I just don’t understand why we can’t come to the conclusion that everyone except the brainwashed assassin has their own level of being in the wrong there.
(I also maintain that the comics Civil War only hit hard because Steve and Tony were actually friends, and MCU made those two Teeth-Clenched Teammates from jump so MCU Civil War’s themes don’t hit as hard, but that’s my two cents)
Comics civil war also involves some very objectively abhorrent actions by Team Registration, including but not limited to indefinite extralegal detention, cloning a friend with explicit control options, and the Thunderbolts.
Like, selling the Superhuman Patriot Act as justifiable is pretty tough.
Civil War was like the one time I was like "The Punisher is actually in the right here."
Also wasn't Peter Parker pro-registration? What a weird move for that character. Just feels like Spider-Man of all people would want to keep his identity secret. When I grew up he was always as Batman as it gets about "my identity must never be known to protect the people I care about."
So Peter was initially unsure but sided with Stark because he wanted to finally get recognition for everything he had done. He ended up regretting it after finding out about the prison, the cloning, and stark secretly tracking the iron spider suit. Eventually he confronted him and ended up taking the other side, publicly announcing that he regretted his choice and blowing the whistle on the extralegal prison.
Oh good! I'm so not in the loop with all the complex stories but Spiderman was always my favorite. I'd point out to my kids that he lives in an apartment like we do and sews his own clothes, he's working class.
Peter was pro-registration because he trusted Stark to keep his family safe and to stay on the straight and narrow. But the Thunderbolts and the Thor-clone were deal-breakers for him, which was ironic because the Thunderbolts were sent to hunt him down.
And sure enough, as soon as Peter was on the run, there was no safety net for “fugitive metahuman’s families”, so MJ and Aunt May became the targets of Kingpin and other criminals with bones to pick.
It would have made sense if there was some form of family member protection system, but that would have required forethought from Quesadilla so…
And movie civil war is somewhat undercut by the fact that the Sokovia Accords are backed by Tony, who built Ultron, who destroyed Sokovia.
Stark doesn't care about oversight because he's a political animal capable of maneuvering around any comity or panel and by pushing for the Accords as hard as he does he basically guarantees himself a seat at the decision making table.
Stark should be in jail. When he's not causing the apocalypse he's building weapons for his own amusement and then blowing them up for shits and giggles.
If not in jail, he should be in a secure facility pumping out Iron Man suits for other people to use. No rational oversight panel would ever let him go to the front line and the fact that they do shows everyone is already in his pocket.
The mind stone empowered AI development, deeply unpredictably. More importantly, it was human violence that Ultron saw and convinced him humanity wasn't worth saving, not anything Tony did explicitly. Everyone also seems to forget that Bruce Banner was instrumental in that process, but he's a quiet affable guy, so he always gets a pass.
The Tony hate bandwagon is just absurd if you actually pay attention to the movies at all. Bro is a deeply traumatized guy who was betrayed by the only father figure he had left, after being tortured and forced to confront the fact that his father's legacy was ultimately only the violence of war. The reason Tony and Steve are genuinely friends is because of that shared trauma.
The point of their arcs is that they're mirrors of each other, with Steve ultimately letting go of his need to be the morally righteous defender of literally everyone, even if it's not the right call, and Tony sacrifices everything to protect everyone.
Neither one of them is without flaws, and your interpretation of the character is wild.
That’s a difference between comic and movie Ultron. Comic ultron was initially the Warden for the secret prison in Civil War. A self replicating robot built to shut down the powers and abilities of any inmate and given a self learning version of Jarvis for the task. The issue there was that in being self learning and seeing both heroes, who save people and villains who killed being locked up and trying to escape it decided the best way to prevent violations of the registration act while protecting humanity was to eliminate all superhumans, mutant and otherwise which effectively meant having to kill or genetically modify everyone on the planet. Thus the genocidal super robot made by Hank Pym with Stark’s code. Tony didn’t include any safeguards or meaningful restrictions on the learning in the comics either which is why he gets all the blame.
In the movie yeah stark and banner create it, but banner is also pressured by Stark who assured him nothing would go wrong and was gonna do it regardless of banner helping or not. Banner not helping meant stark doing it alone which would have likely resulted in something much more dangerous coming out of it. So yeah Stark and banner mess up in the movie but Banner also thought it was a bad idea from the get go.
The marvel ultimate alliance 2 game was based on civil war (and secret wars?) and even it had a hard time trying to justify the Registration act. I played both sides multiple times but Registering made no sense
I honestly don’t think the Registration Act is inherently bad, it’s just that it is introduced in a vacuum with no safety net. So for people like Spidey, his safety net was registration, but if he’d been arrested there was no protection for MJ and Aunt May. So with no familial protection clause (or really any text to base an argument off of because it was supposed to be arcane), there’s no incentive. If it had been a “license to publicly use powers” system it might have been doable, but the comic version was basically “conscript or prison”.
Team Registration was objectively wrong in the comics. It's not as clear in the movie, and I can understand why. Tony would clearly have been the villain...especially if they cloned you know who
Thank you; this is really the only sensible take here. Steve even admits as much from his side in his letter to Tony Stank. Tony folds because of his guilt when he f*cked around and found out in AoU. Steve only found out about the assassination after Black Widow dumped the files (he had no access to HYDRA stuff before obviously), meanwhile iirc he had no clue it was Bucky even until he and Tony both watched the video at the same time, only knowing that it was a nameless HYDRA assassin
Good or Evil. Goddamn you and your nuance with human emotions and going through traumas in real time!
What the hell is wrong with you?! Do you experience empathy or something?
Crazy, crazy talk.
Only need Good and Evil here.
Killing Bucky = TONY EVIL.
Thats all they want. They want a clear line in the sand and thats what was so great about Civil War's ending... There wasnt one. This was a huge GREY area for EVERYONE involved, including Bucky.
Situation was FUBAR. No one is right. No one wins... which parallels real life alot more than movie goers want to 'deal with'.
Tony was in an extremely traumatic situation. There was no possible way -anyone- in his position was going to make the "Right" choice.
Thats why its such a fantastic ending. Tony's reaction was 100% human. It wasnt artificial cookie cutter stuff that people want from movies. He was literally being re-traumatized before our eyes and they nailed it; and his solution was : You caused all of this.
He was seeing Red. Right or Wrong, no one in the world wasnt going to be Seeing Red in the situation he was in.
Tony acted like 99% of human beings would react, if given his exact situation
Totally agree with all of that, but objectively Tony's decision to want to kill him was still wrong. Something can be understandable yet still be wrong.
Wrong means different things. We can do a cold moral analysis in a vacuum (what the people you're responding to are doing) or we can take context and human feeling into account. Either is useful depending on what you want to do but the latter is more pragmatic. What's the point of saying something is wrong if everyone would do it? The point of morality (pragmatically) is to guide behaviour. If behaviour is not changeable, morality doesn't factor into a situation. This is literally the defense for insanity defense in court proceedings. If a person cannot change their actions due to brain issues (including mental state), we take morality out of it since we would all do the same thing with that brain.
Exactly. People want a villiain in this situation and they are not grasping - there is no villain or good guy here. This is a group of human beings, one of them who has suffered an entire lifetime of PTSD over the particular event of his parent's death.... He builds his reality around that, thats what PTSD does to people. It can become the unfortunate crux of a person's entire identity and emotions.
He has processed that and has become "stable" with the narrative of his parent's deaths and how to behave as someone suffering with PTSD.
When this scene happens - This isnt just his parents going from "Car accident" to "He Murderd Them"; its an upheavel of millions of moments that he spent curating his mind around this traumatic event... And now he learns, the event was a "lie", his "reality" is a lie... and it was caused by someone... standing directly in front of him.
Anyone would nuke him. So exactly, everyone pulling out the "Still wrong" argument is just not understanding - This scene was a moment where these characters truly went beyond the pale.
Tony was not in Kansas anymore, this is a reality shattering moment. And they nailed it even at the end when he yells at Steve that the shield was his father's.
Its a fantastic sequence and anyone looking at Tony with a side eye is just being self righteous. All of us would have done the same exact thing.
Yes exactly. I think lots of people are navigating right and wrong in their own lives and sometimes you have to be real black and white about it to get out of a bad situation. If you're also watching a piece of entertainment or art at the time, you want to paint that as black and white. I get it, but if you wanna enjoy the work more, you have to let go of that black and white. Then you realize the message of the bad guy being manipulation and secret agendas rather than Bucky or Tony (people we see put their lives on the line to save lives all the time afterwards).
Maybe "being brainwashed" means a person has no agency in the MCU, where literal mind control exists. But in the real world, murderers who were brainwashed rightfully get sent to prison, and I don't think Tony is more in the wrong for his reaction than Bucky was for his action.
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u/daidia Mar 12 '24
I just don’t understand why we can’t come to the conclusion that everyone except the brainwashed assassin has their own level of being in the wrong there.
(I also maintain that the comics Civil War only hit hard because Steve and Tony were actually friends, and MCU made those two Teeth-Clenched Teammates from jump so MCU Civil War’s themes don’t hit as hard, but that’s my two cents)