Why is that people so readily accept Iron Man as this inherently disgusting symbol of capitalism but make them question Captain America for one second and they explode?
Like, okay, I might be a little biased here as someone who is an Iron Man fan, but it's a little annoying to me that there was so much wank around Tony from 2016 onwards about how he's a capitalist/imperialist/whatever-ist because a bunch of people online decided to be Not Very Normal About Supehero Movies while Steve was basically put onto this pedestal of being Good Man Who Hates Bullies™ and it felt very ... hollow to me?
Because a lot of the time in felt like people were indulging in American Exceptionalism But Woke™, and rarely ever indulging in good faith.
I feel like a lot of your posts about MCU Tony range from “yeah that’s understandable” to “IDK Man I Think It Depends”
there’s a lot to criticize there, absolutely — but I also feel like you tend to edge into … bad faith readings, most of the time? It feels more spurred on by petty fandom beef about MCU Steve and people saying mean things about him than anything grounded or nuanced, y’know?
Well, it’s funny you said that because when this came in I was trying to frame a response to the first one and it started with ‘the wording of this ask is so loaded I can’t consider it a communication made in good faith but.’
So, but I can tell you that in my case the reaction is only secondarily ideological. It’s primarily a personal reaction to the writing, an emotional and aesthetic assessment of the material present onscreen.
In brief, when the writing for Captain Steve America sucked, he just kind of lost his personality and got worse at tactics. When the writing for Iron Anthony Man sucked, he kept entering doom spirals and forcibly dragging in everyone around him.
My objections to Tony Stark as a character have at base a lot less to do with his whole billionaire shtick or the drummed-up rivalry or any of that than like.....
Increasingly, as the Marvel film series went on, I was experiencing the actual text of the films attempting to gaslight me into accepting that the most important aspect of the events depicted, no matter these were, was Tony Stark’s personal feelings.
As far as the rivalry goes, I actually think it’s stupid. It’s kind of gross. It led to some unbelievably stupid writing choices, but more than that it’s nonsensical. It’s...apples to carburetors, or something.
Like. You cannot make any kind of rational comparison between these two men on a moral basis, and find them remotely on the same level.
One of them has never been given anything he didn’t have to fight for except his mother’s love, dislikes the idea of killing, and was anti-Nazi for ethical reasons in 1943. Which was not actually particularly common.
One of them has always been given everything except his father’s love, and responded to trauma by building a flying tank and racking up the highest personal kill count of anyone in world history, if we are to believe the statements made at the beginning of Iron Man 2 about his approach to ‘privatizing world peace.’
Tony Stark is designed to be a shitty person who becomes better, so the focal point of his narrative is his personal growth; his feelings, his motives, his flaws and how he struggles to rise above them. This means he is fundamentally obnoxious, selfish, and self-obsessed, and the story engages with these traits.
He, MCU version, once tried to apologize for fantastically shitty behavior to one of the two most important people in his life, to that end gifted her food she’s allergic to, and asked for ‘credit for remembering there was a connection.’
They figured out where the supervillain was staging his attack via Tony realizing his description of Loki’s supervillain priorities also described himself. His second movie largely revolves around him handling terminal illness so badly he i.e. demolishes his own house attempting to kick the shit out of his best friend, whom he refuses to confide in.
It took being personally blown up with his own bombs and being held hostage for an extended period, and then watching his only comrade in that captivity die, to encourage him to introspect at all about how he was enabling the US imperial military-industrial complex to prosecute extended foreign occupations for no good reason except to keep a Republican president in office despite his many policy failures.
He is deliberately designed to suck. His original creator designed him as a challenge in developing a character who is objectively deeply shitty, and then making the audience like him and root for him anyway.
Tony is not good. He is not good-at-being-good. When well-executed, the point of him is that he is trying anyway. Even though it’s hard, and doesn’t come naturally, and is contrary to most of his training. He is trying so hard to be good, and he’s reaching for it with all that unhinged hubris that goes with having always been filthy rich and too smart for your own good, and there’s something glorious even in the very selfishness of his wanting that redemption arc.
And even when he succeeds in catching it, he remains self-obsessed and annoying.
And we can love him for it, as a character; we can see our own limits and foibles reflected in him and feel that he shows us that, in spite of all the things we know to be wrong with us, we too can be transformed by the alchemy of heroism in the act of sincerely trying to be better, and to accomplish worthy ends. The orphans do not care why you built the orphanage.
The MCU achieved this fairly well with some of the early work with Tony, I feel. He was kind of compelling. He and the subtext of his films were off-putting to me personally in a lot of ways, including having extended sections that bored me to tears, but the character was presented in a way that worked. In part because Robert Downey Jr., noted nepotism baby and recovering addict, identified with his character so profoundly he conveyed his emotions really well.
I was very much not the intended audience, but I was willing to ignore the many issues I had with the premise and go along with the underlying idea of this character. Especially having had him re-imagined for me in a flattering light by various fanworks.
But the problem was: they ran out of chain. By the third or fourth time you put the same character through the ‘breakdown→act out→make a transformative resolution→fuck up’ cycle it stops looking triumphal or even productive, and just starts looking like an addiction spiral where the drug of choice is narcissism and robots.
And in Iron Man 3, disney even kind of acknowledged that and made it text, by having him explode all the suits at the end in a gruesomely costly symbol of breaking out of the cycle.
Which in turn got cheapened before the film was even released when Downey signed a new contract and they got Tony back in the flying armor. And we had multiple movies where the explicit literal plot was that Tony Stark being so wrapped up in his own feelings and so willing and able to impose his will on other people and the world at large about it was Bad.
The only reason he’s not technically the villain of Civil War, structurally speaking, is that he’s getting played by actual villains the entire time; he’s a patsy. A puppet on a string.
The only reason he’s not the villain emotively speaking is that the movie was cut to give his feelings and perspective loads more screen time than Steve’s, meaning that in some ways he’s the implicit protagonist of the film even though it’s notionally Captain America III. The thing about being the protagonist is it doesn’t matter who’s good or bad; if you’re the main character you’re the main character. Fullstop.
Tony Stark is written as a person who always believes he’s the main character and hurts people about it. Constantly. Especially the people who trust him.
I think that’s a reasonably interesting character premise, but Disney managed to make it atrocious by looking at how much money Iron Man movies made and deciding to make him in fact the main character of everything, forever. Resulting in films that self-contradict in absurd and distressing ways, and a black hole in the shape of a man distorting the entire series around himself.
Tony has always been hamstrung by the serial format limiting his growth, that too is baked in, but every successful superhero comic has this problem in some form; recreating it so grandiosely and so fast in a movie franchise wherein it ought to have been way more avoidable is just. Kind of embarrassing.
(It was embarrassing when Nolan did something similar with Batman, also, but at least he had the excuse of actively disliking Batman as a concept and deliberately trashing him, meaning some of the blame can go to the failure of judgment represented by making three batman films in that context, rather than to incompetence.)
Meanwhile Steve Rogers is a much more straightforward character concept, still complex enough to have psychological depth but not inclined to make his feelings anyone else’s problem. Who was initially very well executed and then increasingly neglected by scriptwriters who sometimes hadn’t even watched his existing films before writing him.
Also, his first movie was a period piece which engaged with its era, on a level that wasn’t particularly rigorous as historical films go but fantastic by the standards of superhero media, which I personally think is super cool. By superhero standards, it's also subtle, which is to say it uses only a small bullhorn to convey its themes.
I also find him relatable and easy to sympathize with, due to his lived experience of poverty and disability, and the intense way he pursues being not only good but decent. Which is a lesser achievement in some regards, a ‘bare minimum,’ but I appreciate that he values it, specifically because it’s not the kind of work that is rewarded in glory, or as a rule rewarded at all.
And it wouldn’t occur to him to think he deserved a reward, or ‘credit,’ for being decent.
Let alone for trying to be and failing.
Steve tries to structure his life choices so that he has as little as possible to be ashamed about, while Tony repeatedly structures his life choices around grand gestures intended to help him come to terms with the shame he’s already internalized, which routinely backfire and send him into another tailspin of shame-compensation.
I, personally, find the former appealing and the latter repulsive. The more so for how unable the character became to learn from his mistakes in any coherent or lasting way, sapping the pathos.
I also think the difference is so profound that it's kind of absurd anyone would need to explain what the difference is, which is exactly how you nerdsniped me with this nonsense.
But like. Tony won, in the sense that the MCU revolved around him. Also in the sense that my frustration with him is much stronger than my attachment to any of the characters I did like. And I have not watched an MCU movie in...what, seven years? No, I did catch Shang-Chi, that was only five years ago. I am simply unable to care about this franchise at this point. It disappeared up its own ass. It has no narrative integrity remaining. Boring.
My problem with Tony Stark is: his movies and his fanbase are weirdly invested in asserting that I have to give a shit about him and his feelings, and prioritize them over considerations I consider to be rationally and ethically way more important.
To the point that the underlying dialogue started mimicking the format of an emotionally abusive relationship, and caused me to recoil on a profound and visceral level.
So like. Please get a life.
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