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Welcome to the main discussion thread for the Marvel Cinematic Universe! This pinned post is here to establish some basic guidelines. All of the Media Forum rules still apply.

  • This thread is for talking about the live-action films, TV shows, animated works, and related content that use the Marvel brand, currently owned by Disney.
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    Original post 
Since Thor and now Captain America came out this year, I wanted to get what Tropers thought of the concept and execution of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in general. Personally I love the idea and wonder why this idea hasn't been seriously tried before. It sorta seems to me like the DCAU in movie form (And well, ummm, with Marvel), and really 'gets' the comic book feel of a shared universe while not being completely alienating.

Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM

windleopard from Nigeria Since: Nov, 2014 Relationship Status: Non-Canon
#96301: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:31:24 PM

I just think that Infinity War needed something a bit more to refute his argument

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

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#96302: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:36:55 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!"
MileRun Since: Jan, 2001
#96303: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:37:39 PM

Thing is, presenting it as "it'd work, it'd just be evil" is how we get tropes like Repressive, but Efficient, which perpetuate myths about dictatorships as being more productive than free societies.

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

Fighteer Lost in Space from The Time Vortex (Time Abyss) Relationship Status: TV Tropes ruined my love life
Lost in Space
#96304: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:39:09 PM

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!"
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#96305: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:46:15 PM

The film does outright say that what Thanos is doing is awful. Everyone who hears of his plan rightly calls him a monster for it. Doctor Strange even says it's genocide.

Disgusted, but not surprised
Nightwire Since: Feb, 2010
#96306: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:50:04 PM

Yes, if anyone in real life thinks that genocide in any form is a totally justifiable thing to do, those people are not worth arguing with.

slimcoder The Head of the Hydra Since: May, 2013
The Head of the Hydra
#96307: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:51:21 PM

Except on ants, those are always justified.

Those ant bastards, always biting us & taking our picnics.

Edited by slimcoder on Feb 5th 2019 at 8:51:30 AM

"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."
M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#96308: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:54:07 PM

The fire ants at least can go right to hell. They'd probably take over the place though.

Hell. Where everything is fire ants.

Disgusted, but not surprised
wanderlustwarrior Role Model from Where Gods Belong Since: Jun, 2009 Relationship Status: What's love got to do with it?
Role Model
#96309: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:56:01 PM

Lang! They're insulting your buddies!

windleopard from Nigeria Since: Nov, 2014 Relationship Status: Non-Canon
#96310: Feb 5th 2019 at 8:56:56 PM

I doubt even Lang likes fire ants.

MileRun Since: Jan, 2001
#96311: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:00:46 PM

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."

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.

Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#96312: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:04:45 PM

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

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?"

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?

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

chasemaddigan I'm Sad Frogerson. Since: Oct, 2011
I'm Sad Frogerson.
#96313: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:18:44 PM

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.

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

alliterator Since: Jan, 2001
#96314: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:22:17 PM

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."
Except there are plenty of people who believe that Utopia Justifies the Means. And there are plenty of action films where the good guys are the ones who have to take the "hard choice" and kill people for the greater good. What makes Thanos different from them? The fact that his killing is on a more massive scale?

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

Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#96315: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:27:45 PM

So, you're saying Thanos should repent at the end of the movie then, right?

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. tongue

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 5th 2019 at 9:28:19 AM

windleopard from Nigeria Since: Nov, 2014 Relationship Status: Non-Canon
#96316: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:28:15 PM

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.

Did the villain actually repent or did the hero just choose not to kill them? Because those are different things.

Except there are plenty of people who believe that Utopia Justifies the Means. And there are plenty of action films where the good guys are the ones who have to take the "hard choice" and kill people for the greater good. What makes Thanos different from them? The fact that his killing is on a more massive scale?

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

Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#96317: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:30:02 PM

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.

[down]I did say "much". tongue

Edited by Tuckerscreator on Feb 5th 2019 at 9:42:52 AM

Anomalocaris20 from Sagittarius A* Since: Sep, 2010 Relationship Status: Love blinded me (with science!)
#96318: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:32:18 PM

Except the villain in The LEGO Movie literally killed a guy a few minutes ago.

Even if he sticks around as a ghost, I always thought it was a little odd. tongue

You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!
MileRun Since: Jan, 2001
#96319: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:46:38 PM

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).

alliterator Since: Jan, 2001
#96320: Feb 5th 2019 at 9:56:21 PM

Action heroes typically kill in self defense or defense of others. Thanos is committing genocide because he thinks it will solve resource scarcity.
Which, according to Thanos, would be "in defense of others." He's only killing people so that he can save the universe. It's The Trolley Problem for him, but on a universal scale.

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.

Again, empathy is the key.
But the movie shows that Thanos has empathy. Hell, there are posters here that arguing that he's sympathetic because he's shown empathy. He just doesn't have enough empathy to stop him plan, because, as he puts it, "The hardest choices require the strongest wills."

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

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#96321: Feb 5th 2019 at 10:06:08 PM

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 surprised
Tuckerscreator (4 Score & 7 Years Ago) Relationship Status: Drift compatible
#96322: Feb 5th 2019 at 10:20:09 PM

Yeah, 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

windleopard from Nigeria Since: Nov, 2014 Relationship Status: Non-Canon
#96323: Feb 5th 2019 at 10:27:11 PM

Which, according to Thanos, would be "in defense of others."

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.

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."

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.

alliterator Since: Jan, 2001
#96324: Feb 5th 2019 at 10:32:18 PM

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.
How many people were inside the Death Star when it blew up? Were they all unrepentant killers or were most of them merely low level maintenance workers who happened to be working for the Empire?

Again, see the ending. Look at the amount of death and destruction left in Thanos' wake in this film.
Again, this is going for an emotional reaction rather than a logical one. Your argument is "He caused death and destruction, therefore he is bad"; the same can be said of dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and yet that is still being debated to this day.

M84 Oh, bother. from Our little blue planet Since: Jun, 2010 Relationship Status: Chocolate!
Oh, bother.
#96325: Feb 5th 2019 at 10:38:24 PM

[up]

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

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