professionallyprocrastinating:

thatvermilionflycatcher:

You cannot make fun of a kid’s hard work and then expect him to think it amounts to something.

THANK YOU!

Whenever they interact, Tony  mocks and belittles Peter’s efforts, albeit subtly.
“Can you even see in these?”, “You need a full head-to-toe upgrade”, “Everyone else thought I was crazy”, “the adults are talking”… Tony could hardly have done a better job of destroying Peter’s confidence if he’d been actively trying.

And then he acts surprised when Peter reports everything to him, seeking approval that he is Superheroing the ‘right’ way like Tony Stark wants him to, and is convinced that he needs Tony’s suit to be a hero.

Because Tony convinced him that he wasn’t enough by himself.

I love Tony. I love Tony and Peter’s on screen relationship. However, this is absolutely a valid criticism and a shitty thing for Tony to have done.

Additionally, Peter was flying totally blind after Tony just…didn’t speak to him for like two months after Germany. Then Tony totally brushed him off after saving him from drowning. He gave Peter no reassurance that he was being listening too, that his fears were being taken seriously, that anything was being done about the Vulture problem. Then gets mad when Peter ruins a plan he didn’t know was being deployed.

Tony oscillates wildly between wanting to use Peter as a big gun during fights but then turning around and wanting to pretend like Peter is somehow a totally uninvolved civilian child once the fight’s over. And yes, Peter is a 15 year old kid, but he’s a fifteen year old kid who can lift a goddamn bus and is constantly throwing himself into gunfire. And he’s got enough autonomy that he’s gonna do it whether or not he’s got permission.

We’ve got ourselves a classic Harry Potter situation here, but that’s another subject.

What’s worse, Tony let his own guilt and insecurity get the better of him. He’s torn between wanting to do the adult thing and being too afraid to actually do it and commit to the role of “mentor.” So, instead of doing the actual responsible thing–talking about the situation, not just deliver a pithy quote and flying away, leaving a goddamn teen with his heart and sense of self split in two–he instead basically attempts to abandon the relationship he’s built up with Peter.

He thinks he can just take the suit, “nope” out of there, and erase his presence along with his duty of care/responsibility. That Peter’s life will just go back to how it was before. But that’s now how it works. You can’t weave yourself into the fabric of someone’s life and then attempt to rip out the threads. All you do is leave a big fucking tear.  

Suddenly, Peter is left without his suit, his confidence, and–worse–any kind of real support system when it comes to the whole Spiderman thing. So when Vulture figures out who he is, he’s got no one who he can call for help or backup. Cue the clusterfuck that is Peter getting a goddamn building dropped on him and nearly fucking dying like 10 times at Vultures hands.

And while I’m happy Peter and Tony are shown on good terms by the end of the movie and that we got to see them together in Infinity War, it sucks that Marvel never addresses this issue, or really even seems to notice it’s there. It was a big fuck up on Tony’s part and he really should have had to do some work before getting to reconcile with Peter. Peter deserved better.  

I can hope that maybe they’ll try to build the relationship into something more functioning and healthy in the next Spiderman movie, but I’m not confident.