#dreamvision

Bonus: who is Tiberius? Is he your favourite character?

This is such a heartwarming ask to receive. Thank you so much! I’m glad you glad my blog.

And, hoo boy. Tiberius Stone makes appearances in both Iron Man and Spider Man comics, but he’s my favorite in Iron Man stuff. Iron Man Vol. 3 (or Iron Man 1998) is when all of this takes place. Here’s the short version:

Basically-- Tony was sent off to boarding school when he was, like, 7. Now, a lot of Tony’s education has been shifted around, but basically, what you need to know for Ty is that Ty was also at boarding school, and they became pals. Or, well, “rivals,” but they’re pretty clearly hanging around each other quite a bit. Frenemies, maybe, but without the “bite”.

Anyway, Ty receives news that his parents died when he’s a little older, and he decides to go off to Europe to get a fresh start. At this point, he and Tony are close (having bonded over the deaths of their respective parents), and Tony’s like, “Sure, Ty, if that’s what you want.” And he lets Ty go.

But then, years later, Ty gets hella rich (richer than he already was, at least) and comes back to America! Woot woot. Tony’s very excited about this. Or, well, he’s medium excited about this.

Look, the suit’s not super expressive. You can tell me how excited you think he looks here: 

Relevant to note here: At this point, Tony is dating a woman named Rumiko Fujikawa. He also has a secret identity, so he’s disappearing randomly and for long-ish periods of time, and she has no idea why. Understandably, she is pissed about this.

So, Tony and Rumiko go to a big party that Ty threw, and Rumiko’s reached a boiling point. She cuts things off with Tony at the party, he’s heartbroken, and before he can get to a bathroom stall to start crying (it’s not implied that he’s trying to do this- this is a joke), 

Ty shows up! And they hug tenderly. And, by the way, Ty calls Tony “Mark Antony” and Tony calls Ty “Caesar.” It’s very cute, until you get to the part where Ty’s unstable and torturing Tony in virtual reality.

More on that later.

So, here’s a quick side note: Ty is often lumped in with Tony Stark’s “Evil Exes,” but this is a fanon interpretation of their canonically platonic relationship, egged on by a silly gutter note joke (a note written in the margins of a comic before publishing) that implies that he and Ty fucked at some point. Which is pretty funny.

I don’t want to bombard you with information, so here’s the gist of it, and I’ll give you the issue numbers to read both the first and the second Dreamvision bits. I think they stand alone pretty well, so you can read them whenever you’d like, but it’s definitely up to you whether you do or not. I just figured I’d drop them down at the bottom there.

Anyway, back to the story.

So, Rumiko and Tony are broken up. Ty and Tony have their heartfelt reunion. Ty gives a presentation on his sexy new Dreamvision technology, which is basically the most realistic virtual reality set-up you could ever hope to buy. Tony’s like, “Wow, so impressive!” and he’s proud of his buddy, and that’s all fun and great. So, they leave things on a good note.

And then Tony goes to make up with Rumiko by bringing flowers to what’s presumably her apartment, and when he gets there, Ty and Rumiko are straight up fucking.

It’s very dramatic.

So, the story itself is much longer than this, so I’ll leave all that backstory there and give you a short breakdown of the rest:

A bunch of shit gets aired about Tony on national news that’s defamatory, and Ty (who owns a major media conglomerate) leads him on for a short while, like, “Nooo, I’m not reporting that shit on purpose, I love you so much, you’re awesome, but if I didn’t report the news, it would be immoral,” and other dumb shit.

And then it’s revealed that Ty was doing it on purpose.

Tony goes to confront him, Ty’s like, “Haha, hey.” He also mentions here that he killed his parents, I believe, so that he could get ahold of the company and start kicking Tony’s company’s ass.

And then Tony’s thrust into virtual reality, wherein he’s tortured by his worst fears and memories. We get this cover:

And we get this absolute fucking trophy of an outfit:

And we learn that Tony might be afraid of Pink Elephants on Parade, and he’s very afraid of cockroaches. This is also a total mind meld sort of situation, so Ty knows Tony’s secret identity now (which is something he later says he’ll keep safe, because that knowledge is “his to play with, and his alone” like the evil ex he is).

So, Ty tries to VR-kill him, but there’s an issue of clashing willpowers, and Tony escapes. Ty is paralyzed from the waist down (temporarily, I believe) by the encounter. 

Ty shows up on public television and claims that it was all Tony’s fault, and the adoring public, who’s already been reading all this awful shit about Tony, is like, “Wooow, that’s so sad, I can’t believe Tony Stark would do that.”

So, they end with a relationship that’s more like:

The second arc is basically this but to the umpteenth degree. Ty and Rumiko are together for a while, but Rumiko has the same issue with Ty that she had with Tony. She confronts Tony at a press conference-style thing he’s giving (after, like, 2 weeks of dropping off the face of the planet or something), and she’s like, “Hey, where the fuck did you go, and also I haven’t seen Ty in ages, and also what the fuck?”

And while Tony’s trying to explain, he sees that a car is about to hit a dog, and so he... suits up. Like, he Iron Man-suits up to save this dog. And Rumiko, who still doesn’t know he’s Iron Man, is doubly like, “What the fuck?” and it’s a whole thing. Tl;dr, they get back together and it’s cool.

Then we discover at some point that Ty is using the charging cable Tony is using to power his chest plate replacement (in earlier canon, Tony had to plug himself into walls to keep his heart from failing) to low-level Dreamvision Tony again. And Tony goes to confront him again, and he gets Dreamvision’d again, and, well.

There’s a lot going on here, pretty much. Ty virtual reality’s himself into bigger and bigger monster-like versions of himself that seem “attached” to Dreamvision, as he says “he and the machine are one.”

He has these interesting bits of dialogue:

And, at the end, when Tony escapes again, this is Ty’s fate:

He’s since been brought back for more current Spider Man runs, but honestly, new Tiberius Stone is a totally different character and I don’t like him that much. I think this Ty is a perfect character, honestly. I’m sure many people disagree, but I’ve gotten kind of attached to the motherfucker.

He’s not my favorite character, exactly; he is my favorite of Tony’s “exes,” and I do like him quite a lot, but I think it’s hard to compare him with other characters who have more canon and more of a stable role in comics. There are plenty of reasons that I like to read him and write about him, but I won’t go too much into detail about that for now. I don’t want to talk your ear off. 

Anyway, here are those issues I promised:

Iron Man (1998/Vol. 3) #37-#40 (first Dreamvision bit) Iron Man (1998/Vol. 3) #55-#58 (second Dreamvision bit)