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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
How much weirder would the ending have been if people weren't shocked, but instead turned to the other survivors and said, "Man, I really hated those guys. Anyway, look at all the resources we don't have to fight over. Go team Thanos!"
Edited by Fighteer on Feb 5th 2019 at 11:38:03 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"I get what you mean, but if you're going to pose a moral question, then it must be answered as an issue of morality, not an issue of measurable correctness. The heroes have to demonstrate why the villain is morally wrong or that cheapens their moral victory.
Let's say that Thanos' plan falls apart in endgame for purely mechanical reasons. The universe is worse off because Thanos didn't consider the issue of food supplies being cut proportionally with those at the top of the food chain, and the Avengers prove him wrong on those grounds. That's not going to reduce the number of people saying, "Thanos had the right idea." They'll justify their stance by saying, "Thanos just needed to check his math and snap away fewer resources/more people." If the Avengers are only right because Thanos miscalculated the number of casualties needed for ideal balance, then that means the Avengers could have been wrong if Thanos was more thorough in his calculations.
The Avengers need to win empathically. Thanos must be wrong due to matters of grief and unrest. The audience must be made to sympathize Thanos' victims, and it has to be that type of evidence that wins the audience over to the "Thanos was wrong" side. Yes, there will always be those pragmatic sociopaths in the audience that'll think the universe would have been better if the snap was permanent, but those types of people will always exist regardless.
Edited by MileRun on Feb 5th 2019 at 8:38:30 AM
You see, I maintain a firm belief that the filmmakers didn't feel the need to explicitly tell the audience, "Killing half of the people is bad, yo."
I think it speaks more about the people who feel that we shouldn't take that message for granted. What exactly is wrong with you that you need it spelled out? "Man, I thought genocide was a great idea until Captain America told me otherwise. My whole perspective on life has changed!"
Just think if the writers had put in that message more directly. I bet it'd have cut down on the post-IW mass murders by at least a third.
Edited by Fighteer on Feb 5th 2019 at 11:43:42 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"True, and I'm not saying that the film has to present that argument so overtly. However, consider that if Endgame shifts focus to saying Thanos' science was wrong, then it's saying that Thanos' morals could technically be right, and that's not good at all.
As much as an audience shouldn't need a lesson on the morality of genocide, the writers of Infinity War chose to present the ethical question of when and if sacrifice can be justified. It's all over the movie, not just with Thanos. If the writers are going to tackle that question, they need to commit to it and bring it to a solid, moral answer.
I kind of agree and kind of don't. While I would prefer to agree that simply spelling out that a measure is immoral is plenty, sometimes presenting solely the moral matter and not the practical leads to weird situations like The Incredibles, where it's taken for granted the viewer will be shocked by "Syndrome is going to make everyone super!" but the lack of description about that leaves the viewer wondering "wait, how is that a problem?"
Well, children watch these films. They're marketed directly to them. Many aren't old enough to do the math that Malthusianism doesn't work. And sometimes they do internalize "mass killing is worth considering" in various mediums. I remember as an eleven year-old being surprised to see a kid's film sparing its bad guys rather than killing them all like all the previous ones I was shown. It made a big impression on me to see repentance for once.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 5th 2019 at 9:05:36 AM
So, you're saying Thanos should repent at the end of the movie then, right?
I joke, but that's not too far off from how his comic counterpart turned out. At the end of the Infinity Gauntlet story, Thanos basically became sort of an anti-hero and was willing to help the heroes of the Marvel Universe fight against larger threats to it.
Hell, Marvel: The End basically is a story of how Thanos obtained power even greater than the Infinity Gauntlet and how he used it to pull a Heroic Sacrifice that saved the entire Universe from being destroyed.
Edited by chasemaddigan on Feb 5th 2019 at 12:20:22 PM
The fact that genocide hasn't just happened in the past, but continues to happen today points to the fact that people are still susceptible to this type of logic.
Edited by alliterator on Feb 5th 2019 at 9:22:45 AM
It would be very unlikely that he could reach a place of deserving to go free what with his setting a new record for Moral Event Horizon, but the brainwashed Children of Thanos may have merited a chance. They're all dead now though.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 5th 2019 at 9:28:19 AM
Did the villain actually repent or did the hero just choose not to kill them? Because those are different things.
Action heroes typically kill in self defense or defense of others. Thanos is committing genocide because he thinks it will solve resource scarcity. Any "good guy" who did what Thanos did would be considered a Villain Protagonist which is how Thanos has been described.
Edited by windleopard on Feb 5th 2019 at 9:30:57 AM
It was Yellow Submarine. All the bad guys either fled or repented.
The LEGO Movie is in the same vein, though I guess both films make it easier in that its villains don't cause much irreparable harm.
I did say "much".
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 5th 2019 at 9:42:52 AM
The reason that genocides happen is because they make the world more comfortable for a select group of people who are willing to ignore the suffering of the rest. You can't present them with facts about why genocide doesn't work because, for their specific desires, genocide does work.
Again, empathy is the key. It's not useless to present children with an empathic reason not to kill people. It's especially important to present an argument for why the "greater good" isn't always worth the sacrifice of the existing good. If you present a child with a logical reason why sacrificing someone for the greater good is wrong, then they might try to argue logically that sacrificing someone under different conditions might be right. If you present a child with the suffering caused by that sacrifice, they'd be less inclined to think it could ever be right (unless they're sociopaths).
Re: The Incredibles, I have no idea what the writers were trying to argue with Syndrome's plan to give everybody super tech when he's done. If they were trying to say that was as evil as the rest of his plan, they absolutely botched it. That bit doesn't mix so well with the other themes of the movie (being true to your identity and using your talents to help others without being consumed by pride).
The problem is, of course, that people will look at the Trolley Problem and go with utilitarianism
, "that which produces the greatest well-being of the greatest number of people." If everyone in the universe is going to starve unless you kill half the people in the universe, well, utilitarianism says do it. That's the fundamental flaw in the movie — that Thanos is using a real world philosophy to justify his actions, one that many dictators have already used. And nobody tries to point out the flaws, they only call him "insane" which doesn't help. If someone tried to point out the many flaws in his plan, even if he ignored them, that would go a long way to showing people that this type of thinking isn't right. After all, there are many criticisms
of utilitarianism.
And here, I would just like to use a counter-example, of a movie that I think does the opposite of this one: The Cabin in the Woods. I'm going to spoil the entire film now, so here goes: It's revealed in the film that the main characters are being sacrificed to Old Gods so that those Old Gods will remain slumbering beneath the Earth and not awaken and destroy the world. The Director tells one of the characters to shoot the other or else the world will be destroyed and she almost does it, but stops. Finally, those two remaining characters are left alive, meaning that the world will end, but they realize that a world that depends on killing innocent people isn't really a world worth preserving. "Humanity...It's time to give someone else a chance." And so the Old Gods rise and destroy the world.
If Thanos was shown as just a straight up sociopath, I wouldn't have a problem.
Edited by alliterator on Feb 5th 2019 at 9:58:34 AM
MCU Thanos does seem to genuinely want to help the universe and its people.
But he's blinded by that desire for approval and vindication he never got from the Titanians who called him the Mad Titan. So he never tries to do anything to help the universe but enact his original plan of halving the population. It doesn't help that he can point to Gamora's homeworld as "proof" that his way works.
The thing is...even after The Snap, he's not going to be satisfied. Not really. Because deep down he was in it for the vindication. But the people he wants to hear say "Thanos, you were right" more than anything are all already dead.
No peace can be found chasing ghosts.
It would have been better for everyone, including Thanos, if he had just moved on from Titan and stuck with farming.
Edited by M84 on Feb 6th 2019 at 2:07:43 AM
Disgusted, but not surprisedYeah, making a solely empathetic argument can work for a kid viewer, though sometimes it feels kind of short-sighted. Obviously most kids are going to be horrified by the climactic scene of half the heroes being dusted, but I'm not sure it really works as a cautionary depiction if it's limited to "Thanos is bad because he hurt the cool characters".
Unrelated thing: Ruth E. Carter talks about her audition
for costume designer of Black Panther, and how she learned you can't open Dropbox at Marvel Studios.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 5th 2019 at 10:21:47 AM
What Thanos considers defense of others and what the rest of the universe considers defense of others are two different things. Especially since action heroes tend to avoid deliberately killing innocent people to achieve their goals something Thanos has no issue doing.
Again, see the ending. Look at the amount of death and destruction left in Thanos' wake in this film. No rational person is going to look at what happened in Infinity War and think Thanos produced the greatest well-being of the greatest number of people.
1. The Death Star was a planet-killing superweapon that had already blown up a populated world. Anyone still willing to work onboard that thing after that was effectively an accomplice to mass murder on an unprecedented scale. Clerks had a bit about that.
2. The difference is that the atomic bombings were done for the sake of, among other things, reducing the loss of American lives. Which it did. Nobody made the argument that it was good for the Japanese people being bombed. As opposed to The Snap supposedly helping the people of the universe left behind.
Also, the USA was at fucking war with Japan at the time. Contrary to the title of the movie, Thanos was not actually at war with the rest of the universe. He's just a mass murderer.
Edited by M84 on Feb 6th 2019 at 2:40:23 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised

Well there was the end scene of utter chaos caused by the snap and the people disintegrating before their friends' eyes.