Lets play Deadpool vs Tony Stark
Deadpool: brings a teenager with superpowers to help him in a fight
Tumblr: DEADPOOL!!. I love the interactions between negasonic teenage warhead and deadpool. Omg so cute. *billions of fanart*Tony Stark: Literally does the same thing when his friends abandon him. Sends him home as soon as he sees a probability that he’d get hurt.
Tumblr: tony stark is a villian ™. I can’t believe he used peter as a child soldier :) :)
Look, okay, people giving Tony shit for recruiting Peter to be a “child soldier omg TRAUMA AND DANGER” is dumb, yeah–no one actually WANTED to hurt anyone else in that fight and on top of that the kid literally comes with his own personal panic button AND is strong enough to arm-wrestle the super-soldier with the METAL DEATH-ARM and win–but this is definitely an example of false equivalence, because COLOSSUS EXISTS.
Colossus knows what Negasonic Teenage Warhead is doing. Colossus is doing this WITH Negasonic Teenage Warhead. He’s her trainer and her teacher and he brings her along–he could totally have made the call to leave her at home while he helped Deadpool himself and she would’ve STAYED home and listened to death metal and eaten all his favorite snacks, probably, but she also had zero compunctions about coming along and kicking ass in the name of “yeah this is kinda our bad on the dude getting away, huh”.
May Parker, on the other hand, does not know where Peter is. Tony not only lied to her, he told PETER to lie to her. Like, yes, the peril is much lower in this situation than in Negasonic’s, but Tony still blackmailed and bribed a kid who’d already said “no” to rope him into fighting his fight–a kid whose personal philosophy of “with great power comes great NEED TO NOT JUST FUCKING SIT ON MY ASS AND LET GOOD PEOPLE GET FUCKING MURDERED” does not even SLIGHTLY jive with the Accords. Peter Parker would NEVER willingly sign that thing. Peter Parker knows DAMN WELL what happens when you ignore the problem and pretend it’s not your business.
(Also, like, unless I’m forgetting a throwaway line somewhere, we don’t actually know how old Negasonic Teenage Warhead is–she could easily be eighteen or nineteen and still using that name–but we DEFINITELY know Peter Parker is still a minor and he seems to be intended to be around fifteen or sixteen. So he’s not only less trained, less experienced, and less powerful than her, he’s also less developed and less mature. Seriously, a four-year age difference is a LIFETIME at that age.)
So, therefore, Negasonic Teenage Warhead’s long-term mentor who she has a stable working relationship with takes her along to clean up a mess they’re partially responsible for and help a dude with whom they had a pre-existing relationship save his innocent and uninvolved ex, a woman who has nothing to do with any of this at all and is gonna maybe die if they fuck this up. Meanwhile, Peter Parker’s random rich-and-powerful stranger lies to his aunt, blackmails him when he tries to say no, and then distracts him with shiny new toys to get him to clean up an in-house mess the AVENGERS are responsible for and help him arrest a guy who literally everyone in actual positions of legal authority in the movie straight-up laughs about the idea of giving a trial to–WHILE ALSO BRINGING ALONG BLACK PANTHER, who, I love you, T’Challa, but you are the only cat in this fight who is trying to actually MURDER someone, at this point in the movie you are still planning to kill a man in cold blood because you THINK he killed your dad. And, again: trial? What trial??
Like–tl;dr, but long story semi-short, Deadpool is trying to save an innocent person and kill literal superhuman SLAVERS with basically zero resources/backup and recruits two people with training and experience and an actual permission slip, and Tony has half the Avengers and all of Stark Enterprises and 117 governments on his side, but threatens a six-months-into-superpowers teenager into working for dudes who have already made it clear they would execute an untried man and want to arrest a bunch of people who have saved the world MULTIPLE times without even hearing them out on why they’re so vehemently against the Accords or even CONSULTING them when first DRAFTING the damn things. Like, that is the thing that is canonically happening here. That is the situation.
Also, Tony Stark is actually styled as a hero who believes he’s doing this for the greater good and is working with legal approval, restraint, and oversight. Deadpool’s goals are all personal and/or selfish and he has already spent his entire R-rated movie murdering people with extreme prejudice and refusing to answer to anyone. They should REALLY be held to different standards there, morally and narratively speaking, and yet Deadpool’s story STILL treats the involved teenager with more respect and agency than Civil War’s does Peter, while also not pretending she is a fully mature adult prepared to take on other super-powered people with zero formal training and about as much prep time as it takes to fabricate a spider costume in a super-scientist’s lab.
SO I CAN SEE WHY PEOPLE GET A LITTLE CHUFFED BY THIS STORY CHOICE, HONESTLY.
