She wasn’t going to let him off the hook that easily. “What about Justin Hammer?”
“I said the ones I affiliate with more often,” Tony pointed out. “I haven’t even seen Hammer since he got dragged away by the cops like four years ago, and even before that I only contemplated being in his presence on pain of death. Besides, Hammer kinda pales in comparison to the alien death king that reduced Lokes to a screaming puddle and kidnapped you.”
“Somehow I’m not sure the people who worked for him would agree with you,” she mused. “There’s a difference between small, whiney, everyday evil and the sort of huge overarching thing that,” she swallowed hard, “Thanos is.” She contemplated the floor for a moment. “And it sounds really simple to say that he’s worse, I guess on a direct one-to-one comparison, he is.
“But he’s really obvious, you know? It’s easy to point to that, to what he did, and say ‘that’s evil’ and get everyone to fight it. It’s so much harder to get people to even see the kind of evil that simply … doesn’t care, and grinds people down every day, day by day. The little sort of evil that … well, that Stane was. He was only interested in the money, and didn’t care who got hurt in the process.”