•Poor Tony Stark's never-ending train of life-suckitude is probably second only to that of Spider-Man, especially before the Modern Age, living through kidnapping, torture, heart problems, evil girlfriends, murderous ex-friends, alcoholism, brainwashing, terrible luck, and dozens of plots to make his life a living hell that would put Daredevil's iconic torment by the Kingpin to shame, all sprinkled with Survivors Guilt. Oh, and once he was mind-controlled by Kang and forced to murder a whole bunch of innocent people and some Avengers teammates. And later he was mind-controlled and forced to blow up a commercial jet full of about 200 innocent people.
◦It gets worse: Remember, Tony's a genius, so he knows the dangers of alcohol poisoning. You know what motivated him to drink? He hated himself that much he wanted to die, and tried to literally kill himself with booze.
■...Not that you have to be a genius to know anything about alcohol poisoning.
◦And, to make life worse, after one drink during the apparent end of the world during The Serpent's invasion, where he gave up everything he could to make Odin see that humanity wasn't worthless, he's now being blackmailed by the Mandarin-controlled American government, they've somehow managed to twist one drink during the end of the world into permission for them to attach a power limiter to Iron Man which can shut off his powers (when the General doing so in question deserted during fear itself...). Due to this, he's had to watch
◦He also rarely, if ever, gets any real support from his "family" for any of the crap he goes through; even Steve Rogers, his best friend, has all but abandoned him at some of the worst parts of his life. The general consensus seems to be that he needs to just get over it. Hell, when he was homeless for a while and nearly died, they were nowhere to be found. He was canonically suicidal — as mentioned above, the alcoholism was a prolonged attempt at suicide, and not a very subtle one at that — and not a single one of them noticed. They only finally confronted him about his drinking when it started inconveniencing them. He's dragged himself up from rock bottom by pure willpower countless times, and the only reaction he ever gets is "Well, it's about damn time." And then they wonder why he's such a mess and why he tends to spiral into self-destructive behaviour.
And after all of that trauma and pain, he never stops trying to be a good person. He's made a lot of mistakes, but he's always done what he thought was right regardless of what it might cost him personally. Which has also been the root cause of many of his screw-ups. Most people would have thrown in the towel by this point, but Tony keeps trying. The closest he gets to getting credit for this is when people stop giving him shit for the times he has screwed up. And unlike Peter Parker, Tony gets zero sympathy, possibly because he's rich, so clearly he's got it made.
You could say the same thing about Emma, she is a ***** for a reason.
__________________ Watch what people are cynical about, and one can often discover what they lack.
- General George Patton Jr
KMC Community Forums
Jul 26th, 2012 08:44 PM
