lucianalight:

iron-gauntlet:

One thing that kinda always baffles me is the whole, “Tony Stark created a murderbot!!” debate – not because Tony was necessarily in the right in attempting to harness alien power but because, as bad as Joss Whedon’s writing is, the one thing AOU does well is provide textual evidence and canonical support to the notion that a) Tony never intended to create Ultron as we see him, and that b) it is most assuredly not fully his fault. 

I kinda think half of the blame towards Tony comes from misunderstanding what Ultron was meant to be, because people seem to be under this impression that Ultron was genuinely meant to be a weapon of some sorts, when it was much the opposite. The original programming was meant to be an AI which, like Jarvis, controls a group of Iron Man Legionnaires (unwearable Iron Man suits) which we’ve already seen in action. The programme was already touched upon in IM3 where Tony created several suits but later destroyed them in an attempt to move forward. The second set we actually see in AOU as the Avengers infiltrate the Hydra base at the beginning – their mission is to help evacuate or protect the civilians (”Strucker won’t care about civilians. Send out the Iron Legion”). The sole purpose of the program is to protect civilians and that’s what makes the later casualties in the final battle of Sokovia (and in CACW, the mention of Charles Spencer) so ironic and tragic. 

Moving on from the fact that Ultron was meant to be something that was already in the works and proving to be useful, there is so much textual evidence and so much sub-text proving that the sceptre’s power is already in some way sentient, given the fact that there’s a Mind Stone in it. I know that people are eager to dismiss this but just look at the amount of evidence:

• “I was asleep”. Ultron states this upon “waking” up, suggesting he was in some way already alive and sentient.
  
• The attempt to integrate the programme fails – not just once, but a total of 76 times as shown on screen. Tony and Bruce give up, not understand where they went wrong (”What did we miss?”). When Ultron awakens himself, Jarvis remarks that he’s “not certain what triggered [Ultron’s] programming-”.  
• Earlier in the scene, Bruce remarks that scans of the sceptre make it look like a brain, and that it looks “like it’s thinking” – although, it’s not a “human mind”. The implication is that whatever is being housed by the sceptre is already, in some way, alive. 
• Again, Tony states that he and Bruce were “nowhere close to an interface”, which begs the question as to how Ultron not only woke himself up, but actually managed to go against his programming. 

I mean, one of the most important scenes proving this is that Thor, upon having his vision, states that the twins’ “powers, our horrors, Ultron himself, it all came from the Mind Stone”. Given that the power is alien and that Thor knows the most about the Infinity Stones, I would say this sentence is significant in showing how little control Tony had over what he was creating – and how unaware he was of it’s true purpose. 

I’m not saying that Tony was necessarily right in meddling with a volatile and dangerous alien weapon but I’m not sure Tony would have even attempted to try this had it not been for Wanda’s vision. I’m not saying Tony didn’t choose to do this (although again this is debatable given his state of mind), but there’s no doubt in my mind that Wanda’s manipulation of Tony mentally had brought these ideas to the forefront of his mind, firstly because Tony actually blew up and destroyed his last Legion in IM3 as a way to try to stop his obsessive PTSD-induced tinkering, and also because as Bruce remarks, Ultron was just a “fantasy” – and until now, there seemed to be no way to actually make it work. 

Regardless of whether Tony would have messed around with it or not, there’s no doubt again that Wanda did influence him in his decision; not only does Fury believe so (”the Maximoff girl, she’s working you Stark”), but Wanda admits to it; “I saw Stark’s fear, I knew it would make him self destruct”. Wanda’s placement of visions in Tony’s head (and the rest of the Avengers’) is not only invasive and brings to question the ethical implications of her powers, but it is a direct trigger to Tony, who canonically has PTSD due to the alien invasion in the Avengers. The parallel between Tony building his first Legion during a manic and paranoid phase at which his PTSD was at its worst, and attempting to make Ultron after being shown a vision relating to his PTSD is stark throughout the movie to anyone who payed attention to IM3, and yet it goes on ignored by many. Not to mention, Bruce’s entire involvement in creating Ultron (and later, also Vision) seems to go on ignored or wildly misinterpreted.

To me, Tony’s flaws lie in not consulting him team about the AI, or Thor about an alien power; more concerning perhaps is the ethical, moral and political questions that such a programme raises, which in some ways becomes important again in CACW, where Tony’s failures push him towards signing the Accords and trying to create a system of accountability. I wouldn’t however state that AOU was meant to be so decisive in saying Ultron, and all of Ultron’s actions, were solely Tony’s fault, so much as it was a tragic series of events that snowballed and very quickly got out of control.

This so in line with my ultimate theory!

OK, why was it necessary to add that “as bad as Joss Whedon’s writing is” disclaimer at the beginning? The entire thrust of this post is that AOU was very well-constructed in terms of its conception of how the Mind Stone works and treatment of Tony’s character. I’m tempted to think the initial disclaimer was just to ward off attacks from overzealous Tumblrites who might detect a heretical departure from the moralistic consensus that because Whedon’s feminism is flawed, nothing about his writing could possibly be good.