zenosanalytic:

purified-zone replied to your post: charlesoberonn:

benepla:

benepla:
marvel is…

wasn’t Iron Man borne from a man’s disgust with his own affiliation with the military?

HHHHHHHMMMMMM…. SORTOF!

It depends on how you read it, and the canon you’re working from.

His first comic origin, the only one I know(and there’s got to be others) paints the US mil as the good guys, and Iron Man was initially very gung ho and anti-communist. That’s a common frame for Comics!Stark; I never really followed the series, but I know that in Civil War(which was a terrible idea) he was the conservative, pro-government mouthpiece, though I think that changed after Rogers died? Basically he was initially a fantasy!Howard Hughes(down even to his character design), and Hughes was a big-time mil contractor during WWII so, as much as my very limited knowledge of his canon is aware, he tended to be pretty pro-military until rather recently(and I could easily be wrong about this).

In the MCU Stark’s arc is learning that his weapon design/dealing was Bad and that he couldn’t trust other people to use his inventions wisely, and the US mil catches part of that condemnation implicitly as they’re his biggest clients, are the original source of the weapons which killed his fellow-captive’s family(iirc), and he was captured after a weapon’s demo for the US Mil. US soldiers were killed in the attack during which he was captured, of course, and one could argue that separates the US Mil from that critique, but I think Stark’s views are important for interpreting this, and fairly clear. He is sympathetic to soldiers, veterans, and their families, but hostile to USMil leadership and US government; he’s also perfectly happy working for SHIELD, an international police, peace, and intelligence force overseen by the UN(I think?), so he’s not completely anti-government just unwilling to compromise his own ethical position, or to trust others for the sake of “patriotism”, and suspicious of what he now realizes to be Imperialism, though he prob wouldn’t discuss it in those terms, and would get pretty sarcastic, dismissive, and maybe even hostile, with anyone who talked about the US’s history in those terms. Basically: his politics are personal, and he is willing to work with people he trusts; because he doesn’t trust the people in the US gov he’s asked to work with, he doesn’t usually trust it past the first film. There’s also his somewhat jingoistic tone in EDIT 1: Iron Man 2 3, but I think the movie establishes pretty well that, while his outward statements might cast that situation in terms of terrorism and protecting the US government, his real motivations are personal, rooted in his PTSD, his fear for himself and the people he loves, his anger/disgust over his past as it comes back to haunt him, and the threat all of this is posing to his relationships. Then there’s War Machine, through whom he maintains a direct connection to the US Military, but again, I got the sense that was more about his personal relationship with Rhodes than his opinion of US leaders and foreign policy.

Anyway, I think for the MCU your assessment is more right than not, but I also think it’s complicated and not really clear-cut. Tony is egotistical, and as such his motivations tend to be ultimately personal even when his actions are external(getting out of weapons-dealing to limit his future moral culpability for what his weapons do), but his concept of himself, and the relationships he, as a very lonely person, relies on for support and self-validation, are all tied up in that past and in USian patriotism/chauvinism, so it’s messy, he often gets pulled back into that world, and I never felt from the films like he was ready to really look at that past critically, aside from his own personal and familial culpability.