petronia

Part 1

Coulson vs. Tony Stark 1 / Tony and Pepper 1 (cont.) A second sidebar here: I am not sure the Tony/Pepper relationship evolves in a way that makes sense between IM1, IM2, and here. That's because Tony and Pepper getting together at the end of IM2 doesn't actually fix why they were going off the rails in that movie (in the same sense that Tony dying of palladium poisoning shouldn't have been the reason for his meltdown, it should've been because he wasn't able to cope. Because the IM tone is just that bit more realistic than most superhero movies). In fact, the only archetypal arc that works for Pepper/Tony across the three films is the old-school screwball "comedy of remarriage": in a very real sense, Pepper was married to Tony to begin with. She is his chatelaine. They just had to renegotiate the terms of their marriage (more equality, less unilateral taking of BS, more sex...). I almost think Pepper had further to go, psychologically speaking; my guess is she was de facto acting CEO from the moment Obie bought it, but she couldn't picture any formal forward step from "PA" than "PA who is sleeping with her boss, thanks but no thanks." Whereas for Tony, it was always a matter of a best friend becoming more, and either he turns out to be a bad boyfriend or he doesn't, either she hates him for ruining it or she doesn't.

I could make a sidebar-within-a-sidebar re: how Gwyneth Paltrow infuses at least as much of herself into movie!Pepper as RDJ infuses himself into movie!Tony, it's just that no one thinks about Gwyneth vs. Pepper because the Gwyneth Paltrow persona pisses people off. In the IM1 DVD extras she talked about how her brother read comics so she grew up around them but she didn't read them because... she was a girl. XD

Anyway. Tony/Pepper: uber-cute in The Avengers! Thanks for being a shipper, RDJ! Tony is way more centred here than in the IM movies, not only because of Pepper, but because Pepper and superhero-ing mean he doesn't have to be "Tony Stark" a lot of the time. He's still going to blow off Phil Coulson and SHIELD, though, which is a lot of funny here but only sets up the sad later on. It does turn out that Pepper and Coulson are personally friendly, which is lovely.

EDIT -- Sidebar the third (or fourth?) I keep forgetting to mention actual plot points. In the real world (ha ha), governments would be way more interested in a scaleable arc reactor that can slot into the grid than in the Iron Man, and Stark Industries' P/E ratio would stay rock bottom as long as Tony keeps flying around in the thing. But I like the green energy angle, which was the best idea in that Iron Man anime by a long stretch (I only watched a bit of it because Fujiwara Keiji, of all seiyuu, dubs Robert Downey Jr.'s roles). And yes, in the real world, if Tony were going to proliferate the things for commercial use anywhere, it would be Japan.

LOKI2: more aliens and stuff. Does this go here? The alien stuff is negligeable, anyway, but viewers of Thor will recognize that Loki mentally edited his past in order to justify his actions. He didn't want to be king in Thor; it didn't occur to him until literally 10 minutes before the end of the movie, in the same way that it didn't occur to Pepper she could be CEO until the job was offered to her. Dude is creys and it's all kinds of sad. In general I think Loki hits that coveted movie villain sweet spot, where you go oh man I grok how saddo you are, but you deserved that beating all the same.

The hypnosis spell is interesting: it speaks to whatever could lead you astray without you even knowing it. Makes you wonder what would have happened to Tony, had he been susceptible. ...Plot? They need a chunk of iridium, IIRC.

Captain America vs. Coulson 1 / Black Widow / Bruce Banner. Coulson being a Cap fanboy: bring on the moé. Coulson gets a lot of perceptive statements, as if part of his characterization is that ability to sum up a person in a sentence. People want a bit of old-fashioned to ground them: that redefines the role of Captain America for the 21st century, right there.

Meanwhile, Steve and Natasha are so professionally cordial that one suspects they've worked together before -- or they came to an immediate instinctive agreement to remain in their mutually preferred mode of dry competence. (EDIT -- on watch #3, it's very definitely the latter. Future generations thank you, Peggy, for teaching him how to talk to women - professionally deadly women, anyway.) And then the Hulk was a big honking metaphor for ableism and mental health stigma. XD; Am I the only one unnerved that this action movie got the subtleties effortlessly right? What I mean is, Steve made his mind up about Bruce before they met, and what he decided was that Dr. Bruce "as smart as Steven Hawking" Banner mattered and his condition was none of Steve's business. (Except how Bruce getting gamma-rayed was obscurely the serum's fault, and therefore Steve's.) Because he is Captain America, he is 100% sincere and disarming, and Bruce believes him. But he still sets the Hulk apart as a negative, damage to manage, and not an integral aspect of Bruce himself.

Part 3