#buzzofjanet

But basically, the two main depictions of Hank’s family are in Ant-Man: Season One, which was... not a great issue, but also not terrible imo. It had Bill in it, which is always good. There, Hank’s parents are named as Warren and... I wanna say Martha? And Warren is a total shithead who heads up taking a bullet for Hank and dying and Hank’s v conflicted about it. And there’s a mention of Warren kicking Hank’s mom out because she’s not useful (???).

The other one was a flashback from the post Age of Ultron things and there Hank’s parents are named as Brad and Doris and Brad is... still kinda a shit? And Doris doesn’t do much and Hank’s grandmother, Angela, is the main person encouraging Hank to be imaginative with his inventions, while Brad is more like “wake up you need to make money”. Then Angela dies and Hank is sad and spends a long time trying to make his dad proud by making profitable inventions rather than doing what he actually wants to do with science (which is probably the mentality that leads him to initially pitch Pym particles for military purposes, rather than literally any of the applications).

So the common threads are asshole dad, pushing Hank to apply his intellect to financial success and recognition in the scientific community and a mom who’s affectionate, but for whatever reason, absent. As for the rest, I kinda fuse the continuities together, with Brad and Doris divorcing shortly after Angela’s death, partially over disagreements in how to raise a child and partially because Brad is a dipshit who doesn’t treat depressed people very well and I headcanon Doris as having depression (which makes the “not useful” comment take on a new, gross light -_-).

So Hank lacks a good model for how a functional family is supposed to look like, which is part of why he never intended to have children. He was worried about turning out like his father and fucking his children over. And then there’s also some internalized ableism where he doesn’t think he should have children because he’s mentally ill (though he wouldn’t tell another mentally ill person not to have them because being an asshole to someone else = bad, whereas being an asshole to himself = okay).

His mother’s depression is also part of why he had such an extreme reaction to Greer cutting him out of his children’s lives for a bit recently. Because he’s spend so much time worrying that he would turn out like his dad, it never occurred to him to worry about becoming his mom--forced out of his family by mental illness and ableism. Though I must stress that Greer is nowhere near as much of an asshole as Brad was.