chop off your fingers so you can’t type this bullshit again.
Cheloneuniverse 