yadda.md

You can probably use D&D alignment to think of interesting character aspects of Marvel characters.

• Captain America is fundamentally on the Good axis, but experiences conflict on the Law vs. Chaos axis in order to seek the Good
• Iron Man is fundamentally Neutral or even Chaotic on the order axis (if you consider a fundamental part of his character his individualism), and his character development (if you go all the way back to Iron Man 1) is about the good vs. evil that is inherent in his individualistic power seeking. Haven't seen it yet, but thing about Civil War and some of the ways the character gets more "boring"/"predictable" is that once Tony Stark become sort of more unambiguously good, you have to go back to the original question of whether he is neutral/chaotic vs. lawful in order to have a character conflict that is interesting for him to have to resolve.
• This of course sets up the premise of Civil War, as it's framed as two good characters falling on different sides of the order vs. chaos debate, which is of course interesting in its own way.
• But actually:
  1. I think this might be a false framing that misses the key differences/points about the characters that are most uniquely "them"--compare the character conflicts between Iron Man 1 and Captain America 2, when each character gets a whole movie to themselves.
  2. They already sort of played with this in reverse in Avengers 1, where you stereotype Steve Rogers as law-and-order, and Tony Stark as chaos, which for whatever reason is good but sometimes a little "boring"/"predictable".
  3. Which of course might be why Civil War is interesting, because it's inverting the trope.
  4. But again that might be a false framing in the first place.

I think the next step in terms of character development is perhaps a Jungian reading of all this, where the interesting thing about character development is every person's journey from their initial core strength, which is distinctive and strong, but unbalanced, to the deeper parts of their selves where they experience weakness, and conflict, and repression, but ultimately become richer and more balanced through the other parts of themselves that are not just the one primary note.