Tony Stark is a tool. That was, for a hot minute anyway, almost the name of this blog. I’ve never completely warmed to Iron Man over the years…he always seemed steeped in patrician arrogance even when he was raging alcoholic and that just irked me for whatever reason…but right now I’m pretty much over him as a character right now.
He has, in a typically smug and self-righteous manner, made himself The Man (writ large) in the Marvel Universe with his zealous championing of the Superhero Registration Act and his assumption of the role of Director of SHIELD. And the Marvel Universe is not really a better place for that.
As far as the Superhero Registration Act goes I can sort of understand his position without agreeing with it. Here in the real world if there were people who had superhuman powers I might indeed want them to be regulated and registered. But the Marvel Universe is not…and nor has it ever been (sorry, Stan)…”the real world” (once you have people who can burst into flame, lift school buses over their heads, or control the weather running around the notion that the MU is just like the world outside your window is immediately revealed as a blatant falsehood) and in the context of that Universe, Stark’s self-serving “futurist” excuses for persecuting his so-called friends don’t hold water. Unless, of course, Tony Stark is a tool…then it makes perfect sense.
Stark has all but forsaken his role as a “hero” with his storm troopers going nuts on draft resisters (which is, basically, what the anti-registration folks are given the so-called 50 States Initiative), the establishment of his other-dimensional prison (where people are held indefinitely without due process), the fact that he gave relatively free reign to a nutjob like Norman Osborn (who, in turn, put nutjobs like Bullseye and Venom on the federal payroll to track down super-beings who refuse to register...yeah, Osborn and the rest of the Thunderbolts are injected with nanites that are supposed to keep them under control but you know that that little plan is going to go horribly astray at some point), and his Draconian manipulation of events to further his ends (as revealed in the final issue of Civil War: Frontline)…”the ends justifies the means” almost never being an acceptable excuse for anything (unless, of course, you’re a tool…and then anything goes.)
Now I will be the first to admit that the Superhero Registration Act goes against every Libertarian bone in my cynical body and thus I was not inclined to be on Stark’s side from the word go (hell, the other side…however smug and self-righteous they were and are as “rebels”…was led by Captain America. CAPTAIN AMERICA…dude, 99 times out of a 100 I’m going to be on Cap’s side because, well, he’s Captain America…and yes I refuse to speak of him in past tense because I know that he will be back sooner or later…) but the heavy handed way the pro-Registration side” continues to act and behave (we could do a whole “Hank Pym is a tool” rant but it would be redundant and not worth the effort) does nothing to win me over to their arguments.
Mayhap Tony Stark can be redeemed in my eyes at some point. I don’t see how but I will continue to try to keep a somewhat open mind. But until that time I will hold firm to my belief that he is indeed a tool until he (and, more to the point, the people writing his adventures) see fit to prove otherwise.
1 comment:
People should read this.
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