In "Infinity War," there's a humorous bit where Thor and Star-lord compare the atrocities they've had to suffer through, where it's all played a bit light so the humour in their battling one another over who has seen more of their kin annihilated -- and thereby the more deserving of consoling for pain-suffered, by "the sought-after maiden" -- triumphs over any deep consideration of what effect that might have had on them. It's a movie mingling different tones, though, and the Tony Stark-vs.-Thanos bit is clearly not supposed to eclipse the PTSD-ravaging explored in "Avengers" and subsequent Iron Man movies for bravado-suffering, but bring it all back to mind.... Tony Stark, sparked into immediate flashback terror at the mere innocent reference to the worm-hole by an attention-seeking kid: such is what would fuel his bringing the fight to Thanos.
But in terms of how earlier traumas unsettle our adult being, it's actually Thanos himself who best reflects this in this movie, with the pain of his daughter's early-on rejection of him, never ever something he could forget, and the movie itself seems a regression from where we as a society are progressing to in terms of being able to "see" the victim rather than, say, be prompted to displace actual sight of them in preference of using them as a vehicle for projected fantasies/revenge plots of our own, from how the effects of trauma were portrayed in "Avengers: Civil War." In that movie, Stark has spent hundreds of millions designing technology which hijacks the hippocampus of the brain to clear traumatic memories, which for Tony are his last memories of his father before he dies in a car crash, where he had rejected him as of any worth AS A father (he sent his own father into a worm-hole of rejection and abandonment -- the guilt!). For him, "indelible in his hippocampus," to quote Blasey Ford, WAS ACTUALLY the pain HE CAUSED SOMEONE ELSE... a turn-around from our time, but reflecting an awareness and deep involvement in trauma that is however up to date/current.
"Avengers: Civil War" may be one of the most interesting exploration of trauma out there, even as it makes the sufferer someone who is absolutely trustworthy as far as memory of an account, but likely untrustworthy in later settings for bearing the damage in a way that makes them perennially "maybe not up to this particular murder mission," to quote fox/rabbit/Rocket, whenever "it" applies to anything that seems to address the injury. It doesn't make a fetish of trauma, make it somehow desirable for drawing sympathy to you, or as something to augment your status -- like the 3000-people-killed bit in "Infinity War" does Thor's -- but brings it into focus as something that could debilitate your whole subsequent being. The attention goes to the victim, and it seems focussed and not, it's-for-us-to-rise-beyond-our-injuries old school... and to me, that's quite new.
Trauma, the consequences of it, has been on the Marvel Universe's mind for quite some time... do you sense too some genuine interest, or just trauma as plot-mover/trope... a trivialization and making-sport of what others are trying to redeem as serious? (Interesting, too, to me is the fact that father-Thanos never laughs at Stark's pain, but offers some apparent consoling to him over it... this could almost function as a memory Stark could artificially implant in his hippocampus to help ease his sense of a lost-father who might possibly hate him for his dismissal of him... the father who would suffer through the entirety of your reaction to him; hate/love/rejection/approval -- all to be taken in and accepted by the father who even with the daughter he thinks might simply hate his guts, never abandons sincere love of her.)
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