Five reasons why Tony is more of a villain in the MCU than Loki
Pure and simple, Tony has a higher human kill count than Loki does.
Loki is responsible for summoning the Chitauri army to New York, and thus all the deaths caused by that.
We are told in Avengers that “he killed eighty people in two days,” and shown in Civil War that the kill count from the battle for New York is seventy-four, (although some of those deaths were shown to be caused by the Hulk).
This makes Loki’s total 154 people.
In canon, Loki is punished for this by being sent back to Asgard in chains and imprisoned there.
Tony is responsible for creating Ultron and unleashing him on the world, and therefore is responsible for all of the deaths that Ultron caused. Now, we are never given a specific number on the people that Ultron killed while resource gathering for his big hit, but we know that there were at least three significant ones. The civilian death count from Sokovia was shown in Civil War to be one hundred and seventy seven, and we know that Pietro died there as well.
Looking ONLY at the Ultron fallout, Tony’s total is up at 181 people.
Now, I could count all of the people Tony killed in the first Iron Man movie even though a good number of them were terrorists, however that gets into a bit of a moral grey area. For the record, however, there were about forty kills shown on screen for this category.
There were also a number of deaths caused by Tony’s fist-fight with the Hulk in Johannesburg, however I don’t currently have a clear number for that, so we’ll pass on those kills for now.
There are an additional fifty nine kills that Iron Man makes on screen in the other movies, whether it be blowing people up, smashing them through walls, or firing a repulsor into their face at full power.
Additionally, I could go into detail about all the people killed by Tony’s weapons when he was selling them to make his billions, but that would take me far too long to total up, and many of the fans will argue about which ones he did and did not sell himself. (Though in the end he technically signed off on all of them, so really, if he didn’t read the paperwork, it’s still gross negligence, and it’s still on his head…)
Keeping in mind that Tony’s creation of Ultron behind his teammates’ backs was the cause of 181+ deaths…If we then include all of the other human casualties that Tony has caused, his total is 280 people.
126 more murders than Loki.
In canon, Tony is excused for all of these deaths without question.
2.) He ratted out Clint’s secret family
Loki brainwashed Clint in the first Avengers movie, and spent half the film inside his head, poking around through his deepest darkest secrets.
He knows everything about Clint.
And yet, Loki never once uses Clint’s family as a bargaining chip against him. In fact, he never tells a soul about Clint’s family.
It would have been the perfect bargaining chip - the ultimate “do what I say OR ELSE” - and Loki never touches it. He sees that this man has a wife and two kids that he wants to keep safe, and has gone to such extreme lengths to make it happen, and he decides to let Clint’s family stay a secret, even when Clint comes back to himself and is fighting against Loki.
The others find out about Clint’s family in Age of Ultron. Clint brings Tony and the others back to the farm in AoU to get them off the radar, trusting the secret of his family to his teammates so he has somewhere safe for the Avengers to stay for a while as they regroup.
In Civil War, at the Raft, Tony mentions in front of everyone that Clint has “a wife and kids” to berate Clint for showing up to help Steve fight the super soldiers. Tony knows that Scott and Sam weren’t there in AoU and probably don’t know about Clint’s family. Additionally, he reveals this information while knowing that Ross and the UN security guards are actively listening in, looking for something to hold over their prisoner’s heads - he scrambles their sound feed a moment later to convince Sam that it’s safe to tell him where Steve went.
Tony knowingly and intentionally reveals the existence of Clint’s wife and kids - putting them all in grave danger - for the sake of punishing Clint for picking what he feels is the wrong side of an argument.
3.) Daddy Issues Are an Explanation - Not an Excuse
Now, neither of them had stellar fathers.
Howard was always distant and busy, and was said to have been too absorbed with his work to take time to “say he loved me to my face” to Tony.
Odin slaughtered Loki’s race, found him abandoned in the rubble, and took him home in disguise as a kind of war prize, letting him believe that he was truly his son until it came down to who would inherit the kingdom, where he chose a (then) inept and bull-headed Thor over a calm and competent Loki for no apparent reason other than favoritism.
Loki blames Odin for his fall from grace, because everything he did was to prove himself to a father that was never even going to consider putting him on the throne. But that’s where it ends.
All of his other mistakes he blames on himself or his nature. He is the monster that parents warn children about, so it makes sense that he would act the part of the monster. (And even then, it’s only for a short while, until he is able to grow past his issues and get his act back together in Thor 2 to help out. He’s still a bit mischievous and a touch backstabbing, but at this point it’s a personality trait, and he always winds up coming around to the side of good in the end.)
Tony blames every mistake he makes on “Howard’s A+ Parenting,” refusing to take responsibility because not getting along with his father while growing up is apparently a valid excuse for the constant bad life choices of a 40-something year old man. He never grows out of this either, and makes no attempts to move on. It is his go-to “get out of jail free” card. “My father never loved me, therefore everything awful I just did is excused.” “Maybe if I’d gotten more attention from my father, I’d be better at dealing with Peter, or being a team player, or not treating Pepper like garbage.”
4.) Knowingly Endangering the Lives of His Allies
In the first Avengers movie, when they’ve all gathered together aboard the hellicarrier for the first time, we find out that Banner is essentially a bomb waiting to go off in the form of the highly-destructive Hulk - a bomb that is triggered by Banner getting mad or startled or threatened.
So naturally, what is the first thing that Tony Stark does, while on an enclosed airborne ship with hundreds of innocent people and his allies?
He purposely tries to set off the Hulk by prodding at Banner with sharp and electrified things, just to see how good a hold Banner has on it.
Tony actively tries to set off the Hulk, knowing full well that it may cause the deaths of many if not all of the people on board the craft, and he doesn’t give a damn.
For another example, Tony gets drunk in the iron man suit and starts shooting things.
With hundreds of people packed into a tiny space.
Now it could be argued that he was having an emotional breakdown at the time because he thought he was dying, however that’s like trying to excuse someone bringing a loaded machine gun into a crowd because “they were under a lot of stress at the time.”
It’s saying ‘my method of coping with my problems is more important than the lives of everyone else.’
In the process of this, he nearly winds up killing Rhody.
And, to further prove that he has no regard for his allies:
He invites a man with a known grudge against him to “hit me with your best shot, here’s my address” and almost gets Pepper killed as collateral. He also turns on Steve at the drop of a pin at the end of Civil War, and tries to kill him, and Bucky as well, until Steve is forced to manually power down his suit. Tony is also firing live explosives at Clint and Wanda in the airport battle (of a large enough caliper that Clint stops to shield Wanda from the giant chunks of debris falling around them cause he’s afraid she’s going to get hurt) and has his repulsors at a high enough charge that he puts a giant hole in solid asphalt from 90 yards away while firing at Clint. He also shoots Sam Wilson point blank in the face with his repulsors for failing to take the shot that knocked Rhody from the sky, despite the fact that Sam risked his life nosediving to save Rhody without any armor to protect him at all and has previous trauma from watching a flight partner lose their life from being shot out of the sky.
Tony has no loyalty to his allies, and sees them all as expendable so long as it suits him at the time.
To quote The Avengers:
Steve: “You’re not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you.”
Tony: “I think I would just cut the wire.”
Loki, on the other hand, tends to switch sides a lot, but he always stays true to the side he’s currently on, and never knowingly endangers his allies.
The people he brainwashes in Avengers aren’t used as cannon fodder - they are kept safe and protected while they do his work for him, and he personally sees to it, to the best of his abilities, that they are not harmed or captured by SHIELD or the Avengers.
In Thor 2 he teams up with his brother and stays loyal to him, helping protect Jane through the length of the film, including two scenes where he shields her with his own body and another where he almost gets himself killed while trying to take out the baddie.
In Thor 3, Loki returns to what he’s pretty sure is going to be a death match with his big sister in order to save the people of Asgard, even though most of them view him with nothing but scorn, and even tries to offer his brother a way out of the arena despite the fact that it will endanger his position with the Grandmaster and potentially put him at risk.
Loki is incredibly loyal to his allies, and wouldn’t ever actively try to harm any of them, regardless of grudges, if they are working on the same team.
At the end of The Avengers, the UN sends a nuclear warhead at New York to prevent the spread of the alien attack, and Tony redirects that nuke up through the wormhole as a convenient way to dispose of it.
Once through the wormhole, he aims it at the home ship of the aliens before letting it go and allowing himself to fall back to the safety of earth a few seconds before the Avengers close off the portal.
The nuke hits the ship, and every alien immediately drops dead.
No matter where they are, no matter the fact that they’re galaxies away or possibly in different realms, every single alien drops dead the minute that ship is destroyed.
Their species no longer exists.
Down to the last male, female, and infant on every planet in every galaxy in all of the universe, Tony Stark has effectively wiped them from existence.
The closest counterpoint I have to this is at the end of Thor, when Loki makes a final play to win his father’s favor by trying to finish his brother’s quest to wipe out the Frost Giants - what he mistakenly believes is the final goal for the King of Asgard.
Unlike his brother, however, he plans on doing so by using the Bifrost to tear their world apart.
Thor stops him by shattering the Bifrost, and in the resulting explosion Thor and Loki are both nearly thrown into space, Odin showing up in the nick of time to grab hold of Thor’s foot.
Loki pleads with his father that he was only trying to do what he felt was his job as upcoming King:
To which his father simply responds “No, Loki.”
And at this - realizing that he nearly wiped out a species because of his own mistakes and ambition - he lets himself fall into the depths of space instead of allowing his brother to save him.
And so, given the above points as well as the fact that Tony always seems to weasel out of all of the consequences for his actions whereas Loki has been punished and imprisoned multiple times for his similar transgressions, I believe that Tony Stark is far more of a villain in the MCU than Loki ever was, or will be.
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