fandomsecrets | [ SECRET POST #4434 ]

[ SECRET POST #4434 ]

⌈ Secret Post #4434 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.

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02.

[The Good Place]

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03.

[Taskmaster]

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04.

[The Umbrella Academy, "We Only See Each Other at Weddings and Funerals"]

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05.

[Criminal Minds S04E15, "Zoe's Reprise"]

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06.

[FBI (2018)]

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07.

[Cameron Britton playing Ed Kemper in Mindhunter]

Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 35 secrets from Secret Submission Post #635.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 1 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That Tony Stark didn't know that his weapons were being used to kill civilians. No, he definitely knew because he'd have to be a fucking moron not to. He just A) didn't care until it personally affected him B) was fine with weapons killing people as long as they were being killed by the right people.

Uh, I'm pretty sure the movie makes clear he didn't know. It was willful ignorance, and he was an idiot not to ask. But he didn't know. I'd say because he chose not to know. But at least I believe the movie intended the message to be he didn't know.

NAYRT

I think any reasonable, intelligent person in Tony Stark's position should have known that it was at least a strong possibility, even if they didn't specifically investigate it. On the other hand, ideological blindness is a thing.

AYRT

I agree that he should have known. And I can even buy that somewhere in his subconscious he suspected. He just didn't care enough to investigate and to actually learn. I don't think him not knowing makes him any more sympathetic because he should have known.

It almost seems like the possibility should have been so apparent and so obvious to him that the only reason not to investigate would be because you don't want to know.

AYRT

That's absolutely what I believe. He didn't want to know what his weapons were being used for. I don't think he was consciously aware. But I think there was some subconscious idea that he actively ignored because he didn't want to know.

I feel like, at that point, it's a kind of "not knowing" that is infinitesimally close to knowing, and not really morally distinguishable from it.

I don't think it is morally distinguishable. It is actually distinguishable. He didn't consciously know. But morally, it is exactly the same to me.

You cannot make weapons and not know they are being used on civilians. Like, even people who are not super up to date on the news know that the US military kills a lot of civilians as collateral damage.

You can not know if it's fiction and your fictional world says you can. If you want, say the writers didn't do their research, but if the movie genuinely portrays him as not knowing, that means it was true in the movie and not a bad take invented by apologetic fans.

There is a dissonance between the way that Tony Stark is portrayed in the film, and the way that the US military is known to work in the real world (and presumably works in the movie as well; there's no particular reason to suppose that it's any different). It's a genuine tension, a thematic/political contradiction, and I don't think it can really be resolved just by saying whether or not it's canon.

Yeah, I'm surprised that anyone thinks he didn't know. You have to know that your weapons of mass destruction are going to kill EVERYTHING they fall on, not just the "bad guys".

But I would agree that there is a difference between intellectually knowing that your weapons kill people, and then actually seeing the people who are likely to get killed.

But you can't NOT know that your weapons kill people - it's just a willful ignorance and an unwillingness to think about it, because you don't want to deal with it.

I think "willful ignorance" is basically on the level with "knew it but was in denial". You don't have to be a genius to understand that if you manufacture weapons, they're going to be used in war, and that war has collateral damage in the form of civilians. Denial is not the same thing as "didn't know".

D'you mean, like, because the US military kills civilians like it's a competition? That he should have realised that the military-industrial complex is inherently amoral, it destroys countless lives every day, and that profiting from it is bad?
Cos, not that I'm quite gonna disagree there, but you do know how much money Marvel's gotten from the US military?

It's a lot.

Marvel should stop taking money from the US military.

I mean, I know they're not going to, but they should.

I'm not american and I'd like to ask why would military pay Marvel? Are they buying comics for bored outpost personnel?

US military gives a lot of money to US media for positive depictions in film and TV. Helps keep people from thinking too hard about all those massacres.

I ... actually agree with this, though I winced a bit because it's blunter than I would have phrased it. It is fairly clear in IM1/IM2 particularly that Tony grew up a) with an ideal of patriotic bloodshed, given Howard's WWII experiences and worship of Cap, plus his own involvement in the military/arms business from childhood up, and b) without any direct experience of actual bloodshed himself. So he's perfectly fine with some vague nebulous idea of people, even civilians, dying by his weapons somewhere foreign in what he'd consider legitimate wars, right up until he has to watch somebody get blown up by one right beside him. Then he gets tortured himself, giving him a much broader and more in-depth appreciation for pain and mutilation and long-term disability resulting from weapon injuries. Then he realises that his fellow prisoner, the man helping him and keeping him alive, had family die essentially by Tony's oblivious hands, and helped him anyway. And then he learns that Obie's been selling things under the table willy-nilly without his knowledge, and the idea of a 'legitimate war' gets shot out from under him as well (though I think it's to his credit that he'd already shut down weapons by then, that even before he learned about Obie the experience of violence alone was enough to convince him that even 'legitimate' wars weren't enough of an excuse).

So ... yeah. The thing he didn't know was that Obie was selling his weapons to terrorist organisations, which he did take badly. He probably did know, intellectually, that civilians were dying by his weapons all along. It just didn't really mean anything until he had to witness it personally. Which was why everything about Yinsen struck him as hard as it did, and why he's spent his whole life since that moment trying to make up for it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ SECRET POST #4434 ]

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