As much as Tony says he isn't sentimental or nostalgic - the only person he's fooling is himself (he tends to do that a lot, when it comes to his emotions, as a matter of fact). Even though he was very young when he lost his father, and Howard Stark spent most of Tony's childhood days either drunk, working, or both, it's clear that he had a deep, lasting effect on his only son... and not just in terms of his bad life decisions or his intellect. Tony also inherited his father's fondness for the idea of a lasting legacy: something good and enduring that could be passed on to future generations. For Howard, it was the blueprints for the arc reactor and the new element (which canon never names, but I am having Tony name legatium for rather obvious reasons). For Tony, he considers his legacy the suit, and hopefully the peace he's able to create with it. The legatium will be part of it, too, but that's something he's not entirely willing to share with the rest of the world until he understands it more fully. He doesn't want to unleash anything on the world that he doesn't completely understand: he made that mistake with the Jericho missile, and it was a hard, fast lesson that he won't need to learn again.
The other thing his time with the Ten Rings taught was the importance of other people's safety ... and how it can be obtained. Tony thought that keeping people safe meant just having a bigger stick than the other guy, and a weapon you only had to fire once. In captivity, he learned that it's not what weapons exist, it's how they're used, who they're used by ... and that sometimes the best way to keep people safe is to just remove the weapons from the equation altogether. Whenever any sort of conflict breaks out, now, the first thing Tony is sure to do is make sure that innocents and other people he cares about are safe and far away from anything that might happen. He knows the risks of combat, but he wants to be sure that the only people hurt in the process are the people who are willing to be there, if at all possible. This concept of safety doesn't stop at fighting Bad Guys, though: it also extends to his reckless behavior.
Tony's come to realize that he'll always have an itch to scratch somewhere that's going to end up making him bleed - or get hungover, or break something - and he's totally fine with that. He's seen the consequences of letting other people get wrapped up in his own self-destructive tendencies, though. So while he's still prone to reckless, spontaneous behavior, there's still some level of control in the fact that he'll almost never consciously do anything that would cause anyone but himself (or his personal property) any substantial, lasting harm. The biggest reason for this, of course, is that between his initial lack of redeeming social qualities, and his outwardly egotistical, aggressive, sarcastic nature, Tony doesn't have many people that are close enough to him to get hurt. In fact, at the end of the day, there are only two: Pepper and Rhodey, and he is fiercely loyal to them. Realizing how much of his crap they put up with before he started getting his act together has made Tony decide that he has a very large debt to both of them, and he's never going to stop working to pay it back, in any way he can. He's still working on learning how to emotionally reciprocate things like friendship and affection without completely making an ass of himself, but he's starting to move past thinking that throwing money and shiny gifts at people can take the place of a kind word. So he's at least making progress on that front. As far as playing well with others, though ...
... that's definitely still a work in progress. Tony's ego and arrogance already make huge marks against him, and don't win him any fast friends. He makes easier rivals than allies, more content to snipe at people who could come close to being his equals. Part of that's his ego, but another part is caution: he doesn't want to risk being betrayed again, and he's still not entirely sure how to figure out who he can trust, preferring to learn by watching people and how they react to things. If, over time, someone proves themselves as trustworthy, loyal, and generally a good person, he'll let his walls down, and the snark will become more friendly and less caustic. If Tony mocks you incessantly, he either loves you or hates you - the actions that accompany the mockery are what help tell the difference.
At the end of it all, though, the most defining part of Tony, the thing at the heart of all the ego and the loyalty and the self-destruction, are two simple philosophies. One: try anything once. Two: if it ends up being fun, do it again. As much as possible. Tony loves life, and all of the good things in it ... so when he finds out he's dying, it's no wonder he wants to go out fast and pretty - going slowly, miserable and in pain, doesn't fit his worldview at all. The world is good, life is short, and there's no point in spending it doing things that either don't help anyone, or aren't any fun. If you're not here for the party, Tony Stark will be more than happy to show you the door... close up, and at high velocity.
Other: Well, of course we've got to talk about Tony's tech. At his current canon-point, he has 6 versions of the Iron Man suit, which he mostly hoards for posterity. The two he uses most often are the Mark 5 and the Mark 6. The Mark 5 is nicknamed The Suitcase, since that's exactly what it is: a portable version of the suit which folds down into an armored suitcase. With the right manipulation, it can be cracked open and worn in a matter of moments, the perfect thing for the hero on the go. The Mark 6 is kept at Tony's home in Malibu, and requires a full complement of his AI and robotics to put on and calibrate.
The robots run pretty much everything and anything Tony needs them to: they fabricate the parts for his armor, help act as extra hands in repairs, and in the case of his first robot, Dummy, handle damage control. The most important of these is his AI butler, Jarvis, who helps Tony analyze his experiments and do any and all necessary research. He also acts as a sort of Mission Control for him while in the Iron Man suit, helping him assess the conditions of his surroundings and the suit, as well as calculate probabilities of certain scenarios. Jarvis is also a bit of a smartass, because Tony knows that life is not half as fun without a little banter in it, even in your artificial intelligence.
The Arc Reactor deserves mention of its own, even if just a little: now that the new element has been synthesized, Tony doesn't need to perform nearly as much preventative maintenance, but there are some conditions that would cause it to malfunction. The only true canon examples are being forcibly removed (thanks, Obie, you ass), and Going Into Freaking Space (but that hasn't happened yet in DDD), but mun is perfectly open to plotting Other Ways To Break Tony. Breaking Tony is always fun and will never get old.
As far as quirks, if the mun listed all of them, we'd be here all day, but one of the more amusing ones is that Tony always, always has some kind of beverage on hand while he's working. It helps him focus. Somehow. He's eccentric, we don't ask. He also doesn't like being handed things.
Additional Links: Wikipedia entry on the film-canon suits & arc reactors. The wiki also speculates that the element created in Iron Man 2 is the same element used in Captain America's shield ... which the mun applied logic to and decided was BS, as Howard said that he couldn't synthesize it with the technology he had. so there
First Person (entry type): So, hey out there in ridiculous impossible internet land. Been a while since I did one of these vlog things - frankly, been a little busy saving the world, you know how it is. Well. Some of you know how it is. First-hand. And hey, more power to you guys. Which isn't to say that those of you who don't know how it is should be sitting there feeling like microwaved scrambled eggs, because come on. We love you. We're doing this for you. I love you. Yes, even you, the one who's mad at me because this popped up on you while you were trying to watch cheesy porn about girls dressed up in cat ears. I love you too. And if it's the one that starts with the pizza delivery boy, don't bother, she's wearing padding and it's less impressive once the tiger print bikini comes off. ... I should probably not be talking about porn watching on a public forum, Pepper gets kind of touchy about that. Pepper? Honey? If you see this, I'm sorry, I was just showing some love to the guy out there, not to -- well -- you know. Myself. ANYWAY. What was I even turning this on to talk to you guys about? I can't remember. JARVIS, did I put anything about what I was gonna vlog about, was this even in the schedule --
[a loud, avian screech cuts into his rambling]
Oh, right. The bird. I was gonna talk about -- okay, see, here's the deal. The cops keep sending me all this stuff they confiscated from Justin Hammer's laboratory of failure, thinking I might actually have a use for some of it. A couple of things made nice paperweights, but really, that was about it. If any of you are in the market for paperweights, I've got plenty of really unique ones. But the weirdest thing is, the other day, one of them showed up with a cockatoo, and -- I am not wired for birds. Birds are not wired for me. Birds just generally don't go well with wires. I'm afraid the little featherball is gonna chomp down on something and ruin my latest masterpiece. Not to mention, well, uh, himself. So ... if any of you wants a great big white bird, lemme know. We'll make arrangements.
[he holds up a hand so that the resulting peace sign takes up most of the monitor] Peace out.
Third Person: Tony was beginning to wish he hadn't taken the reins of the company back from Pepper so soon, and so easily. She'd just made that pouty, wide-eyed, harried, stressed-out-Pepper face at him, and he'd crumpled under the force of so much Magical Girl Emotion Power. As he sat in his chair at the end of the conference table, idly spinning from one side to the other as much as his limited sense of decorum would let him get away with, though, he had the distinct thought that she could have waited another couple of weeks. The other members of the committee were engaged in a lukewarm debate about the fate of the remainder of the Stark Expo, but the minute they'd started talking about dividends and ROIs and other complicated stuff that he couldn't be assed to consider, Tony's eyes had glassed over. Finally, the last of his give-a-shit muscles failed, and he turned his back completely on the rest of the table to look out the window.
The meeting room was at the top of one of the many conference centers on the Expo grounds, and one of the few that hadn't been damaged in his skirmish with Ivan Vanko. Whiplash, the papers were calling him - Tony was pretty sure the name had come from that cigar-chomping right-wing blunderbuss at the Daily Bugle. He couldn't fault Jonah Jameson too much - he was one of Iron Man's biggest fans in the press sector - but Tony had to admit that the man could probably give Stephen Colbert a run for his money, in an unironic sense. "Not a bad spot, though," he muttered to himself, recalling the gist of the article as his gaze swept over the swath of damage that cut through Flushing Meadows. It had mostly said a lot about what an asset Iron Man was to the country, how Senator Stern could stick his opinions on Tony Stark where the sun didn't shine, and a lot of other typical Jameson bluster. But what had caught Tony's attention was that the editor-in-chief had lauded the Expo itself, touching on a lot of personal nostalgia about the original session, and hoping that it would go on. Shifting in his chair to sprawl slightly, Tony reached for the glass of water at his side and sipped, pensively. He hoped it would, too. And of course, just as he'd reached that conclusion, one of the committe members' voices cut through his thoughts: "-- going to have to shut it down and eat the difference."
"Excuse me?" Tony spun around, setting his glass down and straightening out his posture. "Could you repeat that? I'm sorry, I was a little too busy looking out at something that's a physical embodiment of this company's entire history, something that my father started, and I've continued, and we both put our hearts and souls into. I know, you guys probably don't get this a lot - you're so busy scratching each other's backs and ordering out to lunch and, uh -" He pulled out his mobile, punched a few spots on the screen, and brought up a holographic projection - "updating your Facebook status about how pointless this meeting is, thanks, Ms. Tautenhan - to actually consider that maybe this isn't about the money. I know, I know." He held up a hand, pushing the hologram back off to the side, where it faded out of sight. "That's rich for me to say, it figures, I've got all the money, yadda yadda bla bla. Believe me, I know what you're all trying not to lean around and mutter to yourselves, I've been at about fifty billion of these meetings. It's cool. I get it. You want to get to your bottom line so you can go back to whatever it is you think counts as work, when in reality, the biggest, greatest work you can do for this company - for this nation - is to get on board with continuing this Expo, so that the great minds of America can share their thoughts and their inspiration with one another, so that we can come up with something worth passing on."
He paused just long enough to glance around the table, taking in the shocked faces of the committee members. "Unless, of course, you've all got enough of those kinds of ideas already. Enough to fill another eleven months or so worth of collaboration and ingenuity. ... Here's a hint. Facebook status, though very cutting edge about eight years ago if you were a freshman in Harvard? Not gonna cut it." Downing the rest of his glass of water, Tony got to his feet.
"And come on. How many of these meetings have you been to? Money's not even an issue, I've got this covered. Send me a bill." As he strode out the door, completely ignoring the cacophony that erupted behind him, Tony smiled. Pepper was going to kill him when he got home, but in all fairness, he was pretty sure that wherever he was in the Great Beyond, Howard Stark approved. And that kind of feeling called for a little celebration. "... Hey Jarvis. Any of those Belgian Waffle stands still open...?"
Tony Stark | MCU Movies | Reserved | 2/2
The other thing his time with the Ten Rings taught was the importance of other people's safety ... and how it can be obtained. Tony thought that keeping people safe meant just having a bigger stick than the other guy, and a weapon you only had to fire once. In captivity, he learned that it's not what weapons exist, it's how they're used, who they're used by ... and that sometimes the best way to keep people safe is to just remove the weapons from the equation altogether. Whenever any sort of conflict breaks out, now, the first thing Tony is sure to do is make sure that innocents and other people he cares about are safe and far away from anything that might happen. He knows the risks of combat, but he wants to be sure that the only people hurt in the process are the people who are willing to be there, if at all possible. This concept of safety doesn't stop at fighting Bad Guys, though: it also extends to his reckless behavior.
Tony's come to realize that he'll always have an itch to scratch somewhere that's going to end up making him bleed - or get hungover, or break something - and he's totally fine with that. He's seen the consequences of letting other people get wrapped up in his own self-destructive tendencies, though. So while he's still prone to reckless, spontaneous behavior, there's still some level of control in the fact that he'll almost never consciously do anything that would cause anyone but himself (or his personal property) any substantial, lasting harm. The biggest reason for this, of course, is that between his initial lack of redeeming social qualities, and his outwardly egotistical, aggressive, sarcastic nature, Tony doesn't have many people that are close enough to him to get hurt. In fact, at the end of the day, there are only two: Pepper and Rhodey, and he is fiercely loyal to them. Realizing how much of his crap they put up with before he started getting his act together has made Tony decide that he has a very large debt to both of them, and he's never going to stop working to pay it back, in any way he can. He's still working on learning how to emotionally reciprocate things like friendship and affection without completely making an ass of himself, but he's starting to move past thinking that throwing money and shiny gifts at people can take the place of a kind word. So he's at least making progress on that front. As far as playing well with others, though ...
... that's definitely still a work in progress. Tony's ego and arrogance already make huge marks against him, and don't win him any fast friends. He makes easier rivals than allies, more content to snipe at people who could come close to being his equals. Part of that's his ego, but another part is caution: he doesn't want to risk being betrayed again, and he's still not entirely sure how to figure out who he can trust, preferring to learn by watching people and how they react to things. If, over time, someone proves themselves as trustworthy, loyal, and generally a good person, he'll let his walls down, and the snark will become more friendly and less caustic. If Tony mocks you incessantly, he either loves you or hates you - the actions that accompany the mockery are what help tell the difference.
At the end of it all, though, the most defining part of Tony, the thing at the heart of all the ego and the loyalty and the self-destruction, are two simple philosophies. One: try anything once. Two: if it ends up being fun, do it again. As much as possible. Tony loves life, and all of the good things in it ... so when he finds out he's dying, it's no wonder he wants to go out fast and pretty - going slowly, miserable and in pain, doesn't fit his worldview at all. The world is good, life is short, and there's no point in spending it doing things that either don't help anyone, or aren't any fun. If you're not here for the party, Tony Stark will be more than happy to show you the door... close up, and at high velocity.
Other: Well, of course we've got to talk about Tony's tech. At his current canon-point, he has 6 versions of the Iron Man suit, which he mostly hoards for posterity. The two he uses most often are the Mark 5 and the Mark 6. The Mark 5 is nicknamed The Suitcase, since that's exactly what it is: a portable version of the suit which folds down into an armored suitcase. With the right manipulation, it can be cracked open and worn in a matter of moments, the perfect thing for the hero on the go. The Mark 6 is kept at Tony's home in Malibu, and requires a full complement of his AI and robotics to put on and calibrate.
The robots run pretty much everything and anything Tony needs them to: they fabricate the parts for his armor, help act as extra hands in repairs, and in the case of his first robot, Dummy, handle damage control. The most important of these is his AI butler, Jarvis, who helps Tony analyze his experiments and do any and all necessary research. He also acts as a sort of Mission Control for him while in the Iron Man suit, helping him assess the conditions of his surroundings and the suit, as well as calculate probabilities of certain scenarios. Jarvis is also a bit of a smartass, because Tony knows that life is not half as fun without a little banter in it, even in your artificial intelligence.
The Arc Reactor deserves mention of its own, even if just a little: now that the new element has been synthesized, Tony doesn't need to perform nearly as much preventative maintenance, but there are some conditions that would cause it to malfunction. The only true canon examples are being forcibly removed (thanks, Obie, you ass), and Going Into Freaking Space (but that hasn't happened yet in DDD), but mun is perfectly open to plotting Other Ways To Break Tony. Breaking Tony is always fun and will never get old.
As far as quirks, if the mun listed all of them, we'd be here all day, but one of the more amusing ones is that Tony always, always has some kind of beverage on hand while he's working. It helps him focus. Somehow. He's eccentric, we don't ask. He also doesn't like being handed things.
Additional Links:
Wikipedia entry on the film-canon suits & arc reactors. The wiki also speculates that the element created in Iron Man 2 is the same element used in Captain America's shield ... which the mun applied logic to and decided was BS, as Howard said that he couldn't synthesize it with the technology he had.
so thereFirst Person (entry type): So, hey out there in ridiculous impossible internet land. Been a while since I did one of these vlog things - frankly, been a little busy saving the world, you know how it is. Well. Some of you know how it is. First-hand. And hey, more power to you guys. Which isn't to say that those of you who don't know how it is should be sitting there feeling like microwaved scrambled eggs, because come on. We love you. We're doing this for you. I love you. Yes, even you, the one who's mad at me because this popped up on you while you were trying to watch cheesy porn about girls dressed up in cat ears. I love you too. And if it's the one that starts with the pizza delivery boy, don't bother, she's wearing padding and it's less impressive once the tiger print bikini comes off. ... I should probably not be talking about porn watching on a public forum, Pepper gets kind of touchy about that. Pepper? Honey? If you see this, I'm sorry, I was just showing some love to the guy out there, not to -- well -- you know. Myself. ANYWAY. What was I even turning this on to talk to you guys about? I can't remember. JARVIS, did I put anything about what I was gonna vlog about, was this even in the schedule --
[a loud, avian screech cuts into his rambling]
Oh, right. The bird. I was gonna talk about -- okay, see, here's the deal. The cops keep sending me all this stuff they confiscated from Justin Hammer's laboratory of failure, thinking I might actually have a use for some of it. A couple of things made nice paperweights, but really, that was about it. If any of you are in the market for paperweights, I've got plenty of really unique ones. But the weirdest thing is, the other day, one of them showed up with a cockatoo, and -- I am not wired for birds. Birds are not wired for me. Birds just generally don't go well with wires. I'm afraid the little featherball is gonna chomp down on something and ruin my latest masterpiece. Not to mention, well, uh, himself. So ... if any of you wants a great big white bird, lemme know. We'll make arrangements.
[he holds up a hand so that the resulting peace sign takes up most of the monitor] Peace out.
Third Person: Tony was beginning to wish he hadn't taken the reins of the company back from Pepper so soon, and so easily. She'd just made that pouty, wide-eyed, harried, stressed-out-Pepper face at him, and he'd crumpled under the force of so much Magical Girl Emotion Power. As he sat in his chair at the end of the conference table, idly spinning from one side to the other as much as his limited sense of decorum would let him get away with, though, he had the distinct thought that she could have waited another couple of weeks. The other members of the committee were engaged in a lukewarm debate about the fate of the remainder of the Stark Expo, but the minute they'd started talking about dividends and ROIs and other complicated stuff that he couldn't be assed to consider, Tony's eyes had glassed over. Finally, the last of his give-a-shit muscles failed, and he turned his back completely on the rest of the table to look out the window.
The meeting room was at the top of one of the many conference centers on the Expo grounds, and one of the few that hadn't been damaged in his skirmish with Ivan Vanko. Whiplash, the papers were calling him - Tony was pretty sure the name had come from that cigar-chomping right-wing blunderbuss at the Daily Bugle. He couldn't fault Jonah Jameson too much - he was one of Iron Man's biggest fans in the press sector - but Tony had to admit that the man could probably give Stephen Colbert a run for his money, in an unironic sense. "Not a bad spot, though," he muttered to himself, recalling the gist of the article as his gaze swept over the swath of damage that cut through Flushing Meadows. It had mostly said a lot about what an asset Iron Man was to the country, how Senator Stern could stick his opinions on Tony Stark where the sun didn't shine, and a lot of other typical Jameson bluster. But what had caught Tony's attention was that the editor-in-chief had lauded the Expo itself, touching on a lot of personal nostalgia about the original session, and hoping that it would go on. Shifting in his chair to sprawl slightly, Tony reached for the glass of water at his side and sipped, pensively. He hoped it would, too. And of course, just as he'd reached that conclusion, one of the committe members' voices cut through his thoughts: "-- going to have to shut it down and eat the difference."
"Excuse me?" Tony spun around, setting his glass down and straightening out his posture. "Could you repeat that? I'm sorry, I was a little too busy looking out at something that's a physical embodiment of this company's entire history, something that my father started, and I've continued, and we both put our hearts and souls into. I know, you guys probably don't get this a lot - you're so busy scratching each other's backs and ordering out to lunch and, uh -" He pulled out his mobile, punched a few spots on the screen, and brought up a holographic projection - "updating your Facebook status about how pointless this meeting is, thanks, Ms. Tautenhan - to actually consider that maybe this isn't about the money. I know, I know." He held up a hand, pushing the hologram back off to the side, where it faded out of sight. "That's rich for me to say, it figures, I've got all the money, yadda yadda bla bla. Believe me, I know what you're all trying not to lean around and mutter to yourselves, I've been at about fifty billion of these meetings. It's cool. I get it. You want to get to your bottom line so you can go back to whatever it is you think counts as work, when in reality, the biggest, greatest work you can do for this company - for this nation - is to get on board with continuing this Expo, so that the great minds of America can share their thoughts and their inspiration with one another, so that we can come up with something worth passing on."
He paused just long enough to glance around the table, taking in the shocked faces of the committee members. "Unless, of course, you've all got enough of those kinds of ideas already. Enough to fill another eleven months or so worth of collaboration and ingenuity. ... Here's a hint. Facebook status, though very cutting edge about eight years ago if you were a freshman in Harvard? Not gonna cut it." Downing the rest of his glass of water, Tony got to his feet.
"And come on. How many of these meetings have you been to? Money's not even an issue, I've got this covered. Send me a bill." As he strode out the door, completely ignoring the cacophony that erupted behind him, Tony smiled. Pepper was going to kill him when he got home, but in all fairness, he was pretty sure that wherever he was in the Great Beyond, Howard Stark approved. And that kind of feeling called for a little celebration. "... Hey Jarvis. Any of those Belgian Waffle stands still open...?"