I always feel like Tony is almost never treated as smart as he actually is in bother fandom and fics??? I'm not even talking about being oblivious more about simple things like being able to calculate nos ridiculously high in his head, out of the box thinking etc
one of the most delightful challenges in the world is writing a character who is much, much more intelligent than you. it’s so fun! but also takes effort the same way any other characterization work does, coming up with all the day-to-day consequences of tony being a genius that are so pedestrian to him they don’t even register.
i’m going to take this moment as an excuse to throw out more smart!tony headcanons:
can identify materials by touch; touches everything, actually, tapping and bending them to figure out if it’s ABS or nylon and is there glass fiber in there? will pick up your retro walkman and be like “what is this made of” and if he can’t work it out WILL pull out a multitool, scrape a sliver of plastic off of a nondescript spot, and burn it with a lighter so he can sniff the smoke and figure it out that way. it’s rude, and also a pretty sure-fire way to notice alien tech.
in that vein, a FANTASTIC mold-maker. he’s constantly prototyping parts and then casting them into exotic alloys, which means he can look at basically any object and split it into smooth planes with no overhangs.
hand tony stark a chunk of machinery and he’ll be able to tell you how it was manufactured, which bits were done first, and how worn out the bits were when they milled out the middle and if the guy chamfering the edges was lazy or not. again, put a piece of alien tech in tony’s hands and he’s going to notice because he is always, always asking “how did they make that” and if the answer is “not on earth” it’s going to be obvious
eyeballs measurements with creepy accuracy. and not just length: angle, volume, temperature, decibels, area, velocity, duration -- all of it. from very large scale to very small, tony’s “ish” guesstimate is way, way closer than you expect
strikingly adept at order of operations. you know how sometimes you find yourself curled into a pretzel trying to squeeze a paintbrush into some weird corner of the thing you’re making you’re like “i wish i had thought to paint this BEFORE i glued it”? that doesn’t happen to tony.
reads FAST. no, faster than that. can read upside-down or mirrored text just as quickly. can read aloud from things written in relatively simple ciphers as a party trick.
fantastic intuition for which corners can be cut, and what needs extra failsafes. still discharges capacitors by putting his thumb over them though. obviously always errs on the side of cutting corners to make things smaller, faster, better, sleeker.
i can’t emphasize enough how much tony knows what’s inside every device around him. it’s how he built iron man out of a box of scraps -- encyclopedic knowledge of what he could get by taking apart all those missiles, and what he could turn it into.
looks at the world in terms of both intended use cases (you are meant to put toast in the toaster) and unintended use cases (if you cut some wires and filled the toaster with water you could probably make an electrolysis chamber to create hydrogen and oxygen). frequently applies unintended use cases to thigs like “your security system” and “household cleaning products”
i could go on, this is the most delightful game
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