Ive Been Thinking Lately About The Tony-deletes-his-brain Arc From Iron Man (2008).

Ive been thinking lately about the Tony-deletes-his-brain arc from Iron Man (2008).

Steve is dead, the Registration Act is done, the Skrull invasion has put Osborn in power, and, thanks to Extremis, Tony is carrying the entire Registration database in his head. The logical and very Tony solution is to slowly delete his own brain by traveling the world and plugging into repulsor terminals he has stashed in various places. Each time, he loses chunks of his intellect and his memory and heads closer to total brain death. It’s the culmination of all his angst over Civil War and Steve’s death.

But one thing that really gets me is this scene in issue #17 when Tony is writing an email to Maria Hill:

Ive Been Thinking Lately About The Tony-deletes-his-brain Arc From Iron Man (2008).

Tony is thinking about Steve when there’s no particular reason to be thinking about Steve, which is very in character for him. But more importantly, he’s forgotten that Steve is dead.

It’s thing that destroyed him in the aftermath of the Civil War, the one thing he couldn’t live with, and he’s forgotten. There was no reason to put this in the scene, other than to highlight that.

I think this was exactly what Tony wanted, and the real reason why he didn’t just eat a gun or “throw himself into a volcano” as other characters suggested. Tony didn’t want to die. He wanted escape from the guilt and to and dull of his mind and lose his sense of self. And when he reboots, he gets to lose the entire year of memories he couldn’t handle. And it’s so, so in character because those are the same desires that made him alcoholic years earlier.

More than that, I think Tony knew exactly what he was doing when he put the database in his head. If things went wrong, really really wrong, he had a ready made escape. A planned loss of the worst of himself and the worst of his memories. (I’d also like to think that if Steve put these pieces together after he returned and Tony had lost a year, he’d be furious.)

So anyway, that’s my over-10-years-too-late extremely angsty analysis of post-Civil War Tony that no one asked for... carry on

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marvel angst tony stark marvel comics marvel 616

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