LNH/Meta: Irony Man's Fate! Was... Re: LNH/Contest: Legion of Net.Heroes Volume 2 #35 HCC8

[Dave Van Domelen]

In article <uuKdncr0b-0CtEvWnZ2dnUVZ_vednZ2d at earthlink.com>,
Arthur Spitzer  <arspitzer at earthlink.net> wrote:
>Which brings me to a question I'd like to ask the group.
>
>Beige Midnight won't resolve the Irony Man plot... at the end he'll 
>still be an LNH'r and still be a jerk and still be guilty of a whole lot 
>of crimes...
>
>So my question is, What should happen to him?
>
>Should he go to prison (some cushy white collar criminal prison?) and 
>have one of his employees be the new Irony Man... (and considering that 
>the end of Beige Midnight is two years ago, he could have completed his 
>sentence by now...)
>
>Or should he just get a slap on the wrist... and remain an LNH'r?

     Given how Marvel dealt with the matter, I'd suggest a few potential
paths.  For those who avoided Iron Man lately, in a nutshell Tony erased his
own brain to keep Norman Osborn from getting at the secrets in his head, but
did it in a very careful way with micro-repulsor blasts so that the brain
itself would be intact.  Then he had friends upload an "innocent" backup copy
of himself into his blanked brain.  This isn't as implausible as it might
seem, since the whole plot of Iron Man: Hypervelocity involved a backup copy
of Tony's mind running a suit of armor.  (It would have been cooler if the
Hypervelocity version was what got re-uploaded into Tony's brain, mind you,
but Fraction isn't that good.)

     1) Reductio ad absurdem.  Toony decides that he needs to excise the
parts of his brain that were responsible for his vile deeds, and sets about
doing so with a ball peen hammer or some other similarly crude instrument.

     2) Baldfaced reboot.  Tony Stark gets a reboot of some sort every so
often (Teen Tony replacing Evil Tony, merged post-Heroes Return Tony
replacing Teen Tony, Fraction's backup copy, etc).  Just say that offscreen
Toony did a clean install.  Maybe give him some compatibility issues with old
drivers.  (Perhaps literally...give him a chauffeur character like Happy
Hogan and have them not get along, for an incompatible driver.)

     3) Inversion parody.  Fraction's story had Tony getting progressively
more mentally handicapped until he was effectively brain dead.  The parody
could go the other way, with Toony trying to force a limit break or something
by boosting his brainpower over and over again in the hopes of being able to
think his way out of the situation.  Flowers for Alt.gernon sort of thing,
perhaps.  

     Dave Van Domelen, figures any of these could be made somehow ironic as
well.