Character Highlight: Pepper Potts (The Avengers)

Pepper’s not a favorite of mine, but I like her well enough.  All in all, I’d say she’s a solid mid-range love-interest character in a superhero movie (we can’t all be Peggy Carter) and is a pretty good personality to put opposite Tony (a few spoilers for the Iron Man films.)

We meet Pepper as Tony’s long-suffering right-hand woman.  Her employment with him long predates the life-changing experiences that lead him to create the Iron Man suit, so she’s familiar with him as the brilliant-but-immature playboy billionaire arms manufacturer.  She’s been with Tony for years and is well-versed in handling her boss’s mercurial decision-making and making sure his one-night-stands leave the house in a timely fashion.

This is probably the first big question about Pepper.  Why is she so loyal to him and do so much for him – from the crucial to the almost demeaningly-mundane – in such an apparently thankless job?  At this point, he’s obviously a very accomplished and powerful man, and he can be charming in a self-absorbed way, but he’s not exactly doing great work, and even though he likes and appreciates Pepper, showing gratitude is a little out of his wheelhouse.  So, it’s hard to say what motivates Pepper.  Is she hoping to be rewarded for her loyalty and advance to a more important position at Stark Industries?  (This pans out for her, since he makes her CEO in Iron Man 2, but since she spent a considerable number of years before that “picking up his dry cleaning,” I’m not sure depending on a promotion from Tony would be a good strategy.)  Is she there because she likes Tony – as a person, as a friend, as a potential lover, whatever – and knows he wouldn’t be able to function without a fantastic assistant?  Does she know all the brilliance Tony is capable of and just wants to be a small part of making that happen?

We don’t know, because Pepper isn’t a big focal-point character here, and for me, that does hurt her character a little initially.  She’s obviously smart and very capable, so why is she cleaning up after Tony and playing his gopher for years when a professional of her caliber could easily have a position better suited to her?  (It’s not that Pepper doesn’t do anything important or challenging for Tony, because she does; in many ways, she’s indispensable.  It’s that those important duties go hand-in-hand with “taking out the trash” and other run-of-the-mill tasks that makes it seem odd.)  At any rate, Pepper makes more sense to me as a character when she is put in charge, not least because owner/CEO in a romantic relationship feels more comfortable than owner-CEO/personal assistant.

For characterization, I think Pepper mostly comes off pretty well.  She’s very knowledgeable and detail-oriented, ready for virtually any contingency from a professional standpoint, although the superhero craziness still tends to catch her off-guard.  Which is fine – it is crazy, and even though it’s obviously not something she signed up for, she’s rolled with it the best she can.  She takes different approaches with Tony as necessary:  patiently waiting while he runs around distractedly, ignoring his attempts to get a rise out of her, sharing her honest opinions with him, leveling with him when he’s diving headlong into a dangerous situation without thinking and she can’t deal with it.  She still comes across a bit like his “handler” at times, which tips the power balance the other way, but overall, they have a decent tug and pull, and she mostly holds her own – which, when you’re dealing with a large-and-in-charge personality like Tony Stark, is saying something.