Heroic Histrionics

Tony is a man who spent practically his entire career as a weapon manufacturer nose to nose with a man who was an Airforce representative. One should really consider what kind of effect this has on Tony’s views and vocabulary, at the very least. I mean, the armed forces, every branch of them, use terms and nicknames for things that you never hear from people outside of them, and Tony would have had quite a bit of exposure to them since he seems to respect those in the armed forces far more than his board. Thus, it only makes sense that he would have internalized bits of lingo as he heard it.

What does this have to do with the statement of ‘I am Iron Man’ in the title up there?

Iron, in Airforce vernacular, means bombs. There was no way that Tony was unaware of this, so when he makes that comment in IM1 about ‘Evocative Imagery’ it’s not him thinking about the suit. It’s him thinking about what else the term Iron Man could mean, most likely.

He’s always been the Airforce’s Iron Man. And, if the vernacular holds between Army and Airforce on the use of the words God and Cockroach to apply to weapon dealers, then he might very well have been called the Iron God from time to time. Cockroach, of course, would apply to Hammer since the term God only goes to the highest quality weapon manufacturers. That is definitely not Hammer.

In any case, the term Iron Man and Tony declaring and accepting it so readily has multiple layers of meaning beyond the obvious if taken this way. I am Iron Man he says, but people assume that’s just him going “Yeah, I’m a hero, this is me” but if you look at it from the angle of someone multilingual, in a manner of speaking, then it becomes something else.

I am Iron Man becomes ‘I am the man who made the bombs’.

In this sense, Tony always has been, and always will be, Iron Man, with or without the suit. In another sense, he makes it clear that he and the suit are no different, and if you consider how he acted the first time he went out, he probably has no doubt that he is as dangerous as any piece of armor. He’s killed, by then, deliberately, because there’s no way the people in Gulmira all survived the way he attacked them.

At the end of the first Iron Man movie, you see Rhodey’s reaction to the declaration of being Iron Man. He’s probably the only one in the room who could possibly understand what that declaration could mean and that it could have had multiple layers of meaning at all.

His reaction is delayed, like it takes a moment to really process what he just heard, and it’s not until the rest of the room is in an uproar that he turns a wide-eyed gaze on Tony. I strongly suspect he entirely understood everything Tony meant, and not just the hero parts, even if that was what he was playing up given the media had picked the name Iron Man for entirely different reasons.

So yes, Tony is Iron Man, and there’s really no way to take that away from him, regardless of anything else he is. It’s just a matter of understanding exactly how deep that goes, good and bad.

I’ll just take it from the top and remind everyone that my boy, and consequently my headcanons, are pretty much entirely based on the MCU because I just have no proper working knowledge of any of the comics. That means that if in the comics (by which I mean any of them, looking at you Ults) Tony’s company didn’t run mostly on weapons at any point, well, that doesn’t really have any bearing here.

No, this section is all about reminding people that Tony Stark is one terrifying human being, and he knows it.

See, that’s one thing people forget in the fandom. Yes, he’s treated poorly and villainized by people who aren’t really observing the material from outside the universe, to say nothing of the people who get taken in by his facade inside it. But, and this cannot be stressed enough, that facade exists for a reason. The facade was not an accident. The facade was not a byproduct.

Tony Stark made Tony Stark^TM on purpose. He made it to disarm, to downplay, and in general to make himself less terrifying to the people he was dealing with in both personal and business circles.

You do not want the people you’re making weapons for to look at you and see the person who just gave them a new creative way to destroy a human life. You want them to look at you and see a friend and ally to the cause. You do not want the country you live in to see a monster, you want them to see a patriot who goes a little overboard from time to time.

You don’t want them to see the genius who zipped through college with degrees at the top of his class at seventeen turning that genius largely to ways to make the world a more frightening place.

So Tony was careful, and Tony built the facade. He believed in the cause. He believed he was protecting his country. He thought he was making his dad proud and Obadiah supported that, but Tony still knew.

Tony is not unaware of the fact that when stocks dived after he closed down weapons it was largely the domestic values that crashed, as the company was suddenly being kept afloat by international sales of non-weapon items, sparse as they were. Countries outside of America probably jumped at the idea of this threat suddenly being less of one and were eager to support the cause to keep him from backsliding due to his company going under.

Tony being the mind behind the Avengers, and probably the face that other countries always thought of rather than Steve who was more a story than any real person to foreign governments, was probably a major cause for the Accords. It wasn’t Ultron. He was an excuse. The idea of a Tony Stark without anything to occupy his time, who just could make god knows what and go wherever he pleased with it?

Probably not ideal. Probably terrifying to those countries that remember the man who held the weapons industry in an iron grip for decades.

Thus, it was better to get the man under a licensing system with contracts instead of letting him roam around without anything keeping his feet on the ground. So to speak.

But coming back to the point here. Tony knows all this. He’s a smart man, and he’s a perceptive one. It may not always seem like it, because of the way he and Steve constantly misread one another, but that’s more a matter of body language not matching implied meaning I think and Tony stumbling on it. After all, he had Natasha pegged within minutes of meeting her. He didn’t know what he was noticing, but he noticed none the less.

So given all that, I find it laughable that people look at Tony in the fandom and see a helpless little man who can’t take care of himself. Someone who always needs to be rescued, and who poses no threat on his own.

That makes no sense at all. Even with all the new arrivals, Tony Stark is the one person in the MCU who will never, ever, ever be helpless. Things go wrong, it’s kind of the tone of his life since 2008, but he’ll find a way out of it, through it, and if he has help then all the better. Help is wonderful and cannot be overstated.

However, that help is more of a want than a need for Tony Stark. Yes, help makes everything easier and probably means he comes out dramatically more intact than he otherwise would, but if he didn’t have that help, well, he’d find a method anyway.

Help just means that the method is less likely to mean people die when he gets himself out of whatever mess he’s landed in this time. After all, Tony’s highest personal death tolls were always when he was fighting without anyone at his side. They were always when he was the last one standing or the only one on the scene.

So yeah, Tony Stark? Frighteningly competent, and I’ll thank the world to remember that from time to time.

Okay, so the last week or so I’ve been finding lots of things about Tony’s various disputes with Steve, with Bucky, even with the sun practically.

Basically, it’s Tony and his way of fighting with people that I’ve been thinking about, and I’ve realized something kind of important.

When Tony plans to kill people, he never warns them. He never declares intent. He just does it. That’s what he does to the Ten Rings when he deals with them. It’s how he tackles things in the fight with the Chitauri. Sure, in the latter fight they’re not human, but that’s not the point. When he comes at Loki, he doesn’t tell him he’s going to kill him, he’s not angry. He’s level headed, he’s calculating, and he plays to the strengths of his team.

When he’s furious over Yinsen dying, he doesn't warn them of his intentions, he just goes and does what he’s going to do. The only time he calls anyone out with intent to harm is during the Mandarin situation, and that was less a combat situation than a calculated move to make them come to him.

It’s made me realize that Tony wouldn’t ever threaten to kill someone if he ever intended to actually do so. Instead, his death threats often serve as warnings of how utterly unhappy he is with any given situation. He’s angry, he’s hurt, he’s ready to lash out, yes, but he isn’t actually aiming to kill. Mind, in the Mandarin situation he probably wanted to, but that kind of public declaration?

No, he’s not stupid enough to set himself up as a murderer in the public eye, intent be damned.

So, that brings the question of why I’ve come to decide this applies to all instances of threat. After all, during the fight in Siberia he looked really damn serious, right?

Well, in a way, yes, he definitely was frustrated, upset, hurt, and betrayed and wanted to beat Steve’s ass. Bucky had the misfortune of getting caught in that emotional crossfire with a target on his back because of the video.

However, please remember Tony blasted Steve in the face with a Repulsor. Please remember that the safeties on his chest reactor triggered the ability to blast off someone’s metal arm.

The reactor has, at that point, probably an energy output of 22-25 Gigajoules per second. Allow me to put that in context, shall I? 10 GJ is enough to power a home for a whole year if someone is a bit conservative. His reactor puts out more than twice that every second.

So.

If he wanted those guys dead, his repulsors, powered by the reactor, could have done it. He can go faster than some of the fastest jets on the planet using that technology. People probably don’t think about this, but the amount of pure force needed for that to happen is kind of frightening, and you don’t see people standing behind a jet do you? No.

So, Tony didn’t blow anyone’s face off. He didn’t intentionally blow a hole in anyone. Instead, he fought, with his fists, using his missiles on the roof instead of the other combatants, and in general played a defensive offense. He didn’t go for the kill shots. He could have. He just aimed to hurt in, shall we say, punishment for his own mental state.

Not to say that’s the best way he could have handled it, but it makes more sense than the theory he actually planned to kill anyone.

Just, you know. A thought to think about.

Sometimes I think that people look at Tony Stark and think that his life had to be easy. He’s smart, rich, educated, and had a ton of opportunities, so clearly, to some people, that’s a recipe for a perfect life, right?

That’s not actually how it works.

What he got from his father’s success was money, a legacy, a company, and all the expectations that come of being born late in someone’s life where up until then, the primary person that his parents had to focus on worrying about was themselves. He was born well after habits were established, and when carving time out of a personal schedule for a child was more hassle than joy.

This is what Tony got from his dad, and while the man probably loved him, he’d already lived a decent life and was heading into the tail end of it when Tony came along. He’d had so long build up the image of what a child of his should be like that there was probably no way for Tony to ever actually be that mythical creature that his parents came up with. But he tried. He had the intelligence and the drive to give it a go, and while he didn’t exactly fail, he had no way to know that.

Intelligence is a curse as much as it ever is a blessing. Being that one kid that’s smarter than everyone else is isolating. If the other children aren’t avoiding you, they’re trying to get close to you to get you to help them to further themselves. It’s not just children either. Teenagers, adults, it doesn’t matter when it comes down to it. People see someone different than themselves, and they isolate. Humanity doesn’t tolerate different when different isn’t useful, and Tony thus learned that the only way to be acceptable was to give when people asked, to help when someone came calling, because otherwise, he would go from useful to outsider, and being an outsider is brutal.

He moved too fast through school, made no real friends as a child, and hit MIT by 15. The only friend it’s noted that he came away from that is Rhodey. What about others? Shouldn’t there be more, if he led a charmed life shouldn’t he have friends trailing back to his young childhood? But that’s not the case. You never hear about him keeping contact with anyone from when he was young other than Rhodey. You never see him holding onto friends he didn’t hire.

Part of this is doubtless because he’s rich. How can you be sure of your friends if only happen to be around you because your money got them there? Can you imagine living that kind of life? Never being sure of who wants near you because of who your parents are, how much money you have, or the business you’ll be in when you’re older, and the rare people who actually want to get to know you for who you are?

When people expect things, and you give them, and keep giving them, it becomes hard to see when you’ve stopped doing it because it’s expected of you and because you want to. Obadiah is a prime case of this. The man was a master manipulator and got to Tony when he was vulnerable, played off their relationship and took control of Tony. He used the expectations against him and made him useful, pressed the point and made sure that Tony never doubted his value was in what he could do, not in who he was.

Tony grew up in this kind of environment, in a world where people he could trust at face value were practically nonexistent, and his only stable platform for basis was in what he could give the world, his friends, his family. He was smart enough people expected miracles, but he didn’t understand how those other people didn’t understand things how he did, and knew they didn’t understand him. It made him excellent at managing people at a distance, and he learned ways to cope and navigate, to use what people expected to give them what they wanted or needed from him.

It didn’t teach him how to trust. It didn’t teach him how to relate to people less intelligent than himself. It didn’t teach him to be open and clear with his motives and feelings.

It taught him to always search for the hidden meanings. If there weren’t any, he would keep picking at it, looking for it, and that is something that’s been reinforced over and over. Every time he’s dared to trust, something has happened to make him doubt his own perception of events. Very few people have escaped this.

And this was before Afghanistan even happened. This was when he was still being a playboy, being that rich man who was a glorious people pleaser and had no apparent substance.

That peoples’ views on him seemed to never change after he became a hero in a lot of ways? Not that shocking to Tony. People don’t like change. People like things that are comfortable, and he’s as much an example of this as a victim to it.

So no, having things, having reputation, having money, and having intelligence? These things do not make a life easy to live.

And somehow I keep noticing that people don’t really see that.

Tony Stark is a man with a long reach and even better eyes. He sees how things can go in the world along certain paths. He makes choices based on what he can see, and this moves are usually sweeping, huge, and at a cost to himself.

Even when he was an arms dealer his eyes were on this bigger picture. Unfortunately, he was also an optimist. He believed that people had good intentions, and he thought that keeping his home, in this case, the USA, safe was enough. He thought that giving the armed forces what they needed to do that would be right and good and nothing bad would happen.

Then it did, and he took responsibility for it as soon as he knew.

When Tony makes mistakes, he always takes responsibility for them, big or small. He doesn’t tell anyone he’s dying? Next time a situation like that comes up, he doesn’t make the same mistake. He tells the relevant parties he’s not-dead.

He learns from his mistakes and tries to not make them again.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of mistakes he can make, and he’s a man afraid of the horrors he can see coming for the world.

And that, my friends, is where it all goes to hell. Tony Stark feels like the whole world is under his responsibility. He feels that the whole world is who he needs to bear up and take care of, to be the image for and the one they stomp down.

Why?

Because he is a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist. I think people like to throw that phrase around and don’t stop to think about what it means that that is how Tony self-identifies when the Hero pieces are stripped away. Let me break that down for you shall I?

Genius. The actual definition of the word is as thus: exceptional intellectual or creative power or other natural ability. Tony is every part of this. He is an intellectual that knows he’s near the top of the ladder, that finding others at or above his level is difficult. He is a creator. He’s made wonders and horrors both. He’s used his strengths both for the world and unintentionally against it. He knows this is not a small burden to bear. He knows he can do more, and think of more, than some people ever dream. It just is what it is and he’s never going to forget it for an instant.

Billionaire. Why is this one important? Because he’s rich? Because he has money and thinks that makes him better? No. He doesn’t think he’s better. He just knows he has resources. He knows what he can do with them. He knows that they’re important and not on a personal level. He employs, even if he no longer runs the company, people all around the world. He directly touches those lives and makes opportunities, influences policy, and his words carry weight. Money always speaks, and his speaks very loudly.

Playboy. Tony knows his reputation, his past, will never be shaken. People will always assume that his sleeping around and partying are the most important faces he has to present the world even if that’s not as true as it once was. He knows that he has to go above and beyond for people to see past the flippant facade and the mistakes that he’s made on a personal level over and over again, at one point without caring. They come back to bite him in the ass, as Killian proved, so it’s not as though they’re inconsequential. It doesn’t mean there also wasn’t a benefit to it, and he met a lot of people in his life that way.

Philanthropist. Going back to definitions here: a person who seeks to promote the welfare of others, especially by the generous donation of money to good causes. Tony sees himself that way. Tony is not a man who does half measures. If he thinks that he does this, that this is something that’s part of his core self, then that means that he does it big, and he does it often. Tony wants to help people. Tony fights to make the world better. Tony just doesn’t always know how.

As a Hero, Tony has literally laid his own life at the feet of the people. He’s taken on things he shouldn’t have on his own, and he’s fought to make himself into a person the public is willing to accept in that role. It’s heavy, it’s hard, and he’s willing, no matter how much it hurts, to keep going. He needs to keep going because it’s the most direct path to use what he has to offer to fix things.

Nothing says the rest stopped. Nothing says he doesn’t burn at both ends trying to work from both the public hands-on angle and the private, hands off anonymous one. Nothing even remotely hints that he no longer sees himself as he saw himself in that argument.

No, he’s just made more mistakes, stepped up his game, and reached too far. And it bit him. It nearly snapped off his fingers and he learned. And then he acted. He won’t ever stand by as his mistakes cause harm. He’ll always step up and take the plate for it. He’ll never brush it off onto anyone else, even if sometimes it wasn’t as much his fault as he believed it was.

Tony Stark always admits his mistakes, even if no one is around to hear it, and he always, always does his level best to fix them.

Eventually, that didn't work out, but it didn't stop him from doing it anyway.