So Thanos

[Beansycheese]

He didn't really do anything after killing half the galaxy. He didn't seem to get any jollies out of it. Why didn't he make half the galaxy never exist? Or make all the planets bigger?

In the original comic arc death is a woman and he is in love with her and wants her attention. But they probably thought that was a bit naff for the cinema version or something.

I think I remember there being that weird scene in the cinema version where he just of retired on a farm after offing everyone. Like “jobs done”.

I know right. I can imagine the actor saying what's my motive for this scene' and the director just shrugging 🤷‍♀️

I liked his lack of anything dramatic. Makes it seem like he really just did what he thought was for the greater good, without necessarily having a goal of personal gain. Definitely made him a more interesting character in my view - more grey than your typical baddie who wants to destroy everything to get something for themselves.

At least he disintegrated people and didn't leave the bodies pilling up on the streets.

He believed he had a vocation, a calling I suppose and he followed it through. Then when he was done, he just went to carry on life quietly because he had achieved what he set out to do. I think it's interesting because at the end it made him almost sympathetic in a way that an antagonist in it for personal gain wouldn't be.

He genuinely believed that it was the right thing to do, and it probably was if you are completely dispassionate about it and view 'the greater good' as being the ultimate goal no matter the price. You can also argue that he is truly altruistic and willing to make sacrifices himself for what he believes - he killed his own daughter to achieve his goals, so he's not a hypocrite. In a way, he's quite selfless!

Why didn't he just make more resources with all those infinity stones?

Also Thanos is super old and has seen planets come and go, destroyed by greed, overpopulation, etc. Certainly in the comics he's 1000+ years old IIRC so you can imagine how over that time, seeing pain and destruction of world and civilisations, he has become fixed on his plan.

Wasn't it something to do with cosmic balance?

So creating new resources wouldn't have restored balance, more created a new one?

That's the major plothole that comes from removing the character of Death from the storyline. In the comics, Death was the one that had the issue: she believed there was a great cosmic imbalance because there were more people alive in the universe than had died in total. She resurrected Thanos, who loved her and had been killed trying to please her in the past (through extensive mass murder but not like in the MCU). Death tasked him with uniting all of the infinity stones for the first time and using them to "correct" this imbalance, which he then did.

In the movies, the motivation is changed to be almost saving the universe from itself by 'making the hard call'. But this is deeply flawed as a storyline because Thanos could have just created an infinite store of resources for those in the universe to use.

Thank you, that makes more sense now

Hi, I am reviving my old thread because I am once again watching the movie. Instead of killing half the universe, why couldn't he make them never have existed. Everyone would be happier and there would be more resources to go round.

He wiped out half the first time around but admitted that was a mistake and decided to do what you're suggesting.

"I know what I must do. I will shred this universe down to its last atom and then, with the stones you've collected for me, create a new one teeming with life that knows not what it has lost but only what it has been given. A grateful universe."

This is, in effect, the same thing. No one knows the loss of half the population because they were born naive.

Give us a few more years, we will do that on our own.

Trousers of time innit? You can't go around messing with causality. What if you killed Churchill and Stalin but not Hitler by mistake? And it's supposed to be random, but you couldn't do that with ancestors because people would be randomly blinked out because granny was.

Did you ever read the Ben Elton book Time and Time Again. @MrsTerryPratchett ? That was an amazing novel about the consequences of changing the past.

While they were wizzing around in their fancy suits shame they did nothing about human trafficking, inequality between rich and poor and climate change.

Thanos was right.

Hes a great baddie because he has depth. You don't necessarily dislike him because you get where he is coming from.

I will have a look for it.