Joe Russo on Thanos & Tony’s interaction in the Avengers: Infinity War commentary. Tony Stark is the only character Thanos canonically sees as a threat.
Concept: Tony Stark never being diagnosed with Aspergers and never realizing he was on the spectrum even though:
He forgets little things like Pollock eras even though he’s a mechanical genius
He’s described as “eccentric” on wiki- meaning unconventional or strange
And his behaviour is strange! he speaks without emotion but has empathy so deep it can get him in trouble (going to Gulmira even though the suit is hardly ready all because “who, if anyone, will help”?????)
Infodumps
Is only comfortable around a small circle of people
wearing sunglasses so he doesn’t have to make eye contact
how at the end of Iron Man 3, we were reassured that Tony Stark would be back.
while for the other MCU heroes, we got this…
… not “Steve Rogers will return” or “Scott Lang will return” or “Peter Parker will return”
and at the end of BP, we see “Black Panther will return in Avengers: Infinty War”
We get their masked identities. Their superhero aliases. Their alter egos.
When we think of Captain America, Ant-Man, Spider-Man, Black Panther, etc., we think of them as the heroes who we could rely on to help us, kick ass, and save the day, right?
And what do we think of when we hear the name Tony Stark?
Here, Tony’s actual name, not his alias, is in the same position as the others, reminding us that Iron Man may be powerful, but the true person we can trust to come and save us is Tony Stark. Iron Man has firepower, but Tony has more to offer the world than just his armor. If he ever finds himself in a situation where he doesn’t have a suit, you bet he’ll find another way to save the day.
That’s what he does. He’s a mechanic. He sees a problem and he fixes it. Yeah, he has an awesome suit of armor that helps him kick ass, but that’s just a high tech prosthesis, an extension of himself, an amplification of his true superpower — his brain and his heart.
tom holland just posted a video on instagram like “I’m sorry that there’s no new news on the spiderman sequel but I just got the script I’m about to read it!!” and he held up the script and it said “spider-man: far from home” so yeah he just spoiled the spider-man sequel title while announcing he had no news on the spider-man sequel,, good job tom
Guess I should be glad I was a skinny kid.
Otherwise, you’d have delivered me to this maniac.
#actually the thing I love best about this scene#(well besides EVERYTHING)#is that this is when I first realized#that Peter’s not afraid of Yondu AT ALL#which I think is important for what his childhood was like?#Peter’s got a lot of justifiable resentment about it#but he didn’t grow up afraid of Yondu#he backtalks him without even really thinking about it#he doesn’t have the ‘flinch’ reaction that abused children have#(e.g. how Mantis is with Ego is a TEXTBOOK example of it)#Yondu might’ve done a lot wrong#but Peter grew up confident and self-assured#and that doesn’t happen by accident (via laylainalaska)
Seriously: compare his body language around Yondu with Mantis’ around Ego, or Gamora’s around Thanos, for that matter. Peter is frequently irritated and resentful with Yondu, but there is none of the wary watchfulness that both of them display–you get the sense that neither woman would like to turn their back on their ‘parent’, let alone let their guard down.
Whereas Peter rolls his eyes at Yondu, pushes back at him, visibly blows him off. Doesn’t even seem to blink when Yondu is literally threatening to kill him until he comes up with a good reason not to.
Literally the only thing I think I’ve ever seen phase Peter around Yondu is the moment where he pawns the troll doll off on Yondu instead of the Stone, and that’s the moment when he explictly says he believes that Yondu will hate him forever now.
No, seriously: I genuinely believe that Peter and Yondu never communicated between vol 1 and vol 2, and that Peter truly believed he’d severed their relationship forever over that trick and was quietly grieving at the same time as he was trying to process his (justified, again) resentments. You can actually see him grieving at Gamora in the end of vol 1, and she just totally fails to get it; to her, Yondu is clearly taking the role of Thanos in her head.
YES, THIS.
I agree that Yondu and Peter probably didn’t have contact between the two movies. Which makes it all the more tragilarious that Yondu had a tracker on Peter’s ship and could have found him anytime he wanted, but he didn’t because he was trying to let Peter make his own choices and waiting for Peter to come to him … while Peter was (almost certainly) pining for a call from Yondu to let him know that Yondu did not, in fact, hate his guts and plan to kill him on sight. (JUST COMMUNICATE, YOU FREAKIN’ LUNKHEADS.)
Anyway, I love your point about Gamora thinking of Peter’s relationship with Yondu through the lens of her own experiences with Thanos. I’ve occasionally seen meta and fic taking for granted that Gamora’s comment to Peter after Yondu takes the orb is objectively accurate, that she’s an unbiased observer of their relationship, but she’s really, really not. She’s trying to comfort and reassure Peter like she wishes someone had reassured her about Thanos (it doesn’t matter, he’s no kin of yours, you don’t owe him anything) but she misreads the situation completely. Not that her reasons aren’t valid – not only is she drawing on her own experience with Thanos, but the one time she saw Peter and Yondu interact, Yondu was threatening to kill him! But she doesn’t have the whole picture.
Oh, absolutely. And in fact, you can see her also projecting her own relationships with her adoptive and biological parents onto Peter and Ego in Vol 2, which is a nice little bit of continuum in characterization: she’s much quicker to push Peter to reach out to Ego and try with him than Peter himself is! And I think that really comes from, as you say, the opportunities Gamora wishes she’d had for herself.
She’s not exactly wrong or right in her reading given the information she has to work with–but hoo boy, is she not an objective source. This is one of the reasons that it really bugs me when I see Gamora written as emotionally capable in the same way that she’s professionally capable, like she knows jack all about how relationships and social interactions and family works. Because in many ways volume 2 is constantly showing us that Gamora, despite being a very bright and accomplished woman, has terrible emotional intelligence. She knows how to function in a professional setting, but she’s really not good at assessing or articulating relationships in a personal setting. And why should she be? She has no practice. She’s taken that entire part of her life and compartmentalized it away since childhood, to survive.
It’s a thing I love about her: she is perhaps the most competent of the Guardians in terms of executing professional jobs, but she is not the emotional center of the team, and she is certainly not Team Mom. She isn’t, emotionally, an adult quite yet–she’s just too inexperienced and she makes too many inept projection mistakes. She’s learning from them, don’t get me wrong–look at her relationship with Nebula!–but I’d actually say that even Nebula is more emotionally fluent than she is. Nebula is at least willing and capable of acknowledging and articulating the unspoken dynamics of her relationship with Gamora, whereas I am genuinely not sure Gamora understood why she was putting herself out to get Nebula safe, even if also safe and imprisoned. She doesn’t act like she knows why she’s doing what she’s doing at all.
No, the emotional heart of the team–and this is another thing I love about Guardians–is really Peter, who is easily the most emotionally perceptive person on the team except perhaps for adult Groot, and that’s not really a fair comparison to either of them on account of alien minds. Peter is the Team Mom. Gamora is, most accurately, Team Dad–and the sort of dad who can’t sort out a situation better than yelling “if you don’t shut up I’m going to turn this car around and no one is going to Disneyland” at that.
Which is why it bugs me when Gamora is treated as 100% correct in her emotional assessments of situations–when we’re actually shown repeatedly that she is wrong about them–and treated like a “real adult” compared to, say, Drax and Rocket in fic. No. She’s as stunted and trying to make her way and learn as any of them, and I love that she–and Nebula, and Mantis!–get to be emotionally stunted as much as any of the boys. I love that we have this woman, this beautiful and intensely competent woman, who is so terrified of emotions and confused by social interactions and threatened by any attachment. I love this superficially elegant, grimly poised woman faking a lot more functionality than she has. I love this woman who is terrified more than almost anything else in the world (bar Thanos) by a cheerful, intensely socially awkward bumbling woman who wants nothing but the best for the people, but who might see her emotions and have her figured all out.
Because Gamora? Gamora is terrified of Mantis. She wants nothing to do with Mantis–she’ll say “you’re not ugly” because she thinks she should, but she switches immediately from casual mostly-friendly relaxation to taut, tense, frozen horror about Mantis the instant she finds out what Mantis can do. She views Mantis with suspicion every step of the way, and I think Mantis is actually the point at which she begins to pivot on Ego.
Gamora is not used to being imperfect. Gamora is not used to being in waters where she does not know what she is doing. And she does not know what she is doing when it comes to interpersonal relationships. She is flying blind and she knows it and she’s terrified to trust anyone, in case she’s wrong and it hurts her.
It’s one of the things I love about her relationship with Peter–his whole arc with her is Peter inviting her to trust him, trying to bend over backwards to be loving and welcoming. And the romance between them consists of Gamora learning to go… “okay. Do I dance? Am I willing to move for pleasure? Is it safe to let my guard down?” at its heart.
I love that. I love it so much. But most of all, I love her so much.
YES TO ALL OF THIS.
Gamora is awkward and emotionally stunted and damaged in real, serious ways that actually impact her relationships with other people, she’s not a ‘broken bird’ who’s only fucked up when it’s pretty and convenient, she’s not emotionally fluent or perceptive; she cares deeply for the people she loves, but she’s actually incredibly bad at showing it. She has no idea how to relax, no idea how to let her guard down, no idea how to be a person when she’s not on a job, because she hasn’t had that opportunity since she was a child. And it’s not often you get to see a female character–especially a hypercompetent badass like Gamora–be flailingly bad at relationships the way she is. I fucking love it.
Peter is an unprofessional juvenile asshole, but by Vol 2 he’s by far and away the most emotionally healthy, socially competent person in the group. The only reason anyone would slot Gamora into that role is some lingering idea that Girls Are Good At Emotions.
failed2be-chill 