I got this thought caught up in my head earlier and now I must unleash my thoughts on you.
Basically, I had this question: why does Tony fight in his suits himself?
As of Iron Man 3, it’s clear he doesn’t need to. He’s shown controlling suits from afar and more than 20 suits are controlled autonomously by Jarvis in the final battle. At any point after that, he’s only needlessly putting himself at risk whenever he goes into battle himself.
Easy explanation - the suite are hackable and he needs to control them personally. I’m not too sure about this one since we see in Iron Man 2 that even when someone actually has an Iron Man suit in their possession, if they’re not Tony Stark, they just can’t make it work. They can only add onto the War Machine suit, they’re never able to produce another one. In the same movie, Vanko is able to control the WM suit from afar, but he’s a genius on Tony or near-Tony levels and had access to information about the arc reactor from his own father and about the WM suit from Hammer. And even then, Tony regains control of it with relative ease. In AoU, Ultron gains control of the rescue bots, but those are non-combatant suits that never pose much of a threat on their own. Ultron needs to make an army of his own bots to fight them. No one is ever able to completely gain control of Tony’s suits. So while this is a logical concern, it doesn’t have a lot of evidence within the context of the movies, and no one ever brings it up.
Meta explanation - the second explanation, and the one I personally think is true, is that Tony’s guilt drives him to put himself in the line of fire to make up for his crimes.
This one tracks all the way to Iron Man. I want to call attention to the scene after Tony’s confrontation with Obadiah at the party.
At this point in the movie, Tony has seen the direct consequences of his own carelessness, naivety, greed, and selfishness. And it completely shakes who he is. As soon as he gets home, what’s his first priority? Recovery, rest, getting back to his old life? No. The very first thing he doesn’t, before even getting looked over by a doctor after spending months in a cave with only one person to trust, being manipulated and both psychologically and physically tortured, is to announce that S.I. will stop producing weapons. He does not take the easy route, he does not try to shift blame to the people who were selling the weapons under the table, he does not ignore it, he does not even try to do this quietly.
But getting back to this scene (because it’s a really good scene, guys). Tony has just learned that despite his efforts, Obadiah, who he considered a trusted friend and ally, is scheming to remove him from his position in his own company and was the one selling weapons. And there’s another detail that’s easy to miss, but the town that the terrorists took control of with his weapons? It’s Gulmira. The same place Ho Yinsen - the man who saved his life and inspired him to keep fighting in the cave - was from.
When Tony sees his reflection, he can’t help but destroy it. He has truly seen the person he was, and the image isn’t pretty.
And this is the moment that he really becomes Iron Man. Because what does he do now that going the slow way and discontinuing weapons hasn’t worked?
He puts himself in the line of fire to personally get rid of his weapons.
If you want to argue that the risk to him is not high here, I’ll remind you that the suit has never been tested for combat at this point (and in fact, the repulsors weren’t even originally meant to be weapons at all but were for flight) and they have Tony’s weapons, possibly the only thing at this time and point to stand a fair chance against what we know the suit can do. And, when flying home, he’s almost killed by U.S. planes who don’t recognize him and deem him hostile. This is where Tony starts being a hero.
And it is not the last time. The montage at the beginning of Iron Man 2 tells us that in the six months following the first movie, Tony has continued retrieving his weapons and personally fighting terrorists. He’s also doing it himself, partially for practical reasons - he emphatically does not trust the U.S. government with his weapons after seeing the truth of war in his first movie - but also because he feels he needs to. Even a slow death from palladium poisoning isn’t enough to put him out of commission.
In The Avengers, he personally gets into the rotors to fix them, which ends up throwing him around a very dangerous set of what is essentially giant spinning metal blades that he has to wait for Steve to fix, and in the climax, he takes the nuke through the portal to the Chitauri. He never hesitates to make the sacrifice, but he also doesn’t try to slow down to come up with an option that is safer for himself. He doesn’t try to launch or throw the nuke through the portal (which is safer for him, but has a lower chance of working) but personally carries it through. He does not expect to survive this and nearly doesn’t.
Come Iron Man 3, his fighting has started to cause him real, severe psychological issues, including vivid nightmares and anxiety attacks that are triggered by mentions of the New York attack. But he doesn’t stop, even though this is the movie where we see that Tony has suits that he can control from a distance, which would allow him to protect people without harming himself. But Tony can’t do that. The option isn’t even brought up as a possibility. Because Tony does not feel like he has been redeemed. He never does, not really. Tony cannot take himself out of the line of fire because he put other, innocent people in the line of fire before Iron Man and he considers this his penance. And I honestly don’t consider his viewpoint to be wrong because he did cause innocent deaths, and just because it happened without his knowledge does not mean the responsibility is not his. (this is a common problem with us Tony stans; we get so caught up in countering antis that we lose sight of the fact that Tony is a flawed person, he’s meant to be, and he did do terrible things and needs to make up for them, although where we think the line to that redemption is and where Tony thinks it is are drastically different)
Tony’s guilt and need to fix things is only intensified in Age of Ultron. I’ve argued in the past that Ultron was not his fault, but rather a combination of Wanda and the Mind Stone (which does seem to have some sort of consciousness of its own), but Tony clearly does not see it that way. He considers Ultron and the people killed by him to be his personal responsibility, and not one he shares with anyone or anything else. His guilt here leads to his strong support for regulation and the Accords in Civil War - Tony no longer considered even himself to be the best judge for his redemption, even though he is his own harshest critic.
Come Infinity War, Tony would chase after Stephen and Peter on the Q-ship and suggest the plan to fight Thanos on his own turf when it’s just the three of time. Some people have questioned this, but I think it’s pretty clear why - turning around and leading Thanos back to Earth will mean more civilian deaths, and that is something Tony refuses to accept. Casualties are unacceptable to him no matter that they’ll have more help if they turn back and recruit the other Earth-based heroes.
In Infinity War, Tony would rather have died than have Stephen sacrifice the Time Stone for him (Tony himself obviously not knowing what this would lead to). Look at his face when he tries to tell Stephen to stop-
He is literally coughing up blood as he tells him to stop, but he’s too weak from the stab wound in his stomach to even move.
It’s only in Endgame that Tony allows himself to be redeemed. Now, when he has a family he loves dearly, he still chooses to put himself on the line because if he sees something wrong - especially something he links to himself - he has to try to stop it. And he does. His contributions (creating the new gauntlet, fixing time travel, figuring out a new way to get the Tesseract, and ultimately destroying Thanos’s army) are vital to the Avengers saving the universe. Tony’s redemption may have been complete years ago for many of us (myself included), but this is the moment it ends for him. He helps bring half the universe back, saves the entire universe by destroying Thanos and his army (who would have destroyed the entire thing because the guy only has one plan, it just goes up in degrees), and then he dies lives happily with his family content in the knowledge that he really has made it up to the world. He is Iron Man.
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