Tony Stark = a fucking cyborg
I am reccing a vid! This vid: Machine | Tony Stark by YunaAoki91
[I should probably rec more vids than I do, because I enjoy a heck of a lot of vids out there. (I have an Avengers YouTube playlist that is 36 videos long, if anyone is interested in that...]
At the moment, I'm gonna go ahead and say that this is my favorite Tony Stark fanvid. The editing is magical (and yeah, I still have a lingering character-crush on Tony, and it's not hard to bring that out, but this really is well-done). This vid seems to simultaneously to celebrate and examine him critically, which, well, isn't that what any tribute to him should do? We love to watch him triumph, but still, we know that he owes so much. (But we know that he knows that, too.) The Grinch/Scrooge trope has been done well many times (er, for example, Scrooge, and the Grinch), but Tony Stark offers a surprising twist on that archetype, I think. Maybe in part because he feels like a mirror for modern society in the "first world." He's dependent on so much and was sheltered from so much. "A part of worldly taking, apart from worldly troubles," as one line in this song puts it. Still, we can't really condemn him - he's extraordinary. And besides that, he's painfully aware of all that, now, and he is taking action to fix it. (There are problems there, though, which I think are real problems the story suffers from. Tony becomes a hero and saves the world, sure, but he saves it from things like aliens and super-villains; he never really confronts the complexity of the real-world problems he was so entangled with at the beginning of the story, being the foremost provider of weapons for the world's biggest superpower. His problem with that was the realization that, sometimes weapons fall into the hands of bad guys. That the American military might sometimes be the bad guys is never brought up. The story doesn't ever really look that hard at world politics and issues... But I guess we can only ask for so much from a superhero movie... And anyway, that can get heavy-handed and stupid in movies like this, so maybe it's for the best. We don't need Iron Man to be Avatar. /Tangent.)
This particular vid fixates on one particular facet of Tony, which is, essentially, his tranhumanism. (Transhuman-ness? Transhumanity?) I mean, the man spends most of his time with robots he built, and then he builds himself a robotic body-suit which he describes as being interchangeable/identical with himself. (And have I mentioned that I love transhumanism and cyborgs? Because I do. Shit, that shit is fun to read/talk/think about.) This vid has made me realize -- and how did I not realize this? -- that not enough people making fanworks have focused on the fact that Tony Stark is a fucking cyborg.
Um, so, anyway. The transhumanist aspect of Tony also ties into that paradox essential to his character: that he is both triumphant -- a genius, an innovator, a creator, a hero -- and, at the same time, absurdly privileged, lucky, indebted to the steps other people have taken which have made the world as he experiences it possible (including his father, who changed the world and brought people into the "modern" age before Tony could push it even further). And even these innovations Tony makes, while they empower him, also make him more dependent. He needs the Iron Man. How could he be who he is without his technology? He's made it a part of himself. Which isn't a flaw, exactly, it's just... interesting.
I guess... I don't know, it just really hit a lot of the right buttons for me, this song with this character with this vidding job. I'd just been watching some online lectures expounding on how humans, because of language and culture, have followed this amazing trajectory of exponentially, (you might say "artificially") evolving through culture and technology, because we can communicate ideas and thus, in a way, be more than just one person or even one small group of people. We have the product of a world of thought available to us -- for some of us, it is practically (and even literally) at our fingertips.
And so I watched this vid, with all this in my head, on my brand new iphone, which I've been pathetically attached to since buying it last week. And it was awesome.
So, I guess, here's to Tony Stark and here's to the future: "It's bright, it's here, it's now."
[I should probably rec more vids than I do, because I enjoy a heck of a lot of vids out there. (I have an Avengers YouTube playlist that is 36 videos long, if anyone is interested in that...]
At the moment, I'm gonna go ahead and say that this is my favorite Tony Stark fanvid. The editing is magical (and yeah, I still have a lingering character-crush on Tony, and it's not hard to bring that out, but this really is well-done). This vid seems to simultaneously to celebrate and examine him critically, which, well, isn't that what any tribute to him should do? We love to watch him triumph, but still, we know that he owes so much. (But we know that he knows that, too.) The Grinch/Scrooge trope has been done well many times (er, for example, Scrooge, and the Grinch), but Tony Stark offers a surprising twist on that archetype, I think. Maybe in part because he feels like a mirror for modern society in the "first world." He's dependent on so much and was sheltered from so much. "A part of worldly taking, apart from worldly troubles," as one line in this song puts it. Still, we can't really condemn him - he's extraordinary. And besides that, he's painfully aware of all that, now, and he is taking action to fix it. (There are problems there, though, which I think are real problems the story suffers from. Tony becomes a hero and saves the world, sure, but he saves it from things like aliens and super-villains; he never really confronts the complexity of the real-world problems he was so entangled with at the beginning of the story, being the foremost provider of weapons for the world's biggest superpower. His problem with that was the realization that, sometimes weapons fall into the hands of bad guys. That the American military might sometimes be the bad guys is never brought up. The story doesn't ever really look that hard at world politics and issues... But I guess we can only ask for so much from a superhero movie... And anyway, that can get heavy-handed and stupid in movies like this, so maybe it's for the best. We don't need Iron Man to be Avatar. /Tangent.)
This particular vid fixates on one particular facet of Tony, which is, essentially, his tranhumanism. (Transhuman-ness? Transhumanity?) I mean, the man spends most of his time with robots he built, and then he builds himself a robotic body-suit which he describes as being interchangeable/identical with himself. (And have I mentioned that I love transhumanism and cyborgs? Because I do. Shit, that shit is fun to read/talk/think about.) This vid has made me realize -- and how did I not realize this? -- that not enough people making fanworks have focused on the fact that Tony Stark is a fucking cyborg.
Um, so, anyway. The transhumanist aspect of Tony also ties into that paradox essential to his character: that he is both triumphant -- a genius, an innovator, a creator, a hero -- and, at the same time, absurdly privileged, lucky, indebted to the steps other people have taken which have made the world as he experiences it possible (including his father, who changed the world and brought people into the "modern" age before Tony could push it even further). And even these innovations Tony makes, while they empower him, also make him more dependent. He needs the Iron Man. How could he be who he is without his technology? He's made it a part of himself. Which isn't a flaw, exactly, it's just... interesting.
I guess... I don't know, it just really hit a lot of the right buttons for me, this song with this character with this vidding job. I'd just been watching some online lectures expounding on how humans, because of language and culture, have followed this amazing trajectory of exponentially, (you might say "artificially") evolving through culture and technology, because we can communicate ideas and thus, in a way, be more than just one person or even one small group of people. We have the product of a world of thought available to us -- for some of us, it is practically (and even literally) at our fingertips.
And so I watched this vid, with all this in my head, on my brand new iphone, which I've been pathetically attached to since buying it last week. And it was awesome.
So, I guess, here's to Tony Stark and here's to the future: "It's bright, it's here, it's now."