Rewatching Iron Man made me realize that my problem with Tony isn't his ego. It's his lack of respect for other people.

I recently rewatched the first Iron Man, partly because I wanted to understand exactly why MCU Tony Stark bothers me so much.

And I think I finally have a more precise answer.

My problem with Tony isn't that he thinks he's special. It's that he repeatedly treats other people as if they're supporting characters in his life rather than independent people with their own time, boundaries, judgment, and priorities.

I don't inherently dislike characters who want to be special. Peter and Ned in Homecoming clearly enjoy the idea of being involved in something extraordinary. Wade in Deadpool & Wolverine desperately wants to matter. That's a normal human desire.

The difference, to me, is whether you can see yourself as special without treating everyone around you as less important.

And watching Iron Man again, I was surprised by how consistently Tony fails at that.

One of the earliest examples is his interaction with the female soldier on the plane. He comments on the fact that she's a woman at all, assumes she might be offended by not being treated differently because she's a woman, comments on her physique, and then jokes about her looking like a Maxim model.

What especially bothers me is the little "it's okay, you can laugh" moment.

Why is Tony giving her permission to laugh at a joke he made about her?

It's a tiny interaction, but I think it reveals something fundamental about him. Tony decides what the interaction means, how the other person should receive it, and when she's allowed to stop being uncomfortable.

And the Maxim comment makes the whole thing worse for me. The movie repeatedly presents Tony as someone whose default image of women is heavily sexualized. That doesn't disappear later either — in Homecoming, he's still making comments about May's attractiveness in front of Peter.

Then there's Christine Everhart.

She confronts Tony about Stark Industries and the civilian consequences of his weapons. Tony responds as if he's intellectually correcting someone beneath him. Then almost immediately, he sleeps with her.

That transition really bothers me.

The woman he was just treating as someone to lecture suddenly becomes a sexual partner, and the next morning Tony isn't even there. Pepper has to deal with her.

Maybe Christine herself doesn't care. That's not really my point. Tony doesn't seem to consider whether putting either woman in that situation might be uncomfortable in the first place.

And Pepper shouldn't have to clean up after her employer's one-night stands.

The movie even jokes about Pepper "taking out the trash," which, in context, pretty clearly refers to Christine. If Christine is the "trash," what exactly does that make the man who invited her there?

This is where I started noticing the same pattern everywhere.

Pepper tells Tony that his plane is waiting.

Tony's response is basically: it's my plane. It'll wait.

That's almost a perfect summary of what bothers me about him.

Yes, it's his plane.

The people waiting for him still have lives and time of their own.

Later, someone tells him they've been waiting for three hours. Tony doesn't meaningfully apologize. He essentially says that he's there now, so what's the problem?

The other person explicitly tells him that Tony doesn't respect him and asks whether he's supposed to be Tony's babysitter.

And... yes. Exactly.

Then, while they're working, Tony asks for alcohol. He's reminded that they're working, and his response is basically that sake goes with sushi.

Tony occupies an enormously powerful position, but he often seems to want the freedom that comes with power without recognizing that power also creates obligations toward the people working under you.

The same thing happens constantly with Pepper.

Why hire an assistant if you're going to dismiss her when she asks you questions that she obviously needs answered to do her job?

He forgets her birthday. Forgetting someone's birthday isn't some unforgivable moral crime. But when she points it out, he doesn't seem embarrassed that he forgot someone this close to him. He tells her to buy herself a present with his money.

Again: money substitutes for attention.

Pepper has apparently been around long enough that she seems completely accustomed to this.

And that's what makes Tony's relationships with employees so uncomfortable to me. He expects enormous amounts of labor, patience, emotional management, and accommodation from the people around him while acting as though their inconvenience is trivial.

There's another visual element in the movie that bothered me too. Tony's sexual partners, Pepper, and the flight attendants are overwhelmingly conventionally attractive white blonde women, while the men around him are allowed much more variety in race and appearance.

Some of that may simply be the visual language of a 2008 American blockbuster rather than something we're supposed to attribute entirely to Tony. But either way, it contributes to the feeling that women around Tony are frequently treated as decoration.

The private-jet sequence is probably the most blatant example: scantily dressed female attendants dance for the men while Tony drinks and talks as if they're part of the scenery.

Steve Rogers literally comes from an earlier era, and even his USO performances don't give me the same feeling. He was ordered onto a stage as part of a propaganda campaign. Tony is voluntarily constructing an environment where women function as entertainment around him.

The dance with Pepper bothers me for the same reason.

Pepper doesn't want to dance.

Tony pulls her into it anyway.

It's framed romantically, but I keep coming back to a very simple principle: no means no.

Tony seems to understand what other people want perfectly well. He just repeatedly decides that what he wants should take priority.

And that becomes much more consequential when we get to weapons.

Tony talks about earning both "respect and fear" through military power. He references the atomic bombings in World War II while presenting weapons development as a path toward peace.

That makes me question what he means by "peace," and more importantly, whose peace counts.

This also complicates the way the movie treats him as a patriot.

I don't think loving your country is inherently the same thing as believing your country is superior. To me, there's an important difference between:

"I love the country and community I belong to."

and

"The group I happened to be born into is inherently superior, so its interests justify what happens to outsiders."

The first is attachment. The second is hierarchy.

And when a wealthy American weapons manufacturer talks about peace through overwhelming military power, I think that distinction matters.

Tony also seems to believe, early in the movie, that the good he does with his wealth somehow exists alongside his weapons business without requiring much deeper moral examination.

I don't think manufacturing weapons for a state is automatically morally equivalent to selling weapons directly to terrorists. War, national defense, and state responsibility are obviously more complicated than that.

But making money from weapons and then using some of that money to do good doesn't erase the harm caused by those weapons.

You haven't morally balanced an equation by helping one group after contributing to the deaths of another.

At best, you're deciding who you consider worth helping and who you're willing to accept as collateral damage.

And the movie itself eventually forces Tony to confront this when Stark weapons kill people he considers innocent — including American soldiers.

But even Tony's realization is revealing to me.

He seems especially shaken by the fact that his own side is being killed by his weapons.

My immediate reaction was: why did it take the weapon pointing back toward "us" for this to become real?

Then Tony gets kidnapped, sees the consequences directly, returns home, and shuts down weapons production.

This is obviously a major moral change for him.

But what he does next is where I start having problems again.

His reasoning seems to go:

I made weapons. Those weapons hurt innocent people. I am responsible. Therefore, I personally need to find the bad people and kill them.

And that leap fascinates me.

Tony discovers that institutions and systems cannot be trusted to use power perfectly, and his solution is to concentrate even more moral authority in himself.

He becomes the person who decides who is guilty, who deserves violence, and when killing someone is justified.

I'm not saying that the terrorists he attacks in the movie are secretly innocent or that intervening in that immediate situation is necessarily wrong. If armed people are actively murdering civilians, stopping them can obviously be justified.

I'm talking about the reasoning that brought Tony there.

He's an engineering genius who has just learned an enormous lesson about unintended consequences. Yet his response is still incredibly direct: build a better weapon, put himself inside it, and personally decide where to point it.

That's especially strange because the movie already shows technology capable of temporarily paralyzing people.

Tony has extraordinary resources and extraordinary engineering ability. Why doesn't his redesign include serious nonlethal incapacitation technology?

Peter Parker manages to build his entire moral framework around stopping dangerous people without killing them. Tony has vastly more money and technological resources available to him.

Instead, Tony's improved suit is packed with offensive weapons.

That feels like another form of arrogance to me: the assumption that the problem wasn't the existence of overwhelming force, but simply that the wrong people were deciding where to aim it.

Now Tony will decide.

This is also why "but Tony is a genius" has never really answered my criticism.

He's unquestionably an engineering genius.

Engineering intelligence is not the same thing as social intelligence, moral judgment, foresight, or risk assessment.

Even in the first movie, he leaves extremely sensitive prototype technology and debris behind rather than ensuring that it is recovered, despite being one of the most influential weapons manufacturers on Earth and having plenty of enemies. It eventually ends up in exactly the kind of hands you'd expect.

Being brilliant in one domain doesn't automatically make someone brilliant in every domain.

Even the famous cave escape is slightly more complicated than the mythology around it sometimes suggests. What Tony accomplishes is extraordinary, but he isn't operating in an informational vacuum. Yinsen is there helping him, and his captors provide materials and inputs because they're forcing him to build a weapon.

Again, none of that makes Tony less of an engineering genius. I just think there's a tendency, both in-universe and among audiences, to let "Tony is a genius" expand into "Tony's judgment should therefore be trusted."

Those aren't the same claim.

The arc-reactor scene with Pepper is another example.

Tony asks Pepper to perform a frightening and potentially dangerous procedure on him. She doesn't want to.

His response is essentially: I trust you. You can do this. You're the person I chose.

That sounds supportive, but it also shifts the focus away from her reluctance and back onto his judgment.

"I chose you" doesn't magically make someone comfortable doing something.

It reminded me immediately of the way he later recruits Peter in Civil War. Tony's confidence that someone is capable of something becomes part of the justification for putting them in a situation they may not fully understand or be prepared for.

And when Pepper later refuses to help Tony continue doing something she thinks is going to get him killed, Tony interprets that as her failing him.

But Pepper refuses because she cares about him.

He takes another person's fear and concern and translates it through his own perspective until it becomes disloyalty.

That's what I mean when I say Tony has a problem with respect.

It's not that he's sarcastic.

It's not that he's rich.

It's not that he's confident.

It's not even that he thinks he's exceptional.

It's that his own thoughts, feelings, priorities, and judgments repeatedly seem more real to him than everyone else's.

Other people can disagree with him, but he often treats disagreement as something to overcome rather than information about another autonomous person.

And ironically, Tony himself reacts very strongly when he feels disrespected.

He wants his judgment recognized. He wants his competence recognized. He wants people to take him seriously.

He just doesn't reliably extend the same courtesy outward.

That's why I don't think Tony's later self-sacrifice completely answers my problem with him.

Being willing to die for other people is meaningful.

But loving people enough to sacrifice yourself for them and respecting those people as autonomous individuals are two different virtues.

You can genuinely love someone and still constantly override them.

You can protect someone while treating them paternalistically.

You can save someone's life while still believing that your judgment matters more than theirs.

And that's why his relationship with Peter in Homecoming bothers me so much despite the fact that I believe Tony genuinely cares about him.

Peter is reckless. He's a teenager. Obviously an adult has legitimate reasons to worry about him.

But Tony is also the person who recruited that teenager into a superhero conflict, gave him enormously powerful technology, withheld information from him, and then positioned himself as the authority who gets to decide when Peter is worthy of using it.

The details change. The underlying structure feels familiar.

Tony decides.

That's also why I don't think my reaction to Tony is simply a dislike of self-important characters.

I actually enjoy characters who are proud, ambitious, dramatic, attention-seeking, or convinced they're special.

What matters to me is whether they understand that everyone else is the protagonist of their own life too.

There's a difference between:

"I'm the protagonist of my life."

and

"I'm the protagonist of everyone's life."

The first is normal.

The second is what I repeatedly get from Tony.

And Iron Man actually made that impression stronger than his later movies did, because the pattern appears in interactions that have nothing to do with superheroics: employees waiting for him, Pepper trying to do her job, women he's attracted to, people disagreeing with him, people setting boundaries, people worrying about him.

Even when the stakes are tiny, Tony's perspective tends to win by default.

So I'm genuinely curious how people who like MCU Tony read this.

Do you disagree that this pattern exists?

Do you see it, but consider it an intentional character flaw that the movies meaningfully address?

Or is this actually part of what you enjoy about him?

Because I'm increasingly convinced that my problem with Tony Stark was never that he has a huge ego.

It's that he seems to have enormous difficulty recognizing that other people's autonomy matters just as much to them as his autonomy matters to him.