Lobotomies and Brain Deletions

[hohaiyee.livejournal.com]

So I started reading Cable and Deadpool, and by the 10th issue, Cable had himself lobotomized...like, parts of his brain, and he looked like he was just gone with the drooling and the ignoring of Sadpool.

...and then he was of course, Okay!

Tony is a smart guy, like, this brain deletion thing, he's really only deleting the parts of his brain that stored the database eh? The database must be huge, so he like, must have used Extremis to keep it separate eh?

So we are going to get a fake brain death, Steve angst, and then Tony will be Okay.

I will laugh at the abuse of the Reset Button, but I still welcome it. Steve will come back, the Avengers will reunite and kick skrull ass, and they will walk into the sunset after saving a whale.

Comments

Whoa.

[jazzypom.livejournal.com]

Seriously? Like in medical conditions and all? I'm not being sarcastic, promise. I thought... those went away in the sixties?

*nods*

[jazzypom.livejournal.com]

The day I stop learning is the day I die. Thank you very much for this information. It might be coming to a fanfic near you! :D

Yeah, I've heard of leeches

[jazzypom.livejournal.com]

In my part of the woods (I live in the UK), they were using it in the better hospitals for that treatment. Oh man.

Hookworms, eh? *thinks about my mum begging me to wear shoes as a child* Interesting.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

I'm suspecting that we may get a thing where Tony has sufficient amnesia that he doesn't recall CW at all. As a method to short-circuiting people criticizing him for it. They seem to committed to him not apologizing, not for his actions -- it's all been "I regret some of the results, but my choices were right!". I mean, he's *sleeping with* the chick who attacked Steve and made sure that the SHRA would dispute would go violent, you'd think if he regretted *anything* it would be that he never got to dispute with Steve in a peaceful atmosphere and legal way.

So since they don't want to back down on that, they just erase his memories, making Steve confronting him or arguing with him pointless, same for everyone else. He can't explain himself, or justify himself, or even genuinely apologize when he doesn't remember what he did.

Something I've been thinking about lately

[cygna-hime.livejournal.com]

I'm inclined to wonder if Fraction has really thought this brain-deletion thing through. Because, you see, the only way it makes sense to me, literally the only way, is that Tony is deliberately torturing himself.

I mean, maybe the real-life people who came up with this whole idea never read Flowers for Algernon. Or maybe they just shrugged and moved on, rather than being terrified absolutely to pieces as I was--and still am. As I imagine Tony being, because Tony is a genius. That's a huge part of how he defines himself, and most if not all of the things about himself he views as good, as really desirable, spring from that. So there is no way that the idea of losing that, of knowing exactly what is happening as his mind, the most important part of him, slips away forever, taking his identity with it, isn't a first-class nightmare for him. And now he's doing that to himself? He's deliberately causing that inevitable moment when he looks at something he wrote and no longer understands it? That, to me, can't read as anything but deliberately torturing himself to death.

It's not like it was ever his only choice. He could have just shot himself and had Maria Hill burn the body. Hell, just setting himself on fire would probably have hurt less. Of course, A-listers with their own books don't get to successfully kill themselves, and for some reason someone thought that "Tony tries to kill self, fails" was a chunk of story that needed to be told again, only without any of the interesting bits. (Rather than, say, "Tony admits to his personal wrongdoing and does everything possible to fix it", which is an even more integral part of Tony as a character, but which can't come into play until the writers start having him ACKNOWLEDGE WRONGDOING.)

This whole concept has, I think, a lot of good stories that could be told around it (I kind of like the "Tony makes himself forget CW" idea, if it could be coupled with "but he still has to deal with the fact that he did those things and can't even remember why"), but I will bet you right now that the actual story we'll get won't be one of them. Mostly because Fraction has very strange ideas of what constitutes a redemption arc. And doesn't seem to be writing Tony as suffering from immense depression and self-hatred, which is the only way I can explain his actions.

Re: *nods*

[hohaiyee.livejournal.com]

Like, leeches are one thing, but I find the skull hole drilling thing scary. What if they slip? EEEEEEK. Like, you could wake up a zombie.

Re: Something I've been thinking about lately

[hohaiyee.livejournal.com]

Yes, precisely, brain deletion makes no sense at all unless it is partial.

[dieewigenacht.livejournal.com]

I have my doubts about The Avengers getting together though...but hell, they might do it, after all, there is an Avengers movie coming...right?

Anyway, doubts or no doubts.

They will save a whale.

Re: Something I've been thinking about lately

[dieewigenacht.livejournal.com]

That mental image, Tony staring at something he wrote and not being able to understand gave me the creeps, it's seriously bad, and sad...and It's making me feel bad.

Re: *nods*

[amonitrate.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I"ve heard this too -- I think it's much more precise than it used to be, so you don't turn into a vegetable.

Re: *nods*

[truthiness-aura.livejournal.com]

Go obscure medical stuff! I keep hearing about maggots and how great they are for wound cleaning ("maggot therapy", I think they call it). Intensely gross, but if it's that or lose tissue to some antibacterial-resistant superbug, I'd probably grit my teeth and go for the leeches.

Also for the lulz: a piece from Cracked (yeah, yeah, I know, but the links are actually solid) entitled 6 Disgusting Ways Animals Can Improve Your Health (http://www.cracked.com/article_17446_6-disgusting-ways-animals-can-improve-your-health.html), featuring leeches, hookworms, and hippo sweat. Please check your upchuck reflex at the door.

Re: Yeah, I've heard of leeches

[truthiness-aura.livejournal.com]

If you could use hookworms to control the immune system like that...man, sign me up. (I wonder, I wonder if that's part of why asthma and allergies are so much more common in developed countries? Immune system evolved with these little nasties that modern shoe-wearing kids aren't exposed to? I now have a bunch of interesting and revolting questions to ask my boss.)

Re: Something I've been thinking about lately

[cygna-hime.livejournal.com]

Well, the idea of Tony being just that self-loathing, so that he decides to kill himself in the most drawn-out, crippling, painful way possible, doesn't seem too nonsensical to me (supposing that he suddenly realized what he's been written as doing), but I'm pretty sure that's not where Fraction is going with this. If he's going somewhere in specific at all, which I doubt. (I will be surprised if his arc ends up showing clear direction. I will be very surprised if the direction is one I find IC for Tony.)

God, can you imagine the angst gold that could be wrung out of Tony deleting just enough of his brain that he's reset to pre-CW? Because he'd try to go to the office, or his home, and find Osborn there, so of course he'd assume he'd been stuck in an AU or time-traveled or something and go to find the Avengers...and then he *finds* them, and they hate him, but he has no clue what they're talking about...and then he asks for Steve, who will know him, surely, who will sort this out. Angst. Gold. But I just don't trust Fraction to pull it off.

Re: Something I've been thinking about lately

[cygna-hime.livejournal.com]

Isn't it just? The idea of Tony remembering that he was smart, that he used to be a genius, the go-to guy for all kinds of tech (because Reed may be smarter, but Reed does not share), but not being able to understand what he did, much less duplicate it...*hides under furniture*

We are a weird and cool species.

[truthiness-aura.livejournal.com]

I remember reading about this in one of my psych classes back in the day; one of the last-resort treatments for really severe epilepsy (as in, constant, violent, untreatable seizures) is to cut the corpus callosum, which is a band of tissue connecting the left and right sides of the brain. (There are other connections, but that's the big one.) People with a severed callosum present with something called "split-brain". If you show them something on one side of their visual field, they can't name it, because the speech control center is on the other side of their brain, across the now broken corpus. However, if you offer them a selection of objects, they'll pick up the right one, because that part of the brain is reachable. (Websites: Wikipedia's Link text (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain)split-brain article, "Splitting the Human Brain" at Indiana U (http://www.indiana.edu/~pietsch/split-brain.html) .)

::shoots little "The More You Know" star across the bottom of the screen::

Re: Something I've been thinking about lately

[truthiness-aura.livejournal.com]

I agree; the idea of losing parts of yourself, bit by bit, reminds me a little too much of things like Alzheimer's and dementia and schizophrenia and all those things that take us away from who we are or were...I don't want to read about it or think about it more than I have to, because it's really disturbing.
...is there any extra space under the furniture? I want in.

Yeah, I do wonder

[jazzypom.livejournal.com]

Because I was raised in the West Indies, and we'd run pell mell without shoes on. Hookworms would get in through the skin of the soles of your feet and live in your small intenstine. Some people would have them in their bodies for years, until the worms grew too big (and tried to get out out of your nose or mouth - ick), or you'd get medicine for it. That's why we'd get a dose of castor oil before going back to school (ick) to get rid of worms.

Yeah.

Re: Something I've been thinking about lately

[tavella.livejournal.com]

(Rather than, say, "Tony admits to his personal wrongdoing and does everything possible to fix it", which is an even more integral part of Tony as a character, but which can't come into play until the writers start having him ACKNOWLEDGE WRONGDOING.)

This is the part that drives me crazy: I don't want to see Tony suffer. Suffering doesn't help anything, and it isn't redemption; redemption is, quite simply, sincere acknowledgment of wrongdoing and the attempt to make it right. And they seem utterly fucking committed to him continuing to think he was right in everything.

They can't even have him apologize to Thor, who he violated in the most personal and pointless way. No matter what you think of the SHRA and the Civil War, I dare you to make an argument that it was necessary to steal Thor's DNA and making a killer clone of him, much less zombiefy said clone further when it wasn't a suitably obedient weapon. Much less send said clone off to a Nazi's laboratory instead of disposing of the remains in some dignified manner. And it's not just JMS -- Fraction had Tony basically sulking at a funeral because Thor didn't want to talk to him.

[valtyr]

I think you're right; I think they're going to go further and blame Extremis for him being overly aggressive and paranoid - ie he made the right choices, but Extremis made them go wrong, and he doesn't even remember them, so no point talking about it!

(In Maria Hill's defence, I have to believe she did not directly confront Cap without explicit orders. She disobeyed a direct order from the President to kill the New Avengers one time, and she and Tony briefly discuss the kind of orders that were coming down to her. But, yeah, still WTF on the sleeping together.)

[valtyr]

Oh, I know. Steve has had his memories wiped, and thinks he is 50s Cap right now. Tony wipes his memory. They BOTH have no memory of their previous lives, so they get on very well.

[tsukinofaerii.livejournal.com]

Call me crazycakes and still horribly behind, but wouldn't anyone with two ounces of common computer sense (not "common sense", because if Tony had that his life would have not been nearly this complex) and as much going on as Tony keep a backup file/restore point*? Or was that covered and negated previously? I have backups, and that's just for pr0n and fics.

*Not that Tony would use Windows in his brain, but the many many WTF moments that OS could cause him amuse me no end.

Re: *nods*

[simmysim.livejournal.com]

From what little I've seen, I'm under the impression they actually screw and bolt the skull into place, and the drill is attached to a stand, which pretty much eliminates the possibility of slipping, outside of a 9.0 earthquake.

but that is from watching TV, so take that as you will. :P

re: They BOTH have no memory of their previous lives, so they get on very well.

[hohaiyee.livejournal.com]

Okay, I've never seen the movie, but I heard about it, so, like, "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EternalSunshineOfTheSpotlessMind)"?

I think I remember fics where Tony lost his memories (the angsty one where Steve finds someone who can't stand the taste of coffee plus another one like so but with a happy ending after Steve came back via Sea Magic), and one where Steve lost his memories but fell in love with Tony anyways...I wonder if there are any where BOTH of them lost memories, in Civil War or otherwise.

re: but the many many WTF moments that OS could cause him amuse me no end

[hohaiyee.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't it be funny, if say, an orgasm would induce Tony to experience A Blue Screen of Death cause his sensory would be like so overloaded?

Re: but the many many WTF moments that OS could cause him amuse me no end

[tsukinofaerii.livejournal.com]

LMAO "Your system is low on virtual memory. Please wait while the system reallocates resources"?

Poor Steve would panic. Panic, I say. He might even think it's another heart attack, Tony's medical history being what it is.

... I want crackfic of this now. D'OH.

Re: but the many many WTF moments that OS could cause him amuse me no end

[hohaiyee.livejournal.com]

Steve would panic a lot, cause like, it'll happen in the middle of sex (because Steve would totally still be going when Tony first comes)...and Tony just goes, BLANK, wide-eyed, blank, not moving, because hello, SYSTEM OVERLOAD.

...and the hilarity of Steve dragging the deadweight that is Tony out into the Avenger's living room with naught but a sheet, and Hank and Richard being called in... Of course, Tony is, OKAY, he just needs a moment, lol, but they will NEVAR be able to live it down hahahahahahahaha!

Re: but the many many WTF moments that OS could cause him amuse me no end

[tsukinofaerii.livejournal.com]

But hey, there's a bright side! The phrase "mind blowing sex" is no longer purely a euphemism, as I'm sure Tony will love to brag.

"My system had to reboot three times last night."
"We know, Tony, the walls aren't that thick."

Steve is going to be so horrified by all of it. Especially the bragging. And now we know why he hates Extremis so much. It traumatized him, poor baby.