Tony Stark Is My Goat - Blog Posts

Tony’s Childhood. Part 2.3. Effects: Bravery

Part 1, Part 2.1. and Part 2.2.

Backstory (read Part 1): Tony was sent to boarding school when he was just 7 years old. All the other students were teenagers from 9th to 12th grade. There he spent another 7 years without contact with peers, away from his parents and Jarvis.

From IM3 we learned that these teenagers bullied him (Read Part 1 - Bullying).

But why was he bullied?

Let's look at Harley. What does Tony see in him? There are no physical signs of mistreatment on Harley, and he doesn’t appear stressed. But. He is an 11-year-old tech genius and nerd. Just like Tony was. And Tony immediately knows what is happening to the boy.

In the deleted scene “Tony, Harley and E.J.” we meet the teenager who bullies Harley - EJ, who is much older than him and has a group of friends the same age. Knowing that Tony had to live in a boarding school with the same contingent, we can conclude that something similar happened to him there.

So, the reasons for bullying in Tony's case would be: he was the youngest and smartest of all the students, was a nerd, probably had a nanny at school, had no friends because there were no children his age, and because he is an introvert (read this for MCU and this for 616).

We don’t know exactly what kind of bullying happened to him, but we can assume that it was physical, since Tony offers Harley a non-lethal, but still a weapon.

So in this case, Tony was always on his own against the bigger and older guys.  And he had to defend himself somehow.

Maybe he could escape them once, but he could not escape the whole boarding school situation, so it was pointless. This is why he doesn't have the "flight" part of "fight or flight" mode. Even if it makes more sense in a specific situation, like facing off against a robot with a fork without any protection in Age of Ultron. In comparison, Bruce has a "flight" mode, so he hid behind the bar even though he could be protected by his big green Alter Ego.

He could try to fight with his fists, but it was also pointless against larger opponents. So he built things. Like that flash thing he gave Harley to “discourage bullying”.

The most important effect of the teenagers’ cruelty on him was probably his bravery. In all the movies, every time there is a fight, it’s Tony who goes against the largest and  most dangerous opponent, be it Leviathans (The Avengers), Killian (IM3), Ultron (AoU), Winter Soldier (CW – Task Force office), Wanda and Clint (CW – airport fight), Scott in his giant form (CW – airport fight), Thanos (IW), or Thanos again (Endgame).

Not captivity and the Ten Rings made him brave. He was brave before that - see this post.

Conclusion: due to the bullying he endured as a child, Tony developed traits that would later make him Iron Man - a brave, fearless, smart fighter who never runs away from the battlefield and always takes on the biggest, most dangerous and powerful enemies, because he has been doing this since childhood.