Okay, okay, I keep thinking about it so I need to just get it out of my thoughts so we'll see if this is coherent but does anyone ever think about Tony's like lack of an identity?
For starters, in a game where a huge mechanic, quite literally *THE* mechanic and objective of the game, is to identify everyone in order to keep track of everyone's movements and solve this mystery, we don't know a character's actual name. When Tony's standing over Martha's dead body and Annie's looking at the list, we learn that Tony is not his real name. Specifically, he says "My real name's not Tony. People just call me that after my father.". Now, we never learn his actual name but let's hold onto this line for a moment. Specifically the bit about his father.
When Helen and Vic are talking in the living room, we learn that Helen found out she was expecting again shortly after the war broke out. (And that apparently her second pregnancy was so much worse than her first) This would mean she was expecting Tony, and she was expecting that everything would get back to normal after the war. But then her husband never came back, and she was left alone, with two little children to care for all by herself. Now that's going to be tough for anyone but I imagine it especially took it's toll on Helen, and I think her grief of her husband is partly why Tony is like that.
From a young age, he'd (like Eve) have seen his mother in pain and I think, given stereotypical gender roles, he decided, as "man of the house", given he'd be the only male in the house, that it was his job to protect her (and Eve). So I think he starts seeing everyone outside of the family as a potential threat, which then feeds into paranoia. And I think those things together are big factors into why he reacts to Hobbes the way he does, by other-ing him and stealing the pocket watch to keep it out of this stranger's hands, it's all a desperate and confused attempt to keep his mother out of harm's way.
But back to his father. Now we don't know what Tony and Eve's father looks like, but it's possible the Tony we know is a spitting image of his father, or somewhere close, but I think with Tony (and Eve) as the last thing she has connected to her husband, Helen starts seeing him in everything Tony does. Y'know maybe they stand the same way, or use the same product to style their hair, or make the same kinds of jokes, but whatever it is, Helen sees the resemblance and what would've been something nice to laugh about if his father was still alive, becomes painful. "You're just like your father." becomes less a lighthearted comment about the men in her life and more a reminder of her grief. But I think it continues, not in a way that she can't separate the two or anything, just that she thinks about them together so much that there's been multiple times where she slips up and calls her son Tony. Then I think it just kept happening to the point where he had to accept it as a nickname.
Now, even sharing his name, Tony has no idea what the man was like. Helen even says herself that "Tony's never known his father" so all he would have to go off of are stories from his mother and potentially from his sister. And I think that makes him feel very lonely (much like everyone else in the Dauer family) and so I think he starts to cling to everything he knows about his father, desperate for some sort of connection that he feels he was robbed of. So I can see him, either consciously or subconsciously, taking the trajectory of his father's life as a road map for his own. Especially since his mother is putting pressure on him (and his sister) to essentially be the best man he can be (aka become rich and wealthy and well-respected so he (and Eve) never have to suffer like she did when raising them). So he models himself off the man his mother holds in the highest esteem, his late father, and starts doing what he did, including joining the army.
Which I know, according to Eddie, he says he joined for fun. But him saying he joined the army "for fun" sounds like an answer you'd give if you know you can't admit your actual answer, be it because you'd get in trouble or, the more likely reason, because you don't have the level of emotional maturity or comfort being vulnerable to actually admit it to anyone.
So I think, with all this, Tony's sort of spent his whole life hiding behind this armor of his father's, sort of tying himself in knots and becoming a not-quite-right replica or facsimile of the memory of his father instead of becoming his own person because that's kinda what his mother needed him to be in those years. She needed someone to help her, needed someone to protect her, needed someone to be the man of the house.
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