Thread by @SlavaMalamud

So last night, my 12-year-old and I had a very deep and difficult conversation about the Marvel Cinematic Universe's most disturbing and hideous character, Iron Man. My son found Tony Stark unpalatable for multiple valid reasons, but I was unsettled on a deeper level.
Thing is...

Tony Stark is the most Russian character in the entire bloody saga. I am not hyperbolizing or being coy. Anton Starkov is extremely, horrifyingly Russian for all the wrong, most problematic, most repulsive reasons.
Consider the following...

It's not just that Stark is ostentatious and vulgar in his displays of wealth and bangs his secretary (and also everyone else), both of which are mandatory by statute for all Russian oligarchs. Tony lives by two core principles, that consume his entire being:

1) everything that gives him satisfaction is good,
2) he is too rich to die.
But it's not only the conviction that every problem can be solved by bribes and not giving a shit that makes Stark Russian. It's also the fact that his fortune is based on his dad's ripping off Russians.

It's also the fact that he despises everyone who isn't as rich as he is (100% of the Earth's population), is childish in his self-obsession (which is why he can only bond with a teenager) and has done more damage to Earth than people and monsters who actually tried to harm it...

Stark lives the life every single Russian oligarch lives, which, of course, makes him the wet dream of American ultra-right libertarian ideologues, to whom he was always meant to appeal.
No wonder Steve Rogers hated the bastard. My boy could smell a Russkie.

Stark, in short, is Russian in every single way that "Natasha" "Romanoff" is not. He even had to make his death all about him, robbing a good-hearted egg-head of hard-won glory, because there is nothing Russian rich boys hate more than liberal intelligentsia.
Fuck Stark forever.

Of course, Steve Rogers is American for the most American of reasons: the religious belief that goodness is defined solely and entirely by how breathtakingly handsome you are.
It's America's ass indeed, Cap.
Fuck you, too.