i've got a lot of brainrot everywhere with all my muses here but i've been brainrotting way too much on unit not to talk about it.
i recently read the story arc that unit was originally intended to be the villain of and knowing that, you can absolutely see the influence of unit's character and his goals on 451. it's also interesting in the context of unit being an antagonist for tony stark. it does make sense from the little i do know about tony and his motivations--i.e., the idea of being a man of peace. unit's character revolves around universal peace/the universal utopia. everything he does is for a wider scale of things, rather than the personal, unidealistic, stance of peace. he has a whole speech--multiple times--about how the golden rule works in context of his moral framework.
according to unit, the golden rule matters less the bigger the scale--given he is working on the universal scale, crimes that would otherwise be seen as horrid or 'mean' are worth it as long as the final goal of utopia and peace is reached. destroying one or two worlds is worth it so long as they will get in the way of the inevitable universal utopia. in his words:
"if i succeed, my creators were right, the end justified the means and everyone living lives happily ever after ...
... if i fail, my creators were monsters on par with the worst of tyrants. if the end is not achieved, all the means were just...mean."
it was stated by the writer that made him that unit doesn't have doubts because he wasn't programmed to have doubts. no matter what happens, unit does it for what he was made for--for universal utopia. an opportunity can arise, but that opportunity cannot always be taken because the risk of his own destruction is too big--and if he's destroyed, and every remnant of his civilization is destroy, then all of it was for naught. all the crimes committed would be considered crimes, rather than necessary sacrifices.
this is extra fascinating to me because this risk that was taken was shown as an error in the form of recorder 451's arc. in the end, he ended up failing and literally self destructing because the ends didn't justify the means, and the single failure was enough to sacrifice too much, and make all his bads just bad. i imagine a similar thing happening to unit if there was a failure that could not be lifted out from.
unit is patient, patient to a fault as things will happen around him and the possibilities will pass him and he'll never move because it's too much of a risk. unit would probably wait till the heat-death of the universe just because everything that happened around him was too risky. that is the difference between what 451 ended up being, and what unit was written as. 451 works on an individual scale, while unit works on a universal.