So basically you just negated an entire movie. That’s what you’re saying here Pearce. Tony spent the entirety of IM2 dying, looking for a cure, enduring all kinds of fear and the surety of his body failing him again. Suffered through the trauma of hearing his father call him a ‘creation’ and once again not telling him he loved him so he could find a cure for the palladium poisoning just so in IM3 you could ‘cure’ him with electromagnets?! The very same electromagnets that he would have had lying around his workshop by the dozen in IM and IM2 . The same electromagnets that he HAS HAD IN HIS CHEST THE ENTIRE TIME. And then you don’t even bother to address how exactly removing the arc would have made his chest fucking cave in without reconstructive surgery?! I call bullshit and lazy, lazy writing. You had no clue who the character of Tony Stark was and you took the gig anyway.
I can almost forgive the way the movie plays as Lethal Weapon 10, I can forgive the twist, it is a very Mandarin thing to do, I applaud the way you addressed the anxiety issues, but I cannot forgive the way you took a hero who so many look up to, a hero who saved himself from kidnappers and a certain death with only the few rough tools he had and his own intellect and sheer tenacity and made him nothing. You took Tony Stark’s one true superpower, his intelligence, and made him look like an idiot.
Mandarin is Tony’s second greatest foe (imo) and you didn’t even let him have the killshot. Tony Stark would never, ever blow all his suits. He may dismantle them, but blow them up? With all the raw materials in those suits he could use again? Never. You did all this so Tony could have a’clean slate’? For what? That’s the whole point to Tony. He is a mess of contradiction and issues and he fights through them regardless.
By combining all the above and then having him remove the arc so casually, erasing all his movie history, you turned one of the strongest heroes in the comic world into a weak minded idiot who apparently has no clue about his medical condition or the contents of his own workshop and that, I will never, ever forgive.
**
THANK YOU.
At least the extremis explanation justified it, c’mon.
Bahahaha, okay, so the thing about Tony Stark is that he does in fact periodically implode his entire life, start over, end up a billionaire again and start once more obsessively building suits. Because you can ‘clean slate’ your life as many times as you like; it doesn’t make your issues go away (and sure, he got over the anxiety thing, but his primary issue has always been and will always be that he’s Tony Stark). And also, he fucking loves being Iron Man. That damn suit is like his security blanket and BFF wrapped up in one.
I figured he blew everything up at the end of the movie, decided to finally get off his ass and deal with the heart thing because he’s had one too many power cell shut-downs for his comfort, and then a week later (maybe a month, he was REALLY feeling devoted to Pepper, there) he was down in the basement building suits again.
There’s an even chance that she made him. Tony without things to do just gets dangerous.
This adequately deals with all my reactions to IM3 except the one where Tony now looks like a totally hypocritical douchebag during his conversation with Bruce on the helicarrier. It’s okay for Iron Man to clean slate, but not for Bruce to get rid of Hulk?? Also, caved in chest damage, seriously.
This is probably more like the Hulk ditching Bruce Banner, honestly. In the Tony Stark/Iron Man relationship, it’s Iron Man who’s the hero. Tony’s the one who needs the fixing. Remember Steve’s snappy line, “You may not be a threat, but you’d better stop pretending to be a hero?” Well, he hit a bullseye there, because that’s what Tony actually thinks. He likes people cheering him as a hero, but as far as he’s concerned, it’s about redeeming himself. Iron Man is all about fixing Tony Stark and his mistakes—trying again, being better. He is, ironically, also somewhat about hiding from Tony’s mistakes behind an awesome life-sized action toy, but on the other hand, something about that lets Tony push down the worst aspects of his personality and become the best of himself. So really, he serves the exact opposite purpose of the Hulk—or, no, the same purpose but with exactly opposite emotions.
Though perhaps more to the point, Tony IS sometimes a hypocritical douche, so possibly he was in fact being a hypocritical douche. ^_^ But this seems more like when you give your friends all the really awesome advice that you know you should be following yourself.
The caved-in chest damage, though. I dunno. HE’S MISSING HIS STERNUM. YOU CAN’T JUST PUT THOSE BACK. ”Oh I’ve got it in a baggie around here somewhere…”