dads of the mcu: a venn diagram
notes:
-I have never actually seen Ant-Man
-I forgot large swathes of the Iron Mans
-’bad’ covers everything from ‘a jerk’ to ‘pretty much the embodiment of all evil’
-to be updated as we go alongScott Lang is a good dad.
Hank Pym is a wretched father and a shitty human being who definitely belongs in “bad dads”. Granted, I don’t think the narrative was actually aiming for that, so.
Is he like that in the movie too, or just the comics?
(I only really had Wikipedia and Tvtropes to go on wrt to him in the movie)
Also, I just looked up Iron Man 1 and Yinsen and I realised that although he says before he dies that he has ‘a family’ he never specifically says he has kids. Oh well. He can stay anyway.
I only half watched Ant-man, but he’s probably on the bad end of the middle. He’s not abusive just thoughtless and over-protective in a partentalistic way.
I think he hasn’t ever really been a dad in the comics? A skrull techniquely raped Tigra using his form and a kid resulted from that, but I don’t know if that counts. He’s a bad and abusive romantic partner in the comics tho
Yeah, that’s my takeaway from the movies as well. He’s not abusive at all; he’s just overprotective. He doesn’t want Hope to have the Ant-Man costume and gives it to Scott instead because his wife/Hope’s mother literally died being Wasp. You can see where he’s coming from even though he is obviously being unfair to her. And the thing is, over the course of the movie he realizes he’s being unfair to her and at the end, presents her with her very own Wasp costume. He does a complete 180 on it, all on his own as far as I can remember.
I think putting him in the good dad/bad dad intersection is just right. He’s a pretty good dad who let his trauma over his wife’s death cause him to treat his daughter unfairly, but then he realizes what he’s doing and fixes it.
Honestly, my litmus test for Howard Stark and Hank Pym was pretty much just “based on what I’ve read, are they really any worse than Yondu, a guy who beat his adult son up…”