Thread by @Amuk3

I'm going to rant a bit about Thanos. So, if you're one of the twelve people who isn't my mother that hasn't seen #InfinityWar yet, don't read this thread. There will be spoilers.

Except for a couple of years of X-Men in the mid-80s, I never really read comics. I like them-and I've mostly liked comic book movies-but they were never my thing. So I didn't come to the MCU with any knowledge of the backstory or expectations about the stories.

I generally accept changes to stories moving from one medium to another of they're necessary and done well. But I am one of those people who gets annoyed when something I like gets made into a movie or TV show and stuff I consider really important gets screwed with.

A bunch of my friends read lots and lots of comics. And a lot of them get annoyed over stuff in comic book movies that I don't care about, so I guess it's good that I don't have that baggage with respect to the MCU. Which, on the whole, has been amazing.

One thing upon which pretty much every comics fan I know who read the stories the MCU is based on has agreed is that the driving force of the Infinity War in the comics-the reason Thanos wants the infinity stones-is dumb.

If you don't know it already, here it is: He's in love with Lady Death and thinks killing half the Universe will impress her.

No, seriously, that's his reason in the comic books.

So, pretty much one and all, my comic reading friends hoped the MCU would give Thanos a better rationale for his actions.

Now, don't get me wrong, #InfinityWar is awesome. It's a triumph and Marvel is to be commended for spending a decade and 18 movies building up to it. One need only look at the disaster that is DC's half-assed attempt to emulate Marvel here to see how it could have sucked.

Sadly, the underpinning rationale they gave Thanos is actually dumber than the Lady Death thing.

"Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist, but that's just peanuts to space."

The Universe is immense, but Thanos is obsessed with finite resources.

He spends years, through underlings and direct action, collecting the stones (and, decades, apparently, culling planets the old fashioned way). Because his own planet didn't like his suggested fix for their Malthusian resource crunch.

Because it was objectively insane.

By the way, Titan, in the vision he shows us, looks more than technologically advanced enough to have solved this problem in any number of ways.

Tony can have a suit made of nanoparticles pop out of a small, shiny box on his chest in mere moments. Titan looks to be at least on the tech level Tony Stark is. Surely they could have improved their resource allocation or colonized other planets. But I digress.

Anyway, the aptly-named Mad Titan has decided that the only solution to the "problem" of the Universe's finite resources being consumed by (sentient) life is to kill half of them.

This is monumentally stupid. Like, makes Courting the Goddess of Death With a Grand Gesture look like genius level stupid.

Maybe Marvel thought it would get some discomfort-creating pangs of sympathy from that portion of their viewership that hasn't figured out that Paul Ehrlich is a laughing stock hack. I don't know. What I do know is, it's crap.

For one thing, it's obviously temporary. Maybe Gamora's home planet *is* a paradise now. But if it got to "problemactic" levels of overpopulation once, it will inevitably do it again. As will everywhere else that has sentient life. Agent Smith can tell you all about that.

So, even if his plan wasn't insane and evil, it would absolutely require someone with his (allegedly) singular will to come along every few generations, load up the infinity gauntlet, and do it all again. And again. And again. Forever.

So, there's that. Then there's the flaw that, if the gauntlet makes one all-powerful, why not just use it to do something less, you know, insane?

Like "terraforming" barren planets to be livable. Making new ones out of cosmic dust. Or altering sentient lifeforms to be less fecund or need fewer resources. Or create energy-to-matter technology so people can turn (quite abundant) solar energy into stuff.

There are quite a few options, most of which would have the galaxy's greatest heroes working with him to make it happen, rather than opposing him at every step.

So, while I loved #InfinityWar, the underlying rationale for the plot must be rated a failure.

It's not Thanos and the Infinity War if he's not looking to kill half the Universe. I get that.

So, kudos to Marvel for trying to stay somewhat in Thanos' lane and not just swapping in the tired old "Megalomaniac Just Wants To Rule The Universe" route.

But they get an F for execution. If this is what they chose, they should've just kept Cate Blanchett around and had Thanos fawn over her.

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