Heroic Histrionics

Please note that in 2010 Tony was dying and thus his naming approach was slightly broken. Also, only AI interfaces get long names. Obviously. Except for Karen because Tony let Peter name her. Bots, on the other hand, just clung to whatever they found funny and started responding to, to Tony's dismay. Also, this only counts kids he had a hand in making, not adoptees.

Dum-E: March 15th, 1987
JARVIS (Just A Really Very Intelligent System): April 12th, 1991
Butterfingers: July 27th, 1994
U: November 17th, 1996
FRIDAY (Feedback Rerouting Interface Disrupting Arbitrary Yelling): February 27th, 2010 (Not the day she was integrated into active systems, that was in 2015 on May 5th, the day she was initially finished)
TADASHI (Technologically And Digitally Applied System Home Interface): April 3rd, 2010 (Finished but unactivated)
JOCASTA (Jurisdiction Over Calls And Secretary Traffic Absurdities): December 15th, 2010 (Finished but unactivated)
Veronica: August 9th, 2014
Ultron (Unassisted Lead Technology Reliant On Nothing): May 4th, 2015
Vision: May 5th, 2015
Karen: August 7th, 2016
Edith (Even Dead I'm The Hero): March 10th. 2018
Morgan Roberta Stark: November 16th, 2019 (and named by her mother Pepper.)

As we all know, I periodically overthink things. In this case, my overthinking is from me seeing a discussion a couple of months ago about Pepper, her likely canon age, and what it means for her having a baby.

On the one side, people had excellent points about how if she was Tony’s age that that could be dangerous. I mean, that’s a real-world concern. Of all character arcs, Tony’s tends to address that the most so it makes sense that people who write Tony and Pepper would take this into account more than most. On the other side seemed to be people who didn’t care so much about those concerns, and just wanted to enjoy their writing in their own ways, which was entirely fair. Something about that argument seemed incomplete to me though. I mean, it makes no sense for Tony to canonly push for a baby if he thought it would be dangerous to Pepper, right?

So, rather than jumping into the discussion when I saw it, I put it aside to let myself muse over it for a while, sorting out what needed to be sorted for it all to make sense.

Which, I have to say, worked out splendidly.

The answer is incredibly obvious, and I think the only reason it didn’t come up in the debate I saw is incredibly simple. People undervalue IM3. They mentally skim over and forget about the plot points because they didn’t like what the movie had to say about Tony, Pepper, their relationship, and what PTSD means for both sufferers and the family therein.

It’s understandable that the superhero parts of the plot got lost in the cracks because of this.

Namely, Extremis.

Guys.

Extremis.

You know, the DNA optimization that fixes all health issues?

You know, the thing that made Killian go from rickety depressed stalker to incredibly healthy persuasive stalker? Albeit with fire-breathing thrown in.

Yeah, so that’s a canon thing Pepper had happen. Basically, any wear and tear from being an older woman would have been washed clean, bringing her to her optimal state of health as an adult. Even if the Extremis was removed when it was fixed, it didn’t suddenly make her body more aged again. As of 2018, that was not even six years ago.

Basically, Pepper is a woman as old as her late 40s living in the body of someone in their mid to late 20s.

In other words, Tony’s got a very excellent partner for having babies with right now. She was already ideal for him on a mental level, and now that he’s settled down enough to look at the baby thing with ‘yes please’ eyes, she’s physically in a good place to do it because of the whole revitalizing effect of the Extremis.

Ultimately, it’s down to if Pepper wants to go for it, rather than if Pepper can.

And that, my friends, concludes this overthinking session.

Now, we all know that Tony has the tendency to adopt kids in his sphere of influence. This is true of MCU Tony, Comic Tony, and Cartoon Tony. I, of course, will only be speaking for MCU Tony here as I don’t handle those, but I’ve seen it in gifs as well as panels, and I’d like to clarify that behavior for everyone given something that I don’t think people think about too much.

Obadiah Stane.

No, hear me out. It’s important.

Whether you ascribe to the idea of the Jarvises being alive in Tony’s childhood or not, we can all agree that when Tony lost his parents, he probably did not handle it remotely well. He’d lost his parent figures in one fell swoop, leaving him with a company that he was barely finished being educated enough to take on, and a fortune that he probably had no idea how to handle at all.

In the instance of the Jarvis couple having been alive when Tony was young, it’s very likely that they died at some point before his parents did due to issues that came with age. After all, one should keep in mind that of all the parent figures in Tony’s life, most of them were from the same era. All save one were born early enough to serve in WWII, to be adults in WWII. Even Peggy, the youngest of the five between the Jarvises and Starks, was still only a few years younger than Steve.

Most people just don’t live past their 70s, in good health or not, if they had a rough start to life. Ana, at the very least, was rescued from her country of origin, and we all know that Howard wasn’t exactly the most careful man. That he lived to his 70′s at all was probably a miracle. It’s possible that Maria was younger, possibly even as young as her 50′s, but her and Howard died together, as we all know, so that’s a moot point.

What it all comes down to is that those four possible parent figures were gone before Tony was ready to be independent of them, and for my Tony, in particular, this is even worse since it all happened by the time he was 17. For most versions of the man, there was a four-year buffer more, but it still comes down to one thing.

The only person he was able to rely on was Obadiah Stane. Obie. His mentor and touchstone. Even in the timelines people have where Peggy was his godmother, she was busy with SHIELD at that time, to say nothing of the fact she was much older than Obadiah. When he died in IM1, he was 60 years old. That makes him a good 30 years younger than any other parent figure in Tony’s life.

It makes him more relatable, the age gap less extreme. It makes it easier to see why and how the man, who would have been in his late thirties or early 40s on the deaths of the Starks, was in a perfect position to just… step in.

He was a mentor, and even if he turned on Tony in the end, he still put a lot of time and care into making sure that Tony didn’t completely self-destruct before then, and would be an active and productive asset to the company. Put bluntly, he was more of a parent to Tony than Howard ever acted, simply because he stayed involved, showed he cared, even if that might have been largely a lie.

In Tony’s mind, even if he never thinks about it, that’s how it works. Your Mentor becomes another parent in your life. They take care of your best interests even when you don’t because someone needs to be the responsible party. They fill a gap where a parent should be and isn’t, either because they’re dead or just were never around.

So for Tony, the line is a little hazy between a parent and a mentor. They fill the same role in someone’s life, and even if one gets the title of dad, that doesn’t make the other one less important. It doesn’t make them less valuable.

And, most importantly from Tony’s perspective, it doesn’t make the responsibility any less heavy.

A mentor is just a parent who chose to be there, in Tony’s mind, so of course he’s going to act like it. He won’t be his dad, failing at every turn. He won’t be Obadiah who made him doubt himself and depend on him more and more until he was tied up in knots. He won’t even be Edwin who was proper but a little distant because he didn’t feel it was his place to be a parent. He’ll be himself, and he’ll take the best of what he ever saw in his parent figures, the bits of them that he most cherished, and he’ll offer that to the kids he takes under his wing.

He’ll be the best damn mentor he can be, and if that looks a hell of a lot like ‘dad’ to everyone else, well. That’s just how Tony Stark rolls.

I got off onto a rant in conversation about how people don’t tend to want to recognize Tony’s PTSD as what it is, and it spiraled down into a dizzying mess where all I could think was that yes, Howard Stark is irrefutable of Jewish stock, and this has dramatically affected how Tony approaches and handles the world.

Now, I haven’t read the comics, but I do know a few things just from talking to those who have and interacting with characters from that universe. From those people, I know that Tony is an alcoholic over there. He comes from a family who already had money when his dad became a businessman. He’s got blue eyes and black hair that he inherited, along with height, from his dad. He’s got hella self-esteem issues and a bit of a god complex that is worse in some timelines than others.

Pretty much every bit of that is different in the MCU.

First, I would like to present you guys with something that Howard said to Peggy during the Agent Carter run, as a basis for some of the speculation that sparked off into this greater analysis:

“I grew up on the Lower East Side. My father sold fruit. My mother sewed shirtwaists for a factory. Let me tell you, you don’t get to climb the American ladder without picking up some bad habits on the way. There’s a ceiling for certain types of people based on how much money your parents have, your social class, your religion, your sex. And the only way to break through that ceiling sometimes is to lie, so that’s my natural instinct to lie. I shouldn’t have lied to you. For that, trust me, I am truly sorry.”

So, firstly, a little history. The Lower East Side was always an immigrant area, but especially when Howard was a kid in the MCU’s timeline, it was largely a Jewish community. Howard, especially when he’s young, very much has that look, with brown hair and dark eyes, so it’s not farfetched to believe that he was among this group of people. How he describes his parents in this little monologue only solidifies the likelihood of this being true.

This, in turn, ultimately led to Howard putting away any lingering religious beliefs he had so he could focus on who, and what, he needed to be to get somewhere in the social climate of the time. It took him luck, skill, and no small amount of creativity to go from a poor Jewish boy to successful American inventor and national staple.

That’s not to say Tony never knew. I can’t imagine he never asked about his heritage, and even if Howard didn’t tell him, it’s very likely that one of the Jarvises did, so that Tony could make his own decision about how to handle the situation. Clearly, he chose to not follow that faith, but that doesn’t mean it has no impact on his life as a greater whole.

Howard Stark, in a world where he knew hardship and didn’t have his business handed to him, or funds ready to access, would have learned to work for it. He would have learned that you can’t just expect things to happen by themselves and that you had to be patient to get what you wanted. Basically, he learned that nothing comes for free, and I suspect this is a lesson the Howard Stark of the 616 universe never learned, and subsequently took out on his son.

MCU Tony hasn't abused the same way 616 Tony was. Neglected by a busy father, certainly, but there was no doubting that Howard in the MCU wasn’t framed in a way that makes him turning into an alcoholic make any sense. He wasn’t a rich businessman who spent his free time drinking around. He was a guy who turned his spare time into running a spy organization where he had to keep his focus. He was definitely a tough man that learned to not be affectionate, yes. Absentminded and distracted, in spades. Harsh and loud? Unfortunately likely. However, he wouldn’t have expected Tony to be perfect the way 616 Howard did. He grew up knowing that you have to work hard to overcome life’s pitfalls, and I expect he did his best to pass that along to Tony, whatever his failings might have been.

Tony didn’t let things sit, even when he was off making a mess of himself going from place to place and party to party, he still kept bettering himself, and building up the company. This is simply true, given the way his history is presented in the MCU. Yes, he was reckless, and it’s clear he did grow up with money, which had an effect on him, but he also had those niggling values that pushed him to keep advancing, keep improving.

And, of course, once the guilt got triggered off, to take responsibility with no further prompting and take care of the whole freaking world. Interesting note here about that. Tony could have let SHIELD cover for him. They wanted to, they set him up to. Tony couldn’t do it. Tony had to take the reigns and say ‘no, this is me, I’m doing these things’. I suspect this was also because of his heritage, in part, and a need to say ‘look at me’ while simultaneously pinning a sign on himself saying ‘I’m responsible.’

And, of course, let it not be said that the change in Tony’s looks can’t come from a change in his dad as well, but that, at least, is fairly straightforward. Ultimately, it’s all a shift in priorities, a shift in what he found acceptable and didn’t because of the change in the examples he was given as a child that makes MCU Tony so different from 616, when it comes down to it.

They’re the same guy, yes, but they’re also different guys, with different issues and different priorities. So, that’s about all I have to say about that.