Tag: infinity war

robotmango:

one of the things i’m concerned about re: infinity war is the fact that, post civil war, the writers have made it so that i have trouble rooting for tony. and i love tony. i have loved every iron man movie, even and especially the third film, because i was deeply glad to see a superhero film explore PTSD, and tony absolutely deserves a story that acknowledges and deals with his considerable trauma.***

but civil war, namely its hamfisted need for a big pointless steve/tony melee, changed a lot of things. the script rendered tony a.) uncharacteristically authoritarian, b.) a mega-genius who is somehow easily duped by government stooges, and c.) so shockingly unempathetic that he tried to murder someone inside of that person’s actual personal hellscape. 

like, of all the sins that civil war committed, and there were many, this is the one i return to over and over and over: they went to the chair. the chair! and nobody cared.

they physically went to the base where bucky was held and tortured and forced to kill and electroshocked and brainwashed. they went to it, and walked inside of it with him, and NOBODY LOOKED AROUND FOR A FUCKING SECOND AND SAID, “WHOA, what the FUCK.” not in the script. like, steve and bucky share plenty of “whoa” glances, probably because they are inhabited by good actors who can read between the lines they’re given. but that final fight could have happened anywhere– inside of a barn or a bunker in utah or a dimly-lit target– instead of inside bucky’s personal hell. the script didn’t treat that space like it was important emotionally. it had tony stark walk in and decide that he needed to beat bucky to death right there, in a room where people had been beating bucky to death for fucking decades. they didn’t have tony turn around once and say to himself, “huh, why are there so many bone saws hanging up? are these… dog cages?” the script didn’t and couldn’t allow tony one smidgen of empathy, because if any empathetic person looked around at where they were and who was in front of them they’d have stopped. tony would have stopped. the script couldn’t allow it, so instead they plunged ahead with ruining him, reducing him to someone who would willingly kill just to relieve his anger; and then at the very end, the script decided that the person who most needed the final catharsis of forgiveness was… still tony.

so yeah. i’m a little worried about infinity war. i’m worried that they will use the “tension” that’s “between” tony and bucky for a gag or a throwaway. i’m worried that tony will do something like… fire a warning shot at bucky. “whoops!” tony will say, sarcastically, before he flips the visor down and flies off. “guess he’s not over it,” clint will say, deadpan, and bucky will look grim, badump-dump tsssh. but like… i’m not going to think it’s funny. because bucky barnes spent seventy-odd years fighting “alongside” people who had the authority to punish him. his captors obviously talked a big game about the mission, and sent teams out with him to hand him his guns, but they were also clearly there to round him up, take him back to base, and shock his fucking brains out. they could hurt him if they chose to and he couldn’t retaliate. sure, he backhands a technician at one point in ca:tws, but then two minutes later they scramble him like a fucking egg.

(i don’t actually think tony would or will try to hurt him again. it’s out of character… it was out of character the first time, tbh… and i think the writers are done with that idea. but imagine being bucky, fresh on your new friendly non-nazi team, the first time somebody on that team threatens you. even in jest.)

so do you think i want him on a team with this newly empathy-free version of tony? in the hands of writers who gave tony his friendships and his dignity back but stuffed bucky into a bag of frozen carrots? not really.

i would love to be so hilariously wrong about this that we all laugh, of course. that’d be swell.

***you know what’s fucking infuriating though, is if the writers sat down for five minutes and had themselves a winnie-the-pooh style Think about this shit, they would realize that tony’s guilt re: arms dealing and indirectly causing a metric fuckton of human collateral damage would provide a genuinely interesting parallel and counterpoint to bucky’s guilt about involuntarily killing people as a brainwashing victim. those two characters might actually be able to go on an interesting moral journey together, but this is fucking marvel, and if it’s not exploding i guess nobody in charge is fucking interested in it