thornsilver on Tony Stark

[conuly]

P.S. Also, let us be honest here. If Tony Stark became suicidal and tried to kill himself, he is not going to use pills. Something will explode.

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Comments

[siliconshaman]

There is that. In theory he could overload a suit's reactor.. in practice JARVIS, or Girl Friday, would probably override that.

OTOH...pretty sure he could find a way if he really wanted to, say hand-building a prototype reactor or weapon and it 'accidentally' goes boom... and statistically, men usually choose more violent methods of suicide.

[conuly]

Which is why they are disproportionately likely to succeed - women attempt it more often, but often fail.

[siliconshaman]

Agreed... and lets face it, Tony is a genius. If he was going to do it, he'd find a way that would be 100% certain to succeed.

Depressing as it might be to think of... but he'd find a way.

[recessional]

Statistically, men choose more FINAL methods of suicide, and in the USA guns are more available. They also have a high rate of jumping off bridges, jumping in front of trains, hanging and actually a high incidence of IMMEDIATELY fatal poisons. Like cyanide.

My entire point is in fact that he specifically would not choose a demonstrative method if he were actually going to kill himself (as opposed to acting self-destructively or harmfully to either vent or to SEEK attention) because ALL OF THEM including shooting himself (reasonable proportion of people miss the immediately fatal shot), hanging (takes too long), fatal crashes and other incidents) have significantly too high a possibility that he will either fail, be stopped or be saved.

However HCN is involved in many processes in his generational occupation and a high concentration inhaled will kill instantly with no meaningfully remedy. High dose orally ingested will kill within moments with little initial signs before intervention is useless (and it's largely useless at a high dose period).

And it achieves the important end which is he's DEAD before anyone has even a glimmer of a chance to stop him.

Which is the only relevant detail, imo, to a Tony Stark who actually wants to be dead.

Everything else of course has a high possibility of him ending up dead, or agonizingly injured, and also explosions. But if he gives even the glimmer of a fuck about that, then (imo) it's not about just wanting to be dead - it's about relieving the internal emotional pressure, or lashing out at himself or someone else or both, or attention, or getting back at someone or something else. All of which are factors that mean he on some level wants to survive.

Others are of course free to disagree, but believe me I am EXCESSIVELY EDUCATED about suicide and related subjects. It's a coping mechanism. 😜

eta: See here's the thing: Tony is exactly the kind of - very often male - person that everyone believes these things about.

They see his personality and maybe even his self-destructiveness and they go: he's LOUD! He's FLAMBOYANT! He does STUPID SHIT that goes BOOM! This is the kind of person who drives off a cliff or smashes things into a mountain or otherwise tries to make a suicide BIG and ATTENTION GETTING and LOUD.

And then when they find him quietly dead in his room, or his office, or his car, they all go " . . . but . . . ?"

Because the BIG and LOUD and CRASHY and "go out on a high note", all of it: all of that is a actually a driving desire to get the mental anguish to stop enough to SURVIVE. We see that in IM2 AND in IM3: both of the times we see Tony go totally off his rocker is when he's faced with the possibility that he is actually going to die and NOTHING he can do will change that.

In IM2 this turns into an orgy of "watch all the stupid shit I can do and still survive"; in IM3 he tries to beat that knowledge back with Planning For Every Attack but the overall point is, that's Tony. He does not give up.

So in order to actually make him suicidal - not "lashing out in anger", not "lashing out at himself", not "giving Death the finger by doing every stupid-ass thing he possibly can and living through it", not "lashing out at someone else going SEE SEE HOW MUCH I HURT HOW BROKEN I AM", not any of those things, all of which are actually about wanting to live and are just really twisted up - in order to make him want to die, you have to push him past that point.

Before that point he's just gonna do IM2 But Moreso. Now at some point that'd probably get him killed, but that's part of why my first comment had the note about "we use this word to describe things that are actually different" - he might die as a side effect, but it's a side effect.

And with Tony, and what we're shown through his solo movies particularly of his personality and drive and mental illness/damage, Tony in that kind of crisis lashing out state is not going to go climb on the other side of a bridge, ponder it for hours and jump (or get talked out of it): in that kind of state he's going to to find someone to hurt or something important to do or he's just going to party but on the other hand at no point would he actually at that point WANT DEATH so much that he'd do it straight up on purpose, something with no other purpose or goal, nor would he stop fighting to try to live through it. (Even his suicide play in Avengers he doesn't actually at any point stop trying to survive/complete the mission, he's just doing it in the awareness that it's not going to be enough.)

The thing is that you can absolutely get that kind of person to the point where they just want to die. They want this to be over. They want out. They want to kill themselves. That in and of itself is the goal, and the whole of the goal.

And at that point they very quietly make their very efficient plan and carry it out and nobody even knows they're contemplating it. And everyone is stunned when they find the body because how could this have happened? He's not the kind of person who would do this! He would have made it a show! He would have made it going out on a high note!

. . .except no, at that point, he wouldn't. At that point of the desire to self-annihilate, he doesn't care about the high note, he doesn't care about the show, he doesn't care about anything except not-existing.

If Tony were an "ordinary" person, he'd just shoot himself in the head. Or maybe hang himself. But he's Tony Stark and he lives a super-profiled/watched/recorded/etc life, which means his biggest problem is going to be able to go through with it and also guaranteeing that nobody (not even his super-mad-scientist-doctor colleagues) can save him. But also not give any tip-offs to make sure he can't be stopped.

[thornsilver]

The problem is, all he has to do is decide to kill himself. He does not have to have elaborate preparations. He has access to a lot of deadly stuff in his usual daily interaction. It is just that in all the movies, his behavior has been extremely performative. He is not really going to be worried that someone will manage to stop him. He would want to know that people remember him.

[recessional]

As it happens, I disagree.

[melannen]

I suspect what he's most likely to do if he gets to that point is either fly the suit straight up until he runs out of air/heat/power, or, in continuities where that wasn't likely to work, drive a very fast car off a bridge or into the side of a mountain. Or at least go with a repulsor blast to the head, which iirc he has contemplated in the comics at least once.

Possibly *after* having taken enough of something to guarantee he'll die regardless, but yeah, I don't see him as the sort to just quietly take the poison. If he did go actively suicidal instead of his baseline of 'If Yinsen put it off until he could go out fighting, I can too', it would either be a) something impulsive while too drunk to plan ahead much or b) while doing something badass so he can go out on a high note.

....this has not been as funny as usual metaquates discussions, gotta say.