In which I have opinions
Goofiest fannish thing of the month I did: going to the Star Wars: Identies exhibition which is currently here in Munich and taking pictures of the Ahsoka Tano part of it.
( Under the cut )
( Under the cut )
And you know, it's not that you can't be a person like this and still have social anxiety - in fact it's pretty clear that a lot of Tony's behavior comes down to unaddressed anxieties and other emotional issues. But it's not because he's incapable of interacting with people, or unaware of their emotions. There's a tendency in fandom to assume that because Tony has emotional issues, that he's unable to address them and that therefore anyone expecting him to react to stressors like an adult is a monster (I got told that I was "scary" for saying that Tony's PTSD does not excuse his decision to attack Steve at the end of the movie). But if anything, he comes off as a man who is perfectly aware of his problems, and of the conventional means of addressing them, and is choosing not to do that. He could hire the best psychiatrist in New York in an instant. Instead he chooses to use an unwilling Bruce as a shrink, or spend millions on a memory-altering technology, or, most obviously, build a metal suit. I don't see anything in his behavior to suggest that this is not a conscious decision.
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Oh absolutely. I mean, I do think he's become more aware post Afghanistan than pre Afghanistan, but not because pre-Afghanistan, he was incapable of it. Plus it's pretty clear he uses the obliviousness thing when it suits him. Minor case in point: when Maya first shows up on his doorstep, he pretends not to know her, but a moment later introduces her by name to Pepper (without Maya having said her name in between) but by saying "please tell me there's no twelve years boy in the car outside" shows he knows exactly when he'd last seen her. And the fanon that he didn't have friendships pre Avengers, or only one sided relationships with people on his payroll, is just bewildering. Rhodey has known Tony since they were at MIT together (i.e. late teenage years), never worked for him, frequently disagrees with him and in fact has retained far more of a non-Tony life than Sam has been shown to have a non-Steve life post Winter Soldier. Even with people who do work for him: Tony knows that, say, Happy Hogan is a big Downton Abbey fan, which is the kind of trivia you recall about a friend, not about someone eternally nanny-ing you, which is how all too often Tony's social circle gets written in fanfiction.
I mean, this infantilizing of a character is hardly unique to this fandom - I remember Blake's 7 fanfiction in which both Vila and miraculously surviving Blake basically apologize to Avon for his attempts to kill them because they didn't understand his trauma! -, but it still grates.
All this aside, on another note: I didn't have the impression he was trying to kill Steve at the end of the movie. He was certainly trying to kill Bucky. Which is absolutely in line with the Tony who responded to Happy Hogan in the hospital with giving the Mandarin his address and basically challenging him to a duel so he could kill him. (Kill, not arrest and imprison, was the announced intention. Now what he'd have done if there had been a real Mandarin instead of Trevor is another question, because that was several days and time to think later, but the immediate reaction certainly was the intention to kill.)
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In terms of Tony's actions at the end of the movie, I think that if you're trying to get through Steve Rogers with the intent of killing his best friend, you're pretty much by definition trying to kill him. I agree that Tony probably didn't articulate that intention to himself, but I also think he knew what he was about - that fight doesn't look as if either of them is holding back, because they're not the sort of people who do hold back. (This, by the way, is my big problem with involving Peter in his fight - not so much that Peter is a child, though that is also a huge problem, but that everyone else in that fight is a killer, and except for Scott and maybe T'Challa, they're all people who are very comfortable with killing. That puts Peter at a huge disadvantage that he probably wasn't even aware of.)
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(Incidentally, a case could be made that Natasha, who like Tony has not been informed by Team Steve about the Zemo issue, wouldn't have minded if T'Challa had killed Bucky at this point, but I haven't seen anyone making it. She clearly changes her mind later on this issue, of course.)
At this point, neither Tony or Natasha know that Bucky has been framed, or that there is a third party involved. They do know that he went into Winter Soldier mode again, and that Steve and Sam helped him escape, and that Clint and Wanda just left the Compound, with no prices to guessing they're going to back up Steve. The goal here to them is making an arrest that keeps their friends alive, as opposed Ross sending the army after them. It's not unreasonable to suppose that a) their friends won't attack them with lethal force, and b) could be talked into surrendering. (Because if you don't know yet that there's a possible supervillain plan involving Winter Soldiers afoot, the question is simply Bucky, who has just, again, as far as they know, demonstrated why he really shouldn't be left to roam at large.)
Later, after Peter has gotten and lost Steve's shield, his first action at the air port fight, asks Tony what to do, and Tony replies "like we discussed, keep your distance and web them up". Which sounds like Peter was supposed to not engage in combat with anyone but do his shooting webs from a distance thing to immobilize and disarm them. Now don't get me wrong: none of this changes Peter's age. Or the fact that Tony should have guessed that telling a teenager who's already spent half a year as a vigilante to keep his distance and stick to disarming, not fighting, is wasted breath. Not to mention that even if he could trust Steve, Sam and Clint (he didn't know about Scott) not to go for a killing stroke, he had no such certainty about Bucky. But if you want to bring someone to a fight where the primary goal isn't to kill your opponents but to disarm and immobilize then, Spider-Man with his abilities is actually a good choice (good as in effective, not good as in morally right). Especially if the main person to be disarmed and immoblized is Captain America, since Steve seems to be the one Tony actually had told Peter go after (or rather, his shield and his legs).
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The kindest interpretation of this is that fandom skews young, and is mostly made up of people who are early in their own paths to adult self-awareness, and project that onto Tony despite the text showing a different situation. It also skews female, and not recognizing the power you have over your own emotional well-being is a well-attested symptom of internalized misogyny. (Less sympathetically, you could argue that by willfully misreading the evidence that Tony has the awareness and the ability to address one's problems, they are arguing that such things don't exist and refusing to engage with them.) The question is whether engaging with these topics through Tony helps people come to deals with them--which I would be more willing to believe if I read more fic that actually cared about character development--or only reinforces these problems with constant repetition.
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It's frustrating, because a lot of Tony's interpersonal dynamic is precisely the sort of thing that abusers do - figure out everyone's boundaries and then push at them, in ways that are very calculated but which are designed to look unintentional, or like the result of obliviousness or social awkwardness. To be clear, I'm not saying that Tony is an abuser - he has a core of compassion and a sense of responsibility that keep him on the right side of that line (though I wonder if a more clear-eyed depiction, particular one focusing on characters outside his inner circle, wouldn't reveal more hurt feelings and damage than we've been allowed to see). But I still don't think it's a good idea to normalize that kind of behavior, or excuse it because the guy doing it occasionally saves the world.
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