Marvel Cinematic Universe

Whereas without weapons of war, we'd still be living in caves being eaten by passing tigers.

Predators exist. Whether in the form of animals, other humans, or an alien warlord trying to kill half the universe, there's always going to be someone who wants to kill and eat someone else. For a stable society to exist, the inescapable presence of violent force must be carefully regulated and controlled, while still kept sharpened and honed to deal with the evolving challenges presented by an ever-changing world.

You don't get to decide whether or not Thanos exists. You just get to figure out how you're going to stop him from murdering your planet.

Maybe a gun that fires a Big Bang

Which sure didn't help an advance civilization like Nova Corps when he attacked.

Or the Asgardians!

Or an evil tyrannical AI that abuses the entire Kree species and makes them believe fully in a glorius fascist empire Hydra would be proud of.

Or that Killmonger only ever sought weapons from Wakanda and didn't even try to find uses for their advance tech outside it.

People would be too busy doing what we do best with weapons, kill each other, than any existential threat the technology would exist to stop. So when the threat arrives it can charge on through because they took themselves out.

As these threats become more powerful the dangers of spreading such weapons to counterbalance only further exasperates the fact we'd do what we always do with it first and foremost.

Meanwhile there's plenty of technology that can serve good uses to help others, and indeed would helpd society greatly. From the Asgardians now living on erth, Wakandas non weapon tech , or the Ark Reactor helping to combat global warming.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Jun 3rd 2019 at 9:12:49 AM

Well, there's some interesting points here.

On the one hand, there are too many benefits for us to completely ignore spreading Tony and Hank's tech out.

Hell, T'challa opted to take a share the wealth attitude post Killmonger.

On the other hand, the threat of how much damage could be done with that tech can't be ignored either. Tobias' example of a bomb with a Pym particle trigger that expands it three seconds before detonation? Imagine tossing in an Arc reactor power source for said bomb. Imagine mixing in some Vibranium.

Now imagine the crater.

That being said, there is nothing in this world that cannot be used for both good and evil. You can kill someone with anything no matter what it was made for; conversely, no matter what a tool was made for, you can find another use for it.

That's life. Good and bad mixed together inexorably. All we can do is focus on the latter while being prepared for the former.

Similarly Vanko making his own arc reactor and Cross making his own Pym particles proves that you can’t just hide the technology

Someone else will eventually recreate the discovery

Iron Man Suits being used for construction while Tony uses them for battle would help with that. He works out the kinks and spread suits more like his early ones but with gadgets suited for building would be great.

But when the new tech is only ever used for weapons, weapons, and more weapons, then how is that technology being used to improve society? Especially when the tech that could be used to improve it is never used despite being there.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Jun 3rd 2019 at 9:25:53 AM

One of the conceits of the Marvel universe, and indeed most superheroic universes, is that the tech that enables the heroes to perform their feats is so cutting edge or so dangerous that it can only be safely used by the people who built it. Clearly this is how Stark and Pym feel about their work. Whether they are right is a different matter, but both have directly witnessed villains using their technology for evil.

Wakanda, on the other hand, has intentionally developed their vibranium technology to be mass-produced and used safely by an entire nation. It's absolutely mature enough to let others have access to; the question there is more political than anything else.

Frankly, these stories ignore the fact that technology is iterative, and once the cat is out of the bag, it will get used no matter how close its inventors try to hold it. You very rarely see generational leaps created by single minds in isolation. It's just not a thing that happens any more.

You need these things to happen for a superhero story, however, so happen they will.

Regarding Pym tech: Yeah, dangerous for everyone to have it BUT you could have trusted people in each harbour to shrink (and resize) goods which in turn would mean less shipping traffic, which would mean way waaaaaaaay less Co 2 in their air.

I mean, those Pym particles aren't THAT easy to reverse engineer if even Tony couldn't do it....

Couldn't do it or didn't try. I don't think anyone wanted to wait around for the years it might have taken him to reverse-engineer Pym tech, although given how quickly he solved time travel, these "rules" are completely up to plot convenience.

The needs of the story drive the use of the phlebotinum. Unless you're writing explorative hard sci-fi, it can only ever work this way.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 3rd 2019 at 12:28:10 PM

I asked this a few a pages back but despite Vibanium tech do they have anything resembling nuclear weapons?Vibanium tech alone would probably make them a superpower though

It's worth noting that despite Reed Richards Is Useless, the comics these movies are based on often do have the tech becoming widespread and iterative.

I remember a comic where some of New York's crime element were doing a black market exchange this way. The seller provided the buyer with contraband shrunk down to fit in the palm of one's hand and a vial of Pym Particles to regrow it. That's just life in the comic-book Marvel Universe.

Similarly, everyone and their dog has either Stark weapons or Stark-inspired derivatives. There are more Iron Men in Universe 616 than you can shake a stick at. In fact, there have been whole Iron Man stories written around the fact that Tony's designs are not cutting edge anymore; the evolution of technology has not only caught up but grown beyond Iron Man.

Also someone leaked his schematics on 4chan so that's a thing.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 3rd 2019 at 11:34:11 AM

Where’s Iron Dog?

The reason the movies get away with not affecting the status quo too much, I think, is because there's only so many of them. The larger the shared universe becomes, the harder it is to justify Reed Richards Is Useless.

It's one thing to say "Nobody on Earth is smart enough to replicate Hank Pym's work." It's another to turn around and go, "Meanwhile, Reed Richards just cracked a mathematical formula buried in the physics of reality that proves the existence of a living will governing the cosmos itself. Also, literal gods exist."

The endless nature of comics is the epitome of "cannot put the genie back in the bottle" logic. While ridiculous nonsense retcons do exist, it still piles up. DareDevil had an arc poking fun at the fact that Matt Murdock's secret identity has been publicly revealed on no less than three separate occasions.

In this arc, he technically had a secret identity but everyone knew it was bullshit and that he was DareDevil. He wore shirts that read "Not DareDevil" and people chatted him up on the street about whatever shenanigans DareDevil got up to of late.

That's the kind of thing that just happens to the storytelling when the sheer weight of the comic universe's history begins to add up. Someone eventually notices that there have been a million "Bad guy with his own Iron Man suit" characters and the writing shifts as a result.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 3rd 2019 at 11:42:51 AM

Makes you wonder how the scientific community at the MU ends up after the last round of "Reed Richards basically changed the laws of physics as we know them".

A few years ago I remember reading a Marxist critique of the Iron Man films pointing out that if Tony Stark really is such a noble man then he ought to be mass producing and providing arc reactors around the world for free or at minimal as a solution to power crises and the fact that he didn't was evidence of the movies' neoliberal centrist agenda. A lot of the rest of it was standard digs at the movie for misogyny, racism, and White Man's Burden, of which some of the points were rather stretchy.

Edited by AlleyOop on Jun 3rd 2019 at 3:15:37 PM

Part of me wonders if Iron Man's nanotech suit in Infinity War and Endgame is the result of Wakanda opening its borders. Tony Stark camping outside the new Wakandan embassy like the people who camp outside a Gamestop for a midnight release of a hotly-anticipated video game.

tony stark camping?

ha

(he'd break in a steal the stuff)

To be fair, the first Avengers film indicated that Tony was trying to do precisely that. He mentioned wanting to expand the Arc Reactor tech in Iron Man 1, while we see him bringing a test reactor to power Stark Tower online in Avengers.

It's just that the writers abruptly stopped caring after that, so Tony's clean energy program was just sorta never spoken of again. Iron Man 3 was the point where "Tony Stark, the atoner scientist who wants to leave a legacy of something greater than violence" ceased to exist, replaced wholesale by "Tony Stark, the awesome super guy who intends to beat up Thanos".

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 3rd 2019 at 1:42:49 PM

Avengera did show him still using it, but again only so he doesn't have to pay an electric bill than to help in general.

I mean it's kind of the tricky balancing act that the MCU films have to put together, and probably why when they started out they were still pretty gritty and avoided going too comic book-y. Because doing that, and featuring films about magic and aliens with interstellar travel capabilities but not having the Masquerade as a central conceit of your work will affect your worldbuilding and verissimilitude to the real world.

It gets to the point where people are like, "Oh, aliens invading again? Yawn. The Avengers will take care of it." Which is then brilliantly subverted in Infinity War when no, no they don't. Not at all.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 3rd 2019 at 3:55:08 PM

The Avengers could have taken care of it together.

But they didn't, and when Tony had the chance to call he chose not to. While if they had united under the Accords the bureaucracy involved ensured nothing would be done while councils delegate on should they deal with Thanos and before they even start the council three weeks after the attack Thanos Snap'd half the people involved.

I do feel there's a point in the Iron Man movies where he is definitely at his worst as Tony Stark and he says it himself he's the best person he can be for Pepper and others when in the suit. Civil War did have him dip to his worse while waring it, but as a mentor to Spiderman he tries and is better than the man who manipulated a kid into joining his side.

Edited by OmegaRadiance on Jun 3rd 2019 at 1:03:24 AM

Citation needed. On basically all of this.

Note that even in Endgame, the Avengers just couldn't hack it. To match Thanos and his forces, Earth needed the Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, the entire Wakandan army, and Captain Goddamn Marvel. Even then, it was nothing short of a miracle that they won.

I don't think there is any scenario where Tony and Peter's presence in Wakanda means Thanos doesn't ROFLstomp everybody.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 3rd 2019 at 2:09:42 AM

Civil War Tony is an antagonist, so naturally he'll be the worst version of himself in that film. Still, the point of his character arc throughout the Infinity Saga is a movement from selfish to selfless, epitomized by his ultimate self-sacrifice. For that to work, he has to be extravagantly selfish at times and suffer the consequences.

The point isn't that they could have beaten Thanos in IW directly, but rather that they might have prevented him from getting the Stones if they were united. It's a long-shot, and obviously that isn't what happens because the narrative says so, but it does make for some interesting speculation.

For example, if the whole team had been in New York at the start, could they have killed Ebony Maw and Cull Obsidian then and there and thus never lost control of the Time Stone? Similarly, would Vision have been wounded and unable to contribute to the fight if the whole team were backing him? If Thanos invaded Earth, lacking the Time and Mind Stones, and faced an Avengers team at full strength and able to utilize both to their maximum potential...?

If the Guardians hadn't foolishly flown off to Nowhere...

Lots of choices contribute to their defeat, and any of them done differently might have changed things.

Edited by Fighteer on Jun 3rd 2019 at 4:19:49 AM

I should point out that Tony literally had the phone in his hands (that fact that he had it on him like that means he did know he'd need it) and was moments away from calling, but Maw chose that exact moment to show up and there was no other opportunity. He really only hesitated for maybe a few seconds.