#mcu tidbits

Tony is a man who spent practically his entire career as a weapon manufacturer nose to nose with a man who was an Airforce representative. One should really consider what kind of effect this has on Tony’s views and vocabulary, at the very least. I mean, the armed forces, every branch of them, use terms and nicknames for things that you never hear from people outside of them, and Tony would have had quite a bit of exposure to them since he seems to respect those in the armed forces far more than his board. Thus, it only makes sense that he would have internalized bits of lingo as he heard it.

What does this have to do with the statement of ‘I am Iron Man’ in the title up there?

Iron, in Airforce vernacular, means bombs. There was no way that Tony was unaware of this, so when he makes that comment in IM1 about ‘Evocative Imagery’ it’s not him thinking about the suit. It’s him thinking about what else the term Iron Man could mean, most likely.

He’s always been the Airforce’s Iron Man. And, if the vernacular holds between Army and Airforce on the use of the words God and Cockroach to apply to weapon dealers, then he might very well have been called the Iron God from time to time. Cockroach, of course, would apply to Hammer since the term God only goes to the highest quality weapon manufacturers. That is definitely not Hammer.

In any case, the term Iron Man and Tony declaring and accepting it so readily has multiple layers of meaning beyond the obvious if taken this way. I am Iron Man he says, but people assume that’s just him going “Yeah, I’m a hero, this is me” but if you look at it from the angle of someone multilingual, in a manner of speaking, then it becomes something else.

I am Iron Man becomes ‘I am the man who made the bombs’.

In this sense, Tony always has been, and always will be, Iron Man, with or without the suit. In another sense, he makes it clear that he and the suit are no different, and if you consider how he acted the first time he went out, he probably has no doubt that he is as dangerous as any piece of armor. He’s killed, by then, deliberately, because there’s no way the people in Gulmira all survived the way he attacked them.

At the end of the first Iron Man movie, you see Rhodey’s reaction to the declaration of being Iron Man. He’s probably the only one in the room who could possibly understand what that declaration could mean and that it could have had multiple layers of meaning at all.

His reaction is delayed, like it takes a moment to really process what he just heard, and it’s not until the rest of the room is in an uproar that he turns a wide-eyed gaze on Tony. I strongly suspect he entirely understood everything Tony meant, and not just the hero parts, even if that was what he was playing up given the media had picked the name Iron Man for entirely different reasons.

So I saw a gifset which was mostly Steve with this quote underneath:

“A super-soldier, a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend.” ⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯ Tony Stark

Sorry everyone, I know it doesn’t seem like it, but Tony meant those as two separate entries. A super-soldier, THEN a living legend who kind of lives up to the legend. He’d already mentioned all the rest of the team in that list, so he then did Steve as the super-soldier, and himself as the living legend.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I didn’t catch that the first time I heard it either, but it’s true.

He was totally talking about himself.

I was just talking to someone about Civil War, and how the whole UN meeting explosion thing would pertain to the timeline we’ve established, and during this talk, I realized some interesting points.

They were already keeping an eye on Bucky.

No, think about it. Sharon had not only the time, but the access to get the files and pass them along to Steve. Even if she was in a hurry, these were comprehensive enough paper files that they needed a folder. It wasn’t just a sheet of paper she wrote some recently discovered address or coordinates on, it was a proper file, with god knows what inside.

This does not say new surveillance.

This says old, ongoing surveillance where they didn’t do anything to bring him in.

Why?

Because They had no proof of Bucky having committed a crime.

No, hold up and take a moment to work with me here. Why else would they wait for something as dramatic as the UN bombing to move? Courtesy?

No.

They had nothing concrete. In fact, I ask everyone to remember that line where Natasha talks about how he’s a ghost story in the intelligence community. About how no one was sure he even existed.

That’s not proof of a crime. That’s not even proof of being in the country the crimes were committed in. 

But what about Washington D.C?

While for story purposes I like to play with the idea of him having been caught on film sometimes, I sincerely doubt that that is what happened.

Bucky was highly trained in avoiding cameras, in keeping his detection low and unseen whenever possible. He was made into someone that didn’t leave witnesses that could give concrete evidence of a damn thing, and even at his most obvious, his face was usually hidden.

But the Stark video says otherwise?

I don’t actually think so. I think that was a singular instance rather than a trend. In fact, it might have been intentional.

Can you imagine how useful having something documented like that could be if Bucky acted up and needed to have a reminder of who exactly he was now? It was a prime opportunity and one that wasn’t liable to come up again. There is more than one source that indicates he’d slipped his leash before, so why not use something so emotionally crushing to use to bring him back in line?

With that video, his handlers could go ‘See, that was you. You did that.’ and what could he say about it? Nothing. It would be an excellent, if horrifying measure, to make him less likely to resist and cause hassle all around.

Then why wasn’t it destroyed later?

The same reason the book wasn’t. It was clear that they were intended to be handed down to someone else taking control of Bucky, and got lost in the power shuffle when Russia stopped being the ones in control of the Winter Soldier.

It was, simply put, a filing error, not a repeatable offense.

Zemo could have turned the video in and gotten Bucky arrested that way.

And it would have even probably worked, but it wouldn’t have done what Zemo wanted it to do. It wouldn’t have brought the Avengers to fight, and it wouldn’t have had anywhere near the same impact. Who knows though, maybe that was plan R, after everything else he wanted to try to get them dealt with failed.

We don’t know what the man was willing to take as an acceptable revenge at the end of the day, we only see what he actually ended up going with, because it was the first plan that worked. 

Ultimately, my point here is that, before that planted video, which placed Bucky at the scene of the UN bombing, they had nothing.

Tony Stark is shown in his first movie with a black piano, very nice, very classy, that he accidentally destroys while falling through his house in a bit of a disastrous landing.

In Civil War, Tony’s opening memory scene has his mom playing a piano. This piano is the same exact kind as the one that was in the Malibu house.

I’m pretty sure that Tony accidentally killed his mom’s piano.

Me: IM3: Alternately titled 'The Saga of PTSD and Bad Choices'

Friend: I have to see IM2 first.

Me: IM2: Alternately titled 'Tony is an asshole when he thinks he's dying'

Friend: OMG

Okay you lot, I’ve seen a lot of posts, a lot of opinions, and I get it, everyone has things they loved or hated about the movie, and that’s awesome. Everyone has their biases about how the characters should have acted, or did, and feel strongly about said biases.

But I would like to remind people about a few things that they seem to have forgotten about Tony Stark.

Tony Stark is someone who has never been willing to submit to a higher authority of his own if he was aware of it. Him bowing to the Accords does not mean that he feels they are something he would not go against for a cause he felt up to the task. In the movie, he very clearly sneaks around them to help his friend even if that goes kind of shitty. He did not do this flagrantly, and he knows that if he got caught he would face consequences. He’s willing to accept them. He’s of course going to avoid getting in trouble, but do you really think if he got caught he would fight his punishment? Probably not.

Tony Stark is not a politician. Tony Stark is not a politician. TONY STARK IS NOT A POLITICIAN. I know somehow you guys have missed this, all of you who seemed to think that his lack of surprise meant that somehow he wrote the god damn Accords his own self, but seriously people. His first words to Steve were that if they accepted it, they could go back and fight it, get it revised. If he was an active participant in the writing of them, guess what. He probably would have stalled the writing of them long enough to get Steve and the others on board to help him. But no, that didn’t happen, because they probably didn’t tell him before they wrote the things, because guess what? Tony Stark is one of the people they’re bringing under the legislature. You tell me how often political persons in charge bring the minorities they’re persecuting to the table when they’re writing about them.

The answer you’re looking for is ‘pretty much never’. And in the culture of the MCU, Superheroes are a minority people. Metahumans are deemed as ‘other’ and this is not unimportant. It’s actually very important.

And then, after that people move on to ‘well Tony wasn’t surprised about the Accords!’ and you know what I say to that? Tony is nosy. Tony probably knew something was up and not what for a while before he finally managed to get word on someone to talk to about events. He knew something was coming, after Ultron he probably always knew something was coming. He wrote a book about his dad and published it to raise funds to make up for the Ultron fiasco. He covered for Bruce and handled the media for the team to keep the world focused on him and not his teammates. These are canon. These are shown in news clips in the extras of other movies. So no, Tony wasn’t surprised.

But you know what also is true? Tony read up on an entire field of study overnight in the Avengers. Do you think he couldn’t read one manuscript, one framed as a legislature based contract? When he was a CEO of a company once upon a time? So yes, he understood it, yes he probably had a day or two more warning to read the thing, but no, that’s all he got. That’s all the movie implies. That’s it.

So seriously people, stop bleeding whatever version of Tony you think you’re seeing all over MCU Tony. He’s not a political mastermind that fucked over the Avengers. He’s a man with problems and guilt that happened to agree with over a hundred countries when they slapped him with a document that demanded he take responsibility for things he already felt he’d done wrong. 

I can see Steve’s position, why he didn’t agree, and honestly, I think Tony can too. I think he gets it even if he doesn’t think it’s the smart choice. He’s losing people who can help him rally and make this document something less terrible every time someone refuses to sign. So sure, Steve had a point, in how it was not okay to control them, and as other parts of the MCU world canon show, such as in Agents of SHIELD, basically register metahumans, but Tony was seeing how it could be worse. He was seeing what ended up happening.