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The Ant-Man suit relies on physics that have nothing to do with ants. It can make its wearer arbitrarily large or small, down to the quantum level. The whole ant analogy thing seems arbitrary. In fact, his wife called herself "The Wasp". ... But yet Hank developed skills for controlling ants. Why did he fixate on ants?

Note that I am not asking why ants are great. that would be a different question, and one could argue that any specific type of organism is great.

Why does 'Hank Pym' in particular fixate on ants?

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  • One might ask the same question of E.O. Wilson.
    – Wad Cheber
    Jul 25, 2015 at 20:46
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    Speculation: They are easy to control, due to their queen/slave social system. They are among the most numerous species on the planet. They are incredibly strong for their size. They are stupid on an individual basis, but clever when working together under the "hive mind". They're everywhere.
    – Wad Cheber
    Jul 25, 2015 at 20:48

1 Answer 1

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Shortly after discovering his shrinking particles (in his first outing in 1962's "Tales to Astonish #27", he accidentally exposed himself to an overdose of Pym particles and shrank to the size of an ant. After being attacked by various insects and facing various micro-sized trials he was rescued by a friendly ant, developing a lifelong love for the little critters.

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In Tales To Astonish 35, we see the fruits of his labour;

enter image description here

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    "Only a few females in an ant colony"? Umm, no. And yet the new Antman movie carries on the tradition. Antony? Really?
    – Joe L.
    Jul 26, 2015 at 4:07
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    @JoeL. Well, since Antony has wings, he may well be a drone. Anyway, it's not necessarily strictly accurate to classify non-reproductive members of a eusocial species as either gender; it seems more or less arbitrarily to me.
    – Random832
    Jul 26, 2015 at 6:55
  • @Valorum - The gods are there because they're interesting. They're the deviation from reality that we came to see. We're not interested in seeing lack of scientific realism besides those points. In fact, we rely on it to make the films relatable. That's why all these films have humans in them, a planet much like Earth, with the same sort of history, (nominal) representation of people from different countries, and indeed differ so little from our world, and why science fiction and fantasy are only a minority of the fiction market - realism is more popular than lack of realism, arguably.
    – Adamant
    Sep 6, 2018 at 23:24
  • There's also not really any good reason to perpetuate these scientific myths. If you know that viewers are going to take your science as fact, why not do your research? Or, for that matter, gender myths - perhaps this one has persisted so long because the idea of "workers" being mostly male is easier to understand than them being female or sexless, or because there's a tendency in English to assign male gender to neuter entities as a default.
    – Adamant
    Sep 6, 2018 at 23:28
  • I mean, you could create a movie set on the planet Zarb where only New Zealand and China exist, the electron has 0.00000001% more mass, and humans (who are actually whales on Zarb) don't think about their actions but instead lurch about randomly, but why?
    – Adamant
    Sep 6, 2018 at 23:33

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