besides the well-known fact that tony stark's arc reactor literally powered his heart and symbolised his second chance at life, it's been not just alluded to but clearly stated by marvel from the very first iron man film that it represents his heart:
this point is made very clear again when it's used to portray his death:
of course they did this; they're such obvious metaphors that are easy to rely on for beautiful visual storytelling. they undoubtedly were aware of the potential for these scenes and carefully considered them since the beginning.
but you don't really get to use each of these moments more than once if you want them to matter, so they had to choose which one of tony's stories needed to be told through carefully picked parallels.
and who did they use them on?
yup, that's right. steve rogers. steve, who literally ends their painful fight by breaking his heart.
steve, whom tony literally hands his heart and says "here, take this" while he's devastated, disappointed, and at one of the lowest moments of his entire life.
so, platonic, romantic, alterous — the intricacies of his feelings don't even matter. they're only for tony to know.
but what we as an audience know, what we were explicitly told by marvel, is that the feelings tony had for steve were so strong that they were the equivalent of getting his heart actually shattered into pieces, and being reduced to offering your desperate, mourning heart on a platter as a way of saying "take it all, there's nothing left of me that you don't own now".
these were not accidents. we were meant to understand how profound his feelings were. so many things spiraled out of their falling out — the entire universe's faith was at stake as a result. tony was not indifferent to him. his problem was that he felt too much.
tony's achille's heel was always steve rogers, and that will forever be the backbone of the marvel universe.
So, let me add my two cents to this conversation. I’m German and in my language, every noun has a gender (either female, male or neuter) and gets referred to by gendered articles which are der (the, masculine), die (the, feminine) or das (the, neuter) and it‘s the same with the pronouns for said noun where there are either er (he), sie (she) or es (it) pronouns used for the word.
And while the moon in many languages is seen as a symbol for femininity, which probably stems from the moon being a female noun in Latin (Luna, Lunae f.), in German, that is not the case.
In my language, the moon is a masculine noun and referred to by male articles. We say DER Mond (the moon) and when we want to say that it looks beautiful, we‘d say: “er sieht schön aus”, aka “he looks beautiful.”
So, what’s the takeaway from all of this? The easiest way to phrase it is, that both cultures and languages are simply very different all around the world. I know that that sounds a bit.. obvious but I have recently observed that, especially on the internet, there seems to be a “right” and “wrong” way to go about things.
Seeing matters from a perspective that isn’t typically “Latin” or “American” is often shunned and shut down online because people aren’t used to it.
You can easily see that happen in the above post, where the user who posted the photo and caption was immediately shunned by the people in the comments for using the “wrong” pronoun for the moon.
Which is kind of funny to me, seeing as in English, nouns DON’T EVEN HAVE gendered pronouns. So this is definitely coming from the culture online being heavily influenced by Latin, as the internet seems to be a very western space and many of those languages have roots there.
But to me it is important to say that just because Luna is a commonly used term when talking about the moon, that doesn’t have to mean that everyone needs to agree on it being female. In my language, that isn’t the case and I’d very much feel pretty annoyed if anyone told me that my or my language’s/culture‘s perspective is somehow wrong.
So, as the person above my way too lengthy post already said: we‘re not all Romans. And in my humble opinion, that‘s a good thing. So stop policing other people on stuff like this, just because they have a different perspective on this. Emphasis on the word DIFFERENT by the way. Different, not wrong.
I think I'm gonna start using he/him for the moon on purpose now.
the effects are just daft punk lmao
✅ harder
✅ better
✅ faster
✅ stronger
Don't we all..
oh how I’d love to have that kind of chemistry with someone ;-;
I love the phrase "they get along like a house on fire". It's perfect. You and me have perfect chemistry and it's setting off the carbon monoxide detectors. People are calling emergency services to get us to stop being so chummy. Someone died
I would pay A LOT of money to see that. Get fucked Ben Sharpie🫧
Hayao Miyazaki transformed into a human-sized AOT Titan and fought Ben Shapiro to the death.
muss aber sagen, die angsty fanfictions zu diesem Ende schreiben sich geradezu von selber..
hurt/comfort natürlich auch 🤷♂️