I guess we'll agree to never agree

[yvannairie]

Content warning: Interpersonal abuse

I haven't even seen the movie but I'm already getting the urge to excise myself from the Marvel conversation, and it's for the same reason I eventually grew tired of the neverending Infinity War hot takes.

So, primarily just the fact that the one genuinely insightful and engaging aspect of Thanos as a character has been lost to the fucking avalanche of people wanting to disavow his actions but going about it in the most tiresome, self-involved way possible.

Like, here's the thing, everyone who's said a variation of "abuse isn't love!" w/r/t Thanos getting the Soul Stone -- y'all watched GotG Vol.2, right? Y'all saw the disconnect between Yondu's behaviour and his intent? We all saw Peter call him out on the abusive effects of his actions while accepting that his behaviour did not fully reflect his motivations? Did we all just, like... forget that motivations are value-neutral, suddenly, just because Thanos is unlikeable and wrong?

And by all means, disagree with Thanos' actions. His critical flaw is that he maximalises the consequences of his own actions in his head (fancy that, a genocider with an elevated sense of self-importance) and as such he has to keep doing the worst thing to ensure he's still getting the best result. Hate him, if he reminds you of your own abuser, hate him if you find his writing is hack and only makes him another in a long line of delusional villains who think the ends justify the means.

But this insistence on rejecting and entirely rewriting his motivations, born purely out of an insistence that "true love" can only result in pure, healing, safe action is fucking disingenious and I am disgusted by the amount of times I've seen people insisting that they know "better" what motivates someone just because they're able to see the consequences of their actions, instead of just sticking to calling the behaviour abusive. Because it was.

I'm off to find somewhere to have this conversation that isn't a gaslit room.

Comments

[queermermaids]

ok cool! So there are some parallels that tell the audience that thanos did love his daughters, but that can happen in the same space as him treating them awfully.

There were a lot of different things, like thor killing thanos early in the movie as he tries to apologize to nebula "Maybe I should have treated you better" kinda showing that he felt some semblance of remorse, but his motivations skewed and made that apology extraordinarily subpar, and when thor decapitated him I read that as not just an extension of his own anger but anger on the behalf of Gamora and Nebula's treatment by thanos, and the multiple scenes with parents and the avengers, (I blanked out when Thor talked to his mom but supposedly it was really good because she was an amazing parent) like when Tony talked to Howard and the audience learns (once again) that Howard was an awful father but as a 50 something Tony has moved on from his childhood and only looks back remembering the bad to make sure he doesn't repeat that with his kid, showing another actual good parent

but the main comparison was when clint and nat had to get the soul stone, the same way thanos got it. They loved each other, validating the reading that thanos did love gamora, but they also fought each other to see which one would die (it was natasha) showing that while the love was there, the contexts were different, one being a deep friendship and trust that their death would not be in vain, and the other showing a different love that many could read as something different, but the universe's rules meant both had to be love for it to work

ultimately the movie shows that your reading is right (love doesn't equal non violent actions) and it also shows that just because thanos loved his daughters didn't mean he wasn't abusive and genocidal

oh and if its any consolidation the movie as shows that thanos' actions (explicitly because he said this) were not about balancing the universe but about him wanting control and gratitude, which the universe did not give him and so he switches his plan to complete genocide

[yvannairie]

Okay! I kinda wish they didn't even show him showing remorse, or reconsideration, or changing his goals, because I feel like the cycles of consequences and escalation have already been present in the movies, but I do like that different types of behaviour stemming from the same motivation are shown. It fits, though, this is just a personal preference.

I think I wrote about this after I'd seen IW the first time, about how it redeemed Ultron as a villain for me by solidifying that theme of the consequences of the solution exceeding the problem that everyone was trying to fix. It happened in IM-IM2, it happened further with Fury in Avengers, with Tony in Ultron -- it's the reason neither Tony nor Steve "won" in Civil War, and why T'Challa won there and in Black Panther. Big solutions are shown to fail all the time, and then the people undertaking the big solutions are the ones who are stuck in a cycle of repairing their mistakes. SHIELD. Tony. Thanos. It doens't work, and the consequences of your actions will define you.

Even Tony doesn't fully break out of this, because he dies in the end. This is why, as much as I dislike it, Steve is the one who lives. Because he's never been one for big solutions -- he ends up representing an opposing big solution in CW, but even there his motivations are just "protect Bucky".

Bad is inherited. Bad passes on. There is no single character in the MCU who doesn't have to fight not to pass the bad on, and a lot of characters who think that necessity of passing the bad on necessitates they create a greater good to pass on with it. Thanos being the extreme end of that thinking is what makes him for me.