#// he was mad tony wasn't a super macho man

[overclocksaa]

anon / Hi, I have seen you talk about Howard and I really enjoy ur analysis. You are damn good. I have one question/confusion. Is Howard evil? I know he is an ass and abusive but I mean like evil- as in supervillain? Because when I read the marvel wiki page, it went from him being a SHIELD Agent and protecting humans and going after those that misused his weapons to him working with Mephisto? Like I thought he was like Endeavor from bnha. A terrible abusive father but outside the house he was “well respected” u know? 

honestly, i guess this is one of those questions where it’s up to the individual reader to make those moral calls.  i mean i, personally, feel like howard is an irredeemable shitsack, but that’s me.  i have a lot of Personal Feelings, considering i - full disclosure once again - was abused as a kid in much the same way as tony, and got gaslighted to hell about not knowing anything, that it was just wanting what’s best for me, parents are hard on the eldest, etc, so i see red every time marvel deigns to slap howard stark in a panel.

(don’t get me started on the mcu’s sorry ass howard stark apologist vibe, either, i will fucking scream.)

the thing about howard, and his being a shield agent and member of the brotherhood of the shield and all that happy shit, is the fact that the whole time he’s doing these things, he’s whining about how his family is holding him back and down.  he’s adopting a baby of a shield agent he basically slutshames to use as a decoy for his actual son (arno).  we find out later - if you want to count it, and i guess we might as well - he tried to sell tony as a baby to dracula (probably for his harem) and then his soul to mephisto (which tony actually witnessed) for selfish ends (immortality).  i guess he’s jealous of leonardo da vinci or something, i don’t know.  he even talks about at some point he’s going to have to bounce, and he’s going to do so faking his death (a car accident - sound familiar?).  joke’s on him tho he literally actually died so.  shrug emoji.

howard is like most abusers in that the  outside world thought he was a respectable guy doing good things in the name of his country, or whatever, yet.  you can go all the way back through to the 60s of tony’s story and see hints that howard has always just been Like This.  like, if we need more, how about:  experimenting on his own son in utero and planning on fucking over an alien robot over it.  all the times he belittled and sometimes got physical with tony over tony doing things normal small children do - despite having a big brain - like playing with toys and being upset over the death of a pet.  he was a member of the hellfire club, which is in and of itself Enough. 

also you have to remember that like.  tony was a shy, quiet kid who preferred to read and tinker by himself and in general just be nerdy with his own special interests while howard more than subtly implied homophobic things here at the same time being irrationally angry that his son wasn’t more of a manly man.  he sent tony to a boarding school at seven where he was bullied and by all accounts had trouble fitting in and making friends, and then when he came home for holidays/breaks, he hung out with the butler who was a hundred times more a father to tony than howard ever was.  howard tried to control every aspect of tony’s life and was praised for it, and all it’s done in the end is cause tony endless grief with feeling like he’ll never Be Enough and desperately seeking that approval from others (steve rogers blatantly comes to mind here). 

i think, in the end, while there’s a certain amount of personal interpretation that goes into how far you wanna slide on some scale of good and evil, overall i think the adage of the banality of evil is very true, especially in this case.  like...howard doesn’t have to be a mustache-twirling snidely whiplash to be a real shitsack (and also by all accounts he was just as horrible in the business world, he regularly ran friends/associates out of business - ty stone’s father, we don’t know what happened with his brother edward but we can make some pretty good guesses there).  he abused a child he adopted to use as a decoy for his own biological son and proceeded to make his life miserable up until the day he died.  if that’s not some definition of evil i don’t know what is.