Avengers temporarily ate my brain

[brainofck]

Or more precisely Cap/Iron Man. Not that I feel any inspiration to write, but it seems to have sucked my brain similarly to the Sherlock attack of a few months ago. Hmmm. There is a common denominator there...

Anyway, yesterday, I went to see Avengers, and as a pre-theater event, I put Iron Man into the DVD player and watched it, pure, straight, and unriffed. (It's a damned funny RiffTrax, though, if you're into that.)

What struck me, which I am sure is no news to anyone who knows anything about Tony Stark, is how all his friends (aside from Pepper and Rhodey) are machines, and how much he trusts those machines. This really hit home for me watching him suit up the first time. He holds out his arms for the gauntlets first. After that, he's at the mercy of the machine. And the machine is holding him up while it puts the suit on him. When it lets him go, he gives a little bump on the floor. The script made the removal of the armor an explicitly sexual joke - "Be gentle. It's my first time." - but I thought putting it on looked awfully intimate.

Of course, he builds all his own stuff, and fan fic suggests that JARVIS's AI is deliberately an extension of Tony's own brain. And of course, there's the -apparantly canon? - techonpathy, where Tony makes himself one with all machines. So is trusting the machines he built just trusting his own genius? Being friends with his own creations just more of his self-absorption? How does that fit in with his canon self-hatred? Machines are good, people are bad? The Iron Man makes him a better person or protects the world from his own failings?

Comments

[green_grrl]

There are actually some fics that get into the idea that Tony builds himself friends. Because, really, other than JARVIS and Dum-E, etc., his friends are people who've been on his payroll. Until the Avengers, which makes the Steve pairing so special.

And yes, the Extremis storyline in comics has Tony infecting himself with a virus that takes over his brain with feeds from all data sources, so he can get into any machine that has any sort of means of interaction.

I see it as "People are unpredictable. They can say mean things, or ignore me, or leave or die. I can program machines that will be the way I want them to be." I think part of it is narcissism, but more of it is emotional. If it was just admiring his own genius, why would he keep Dum-E, who really isn't that smart, when he could build a robot a thousand times better now? Sentimentalism for his first friend.

Iron Man, hmm. He definitely sees him as the better part of himself. Atonement for his guilt over the years of weapons building. If he just saves enough people it will make up for having been a war profiteer--only it never will.

[brainofck]

If he just saves enough people it will make up for having been a war profiteer

That, at least, is pretty explicit - part of his whole self-loathing, yes?

I think I'm with you on him creating his own friends for emotional reasons. I guess what I was trying to get at was that for him, these really are real friends that he's emotionally involved with, rather than fancy cool toys that substitute for his inability to have human friends. My other questions were more on a lit crit level - what are we readers supposed to think of a guy, one of whose best friends is an AI created in his own image? What are we, as viewers, supposed to see in that initial suiting-up scene? There's a lot of psychological weirdness there, too, since JARVIS is a servant, a helper, an intellectual equal...