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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
With Infinity War it seemed like the writers just thought Thanos's gameplan was self-evidently monstrous and batshit and simply failed to account people taking it at face-value. That's why Endgame makes no bones about Thanos's plan being ridiculous.
That's just something that has to be kept in mind for future villains in the MCU. Nothing is self-evident.
"All you Fascists bound to lose."![]()
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The ongoing comic takes that idea apart a bit. After taking over another country due to said country masterminding a coup against him, he realizes that while the conquest was easy, actually governing his newly conquered territory is not. He does not know if Latveria can even support the sudden influx of refugees his conquest created.
Edited by M84 on Dec 17th 2020 at 1:29:17 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised![]()
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I always thought the counter response to Thanos was a good example of how vocal minorities tend to rail at moral ambiguity with villains in films, either in support or in criticism.
While this has been a problem for a long time, the current generation has always had a bit of a problem dealing with moral ambiguity in characters - and a bit of a disconnect between the ability to relate to a character and the ability to accept that they are not right or wrong just based on relatability. It's why Draco in Leather Pants exists, why you still sometimes get people interpreting complex narrative situations in black and white ways (over in the Hades trope page, we just recently got someone interpreting everyone - including the protag - in the game as abusive and loveless because so much if it is built on fighting, ignoring the entirety of the context surrounding it), and why villains who you are meant to have some but not much empathy with often get camps of people decrying others for calling them evil and other camps of people chiding the work for condoning actions it doesn't.
Thanos, as an example, largely got a lot of people assuming that the film was agreeing with Thanos - despite the rather obvious thematic, character and story indications that it was not - often because no one said directly to his face that he was wrong, which is not something a writer would feel they would have to do in the first place. As noted, Killmonger got the same responses, as did characters like Mariah Dillard (Dillard was a corrupt politician superficially opposed gentrification, leading so several knee jerk responses that "Marvel supported gentrification" until people from actual urban environments who knew the kind of politicians she was a satire of shut them up). It comes from people still interpreting characters as blocks (that they're either entirely good or entirely bad, and thus everything they do has to be respectively either good or bad) even in situations where they clearly are not. People these days also have a nasty habit of interpreting empathy/understanding as forgiveness/support - even in real life (something the current... situation in America has not helped) - even though the two are not at all the same.
You don't only get instances where people believe the character is right because they're sympathetic, you also get instances where people believe that the character is inadequately established as wrong because they're sympathetic, and there's no real way to avoid that when you're writing sympathetic villains - not everyone handles moral ambiguity well.
But I don't think we should dumb down works to accommodate this - if we're not writing the best characters we can just because we assume some fraction of viewers will not understand them, then we might as well not be making media at all.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 16th 2020 at 9:49:09 AM
I think there’s a difference between dumbing down and clarity. It doesn’t necessarily have to be characters voicing outloud what the audience is supposed to think. It’s more about being consistent in direction. Kinda like how the same film had people think the Hulk was scared of Thanos, something the creators didn’t intend, because without clarity as to why Hulk was actually reluctant people just interpreted with what little details were available.
Edited by Tuckerscreator on Dec 16th 2020 at 9:51:34 AM
The Hulk situation and the Thanos situation are two very different things. They didn't provide any context for Hulk at all in that instance, nor was what his motivations were ever a plot point (only that he was acting as he was, and Banner's reactions), and they only revealed what was going on in Word of God.
I suspect the reason they did that was simply because they conceived it was a plot where Banner saved the day and not Hulk (or at least, tried to) - leading into Hulk basically being Banner in the next film - and filled in the blanks later.
Thanos, again, gets a great deal of thematic context for how awful and insane his actions are, but largely gets flak from a Vocal Minority for that context not going above and beyond to be explicit as possible despite being evident - which again tends toward it being a function of fan response vs necessarily a deficiency in the writing.
To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if the "Thanos isn't explicitly wrong enough" response didn't actually originate because of the way Thanos is written, but was a response that grew out of reactions to the Vocal Minority that agreed with him. Kind of a "clearly, Thanos is badly written if I keep seeing people on my feed that have opinions about him I disagree with" situation, which is also something you do so see a lot these days. Essentially an opinion formed entirely out of fan contention.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 16th 2020 at 9:59:23 AM
I can’t speak for everyone but I can explicitly say that my response wasn’t from other viewers, it was from the film. Both me and my mom left the theater going “WTF? Was the film asking us to agree with Thanos?”
When the MCU finally adapts Doctor Doom, I hope that they keep in mind what Jack Kirby said about him:
"Doom is an extremist; he's a paranoid. He thinks in extremes... if Doom had an enemy, he'd have to wipe him out. And if Doom thought that anybody was smarter than himself, he'd kill 'em, because Doom would have to be the smartest man in the world."
Trope Editor (he/him)![]()
And like I said, that's going to happen. Some people are going to respond to these things some way, some are going to respond to them another way. I myself know several people who walked out of the theatre believing Killmonger was entirely in the right, for instance.
It's when these reactions balloon into groups and become recriminations on the characters themselves that those reactions become more subject to scrutiny themselves.
That just seems like saying that people’s reactions are just inherent and films can’t influence them, which strikes me as discarding a film’s story analysis, language of a shot, etc. Some viewers might be looking to see just what they want to see, but that tends to come with a lack of film literacy rather than because of it.
I mean I have to agree with Unknown. I felt like Thanos's plan was self-evidently awful, and I did feel like the movie was giving him sympathetic depths, but not asking us to sympathize with what he was doing. We saw enough of his atrocities, and obviously the immediate aftermath of the snap, for me to think that the film wasn't endorsing him. But: that's me. I cannot speak for everyone.
Edited by jjjj2 on Dec 16th 2020 at 1:51:38 PM
You can only write so much in your forum signature. It's not fair that I want to write a piece of writing yet it will cut me off in the midTo be fair, there definitely is the case that the movie is very front loaded on Thanos being wrong, and very back loaded on Thanos being sympathetic.
Since we get more of the heroes' perspective on Thanos in the first half, that's where you get the vast majority of the film's statements on Thanos is an awful person with a batshit crazy motivation, who is constantly destroying things people care about for his own selfish ideologies. But since the second half of the movie is focused increasingly on Thanos winning, we get more of his perspective on that half. Since the movie is so... damn... long... it's easy to forget when we get to the point where Thanos is all "I sacrificed everything, pity me!" that several real life hours ago the movie was just as blatantly noting him as a plague and a psychotic warlord.
Also, there's the whole "I'm the only one with the conviction, so I deserve to win" ideology of his, which is blatantly hypocritical given his actions, but delivered in such an understated way that I have heard people believing that the hypocrisy was a mistake on the writers' part and that they actually meant for him to be right about that.
Thanos is an interesting study in whether audiences ought to be guided through what the movie is trying to say or not. Since the Thanos issue is mostly just debated by a small portion of the fanbase, though, I would say they succeeded overall. TBH, in my opinion the worst MCU film for "plot content and development just isn't there" is IM 3.
Edited by KnownUnknown on Dec 16th 2020 at 10:53:37 AM
The gauntlet was nearly fried and nearly killed Thanos just by killing half of all life, I feel like creation is a lot more complicated than destruction, it's possible that simply creating enough resources to fit Thanos's idea of what the universe needed was beyond the gauntlet's power.
Also, Thanos's entire motivation is that he needs to prove to his dead planet's ghosts in his head that he was right all along about population control, so changing the plan in any way would be admitting that he was wrong. And "just make more resources" wasn't an option for Titan.
The fact that some people needed it spelled out to them that a plan that kills uncountable trillions is inherently bad and monstrous and absolutely unjustifiable no matter the outcome is much more a condemnation of the human race than of the people who wrote the script for Infinity War.
My various fanfics.When people argue about whether Thanos was right (or whether the movie was saying Thanos was right), it can get confusing because there are two different ways the words "right" and "wrong" can be applied to Thanos.
There's the moral sense, where you're judging Thanos's actions as morally right or wrong. But there's also the factual sense: where you're determining whether Thanos's claims (that all civilizations are facing an overpopulation crisis, and that the Snap is the only way to prevent it) are right or wrong (or, if you prefer, accurate or inaccurate).
And depending on your ethical framework, whether Thanos was right or wrong in a moral sense hinges on whether he's accurate or inaccurate in a factual sense. Killing some people now to prevent an even greater number of people from dying later is a well-worn ethical argument. But for it to apply, there actually has to be a larger threat that people need saving from, and the proposed murderous solution actually needs to be something that would work.
And the movies never really argue that Thanos's claims were inaccurate. When he lays out his plans, or cites previous cullings of worlds as evidence to support him, no one questions the validity of his theories or whether his plans will achieve his goals; their objections are always framed in terms of moral outrage, not factual skepticism. And given how Infinity War puts so much thematic focus on the heroes' "we don't trade lives" ethos, I think we are meant to accept Thanos's claims at face value, with the conflict being entirely about the morality of his extreme utilitarian philosophy, not about whether it's based on faulty premises.
Edited by RavenWilder on Dec 16th 2020 at 12:06:56 PM
There is some ambiguity regarding Thanos's claims. There's some Freeze-Frame Bonus in Guardians of the Galaxy that says Gamora is the Last of Her Kind. There's also the scene wheere the heroes arrive on Titan and Quill mentions how Titan's axis was off-balance along with its gravitational pull, which would suggest that was a bigger contributor to the fall of Titan than overpopulation.
Then again, these scenes are just subtle hints and might not even have been intentional. It's ambiguous, which might be part of the problem.
But there's also the larger argument that overpopulation isn't really so much the problem, it's more along the lines of distribution and systems that are designed to keep the poor from feeding themselves. But I think Renegade Cut does a better job explaining it than I ever could:
Its worth noting that the "Gamora is the last of her kind" is something that Gunn himself had wanted to recon and its possible he took the IW flashback scenes with Thanos/Gamora as a way to do that without adding on to Vol 3.

I also remember the Emperor Doom GN’s premise that Doom could be an effective (totalitarian) ruler and fix all the worlds problems but he’d get bored and would rather supervillain
He’s just a higher concept Sauron in a way
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