Your theory is possible. I don't want to dismiss it out of hand.I still struggle with Fury's line in the Iron Man 1 tag "You think you're the only superhero in the world??" There are a few explanations I can think of, with varying levels of problem with them.
Fury may just have been trying to bluff Tony. He may have been trying to contain the Tony ego problem by making Tony feel small. If Iron Man really did shake things up at SHIELD, Nick Fury is scrambling to figure out the new landscape, and anything he can say to put Tony off balance is to his advantage.
Fury may be speaking of Hawkeye and Black Widow. After all, Tony, unlike Bruce, Steve, and Thor, is still baseline human. We think of Tony as being in the same class as Thor and Steve, because as we saw in Avengers when he's in his suit he can hold his own against them, but if we imagine Fury's perspective to be "A superhero is a baseline human who uses technology and training to act like a comic book character", Hawkeye and Black Widow certainly count.
But I'm not convinced by this because whatever Fury's definition is, that can't be Tony's definition. Can you imagine Tony being surprised that a spy agency has a guy like Clint or Natasha? Impressed, sure, but not surprised. Fury's not hinting at well trained spec-ops agents, he's hinting at things that make the Iron Man suit look normal. And his failure to deliver on that muddies the waters. Maybe he was talking about Steve- maybe somehow even back in Iron Man 1 era, he expected that in a couple years he'd be digging out Cap from the arctic ice, and between Bruce and Steve he would have real superhumans to stack next to Tony. (This is kind of plausible when you remember the writer's strike delayed Captain America, which otherwise would have been out closer to Iron Man)
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Date: 2012-05-31 03:50 pm (UTC)Fury may just have been trying to bluff Tony. He may have been trying to contain the Tony ego problem by making Tony feel small. If Iron Man really did shake things up at SHIELD, Nick Fury is scrambling to figure out the new landscape, and anything he can say to put Tony off balance is to his advantage.
Fury may be speaking of Hawkeye and Black Widow. After all, Tony, unlike Bruce, Steve, and Thor, is still baseline human. We think of Tony as being in the same class as Thor and Steve, because as we saw in Avengers when he's in his suit he can hold his own against them, but if we imagine Fury's perspective to be "A superhero is a baseline human who uses technology and training to act like a comic book character", Hawkeye and Black Widow certainly count.
But I'm not convinced by this because whatever Fury's definition is, that can't be Tony's definition. Can you imagine Tony being surprised that a spy agency has a guy like Clint or Natasha? Impressed, sure, but not surprised. Fury's not hinting at well trained spec-ops agents, he's hinting at things that make the Iron Man suit look normal. And his failure to deliver on that muddies the waters. Maybe he was talking about Steve- maybe somehow even back in Iron Man 1 era, he expected that in a couple years he'd be digging out Cap from the arctic ice, and between Bruce and Steve he would have real superhumans to stack next to Tony. (This is kind of plausible when you remember the writer's strike delayed Captain America, which otherwise would have been out closer to Iron Man)