Ok but, the great tragedy of Tony’s death is that of all the Avengers, he was the happiest in the post-Snap world. The happiest we’ve ever seen him.
Everyone else developed unhealthy coping mechanisms: throwing themselves into work, or alcoholism, or murder sprees. Bruce seems the next happiest, but even he says he feels responsible for Thanos. Everyone else jumps on the chance to undo the Snap, except Tony, who says “I’ve got my second chance right here.”
He made a second chance for himself. Not because he didn’t feel guilty (“I couldn’t stop him.”) Not because he didn’t lose anyone (“I lost the kid.”) But because that’s what your supposed to do when life deals you a shitty hand, you learn to live with it and you move on. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s worth it, because you can be happy again.
That should have been the message of the movie. Would have been if not for the lazy ending.
Tony knew that working with the Avengers again meant a high probability of his death. He recorded a farewell message for his daughter. He gave his Iron Man suit the ability to attract and hold the Infinity Stones, knowing he could not survive using them. Maybe he can even speculate why Doctor Strange traded the stone to keep Tony alive, when he previously said that he would have no problem letting Tony die.
Tony set the rules: we use the stones to bring everybody back, we don’t change anything else. He knew how dangerous time travel was. Steve says “We can fix everything,” and Tony says “Or we could make it worse.” And he was right.
Even if you ignore the havoc the Avengers could have left in other timelines – What does Loki do after he escapes with the Tesseract? How does Hydra react when they think Captain America is one of them? Does ever-paranoid Hank Pym continue to work for SHIELD after four vials of his highly experimental substance are stolen from their headquarters, and if he doesn’t, who stops the nuclear bomb that was headed to the US? Was the Ancient One really the first person to raise the question of what happens to other realities when Infinity Stones were taken from them? And does Bruce really know that they’ll be able to return them, that they have the ability to travel to a specific existing alternate timeline? – the Avenger’s actions allow Thanos to nearly destroy the entire universe.
Tony drives this point home when he says “You mess with time it tends to mess back.”
And that makes Steve’s line at the end about Tony wanting him to get a life so infuriating. How can Steve possibly think that going back in time to start another timeline with Peggy Carter is what Tony meant? That Tony – whose always made making sure his technology doesn’t get into the wrong hands a top priority – would have wanted Steve to selfishly mess around with the time-travel/multiverse technology that got him killed? (To say nothing of the possibility that Tony knew Peggy’s husband and children growing up, knew how happy and proud she was with the life she lived without Steve.)
The message Steve, and the audience, should have taken from Tony’s story wasn’t you need a wife and a kid and a house in the suburbs to be happy. The message should be you find happiness with what you have and then you build from there.
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