#antitony

In AC, the only time you see a person from the same socioeconomic class as Peggy, they're a villain. Similar thing with Tony's villains in IM (Obadiah Stane, Anton Vanko, Justin Hammer, Aldrich Killian...) they're just Other Tonys.

(So you can tell that TPTB have some kind of... English fetish going on and think upper classness is definitely part of her Specialness?)

While Tony has the same 'avoidance of all consequences for his actions' wealthy white privilege that Peggy has, there are certain important differences.

Generally speaking, they share one over-arching trait, which is: if you consider whether or not the world / people around them would be better off if they didn't exist, the answer is yes.

Without Tony, there'd be no Anton Vanko, no Aldrich Killian, no Quentin Beck (which means no Spider-Mans dimensional incursion), no Ultron (which, in another universe, endangered the entire multiverse), no dead Pietro, no dead Sokovians generally (meaning probably no Scarlet Witch, no Vision, no Westview Hex, all the knock-on effects of that?), no Snap. And Hulk or Thor could have put the nuke through the wormhole in A1 (except he wouldn't because it wouldn't have been written into the story at all since Hemsworth doesn't have short man syndrome.)

With no Peggy, Steve's story in CATFA isn't altered (because she didn't matter to the plot or his life at all). But there would be no Winter Soldier programme (since she wouldn't be around to give the man who started it a job at SHIELDra), ergo no Black Widows being mind-controlled either (since that was based on Winter Soldier tech), no continued Hydra (WhatIf confirms all this by showing that a SHIELD founded by everyone else who was there originally, except her, has no Nazis in it.) Ergo no Project Insight. No Winter Soldier means no assassination of Howard Stark, so no Civil War bust up of the Avengers, if Tony still exists (unless Zemo found some other way to effect it). C.1940s her male colleagues in SSR would have handled everything she interfered with in AC, Edwin Jarvis's wife wouldn't have been sterilised by gsw in the uterus, and Daniel Sousa would have settled down with a nice girl (nurse Violet, possibly Skye) and wouldn't have been assassinated by Hydra for whistleblowing in 1955, because there wouldn't be any Hydra.

.

Now the differences:

First, Tony is actually above-average at some of the things he thinks he's good at, so his arrogance based on that is at least partially warranted (which Peggy's conviction of her own competence, moral integrity, etc. isn't).

His estimate of his own ability is debatable, though, since his genius (in the MCU) stems from the Grand American Capitalist Tradition of stealing other peoples' work, doing a minimal amount to hone it, and then claiming all the credit / reaping all the financial reward.

(See: Iron Man suits, AI, E.D.I.T.H., B.A.R.F., Extremis serum, time-travel, etc. Tony's only original creations I can think of in the MCU are his robot-servants and the improvised booby-traps from Iron Man 3.)

Second, Tony may have got into MIT as a legacy admission (nepotism), but he does actually have at least some of the expertise in a STEM field to warrant a place, which Peggy lacks.

(She gets an honorary degree from IIRC Oxford: ie. rewarded for doing no work. And while she claims competence in mathematics (as part of the AC retcon of her war record), outside of one code-breaking scene her alleged mathematical ability is never shown. And in fact there is a scene where a character has to explain to Peggy how many sides a cube has. No, I am not exaggerating. This literally happened.

And Bletchley Park's happy concession to her leaving mid-war suggests she wasn't a crucial employee. It's like the opposite of all those 'screenshots of my boss begging me to come back after I quit' stories.)

Third, while Tony may have inherited his company without earning it, he does have the necessary brains and thieving habits to create and maintain such a company if he wanted to. He was CEO for decades (since the age of 21) without the company imploding.

Although Obadiah Stane was dirty dealing under his nose without his knowledge so- er wow okay looks like he and Peggy are neck and neck? Except that Peggy did know she had bastards working for her and kept them on anyway (see: Zola, Mitchell Carson).

Tony has some appropriate skills; which cannot be said of Peggy in any of her unearned spying jobs.

Peggy is a nepotism baby who couldn't stomach any of the jobs she was handed on a silver platter, one after another, that she kept idiotically choosing to ask for despite her unsuitability for them (which she also cannot recognise).

And then she flaked out on these jobs from 'boredom,' even in the middle of a crisis like a world war (failure is never her fault, always the job's, always the mens').

Essentially she keeps asking for desk jobs she doesn't deserve, being given them because of glass ceiling nepotism, and then whining when she… is expected to do them? And is not respected when she doesn't?

She believes she is a brilliant, underappreciated spy, surrounded by inferiors, but cannot spot a single spy when they infiltrate her organisation or home (any one of many, many occasions: during the war and after).

She's a spy who craves attention.

Whose disguises fail in seconds, and are so inept that she cannot avoid detection by someone who barely knows her, even when photographed from the back!

(Contrast that with actual-spy Natasha, whose disguises are so good not even we realise it's her until she reveals herself! Or Coulson, who is not disguised but is so unassuming that he has no need!)

Peggy is a woman who thinks she is a sort of hero to other women... but is fine shunting the work which she considers beneath her off onto them... (but she reacts with outrage when men do that exact same thing to her) ...or fine with letting her rich male friends get away with chauvinism.

Who interferes to prevent male feminist colleagues from taking steps that would make life better for the Other Girls (whom she is Not Like and who Cannot Therefore be allowed to Become Like her.)

(Because as long as White Feminist knows Her value, she's the only person that matters!)

It takes a certain level of competence to correctly gage the extent of your own competence, or relative incompetence. It's the basis of true self-awareness.

She lacks that.

(Whether Tony also lacks it is... not clear. Maybe he does, too).

Peggy's continued bloody-minded belief that she is, eg. a competent spy and a feminist, directly contrary to the evidence... (because the writers aren't capable of recognising when they've written the exact opposite of what they vaguely intended) ...is the proof that she lacks the qualities necessary to actually be either of those things.

And to realise that she is just not physically or temperamentally suited to spying or heroism, at all.

She does share Tony's habit of blaming anything but herself for her problems, though. 🤔

When Peggy shows up hours late for work, eats like a slob at her desk while all the men are doing their paperwork, refuses to do said paperwork (even though that's the job she's been hired for and accepted) as if it's an insult to even ask her, shunts it off onto female underlings (can't expect Her Majesty to do it, but those working class sluts upstairs?), and then does nothing except sabotage her colleagues' work for months, then unilaterally hires someone (Johann Fennhoff) who cannot be trusted and so kills 40+ people...

She acts as if her male colleagues' lack of respect for her ability is due to ONLY sexism, and not to her being -- for example -- lazy, treacherous, bad-tempered, entitled, disastrously incompetent, and a self-outing nepotism hire, who is ALSO a woman.

(The fact that she is also sloppy/unprofessional at work is moot, since at least one of the male agents is too, and in this field her capacity for violence is a feature, not a bug.)

When Tony calls himself a "genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist" he is at least getting 1/4 of those right... ish?

(Is it genius to commit industrial espionage and rip off the designs of other men including employees, do 12% of the work and then patent them as your own?

When it's JARVIS and FRIDAY who do everything for him, actually?

Is inheriting generational wealth a flex?

Does exchanging sex for favours make you a womaniser or a creepy Weinstein-esque loser?

Does making money off cleaning up the very mess you caused, for Rich-White-Guy tax write-offs, count as actual philanthropy?

Would an actual philanthropist list philanthropy last, of all those things on the list?)

He does appear to learn from his mistakes for a brief period...

(His Act 1 Fuck Up is usually revealed as a Plot!Coupon necessary for his Act 3 Success; the icing over of the Iron Man suit, the double-reverb attack gained from firing at Rhodey in IM2, etc.)

...But that is over-ruled at the beginning of each new Iron Man movie, when the lessons of the last one are ignored to set his personality back at 0. 🙄

In the case of the Avengers movies, though, he doesn't learn at all. Ultron tries to murder everyone (WhatIf reveals he would have eventually destroyed the entire multiverse.)

Hydra tries to enact Project Insight A.I. to kill millions...

And yet years later Tony is still claiming those two as morally correct successes, flawed only because they were made to fail (not because they were horrible fascist ideas to begin with), and redoing Insight as EDITH only giving it to a disaster teenage boy. 🤦‍♀️

Peggy, however, is pathologically incapable of learning from mistakes, because that first requires you to acknowledge that you are capable of making mistakes, which is inconceivable to her.

She has herself up on a high pedestal, as the pinnacle of womanhood around which the world and all other women surely revolve, and cannot be knocked off her axis.

The closest she has ever come to an accurate self-assessment was when Edwin Jarvis called her arrogant and ignorant and she flippantly pretended to agree. (Inadvertently proving him right).

Tony is possibly redeemable because he at least has sensible people around him, telling him he's a fucking idiot.

He does occasionally make the obeisance of saying 'my bad,' even if he doesn't fully comprehend it.

Peggy on the other hand isn't redeemable because she doesn't think she's ever done anything wrong in her life, ever.