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Tony Stark has always been a team player
Dec. 6th, 2018 12:19 pmI’ve been thinking for a while about how so many antis and just other people in general who don’t understand the characterization of Tony Stark assume that he’d feel threatened if he ever met Shuri and found out how brilliant she is. And I think this perception of him really ties back to how his initial assessment from SHIELD states that he doesn’t play well with others when really that’s far from the truth.
So many people are convinced that he would despise or be jealous of anyone that’s shown to be smarter than him when in fact he supports others who he knows have the ability, that he doesn’t, to create a better world and make the advancements that he never thought of. He just loves meeting other scientists because they all have such incredible ideas. All Tony wants is to make sure that these scientists get the funding, recognition, and freedom to work, that they deserve.
Think back to the first Avengers, when Tony studied Bruce’s research overnight and was immediately impressed by his work, and offered him lab space at Stark Tower. Or in AOU, when Helen says that soon her work and research would leave Tony’s suits in the dust. And Tony’s response? “That is exactly the plan.”
He doesn’t want the Iron Man suit to be the answer to all of the scientific problems of the world. That would make things stagnant. No one wants that.
The fact of the matter is that in order for Tony to have managed to get this far in life, with his inventions and progress with science, he must have learned how to be a team player early on as he was growing up.
Tony has so much love and respect for other scientists, engineers, innovators — people who create. And the fundamental reason behind this has everything to do with the core of science as a field.
Think about when you were in school, in biology or chemistry class, and whenever you had experiments to work on. You were always assigned into groups, or at the very least, partners. It’s not necessarily that the school didn’t have enough resources for each student to work on his or her experiment individually. It’s the fact that in science, we always stress the importance of collaboration.
Isn’t that what science has always been about? The spirit of collaboration? Working with others on discovering new things — cross-referencing, peer reviews, strengthening their research, tackling different parts of a lab report — and sharing them with the world? And don’t you think Tony, whose entire life has evolved around science and innovation, would understand that?
Tony lifts others up and helps provide them with the resources and recognition that they otherwise may not have received. That’s why he created the September Foundation for MIT students, to make sure that all of their research would be fully funded, because god knows students are always competing to win grants when all of them deserve to explore their ideas. That’s why Tony sends Harley new equipment, so he could work on new projects and improve his potato gun, because a little kid’s creativity and intelligence doesn’t deserve to be stifled just because of a lack of money, a problem that Tony could easily solve.
Ultimately, Tony knows he’s not going to be around forever, but he’s a futurist. He’s always looking forward. He wants people to be better than him. To be able to create the things that he couldn’t. Because then he knows that the world — the future — will be in good hands.
So many people are convinced that he would despise or be jealous of anyone that’s shown to be smarter than him when in fact he supports others who he knows have the ability, that he doesn’t, to create a better world and make the advancements that he never thought of. He just loves meeting other scientists because they all have such incredible ideas. All Tony wants is to make sure that these scientists get the funding, recognition, and freedom to work, that they deserve.
Think back to the first Avengers, when Tony studied Bruce’s research overnight and was immediately impressed by his work, and offered him lab space at Stark Tower. Or in AOU, when Helen says that soon her work and research would leave Tony’s suits in the dust. And Tony’s response? “That is exactly the plan.”
He doesn’t want the Iron Man suit to be the answer to all of the scientific problems of the world. That would make things stagnant. No one wants that.
The fact of the matter is that in order for Tony to have managed to get this far in life, with his inventions and progress with science, he must have learned how to be a team player early on as he was growing up.
Tony has so much love and respect for other scientists, engineers, innovators — people who create. And the fundamental reason behind this has everything to do with the core of science as a field.
Think about when you were in school, in biology or chemistry class, and whenever you had experiments to work on. You were always assigned into groups, or at the very least, partners. It’s not necessarily that the school didn’t have enough resources for each student to work on his or her experiment individually. It’s the fact that in science, we always stress the importance of collaboration.
Isn’t that what science has always been about? The spirit of collaboration? Working with others on discovering new things — cross-referencing, peer reviews, strengthening their research, tackling different parts of a lab report — and sharing them with the world? And don’t you think Tony, whose entire life has evolved around science and innovation, would understand that?
Tony lifts others up and helps provide them with the resources and recognition that they otherwise may not have received. That’s why he created the September Foundation for MIT students, to make sure that all of their research would be fully funded, because god knows students are always competing to win grants when all of them deserve to explore their ideas. That’s why Tony sends Harley new equipment, so he could work on new projects and improve his potato gun, because a little kid’s creativity and intelligence doesn’t deserve to be stifled just because of a lack of money, a problem that Tony could easily solve.
Ultimately, Tony knows he’s not going to be around forever, but he’s a futurist. He’s always looking forward. He wants people to be better than him. To be able to create the things that he couldn’t. Because then he knows that the world — the future — will be in good hands.
