Fridge / Avengers: Infinity War

WARNING: Fridge pages are for post-viewing discussions and thus have unmarked spoilers. Tread carefully.

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Fridge Brilliance

• Thanos' first quote in the movie is a monologue about destiny (and by extension himself) catching up to the heroes despite their best efforts. After watching the sequel, it becomes clear that said monologue was a whole paraphrase for the much more straightforward "I am inevitable".
• The film shows us very good reasons on why the Iron Spider really isn’t street-friendly. It was actually able to hurt Thanos and members of the Black Order. Had this been used on criminals, it’s Ludicrous Gibs on them.
• In keeping with the fact that this is Thanos' movie, it can be argued that this is his Hero's Journey:
  • Call to adventure: Titan suffers. He braved to save it, but failed. Now he must go on a quest to save everyone else from themselves. Alternatively: Thanos is on his daily routine but finally gets clued in on how to get all Infinity Stones (passing the threshold), with the threshold guardian in this case being Loki.
  • Darkest Hour: Thanos hits his lowest emotional point and is forced to chose between his loved one or the common good. He takes the "heroic" action, but it's such a tough choice that he even undergoes a "death" of sorts. Bonus point for Vormir to look like a literal Underworld.
  • Apotheosis: Literally. He ultimately "saves the day" and restores balance.
  • Many of the heroes arguably fill villainous archetypes, like the Guardians ganging up on him and subduing him as well as defeating themselves. Also the ending is a straight example of Near-Villain Victory.
  • Additionally, the "heroes" are presented as antagonists towards Thanos in their aggressive sneak attacks and violence. They all try their hardest to kill him. Not counting Gamora, Loki, Heimdall and Vision, Thanos doesn't physically kill before the snap, instead seeks to subdue his opponents.
• Though the stones are in relation to the Avengers and co., Thanos isn't interested in the latter. Iron Man, Thor, Star Lord, Drax, Nebula and Gamora (at least) all want revenge on the mad titan, thus making it personal. Thanos will go through them to acquire the stones, but has no personal vendetta with them. This enforces his protagonist status as MCU antagonists usually have grudges to settle and fail.
• When Thanos obtains the Space, Soul, and Time Stones, he does so by making a deal with a hero, being Loki, Gamora, and Dr. Strange, to spare the life of another, being Thor, Nebula, and Tony. Guess who ultimately survives the snap?
• This is the first Avengers film where the team loses, it actually dials back to Hawkeye's quote "Really? I retire for, like, what, five minutes? And everything goes to shit." as in this film, Hawkeye is Put on a Bus. Makes sense that he returns in the sequel.
• Several fans were confused about the lack of air support during the Battle of Wakanda, as the previous Black Panther showed that they had several warships and drones. There are at least three main reasons that T'Challa would keep them away. Firstly, the force-field dome over the city severely hampers their maneuverability. The main army on the ground is supposed to be an appealing target and distraction to the Children of Thanos, and air support would have made it appear to be a more formidable opponent and less appealing. Finally, T'Challa orders the city to be evacuated. With likely the majority of his forces committed to the main battle, the air support would be necessary to defend the civilian population.
• At the end, the characters aren't just disintegrating, they're turning into soil. This could be taken through two ways: either they're returning to dust, or it's a visual reminder of gravesoil.
• Some of the character deaths are foreshadowed in some way:
  • In Ragnarok, Thor mentions that Loki's trickery has become predictable, and this is exactly his downfall when he tries to trick Thanos.
  • Spider-Man acknowledges early on that stowing aboard the spaceship is a "one-way trip".
  • Rocket Raccoon lies to Thor that he's the captain, not realizing everyone else dying later would mean the title would pass down to him.
• Thanos's clothes have received some flak, being a simple sleeveless tunic and pants rather than his usually more ornate garb, but in this film, Thanos is not screwing around with the heroes. He wants the Infinity Gems and is willing to go to war for them. His war clothing reflects that; real military field uniforms are utilitarian, practical and designed for hellish conditions and combat. Thanos's previous clothing, in turn, could be the equivalent of a dress uniform; fancy/ceremonial and for formal occasions.
  • According to the Russos, Thanos's regular armor is just typical protective gear, such as a helmet, boots, chestplate, etc. Why would he need protective clothing when he has a gauntlet that allows him to throw moons? Regardless of whether or not Mjölnir gets fixed after/during Ragnarok, even Thor and The Hulk couldn't lay a finger on him.
  • In the film proper, Thanos does start out wearing armor, but it proves a hindrance/pain to have on once he gets a second Infinity Stone (every time he adds one there is a major ripple effect on the rest of his body), so he just rips it all off since with two stones the armor isn't at all needed anymore, anyways. Well, at least until Thor managed to overpower the whole Gauntlet with Stormbreaker's powers and hit him square in the chest of course.
  • The above point is meant to highlight as the Russos said that Thanos removing his armor was meant to show suicidal overconfidence since the armor would have helped him resist some of the heroes' blows such as Stormbreaker. Turn Avengers: Endgame, Thanos is a lot more dangerous in close combat because he has both his protective equipment and a weapon and is presumably more well protected because Thor has to keep going for the head.
• In hindsight, the stylistic similarities between Thor: Ragnarok and the Guardians of the Galaxy films (bright colors, weird costumes, wacky humor, etc.) make sense. Thor basically took a trip to the Guardians' neighborhood, which would lead him to meet the Guardians themselves.
• Thanos uses the Infinity Stones to wipe out half the universe. Each hero who dies is a counterpart to one who lives, unless that counterpart had died beforehand, and who acts as something of a foil to them.
  • Tony/Doctor Strange: Both geniuses in particular fields. Also Science vs. Magic. Tony has years of experience with his 'powers', while Strange is relatively new but already the master of his field. Notably, Tony is never shown studying (besides an offhand comment in Avengers about learning a new field 'last night'), while Strange had several different montages about how he had to learn his abilities. Both of them also used to be arrogant upper-class jerks until they had to learn humility and become heroes after a debilitating physical injury. In a meta sense, their actors both portrayed Sherlock but in different way, with Benedict's Sherlock being more cold hearted, while Downey's Sherlock is more eccentric.
  • War Machine/Falcon: Both Air Force pilots and partners/friends to well-known heroes. Rhodey is an active and still enlisted fighter pilot, while Sam is a retired veteran formerly specializing in medical evac.
  • Thor/Black Panther: Kings. Both inherited when their fathers die suddenly in their presence and there was nothing they could do about it, and had to fight a challenger for the throne who was a blood relation they previously knew nothing about. Even their fathers' deaths are foils, since T'Chaka died suddenly and violently, while Odin died peacefully with dignity.
  • Hulk/Drax: Green individuals driven by rage. Both are simple minded, the Hulk from emotional immaturity, Drax from a cultural block against metaphors and figures of speech.
  • Captain America/Spider-Man: Inspirational heroes with a red-and-blue color scheme, whose main concern is doing what's right and helping out the little guy. Also both born in New York. One is very young, relatively innocent and inexperienced, the other is the oldest human member of the Avengers who learned war in World War II.
    • Additionally, from the stinger of Ant-Man and the Wasp, Ant-Man himself survived Thanos, while Spider-Man himself got erased. Both are bug-themed superheroes who are rather comedic compared to the rest of the team, and were both Sixth Ranger members during the events of Civil War.
  • Black Widow/White Wolf: Created to be assassins. Each one has a color as a part of their codename, and both were affiliated with shady parts of the Russian government. When initially introduced, one was a willing member of S.H.I.E.L.D., the other a reluctant tool of HYDRA.
  • Rocket/Groot: Partners. One is, as we learn in Guaedians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, an Uplifted Animal, the other is a sentient plant.
  • Nebula/Mantis: Friends to the Guardians of the Galaxy who were minions of a Big Bad. Mantis was Ego's only full-time minion, while Nebula was the least-favored of many. Both are The Unfavorite, and the Big Bads they're affiliated with play a parental role to...
  • Gamora/Star-Lord: Both Cosmic Heroes. Both taken from their real homes and raised by tough-love father-figures with a skewed sense of morality, and the flashback scene to their youth shows them losing their mother. Quill's mother is shown to have definitely died, while the fate of Gamora's mother is a bit ambiguous. Both were put through training from hell and abusive childhoods by their respective adoptive fathers, but were still loved, in their own way. Quill's (not adoptive) father lured him with promises of love but treated him as yet another replaceable tool in his plan to remake the universe in his image and Peter killed him for it, and his adoptive father died to save him. Gamora was treated as a favored heir but was killed as a tool in her adoptive father's plan to remake the universe in his image, even if (and because) he really did love her, even if he had to make her die for him.
• The theme of parallels and balance is prevalent throughout the film. Thanos decrees that half the population must be quelled so that the other half will survive, but in Daoism, there must always be two halves together, thus allowing light and dark to maintain proper balance. In his quest to rid half the universe of overpopulation, Thanos ruins himself as he loses his daughter Gamora. Captain America also loses Bucky, Tony loses Peter, Rocket loses Groot, Okoye loses T'Challa, etc. All of them lost their halves. Hence, Avengers 4 is needed. It's the rebalancing, the Yang that will complement the Yin of the first part of this entry. Infinity War has just begun.
• Star-Lord and Thanos:
  • In a rather ironic case, the two mistakes courtesy of Thor and Star-Lord both involve Thanos's head. Star-Lord whacked the Titan repeatedly in the head in his grief when it was the worst possible thing to do at the time, while Thor didn't aim the Stormbreaker at Thanos's head when it would've been the best possible thing to do at the time. And for bonus points, even if it seemed unintentional, it was Thanos who got into Star-Lord's head!
  • On Knowhere, Quill warns Drax not to act recklessly when fighting Thanos and stick to the plan — yet later on Titan he does exactly the same thing himself. Now, why does Drax want to kill Thanos? To avenge his loved ones, who died due to his actions. What made Peter attack the Mad Titan? Thanos killing his beloved!
  • Tony is the first to try to stop Quill from attacking Thanos when the Mad Titan admits that he killed Gamora. Probably because he knows what damage blind rage over a loved one's death can do: the fight he had with Steve back in Civil War.
    • More to the point, the way Tony tries to stop Quill. Tony is calm, but speaks quickly and clearly, and focuses on the mission at hand. Later, just before Peter Quill disintegrates and is feeling odd, Tony gently says, "Steady, Quill," even after Quill has screwed everything up. Back in Siberia, Steve Rogers didn't exactly handle Tony's breakdown in the best way. Tony is trying to do everything for Quill that Steve failed to do for him in Siberia (acting quickly, empathetically, and avoiding phrases that might make Quill feel even worse). It's not just his own mistakes Tony learns from, but other peoples' as well.
  • After finding out about Gamora's murder, why did Quill whack Thanos with his fists instead of using his gun to (try to) blast him into pieces like he did Ego after he found out about his mother's death? That's because back then, Quill had already made peace with his mother's death by the end of the first movie. What Quill felt was Tranquil Fury, hence he simply wanted Ego to be gone as fast as possible. With Gamora however, her death is fresh news to him, so what he feels is Unstoppable Rage, and he uses his fists as a means of catharsis. He wants Thanos to feel every blow and suffer for it.
  • More brilliance regarding Quill's unprecedented rage: Thanos used the same excuse as Ego did, which is sacrificing their (and Quill's) loved ones for their personal goal.
  • Star-Lord also displays Thanos's sense of balance through his morality. He wasn't too good at utilizing his Celestial powers when he used his brain. He only defeated Ego when Yondu told him to use his heart instead of his head. Thanos (indirectly) and the Russos contradict Yondu's ideals by having one of the main reasons the heroes lose be that Star-Lord acted without thinking.
• When Drax said that Thor is like a fusion of angel and pirate, it should be understandable that Quill gets pissed off. After all, Quill is a space pirate whose father was described as an "angel" by his mother.
  • Also regarding the "pirate" bit, Loki cut off his hand in an illusion, and he lost an eye to Hela.
  • Also still, Drax was kind of right. Put Odin and Frigga side-by-side, they could pass off for a pirate and an angel. It helps a) that Odin had some stolen relics in his vault (sounds kind of piratey), and b) Frigga's treated as Thor's birth mother in this continuity (as opposed to the mythology and comics where she's his step-mother).
• It takes mere moments for Quill to get extremely jealous of Thor and start acting out on it. Now imagine how Loki had to deal with that attitude for 1,500 years.
• When Thor explains that the Reality Stone was given to the Collector, Star-Lord replies that “only an idiot” would entrust such an artefact to him. Thor quickly counters that “a genius” would too. In Thor: Ragnarok, Thor found out that Loki had been impersonating Odin, and as such ordered that the Collector have the Aether. This is another reason Thor gets confrontational with Star-Lord: he indirectly insulted Loki.
• Of course Thor knows the Groot language. As a (then) future king of Asgard, he needs to know the languages spoken in all Nine Realms for the sake of diplomacy.
• Thor and the killing blow:
  • Why didn't Thor aim for Thanos's head for the final blow? Well, while he did get another eye, Thor quipped about how it didn't seem to work after installing it. Considering that he's only had it for less than a day by the time he tried to end the war, he could have still needed a while for his vision to get accustomed to it.
  • Another reason was that he's not used to using an axe. With Mjölnir, he always aimed for the chest, because that's the best way to knock someone off balance and he's not usually trying to cave someone's skull in instantly. The problem is Thanos can take an axe to the chest in ways most can't.
  • He also says something like "Told you I will kill you for that." referencing Heimdall's death. He's also trying to avenge Heimdall by trying to kill him the same way, stabbing in the chest.
    • The Russo brothers basically suggest it was something closer to this, which also makes Thor responsible for Thanos's success.
  • As much as using Stormbreaker on Thanos's head was preferable, this was the best time for Thor to hit him on the chest as a form of insult on Thanos's perception of love.
  • And of course, simple practicality. The chest is a higher and less movable target than the head, and aiming to it he can make sure that he will receive the full force of the attack. A shot to the head may be more lethal, if you manage to make it to the center. It would be easier for Thanos to simply move his head aside and avoid the full force of the attack. Thor may manage to land the attack on the shoulder or the neck, but it wouldn't be the same. Even in real life, the Boom, Headshot! trope is just an Acceptable Breaks from Reality, police and military personnel are trained to fire at the chest, not the head. It's not Thor's fault if he did not suspect that Thanos could No-Sell an attack like that, which would have instantly killed most other foes.
• In Gamora's past, we see the younger Gamora on the right side where half her people lived but as for Thanos, his left side was where the other half of the population are killed. This establishes Thanos as the Noble Demon with Gamora as the Morality Pet.
• Doctor Strange seems to be so antagonistic against Tony. Of course, he may have met him some time before but Tony was at his reckless playboy stage before Iron Man, which rubbed Strange the wrong way. Also, both of them remind the other of each other's past. Or present; they're still Insufferable Geniuses.
  • That likely explains why Strange didn't go to Stark to help him with his hand injuries—Stark could theoretically develop nanotech to heal Strange's hands, seeing as Tony's new suit is entirely nanotech, but Stephen believed Stark is just an arrogant jerk.
  • Pay close attention to Tony's behaviour the moment he meets up with Strange. While Strange, Bruce and Wong speak seriously of Thanos, Tony has a flippant, almost indifferent attitude. He shows a lack of respect towards his surroundings and “allows” people to disagree with him. It’s far from a good first impression. To add insult to injury, he immediately starts ordering people about when the Black Order descend on the city. To someone who's not used to him, Tony comes across as a spoiled brat.
• Why did Thanos execute the iconic finger-snap only after getting the Mind Stone, when he already got the rest of the stones already? Because the Mind Stone (as stated in Age of Ultron) is basically the supercomputer of the Stones. Its unlimited computing power is what made it possible to truly use the power of Infinity Stones on a universal level. Until that point, Thanos controlled the Stones with his mind, and did only things he could fathom with his mortal mind. But with what was basically an omnipotent A.I. to control the Stones for him? That is why it has the prominent place in the middle of the gauntlet.
  • This also proves how he can snap and get rid of half the universe while during the whole movie (even when he already had the Mind Stone) he closes his fist to activate the Stones. The Mind Stone allows him to be able to do things with a snap, not closing his fist.
• Doctor Strange and his plan:
  • Considering that Doctor Strange used the Eye of Agamotto to force Dormammu into Rage Quitting, why didn't he try using it once during the fight with Thanos on Titan, even moreso knowing that Thanos still had an incomplete Infinity Gauntlet? Remember what the Doctor said about there only being one possible timeline out of over 14 million possibilities in which they win — and he doesn't elaborate on what a "win" entails. Everything he did while on Titan, ranging from not telling his teammates about what to expect to not advising Star-Lord on not attacking Thanos or using the Time Stone at all in that fight and eventually handing it over to specifically ensure Iron Man's safety, was all part of the plan he had hoped to achieve in the long run; Thanos may succeed in wiping out half of existence in the short term, but Doctor Strange has reached chessmaster-levels of strategy that will hopefully allow the rest of the Avengers to win in the long run. He wouldn't risk a single deviation provided that he can control his actions, entrusting the rest to whoever survives the snap.
  • If Doctor Strange saw the one timeline where the Avengers won, why didn't he tell them how they did it? He probably tried, but it was in a timeline where they lost.
  • Of course, Strange himself noted that his plan worked against Dormammu because Dormammu has no concept of time, existing in a timeless universe as he does. Thanos, knowing what time is, can understand how you fix a time loop.
  • There's also Thanos' comment chastising Dr. Strange for not using the Time Stone, Strange's trump card, against him. However, Strange already used it beforehand to see through the future and find a timeline when the Avengers win. All that needed to be done after seeing that particular timeline is to ensure that it happens. So Thanos was wrong when he said to Strange "You never once used your greatest weapon". He'd actually used it over 14 million times!
  • Dr. Strange claims that there is only one scenario where they win. Strange must have seen many things. He must have known Peter Quill would ruin the initial plan, but had to take place in the fight while still being destroyed by the fingersnap, that Tony had to survive the fight and that he would survive the fingersnap either via Thanos' promise to spare Tony or the random chance of the fingersnap's victims, that many of the heroes were unnecessary to beat Thanos with a fully powered up gauntlet, that he couldn't tell the others what would happen, that he could showcase the Time Stone's power to Thanos, that he had to make Thanos promise to only spare Tony and no one else, etc. etc. It is hard to tell which factors he saw and which ones he determined were necessary to win, but based on Dr. Strange's last words, this all going All According to Plan with Unspoken Plan Guarantee being enforced.
  • Strange is also the only person who didn't try to stop Quill. He saw all of the 14 million plus futures where they threw everything at Thanos, and thus there's no way he couldn't have known that Quill would lash out at Thanos in a rage, at least in some of them. And on the extremely-off chance that Quill's rage would have ruined their single chance, Strange would've done the sensible thing: prevent Quill from doing it, either with normal magic or with the Time Stone (if necessary). But he didn't... because the result was the same either way: Thanos would keep control of the gauntlet, or get control of it back, anyways.
    • Plus, even without the Gauntlet, Thanos is a ten foot tall wall of muscle that curb stomped the Hulk in less than a minute. Thanos losing the Gauntlet probably would drive him into a rage that he was about to fail his mission, and it’s entirely possible that he could kill or injure enough of the Avengers on Titan to regain the Gauntlet. Especially if Tony died in these timelines, meaning Strange’s deal would no longer be possible. Strange letting Quill lose it potentially minimized casualties and long term damage to the timeline.
  • To summarize, Dr. Strange is basically letting the Avengers lose a (relatively) minor battle in order to win the universe's greatest war.
  • On a meta level, Benedict Cumberbatch was the only actor to know the plot of this film, having read the entire script. Doctor Strange is the only character to know all the possible outcomes of the war, having seen millions of possibilities using the Time Stone.
    • More fridge brilliance, on a meta level; Cumberbatch said that he convinced the Russos to let him read the entire script because "He wanted to understand the character's motivation in the story." Pre-release, it seemed like a smug, troll-ish justification, as that's a common reason actors give for wanting to read a whole script despite only playing a smaller part, and can't really be denied by the Russos; thus, it was assumed that he had basically conned the Russos into letting himself spoil the ending for himself. However, post-release, Cumberbatch is, both on- and off- screen, the only member of the cast to know the whole story, which WOULD help him understand the character's behaviour and motivation better.
    • Similarly, the joke that Cumberbatch is assigned to stop Tom Holland from spoilering things. Knowing the whole script (and therefore the finished two-parter story) certainly qualifies him to nip any secret-leaking in the bud.
  • If Dr. Strange knows that they have to give up the Time Stone to win, why didn't he do it right as Thanos shows up? For once, if they give up right away, Thanos might sense that something is off. Moreover, Strange is buying time for the heroes back at Earth so they can safely escort Vision to Wakanda and take out the Black Order, and for Thor to complete making Stormbreaker. Too early or too late, and the plan will fail.
    • Strange might also have known that, for the win to occur, the Avengers on Titan had to delay Thanos a specific amount of time, perhaps down to the nanosecond. It is repeatedly stated that Thanos' culling is completely random, and with the Infinity Gauntlet allowing him the power to apply that across the whole universe, who knows what variables affect the outcome? If Thanos had performed the snap at any other time or place, heroes necessary to eventually defeat him may have been slain. No matter how many victories Thanos attains today, Strange and the Eye are assuring he meets defeat next time.
    • More specifically, after watching next installments of Phase 3, the delay may have been necessary to ensure that Scott Lang would be in the Quantum Realm at the exact moment of Thanos's snap. Had he not been trapped there for five years that felt like five hours, he wouldn't have alerted the Avengers to its potential as a time-travel method and the events of Endgame couldn't have unfolded as they did.
    • On that same line of thought, it's possible that in some futures, all the heroes were slain, so Strange needed to recreate the exact future where the heroes needed to defeat Thanos would survive the snap.
    • In fact Endgame shows that Strange giving up the Time Stone willingly was crucial to the plan. The Ancient One refuses to give Banner the Time Stone until she learns that Strange willingly gave the stone to Thanos.
  • Another dose of meta: Strange's future-meditation is the answer to all the questions about this part of the movie. Why didn't Strange do this? Why did Strange allow that to happen? Obviously, those actions were part of the 14 million failures.
  • Doctor Strange makes it very clear to Tony early on that he will sacrifice Tony Stark's life to protect half the universe if need be. In the end, Strange surrenders the Time Stone to Thanos to spare Tony's life. The sudden shift in his view of Tony seems odd, but maybe not so much after viewing millions of possible futures, seeing only one in which Thanos loses. He most likely saw Tony fight to the bitter end millions of times, and grew to respect Iron Man and could not bear the sight of seeing him die for real.
    • Or it likely is the case where it is necessary to ensure that Stark survives into the next phase of the battle. A telling factor in this is that Stark took the fatal blow in the battle and by the end of the war, the entire Titan team save for Nebula had been removed from existence. This is likely no coincidence because outside of singling out Nebula because of her status as his daughter, Stark was likely supposed to have died or erased along with the rest of the Titan team. This meant that Strange's plan not only required him to give up the stone, but it also required Stark to survive into the next battle.
    • And Endgame resolves the contradiction: it's only by Stark's Heroic Sacrifice that Thanos's victory is ultimately averted. So Strange actually was sacrificing Tony's life as he'd promised to, just not yet.
    • Also in "Eternals" it is revealed that the Snap delayed Emergence of a Celestial, an evemt that kills the planet where it happens. Eternals seeing Avengers fight Thanos and bring back the snapped inspired some of them to decide to stop the event from happenninf and save the planet.
• In some light-hearted Fridge Humor, the 11th-Hour Ranger that Nick Fury summons to deal with Thanos is none other than Captain Marvel.
• When Quill lists off his own tragic past, it's not just him trying not to be upstaged by Thor; it's simultaneously a call-back to GotG Vol. 2 and foreshadowing of what happens during their battle with Thanos; given how recently he lost both Ego and Yondu, of course Quill is unable to resist his fear and anger over the fate of another loved one! Once he heard Ego confess to sticking a tumor in his mother's head, it only took him ten seconds to tear himself free of an all-consuming cosmic bliss-out and open fire with both guns. That time his hot-headedness saved the universe. This time? Well, one could guess that his freakout was integrated into Strange's Time Stone shenanigans, but at face value, he screwed everything up.
  • Doubles with Fridge Horror. Quill has lost a loved one — his mother, his adopted father, and his lover — in each movie he's appeared in. He was starting to care about his biological father as well, but had to kill him to save the universe.
• In Norse Mythology, rabbits and hares were associated with Freya, one of the most powerful goddesses whose spheres of control included magic, love, beauty, fertility, war, and death. To Thor, Rocket isn’t “vermin” or some freak of nature; he’s a noble and sacred creature worthy of respect.
• Retroactive Fridge Brilliance for the whole MCU. According to Thor, Thanos attacked Xandar a week before the events of Infinity War. What happened a week before IW? Thor: Ragnarok, when Odin dies, Thor loses his hammer, and Asgard's army gets wiped out by its renegade princess. Then Thanos descends to kick them while they're down. This could mean that Thanos didn't want to challenge Asgard when it was at its best.
• Thanos genuinely sympathizes with Tony as they are not so different. Thanos' visions saw that Tony desperately wanted to protect those he cares about which isn't as big a stretch to Thanos was doing with the Infinity Stones (both trying to save their home planet from ruin). And he also understands loss with Thanos losing his people and his adopted daughter and Tony losing his parents and the Avengers.
  • In fact, there is an indication that the visions Tony saw were subtly influenced by Thanos. Tony saw a vision were everyone he cared about and fought by were dead, and he was the only survivor as devastation came to his home world, leaving no one else to stop it but him. After this vision, everyone sees him as unreasonably obsessed with his vision of how to protect the Earth, with the words "mad scientist" being used. Thanos' backstory is that the overpopulation of his homeworld resulted in the death of all its people but him whose proposed idea to allow people to survive was decried as "mad". The vision Tony saw was essentially Thanos' backstory, translated to Tony's point of view!
  • Also, in this version Thanos doesn't love Death like in the comics, he fears it as he was forced to watch his people be slaughtered in a massive extinction event. What happened long ago forces him to wear a suit of armor and that is similar to Tony's predicament in Iron Man 3. However after getting several Infinity Stones, he took it off as he already has a suit of armor that will protect him from Death. Iron Man's Bleeding Edge is more than the culmination of Tony's progression, but it also parallels the Infinity Stones.
• Fridge Humor of the Stealth Pun variety: Groot completes Stormbreaker with wood from his own forearm. It's a handle!
• Death by Irony:
  • Ebony Maw — a pompous windbag with telekinesis powers and magic — dies because Spider-Man and Iron Man, two of the quippiest and most technological characters in the MCU, distracted him with words and got him sucked into deep space by simple physics, depriving him of air.
  • Corvus Glaive dies on his own glaive, at the hands of the being he spent the whole movie trying to kill, in the same way he tried to do to his target: surprise backstab through the heart.
  • Cull Obsidian, the big, tough brute, gets out-thought by someone weaker than him and dies slamming into a shield that's even tougher than he is. He lost his hand earlier, and dies by the hand he removed from the Hulkbuster armor, which "replaces" the lost one. He liked using his grappling hook to pull people around, and dies because something pulled him around. And he's The Big Guy of Thanos' Children, fighting who is normally The Big Guy of the Avengers, but owing to Thanos' smackdown of Hulk at the beginning of the film, Cull has to settle for Banner... and probably wishes he hadn't.
  • Proxima Midnight gets dispatched by one of the very machines she ordered out, by someone whose powers were created by the item she's fighting to get. She was also killed by the woman SHE spent the whole movie trying to kill, like Corvus Glaive.
  • Thanos left Thor for dead, and left Eitri psychologically defeated, and unable to work his own forge. Between them, Rocket, and Groot, they're able to make a weapon that nearly kills Thanos. Both Thor and Eitri were only motivated to do that by what he did to them, instead of killing them out of hand. He almost literally made a rod for his own back. Except it was his chest, and it was an axe.
  • Loki, a literal trickster god and master of manipulation, is done in when Thanos sees through his guise and uses his own word choice against him. Thanos himself even points out that this may not have been the best place to use the word “undying.”
  • Gamora said in the first Guardians movie that having lived her life surrounded by people who hated her, she would be honored to die in the company of friends. Here, Gamora learns that her adoptive father did indeed love her in the worst way possible. On top of that, she ends up Dying Alone on a distant world and not even the audience can hear her scream.
• There's a particular point where Thanos has effectively already won, when he gets the Reality Stone. Thanos is already massively powerful on his own, plus 2 Infinity Stones he pretty much starts the movie with, but it's still possible for the heroes to beat him. With the Reality Stone, he can rewrite reality to whatever he wants it to be, including undoing any potential defeats; the only limitation is he has to be actively maintaining that reality. Getting the Time Stone afterward just nails in the coffin further, because not only can Thanos undo any defeat short of instantly being killed, unlike with the Reality Stone, any changes he could make to the timeline would be permanent. Thanos was effectively just screwing around for fun after the point he gets the Reality Stone ^note The Soul Stone incident is an exception because he is visibly pained due to the sacrifice involved.
• After spending the last year or so as the mentor and father figure to Peter Parker, it makes sense that Tony Stark is thinking about having kids of his own with Pepper Potts.
• Thanos as the protagonist:
  • Thanos has been stated to be the main character of this film, so with that in mind our lead actually wins at the end of the film, while the antagonists end up losing, just like every other film in the MCU.
  • This point is further hammered home by the final shots before the credits; Thanos contentedly looking at the sunset from a humble house in a rural quiet countryside. A.K.A. a classic ending normally given to heroes straight out of The Hero's Journey type tales and Thanos is the one who gets it.
  • The ending tagline even states "Thanos Will Return." Granted, most of the characters we've been following so far who have previously returned can't (being dust and all), but it really reinforces that this installment was Thanos' story.
  • It also makes sense when you factor in a common criticism against the MCU for not developing their villain characters. The Avengers, the Guardians of the Galaxy, etc. barely get any development in this film because seeing all of the pre-Infinity War films is a guaranteed prerequisite to fully understanding their characters, whereas Thanos is the one character that is fully fleshed out here. Treat Infinity War as its own film, with Thanos as the main character and the others as antagonists, and you get your typical MCU film.
  • The brief moment where it seems the heroes have won despite everything. Thor has embedded Stormbreaker into Thanos's chest, and is heightening the pain by pushing the axe further in. Thanos then proceeds to snap anyway, mocking Thor for not killing him immediately. Thor made a villain mistake: he proceeded to gloat instead of finishing Thanos off. This is a common error that several MCU villains have made. One which has cost them their victory. And it applies to the heroes as well.
• Gamora and the Soul Stone:
  • Gamora found the Soul Stone but had not retrieved it. Why? Because she would never willingly sacrifice anyone she loved for it. Plus, it is ambiguous if she had anyone left who she loved at that point — Nebula would have been the only possibility.
  • Gamora says she had a map but we never see it. Why? Because she destroyed it and never went to the place it mentioned, which means there are no navigation logs. Literally, the only thing that could tell anyone where to go is her memory, and she makes Star-Lord promise to kill her, just like she did the map, without telling him why. Her fear of Thanos getting it outweighed her curiosity or greed to have the power for herself, and indeed, her own sense of self-preservation.
  • When Gamora swears to Thanos that she never found the Soul Stone, she may not even be lying. She found a map to the Stone, but never mentions following that map to its destination.
  • It's established that a seeker must sacrifice the person they love the most to retrieve the Soul Stone; this movie establishes that Thanos loved Gamora in his own messed up way. Was the sacrifice stronger because of Gamora's feelings for Thanos? This movie also establishes that she has some care for Thanos amidst her hatred for him; her sobbing after "killing" him might have been a combination of relief it was over and a sense of loss to her father figure; Thanos even lampshades it. One wonders if that moment between them contributed to the power of her sacrifice later.
• The whole movie really shows Thanos' inability to devise multiple solutions to problems and his Knight Templar status. He ignores several key failures to his plan.
  • 1. His plan ignores civilizations he's already culled and civilizations that aren't yet in need of culling due to being nowhere near the starvation point. He may have also driven species extinct that were sparsely populated due to previous disasters.
  • 2. He also ignores who he kills, making it indiscriminate so that it's "fair". He would have killed pilots/drivers/operators of heavy machinery of vehicles causing secondary deaths from the crashes, which we actually see in the post-credits scene, where a helicopter smashes into a skyscraper after its pilot is killed. Due to probability, there would be instances where he killed the pilots and copilots of, say, a jumbo jet, but none of the passengers, effectively dooming everyone on board. He could also end up killing too many of a civilization's food producing cultures like farmers, fishermen, herders, genetic engineers making GMOs, workers for packaging and supplying companies, etc., causing starvation anyways especially for isolated communities. Then caretakers for children, sick, and elderly could die, leaving the helpless without someone to keep them alive. It would also kill doctors during surgery and medical professionals who specialize in rare diseases, thus dooming their patients. Finally, he could have killed very powerful people or whole armies leaving civilizations with enormous power vacuums and a whole host of instability problems.
  • 3. The fingersnap also ignores the other consequences like the ensuing panic, riots, and war.
  • 4. The culling does nothing to address inequality, access to resources, classism, greed, or the many other causes of starvation (and honestly, doesn't increase the abundance of resources, either). Without someone enforcing equality or redistributing resources, people will starve, anyways. This is especially true since Thanos stepped down as emperor and if his own armies were also affected by the culling, disrupting their chain-of-command so nobody can restrain them from pillaging or even resuming their death-crusade.
  • 5. The culling wouldn't be a permanent fix. Given enough time, each civilization would become overpopulated again and starvation would again become a regular thing. Unless Thanos is immortal, he would need successors to cull the population again with the Infinity Stones and hope they didn't abuse their power. It also ignores the fact that each civilization would take a different amount of time to hit the starvation point.
  • 6. In the end, more than half the galaxies population would die unless Thanos could somehow predict the consequences of each and every individual disappearance and plan accordingly to make sure that ONLY half of everyone died. Since he promised to only kill half of survivors of any war he waged, this would make him a Hypocrite. Whether he decided that the additional deaths were somehow necessary or unavoidable, did plan out who he eliminated and how many he eliminated to ensure exactly 50% of each civilization died, showed preference to certain types of enforcers or producers, just ignored the problem, or many other scenarios ensures that he couldn't keep the promise that he made.
  • 7. Finally, he ignores the many other solutions available to him. The most obvious one is using resources from uninhabited areas like dead planets or nebulae to produce the food, materials, and other resources necessary to sustain each civilization as it is without causing problems associated with overpopulation. Heck, even if a planet couldn't sustain any more intelligent life due to some kind of pollution issues or something, he could simply have teleported portions of the civilization to another planet that can sustain life to ensure over-consumption doesn't become a problem either. While this solution has the same issue as the 5th point that this wouldn't be a permanent solution, he's no less likely to help as long as he has successors or immortality.
  • All in all, this really showcases just how out of touch and delusional Thanos is. Gamora sums it up after his brief Motive Rant (that he's no doubt told her many times) by screaming "You don't know that!" But he brushes it off, showing that in his mind anyone who disagrees with his plans simply doesn't know any better, is too weak to be willing to sacrifice what he is willing to sacrifice, to do what he is willing to do, etc. Thanos has truly deluded himself into believing he is the savior of the universe, and all the suffering he inflicts so casually is well worth it.
    • Hell, he has the Infinity Gauntlet. Thanos could have solved the resource shortage simply by making more resources with nothing more than a snap of his finger. If anything, his refusal to acknowledge any other course of action besides the one he's undertaking represents how, if he did do that, he'd have to acknowledge that all the slaughter he's done before getting the gauntlet would have been meaningless bloodshed.
    • Even so, he could've avoided the guilt of rendering the bloodshed he inflicted meaningless by also using the Infinity Gauntlet to restore the civilizations he culled over the years, which would have also given them the benefit of sharing the new plethora of resources that he created for the rest of the universe, resources they might not have originally had.
    • Alternatively, it's not a case of can't but a case of won't think of or use alternate solutions. Because that would deviate from the original plan he presented to his race. The plan that got him exiled marked as the Mad Titan. Despite Thanos's age, he still carries the scars of being the last of his great race. Thanos needs to save the Universe using his original plan as to him that would mean that their loss would have some meaning, some point. As well as to prove to those who rejected him, who shamed him, that he was right all along. Thanos needed to prove to the ghosts of his long dead people that he was right and they were wrong, and wiped out half the Universe to do it.
    • This makes even more sense when you realize that Thanos' original plan had been to rendezvous with the Black Order on Titan when their tasks of retrieving the Mind Stone and the Time Stone were complete. Had things gone according to plan and they all met up at Titan, Thanos would've completed his gauntlet on his home planet...whereupon he would've most likely performed his Badass Fingersnap as the ultimate way of proving he was right to his people.
  • Thanos' not considering other alternatives is also a subtle Mythology Gag. He's obsessed with Death in the comics, so he's obsessed with it in the film.
• Of course Stan Lee wouldn't find a giant alien spaceship weird, he's an informant for an ancient alien race!
  • Alternately, remember his cameo in The Avengers (2012)? He was in New York when the Chitauri attacked, so he has seen spaceships over the city before.
• At first glance, it seems odd that the Guardians are unaware of such a momentous event as Thanos' attack on Xandar to claim the Power Stone, when it happened a week before the events of the movie. But it makes perfect sense given their location: Thanos attacked the Statesman very close to Asgard (only 22 jumps away to be precise) and the Guardians answered the distress call quickly enough to find Thor still alive, meaning they were also relatively close to Asgard. Thor: Ragnarok established that it takes 18 months of travel by conventional FTL to get from Xandar to Asgard, so the Guardians were too far away for news to have reached them yet.
• The Bleeding Edge armor appears to have been extensively adapted for melee combat, allowing Tony to fight even Thanos — a man who straight beat up Hulk — on equal footing for a short time. And this makes sense, since Tony's last armor was beaten up by Cap in fisticuffs. Tony always learns from his mistakes and compensates for any weaknesses. Now, he can take on a guy who outclasses Hulk without the Hulkbuster.
  • The armor also seems to be made of the same nano tech that the new Black Panther suit is made from, which makes sense when you consider that T'Challa opened up Wakandan science and technology exchanges with the rest of the world. Of course, Stark Industries would be one of the first companies in line to work with Wakanda, especially since Tony knows T'Challa personally.
  • Tony managed to hold off Cap by changing his fighting style. And the Bleeding Edge armor is nearly infinitely adaptable.
  • Speaking of learning from mistakes, the Bleeding Edge armor is markedly superior to Black Panther/Golden Jaguar suit. When stabbed, the wearer of the Golden Jaguar suit bled to death. When put in the same situation, Tony was able to use the suit's own nanobots to stop himself from bleeding. He didn't just learn from his own mistake, but from Shuri's as well.
• Quill tells Tony he's not from "Earth", he's from Missouri. It's likely that, in space, he's gotten so used to hearing it called "Terra" that he didn't realize Stark had said the right thing for a second.
  • Another possibility is that Quill is covertly testing Tony. After all, his line only sounds silly to Tony and the audience because we already know Missouri is on Earth; most aliens, on the other hand, would not.
• The movie's Central Theme revolves around sacrifice. The biggest conflict that the characters face in the film, and what ultimately costs them, is their hesitation to make all too painful sacrifices to achieve their goal until it's too late: the Avengers refuse to sacrifice Vision in order to destroy the Mind Stone, saying that "we don't exchange lives" and preferring to safely extract it. What do they get? A lot of dead Wakandans trying to hold the line so they could perform the surgery and Wanda having to desperately destroy Vision when there is no other way, with Thanos and the Time Stone making everything else for naught. On the other hand, Thanos willingly pays the all-too painful price to achieve the next step of his plan, many times in the film other characters allow their attachment to those they hold most dear to stay their hand at stopping the next step in the plans of Thanos. With that said, the one hero that is willing to sacrifice in name of his goal is Dr. Strange, since he willingly hands over the Time Stone to defeat him. The result? He gets killed alongside half the universe! What greater personal sacrifice can you make other than killing yourself in the name of your plan? This is why he will eventually win, even if its beyond the grave.
  • Doctor Strange is the character who is willing to sacrifice from start to finish. He makes it very clear to Tony early on that he will sacrifice Tony Stark's life to protect half the universe if need be. After using the stone to see the one time line where they succeed, he gives up the Time Stone, trading half the universe (at least temporarily) to save Tony's life. Iron Man must be REALLY important to the eventual defeat of Thanos.
    • In the movie as a whole, three non-Thanos characters sacrifice (or attempt to sacrifice) the few for the sake of the many, and in each case (had the sacrifice gone as planned) Thanos would not have been able to do the snap. 1. Quill shooting Gamora (which takes the Soul Stone out of his reach), Wanda killing Vision (which removes the Mind Stone, and 3. Strange sacrificing half the universe in the short run to save everyone in the long run. In the first two cases, the sacrifice goes wrong, and in Wanda and Visions case, if the sacrifice hadn't been postponed, who knows if Thanos would have ever gotten the mind stone?
  • A big part of what makes Doctor Strange one of the heroes that can equally match Thanos is his resolve to bend the rules in order to achieve victory. A line says in their first meeting is "you will find our will equal to yours". At first it seems like a boast. But as the fight ends and the plan seems to unravel, you realize that Strange meant it literally from the opposite side of Thanos' perspective. He is willing to gamble with half of the universe as an ante in order to defeat Thanos and like Thanos, his many visions of the future have led him to a single path. In executing his plan, he not only has the will to oppose Thanos as an equal, but is also willing to make the same sacrifice to achieve victory.
• By the end of the film, Tony, Steve, Thor, Natasha, Bruce, and Hawkeye (presumably) are still alive. The original six.
  • The fact that the original Avengers are all still standing, combined with the fact that we know that this movie is part one of a two-film story arc, we’ve got a glimmer of hope by way of a Call-Back to Tony Stark’s famous line to Loki: Thanos came, and he was too much for our heroes (not to mention the audience). But the fight isn’t over yet. They couldn’t protect the earth, but we can be damn well sure they’ll avenge it.
  • And why did the original six Avengers just happen to survive the snap? Dr. Strange arranged it that way. He saw 14 million possible futures, and the heroes only win in one. Presumably, a lot of details need to go exactly right to ensure this future comes true. Although the snap was "random," Strange must have found some way to Butterfly Effect it to ensure that the six people needed to take down Thanos randomly survived.
    • Leads to some Fridge Horror if you're of the opinion that Dr. Strange didn't tamper with who gets dusted. How many timelines happened where everything up to and including the snap went the exact same way as this version, but the wrong people got dusted? If Strange didn't tamper with the snap, there's definitely some timelines where, if you take into account future installments of Phase 3, Scott got dusted in the Quantum Realm and wouldn't realize the time travel possibilities. Universes where either Hank, Hope, or Janet were spared and brought Scott back so that they never realized it was a time machine. Universes where Tony got snapped so he can't solve the time travel issues. Hell, we could fill a whole Fridge Logic page on ways the plan could have failed based on the people who ended up dusted.
• Though seemingly debunked, the T.H.A.N.O.S. theory can still be used with the the Soul Stone being associated with the following words starting with H to complete "Thanos".
  • "Hidden", since its location is a complete secret that only Gamora knows.
  • "Heart", as the only way to unlock it requires sacrificing something the person loves.
  • "Hydra", due to Red Skull guarding its location.
  • "Hurling your daughter off a cliff", as some snarky memes have said.
  • H is the Head (Vision's). S is for Sacrifice.
  • Additionally, for the purposes of the acronym, the Eye of Agamotto was referred to as a "necklace," which was always fairly awkward since it was never called that or even loosely mentioned as such in Doctor Strange. Here, though, it's actually used! Granted, it is Tony Stark who called it that, so we still have yet to see a "serious" use of the term, but who cares?
    • Most likely, it was too subtle for most to notice. As in, they didn't say it in the movie, but a quick google search reveals that Vormir is the sixth planet in the "Helgentar" system.
    • Additionally, take a look at the planet the stone is kept on. It appears to be a mostly level surface, except the spot where the stone is. The actual location is at a great height.
• What changed to make Thanos, previously content to let flunkies like Loki and Ronan do the legwork, launch an all-out assault on the keepers of the Infinity Stones? Nebula. She was captured and interrogated, and from her, Thanos learned that Gamora knows the Soul Stone's location. For the first time, he has solid leads on all six stones, enabling him to rapidly go after them in a short space of time rather than give one or two of the Stonekeepers a chance to move or hide their stones beyond Thanos' reach.
  • As mentioned with Xandar, on a similar note, Thanos probably had his flunkies do the legwork instead of launching all-out assaults so as not to attract the attention of and be killed by Odin.
• There are two counters to the idea that Thanos could simply create more resources to solve his problem, both having to do with his personality:
  • 1. The Reality Gem as shown in the movie only seems to change the state of already existing matter, and does not create or destroy matter. Thus, it seems that there is a trade-off where the original state of the affected matter must be given up to change into Thanos' vision. Since Thanos believes that resources are ultimately finite, he naturally believes that usable matter is finite, and therefore thinks that increasing resources can only go so far.
    • Headscratcher spinning off of this: if he believes/understands matter is finite, it seems unlikely he wouldn't understand the idea of matter cycling through different forms. Even if there is limited resources, so long as a set of matter is put aside as a resource, it could be molded by the gauntlet forever into whatever the wielder needs. As an example, if you have one meal to feed someone, as soon as that meal... *passes*, the gauntlet could easily turn the remains back into edible food again.
  • 2. A simpler explanation is that the Infinity Stones do the bidding of whoever wields them. Since Thanos sincerely believes that resources are finite, he could only create a world in which his assumptions are true and his actions are justified. Even if he was wrong initially, he could alter the universe into one where he was right.
• While most Big Bads in MCU movies have a tendency to be Evil Counterparts to their respective protagonists, Thanos doesn't really look like one. However, it turns out of all heroes he fights, he has more in common with Tony Stark as they are both visionaries that want what is best for their civilizations and pursue unorthodox methods to achieve it. How fitting is that Thanos would be an Evil Counterpart to the original hero that started the franchise? This would also explain why Thanos specifically praised Tony for his spirit and sincerely expressed hope that the people of Earth would remember him. That's what Thanos wants for himself as well.
  • To further add onto this, Thanos could also be said to be an Evil Counterpart to Steve Rogers, in the sense that both were born with deformities and have similar drives to do what is best for their civilizations. With that in mind, it's very interesting how Thanos addresses Tony and shows him respect, whereas he never addresses Steve at all, instead treating him as a mere obstacle to his goal.
• The end of the movie for Tony and Steve is pretty interesting: On Titan, Tony is near catatonic, and in shock, after watching Peter die. He was reliving his worst fear, where his friends were gone but he was still around, billions of miles from home. Alone. Tony, the futurist, realized no matter how much he dreaded it or ran from it, “destiny still arrived.”
  • Steve's reaction in Wakanda is a bit more interesting — he had just seen Bucky, and everyone else, turn to ash. Amid the chaos, he stumbled across Vision’s mutilated corpse, and it sunk in just how badly they lost. Perhaps in Infinity War, Cap finally saw what Tony had seen six years ago inside that wormhole. He finally realized what Tony meant in Age of Ultron: That the Avengers could spend all day busting Hydra and other arms dealers, but they were not ready for the end game. Thanos was the end game and he wiped the floor with them.
  • Steve previously said that they would face the end together and, if need be, they’d lose together, too. Except, in Wakanda, they didn’t really lose together — they, meaning the OG Avengers, just lost everyone else while they were allowed to live. That was literally the manifestation of Tony’s worst fear and Steve finally saw it. It's significant they ended the Wakanda scene with Cap sinking to the ground, horrified, and saying, “Oh God…” Because that’s what Tony had said all along and finally, finally they were both on the same page.
  • The Avengers franchise had always been predicated upon Cap and Tony’s clash of ideals and their mutual willingness to do the right thing. They differed in their ideals because of their experiences — Tony, the futurist, saw ten steps in advance. Cap, a man from the past, was more of a “we’ll cross that bridge when we get there” kind of a guy. He preferred focusing on the here and now while Tony was more of an end game guy. But after Infinity War, the end game is here and now, so they’ve finally arrived on the same page.
• We see two of the Infinity Stones (Space and Time) summoned out of thin air, but this makes sense. Both summoners (Loki and Dr. Strange) are adepts at magic, so they can just cast some magic to hide it. Moreover, the Tesseract can simply be teleported away to a hidden location (if not a pocket dimension) until Loki calls it back, while the Time Stone can simply be sent through time to the future, just to the right moment when Strange needs it.
• In the comics, Gamora is considered "the deadliest woman in the whole galaxy" for her martial arts skills. The MCU version arguably also qualifies, for a different reason; she knows the location of the only Infinity Stone Thanos hasn't located, which he needs to complete his plan of killing half the sentient life in the whole galaxy.
• Rhodey managed to trick Bruce Banner into bowing before T'Challa, who tells him "we don't do that here"... even though the flashback at the start of Black Panther showed that even N'Jobu was expected to kneel before T'Chaka, his own brother. Now that T'Challa is king, this is presumably one of a dozen changes he was making in the process of opening up Wakanda to the world.
• Thor getting a cybernetic eye is criticized for undoing Thor's Character Development from his last movie, but with consideration it's the exact opposite. Thor's arc was about learning from and not repeating the mistakes of his father Odin, which was to either cover up mistakes or cast it out. Odin also had an eye put out, and in myth this was a sacrifice gain divine wisdom... which was likely the positive political spin he put on an injury that would have essentially ended his career as a warrior, since without binocular vision he'd have difficulty judging distances or aiming properly with Asgardian energy weapons, crippling his ability to fight. He 'covered it up' with a golden eye-patch, and 'cast out' the downsides of this by putting out the story losing his eye made him wiser. Thor, an experienced and active warrior who understands subtle details like how Mjölnir needs to be perfectly balanced or else you lose power on the swings, knows that having only one eye when he's soon to come to the fight of his life is a dangerous liability, and opts to fix it at the soonest opportunity rather than to brave it out. While becoming a one-eyed king visually makes him like his father, getting a sensible prosthesis that restores his ability when he really needs it makes him a different king from Odin.
  • Although the lighting makes it difficult to tell, Thor's new eye appears to be green or grey in color. In other words, Loki's primary color scheme.
  • In Norse mythology Odin lost his eye to gain wisdom. Thor gaining a prosthetic eye while pragmatic can symbolize his foolishness later.
• Obvious in hindsight, but Steve's damaged costume is actually very specifically handled. All of the immediate symbols of Captain America (the "A" helmet, the star, shoulder emblems, and abdomen stripes) are removed or obscured somehow; in addition, the bracers of his gloves that used to contain the electromagnetic tethers for his shield are removed, because with no shield they're just dead weight.
• Peter Parker's death is so heartbreaking because of how much it hits on a meta level. Spider-Man is Marvel's flagship hero. He's been in film since 2002 and in animated TV shows before then. He's just been introduced into the MCU in a movie that was praised as the best of its kind, with an actor that made audiences fall in love with the character again. He's been riding a rocket to the big leagues in-universe and out. Hell, in this movie he went toe-to-toe with friggin' Thanos. By killing him, Marvel is effectively communicating that Plot Armor is a thing of the past, and that all bets are truly off from here on in.
  • It also hits even harder for those who know about the deal Marvel made with Sony to even get Peter in the MCU in the first place — with his death, all the effort and negotiations that went into said deal feel wasted. It's unlikely that it is, of course, but it sure feels that way.
• Why doesn't Rocket get offended whenever Thor refers to him as "Rabbit" like he did when others called him "vermin" and "rodent"? Because the words themselves (which he might not even understand; he doesn't know what a raccoon is, after all) don't trigger him, it's the way they're used. It's being condescended to that sets him off, not the exact words, and while "rabbit" may confuse him, Thor is never anything but polite, respectful, and positive in their exchanges.
• The film poster has 22 heroes in total (Black Panther, Black Widow, Captain America, Doctor Strange, Drax, Gamora, Groot, Hulk, Iron Man, Mantis, Nebula, Okoye, Rocket Raccoon, Scarlet Witch, Shuri, Spider-Man, Star-Lord, Thor, Vision, War Machine, Winter Soldier, and Wong). Thanos' plan is to kill half the universe. By the end of the movie, half of the characters in the list are dead.
• For the past few years, Marvel films have typically had two stingers, with the exception of Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 with five. Avengers: Infinity War only has one stinger, at the very end. Thanos halved the number of stingers for this film—perfectly balanced, as all things should be. And continuing the comparison to the Guardians films, all but one are gone now.
  • Even more, multiple Stingers started with the first Avengers, the culmination of Phase One and the start of a whole new era for Marvel films (and arguably, filmmaking in general). Infinity War goes back to one Stinger, signifying another new era.
• As someone with the moniker of "Mad Titan", it's fitting that Thanos started his conquest by giving up the Mind Stone to the God of Mischief, symbolizing him losing his mind. Similarly, the last stone he gets is the same Mind Stone he gave up in the first place. After the snap, he expresses deep regret in that it cost him everything, realizing only too late how big the cost of his conquest is. In other words, he regains his mind.
• When Thanos informs Tony that "You are not the only one with the curse of knowledge", Tony replies "My only curse is you." Tony Stark, who identifies himself as a genius first and foremost, has changed the world and saved many lives with his intelligence and inventions as himself and Iron Man. Even though being the only Avenger who had any idea of the looming threat Thanos posed, Tony would never see his intelligence as a curse. If anything, Tony's intelligence has created the means for him to take action to stop Thanos and (hopefully in the sequel) avenge the Universe.
  • There's actually another interpretation to this. There are two reasons Tony's knowledge began: the attack on New York (commanded by Thanos) and the sceptre (given to Loki by Thanos) - effectively, Thanos is the reason why Tony is "cursed with knowledge". Of course then, by that logic, Tony would go mad, since Thanos really is his only curse.
  • Tony has also seen visions of Thanos and his allies dead before him since Age of Ultron, although he didn't know his name then. This "curse" of Thanos' image is what ultimately drove Tony to do the things he did (the creation of Ultron, support of the Sokovia Accords) in an attempt to possibly prepare for The Mad Titan.
  • This is what separates Tony from Thanos. Thanos is hopeless; he sees his knowledge as a curse because he believes that, despite his knowledge, there is nothing that can be done to save the universe besides his horrible plan. Tony responds that, no, he does not see his knowledge as a curse, because he has hope that, with his knowledge, the universe can be saved.
  • This exchange was very likely also alluding, at least in part, to the "knowledge" Tony gained about his parents' deaths two years prior. (Watch Tony's face just after Thanos says, "You're not the only one cursed with knowledge.") Despite his violent breakdown in Siberia, Tony afterwards made no effort to track down Bucky, and instead put everything into helping others, like Rhodey and Peter Parker. Whether Tony is trying to move forward from the trauma in a healthy manner, or simply trying to bury it, "My only curse is you" affirms his determination not to dwell on Bucky.
• It was no coincidence that Heimdall sent Hulk to the Sanctum Sanctorum. Thor probably told Heimdall of a wizard on Earth who had made a fool out of Loki. Or Heimdall was keeping tabs on Odin during his exile and realized this Earth magician was keeping Odin off the radar. Or Heimdall was just familiar with the Masters of the Mystic Arts. This is the kind of power Heimdall would be familiar with; if a message needed to be sent by the Hulk that Thanos was coming, Doctor Strange was the person who needed to hear it first.
  • It's no coincidence that he chose Hulk to send there, either. Thor wasn't an option because he'd been practically bolted down to the floor by the Maw's levitating girders, and if Heimdall had managed to send Loki there, nobody would have believed him about the threat: he's not only a proven trickster who lies as easily as he breathes, but he'd be a wanted war criminal on Earth!
• "Now is no time to mourn, child. 'Now' is no time at all." Thanos calls Wanda "child"... and makes a dad joke.
• As pointed out by Moviebob in this video, the movies up to now have conditioned us to accept that Evil Will Fail so long as the good guys experience Character Development, make the right calls and/or learn lessons from their mistakes. But then Thanos comes along and proceeds to beat the heroes each and every time regardless of what choices they make because he's just that capable, despite being the bad guy, and the movie hits all the harder for it.
• Remember when the Avengers had to close a portal powered by the Tesseract? They used Loki's Scepter because as Dr. Selvig puts it, "You can't defend against yourself." Then, it's revealed that both have Infinity Stones (Space and Mind). It then makes sense that only Wanda has the ability to destroy the Mind Stone because her powers contained the same energy. Going even further, Wanda could possibly destroy all Infinity Stones.
• Dark Fridge Brilliance/Fridge Black Humor — a 100% Celestial sought to and made a good try to wipe out 100% of the universe. His half-Celestial son is complicit in wiping out half the universe. Simple math.
• Rocket being the only Guardian to survive makes strangely sense. Assuming that "half of the universe" means "half of every species", Rocket presents the whole of his species, being a unique experiment, and the stone can hardly wipe out half of him. This begs the question though if Quill counted as human or celestial.
  • Due to the implication that the celestial side of Peter died when Ego's core was destroyed, it's more accurate to say he's human now than he was before, thus him being wiped out with the unlucky half of humanity.
  • If this implication is true, it's possible that Eitri did survive after all due to being the Last of His Kind.
  • And it suggests that either there are other Groots out there somewhere, or that Stormbreaker's handle can grow a new one.
  • Rocket being the only Guardian to survive makes for a more poignant finale to his character arc as well. The two GOTG movies have set him up as a character who behaves like a jerk in a way to test the limits or the loyalty of his friends, as a result of his trauma and fear of being left behind. And being left behind as the only Guardian still alive (lest you count Nebula) is exactly what happens in this film, a perfect set-up to mark the culmination in Avengers: Endgame of Rocket's character development.
• How did Hela know that the gauntlet in Odin's vault was a fake if she'd been gone for millennia and Eitri just made one for Thanos? 300 dwarves showed up in her domain talking about how they were murdered by Thanos to make a gauntlet for the Infinity Stones!
• Thor once muses during a conversation with Rocket that Thanos is only one of many who tried to kill him, and Thor is only alive because fate wills it so. As such, Thor is one of the surviving heroes after Thanos' universal culling. If going by the original Norse, Thor only meets his death together with Jörmungandr in a Mutual Kill. Therefore, it would seem that Thor really has Plot Armor because fate has decreed that only the World Serpent would be able to kill him.
  • Fridge Horror: what is the shape of one of Thanos' Q ships. A circle. What is the shape of the World Serpent? A circle
• This is a very technical entry as it requires a bit of research. Nonetheless, it also contains some heavy fridge horror. Much ado has been made over "why didn't Thanos just make more resources for everyone" and there's more of an answer than "because there wouldn't be a movie". If you look up the experiments by John B. Calhoun on mice and rat population, we've been able to scale the results of his experiments and reach numerous conclusions regarding population sizes in proportion to resource availability. However, there's an important aspect to consider, which is the difference between total population and population density. In his experiments, Calhoun had enough food and living space for all the rodents, but they would group together in dense social groups. He noted that twelve rats is the maximum number that can live harmoniously in a natural group, beyond which stress and psychological effects function as group break-up forces. It was a different number in mice, but the principle still applies. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against. Why didn't Thanos just make more food-producing industries? Because "hunger" is just the simplest explanation he could offer in a movie with a time constraint. The more technical reasoning is there were too many people living in densely populated areas, being forcibly over-socialized, leading to societal deterioration. Aggressive men fighting for no reason, mutilating random people, and possibly cannibalizing the young even when food was available. It's not as simple as creating more living space for people, because social creatures are naturally inclined to live together which naturally leads to population density overfill. What horrors did Thanos witness in his youth to conclude that a galactic culling was the most positive outcome? Probably more than he'll ever talk about.
  • To further add to the Fridge Horror, considering that he is said to have been born and considered a "freak" on Titan, who knows if many, if not all of those aforementioned horrors were directed at Thanos himself?
• Wiping out half of the population of the galaxy caused Thanos to wipe out half of his forces.
• With the final episodes of the fifth season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. occurring at the same time as Infinity War, with the event where Talbot destroys Earth happening before Thanos arrives to Wakanda, it could be possible this event could be one of the many losses Strange saw in the 14,000,605 different timelines.
• Despite the fact that this is the Darkest Hour, the MCU's signature humor isn't abandoned till the final act. This creates Mood Whiplash, but this is likely deliberate. Keeping the humor puts the audiences' guard down, makes the audience think it's just like any other MCU film. It's like a false reassurance that everything'll be okay.
• Loki dies exactly like◊ his mother Frigga, whom he takes after in many respects. Both stand up for someone else (Jane, Thor), both briefly use illusions (to conceal Jane, to hide a dagger), both attempt to take on a much stronger foe (Kurse, Thanos) with a short sword/dagger, both have their quick attack repulsed, and both are Defiant to the End: their last words are "I'll never tell you" / "You will never be a god." Bonus points for Odin and Thor (father and son, both the King of Asgard) grieving over their lifeless bodies in the same fashion moments after their death. There's a poetic and very tragic symmetry in that Loki, his mother's son, and Thor, his father's son, share the same fate as their parents—as part of his redemption arc, Loki both embraces and emulates Frigga's heroism at the cost of his life, and his murder leaves his brother Thor as bitter and violent as Odin was after his wife's death.
• A bit of brilliance that shows just how much Dr. Strange and Tony Stark are alike in demeanor. The Cloak of Levitation, which took a shine to Dr. Strange previously, immediately approaches and befriends Tony while its former owner is in Maw's clutches. It even starts imitating Tony's movements and takes Tony's "side" when he starts arguing with Peter.
• 'Rubberband Man' by the Spinners plays when the Guardians first appear. What sound does a rubber band make? *snap*
• Again, Wanda's big demonstration of her powers is tearing through a ton of metal on a battlefield. Due to the tangled rights issues, they cannot state it directly, but it's a good enough Shout-Out to her being Magneto's daughter.
• Even though Tony and Steve don't interact in this movie, Tony still clashes with a hero of blue and red. In a small Call-Back to The Avengers, they clash over how to deal with an alien threat and discuss ideas of sacrifice like Tony and Steve do.
• Tony tends to upgrade his suits in ways that fix the flaws of the previous suit. Peter had trouble learning the functions of his old costume, so Tony made the Iron Spider a lot more "intuitive".
• Tony's wish to start a family with Pepper was probably partially egged on by his interactions with Parker in Spider-Man: Homecoming helping give him the faith to believe he can be a good, responsible father. This makes his inability to save Peter all the more heartbreaking.
• Even though he receives a brand new prosthetic, Bucky never seems to fight directly with it, instead relying on a rifle to attack the outriders. A new arm with a different weight, shape, and flexibility would take time and practice to get used to, especially for direct combat. Neither of those was available with the army about to bear down on them.
• Bleeding Edge armor's name is fitting in a darkly ironic way - since Thanos breaks off a blade (i.e. edge) from it and stabs Tony with it (who begins bleeding and coughing up blood). That edge was really bleeding.
• Fate, or destiny, is considered to be the highest power in Norse (i.e. Asgardian) religion, so Thanos proclaiming himself to be the embodiment of Destiny would be considered a Blasphemous Boast to the Asgardians. In context, Loki's last words serve to defy Thanos' hubris; You'll never be a god.
• Loki and Heimdall can be considered the two final casualties of Ragnarok, and, while they don't kill each other, their fallen bodies lie close together as their battleground goes up in flames, similar to their fates in the original Norse mythology.
• Shuri quickly coming up with what would have been a better method of incorporating the Mind Gem to Vision's android body makes perfect sense when you consider that when Bruce and Tony did that, they were working around the clock with Ultron's threat looming over them. They didn't have time to polish the design beyond the first workable solution.
• Thor arrived too late to stop Thanos from getting the Mind Stone. However, keep in mind that when Steve Rogers radioed the Avengers to come to him to fend off Thanos, Thor was the only one who didn't have a communicator since he'd been off world! He literally Missed the Call!
• Why give Bruce the Hulkbuster armor to pilot? A few reasons. One, he helped design the Hulkbuster with Tony (As it was stated in Avengers: Age of Ultron) so he'd be the next person after Tony to be familiar with it. Also, it's to give him some character development in as he started to enjoy using the armor to fight, he may fully accept the Hulk.
  • Notice that unlike Tony, Bruce never uses most of the armor's arsenal, such as its repulsor beams or rapid punching arm. Rather, he uses mostly brute force until the point he finishes Cull Obsidian with a rocket arm, which ties to the point below.
  • It could also be a gambit to make the Hulk jealous of Bruce using someone else's power than his own, forcing the two to accept each other.
  • Yet another: Bruce knows nothing about combat. He's never needed to; just pointed the Hulk at baddies. Wearing the Hulkbuster armour is the only thing for him to do.
• Eitri is unable to properly complete the handle of Thor's axe, Stormbreaker, as Thor can only hold the iris open to heat the forge for so long. In Norse Mythology, Mjolnir's handle was also somewhat flawed because Eitri was unable to sustain the heat of the forge long enough to complete it.
• As Thanos gains each Infinity Stone, he begins to lose some kind of outside protection he once received. It’s symbolic of his growing personal power and his decreased reliance on outside aid. He is, in a way, undergoing an apotheosis of sorts.
  • After gaining the Space Stone, he sheds his armor. He no longer needs to rely on a suit to protect him from his enemies.
  • After gaining the Reality Stone, Ebony Maw is killed thanks to the cleverness of Peter Parker. Thanos loses his most powerful lieutenant, but to quote Maw himself, his powers were “quaint” compared to what the Reality Stone offers.
  • He lost the only person he truly loved, Gamora, to gain the Soul Stone.
  • He gained the Time Stone without any outside assistance, save the stones he currently had. Yes, he lost the rest of the Black Order and the bulk of his Outrider contingent on Earth, but what use was it now? He could control time.
  • After completing the Infinity Gauntlet, he probably lost everything he had. Half of his armies would have been decimated, the universe in disarray, and he has nobody to turn to. That’s the price he paid for completing his mission.
• It was established before this movie that Gamora was Thanos's favorite among his adopted children. In this movie, we learn that the only person Gamora ever told the truth about her mission to find the Soul Stone is Nebula (which is how Thanos found out). If these two facts are put together, then Nebula's attempts to kill Gamora take on a different light if a third fact is also true: Did Nebula know about the sacrifice necessary to acquire the Soul Stone? If so, then she could have guessed that Gamora was the only way Thanos could get it, and was trying to prevent him from getting it.
• After killing Loki, Thanos snarks "No resurrections this time." This reference to the fact that Loki has appeared to die twice before in the franchise seems like it only works on the meta level. But then again, after Loki's Disney Villain Death in Thor, he came back in The Avengers working for Thanos. What if he actually did die in Thor and Thanos—perhaps using the Mind Stone—actually resurrected him?
• In the illusion Thanos creates of himself speaking to the Collector, he says the Collector would sell his own brother for a trinket. An unusual choice of words, as the expression is usually that you would sell your own mother. Thanos is probably saying "brother" instead because he doesn't know if the Collector has a mother, but probably does know of the existence of the Collector's brother, the Grandmaster.
• Captain America shouldn't be anywhere near strong enough to be able to grapple with Thanos the way he did. However, he was touching the gauntlet with his bare skin at the time, and the first Guardians of the Galaxy film established several people can tap into the Infinity Gems at the same time. It could very well be possible that people can do this also while trying to use the gems towards opposing effects. Cap might have been unconsciously tapping into the gems with his Heroic Willpower, and that is what allowed him to stop Thanos, if only for a moment.
• How did Thanos get to the Collector ahead of the Guardians? He simply used the newly-acquired Space Stone to get there instantly.
  • If this is possible then how come he did not simply teleport Gamora and himself to the ruins where the Soul stone was on Vormir instead of walking? It's because he did not trust her. The planet is being torn apart by some cosmic forces and it would only take her giving him some bad directions for them to end up being killed on arrival. By going on foot he can keep an eye on where she is leading him. Also while Gamora saw the map, it's been years. Something about the terrain could have changed or she may be mistaken about some things, which would make trying to jump to the exact spot from memory a risky venture.
• Who had a stone, and how they die:
  • The NOVA Corps had the Power stone. As we saw in Guardians of the Galaxy, they defend more than attack. They were simply overpowered.
  • Loki had the Space stone. While he died from Thanos figuring out his trick, if he was closer Thanos would be dead. He could've judged space better.
  • Red Skull guarded the Soul stone, even though it belonged to the planet. He died as a result of Captain America deciding to be honorable and save Bucky.
  • Dr. Strange had the Time stone. He's supposedly letting himself die so he'd affect the future. He also died in his own movie creating a time loop.
  • Vision had the Mind stone. Even though it would've been really hard, the smart thing to do would be to just kill him. The guy with the supercomputer in his head didn't do the smart thing.
    • Loki also had it at one time. He could've thought of a smarter plan.
  • Even though he doesn't actually die, Thanos came close when he had every stone. He could've stopped it (he had enough warning to do some kind of magic), but he didn't, despite having just gotten the Mind stone.
  • Although a very tongue-in-cheek Stealth Pun and is more credit-able to the comics, it's kind of ironic that the INFINITY stones are what bring half of all life in the universe to an end.
• One that goes all the way back to Iron Man: As we slowly learn through Iron Man 2, Captain America: The First Avenger, and The Avengers (2012), the Arc Reactor is based on studies of the Tesseract, which contains the Space Stone. All that research that led to HYDRA's disintegration guns, Tony's arc reactor and Iron Man armor, SHIELD's weapons and so on was based not just on an Infinity Stone, but on the thing built to contain it. The new element from Iron Man 2 being "what the Tesseract is made of" doesn't mean it's the same structure as the Space Stone, but of the material made to house its awesome power.
• There may be something about Drax's culture gap that made him believe standing still would make him invisible. In Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, there's a point when, during Groot dancing around the fight, Drax lands right behind Groot. Groot stands perfectly still, while Drax just stares, then joins the battle again. Maybe Drax can't see anything that's standing completely still.
• Gamora and Peter Parker:
  • They both die lying on their backs while their father figures are watching and later mourn for them. But unlike Thanos who watches Gamora's death from distance, Peter dies in Tony's arms.
  • Also, both of them were almost shot by Star Lord. In Gamora's case, Thanos is impressed and even forces Quill to do it (but of course bubble effect). On the other hand when Quill threats to kill Peter, Tony looks like he going to lose it and threats to kill Drax if Peter gets hurt.
• Loki's attempt at assassinating Thanos with just a knife maybe seems out-of-character for him (especially after Hulk's defeat) but notice where was Loki trying to stab Thanos - the head. What if Loki knew that for him there is no hope to survive this situation because he already disappointed Thanos a few years ago in New York? Maybe the only reason for the assassination attempt was to send a secret message to Thor - to go for the head.
  • Furthermore, Gamora breaks down and absolutely believes that she killed Thanos by stabbing him in the neck on Knowwhere, and as his daughter who grew up with him for years, she would know whether something like that could really kill him or not. Loki's assassination attempt wasn't as foredoomed to fail as it initially seemed and if it wasn't for Thanos using the Space Stone to stop his arm, he might as well have succeeded.
• The three people to whom Thanos explains his motivations – Gamora, Dr Strange and Stark – all cold-bloodedly brush him off. While they don’t believe in genocide being a worthy goal, they also have their personal issues to project in the matter:
  • Gamora was raised by Thanos, who slaughtered half her race. There’s a mix of affection and hatred in that relationship, so while she's against genocide on priciple she's also trying to hurt him with her condescension.
  • Dr Strange has the least personal bias against Thanos, but he’s encountered someone as extremist and moved by loss as him before in the form of Kaecilius. Kaecilius was moved to save the world by annihilating it, which is similar to Thanos’s belief. When he sarcastically congratulates Thanos on his foretelling the future, his rationale is that people die everyday, and no heroism can stop it, and that people should just move on.
  • Iron Man calls Thanos his curse. It was because of Thanos’s actions that Tony built Ultron and set up the Accords, the consequences of which broke up the Avengers.
• Wanda's reaction to the news that Tony Stark has disappeared with the alien spacecraft. This isn't just a concerned comrade. Wanda has personally, literally, seen Tony's deepest fear, and deliberately increased it back when she was living the life she now regrets so much. Wanda knows exactly why Tony was in that space craft, and probably blames herself for "sending" him up there.
• Of the New Avengers Rhodey is the only one still alive with the original members. It’s actually quite fitting as his character has been around since the original Iron Man and he’s been superheroing since Iron Man 2, a movie that is firmly part of Phase 1. The other New Avengers were all introduced at one point or another during Phase 2. So while not one of the original Avengers, Rhodey’s been there since the beginning.
  • Also tying into this: Carol Danvers's story takes place in the '90s. So all of the "original" Avengers (the one who existed before the Battle of New York) are the only ones left.
• During the battle on Titan, Quill flips Thanos off before jumping into Dr. Strange's portal. The Space Stone, which Thanos uses to open portals, is located on the gauntlet's middle finger.
  • On the Just Eat Gilligan page On This Very Wiki they discuss the idea of Doctor Strange doing what Wong did to Cull Obsidian and opening and closing a portal around Thanos's hand with the Gauntlet on it as that took of Obsidian's hand. Word of God explained that Thanos's skin is too tough for that to work and we see throughout the movie how true that is as aside from Stormbreaker, a cutting weapon designed to pierce skin, absolutely nothing pierces Thanos's skin. Even Tony throwing everything he had in his most powerful suit just led to one drop of blood, Strange probably recognized that it wasn't worth trying.
• Steve and Tony never meet in the film since they still have a barrier set up between them from Captain America: Civil War. While Steve left the cell phone with him back then, offering to build a bridge, Tony never used it. Apparently he hasn't heeded T'Challa's speech from the end of Black Panther (2018) and the universe pays the price:
  In times of crisis, the wise build bridges while the foolish build barriers.
• Thanos mentions that he never taught his children to lie, implying it was so they couldn't keep secrets from him. In Guardians of the Galazy Vol 2, Quill makes fun of Nebula for being a bad liar; this is likely why.
• A slightly meta example: When looking at them in their own movies, Tony and Strange are similar, arguably the same, characters. When it came to putting them in scenes together, the writers made their outlooks on the situation different... outlooks that actually come from their disciplines/jobs; Tony, as an engineer, uses his understanding of science to manipulate it, and "break the rules" (when he knows it would be worth it, or is certain it would work) to his advantage and stretch the boundaries of the laws of physics, thus why he's insistent on using all available resources to beat Thanos, and to think outside the box in order to catch Thanos off guard. Strange, on the other hand, is a doctor. In his (previous) line of work, trying to push the boundaries of science could and likely would get people killed. Thus, Strange insists on abiding by his codes and oaths, knowing that even if it seems strategic to break the rules, the consequences of doing so could be more dangerous than the original outcome. And, just like in real life (as anyone who has been in a room full of doctors or engineers can attest), their bickering comes from the fact that both have solid reasoning behind their beliefs, and both think they are the Smartest Man In The Room, who needs to explain to the other dumbass why they are wrong.
• When Quill mentions meeting Thor, he describes him as being "not that good-looking," clearly still stinging from his crew dissing him in favor of Thor. Parker gives him a look that's a mix between confused and offended. However, as far as Parker knows via pictures/video, Thor still has his trademark golden locks and binocular vision, whereas Quill's only seen him in rather worse shape with short hair and missing his eye.
• There are several parallels in the film that paint Thanos in the same light as a god or a higher power, sometimes similar to the Christian God:
  • In the beginning of the film, Loki tells Thanos that the latter will never be a god, and this is after Thanos declares himself to be destiny personified. In many religions, only a god can control fate and destiny, and if they don't, they submit to the power of those who do; controlling destiny either makes one a god or gives him/her power over gods.
  • Thanos collects six stones, erases half of all life in the universe, and then rests, just as God spent six days creating the universe and rested on the seventh.
  • Immediately after the snap, during Thanos' vision with a young Gamora, he appears to be walking on water, just as Jesus did in the Bible to prove His divinity.
  • The final words of the film, when the heroes (Steve Rogers specifically) realize that Thanos has completed his mission: "Oh, god."
• Although maybe not planned by Thanos, the order in which he retrieves the Stones makes getting every subsequent one a little easier:
  • The Power Stone gives Thanos the edge he needs to fight Thor, the other Asgardians, and the Hulk.
  • Every other stone except the first two are rather spread out, so especially if Thanos is spreading his forces out to cover more ground, the ability to teleport using the Space Stone is super helpful. (Unlike all the other stones, this is almost 100% guaranteed to have been planned by Thanos beforehand, considering how much more frequently than the others he uses the Space Stone.)
  • The Reality Stone makes surprise attacks possible, despite Thanos being a large being that leaves carnage in his wake seemingly by pure nature at times. It also helps to protect him as he encounters more strategic and logical foes who use the laws of reality as they understand them to be in order to fight most effectively. Finally, Gamora knows that Thanos is collecting the stones, so she also knows he will start with the least fortified stones, which ends up placing her in Knowhere to be captured by Thanos and lead him to the Soul Stone.
  • The Soul Stone requires a sacrifice, which steels Thanos on, and keeps him from getting cold feet at the half-way point. The person he sacrificed to get it also, arguably, is the reason Thanos was able to overcome the Avengers on Titan. Finally, the Soul Stone shakes Doctor Strange's astral form free, a distraction which helps Thanos turn the tide on Stephen in their battle.
  • Lastly, and most obviously, Thanos couldn't have revived Vision without the Time Stone.
• Dr Strange takes a somewhat nonchalant but accepting outlook on his death. While this is partly due to his Thanatos Gambit that he's set up so that the heroes can win in the long term, he other reason is that in his own film, he died an infinite number of times against Dormammu, and remembers each one of them. So naturally, one more temporary death isn't gonna faze him.
• It seems rather convenient that not only the heroes fail to stop Thanos, but the snap spared the original Avengers. However, recall what Kevin Feige said about the Time Stone itself in Doctor Strange (2016). He said that the Time Stone can not only manipulate time, but also probabilities. Of course things played out the way it was. Of course Quill would accidentally hit Mantis' hand, undoing her mind control. Of course the heroes came short of pulling the gauntlet off completely. Of course the original Avengers and, as we see in "Ant-Man and the Wasp", Ant-Man were spared. And of course in that same movie the Pyms got dusted before they could pull Scott Lang out of the Quantum Realm. Doctor Strange manipulated all the chances of that happening with the Time Stone before he gave it to Thanos.
• Thor reasons that he isn't dead and that he will kill Thanos because fate has willed it but Rocket bringing up the possibility of Thor being wrong isn't just a heart to heart, but foreshadows that Thor will not be able to kill Thanos. Because Thanos has the Infinity Gauntlet, he effectively controls fate, meaning fate won't go as intended, making Thor killing Thanos much less likely.
• Fridge Awesome/Heartwarming. During Thanos and Doctor Strange's conversation on Titan, Thanos tells the Master of the Mystic Arts that "the hardest choices require the strongest wills", referring to the Decimation and, more recently, his murder of Gamora, his own adopted daughter. Strange replies, "I think you'll find our will equal to yours". While this at first seems to be Strange telling Thanos that he and the other Avengers & Guardians will give Thanos everything they've got, the reveal that Strange knew the events of Infinity War were the "only way" puts this in a whole new light. Doctor Strange was also willing to let trillions, including himself, die in order to win the Endgame - Strange's will is of the exact same strength, and type, as Thanos's, and he knows it. This makes his Pre-Asskicking One-Liner less of a boast and more of an in-joke that Strange is having with himself.
• From a Meta standpoint, Thanos' victory was inevitable. Most movies involving a superweapon have a scene where the hero (and audience by extension) witnesses a test of that weapon and sees the consequences of failing to stop it. However, the Infinity Gauntlet is so powerful that a test would be the same as actually using it. So the consequences of failing to stop it had to be shown by the heroes failing to stop it.
• Thanos and the Black Order parallel Tony Stark and the Avengers a lot between this movie and its sequel:
  • Captain America and Iron Man are obvious parallels to Thanos. Thanos is someone who is extremely stubborn and morally unshakeable, and who was initially disbelieved because of his outlandish ideas (similar to how Steve being in the war was something America laughed at). He is also a futurist who sets out to save the world following a near-fatal event, but is often called a madman because of how his ideas often have terrible consequences (see: Ultron).
  • Thor is a foil to Corvus Glaive. Both of them are No-Nonsense Nemeses compared to the rest of the Avengers and Black Order, who have some comedic moments. However, when they get the chance to get revenge on their foe by killing them (Thanos for Thor, Vision for Corvus) they stop to gloat about how their opponent is less powerful than they thought, which proves to be their undoing.
  Corvus: I thought you were formidable, machine. But you'll die, just like any other man.
  Thor: I told you, you'd die for that.
  • Black Widow is a foil to Ebony Maw. Both are powerful when provoked, but their first and foremost techniques are to use their words to manipulate their opponents. In addition, Ebony Maw abandons his friend on earth and is killed without any backup from him, while Black Widow sacrifices herself for her friends and ends up saving the universe.
  • Hulk is a clear foil to Cull Obsidian. Both are extremely powerful and the Big Guy of their group. However, whereas Banner has intelligence and is eventually forced to use this rather than his strength to fight, Cull Obsidian is never forced out of his comfort zone and is eventually killed by Banner when the two are put in a fight.
  • Finally, Hawkeye is a foil to Proxima Midnight. Both are the "normal guy" of their team, and both have a family that they try to take care for. Both also end up watching their family die in their arms - however, Hawkeye is forced to live with this experience for five years, while Proxima dies soon after.
• Black Panther's film parallels Thanos somewhat and essentially foreshadows Thanos' victory:
  • After years of isolation, Wakanda opens up to the world against years of tradition; Thanos, after years of looming in darkness, finally emerges likewise but with different intentions.
  • Where Wakanda intended to improve earth with its resources, Thanos sought to halve the consumers of said resources to achieve the same goal.
  • Much opposition welcomed the prospect of opening Wakanda to the world and not one year after finaly doing so, Wakanda was where the dreaded snap took place.
  • King T'Challa failed to stop the enemy in his kingdom at the climax like how Thor, another king who'd just lost a father, failed likewise at the films start.
  • If Iron Man's Bleeding Edge armor is indeed Wakandan and therefore, Vibranium based, Thanos tearing it apart foreshadowed that Wakanda's greatest recourse was powerless against him.
• The heroes' loss at the end is probably as crushing to the heroes as it is to the viewers, especially if the viewers don't know about future MCU movies because the viewers are lead to believe the heroes would win because Strange knows the only one way out of over 14 million possibilities that they will defeat Thanos, thinking that means the heroes will defeat Thanos in the movie but by the end of the movie, viewers will be thinking, "what the hell, I thought the heroes were supposed to win"/"I thought Strange knew the one way they would win", which is also because viewers are lead to believe that every MCU movie will end with the heroes winning.
• Thanos taunts that Thor should have aimed for the head, but the only reason Thor struck Thanos' chest was because he was countering Thanos' energy beam. It may seem strange at first, but it follows the idea of fate and how fate is just an endless number of possibilities you have no control over. If Thor acted fast enough, he could have thrown Stormbreaker at Thanos' head, or if Thor was more willing to risk his life, he would have just aimed at Thanos' head and taken the energy beam, but because the situation occurred so fast, Thor couldn't consider a better course of action. Moreover, because Thor happened to strike Thanos in the chest and not kill him, that gave Thor an opportunity to let his guard down and torture Thanos instead of ending him immediately. Thor would have stopped Thanos immediately if fate was more fortunate, and that's where another piece of brilliance lays. By that point, Thanos has successfully collected every infinity stone and mounted them into the gauntlet, effectively allowing him control over his own fate.
• It's rather fitting that Thanos compares himself to the very concept of destiny. He doesn't win because he planned out everything and manipulated everyone, but because things played out the right way for him. The Avengers are separated on their own accord, and his potential competitions such as Hela or Ego were killed off by the heroes, or in Odin's case, died of old age. Thanos won because destiny was on his side.
• Why does Thanos turn Quill's gun and Gamora's dagger into bubbles besides sick dark humor? Because he's turning their actions into thought bubbles by erasing the tool they would perform the action with. With the Reality Stone, he's turning their desired actions into mere thought and impulse. Bubbles are also analogous to dreams. He's turning their desired actions into mere dreams. With the Reality Stone, he can make his imagination into reality and turn other people's reality into their imagination.
• When Ebony Maw hands Thanos the Tesseract, his closing statement on how Thanos now has two Infinity Stones is that "the universe in his (Thanos) grasp". Thanos crushes the Tesseract to obtain the Space Stone inside. This foreshadows not just the reality of Snap's consequences (the indirect deaths afterwards while leaving the universe in tatters), but also, in "Endgame", his plan to destroy and rebuild the universe.
• Why does Loki turn a very unpleasant purple upon death? Because he’s no longer alive, the spells concealing his Frost Giant nature have no reason to work.
• Drax's question, "Why is Gamora?" while seeming to be nothing more than another of his cultural gaffs, ultimately turns out to be a valid, even crucial one. As the only being Thanos truly loves, she turns out to be his only path to obtaining the Soul Stone.
• With the Infinity Gauntlet (and the Nano-Gauntlet in Endgame), the middle finger and thumb are the fingers which are physically used to make a fingersnap which activates the Infinity Stones' combined power, and those two fingers are where the Space and Time Stones are respectively positioned. When the user snaps their fingers, they literally have control over space and time, as the classic sci-fi line about Galactic Conquerors goes.
• Rhodey's first interaction with Sam, Wanda and Vision when he's reunited with them has a lot of subtle details going on.
  • The tension in the background of this scene is palpable. The minute that Rhodey switches his focus to the others, Steve and Natasha move to greet him. However, the three in the background immediately turn their attention to one another, looking for a distraction. The excuse of Sam and Wanda to check on Vision’s injuries is an easy one, and one that doesn’t bring much question, but when literally nothing has changed from a few seconds previous, and all three of them turn at the first sign of having to interact, it strikes as awkward. None of them look up again until Rhodey specifically addresses them, and their reactions then are even more telling.
    • Vision is not even looking up at Rhodey for most of the scene despite the fact that there is a conversation going on, and who is refusing to meet his eye. After all, Vision was responsible for Rhodey’s paralysis, and probably hasn’t spoken more than a sentence to the man since it happened almost two years ago, despite living in the same building. Rhodey still clearly doesn't trust and hasn't forgiven Vision, and Vision knows damn well why. Rhodey doesn’t even acknowledge that Vision is there. He just talks directly to Wanda and Sam. Vision starts a tentative smile, but as soon as he realizes that he’s being excluded from the conversation, his expression falls and he hangs his head. He’s not truly welcome here, and he knows it.
    • On the other end of the spectrum, you have Wanda. Wanda also has not seen Rhodey in two years, but whose last interaction with him was him stunning her in the back with a sonic cannon while she was just barely holding fifteen tons of rubble over Steve and Bucky’s heads. Fifteen tons of very carefully balanced concrete and rebar that Rhodey intentionally made her drop, almost spilling Steve and Bucky’s blood on her hands. She doesn’t quite know how to feel about the man who nearly made her responsible for the deaths of two of her teammates in a near-repeat of what happened to her at Lagos, so she avoids interacting with Rhodey. She specifically looks away when Rhodey begins talking with Steve and Natasha. She doesn’t respond when he talks to her and Sam. Her expression is troubled, and she redirects her focus back to Vision the second she has an excuse to. Rhodey doesn’t even get a smile out of her.
    • And lastly, there’s Sam. Sam, who probably gets a flashback of Riley’s death every time he looks at Rhodey. Sam sees a friend suffering because he believes that he has failed to protect them. Again. He is so desperate to talk to Rhodey, to make sure he’s really okay, but can’t quite get past the fear that Rhodey blames him for the paralysis. Blames him for dodging Vision's laser blast instead of simply taking the hit himself, despite the consequences. Sam returns Rhodey’s smile, and answers his comment with light banter. He’s trying so desperately to interact, but is afraid that he will not be welcomed. Sam wants to fix things, but he’s terrified that he’s just going to be shut out.
• If one thinks very closely, the one thing that stopped any of the heroes from winning against Thanos was love or sentiment.
  • Loki gives up the Space Stone so Thor won't lose his head from the Power Stone.
  • Wanda refuses to kill Vision by destroying the Mind Stone, and all of her allies also try their best to keep Vision alive.
  • Quill doesn't try killing Gamora before Thanos gets his hands on her (she might've lived, but maybe Thanos would be shocked that Quill actually did it and not used the Reality Stone)
  • Thanos tortures Nebula to coerce Gamora into giving up the Soul Stone's location.
  • Quill beats the crap out of Thanos after finding out that he killed Gamora, ruining the Titan team's efforts to get the Gauntlet off of Thanos.
  • Lastly, Thor wastes time by slowly burying Stormbreaker into Thanos's chest so he would feel pain instead of just shoving it straight through him, or withdrawing it and cutting off Thanos's head or Gauntlet hand.
• While the Infinity Gauntlet being an Adaptational Wimp is likely a narrative necessity to make it seem as though the Avengers have a fighting chance against Thanos, there is also a potential in-universe reason too - when Eitri was creating the Gauntlet for Thanos, it's not out of the question that he secretly built intentional flaws in its design (like how its wielder needs to close their fist to use it) so that anyone fighting Thanos with a completed Gauntlet wouldn't be automatically doomed to fail like in the comics.
• In a Deleted Scene Tony and Pepper are speaking about their wedding and a suggested date is August 27th, the same wedding date that Robert Downey Jr. had in real life.
• The first time that Strange attempts to use the Time Stone he is stopped by Ebony Maw, this was prefaced by Tony telling him that he might not want to use it as a way of keeping it away from the bad guys, and him saying maybe he should use it. After he regains consciousness aboard Maw's ship, he never uses it in a fighting matter as mentioned by Thanos, meaning that he took Tony's advice to heart.
• The Ancient One telling Strange in his movie about how she can't see past her own death helps contribute to the astronomical odds of them losing as there plenty of realities where Strange would have never been brought back and as such it is obvious that he wouldn't even see it, all of them would have just consisted of him dying, which is Fridge Horror that he saw himself die so many times.
• Of the seven heroes who battle Thanos on Titan, five are dusted after he snaps his fingers, leaving Stark and Nebula completely alone on the planet. Is it simple rotten luck that this group, already reeling from Thanos having escaped them, lose well over half their members in his culling? Perhaps not: perhaps these seven people are the only living things in the entire universe whose fate was decided by Thanos rather than left to random chance. Thanos came very close to losing when Mantis put him to sleep and was furious after awakening; though he calmed down through winning his one-on-one duels with Strange and Stark, the frustration of that fight is probably still fresh in his mind, far more so than the Curb-Stomp Battle he'd just delivered to the many heroes waiting for him in Wakanda. And so, still angry at the opponents he faced on Titan, he eliminates all of them — all but Stark, whom he promised Strange he would spare, and Nebula, whose reasons for being spared we learn near the beginning of Endgame: for one thing, despite how cruelly he treats her throughout this film, he is fond of her in his own twisted way, as he admits in his dying breath. For another, as Nebula explains before setting off with the Avengers to find Thanos in his garden, he used to tell her at length about his hopes for his "grateful universe"; Thanos probably wants her, the person who knows more about his hopes and dreams than anyone else, to see what happens.
• Why does T'Challa have twin mini shields made for Steve rather than a shield more similar to his previous shield? Because he's accounting for Steve having to fight without the vibranium shield for two years and being more used to fighting with both his hands at the current moment as such. Case in point, when Steve fights with both shields, he fairs quite well. T'Challa also had those types of shields made too because those shields would be better for offense, which would be better for an all out fight.

Fridge Horror

• Loki dies without knowing for certain that Thor was not going to be killed next. Furthermore (assuming Loki is Killed Off for Real) there is no indication that Jötnar share an afterlife with Asgardians. Loki could very well be separated from his Asgardian family even in death or at least die believing this (though his line "the sun will shine on us again" could also be read to indicate "see you in another life"). Notably there is no scene where Thor prays for his brother's soul to enter Valhalla as with Odin in the last film...
  • Maybe Thor's praying happened when he rested his head on Loki's body as the ship was exploding, which slightly mitigates the horror.
• The planet Xandar was attacked by Thanos a week before the movie begins, and in addition to taking the Power Stone he kills half the population. We have no idea just who on Xandar from the first Guardians of the Galaxy movie survived.
  • Even worse, Xandar was the original destination of the survival ship from Asgard. The entire population would have met Thanos, or, a war-ravaged Xandar.
• T'Challa ordering that his city be evacuated may just have been a precaution, but could also be seen an indication that he believes he has little hope of winning the battle his army is about to fight to keep Thanos' forces out. All the more meaningful given Wakanda is famous for having never been conquered.
• The setup for this film with the last few MCU films is chilling: each film saw the heroes suffer tragedy and losses and wind up weaker than they had been before.
  • The Avengers broke apart in Civil War;
  • Wakanda was weakened from the infighting that Erik Killmonger made happen and lost a lot of people, especially members of the Border Tribe;
  • Asgard was destroyed, first by Hela and then by Surtur, and even prior to that it lost Odin Allfather;
  • The Inner Sanctum lost its Sorcerer Supreme as well as several other wizards (even though Strange is good, he doesn't have the centuries of experience that the Ancient One had)...
  • Basically, the heroes were in a more precarious position than they had ever been, and in that state they stood almost no chance against Thanos. One has to wonder if Thanos timed it that way; did he wait until everyone was weak, and then exploit their weakness and vulnerability by choosing right then to attack?
• Rocket tempted some serious fate, and fate bit him in the ass. After Thor's finished telling him about how everyone he loved has died and he therefore has nothing to lose, Rocket nervously mentions that he still has a few things he'd rather not. By the end of the movie, Rocket is the only one of the Guardians still alive.
• Somewhere between Brilliance and Horror; of course the Guardians (aside from Rocket and Nebula) were subject to a near Total Party Kill by Thanos. The Avengers knocking back the invasion? Well, that's a small inconvenience, but it's business. The Guardians managed to piss him off on a personal level by recruiting both of his favorite "daughters" and killing one of his better flunkies. Add the fact they topped it by nuking an entire sentient planet (Ego), Peter being half-Celestial, and Mantis's crazy level of power. They had too much potential to throw a Spanner in the Works. Thanos's thought process would probably consider killing all of Gamora's friends so they can all be Together in Death to be a happy outcome. Why was Rocket "spared?" Well, Rocket said it himself; he hasn't got a long lifespan anyway. And what good is it if you can't leave someone alive, but broken, to tell the tale of your victory? Sparing Nebula? She was The Unfavorite "daughter" to begin with. Leaving her alive to suffer and know the extent of her failure to either live up to Thanos's expectations and/or stop him is Cruel Mercy indeed.
• There's been a few interpretations of Wanda and her expression while vanishing that she's not entirely upset with dying since, on top of everything she's been through, she'll be Together in Death with Vision. If so, this also applies to the other most important loved one she’s lost at the hands of the enemy: her brother Pietro.
• Think about what a lot of those people might have been doing when they were disintegrated — driving, flying planes, operating heavy machinery, etc. Sure, Thanos's fingersnap wiped out half the population, but how many people were killed in the aftermath?!
  • Just to drive the point home: there are around 9,700 planes in the sky at any given time. Even if only 5% of them should crash, that's still 485 planes, and some of them are guaranteed to crash on populated areas. Especially since, unlike in your run-of-the-mill air crash movie, half the air-traffic controllers and airport ground crews are dust, too....
    • We even SEE this during the post-credit scene as Maria Hill and Nick Fury witness a car suddenly veering off the road as its driver disappears and a helicopter smashing into a building. Even if our heroes reverse the snap, potentially millions will have died from these accidents.
    • Forget planes; what are the highways going to look like? Considering the carnage that can arise from a single vehicle going out of control in busy high-speed traffic. Then imagine half the vehicles on the road doing that simultaneously. No way is emergency services equipped to deal with a disaster like that, even if they haven't just lost half their people too.
  • How many people who were nuclear power plant operators were killed?
  • How many babies and toddlers — heck, even pets, the severely mentally disabled, and the very elderly — were left alone in their homes, crying for caregivers who will never come, out of earshot of any survivors who could rescue and care for them? Not to mention the diseases spread by the resulting cadavers...
    • This also applies over a longer time period. Half of the population disappearing means too few people to keep infrastructure intact and all necessary services like education, healthcare, food production and others. While there will be less people to feed and care about, it will take quite a lot of time until the society reorganizes into something functioning again, and there will be casualties until then. Societal disruption at its peak.
  • Let's just hope that the defenders of the Sanctums weren't among the casualties, or the survivors of Thanos' massacre might have to contend with another problem named Dormammu.
    • Except they won't. The entire planet will be cracked long before that.
  • Cracked has an article on how fucked Earth is.
    1. Randomly killing half the population likely means that medical care is screwed; huge percentages of the modern world need daily medical care that our existing civilization can provide on the cheap, but will be in short supply due to lack of warm bodies to process and provide it. Unless Thanos specifically targeted unhealthy populations in the Snap, they're all going to die anyway.
    2. The entire modern world runs on gasoline (fsck you very much for not commercializing arc reactor technology, Stark), and if there are too few people to maintain the supply chain, it's all going to become even more useless than expired milk in about a month.
    3. Food, food, food! Modern civilization has eliminated most forms of micronutrient deficiency via huge supply chains keeping all those marvelous supermarkets full of fresh produce. If the trucks stop bringing oranges from Florida and California, then New York and Chicago are going to get a good, close look at what scurvy actually looks like. Everywhere on Earth is going to look like a third world country. Hell, one of Cap's laundry list of health problems pre-Serum was an absolute motherfucker called "pernicious anaemia", which until the 20s was basically a death sentence. It’s a condition where an enzyme necessary to absorb vitamin B12 is not produced and the patient becomes progressively more anaemic until they suffer complications such as neurological damage or simply die (hence the word “pernicious”). Modern nutritional supplements have rendered this a nonissue, but until 1928 the only treatment was to drink copious quantities of the juice from liver (more than a pint a day) or eat half a pound of liver a day. Raw. Steve was born in 1918, so he had to choke that down til' he was ten, and will now see a world where such conditions are again a leading cause of death.
    4. Nuke plants were mentioned, but don't forget the gas lines; when one goes due to lack of maintenance, it looks like a Michael Bay film. Gas stations will go dry quickly, but every industrial site is a chemical time bomb. LOADS of stuff can explode if it's not maintained or disposed of properly. Even grain silos can turn into mushroom clouds if not properly looked after.
    • All in all, Earth's population could be halved again by the aftermath of Thanos' bullshit. Maybe several times. Now extrapolate these processes across the universe.
    • And as some budding Demographers (population scientists) have pointed out, Thanos' plan isn't how population control actually works! on a small scale it might actually work, but on a Universal scale? the population of the universe will use more resources trying to build back up.
• The Snap also wiped out half of every living thing, not just humans and what would be considered "sapient" that means half of all the animals (though plants at least were spared), what will that do to the ecosystems of the universe? How many species are now extinct due to Thanos?
• At least the idea of 50% the population being killed is fiction, right? The Black Death is estimated to have killed up to 60% of Europe's population! The western world has already experienced a crisis worse than Thanos' snap! (albeit over a period of years rather than all at once).
• Joe Russo has said that Valkyrie will return in Avengers 4, but that raises some questions. What happened during Thanos' invasion of the Asgardian ship that made her out of commission throughout the whole movie? And on that matter, whatever happened to Miek and Korg? It's clear that Valkyrie survived Thanos destroying the ship, due to her being Asgardian, but it's very possible that Miek, Korg, or both of them perished either through the destruction of the ship or the culling of half of all life in the universe.
  • And let's not think about how Valkyrie will be affected with the culling of half of all life.
  • Poor Valkyrie: for centuries, she’s been drowning her sorrows to distance herself from her former life on Asgard. Her Character Arc in Ragnarok was all about her overcoming the pain of her past and reclaiming her Asgardian heritage to fight for her people. Now, the majority of them are gone. The last she saw of her king and friend, he had come face to face with the most feared man in the universe. She was tasked with getting the remaining refugees to safety, and now she has to protect whoever remains.
    • After Hela’s reign of terror, the slaughter of half the refugees by the Black Order, and finally the culling of half the universe, just how many Asgardians are still alive? If another cataclysm befalls the Asgardians, it’s highly unlikely that they as a people will survive.
  • On the subject of the culling, what happened to Hawkeye and Ant-Man? It's likely that they both survived, due to them being noticeably absent in the movie, only getting mentioned with the fact that they're under house arrest, and that Ant Man has a movie reportedly coming out before Infinity War, but that raises more horror, since we don't know the fates of their families. Whatever will happen, it'll probably result in both or one of them being very, very pissed.
  • "In Ant-Man and the Wasp", Scott survived the culling but Hope, Hank, and Janet were not so lucky; Scott is now trapped in the Quantum Realm for god knows how long.
    • The most recent trailer for Avengers: Endgame confirms Hawkeye's alive... and running around on his own as Ronin. Given his haggard, haunted expression, it's really not looking good for his family.
• Most of the heroes who got snapped seemed to know their end was coming, but Spider-Man's death becomes all the more harrowing when factoring in his Spider-Sense. When Peter says he doesn't feel good, that might be from his Spider-Sense screaming that he was in danger, but without any way to avert that danger, compounding the dread he was already feeling before he fades away.
• Thanos said he wanted to wipe out half of all life in the universe, in order to maintain balance and prevent starvation and overcrowding. If the half of life includes plants and animals, he won't meet his goal, he'll actually make things as bad or worse than before.
  • Even if they aren't directly disintegrated, since no plants were shown to vanish, massive amounts of domesticated animals will die with no one to care for them, crops will rot in the fields with no one to pick them or go unplanted altogether ...
  • Confirmed by Kevin Feige that animals were also affected by Thanos's fingersnap. We know from "Ant-Man and the Wasp" that [[spoier: the giant ant at Lang's house is okay]], but this could essentially negatively affect the ecosystem if the food chain gets affected somehow.
  • It doubles as a case of Fridge Brilliance. To fail to notice the half of life includes plants and animals isn't out of character for someone who fails to notice the Infinity Stones' power can be used to multiply food and everything else needed for subsistence so his idea of killing people to save others won't be necessary.
    • That's assuming the Infinity Stones CAN do that in the first place. Since we are never shown the stones conjuring something from absolutely nothing, there's the possibility that they can't. Then there's the issue of Thanos's fingersnap burning out the gauntlet. If he's only got one shot, Thanos is going to use it to make HIS point (even if the point really is insane), not just kick the can down the road (he thinks the universe will be grateful to him and follow his example into the future), which is what just increasing existing resources once would do.
  • Given that two of the six stones pertain directly to two things which non-sapient organisms aren't generally considered to have - Mind and Soul - it's plausible that it had to be sapience which was targeted. The other four Stones wouldn't have been enough to enact the culling without those two, else Thanos wouldn't have had to bother collecting them; presumably, he needed them to limit the destruction to just sapient life specifically, as destroying all life indiscriminately would've been well within the other four Stones' power.
• Eitri mentions that Thanos killed everyone else in Nidavellir. In Norse Mythology, Eitri and his brother Brokkr forged Mjölnir. Assuming that this carried over into the MCU, Eitri probably had to watch his brother die.
• Despite the movie's overall Downer Ending, there is an odd Hope Spot here and there, not least of which is Captain Marvel's arrival, as well as Doctor Strange revealing that despite all the odds, there exists a way to defeat Thanos. However, consider this from the Doctor's point of view. Strange said that he went through 14 million possibilities to find only one where Thanos is defeated. Assuming that he experienced all of them in the same way he repeatedly died against Dormammu in his own movie, that raises a lot of questions: How many times did he experience dying, either by the snap or in some other fashion fighting against Thanos? How many times did he see other people die in different ways? How does he not mentally break in seeing the literal millions of ways Thanos ultimately wins? How the hell does he ultimately put on the same brave face he has normally, knowing how everything plays out?
  • Fridge Brilliance: As a doctor, Strange would have seen people dying despite his best efforts to save them, and then he would have had to put that aside and move on to the next patient as if nothing had happened. He can put on a brave face and cope mentally with the horrors he’s seen because he’s been doing this for years, albeit on a smaller scale.
• The cruel irony of Tony being traumatized by seeing the Chitauri ship on the other side of the portal in The Avengers (2012), and then spends so much of the next 6 years attempting to prepare for when it happens again, losing so much often because of the consequences of his own well meaning decisions, ending here with him being trapped in space after failing to stop the being that traumatized him, starting all of this in the first place, with seemingly no real way of getting back that he can know is just heartbreaking.
• The end of Infinity War has half the universe decimated, and by proxy, half of humanity. Ultron's Motive Rant about the impending, Stone-related doom that humanity was barreling towards is now eerily prophetic in hindsight. And yet, Thanos was somehow more merciful in comparison to what Ultron intended to do.
• We saw plenty of Wakandan warriors, along with the various heroes, disintegrate in the aftermath of Thanos's victory. But who else that's a civilian, like Pepper Potts, Aunt May, Peter's classmates, Happy Hogan, Coulson and his team, Jane Foster, Peter Quill's grandfather (if he was still alive in the present day), Selvig, Darcy, Everett K. Ross, Sharon, Shuri, and everyone else are left?
  • Since the TV series follow the same timeline as the films, we can include The Defenders, their friends, family, and allies, the Runaways, Coulson's team, and anyone involved with them.
    • For an even more subversive take, what if Deke (the grandson of Fitz and Simmons, and their "evidence" for whether or not the Stable Time Loop the team was stuck in had been broken or not) was one of those disintegrated, while Fitz and Simmons weren't - but they then assume that the loop has been broken and then mistakenly act as though it were?
  • And let’s not forget Clint, Scott, Hope, and their respective families.
  • And that's just on Earth: who knows what happened to Kraglin and the Ravagers, the Nova Corps, the Sakaarians, and so on...
  • We can wonder about the fate of any character, but there is a huge one: what happened with Stan Lee? He died.
• Thanos's goal will actually kill more than half. Starting with the collateral damage shown in the after credits scene. Then by probability, some planets would have a majority of the species wiped out (while some are relatively unaffected) or only one gender being mostly vanished etc., leading to unintended extinction. Worst-hit of all may be whatever races of Bee People there might be out there. What happens if your entire species depends on a single revered Queen to procreate, and by the random flip of a cosmic coin, she disappears? This leads to Fridge Brilliance if we assume the Mind Stone is necessary to coordinate the rest of the stones to achieve the effect. It would also account for his intent and only eliminate those that need to be immediately erased to also eliminate the remaining by causality to reach Thanos's goal. "Perfectly balanced, as all things should be."
• Imagine living on a planet, not knowing about Thanos or the Infinity Stones or anything like that, then suddenly and without warning, half of your population disintegrates, and the consequences lead to even more people dying.
• This loss could be considered one of the consequences of Civil War and Cap leaving the Avengers. On Titan, Spider-Man and Stark, who have Super-Strength and Powered Armor respectively, struggle to remove the Gauntlet from a nearly unconscious Thanos. Later in Wakanda, we see Captain America holding off Thanos nearly single-handedly. Sure, he struggles, but he holds his own arguably better than even the Hulk. If the Avengers had stayed together, it's possible that he would have been on the ship with Stark and Strange (and Parker might not have been there at all), and together they would have been able to remove the Gauntlet before Quill freaked out.
• The idea of Thanos instantly killing half of all life in the entire universe with a snap of his finger is scary enough, but what about indirect deaths that could be caused by it? Doctors performing life-sustaining surgery, pregnant women, even something as simple as someone holding a baby or small child, and countless others. If they suddenly and unexpectedly die, someone else most likely dies as well.
  • Imagine it the other way round. How many babies or small children turned to dust in the arms of their parents? And there's no telling if the results of Thanos' doing were limited to born children...
  • On a related note, what about conjoined twins or any alien creatures that are made up of several people? Do they count as one soul or are they separate?
• We've seen firsthand now how Thanos and his armies slaughter half the population of any world they invade and conquer. If the invasion in the first Avengers had been successful, Loki would have most likely had to do that to Earth.
• As we've seen on Knowhere, mortals changed by the Reality Stone are still alive and aware. Now, if people turning to dust is the effect of the Reality Stone, just made permanent by the use of Time Stone... could that dust still be alive and aware?
  • Presumably, the Soul Stone is used to remove the consciousness of whoever is turned to dust.
• Assuming that Thanos did really kill half of the Xandarians and Asgardians, it's entirely possible that after his fingersnap their surviving populations were reduced even further.
  • Not to mention other planets that Thanos has ravaged — what effects did the snap have on Drax’s planet? Or Nebula’s people, the Luphomoids? And if we believe Thanos’ word that Gamora’s world, Zen-Whoberi, was able to reclaim some semblance of peace after his attack, who’s to say the snap didn’t disrupt that too? What about the species’ of Thanos’s other kids?
• With all the heart-shaped herbs already destroyed in Black Panther and T'Challa dead, the Black Panther lineage is now extinct. With a single snap, Thanos destroyed thousands of years worth of Wakandan culture.
• We didn't see Dr. Strange take off the Cloak of Levitation when he got disintegrated. Which means the Cloak — which has has a mind of its own and its own quirky, sassy personality — is also dead.
• Everyone who survived, all across the Universe, will not only have to deal with the destruction from the immediate aftermath of The Culling, but also from losing half their friends and loved ones as well. Add losing half of world leaders and the immediate chaos of not knowing what caused the event in the first place, and the sudden "abundance" of resources will be the last thing on anyone's mind. From Bad to Worse doesn't even begin to cover it.
• T'Challa informing the Black Order that "Thanos will have nothing but dust and blood." Proxima replies that they have plenty of blood to spare. Where will Thanos find dust? From disintegrating half of the universal population after he succeeds in his plan.
  • Even further noting that Thanos' people on Titan are long extinct. The Black Order is destroyed. Thanos had to sacrifice Gamora for the Soul Stone. Nebula, who hates him, could have been disintegrated with the half of the universe population. To Thanos' knowledge, all the Children of Thanos are dead. In the end, all Thanos really has to show for his efforts is dust and blood. "At what cost?" "Everything" indeed!
  • Joe Russo did an interview and said Thanos had an "interesting" look on his face after he did the snap. This was in response to someone asking if Thanos included himself. He may have included himself in the Culling.
• Back during the first Avengers film, the only confirmed stone that Thanos willingly gives up to begin his conquest was the Mind Stone, a move that set several events in motion. Fast forward to this film, the events come full circle as the Mind Stone is the last stone that Thanos retrieves without any difficulty; he already knew where it was and how to get it, with all the resources he needs to ensure its safe retrieval.

• As mentioned on the Nightmare Fuel and Tear Jerker pages, the simplicity of the credits sequence is akin to a list of casualties in war.

• The sudden disintegration of over half of Earth's population bears a chilling resemblance to the Rapture as described in numerous Christian sermons and works of fiction. How many crazy fundamentalist Christian cults are going to pop up as a result, adding to the chaos in the wake of so many losses?
  • Probably not as many as you think, if any at all. The whole disintegration thing doesn't line up with any ideas concerning the Rapture (there shouldn't be any Christians left behind, so therefore any being left would make it obvious this isn't the Rapture). Not to say that there aren't religions on other planets whose Rapture involves people turning into dust.
• The manner in which people vanish - disintegrating over the course of a few seconds, from the legs upward - seems almost designed to deny survivors any glimmering of hope. If the culled victims had simply disappeared, or faded out, or otherwise vanished all at once, the ones who are left behind might have assumed they'd been transported, not destroyed, and thus been left with a (false, yet consoling) hope that the victims are still alive in some other place/time/dimension. But seeing them literally fall apart into wisps takes away even that possible source of comfort.
  
  Fading away gradually from the legs up also gives the people around them, often friends and/or loved ones, the opportunity to see the face of the person who's dying, adding heartbreak and emotional turmoil to the already-horrifying idea of witnessing people you care about disintegrate into nothingness. Additionally, it gives the victim the opportunity to see and be fully aware of what's happening, at which point they either know that they can do nothing about it, or they have absolutely no clue what's happening; whatever the case, the victim's death most likely isn't without some combination of panic, terror, hopelessness, and/or confusion.

• In hindsight Vision experiences a horrific death not once but twice, even worse if you imagine it from his point of view. Thanos uses the Time Stone to rewind his death to the second before Vision explodes. Within a fraction of a moment after confessing to the love of his life and calmly resigning himself to an excruciatingly painful death, Vision now finds Thanos standing over him eagerly ready to rip his skull open in order to attain the Mind Stone.
• We only get to see awake people disintegrating after Thanos' fingersnap, but imagine all the people who were disintegrated in their sleep, being ignorant that their night would be the last. Worse even, they could have been spared but not the rest of their family and they may never know how or why this happened.
• A line from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 is even more heartbreaking than it already was, when Rocket shot Gamora in the back so that she wouldn't go back to save Star-Lord from Ego, he remarks, "I'm sorry but I can only afford to lose one friend today." As of this movie, Rocket loses all of his closest and only friends in the span of seemingly just one day.
• A line fitting with Doctor Strange coming up with a plan to beat Thanos which has to result in unfortunate sacrifices calls back to his origin movie. After he is traumatized from killing one of Kaecilius's zealots in self-defense as it broke the Hippocratic Oath, Strange argues with Mordo over whether it would be easy for the latter to kill a person.
  Mordo: Yes, without question.
  Strange: What if there's another way?
  Mordo: There is no other way.
  Strange: You lack imagination.
  • Come this movie and Strange recognizes that Mordo was right; sometimes in a tough difficult situation, there is no other way.
• How many children lost their own parents after Thanos's finger-snap? Imagine waking up one day, to find your parents gone or worse disintegrating into ashes in a blink of a eye.
  • On the flipside, how many parents lost their children? Thanos stated he's Equal-Opportunity Evil, so no one would be spared from the culling. Imagine an infant crumbling into dust in their parents' hands moments after being born. Or moments before.
• Because the culling is completely random, it's just as likely to leave people who are already dying alive as people who are healthy. Imagine being a terminal patient in a cancer ward, your life expectancy measured in days or hours, your pain so terrible that no amount of drugs can bring relief, your sole source of comfort the loved one who remains by your side, holding your hand. Imagine that, without any warning, half the nurses and other patients start fading into ashes all through the hospital. Imagine locking eyes with your loved one, as you share the unspoken hope that it'll be you that disperses, thus painlessly ending your ordeal ... and the horror, despair and guilt that seizes both of you - them for an instant and you, for the anguished remainder of your life - as it's their coin-flip that comes up "tails" and their hand that disintegrates in yours.
• On a related note - and while this is very unlikely, it cannot be ruled out - if someone who was planning on murdering an acquaintance goes through with it shortly before the snap and successfully hides or destroys their body, they could get away with it by saying that the victim died during the snap, with no-one none the wiser.
• Because Vision dies before the fingersnap, we have no way of knowing if synthetic life forms or non-living robotic intelligences were affected. Cutting back so many organic races' populations and throwing their societies into chaos may just have left whole galaxies' worth of living creatures on the losing end of a Robot War.
• Speaking of war, just think how much war half of the population of every planet with life on it suddenly disintegrating would cause. Earth would actually be the lucky ones because they're in a position to know what's going on and thus inform the population what happened and who was responsible. Elsewhere? After The Culling happens it's highly likely mass paranoia will take over, with anything from a couple groups of cavemen near each other to interstellar empires blaming each other as the cause of it because they don't know the real reason and thus start attacking each other in retribution.
  • The comics the film is based on show precisely this happening, as the Kree and Skrull empires immediately blame each other for half their populations dying and go to war. For those not versed in the comics, think of a Cold War on a galactic scale turning hot.
    • Fridge Brilliance: Captain Marvel, the last movie before Avengers 4, is focused on the Kree-Skrull war. It's fairly likely that if her aging is hand-waved or ignored, and she is still living among the Kree, this description will likely be how she finds out about Thanos' snap, with Fury's page being her cue to return to Earth.
• Depending on how much of the Marvel Universe is actually in the MCU, if he exists, there is a 50% chance that Thanos just killed Galactus. Hi, Abraxas. Do other Cosmic entities count as alive, too?
• Thinking about what happens to pregnant people getting snapped is horrifying enough, whichever one gets dusted. But what happens if the solution is about reversing the snap?
• Thanos' victims were chosen at random; certainly, among Strange's 14 million possible outcomes, one of factors that separate the timelines are the different sets of people that survive the snap. Therefore, because Strange's Batman Gambit plan for Endgamerelied on a certain set of heroes to survive, and due to the Snap's random nature, the current timeline could have a very different set of survivors than what Strange planned, making his preparations and sacrifices completely useless, and potentially sealing a doomed (or, at very least, disadvantageous) fate for the Avengers.
• What's worse than watching your parents get brutally killed by someone standing right next to you, and not being able to get revenge on the people truly responsible? How about being the "parent" and having your "son" die in your arms, leaving you coated in his remains, while trillions of others you've failed to save also die, the murderer being someone you just lost a fight to who got away and won. The fact that Peter was clearly the biggest thing helping Tony move past Siberia just rubs so much salt in the wound.
• These events can't have done much for Wanda's already guilty conscience. First she's living in hiding for a string of events she must have a lot of mixed feelings about. Then Tony vanishes with the alien spacecraft; Wanda knows full well what Tony's biggest fear and obsession are, and remembering how she mind-f*cked him about it three years prior, might be blaming herself for sending him up there... and then she has to kill her last living loved one, the one to whom she likely feels she owes what little happiness and mental stability she currently has to. The fact that she's saving the universe in doing so is probably small comfort. No wonder she looked relieved when she died.
• Due to the sudden nature of the Culling, the survivors of the snap are most likely left with the fear that something like this might just as sudden repeat any moment, for the rest of their lives.
• Worded symmetry: In The Avengers, Steve says proudly to the 4 main Avengers after they drive the Chitauri out, "We did it." In this movie, Nebula says brokenly to Tony, after watching most of their team of 7 disappear after losing, "HE did it."
• Considering that Thanos also took out non-sapient life, did it go as far as to kill fungi, algae, protists, bacteria, and even viruses? Imagine the people who died due to half or more of their gut flora dying, leaving them vulnerable. All the ocean deadzones resulting from the deaths of the algae, diseases running rampant due to the deaths of vaccines and other lifeforms that keep them in check...
• Okay, five other Stones might be devastating, but the Time Stone is outright creepy. It's shown that a mere human with some mental training can observe 14 millions realities in a few seconds and it won't even cost him anything. Now imagine what you can achieve with this power: you can do anything you want to anyone you want, you can experience endless lives based on your decisions and you don't even have to survive to observe the consequences. You may murder or rape people and then go back as if nothing happened, and no one will ever stop you, as you can always predict any difficulties you will face AND you're immortal in present time, as you can create a time loop! Good thing Dr. Strange is not so easily tempted, huh?
• Thanos' past on Titan. In his words, his proposal to solve Titan's overpopulation problem was viewed as a Cassandra Truth. Not only that but Word of God says that he was locked up in prison long and Forced to Watch as his planet fell to ruin over time. But, if Thanos merely suggested the solution first, doesn't it seem like Disproportionate Retribution to lock him up for stating so? Therefore, it's likely that when Thanos realized nobody believed him, he started killing random citizens, (discreetly or openly), simply so that in his twisted mindset, he could provide proof that the majority now has more resources thanks to the "sacrifices" of others. Thanos was a serial killer on his home planet long before he target the entire universe.
• Thanos showing younger Gamora his weapon makes for a very creepy echo of a signature scene from Guardians of the Galaxy in which Groot gives a flower to a random girl of roughly the same age as younger Gamora.
• When Corvus Glaive and Proxima Midnight engage Wanda and Vision in their first attempt to get the Mind Stone, Cap, Natasha and Sam swoop in and rescue them when the fight takes them into the railway station. With the events of WandaVision taken into perspective, one realizes that Cap's team didn't really save Wanda and Vision, they saved Proxima Midnight and Corvus Glaive, because Wanda was about to pulverize them all by herself.
  • The only thing stopping Wanda from doing so is if her current power isn't strong enough to do so, since her power level is determined by her emotional state, especially because the current height of her powers seen in WandaVision was brought by her being at her emotional low point, or if the two choose to target Vision to distract her.
• Years previously, Gamora lied to Thanos about failing to find the Soul Stone, in an attempt to keep it out of his hands. We've seen how Thanos handles failure, and even his "favorite daughter" Gamora has a few cybernetic enhancements of her own. He probably tortured her as punishment for failing to find the stone those years ago—and she took it rather than reveal the truth, because the Soul Stone in Thanos's hands was just too dangerous.
• While the threat at hand would be incredibly stressful for every hero in the movie, Bruce Banner asking Thor about if they stopped Ultron when he goes back to Banner form, means that for him only a few days passed between stopping Ultron, and then helping Thor, Valkryie and Loki stop Hela, and assuming not too much time passes between the end of Ragnarok and the beginning of this movie he gets thrown into stopping Thanos. All of that to Bruce had to have occurred in just a week.
• There is a truly heartbreaking Call-Back to the rooftop scene from Spider-Man: Homecoming. Before Tony made the call to take the suit back, he said, "What if someone had died today? Yeah that changes things cause that's on you and I you died I feel that would be on me. I don't need that on my conscience." Tony was assuredly thinking about that when Peter was in his arms.

Fridge Logic

Fridge Logic belongs on the Headscratchers page.

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