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In the beginning of Avengers: Age of Ultron (see clip), Strucker's Hydra base is raided by the Avengers, but it looks like the Avengers try to stun, not kill. It's especially highlighted when Iron Man tries to talk down a group of soldiers, but they keep shooting, so he shoots them and says "It was a good talk", to which one of them replies "No, it wasn't!". Nevertheless, literally one second later Iron Man shoots Dr. List to death even though Dr. List posed no physical threat. Strucker himself is soon taken alive by Captain America.

So why was was Dr. List treated differently? Is it because Dr. List tried to delete files that for Iron Man are worth killing over? Or because Iron Man decided List deserved death for sort of being a torturous doctor like Josef Mengele? In that case, would Iron Man have killed List's superior Strucker too had he gotten to him before Captain America did?

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    Was it specifically shown that Dr. List was killed? Tony has 'shot' other people with the flight stabilisers on his palms without killing them, although some of them did have at least some amount of armour on (i.e. Sam in CA: Civil War)
    – Stephen Francis
    Commented Aug 30, 2020 at 6:11
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    Good question. Like you said, he had no armor. Officially, they just moved to the next scene and removed his character from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Unofficially, he's listed as killed by Iron Man in every known up to date user generated knowledge base.
    – LWC
    Commented Aug 30, 2020 at 20:03
  • So is it fair to say this question is based on an unknown? It seems we might know that List is dead, and that Iron Man shot him, but that there is no known correlation between the two.
    – Joachim
    Commented Oct 2, 2022 at 18:29

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Strucker was a target for imprisonment, probably for interrogation, and it's likely that the soldiers are just that: soldiers. The Avengers aren't blood thirsty killers, they're heroes who are willing to do what has to be done. Tony Stark, however, is well known for being impulsive, and has no qualms with killing people who he thinks deserve it. In the first Iron Man film, he even has a pair of multi-target, shoulder-mounted guns that auto-target the heads of a group of terrorists threatening hostages, and then executes them. List was a traitor to the side that Iron Man is a part of, and if I had to guess, he took that personally and decided not to let him keep betraying Shield.

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  • Those terrorists were an immediate threat, a ticking time bomb if you will. They were literally a second away from killing lots of innocent hostage villagers. Regarding the traitor factor, List wasn't an American. In the context of the cinematic universe, did he even ever work for S.H.I.E.L.D?
    – LWC
    Commented Jan 9, 2021 at 10:12
  • According to the wiki, he was in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and was supposed to be studying Loki's scepter. And you don't have to be American to be a part of S.H.I.E.L.D. Iron Man still is willing to kill. There are plenty of examples where, while force was being used against him, it was like children throwing rocks at a tank. A great example is when an actual tank shot him out of the sky. He could have flow over, opened it up, and pulled out the driver. Instead, he blew it up and walked away while the wreckage burned. Restraint is not his strong suit.
    – Carson
    Commented Jan 11, 2021 at 15:13
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    Which wiki? Most of them go beyond the cinematic universe.
    – LWC
    Commented Jan 11, 2021 at 20:47
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    This wiki is the most cinematic universe oriented I've seen, and yet it treats comic like it's part of this universe.
    – LWC
    Commented Jan 12, 2021 at 8:45
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    Yet many if not most of the movie watches won't ever even know they exist.
    – LWC
    Commented Jan 13, 2021 at 17:31

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