Heroic Histrionics

Tony Stark is, by and large, a character known for his verbosity, his way with people, and his facades. So, this section will go into those things and touch on exactly what he thinks of himself when he throws around phrases like ‘genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist’ at people. There will also be a detour into his sexuality and why I pin it in the direction I do.

First, his four-word byline, his go to in the face of insult, and his guiding light when reaching for a shield of his own. ‘genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist’. This isn’t a self-praise. This is Tony holding up a line that’s been aimed at him over and over for years and going ‘don’t you know? This is who I am’.

Genius, because Tony is a genius. His brilliance is undisputed and has long been touted as his best feature, and never let him fool you that he’s not aware of that. He’s long been taught, unintentionally through family and the media, more intentionally through Obadiah and those like him, that if he wasn’t smart, he’d be less valuable. This is, in some ways, even later perpetuated by the Avengers on accepting gear without, in some cases, seeming to even properly get to know him.

Billionaire is self-explanatory. Everyone knows Tony has money. Because they know he has money they expect him to use it, and to be out of touch. He contributes funds to everything in the team, and without his money, he wouldn’t have had nearly as many resources to make his suits from. He can live in comfort and he knows it, but he also knows many people only see the money and where it came from before anything else.

Playboy. This one is both a point of pride and a point to sigh over by Tony I think. On the one hand, he put a lot of effort into being approachable, and in making sure that his partners never feel cheated by the experience when he leaves him.

And then we have Philanthropist. I always found it interesting it’s the last thing on the list. It’s the thing he adds for himself, that he is but that he doesn’t tend to talk about. It’s the thing people rarely are willing to admit to like the other three, and the one that he’s most proud of. So on the one hand, he wants it to be the one that lingers in the mind, but he also knows it won’t be.

So, above I mention Tony’s tendency to please his partners. There is more to the playboy thing. I think there is genuine proof that while Tony is incredibly reactive, he’s not actually in it for the sex. Thus, asexual. With Christine, for example, he puts his proposition forward in a relatively tactful way but uses it as a deflection. Similarly, with Maya, he seems genuinely more interested in the science until she makes an overture, at which point he’s willingly distracted.

Meanwhile, with Pepper, he never moved in for the kiss. No, this is important. It’s not because he didn’t like the idea of kissing her, but he was letting her determine when and if it will happen. The only reason he moved in for the rooftop kiss was exhilaration, but the immediate ‘is this okay?!’ is actually quite important. Everything we see shows even if he expresses any kind of interest, he only follows through on turning it from friendly to sexual if the other person first shows that they want to treat it that way.

It’s all very passive, and not something someone whose interest is sexual would probably default to when dealing with interested parties. Especially when it wouldn’t be difficult at all to be more forward and get a favorable reaction. Of course, none of this is concrete proof of his inclinations, but it makes sense given, in my head at least, that he’s a man who is easily distracted from sex with thoughts of science and can easily live without sex as much as with it without giving it a thought.

I also have him flagged down as a polyromantic person. That isn’t as obvious as it looks. While yes, my Tony is happy with Poly relationships, in this instance it’s more that gender has no real impact at all to his romantic inclinations. The actual definition of the flag for it is as such: Polyromantic is a term which is typically used by open-minded people who was to disregard the idea that there are only two sexes or genders (male & female).

I feel this very much fits Tony.

Now, for something a little lighter but no less important. Tony talking.

No, bear with me. Tony talking is important. As seen in Civil War, he talks. A lot. Natasha noticed something was wrong in his silence and Steve just… failed to get it, instead making a smart remark about how Tony had his mind made up. While true, that wasn’t the reason he was quiet.

Tony has a long history of silence when something is wrong. He wasn’t silent because of the Accords. He was silent because he’d had the death of a young philanthropist shoved in his face. Tony presents it as a reason, rather than something that pains him, and the others just don’t get it.

Tony’s silences cover for him when he doesn’t trust himself to talk, when he might risk giving away a soft spot or saying something too personal. They mean something is wrong more often than not, and this applies to all situations. If something is off in the bedroom, it’s very unlikely he’ll say anything, and he’ll instead just ease back into more passive behaviors. If he’s dying then he won’t say a word and wait for people to notice. If he’s hurt, he’ll watch, and wait, and work around it.

His silences cover distress. That’s not to say that’s his only reaction to things being wrong, just his most common, and it’s something to keep in mind. After all, he did ask Pepper, then Natasha, for alternate choices about his birthday in IM2. That was an alternate version of silence, where he skips around the topic and hopes to get out of something he doesn’t really want to do. He ends up doing it anyway because he can’t make himself clear.

Part of that is because his facade is such that silence just seems like he’s holding himself aloof, but part of it is that I rather think he simply doesn’t know how to convey things that he finds so very important when he’s not sure other people would find them equally so.

It’s easy to talk someone into fighting hunger when hunger is a tangible, visible thing. It’s harder to talk someone around to letting you have a quiet birthday.

Okay you lot, I have something to tell all of you out there that seem to be under the impression that because Shuri’s tech is amazing and advanced more quickly than Tony’s that that makes her more intelligent than he is. Now, I’m not saying she’s not brilliant, because I’m sure she’s one of the most intelligent characters in the series, and might even surpass Tony, but that is the wrong thing to base it off of.

You see, Shuri is from Wakanda. Shuri had a privileged upbringing in that she was from the most advanced country in the world. She didn’t start at black and yellow monitors and floppy disks. No, she started in at least a modern footing of technology, if not further, and built on that. She already had the code to build on. She had the foundation to build on.

Tony did not. Tony had his dad’s work, which had some intuitive leaps, but most of those Howard locked away and never shared with the world, let alone with his son. No, largely, in this comparison, Tony pioneered in a country that was well behind the curve by Wakanda standards. In fact, let me frame this differently.

Tony’s achievements put against Shuri’s is like putting a kid going to school in a high-end New York special school with all the bells and whistles and new computers and a huge budget against that kid who has to order everything online in high stakes eBay auctions because their school has two computers for the entire student population and their budget is approximately three dollars a student for the entirety of a student’s school career. In this particular comparison, Tony is a kid bringing enough money from home to actually manage those auctions so he can build his school projects, but he’s still being taught at a much lower standard while having to make up the difference entirely out of his own resourcefulness. The kid at the high-end fancy New York school, on the other hand, has everything they need at their fingertips, and the struggle simply isn’t there.

And I think that’s where people are losing the plot. Shuri is a brilliant, innovative girl, who has done amazing things with the specialization that her country’s access to Vibranium has allowed her. That doesn’t put her above or below the guy who had to claw his way up from boxy computers that only did anything if you input them with a floppy bit of plastic that barely had any information on it to being the creator of multiple AI consciousnesses (one of which he developed in the late 80s when the internet was still a bit of a joke no less), up to what he’s done now.

So guys, please. Be happy about Shuri, she’s amazing, but don’t point at Tony and laugh while you do, because that’s not a fair comparison to either character. Shuri couldn’t do what she does without someone in Wakanda being what Tony is for his country before her.

Remember that.

Tony and Happy's Relationship

Happy and Tony have known each other a long time, actually longer than he’s known Pepper. He ended up getting a bodyguard when he was 24 after he got picked up at a party and didn’t have anyone with him to notice that he hadn’t actually wanted to go with the person on his own. It was a mess, and it made him paranoid enough that he felt like he needed another set of eyes on him because he couldn’t rely on his own.

Because of this, when he met Happy he was really open to the idea of actually trying to trust someone to watch out for him that was new. Hilariously, Happy wasn’t actually trying to get a job with Tony when they met. In fact, he was working on getting an instructor gig at a local gym, and Tony sort of slipped in and was all ‘so tell me how good you really are at this stuff’ and that turned into an impromptu interview that Happy hadn’t been remotely prepared for.

Tony liked what he saw and talked the man into being his bodyguard, his sometimes driver if he’d been drinking, and his general eyes to make sure nothing fucked up happened that he didn’t want to have happen. They spent a lot of time together after that and realized that they actually liked each other’s sense of humor, and Tony’s tendency to get himself into weird situations was enough to keep Happy on his toes without being overwhelmed.

It really screwed with Happy’s head to go from constantly needed guardian angel, close friend, and confidant, to just another guy in Tony’s life who didn’t have a clear purpose. Tony regrets that, but a lot of their relationship was based on Tony needing that backup, that person to keep him out of trouble, and that’s not his life anymore.

They’re still friends, and Happy understands that watching over Pepper is just as important to Tony as watching over Tony had been back when they met, but they aren’t as close, and they don’t share the kind of secrets they used to. Happy isn’t with Tony every step of the way on the social scene anymore, and Tony no longer wants Happy to try to protect him, because his threats are a lot more dangerous these days than someone trying to drug his drink.

It’s put a strain on it, though they care a lot about each other, and Tony will always trust Happy unshakably. He was there through a lot of shit that even Rhodey never saw, even if he heard about it after the fact, and that leaves a mark.

As for the best memory between them? For Tony, at least, it was at one party, and the music was loud in the next room and they’d just made their way away from the crowd because Tony wasn’t feeling the best, and Happy just sat him on the couch, then sat next to him in the empty room and told Tony that he didn’t regret meeting him, and he was happy to be there. Tony never forgot that, and on days when he hesitates or wonders if he ever did anything good for anybody in his life, he remembers how sincere Happy was that day and lets the thoughts go.

Steve: Is this the first time you lost a soldier?
Tony: We are not soldiers.

Okay, I want everyone to take a moment and really think about the expression on Tony’s face vs the one on Steve’s.

I’m not entirely sure what’s going through Steve’s head during this scene, but one thing I’m clear on is that he considers fighting units to always be a soldier situation, if only because that’s how it was presented to him, and he was trained in that way of thinking. You’re either a soldier or a civilian, and there’s not really an in between. It makes sense that he can’t see why Tony wouldn’t look at it that way himself, given where they are and the obviously military nature of it.

Tony, on the other hand, could never see it that way. He grew up in the modern era, with the layers of aid workers and civilian volunteer units. He’s had close ties with the military basically all his life, but he’s always been a step removed from it and he’s known that. It’s a situation where all the question did was remind him that the answer was yes and they weren’t even technically his. Soldiers died in Afghanistan, for him, a civilian, and he’ll never forget that he was not trained for that kind of combat. He’ll always remember he’s a step removed and valuable for things that mean he’d never be able to consider a soldier’s life as a viable option because he could never keep himself limited to that kind of system with a clear conscience.

Tony has probably idealized the idea of a soldier in some ways, because they’re people who have devoted themselves entirely to the defense of their country, and he respects that. He also knows that soldiers follow orders, and if there’s one thing that the Avengers team has never been terribly good at, especially when they were first forming up, it was the order aspect of things.

Tony also knows that none of these things apply to him, and that’s upsetting overtop of the loss of Phil and the reminder of those soldiers he did lose during one of the most traumatic events in his life. So that’s why the notion of being called a soldier, even indirectly the way Steve did it, scraped him so immediately and viciously raw.

And that's ignoring the vastly different social climate around soldiers themselves given that Steve's war was not the smaller local disputes that Tony was raised with. But that's another thing altogether.

In my opinion at least.

Tony: It was supposed to learn slang, not go insane.
Bruce: You're assuming it did.
Tony: Look, we both know the guy has anger issues, which, not to point a finger-
Bruce: We told him to solve the world.

One thing that always gets me about this, when I hear about it? Tony’s coming from the position that ‘This one, among all the AIs I’ve ever created, is the only one trying to kill us all. You’re the main factor of what changed.’ Which is true. Tony looked at Bruce and went ‘I can see you in him, not just me’ and Bruce immediately tries to justify it.

What kills me though, is that Ultron wasn’t finished. He hadn’t had anything like a proofreading. He was incomplete, and all the loose ends and bits of code that shouldn’t have been in the final creation were still present. So yeah, I can see why Tony used the word crazy. Ultron was acting on logic, yes, but it was a broken logic that ignored the spirit of the thing for the exact thing.

That’s a programming flaw and Tony calls it madness, which I think had been his way of excusing Bruce for his part in the debacle because when you’re programming a sentient being, you try not to give it things like this, because they cause this kind of issue. This is the kind of issue that comes of giving something an exact, inescapable purpose. But Bruce doesn’t accept it being called madness, so Tony points out what else it must be.

The only AIs in the MCU that show this demented set of issues? Well, they’re the only two that were on screen programmed with parameters that clearly and indisputably gave them a purpose. They were the two that were told, in code, that they had to do it to the exclusion of anything else. Honestly, it kind of makes me wonder if that ‘we’ in that last bit wasn’t more of an ‘I’ instead because Bruce realized his mistake. Yeah, Tony may have had that purpose in mind… but I expect he’d planned to teach it, not hardwire it in.

Bruce, brilliant man that he is, probably didn’t understand that. After all, this is his first AI kid. He wouldn’t have known. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t have mentioned something to Tony, nor that he shouldn’t have tried to defend his choices when they came to light, but it does give him the excuse that he simply didn’t know better. Not everyone has a passel of AI children in their repertoire, after all.

Still, in this, Tony knew what he was talking about, and sometimes I have to wonder if people miss that because this ended up not being in the main video. Tony takes all the blame for Ultron, yes, but it makes me step back and consider how much of the blame he feels isn’t along the lines of ‘I should have stepped in while I had the chance’ instead of ‘I made him badly’.

Natasha: Are you incapable of letting go of your ego for one goddamn second?

The big thing that really gets me about this scene is the subtext. It’s loud, it’s uncomfortable, and it smacks of Natasha trying to go through Tony to get him to fix the situation by caving in when her efforts to get Steve to do so already failed.

It’s not about ego. It’s not even about the Accords and what it stands for.

It’s about Natasha not picking a side.

In this situation, Natasha sat on the fence because she didn’t want the group to break up, and it’s not even a secret that this is the case either. She tells Steve that all she wants is to have everyone together, regardless of what together entails. She has a family, and she already lost Bruce because of her own actions, to say nothing of Thor vanishing to parts unknown and not returning. It’s pretty easy to see that she doesn’t want to risk anyone else finding somewhere out of her reach to be.

So, when she runs low on options and her manipulation of the situation isn’t up to standard, she decides that she’ll take the road that means that everyone might be in trouble because trying to get everyone on the side of not trouble clearly didn’t work.

Which means hitting Tony, who she has seen at his lowest because she can count on Tony to give in if she just figures out how to do it. She knows it’s not about ego. She knows all of this is about trying to do what’s best for the world, and in spite of all that, she really doesn’t care.

To Natasha, the world isn’t what’s important now that everything has started falling apart. No, in this situation her not losing everyone is what matters. If that means going through Tony and stomping over wounds she knows are still bleeding then she’ll do it. Ego was the cause of Ultron in Tony’s mind, and she knows that. It’s why people died, why JARVIS died.

So yeah, she’s using that pain, not even two years gone, to try to force him to change his position when he feels it’s honestly the best one for the world, regardless of personal cost.

That, my friends, is what this scene really means because Tony knows that’s her position. And there’s absolutely nothing he can do about it.