Cultural Crossovers #7: Iron Man 3

Don’t really have to say anything at this point, do I?

• Nice “you know who I am” badge.
• Ooh, nanoficus.
• Less cool: exploding ficus.
• JARVIS continues to be best house brain.
• Your R&D process really looks unnecessarily painful.
• See, now folks like this asshole is why the King of All Known Space sometimes orders the King’s New Glass Marina.
• (Also, War Machine was so much better as a name.)
• Post-traumatic stress sucks; and while the audience recognizes it, they’re from a culture that is very predisposed to repress the hell out of it. (Which is why the Imperial Military Service spends so much time and effort watching for, guarding against, and dealing with it.) ((And as honers of the will to a razor edge, those cases that do show up are exactly this bad.))
• And for the record, both they and I think it was handled very well.
• Nice holoballs. (“Conversation balls”, as we call ’em.)
• The empty slots in the brain really sound different to a species that actually was designed.
• Well, someone’s not solved the nanocyborg waste heat problem. (To reference a recent discussion: catching fire and then exploding is exactly what happens to people who get overenthusiastic about the extrinsic power sources. If you want high energy, go metal.)
• Damn, that’s some degree of control. (Also, no anti-air defenses, Tony? We would have thought that you’d have thought of that.)
• …they killed Dummy and Butterfingers? Someones need to die. A lot.
• (And we really hope Jarvis is a fully distributed system.)
• We applaud you, kid. You have… potential.
• Dear media networks: your security systems are a giant ball of suck. I mean, seriously. Kids with a My First Firewall kit could follow this act.
• Yeah, that is a terrible password. It’s also fairly terrible to be using a password.
• Ease back there, fanboy. A little dignity, please.
• IN A HARDWARE STORE! WITH A BOX OF SCRAPS!
• … well, of course they have a decoy schmuck.
• Killian, your personnel policies are all kinds of terrible.
• Pretty sure a flamethrower – even an implanted flamethrower – is better than the potential of, y’know, exploding.
• Ah, the Vice-President has a sympathetic motivation. Which, in Imperial terms, means he’s earned a pistol with one shot left overnight in his cell in between arraignment and trial for treason.
• Now that’s a rescue back in the proper form!
• Autonomous mode for the win.
• You gave them all individual names? Awww.
• Oh, shit.
• …but best not-actually-resurrection ever. Damn, Pepper. Nicely done.
• And the audience delivers multiple standing ovations for that series of endings, which cap things off exquisitely.
• (Especially the salvaged robot arms.)

Yeah. Just… yeah. Works perfectly. Both on its own merits, and because, in a different way to Captain America, Iron Man is exactly the kind of hero they write stories about.