So I came up with this idea a year and a half ago when I rewatch Iron Man for the first time in awhile. I just rewatched it again, and while I will always maintain that its an extremally well put together movie, obviously i'm not telling anyone here anything new when I say you have to accept some pretty awful imperialist framework with the package. I am however going to rant about that framing for a paragraph just because I just rewatched the movie and I'm annoyed about it.
I'll admit, I dont know the background of 616 comics Tony Stark all that well, though since he was invented during the Cold War I honestly assume its worse than the movie, but yeah in the movie billionaire arms manufacturer Tony Stark gets kidnapped by a terrorist group, finds out they are using his weapons, and comes home and decides to stop manufacturing weapons altogether. While there's some mixed messaging about this, overall its only treated as a bad thing that Stark's weapons were getting in the hands of terrorists too, and the movie obviously never criticizes that he made weapons for the America military. Like yes, he stops producing weapons altogether, but Tony at one point even says that his eyes were opened by seeing his weapons used against "our boys" lol. (My Marvel-head friend has tried to excuse this as Tony doing theater, but I dont buy that). Like I said its a bit of a mixed message because the movie DOES treat being an arms manufacturer as a bad thing as a whole but sells that to the audience by having a eviiiiiiill terrorist group using his weapons. And Tony remains buddies with his military liaison Colonel James Rhodes and Rhodey is treated as a good guy.
But the idea I had was, what if Tony Stark's traumatic experience taught him a different lesson. What if the scientist from the (global south country) he was imprisoned with gave him a talking to about what the American military has done to his people. What if this all put him on the road to realizing that American imperialist hegemony is the chief evil of the world. And instead of never dealing with the problem* he goes after it head on and becomes a Marxist-Leninist. I figure in this continuity Warmachine/Rhodey could actually be an enemy of his (at least at first, my Marvel-head friend who I discussed all this with would want Rhodey to eventually come to a realization himself, insisting he has a moral compass) since in this AU he'd actually make sense as an antagonist and foil.
This actually feels underdeveloped now that Ive written it out but I'm making the GODDAMN post.
*I have no idea if this issue is ever addressed in the comics, its an area of comics I dont know much about.
I think it's a good idea, but one trouble with Super Genius characters is that they make the normally-invisible labour that goes into technological development outright nonexistent.
Canon Tony Stark basically doesn't need Stark Industries at all for anything, having made low-AI machines to trivialize the creation of his technology - perhaps by removing the automation, he would need actual people with skills he can't handwave. Having to gather the highly skilled and ethically aligned personnel needed to realize his design work (and build his random bunkers) still makes him the lynchpin, but one that's intimately tied to his workforce.
This can tie into him encountering Obadiah's own internal efforts to reverse-engineer the Mk1 without Stark.
Thanks for elucidating this, it's a HUGE misconception about how technological and material development happens. Iron Man is just a recent example of this trope, but it's pervasive in media. For example, this is a major plot point of Atlas Shrugged, where John Galt and Hank Rearden are super genius inventors who create world-shaking scientific and technological breakthroughs. I think this is the source of a lot of the brain worms about Elon Musk and other tech billionaires, people seem to think that Elon is literally like Tony Stark, instead of him just being an anthropomorphic wallet that pays tens of thousands of people to do all of that stuff (and then takes credit and keeps all the profit).