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THE CHARACTER

Character Name: Anthony "Tony" Edward Stark
Series: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Canon Point: Post-Spiderman: Homecoming
Character Age: 47
Background: you've probably never heard of him

Personality:

Tony is the kind of duplicitous character that builds up a set of walls and masks (or has false masks attributed to him) -- practically a mythos, in his case -- that get presented to the world at large as the sum total of who he is. This isn’t entirely unusual, especially for celebrities, but in Tony’s case, those who get to know him start to understand that his public persona and actual person aren’t just dissimilar. In some ways, they’re polar opposites.

Tony is a successful socialite; he can navigate a cocktail party or a board room or a senate hearing or a press conference with what appears like flawless ease, but at the end of the day, he prefers to isolate himself, to hermit away with a very small circle of trusted people, a not-insignificant number of whom are AIs of his own creation. He sometimes boasts his accomplishments and virtues in grandiose displays of ego (an elaborate, armored entrance to his own Expo in Iron Man 2, complete with cheerleaders), and though he is genuinely proud of some of those accomplishments, he’s also riddled with guilt and ever-present doubt (Is this the right way to go about things? How many mistakes could he have avoided making?). He feigns casual, aloof indifference, despite how many of his problems stem from just how much and how deeply he cares about those around him and the things that are important to him (Happy accuses him of ignoring Pepper at the start of Iron Man 3, but joke’s on Happy, Tony’s been cyber stalking the entire time!). He comes off as arrogant and self-assured, but he’s riddled with PTSD and anxiety after coming toe-to-toe with aliens, magic, gods--things he can’t easily explain or quantify, and he’s self-aware enough to know that, compared to forces like that, he’s “just a man in a can”. People see him as selfish and self-obsessed (SHIELD has him pegged as a textbook narcissist incapable of teamwork, and Steve tells him he only fights for himself, that he’ll never be the person to play the sacrifice card), and he doesn’t particularly see himself as a hero -- he doesn’t even include himself when rattling off a list of the Avengers to Loki, and insists that he wants Peter Parker to be better than he is -- and yet he’s willing to sacrifice his life to carry a nuke through a portal into space, if it means saving New York City. He doesn’t even think twice about it.

All of these misnomers can make Tony seem, depending on the position of the observer, like he has his shit together way more than he does; like he cares about things far less than he does; like he’s far more irresponsible than he actually is; like he’s far more hedonistic and self-obsessed than he actually is; and on and on and on. And this isn’t to say that none of Tony’s stereotypes have any basis in reality, because they do (he definitely has a partying, playboy past), but the truth behind Tony Stark lives in those glimpses underneath the media buzz and harshly worded SHIELD character profiles, particularly as the movies go on and he matures. He’s the man who escaped captivity and shut down his company’s legacy because he saw it being used for evil, and accepted full responsibility and culpability. He’s the man who spends the rest of his life trying to make amends for that bloody history, and all the mistakes that follow. But Tony Stark is also a visionary and a futurist, not content to simply wallow in the past and make amends for past deeds; instead, he focuses on the future, on determining what may happen and how his own hands can play a role, and attempting to avoid tragedy before it can even occur. Naturally, when combined with his guilt and fear and anxiety, this just leads to further tragedy. See: accidentally building a robot menace that nearly destroys the world, when he was just trying to protect it. Classic.

But Tony isn’t just a ball of fear and guilt and issues, though those things do provide the backdrop for many (maybe even most) of his actions. He’s a little shit, plain and simple, and intersperses many of his interactions with flippancy, quips, degrading nicknames, and sarcasm. He plays himself off as cavalier, dismissive, and arrogant, often to the exasperation of those around him. This is sometimes Tony making a production of how Just Fine he is, but other times it’s just Tony being himself.

He’s a genius in the most traditional sense, which ends up being his “superpower”, and despite his many insecurities, his ability on this front is something he’s unfailingly confident in. He can create almost anything he sets his mind to, even if that something is an element that his own AI says cannot be synthesized. He built himself a sustainable miniaturized power source (in a cave! with a box of scraps!) under extreme duress, with limited time and resources. And that’s not even mentioning the creation of the Iron Man suit, or the many (many) iterations that followed, each more advanced and impressive than the last.

He has perseverance in spades; he spends many of the movies under some kind of pain or duress (physical or mental), but never kicks up any kind of fuss about it or even admits to it most of the time, choosing instead to soldier on in silence. This is often a problem in and of itself (Tony Stark will never tell you if he’s dying or not; you’ll just have to figure it out), but it’s also the quality that allows him to keep picking himself up despite repeated hardship and trauma. After Afghanistan, after Stane’s betrayal, after nearly dying in Iron Man 2, after New York, after the events of Iron Man 3, after Ultron, after Civil War--he just keeps soldiering on despite the hardship, because that’s who and what he is. An iron man, you might say. (I’m sorry)

He also has a generous spirit underneath his performative aloofness; he gives millions of dollars away to crowds of MIT students, supports charities, offers to fly Phil Coulson to Portland any time he wants to visit his cellist girlfriend, fully funds the Avengers’ operations and equipment, decks out the workshop of a child that took him in for a few days in Iron Man 3, builds multiple super suits for a kid he saw on Youtube, etc. He doesn’t take his wealth for granted, and instead uses it to further his futurist ideals-- “reframing the future” for the better, as he puts it in Civil War.

This is just another indicator of the big heart he carries around with him, the same one that’s motivated by guilt and a desire to make amends. He’s a man who cares about things so strongly and holds so steadfast to his beliefs that he often manufactures his own problems and demons. So much of his time is spent attempting to correct past mistakes and make up for the guilt that hangs heavy on his conscience that it becomes his primary motivator and creates even more tragedy to befall him, like a vicious cycle. But that’s the classic story of Tony Stark: he tries REALLY hard, all the time. Sometimes that’s the problem.

Nonetheless, for better or worse, he’ll keep trying.

Powers/Abilities:

There’s a more detailed wiki entry here, but I’ll summarize according to my personal interpretation/discretion:

• Mechanical engineering - he’s an expert with weapons manufacturing in particular (missiles with advanced computerized components, guns, land mines, you name it), but he’s also advanced enough to create the Iron Man suit’s many iterations and miniaturize Howard Stark’s arc reactor. He’s also great with cars, planes, tractors, various sundry found at a RadioShack -- basically, if it’s a machine, he’ll probably coo softly at it before lovingly taking it apart and improving it.
  
• Computers & Programming - similar to the above, as he’s responsible for programming his house, his AIs, his phones and tablets, self-piloting jets and helicopters, etc etc etc. He even managed to suggest modifications to the Extremis program while drunk off his ass that one time.
  
• AI - he’s able to design AI like JARVIS and FRIDAY that are practically people in their own right for how efficient and responsive they are to verbal commands and requests. (And he somehow even programmed JARVIS to be sarcastic). There’s also that time he accidentally created sentient life in Ultron, but... yeah. Anyway.
  
• Mathematics - given all of the above, Tony can presumably do ridiculously complex mathematics in his head, in record time. To quote him, “[If] my math is right, and it always is.”
  
• Hacking - he hacked the Pentagon on a dare in grade school, and his prowess has presumably only improved since then, given the times we’ve seen him hacking government computers at senate hearings, hacking SHIELD, de-encrypting nuclear codes, etc etc.
  
• Intellect, in general - consider all of the above, his quips about becoming an expert in thermonuclear astrophysics in one night, his ability to analyze something like Loki’s scepter and glean that there’s AI embedded inside it, and it’s clear that Tony’s real super power isn’t any one skill so much as his genius.

Power Nerfs (if applicable): N/A

Inventory: He just comes in with what he’s wearing, which includes a wristwatch that can be converted into a metal glove with a repulsor in the palm.

Incentives: Guaranteed safety of his friends and loved ones will do handily, as will obtaining his armor should he not be able to come in with it.

SAMPLES

TDM Thread and previous game threads for good measure