Tony is gonna use the gauntlet, because the Russos have a major hard-on for mirror imagery and bookends. And he’s gonna live to tell the tale.
According to Joe Russo and Christopher Markus, the Infinity Gauntlet requires a tremendous amount of energy to use. Knowing this, what comes to mind when you think “power" and “energy” in the MCU? The arc reactor. (Like what else?) Yes, it’s man-made, not some alien, cosmic, or god-like energy source, but I think that’s the whole point. That it is man-made.
In Iron Man 2, the New Element was discovered when Tony Stark poured through his father’s old belongings, leading him to uncover a hidden atomic structure within a model of the Stark Expo.
This “New Element” was synthesized by Howard’s study of the Tesseract. Later, the Tesseract was revealed to be the Space Stone, which makes this the first canonical appearance of an Infinity Gem in the MCU.
In The Avengers, Nick Fury says this to Steve about the Tesseract and why it’s important:
Yeah. “Unlimited sustainable energy.” That could come in handy, right? This same idea is hammered home in Iron Man 2 when Nick talks with Tony about his father:
That tells us that the New Element, which feeds the arc reactor in Tony’s chest, could theoretically be capable of much more than what we’ve seen so far.
… Like maybe power an Infinity Gauntlet?
So, what happens when Tony wields this mega-powerful gauntlet? The arc reactor (conveniently back inside Tony’s chest for the first time since Iron Man 3) will probably explode from being overloaded, which will mimic the injury that led him to become Iron Man in the first place (wooo a chest full of shrapnel). This would mirror Thanos getting slammed with Stormbreaker dead-center of his chest right before he snapped his fingers.
I mean, the first thing Thanos even did when he appeared in the Soul World post-snap was to touch his chest (then look at his arm):
Just as the bomb in Iron Man didn’t kill Tony, I don’t think wielding the gauntlet will kill Tony either (he’s a survivor), but it will most certainly cripple him. Tony’s left arm is going to be fucked up, just like Thanos’s, but we’ve been getting signs that’s going to happen for a while:
Most notably, Tony suffers a ton of left arm injuries in Captain America: Civil War, which was written at the same time as, you guessed it, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers 4.
Just like Tony got to go home at the end of his stint in Afghanistan (wearing a sling on his arm no less), Tony will go on to live a life post-gauntlet that’s much like Thanos: finally building a farm, metaphorically hanging up the armor… it’s what he’s been dreaming about since AoU.
After all, he and Thanos appear to be on parallel journeys. If Thanos got to see the sunset on a grateful universe, then Tony will as well.
But whatever injury he gets from wielding the gauntlet will permanently bench him from ever suiting up again. Tony doesn’t need to die to explain his absence from future MCU films. A life-altering injury + being a stay-at-home dad is enough, right?
I will forever reblog this when it appears on my dash
kitthesortingwhatnow 