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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
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While that is true, the movie allow Thanos to carry out more dignity that it deserve, is one thing to be a warmonger but thannos is pretty much the equivalent of a homopathic doctor with a army.
Edited by unknowing on Dec 17th 2018 at 12:39:12 PM
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"![]()
It doesn't specifically say "killing off half the universe is bad and will not work" because it shouldn't have to. Of course it is bad and will not work. We know that. Everyone knows that. But we're so used to being spoonfed our morals in film that it felt like something was missing without it.
Doesn't help that it's scaled up to the entire universe. We know that killing half the population of Earth wouldn't fix Earth's environmental problems and resource scarcity. There is actual real-world research on that. But since we don't know what exactly is going on in space, in theory their problems could be solved by killing half of everyone. Again, that's not actually true. But the movie did not explicitly say it.
Writing a post-post apocalypse LitRPG on RR. Also fanfic stuff.By the way:
Nobody actually challenges his logic. They call him a madmen, crazy, etc, but that's it.
Edited by alliterator on Dec 17th 2018 at 8:44:08 AM
Black Panther > Infinity War for me, but I don't really think the two should be compared because each movie had a different mission; Black Panther was T'Challa's spotlight and introducing his world into the MCU along with racial/national identity and Infinity War was a whole different beast, being a movie that is a continuing storyline that had to juggle so much, as well as building up Thanos.
For the record, I don't think Thanos's intention was noble or anything, and I'm sorta glad the movie didn't dip into the Fridge Logic of it so much. He is the center character of IW, he had a goal and he achieved it, at a great cost.
By the way, all you have to do is google "was thanos right"
and you will find numerous articles debating his plan and numerous people who believe that yes he was.
This is the kind of thing that makes forums exhausting and not fun. I said, "I thought the movie made it clear that Thanos was wrong." I felt that the movie made that clear, as did many other people. Is it really necessary to try to somehow refute me thinking that it was clear?
"In 900 years of time and space I've never met anyone who wasn't important."
I will said Thannos got that because he used the same tactic many group used today: try to not look like a complete lunatic.
I mean is how alt right got so far some years earlier: is easy to make your batshi insane idea look pausable if you dont look crazy for cocapuffs.
The movie didnt make him right but it give him a sort of dignifty villains dont have.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"It never occurred to me that Thanos could be right. He can certainly have a point... we even have a trope for that. But that doesn't make what he wants to do any less horrible. Do we really need films to spoon feed us our moral lessons like we're four years old and watching Dora the Explorer?
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I'm going to answer yes because I think the last few years have demonstrated what we assumed to be baseline shared morality among fellow human beings is less shared than we think.
Also an appreciable share of the audience actually is children, so there's that.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Dec 17th 2018 at 9:01:11 AM
By the way, one of the instances of the movie "brushing past" Thanos being right or wrong:
Strange: Genocide?
Thanos: At random. Dispassionate; fair to rich and poor alike. They called me a madman... and what I predicted came to pass.
Strange: Congratulations, you're a prophet.
Thanos: I'm a survivor.
Strange: Who wants to murder trillions.
Thanos: With all six stones, I could simply snap my fingers; they would all cease to exist. I call that... mercy.
Strange: Then what?
Thanos: I finally rest, and watch the Sun rise on a grateful universe. The hardest choices require the strongest wills.
Strange doesn't debate Thanos — in fact, he calls him a prophet (even if he is being sarcastic). Instead, Strange's response to Thanos's logic is, basically, to say, "Murdering trillions is terrible, even if your plan would work." It's part and parcel with Captain America saying, "We don't trade lives."
Edited by alliterator on Dec 17th 2018 at 9:21:40 AM
I think this is kind of the problem. Not everyone here wants to have a debate. I genuinely don't mean to be rude saying this, but you tend to come off as if you're trying to "win" at something, even if that's not what you're trying to do. Me saying that I thought the movie showed Thanos was wrong was never meant to be a debate point to argue with, just my feelings on the movie in what I thought was a casual conversation.
"In 900 years of time and space I've never met anyone who wasn't important."Considering how a certain other villain in a certain other iconic franchise has an unexpected number of people asking us to "sympathize" with him despite all the evil that he does, I don't really take the "was Thanos actually right" crowd all that seriously.
Any reasonable person can see that he was wrong. Does he have a point that perhaps overpopulation/resource depletion is a problem that should probably be addresses yeah probably. Can you buy that HE believes that he's right in his own twisted mind, sure (using his own and Gamora's homeworld's as "evidence" to prove). And does he have some dimension as a villain, perhaps, etc.
HOWEVER, anyone looking at it objectively can see that he's also an arrogant psychopath who has so bought into his own BS that he won't even consider alternate possibilities. And said alternate possibilities clearly exist given that he basically became a god once he collected all of the Infinity Stones. It's very obvious, so I don't see the problem here.
He's a somewhat interesting baddie, but clearly a baddie nonetheless.
I think The Dark Knight shows best how to depict a villain like Thanos as both tragic and misguided, not "seems like he has good ideas".
Harvey Dent, in becoming Two-Face, takes on an absolute ideology and deals death or life according to its rules. He says life is chaos and everything is up to chance, so he punishes anyone he encounters at the flip of a coin. Despite his murders, we feel sympathy for him because we see he could've once been great but succumbed to darkness. Despite his claims about life, we aren't compelled to them because we see he's actually just fearfully trying to make the world that hurt him make sense again. And while one might think that an ideology based around coin-flipping is too trivial to refute, the movie does so efficiently: Batman intervenes, and the coin lands heads side up.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Dec 17th 2018 at 9:42:36 AM
Harvey Dent also had the benefit of an actual tragic character arc. We see him as an honorable man trying to do good. We see him willing to risk his own life to try and take down the mob and then Joker. We see how he loses the person that he cares about most, and is maimed himself at the same time and how that crushes him. And we see how his grief turns to rage when he realizes that it all happened in part because Jim Gordon didn't listen to his warnings, and what he feared ended up being the case. And we see how the Joker deliberately sets out to corrupt him, and picks exactly the right moment to finally push him over the edge. And even then, he only goes after people whom he believes are "guilty."
So by the end, you don't agree with what he's doing and he needs to be stopped. But there's also a true element of tragedy to him and it's kind of sad when he dies.
Killmonger also has that, albeit to a somewhat lesser degree. Yeah he did lose pretty much everyone that he loved, yeah he did get screwed over in many ways, yeah if T'Chaka would have made a different choice maybe things would have been different, and yeah you can see how his environment shaped him. So yeah, it's easy to see how he became as angry and bitter and hate-filled as he did, and he does bring up some legitimate points at times. But of course his actions are what makes him the villain and why he needed to be stopped at the end of it all. But even T'Challa can see the inherent tragedy of what happened, hence his actions towards the end of the film.
Also I kind of agree that I wish that they wouldn't have killed him off as I feel like there were still places that they could have gone with his character moving forwards, but oh well.
When it come to a villian there two thing to consider: Result and reasons.
With villians is easy: the result are awfull or no and the reason are ether sympathic or not, with Ghost for example the Result will be bad for Hope Mother but her intentions is Sympathy, meaning she is will be good person if her issue is fixed.
With Thanos is result are bloody awfull but he is so calm and detach of any reason being self serving(aside for ego) that is not hard to be sympathy of him.
My complain is that: he got to much dignity for someone who unleash genocide of half of the damn universe.
"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"You keep saying that, divinity, dignity, dignity.
Would you rather have him be a sniveling, cackling weasel?
Of course he carries himself with some measure of dignity. He’s a galactic warlord who brings entire planets under his heel with his bare-hands alone.
A man who can beat the Hulk in a fistfight is a man of immense might.
Edited by slimcoder on Dec 17th 2018 at 11:01:13 AM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."There’s a difference between a villain who projects himself as dignified, and a villain being framed by the story as dignified. For instance, Immortan Joe presents himself as a man of great respect. Everyone who serves him is seen in awe of his seeming power and generosity. But we the audience are privy to his private moments of weakness. His fake medals, his hiding of his poor health, his exasperation with his incompetent sons, etc. So the story doesn’t treat him as dignified. It frames that “dignity” as another obstacle to the heroes, fighting his cult of personality.
According to Infinity War’s director commentary, Thanos is also a villain of concealed insecurities. He doesn’t actually care about preserving life, he just can’t let go that he got kicked off Titan for proposing an awful plan. His “noble quest” is to give the middle finger to a pile of graves. But since we are never shown his moments of weakness, only his moments of “honorable tragedy”, he gets portrayed as noble through and through when he is canonically anything but.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Dec 17th 2018 at 11:23:12 AM

It's obvious that Thanos's plan is cruel and awful and so on. Even he doesn't deny it, but he thinks it's worth it in order to make sure that half the universe lives with enough food and resources. When does the movie refute his logic?
You can say "His logic is wrong and his plan wouldn't work" all you want, but the movie doesn't say that at all. In fact, it barely looks at Thanos's plan, moving past it as if saying "Don't think about it too hard."
Edited by alliterator on Dec 17th 2018 at 8:38:34 AM