I think you nailed it - Tony Stark's most frequent enemy is Tony Stark. It's just his personality. He over-reaches, over-dreams, over-acts, and then has to dig himself out of the hole.


Quote Originally Posted by MichaelC View Post
There's also the fact that Stark, by his very nature, is a character about balancing responsibility and hubris. Those characters often don't have arch-enemies.

In stories about balancing responsibility and hubris, the protagonist himself is the villain half the time, as he struggles to find the line between doing all he can to help the world, and controlling the world or being a mad scientist/mad wizard. The question is how far should he go to do so before he becomes a controlling dictator or mad god. Villains in such stories tend to be characters who either push the hero into giving in to his flaws, or examples of what the hero is becoming if he continues his path. That is, when the villains exist at all, as as I said before the protagonist is the villain of the story half the time. Iron Man is the poster-boy for this sort of story.

That makes him very different from, say, Spider-Man, who is about balancing responsibility with just having a normal life. There's no danger of Parker becoming a mad scientist or overreaching wizard because he's simply not powerful enough or quite smart enough for that to be a thing. Instead it's about the difficulty of finding that sweet spot where he helps his community as much as he can, while not neglecting his wife and aunt or failing to pay his rent. Such a character is far more likely to have a consistent arch-enemy, because an arch-enemy is there to put a massive strain on his ability to balance those two things, or even to accomplish just one of them.

All that said, to the degree that Stark can even be said to have an arch-enemy, it is clearly The Mandarin.