Tony Stark (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
industries) wrote2022-04-01 07:30 pm
industries) wrote2022-04-01 07:30 pm
Entry tags:
application | abraxas
OOC INFORMATION
Player Name: Erin
Are you over 18?: Y
Contact:![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
lacidiana, LaCidiana#8176
Other Characters in Game: N/A
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Tony Stark
Canon: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Canon Point: Beginning of Avengers: Endgame (after he's brought back to Earth, but pre-timeskip)
Age: 48
Background: You know who I am.
Suitability:
Once Tony orients himself to his jamjar circumstances in the Free Cities, he'll very quickly come to some alarming conclusions. As someone with a complicated history as a weapons-manufacturer-turned-superhero-"pacifist", he'll deduce (correctly or not) that he's been brought to this world to do the very thing that he has forsworn – developing weapons for a military power – and would immediately recoil from the ask.
However, this initial revulsion at the idea might lead to some interesting opportunities. Perhaps Tony would drop in on some laboratories to get a lay of the land, and then draw attention to himself when he blurted out everything the local scientists could be doing better. Perhaps he would commit his considerable expertise to propelling Cadens' farming machines into the modern era, or maybe he'd overestimate his sway and instead get a stern talking-to from Cadens' officials – but also draw their legitimate interest.
Maybe still, he'd witness an act of aggression from Thorne that would convince him (again, correctly or not) that they are the true oppressors, and that he should help fight for the Free Cities' continued autonomy. Although he'd refuse to create tools of violence for others, he'd be willing to employ them with his own hands to protect innocent civilians, and a steampunk-styled Iron Man suit is almost certainly in the cards.
Or maybe, as a true endgame, he'd do some combination of all of the above to gain the Cadens government's trust so that he could investigate the Singularity with sponsored resources, under the guise of finding a means to permanently destroy it. In actuality, he'd be trying to unearth a way to harness its tremendous power to send Abraxas' visitors back to their worlds... and go home. Maybe he'd make some progress to that end, or maybe Cadens would discover his plan and imprison him, or force him to defect to Thorne.
Who knows! All that's for certain is that once Tony decides on a course of action, he generally commits come hell or high water. It'll also be fun – as it always is in jamjar games – for celebrity Tony Stark to come to terms with the fact that he's small peanuts here, and will have to prove himself to earn some measure of the deference and privilege that he enjoys back home.
Powers:
Technically, Tony is a 100% garden variety human, with no magical, mutant, radioactive, or supernatural abilities whatsoever.
However – Tony is also a preternaturally gifted AI programmer and mechanical engineer, to the point that the technology in his personal lab is decades ahead of anything developed by entire governments or private companies on Earth (with the exception of Wakanda). Spanning his entire canon, Tony's genius has allowed him to achieve feats that would be reasonably impossible for even the most brilliant real-life human, such as inventing a renewable energy source from a box of scraps in a desert cave, to him reverse-engineering time travel from a few updated metrics, to him solving an immortality-esque healing factor equation while blackout drunk. His big brain and gifted hands will be tackling similarly "impossible" projects in Abraxas, so it seems fair to state he's essentially got a form of technomancy that allows him to learn new concepts and technologies with unreal speed, paired with the ingenuity to apply those concepts to limited resources and still come out successful.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
The seminal moment in Tony's life is definitely the most obvious: Iraq, 2008. Before then, as a billionaire at the top of the 1% and heir to an arms tech company, Tony had zero checks or limits placed on his desires except for the theoretical disapproval of his very-dead father. Under Tony's guidance, Stark Industries sold missiles, guns, drones, AIs, and other weapons of mass destruction to the U.S. Military, with no thought toward the lives they might destroy. He jumped from parties to board meetings to his personal lab with no regard for anyone but himself, and justified it to anyone who would ask that he only sold his tech to the "good guys," and therefore it was a-okay.
The whole world knows what happened next: Tony Stark emerged from that cave as Iron Man, with a brand new heart and a brand new direction for his company, in which profiting from murder had no part.
What the world doesn't know is how much Tony still grapples with the man he used to be and the wounds he inflicted on the world. Deep wounds, unforgivable ones. For every Ho Yinsen, there were a hundred more communities eviscerated by his greed; for every Wanda Maximoff, there were countless more children who watched their parents die.
Tony's guilt and his resulting sense of responsibility have become the cornerstones of his personality and drive everything he does. On the surface, he comes across as the same egotistical, self-important billionaire playboy with witty ripostes and disarming nicknames. But his closest friends and teammates know the truth: Under the armor, Tony Stark is human, and although he tries his best to right his wrongs, he never feels like it's good enough.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Tony was forced to face his demons ten years ago, and they remain big and scary and in his peripheral vision at all times, dogging his every thought and action and relationship. Tony knows intimately what he's done to hurt people, so he thinks he knows what he needs to do to protect people – and that includes everyone, everywhere, on the entire planet. He thinks the entire world rests on his shoulders because he's the only one who can carry the weight... and the only one who should have to.
Of course, he's wrong. And so he keeps seeing his old demons, and keeps building new ones as a result. Ultron, Avengers' Civil War, the loss to Thanos – all catastrophes that could have been avoided if Tony hadn't pursued what he thought was right to the exclusion of everything – and everyone – else. He emerges from the rubble of each disaster with a little more experience and humility, but it only feeds into his same vicious cycle of personal guilt, which in his worst moments morphs into self-righteous rage that he projects onto those around him.
At this canonpoint in particular, he's taken a devastating blow and watched his greatest fear come to pass. He tried to save the world from a catastrophe he spent years preparing for and failed. He watched someone he cared about die in his arms, while he himself survived. Half the universe is dead as a result of an exchange someone else made for his life, and he knows it.
However, it's also a testament to Tony's strength that he carried on and survived. That he cares so much for his loved ones back home that he managed to drag himself halfway across the universe to get back to them. At the end of the day, it's Tony's heart that guides him, for better and for worse. Despite his outward arrogance, he genuinely wants to help people and protect those he loves, and would trade his own life for them in a heartbeat. In fact, he eventually does.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
As a mega-rich über-genius, one might assume Tony has a hard time relating to other people, and to some extent that's true. Tony considers only the most brilliant minds his intellectual peers, and to that end counts Bruce Banner among his closest friends. He also probably wouldn't have taken Peter Parker under his wing had his inventions and ingenuity not reminded Tony so much of his child prodigy self.
But that's not to say Tony avoids interacting with normal people. To the contrary, Tony is charming and confident, dapper and suave, the first to crack a joke when the situation demands it, and even when it doesn't. Much like his literal armor, Tony's public persona – and in particular his humor – serve as his figurative armor, often with the intended effect of coming off as charismatic, yet insensitive; generous, yet unattached.
In reality, Tony is an extremely emotional and empathic person, able to easily read between the lines in social interactions and perceive the feelings and motivations of those around him. It's because of this that a pattern emerges in those he cares about: Honesty. Pepper Potts and Col. James Rhodes distinguished themselves early on as the two most important people in Tony's life because rather than acting as celebrity yes-men, they challenged his beliefs and confronted him as equals. And as much as Tony will deride teammates who question his decisions, time and again he's shown that it's precisely those people for whom he reserves the greatest respect – and whose perceived betrayals have cut the deepest.
Tony values loyalty, and family, and doing the right thing above all else. Unfortunately, he can be inflexible and hypocritical in the way he defines those things, which has caused himself – and the world – a great deal of tragedy.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Tony Stark loves himself more than anyone else in the world. He's smarter than you, richer than you, more handsome and charming, more accomplished and liked. He has everything he could ever want and he deserves it all. He is better than anyone in every measurable way.
This is the attitude Tony projects through every social interaction, the picture he paints with every dismissive insult and self-aggrandizing boast. Some of it is even true – he usually is the smartest guy in the room. He is privileged, and petulant, and more than a little vain.
But underneath the self-perpetuated myth is a man who knows his failings, and who has cataloged and analyzed them with vicious scrutiny. Tony's insecurity and self-loathing run so deep that his greatest fear was not that his team died while trying to save the world, but that his team died while trying to save the world... and he survived.
So Tony throws himself into his work with hellbent fixation, to such an unhealthy degree that it has jeopardized his relationship with Pepper multiple times over the course of a decade. He tries to treat his fears and self-doubt as things that are tangible, that he can confront and fix if he just finds the correct algorithm, the right alloy. He believes more in his creations than he does in himself.
In summary: Tony Stark is a superhero genius idiot disaster human who tries his absolute hardest to do the right thing but a lot of the time just makes things worse – as in much worse, like personally creating a brand new supervillain or pushing inter-Avengers relations to all-out-war. He has so little faith in himself that he conflates his personal worth with the utility of his creations, while still projecting (and on some level believing) that he is invincible and infallible. He's an extroverted introvert, so selfless in his ideals that he's selfish in their execution; he's a killer pacifist; he's a monogamous playboy; and at his current canonpoint, he feels personally responsible for the annihilation of half of all life in the universe.
He's complicated.
What is their sign, and why?
The Magician reflects not only Tony's prodigious talents in the sciences, but also the single-minded intensity that he brings to every project he takes on. "Hyper-focused" and "perfectionist" fit Tony to a T, and even his most ardent detractors would have a hard time arguing that he isn't the "best of the best" at what he does.
Arrival Scenario:
Free Cities
CANON UPDATE
New Canon Point: End of Avengers: Endgame, when he. Y'know, gets ripped apart by the concentrated power of the cosmos. And dies.
Psychological Changes:
Tony will have now lived in a strange new world for five years, where half of Earth's population died as a result of something he perceives to be his own fault, but where those closest to him (Pepper, Rhodey, Happy) were lucky enough to survive. In those five years, he officially quit the Avengers and retired to a quiet(er) life in upstate New York, where he started a family with Pepper. His four year-old daughter Morgan is now the most important thing in his life, which he isn't afraid to reiterate to his old teammates when they approach him with a plan to save the universe so crazy it just might work.
But despite his claims of leaving that life behind, he's still the same old Tony Stark at his core. Even before he agrees to help with the Thanos-thwarting Time Heist, he keeps working, building, fixing, never really able to rest. He commits considerable resources and time to helping Bruce Banner take control of his condition, develops an AI named EDITH to control Stark Industries' satellite network, and advances through thirty-five iterations of Iron Man suits despite claiming no interest in returning to active combat.
So, basically – he's a stay-at-home dad for his Forbes CEO wife, who happens to have a holographic AI interface in his living area that allows him to invent theoretical time travel once he plugs in a few quantum mechanics. That's the vibe.
All jokes aside, Tony's family and his love for his daughter are the only things that allow him to survive and carry on after the trauma of 2018, and his own deep-seated guilt over not being able to stop it. While he finds some measure of peace in his new life and release from the existential dread leading up to Thanos' victory, he's never really free of his self-imposed burden of responsibility – which is why he finally agrees to rejoin the Avengers, under specific terms, to bring back everyone who was lost.
And it's because of both these things – his duty to the world, and his love for his family – that he makes the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.
Physical Changes:
Tony will be unsettled (though secretly chuffed) that due to the nature of Abraxas' canon updates, he's been shoved back into a body five years younger than he actually is. However, once he toughs out the immediate, extremely intense death-hangover, he'll also notice (subject to mod approval): hairline scars emanating from his knuckles and rising up his arm, shoulder, neck, and finally to his cheek, and under his eye – something similar to this image.
Player Name: Erin
Are you over 18?: Y
Contact:
Other Characters in Game: N/A
IC INFORMATION
Character Name: Tony Stark
Canon: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Canon Point: Beginning of Avengers: Endgame (after he's brought back to Earth, but pre-timeskip)
Age: 48
Background: You know who I am.
Suitability:
Once Tony orients himself to his jamjar circumstances in the Free Cities, he'll very quickly come to some alarming conclusions. As someone with a complicated history as a weapons-manufacturer-turned-superhero-"pacifist", he'll deduce (correctly or not) that he's been brought to this world to do the very thing that he has forsworn – developing weapons for a military power – and would immediately recoil from the ask.
However, this initial revulsion at the idea might lead to some interesting opportunities. Perhaps Tony would drop in on some laboratories to get a lay of the land, and then draw attention to himself when he blurted out everything the local scientists could be doing better. Perhaps he would commit his considerable expertise to propelling Cadens' farming machines into the modern era, or maybe he'd overestimate his sway and instead get a stern talking-to from Cadens' officials – but also draw their legitimate interest.
Maybe still, he'd witness an act of aggression from Thorne that would convince him (again, correctly or not) that they are the true oppressors, and that he should help fight for the Free Cities' continued autonomy. Although he'd refuse to create tools of violence for others, he'd be willing to employ them with his own hands to protect innocent civilians, and a steampunk-styled Iron Man suit is almost certainly in the cards.
Or maybe, as a true endgame, he'd do some combination of all of the above to gain the Cadens government's trust so that he could investigate the Singularity with sponsored resources, under the guise of finding a means to permanently destroy it. In actuality, he'd be trying to unearth a way to harness its tremendous power to send Abraxas' visitors back to their worlds... and go home. Maybe he'd make some progress to that end, or maybe Cadens would discover his plan and imprison him, or force him to defect to Thorne.
Who knows! All that's for certain is that once Tony decides on a course of action, he generally commits come hell or high water. It'll also be fun – as it always is in jamjar games – for celebrity Tony Stark to come to terms with the fact that he's small peanuts here, and will have to prove himself to earn some measure of the deference and privilege that he enjoys back home.
Powers:
Technically, Tony is a 100% garden variety human, with no magical, mutant, radioactive, or supernatural abilities whatsoever.
However – Tony is also a preternaturally gifted AI programmer and mechanical engineer, to the point that the technology in his personal lab is decades ahead of anything developed by entire governments or private companies on Earth (with the exception of Wakanda). Spanning his entire canon, Tony's genius has allowed him to achieve feats that would be reasonably impossible for even the most brilliant real-life human, such as inventing a renewable energy source from a box of scraps in a desert cave, to him reverse-engineering time travel from a few updated metrics, to him solving an immortality-esque healing factor equation while blackout drunk. His big brain and gifted hands will be tackling similarly "impossible" projects in Abraxas, so it seems fair to state he's essentially got a form of technomancy that allows him to learn new concepts and technologies with unreal speed, paired with the ingenuity to apply those concepts to limited resources and still come out successful.
PERSONALITY QUESTIONS
Describe an important event in your character's life and how it impacted them.
The seminal moment in Tony's life is definitely the most obvious: Iraq, 2008. Before then, as a billionaire at the top of the 1% and heir to an arms tech company, Tony had zero checks or limits placed on his desires except for the theoretical disapproval of his very-dead father. Under Tony's guidance, Stark Industries sold missiles, guns, drones, AIs, and other weapons of mass destruction to the U.S. Military, with no thought toward the lives they might destroy. He jumped from parties to board meetings to his personal lab with no regard for anyone but himself, and justified it to anyone who would ask that he only sold his tech to the "good guys," and therefore it was a-okay.
The whole world knows what happened next: Tony Stark emerged from that cave as Iron Man, with a brand new heart and a brand new direction for his company, in which profiting from murder had no part.
What the world doesn't know is how much Tony still grapples with the man he used to be and the wounds he inflicted on the world. Deep wounds, unforgivable ones. For every Ho Yinsen, there were a hundred more communities eviscerated by his greed; for every Wanda Maximoff, there were countless more children who watched their parents die.
Tony's guilt and his resulting sense of responsibility have become the cornerstones of his personality and drive everything he does. On the surface, he comes across as the same egotistical, self-important billionaire playboy with witty ripostes and disarming nicknames. But his closest friends and teammates know the truth: Under the armor, Tony Stark is human, and although he tries his best to right his wrongs, he never feels like it's good enough.
Does your character have a moral code, or other set of standards they try to live by?
Tony was forced to face his demons ten years ago, and they remain big and scary and in his peripheral vision at all times, dogging his every thought and action and relationship. Tony knows intimately what he's done to hurt people, so he thinks he knows what he needs to do to protect people – and that includes everyone, everywhere, on the entire planet. He thinks the entire world rests on his shoulders because he's the only one who can carry the weight... and the only one who should have to.
Of course, he's wrong. And so he keeps seeing his old demons, and keeps building new ones as a result. Ultron, Avengers' Civil War, the loss to Thanos – all catastrophes that could have been avoided if Tony hadn't pursued what he thought was right to the exclusion of everything – and everyone – else. He emerges from the rubble of each disaster with a little more experience and humility, but it only feeds into his same vicious cycle of personal guilt, which in his worst moments morphs into self-righteous rage that he projects onto those around him.
At this canonpoint in particular, he's taken a devastating blow and watched his greatest fear come to pass. He tried to save the world from a catastrophe he spent years preparing for and failed. He watched someone he cared about die in his arms, while he himself survived. Half the universe is dead as a result of an exchange someone else made for his life, and he knows it.
However, it's also a testament to Tony's strength that he carried on and survived. That he cares so much for his loved ones back home that he managed to drag himself halfway across the universe to get back to them. At the end of the day, it's Tony's heart that guides him, for better and for worse. Despite his outward arrogance, he genuinely wants to help people and protect those he loves, and would trade his own life for them in a heartbeat. In fact, he eventually does.
What quality or qualities do they admire most?
As a mega-rich über-genius, one might assume Tony has a hard time relating to other people, and to some extent that's true. Tony considers only the most brilliant minds his intellectual peers, and to that end counts Bruce Banner among his closest friends. He also probably wouldn't have taken Peter Parker under his wing had his inventions and ingenuity not reminded Tony so much of his child prodigy self.
But that's not to say Tony avoids interacting with normal people. To the contrary, Tony is charming and confident, dapper and suave, the first to crack a joke when the situation demands it, and even when it doesn't. Much like his literal armor, Tony's public persona – and in particular his humor – serve as his figurative armor, often with the intended effect of coming off as charismatic, yet insensitive; generous, yet unattached.
In reality, Tony is an extremely emotional and empathic person, able to easily read between the lines in social interactions and perceive the feelings and motivations of those around him. It's because of this that a pattern emerges in those he cares about: Honesty. Pepper Potts and Col. James Rhodes distinguished themselves early on as the two most important people in Tony's life because rather than acting as celebrity yes-men, they challenged his beliefs and confronted him as equals. And as much as Tony will deride teammates who question his decisions, time and again he's shown that it's precisely those people for whom he reserves the greatest respect – and whose perceived betrayals have cut the deepest.
Tony values loyalty, and family, and doing the right thing above all else. Unfortunately, he can be inflexible and hypocritical in the way he defines those things, which has caused himself – and the world – a great deal of tragedy.
Do they have a part of themselves they dislike?
Tony Stark loves himself more than anyone else in the world. He's smarter than you, richer than you, more handsome and charming, more accomplished and liked. He has everything he could ever want and he deserves it all. He is better than anyone in every measurable way.
This is the attitude Tony projects through every social interaction, the picture he paints with every dismissive insult and self-aggrandizing boast. Some of it is even true – he usually is the smartest guy in the room. He is privileged, and petulant, and more than a little vain.
But underneath the self-perpetuated myth is a man who knows his failings, and who has cataloged and analyzed them with vicious scrutiny. Tony's insecurity and self-loathing run so deep that his greatest fear was not that his team died while trying to save the world, but that his team died while trying to save the world... and he survived.
So Tony throws himself into his work with hellbent fixation, to such an unhealthy degree that it has jeopardized his relationship with Pepper multiple times over the course of a decade. He tries to treat his fears and self-doubt as things that are tangible, that he can confront and fix if he just finds the correct algorithm, the right alloy. He believes more in his creations than he does in himself.
In summary: Tony Stark is a superhero genius idiot disaster human who tries his absolute hardest to do the right thing but a lot of the time just makes things worse – as in much worse, like personally creating a brand new supervillain or pushing inter-Avengers relations to all-out-war. He has so little faith in himself that he conflates his personal worth with the utility of his creations, while still projecting (and on some level believing) that he is invincible and infallible. He's an extroverted introvert, so selfless in his ideals that he's selfish in their execution; he's a killer pacifist; he's a monogamous playboy; and at his current canonpoint, he feels personally responsible for the annihilation of half of all life in the universe.
He's complicated.
What is their sign, and why?
The Magician reflects not only Tony's prodigious talents in the sciences, but also the single-minded intensity that he brings to every project he takes on. "Hyper-focused" and "perfectionist" fit Tony to a T, and even his most ardent detractors would have a hard time arguing that he isn't the "best of the best" at what he does.
Arrival Scenario:
Free Cities
CANON UPDATE
New Canon Point: End of Avengers: Endgame, when he. Y'know, gets ripped apart by the concentrated power of the cosmos. And dies.
Psychological Changes:
Tony will have now lived in a strange new world for five years, where half of Earth's population died as a result of something he perceives to be his own fault, but where those closest to him (Pepper, Rhodey, Happy) were lucky enough to survive. In those five years, he officially quit the Avengers and retired to a quiet(er) life in upstate New York, where he started a family with Pepper. His four year-old daughter Morgan is now the most important thing in his life, which he isn't afraid to reiterate to his old teammates when they approach him with a plan to save the universe so crazy it just might work.
But despite his claims of leaving that life behind, he's still the same old Tony Stark at his core. Even before he agrees to help with the Thanos-thwarting Time Heist, he keeps working, building, fixing, never really able to rest. He commits considerable resources and time to helping Bruce Banner take control of his condition, develops an AI named EDITH to control Stark Industries' satellite network, and advances through thirty-five iterations of Iron Man suits despite claiming no interest in returning to active combat.
So, basically – he's a stay-at-home dad for his Forbes CEO wife, who happens to have a holographic AI interface in his living area that allows him to invent theoretical time travel once he plugs in a few quantum mechanics. That's the vibe.
All jokes aside, Tony's family and his love for his daughter are the only things that allow him to survive and carry on after the trauma of 2018, and his own deep-seated guilt over not being able to stop it. While he finds some measure of peace in his new life and release from the existential dread leading up to Thanos' victory, he's never really free of his self-imposed burden of responsibility – which is why he finally agrees to rejoin the Avengers, under specific terms, to bring back everyone who was lost.
And it's because of both these things – his duty to the world, and his love for his family – that he makes the ultimate sacrifice for the cause.
Physical Changes:
Tony will be unsettled (though secretly chuffed) that due to the nature of Abraxas' canon updates, he's been shoved back into a body five years younger than he actually is. However, once he toughs out the immediate, extremely intense death-hangover, he'll also notice (subject to mod approval): hairline scars emanating from his knuckles and rising up his arm, shoulder, neck, and finally to his cheek, and under his eye – something similar to this image.
