Comic Strips

EDIT: ITT, people deny the premise of the comic they just read].

Comics Stark is generally a narcissistic alcoholic asshole who drives away everyone who cares about him and who has ruined his own company more times than I can count.

Hubris is practically his main enemy.

He was Elon Musk (with the exception that Stark actually is a genius while Musk is dumb as a box of rocks) decades before Musk even moved to the USA.

You've never been supposed to like him (except when written by some hack who doesn't understand the character). The only core Marvel hero more unlikable than him is Henry fucking Pym, who somehow manages to be even more of an entitled narcissistic asshole, but without the money or the charm.

The premise of the books is that heroes can be flawed, small, broken, unsympathetic assholes, behind the mask.

What made Marvel different back in the sixties when they got back into superhero books is that their heroes were human, flaws and all. Peter Parker was a broke teenager way out of his depth who accidentally got his uncle killed; Steve Rogers was a man out of his time pursued by ghosts of the past; Bruce Banner effectively had multiple personality disorder and ran away from society (and himself) to avoid causing harm; the Fantastic Four and the X-Men were families, with all the petty little squabbles that come with that, the latter having to deal with discrimination on top of that; and Tony Stark was a wealthy, narcissistic, alcoholic asshole, who played the hero to cope with it.

Now, of course Iron Man was not the right character to kickstart Marvel's cinematic universe. Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, or the X-Men would have been the ideal ones. Iron Man was never one of Marvel's best selling books, probably for the same reasons you don't like the character.

But it was the least worst they had left, after selling the others' rights to other companies. And, somehow, in great part thanks to Robert Downey Jr. practically having been born to play Tony Stark, they made it work.

Sure, they had a bit of a redemption arc; he stopped selling weapons, he managed to eventually have a family that loved him despite his flaws, and he died sacrificing himself to save the world... but he also created Ultron (with all the chaos that ensued), caused the Avengers to break up, and never really stopped being a self entitled narcissistic asshole.

But, here's the thing: there's nothing wrong with unlikable protagonists when acknowledged as such, even if they don't get a redemption arc.

Plenty of great books and films have extremely unlikely and flawed protagonists, who never redeem themselves.

See Tyler Durden, see Jack Sparrow, see Rorschach... fuck, see Victor Frankenstein, or Henry Jekyll, or captain Ahab, if you want to go deep.

The Iron Man films are not Marvel's best. They aren't deep, they don't add, by themselves, anything significant to the history of cinematography. They're just fun, simple, action films.

It's perfectly fine not to like them, everyone is entitled to their tastes. But not liking them because the protagonist is an entitled narcissistic asshole... is kind of missing the point, and not seeing the forest for the trees.

(Do note, though, that viewers who idolise Stark are also missing the point, probably to an even greater extent; like Rorschach or Tyler Durden you can enjoy a well written and acted character, but you're not supposed to idolise them or want to emulate them. They might be “the good guys”, maybe, but they're definitely not good people.)