#OP sorry to hijack I always intend to write sth pithy but keep thinking up new things to add til it ends up like this π
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TL;DR: It's not true that Tony didn't have any involvement with weapons at the time. The Maximoffs were killed in 1999. By that point, Tony had already been "merchant of death" and CEO of Stark Industries for 8 years.
Long answer:
IM1 specifically said of that period:
"...at age 21, the prodigal son returns and is anointed the new CEO of Stark Industries. With the keys to the kingdom, Tony usher[ed] in a new era for his father's legacy, creating smarter weapons, advanced robotics, satellite targeting. Today, Tony Stark has changed the face of the weapons industry..."
In other words, Tony's presence is framed as the thing which triggered the creation of smarter weapons (among other things, too). There's no indication that he started on the weapons part later on.
(In fact, he is personally credited with having changed the weapons industry. Not his father, not the company generally: Tony. And not the robotics or satellite industries, either.)
As Pepper said in IM3, Stark Industries profited off military contracts.
At the end of 1999, the year the Maximoffs were killed, Tony was in Bern, Switzerland for New Years Eve, famous enough to be delivering a lecture on integrated circuits at Bern 2000, while drunk. And important enough in the weapons industry for A.I.M founder Aldrich Killian and Extremis-inventor Maya Hansen to be trying to give him elevator pitches.
So he's a famous weapons designer, canonically- what, 800 miles away? -from Sokovia, doing science stuff, publicly, in the same year... but he's got nothing to do with his company's missiles being there? π€¨
By the time Tony was 40 in IM1, eleven years after the Maximoffs died, he had already designed the Jericho missile, was making personal pitches to the US Army, had a long-time buddy in the US Air Force, and was beloved of American soldiers (why? what's he done for them? obvious answer: designed weapons). And he was not acting as if any of this was a new or recent development for him.
Tony was building circuit boards when he was 4, engines when he was 6, robots when he was 16, graduated early from MIT at 17, and was CEO at 21. The implication of Tony being a wunderkind is that he was capable of making people-killing designs for a lot longer / from a much earlier age than you'd think.
In both IM1 and IM3 he was shown capable of making weapons from scratch by hand, with limited resources and without a computer's help (and weapons were his first idea; not, say, robots. He describes himself as a mechanic... but he doesn't make a machine. He makes improvised bombs and guns.)
He also had a pocket-sized "very powerful weapon" on him, for his personal use (which he gives to a child). Where'd that come from? It's antithetical to Tony's ego to be carrying something he didn't design himself, given the way he sneers at other weapons designers. So chances are that's a weapon Tony designed... years after claiming to be out of the weapons designing industry.
It's similar to the one Obadiah Stane used on Tony in IM1. And Stane said "you remember this one?" as he deployed it on Tony. So chances are⦠that thing was Tony's design too. (We don't know for sure. But we do know for sure that it was designed by Tony's company, that he was in charge of). Yet Tony still had something similar by the time of IM3: his weapons producing habits didn't alter outside the timeline of the movies; only his sales habits.
Also relevant: Stane described Tony as the goose that laid the golden eggs (viz. weapons designs) and that killing him would cause a fall off in designs. Because he wanted control over sales of weapons that Tony designed, including the ones government didn't approve. So Tony didn't just design weapons, he designed unethical weapons, and continued to do so even after falling victim to said weapons himself and (therefore) claiming to be out of the weapons designing business.
Sidenote: Unlike his daddy, who only "helped give us the atomic bomb" with US government backing. Howard made weapons with government backing, whereas post-IM1 Tony believes he's doing it outside of government control / believes he's not an arms dealer just because he's only dealing arms to Americans. But... he gives his designs to the USAF free of charge... and to daddy's corrupt American alphabet agency... despite already finding out they were hiding things from him way back in Avengers1... and then he signed the Sokovia Accords. π€¦ββοΈ (And this isn't even including his work on Project Insight and Insight 2.0, aka E.D.I.T.H.)! You can really see where the writing failed to point out the delusion and hypocrisy, here!
Ergo: Tony has always been a weapons designer and truly never stopped, so designing and selling a missile that killed the Maximoffs is totally within his wheelhouse. He didn't for some reason suddenly become inept / unconnected to weapons design, during the period of the Maximoff's death, just because it's icky and he was in his 20s at the time. π€·ββοΈ
(And I don't think it's a coincidence either that Tony's baby Ultron is obsessed with "peace", and tells Wanda "men of peace create engines of war," War Machines if you will, when Tony specifically keeps framing himself as creating a "peacekeeping initiative", having "privatized world peace" etc. right before the scene where Pietro describes how their parents were killed by one. You are meant to see the connection to Tony, not just the Stark company.)
However: what we don't know is whether that specific missile that killed the Maximoffs... was one of Tony's designs, or Howards, and/or when it was bought.
In AOU (2015) Strucker's Hydra base fired missiles on the nearby Sokovian city, and the locals reacted with hostility to the appearance of Iron Legion bots (Tony's proprietary tech). If the same base deployed the Stark missiles that killed the Maximoffs in 1999, then you could interpret that as showing the connection between the Starks and SHIELDra. (Though it makes the idea that the twins would then volunteer to work at that base... completely baffling?? π΅)
The missile that killed their parents could've been one of Howard Stark's designs from the 19?0s, kept in storage for years before it was deployed in 1999. But it's equally possible that it was a brand new design of wunderkind Tony's, recently sold to SHIELDra.
But that is irrelevant.
Because either way Tony did still get the profits from that missile sale. He was an active part of Stark Industries weapons designs already, on the same continent, and made money off the thing that killed the twins' parents. He still should have apologised; or at least paid compensation or something (what did he profit from those missile sales, I wonder? How much does one cost?)
The fact that Tony may or may not have personally designed and sold that specific missile (or if he didn't personally assemble it, with his own bare hands) is immaterial when he was the one who reaped the rewards. It'd be like claiming Elon Musk isn't to blame if someone was killed in the emerald mine he inherited from his father, when he also happens to run a 'making things that kill people in emerald mines' company.
The real problem is the double standard of protagonist-centered morality.
Wanting to kill the person responsible for your family's death is framed as villain/antagonist behaviour when Wanda, Pietro, Vanko, T'Challa, Zemo, various Spidey characters, etc. do it. But Tony is allowed to want to kill someone actually innocent of voluntarily killing his parents (which Tony admits to knowing, mid-fight) and still be regarded as a hero.
Everyone else is made to either nobly give up their desire for revenge (as a sign of their heroic nature), realise they were targeting the wrong person (as a sign of acquired wisdom), or both... or remain a villain. But not Tony. π Tony tries to kill the wrong person and someone extra just out of spite, and he gets apologised to!
And so far from personally apologising to Wanda, they never have scenes together (ditto Bucky), and CACW has Tony shifting the blame off himself and mansplaining to Wanda & the gang how they don't care about civilian casualties like he does... after yet another Stark design murdered her twin brother! And by EG, he's back to claiming that Ultron (indistinguishable from Hydra's Project Insight, and what Baron Strucker was working on) was a great idea anyway!
The one thing that frustrates me about Wanda hating Tony and blaming him for what happened to her parents was that he didnβt have any real involvement with weapons at the time and he didnβt have any change to apologize or clear up anything about it and we can all blame the writers instead of blaming Wanda or Tony
#obadiah stane#long post#mcu critical#antitony#and then wanda AND bucky are... at his funeral?? because?? why??#but yes the writers are dicks#in the sense that nothing mcu tony does is ever properly addressed as [what they designate] villain behaviour that ought to cost him things#he's allowed to just throw a quick 'my bad' into the middle of a glib sentence and that's it (and then prove he didn't mean it anyway)#man saw hydra had the exact same idea as him and was like 'great now ~I get to do it!' he is such a chip off the old block#needs jeff goldblum from jurassic park to come in and slap him for always doing BadThing with science#have you noticed that the later IM appearances all try to walk back the fact that tony was a weapons designer & arms dealer?#IM1 is all 'woo look at my arms I am here to deal personally which I personally designed so well that ppl would kidnap me to do it again'#but IM2 has tony insisting the IM suit isn't a weapon... despite the end fight where it has a laser cannon and fires missiles π€¦ββοΈ#and the big boss fight is between tony/rhodey and... iron man drones and... a man in an iron man suit π€¦ββοΈ (just like IM1)#and during the fight they criticise hammer tech's weapons (that rhodey conducted an arms deal for) for... being shit#(shit compared to... whose? those weapons tony just deployed? that don't exist? because he doesn't make weapons any more?? π€)#(so it's not weapons designing that's bad - it's INEPT weapons designing? and it's not arms dealing that's bad but being ripped off?)#IM3 has pepper saying they don't deal in weaponizable tech (but comparing the company to... WERNHER VON BRAUN'S NASA?? π)#when the bad guys again use iron man suits AND SHE PERSONALLY uses one to murder the bad guy in the end π€¦ββοΈ#and then CACW has tony saying he wonders what his father felt about what 'HIS' company did...#my brother in christ... that is YOUR company.... that is what YOU did since you were 21! not just howard!#YOU personally ushered in a new age for the weapons industry!#all of this wouldn't be a problem if they: a) framed tony as a currently-trying-to-reform-himself ex villain (interesting!)#b) gave him actions that are actually opposite to badthings he did before not just the same badthings only dubbed heroic now#OP sorry to hijack I always intend to write sth pithy but keep thinking up new things to add til it ends up like this π#mcu meta#mcu salt#tony meta
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