girlsbydaylight:

rozzingit:

Okay can we talk about Pepper Potts for a second.

There has been a lot of talk about her in the latest movie, obviously.  And a lot of people being mad at her, thinking that she’s not supporting Tony, all this shit.  And I want to talk about this, because I feel like people are making a lot of assumptions and really ignoring the context in which these events are happening.

Tony is a man suffering from PTSD.  This is an awful thing that deserves empathy and support from those who care about him.

However, Tony is also a man suffering from PTSD who has refused to talk about it or deal with it in any way.  His conversation is Pepper is the first time he’s admitted it to her, but you sure as hell know it’s not the first she’s known of it.  Of course she knows.  Do you think she’s done anything except try her very hardest to support Tony in whatever way she can in the months since the events of New York?  She’s moved in with him, and I think we can assume without seeing every interaction that’s she generally done her best to take care of him, because she’s Pepper and she’s a professional at taking care of Tony Stark, and because she loves him.

She doesn’t call Tony’s suits a distraction because she’s annoyed at him not spending time with her.  She’s calling them a distraction because their Tony’s way of distracting himself from the very real issues he’s refusing to deal with.  Sitting down in your workshop when you can’t sleep and building THIRTYSOMETHING SUITS is not a healthy way to deal with your emotional trauma.  Tony is building a wall of metal around him, pulling away from those who care about him in a very literal way that we can see when he has an empty suit stand in for him on date night with Pepper.

And then the dream happens.

I’ve heard even from people who aren’t frothing about Pepper being mean to Tony that they wish Pepper had just been more terrified and less angry.  One, emotions are not rational when you have just gone through a life-threatening situation.  Like, come on.  Two: although Tony is not responsible for his nightmares, and his suit activating was an accident, it’s all a part of the continual road of Tony not dealing with his issues in a healthy way.  It was an accident, but it was an accident born of Tony’s actions and responses to his trauma.

Have you ever tried to help someone who refused to help themselves?  It’s really, really hard.  It’s incredibly frustrating.  And, yes, it is angering.  It is infuriating.  And if their refusal to help themselves ends up putting you in danger, accidentally or not, you have every right to be angry about it for one night.  It is a normal human reaction to be pissed and terrified and need space.  Most of Pepper’s life for the past — I don’t know, seems at least a decade — has been taking care of Tony Stark, and now she takes care of him as a lover and a girlfriend rather than a personal assistant, and that’s great, but he is Tony Stark, and he must be exhausting.  I mean, think about it.  He is not an easy man to love.  She stays with him because she does love him, and for her he’s worth it, but she’s human.

So no, if you’re one of the people whining about Pepper being mean to Tony, you need to stand back and reassess.  Pepper is a woman trying to love a very damaged, difficult man.  Tony’s PTSD is not his fault.  I’m not even saying the dream and the accidental suit attack was his fault.  I’m just saying that he’s someone who’s not taking care of himself and who has refused, up until his scene with Pepper in the movie, to open up about it.  That’s where the movie opens up on the subject, but this isn’t the beginning of Tony’s problems.  I don’t know about anyone else, but I find it impossible to read Pepper’s “oh, you think?” in that conversation, reacting to Tony admitting he has a problem, without seeing all the times she must have tried to help him before now.

Pepper is human.  Tony is human.  We’re all just human.  She’s not being mean or a bitch, she’s not abandoning him in his time of need.  She’s doing what she needs to do for herself and her own emotional safety and well-being for one night, because that’s actually the appropriate response.

So yeah.  Pepper is awesome, man.  Haters gonna hate, but they shouldn’t.

WHAT A GOOD POST.

This reminds me of something I was thinking about earlier today, that Pepper is incredibly supportive in this movie, without being a pushover.  She’s ready to walk back upstairs when Tony is O N C E   A G A I N in his workshop, building more suits.  He’s had time to build, like, forty of them, he’s been down there awhile.  Probably almost the entire time since New York, once the euphoria of victory wore off.  This is not something that’s just suddenly coming up, meaning that he’s been avoiding dealing with his reactions for a really long time.

And then they have date night, which Tony was apparently planning on skipping out on, he sent a suit up there instead of going himself, and she had every right to turn around and walk back upstairs in anger.  But he admitted something real and so she turned back around and listened.  She clearly understood why he was feeling the way he did, she had a very sympathetic look, she put her arms around him and pulled him in to lean against her.  But she also wasn’t going to just sit back and enable this behavior.

Because Tony’s behavior in his dealing with his feelings was not okay.  The movie made a point about it—whenever he started to have an anxiety attack, he would start building things.  He was building an army of suits that would be there JUST IN CASE something else happened, meanwhile not actually getting on with his life.  It’s understandable.  He almost died.  He thought he was going to die when he took that nuke into outer space.  But then he didn’t and he doesn’t know how to deal with it.  Totally understandable!  But that lack of dealing with it in any sort of healthy way put her in very physical danger when he accidentally called the suit to him when he was dreaming.

Yes, it was an accident and he didn’t mean to and she was all right and he was scared right then.  But, jfc, so was Pepper!  She was terrified in that moment and she’s been dealing with Tony’s not dealing for months and if she’d stayed, if she’d said that it was okay, if she sympathized with him about it, it would have just been enabling him.  Tony needed a very real smack in the face that THIS WAS NOT OKAY, HE WAS HURTING OTHER PEOPLE, THEY CANNOT LET THEMSELVES BE CONSUMED BY HIS FEARS, TOO.  He was hurting Pepper by not trying to deal with this and not recognizing that she’s going through shit, too, strikes me as terribly unfair.

But you know how Pepper handled this relationship?  She stayed.  She went to sleep downstairs, but she didn’t leave.  When Tony went out and TAUNTED A TERRORIST INTO ATTACKING HIM?  It would have been entirely goddamned reasonable for Pepper to say, no, this has to stop, I’m done.  It would have been entirely reasonable for her to just leave.  But she didn’t.  She had zero intentions of it.  She packed some bags and said, okay, get your shit together, because we’re going out of town for awhile.  She was staying in this relationship, but she wasn’t just going to sit back and not do anything about it.

Then there’s the ending, with Tony destroying the suits.  It wasn’t about walking away from Iron Man because of Pepper, which I’ve seen fandom try to level at her.  For one, Tony clearly said that he’s still Iron Man.  Two, he’s Tony goddamned Stark, he built the first Iron Man suit, he still has all the specs, he can build as many more as he likes.

The most important point, though, is that those suits needed to be destroyed for the symbolism.  They were what Tony used to keep the world at arm’s length because of his fears.  They had to be destroyed to show that Tony wasn’t going to live his entire life planning for what MIGHT come next.  They had to be destroyed to break his obsessing over them.

It was his choice to destroy them.  Pepper never asked him to do that.  Pepper supported him, even through all those months of him pulling away to obsess over more and more and more suits.  Tony did it because it was the right choice for him to MOVE ON.  Of course he’s still going to be Iron Man—he said so himself at the end of the movie and, you know, Avengers 2 is still coming out.

Ultimately, I guess my point is… you don’t have to like the Tony/Pepper relationship, it’s actually really fine and okay if you don’t!  Maybe you got attached to something else first, maybe you just don’t see any chemistry between them, maybe you don’t think it would work out as well as something else would, maybe you don’t care for the direction it took, maybe a hundred other things that make you not care for it.  That’s all fine, really.  :)  But blaming Pepper for being actually pretty damn supportive and tough, I’m not so okay with that.

WOW, I DIDN’T MEANT TO JUMP OFF ON THIS POST, BUT ONCE I GOT STARTED, I COULDN’T STOP.

SORRY I’M NOT SORRY ABOUT MY IM3/PEPPER FEELINGS.