spiderman homecoming spoilers

bigskydreaming:

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.