#but the recent trend of things backfiring on him? that’s bc writers don’t respect his genius

[oluka]

Is Tony unlucky in the comics? it seems like he always makes impulsive decisions and it firebacks every time.

I’d say that Tony is unlucky, yeah. There’s his dating history, where half the women he dates are villains or try to kill him, and another chunk dies in his arms. There’s the numerous attacks on his company. There’s the fact that he can extrapolate from present trends and “see” the future, but almost no one believes his worst case scenarios. He’s always been a tragic character, from the start. There aren’t many times where he’s happy.

Tony rarely makes impulsive decisions, though. He often thinks things through, but he’s also fairly often in “bad or worse” situations, where regardless of what he does, it’ll end badly for someone. And this is more a writing choice from Marvel than something that Tony can influence.

In recent years, Tony has also been turned into the stereotype of the tech guy who thinks all his inventions will work but in the end they don’t. And that is, in my opinion, because writers have forgotten that Tony is a genius and also an engineering genius. His machines shouldn’t fail because they aren’t good enough, that’s stupid. But as long as the people who write him think that he’s some kind of Elon Musk who pretends to be smart and thinks too highly of himself, we will have hulkbusters that fail after three seconds and artificial celestial gods who decide that killing humanity is the thing to do.

So nowadays we have Tony, with the classic superhero bad luck (see the current run: the villain is destroying everything that Tony has, his reputation, his company, isolating him from his friends, etc) where he just can’t catch a break. But we also have a Tony who makes machines that fail or plans that backfire on him (and that is, in my opinion, due to writers not understanding his character).

It’s not a good time to be Tony Stark.