TONY STANK IS THE ONLY CHARACTER IN THE MCU WITH MENTAL ILLNESS!!!!1!!!11!
I’ve been hearing this shit a LOT on tumblr as of late and I’m tired.
these arguments also always say that we don’t care for tony’s mental illness because it’s “ugly” which is blatantly untrue. I don’t care for tony because he’s a morally incompetent, corrupt son of a bitch.
y’all so ready to talk about his mental illness but won’t talk about bucky’s (aside from the obvious torture), steve’s or nat’s or sam’s or bruce’s - the list goes on!
bruce has literally tried to kill himself and steve has veryyyy suicidal actions (especially in catws) which is connected to depression. bucky and nat were made into weapons, and like sam, have witnessed a lot of shit that would result in ptsd (like tony har har!). now I actually can’t really pinpoint all the mental illnesses the characters from the mcu have because, unlike tony who got a whole movie and some more, we don’t get any of this shown in the mcu.
we see the torture that bucky went through, glimpses of nat’s too but other than that we don’t see how they’re handling life now, mentally. and sam? he saw riley fall to his death and he had to watch rhodey go down too then just got shot point blank for it?? ok. (like sam would’ve died if vision didn’t miss, you know that right?)
the one I can write about most is steve, because like him I suffer from depression, and tbh if I didn’t I would not have picked up he was depressed in catws. in this movie he’s so damn reckless, to the point where it’s suicidal, he throws himself into the hellicarries with no backup plan, yes we’ve all seen heroes play the sacrifice card but this is different. this is suicidal ideation [x / x] I mean doesn’t this sound conventionally “ugly” to you? people see his sacrifices in catfa and catws (and later cacw) as heroic, but they aren’t, not really, if one wants to die why not go out like a hero? make it look like you didn’t want to die, go with the intention of saving the world - even at the cost of your own life, steve will do this again and again and again.
steve goes about his life but he doesn’t live it, we see in catws how sparse his apartment is, he doesn’t seem to have friends asides from nat and he hasn’t really tried to get to know anyone romantically until nat is constantly pushing him to - and will he ever get around to actually doing the things in his notebook, the little book just showing how much he’s lost since time has changed so much. he doesn’t go into the hellicarrier and let bucky almost kill him as an act of suicide, he’s just trying to save bucky but if it meant he’d die to do so you know he would’ve let bucky kill him. steve’s depression isn’t your conventional depression where he’s in bed all day - [he’s] living life as though you were just an onlooker - it’s subtle enough that no one acknowledges this (also not having your own third movie to expand on it doesn’t help with the lack of this representation).
tony stank isn’t a special snowflake with the only mental illness in the mcu - or an “ugly” one at that, he’s not the only one to play the sacrifice card (seriously he saved manhattan whilst thor has saved the goddamn universe like twice shut up dude), he’s not the only one to have lost people - in fact he’s the reason wanda doesn’t have a fucking family (lmao it’s such bs that he, a weapons manufacturer, didn’t know bad guys could get his stuff until his sorry ass was pulled into it, seriously that’s some naive bs). the difference is he gets movies showing his mental illness, everyone else doesn’t. you mistake our hate for tony stark for hate towards his illnesses, when in fact we hate him because he’s a piece of shit and has been ever since iron man came out in 2008.
