#i just don't tend to have the energy to write a whole big deep meta post like i really want to

[thevioletcaptain]

is harry chapin's cat's in the cradle extremely overused when it comes to talking about father-son relationships in media and in general? look, probably!!

but regardless of any real or perceived banality of the reference i'm still sitting here on a tuesday evening thinking about dean and jack and how much jack models himself on dean, and dean's deep, crushing guilt over that, and the song's final lamentation that he'd grown up just like me, my boy was just like me, and--

it's a lot, man. it's just a lot.

[thelightofthingshopedfor]

Look, I loved up to IM3 Tony, but then you have Ultron Tony blithely creating a world ending AI, CW Tony feeling guilty enough about that to sign up to in universe untrustworthy authoritarian dictatorships, then blithely ignoring any protocols the second it didn't suit him. He can do what he wants because of a signature?! Then there's Edith, which is appalling even NOT in the hands of an actual child. I actually don't get how anyone defends Tony past CW tbh. I used to love the character.

yeah, I...like, I really don’t want to unnecessarily bash people’s faves--especially when said fave recently got killed off! that sucks and for obvious reasons I have a good sense of how much it sucks!--because I don’t want to be an asshole, and I don’t want to wade into fandom discourse because I literally never have the energy even to defend my faves from textually, canonically inaccurate criticism, let alone doing the opposite by straight-up criticizing other people’s faves (typically in defense of my faves, in fairness)

buuuuut

I also used to like Tony a lot. I loved pretty much everything about IM3. partly I cooled on the character because I started hanging around people who loved Steve, and then I also started loving Steve more, and then I started noticing that people who liked Tony tended to spend a lot of time talking about how much better he was than Steve--like, I remember one specific meta post discussing a particular IM3 scene and what it said about Tony, and it was all very positive and honestly pretty interesting, and like two reblogs down somebody had to turn it into “this is why Tony is the real leader of the Avengers and not Steve! because Steve wouldn’t do this and also he sucks!” at this point I tend to get uneasy if I see people praising or defending Tony, because it’s usually just a matter of time before they start shitting on Steve (or Wanda much more often lately, for obvious reasons) in the process.

but I feel like I would still have some issues with the way Tony was written regardless of how I felt about other characters? because the whole thing about EDITH is...uhhhh well it’s yikes, it’s just a big yikes all over really!! I ended up writing a very long post like a year and a half ago about some of my problems with Tony or at least my rebuttals to some dumb criticisms of Steve, most of which came down to frustration with Marvel’s writing decisions. and I was frustrated with a lot of other things, but the thing that really got to me was, yes, EDITH. because...a lot of the other stuff, I can at least understand why Tony did or thought certain things even if I don’t necessarily agree, but then I think about Far From Home and my head just sort of explodes because I can’t think of a justification for the whole situation that doesn’t boil down to either “Tony is extremely naive about the ways EDITH could be horrifically misused,” which is a terrible look on him and honestly doesn’t make sense with his established characterization, or “it’s just a fun superhero movie, lighten up, it’s not that deep and you’re not supposed to put that much thought into it” which might be true but certainly isn’t satisfying, especially if you’re looking for an in-universe explanation that doesn’t present every adult Good Guy in the movie as either evil or stupid. I mean--maybe there are better interpretations and I just haven’t thought of or seen any because I don’t spend a lot of time in the Tony fandom? but typically I can think of some way to make seemingly contradictory elements of canon make sense with each other if I give it some thought, and in this case I’ve got nothing.