quigonejinn (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
quigonejinn) wrote2008-05-31 04:29 am
quigonejinn) wrote2008-05-31 04:29 am
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Stronger (Harder, Better, Faster)The song is on my default playlist, and last week, in the throes of full-blown fandom crazy, I started obsessing about what a fantastic track this would make for an Iron Man vid. And then one of the DOOMTHREADS -- it is 4:30AM, and I am too brainfried to figure out where, even with Gmail's halfway decent search engine -- somebody mentioned wanting to see it. And uh. I was too tired to write tonight, so here! HAVE MY OBSESSION.
Tony Stark set to Kanye West and Daft Punk
XVid, 35MB
Started at 10PM or so of Friday night, finished around 4AM of Saturday morning. Not much in the way of movie-independent storytelling, which is probably why it came together so easily. It usually takes me about eight hours per minute, but I banged this together in way, way under that. Think more like a 5:20 recap of the movie than anything else.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y'ALL.
And I don't think it's as simple as Poor Little Rich Boy, not by a long shot. You're exactly right. A lot of his barriers are self-imposed -- I refuse to believe that every woman he's ever had a one night stand with was crazy. Even given the way he tends to pick up women, a decent number had to have been probably perfectly nice women who would have been decent girlfriends. But no, Tony doesn't even want to find out what they're like because who wants to wear their game face first thing in the morning?
Pre-Af Tony only interacts with people when he's wearing his game face, and his game face is an asshole. In fact, you can almost see him transitioning to a slightly more public version of himself when Pepper comes down into the shop.
(I have a pet theory that Tony blew off the Apogee Awards when he realized that they were going to do a mini-biog heavy on the CHILD FUCKING PRODIGY and INHERITOR OF DADDY'S MANTLE and MAGAZINE COVER BOY thing on top of Rhodey presenting the award. Sure, he's totally convinced of his utter brilliance and worthiness of being adored -- but at the same time, his Daddy issues totally predate Afg, and if he really is as emotionally shut down as we've been postulating and if he's aware of his performance, I can kind of imagine Tony not wanting to have it rubbed in his face, particularly if it's Rhodey, who called him the day that awful fucking news broke, who flew all the way from Denver to be there at the funeral, etc, etc. Too much potential emotional vulnerability in one place, guys.
It's the same kind of HEDONISM NOW PLZ avoidance that happens when Rhodey starts talking to him about why he loves the military.)
despite all the frustration and supreme human effort it took to get him there, watching him work over the torch, finally silent
Exactly. And in my head, there's a very real difference in which Tony charms the welders and how he's schmoozing, say, the president of Lockheed Martin, for whose new communications satellite Stark Industries could supply microassembly expertise. I like to think that Tony really does <3 the people in the funvee, but that he doesn't fundamentally care at all about the military-industrial complex wankers who are attending the Apogee Awards and could take his failure to show up as an insult.
I think Pepper would pick up on the difference.
Randomly: Is it wrong to want Everhart/Stark? Because I was watching the ending of the movie there, and she's the ONLY PERSON SITTING in the whole room, and you know that a huge part of why Tony came out of the Superhero Closet was to fuck with her in much the same way that he buys the Jackson Pollock just to fuck with Pepper. And, plus, I bet there was assigned seating. And there has to be a reason why a reporter for Vanity frickin' Fair, a magazine known for its hard-hitting coverage of daily events, is front an dcenter on this. I like to think that he has a tiny bit of proto-respect for her.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&#39;ALL.
That's a great observation. I actually know a few people like Tony, and it's very, very hard to get beyond their game faces. They're always *on*, even when they don't want to be. It becomes habit, kind of instinctual, and sometimes they can't turn it off.
I have a pet theory that Tony blew off the Apogee Awards when he realized that they were going to do a mini-biog heavy on the CHILD FUCKING PRODIGY and INHERITOR OF DADDY'S MANTLE and MAGAZINE COVER BOY thing on top of Rhodey presenting the award.
I think this is a sound theory. In fact, it makes a hell of a lot of sense, because clearly he'd been there at some point, as there was an empty chair and half drunk glass of something or other next to Obie.
Okay, I totally agree that Pepper picks up on the difference, and that's why she's still there all these years later. She's the one who sees him like this the most, as she sees him actually working in the lab, and when he's working it's harder for him to wear the game face (notice he doesn't wear game face AT ALL when he's with Yinsen. Not once.
Also, yeah. I think Christine/Tony would be kind of hot, because he knows he can't really pull one over on her, but he'll just keep trying. And because she's awesome.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&#39;ALL.
SHIT. I hadn't noticed that, but you're right. You're exactly right. How can you wear a game face when it isn't a game anymore? Shit.
... I was going to talk about how brilliant you are and how this is incredibly helpful to my cracky Yinsen story idea, but I see that you've already thought it through and put it to far better practical application than I would have thought of. :D NO FLYING ROBOTS. What does that mean? No battle to conclude the movie, probably, or SHIELD having to bring out the heavy artillery earlier.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&#39;ALL.
re: the cave - I hadn't realized it until now. But he doesn't try to crack one joke. it's really unusual in the scope of the film, and I think that's the real Tony Stark. We get glimpses of him after that (and when he mentions his dad to Christine) but really he keeps the damn game face on nearly all the time, doesn't he? He even does it with his robots, to a certain extent, when no one is looking.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&amp;#39;ALL.
Yeah. That makes perfect sense. SO maybe try to re-route Tony harder to develop the arc reactor stuff? We never really hear about it after Tony manages to build a better one for himself, and from the HE BUILT IT IN A CAVE FROM SCRAPS convo, it doesn't sound like he's feeding even legit enterprises of his company the info. I'll choose like to think it's characterization rather than, uh. You know.
I wonder what he would have made of the NO MORE WEAPONS move.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&amp;#39;ALL.
He seems to have got pretty paranoid right off the bat about sharing his tech - from day one of his return he's not keeping anything on the company servers - and it's HIS company, and he has no reason to suspect Obie yet.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&amp;#39;ALL.
Yeah, that makes sense. And the destruction of the old one would certainly give him a kick in the ass to start working on the tech again. A chest generator in each child by 2085!
Although. At the same time, Tony does get sidetracked from arc reactor pretty easily. And while we never learn whether the old, shitty arc reactor got improved on because of an advance in tech or because of better materials, you'd think that if he were seriously motivated, in the time it takes to build a full-blown Robotosuit Ego Booster, he'd have time to dictate an e-mail to send to his tech guys.
I wonder why he's so immediately paranoid. (OK, plotwise, it's probably to keep Obie from having a totes awesome suit and just mopping his ass with it, but still.)
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&amp;#39;ALL.
Plus, he's a bit obsessive. This ties in with the whole beginnings of PTSD, because he can't actually concentrate on anything but the suit and the mission. He just can't do it. Especially after Gulmira, and I can see this just getting worse after Obie.
Immediately paranoid: well, he didn't exactly get embraced with open arms after the press conference. Rhodey reacted badly, Obie definitely wasn't too happy, despite pretending. Even Pepper was taken aback.
Plus - back to the PTSD - he had to keep what he was doing secret from the Ten Rings for months. It's only natural that that mindset stick with him when he gets back. Keeping secrets kept him alive in Afghanistan.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&amp;amp;#39;ALL.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&amp;#39;ALL.
Oh! Huge puzzle piece slides into place for me.
Plus - back to the PTSD - he had to keep what he was doing secret from the Ten Rings for months.
And another! "I don't know who to trust ..." He didn't know who to trust after Afghanistan because the only person he had learned to trust in captivity was dead.
Thank you for those. I love potential PTSD angles, and yet I wasn't snagging those.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&amp;amp;#39;ALL.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&#39;ALL.
YOU'RE RIGHT. Dude, I didn't even follow that through. And I think it comes back to control (if it's a character thing and not a time thing), because the realization that Obie could go behind his back to the board and shut him out, and he was his friend, and now Tony has literally NO ONE besides Rhodey, like you said:
with Obie dead, Rhodey is the person still in Tony's life who's known him the longest
Tony isn't going to trust anyone in the company, not anymore, not after he's been burned by a person that was as close to family as he had then.
Because when it comes to Tony, his ego (i.e. raging control issues) will always trump his good intentions.
Ow.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&amp;#39;ALL.
I think he would have quietly called him on the suit. Pointed out: weapon.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&#39;ALL.
Which, I think, is why he drinks. He's not excessive yet, not in the film. Because the tech is still new, it still feeds into his "HOLY NEAT LOOK WHAT I MADE GUYS" portion of his brain, he still thinks it's the answer, and it still feels like it, for the moment. But the downtime after the announcement, after Obie, is going to wear the high a bit, and nothing after will really match, you know, that night because the variables will never be perfect for that sort of crisis again. Obie became a representation of what Tony no longer wants to be (complicit, manipulated, gullible), and directly responsible for those three months gone.
And he killed him using his big shiny suit he built himself. That's got to be a great feeling, it's got to be practically tangible. And the high from that will never going to last or be that good again.
So he'll keep chasing that high, and he'll never feel like he's achieved something as tangible as that first time, and he'll get more and more frustrated as he discovers one man really can't do everything, because now he's discovered "everything" no longer just includes him, and that's going to sting.
So he'll drink, because it's a way to turn off, it's a way to forcibly override his code, it's a hack to relax.
notice he doesn't wear game face AT ALL when he's with Yinsen. Not once.
I never even considered that. Wow.
I love you.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&#39;ALL.
YEah. lots of Tony's behaviors are very much in the realm of an addict. Dysfunctional at the very least.
And pretty soon game face just doesn't work any more - at least not with himself.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y'ALL.
NO. I AM SO WITH YOU THERe, FOR THE EXACT REASONS YOU SAID.
I love her. So, so much. But we know this.
I like to think that he has a tiny bit of proto-respect for her.
Hee "proto-respect" to go along with his "proto-soul." Was that you that coined that? Because I love it and it never, ever gets old.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&#39;ALL.
Re: TONY STARKS WON THE OSCAR, Y&#39;ALL.
Seriously. I love that we don't see a fully formed adult human here - he's got so far to go, and it's seriously doubtful that he'll ever get there the way he's headed. But he's trying.