Iron Man – the worst superhero
Iron Man. Tony Stark. The genius scientist. The egocentric billionaire. The keeper of law and order. The enemy of humanity. The destroyer of our world. The traitor.
There is a villain in every story. Usually an interesting character, a person who sets new events in motion in his desire to change the world. The story always has a hero too. Often a not very deep person whose only goals are to protect the system and the survival of society. The villain always brings with him destruction on an unprecedented scale and sometimes even the annihilation of the entire world. For Tony Stark, however, this is not enough. He had the need to destroy the world twice.
Tony Stark created Ultron. An artificial intelligence whose purpose is to build a shield around the Earth because Stark finds our planet too weak and incapable of existing on the same level as the rest. Here he is already one of the biggest monsters Marvel has offered us. Stark chose to isolate Earth from its own universe out of fear. But what a shock, the idea of a computer ruling over human life didn’t turn out well and things spiraled out of control, turning Ultron into a maniacal exterminator.
And in response to his own mistake, Stark decided to make an even more perverse mistake and create the only thing worse than Ultron – Vision. Vision is the creation of a sick mind. His existence is inherently flawed and in direct contradiction to the nature of life. Vision has no soul and is not human, but neither is he a machine. He is neither alive nor dead. Ultron could destroy the material world, but Vision has the energy of a being that can devour Spirit itself and close the eyes of the cosmos itself forever. The creation of Vision was a betrayal of humanity for which the vaunted cyborg Tony should have been publicly executed.
But Stark isn’t pathetic just at scientific invention. He also demonstrates impressive pitifulness with his moral stances. When faced with the opportunity to defend his friends’ right to love and live freely, he chose to fight on the side of… the law. Captain America believed that special and powerful people should determine for themselves what was right. Stark wanted them to serve the public. Captain America puts love for his brother first. Stark puts the rules there. Captain America fought for individualism, and Iron Man fought for the collectivists. And at last, when he was finally about to see that his friend was right, Stark broke under the power of something equally disgusting – the desire for irrational revenge.
But as obnoxious as he was in every conceivable situation, Tony Stark saved his biggest misery for last. His final battle with Thanos. The snap of fingers that brought half of humanity back from the dead to kill us all. Stark’s inability to accept loss with dignity drove him to rip several million people from their natural path, upset the balance of the universe, turn against nature, and bring chaos to humanity from which it could never recover, simply because he was too weak to cope with reality.
Tony Stark is a rich man with no morals who puts the system and survival above individualism and life. And the only sure thing about Iron Man is that he is neither iron nor a man.