Why Thanos doesn’t work§

First, a super-quick summary of what I’m reacting to.

The original sin here is how the MCU signals Thanos to the audience. The text makes a deliberate gesture toward Thanos’ actions and motivations being based on a philosophy of balancing the universe for the greater good and thus morally ambiguous, but it’s not backed up by anything and immediately collapses when inspected.

Thanos grew up on Titan, which suffered an overpopulation crisis. Thanos suggested reducing their resource costs by killing a random half of the population, a proposal which was rejected so thoroughly they exiled him from the planet for it. The planet eventually does succumb to an overpopulation crisis. Thanos is convinced his genocide plan is necessary to keep the same thing from happening everywhere, and starts a centuries-long campaign of wars that end with him indiscriminately killing half the population of any place he can find.

The movie plays him as “reluctant”, which he is not. When his planet is destroyed, Thanos centers this around himself — not just a “loss” but a conflict he lost — and spends the rest of his life trying to prove to himself his plan would have worked and so he was the one wronged. His noble model of “balance” is internalized bullshit to cover an ultimately childish motivation.

Simple enough. I’m not covering any new ground here, I don’t think.

Horse-blind Thanos§

So how do you make a cosmic genocider complex and interesting?

First, you pretty much have to give up on “moral ambiguity”, unless you’re making that the main plot of your movie. The convergent instrument fallacy “I demand to have my boot on your face because I think that’s best for everyone” doesn’t cut it. You also don’t want to change Thanos’s mechanical role in the story for this. He still needs to be an immensely powerful conquering force who ultimately kills half the population. No Infamous Iron Man’ing.

So here’s how you fix it:

Thanos starts from a position of power — the royal family — but when he tried to impose his idea he didn’t have enough power to actualize his vision. So, in reaction (almost as a trauma response) he starts accruing power in the form of military might. Thanos is already a talented military tactician himself when he’s exiled from Titan, so we know Titan wasn’t really edenic. Titan wasn’t overtly evil, but it was militaristic enough that Thanos transitions straight into position as a conquering warlord.

With a militaristic head-start, Thanos spends his military career developing the strength of his armies, with an absolute focus on this idea of balance through destruction. But this keeps Thanos immersed in a military culture of his own creation for centuries, which becomes a feedback loop that changes the way his mind works and how he views the world.

That’s the hook. Thanos’ problem is that he’s wearing horse blinders. His background has fundamentally limited how he thinks about the world, and this is what stunts him. The only solutions he can imagine to any problem are violent because his thought patterns have boxed him in to a way of thinking that only produces that flavor of idea. All he has is a hammer.

So far everything I’ve been talking about applies to Thanos as a warlord. But this does mean he’s limited by the fact that he’s only wielding the tools of war. He physically only has a hammer.

The introduction of the infinity gauntlet is the perfect linchpin to this theme. Completing the gauntlet should represent a moment of immense freedom. After centuries of pursuing his goals with force, he’s finally handed a true blank check. While before he was limited by the paradigms of force, he can finally choose any result he wants and achieve it directly. It’s absolute power, limited only by the imagination of the user.

And instead of addressing the root cause of the problem, he just intensifies his pursuit of genocide. With this, what was ostensibly an instrumental goal becomes the thing he chooses to affirm instead of the original goal that prompted this whole course of action.

This should be the culmination of the theme: Thanos is stupid. His fatal flaw is that he is indeed limited by his own imagination. He’s spent so much time pursuing his path with absolute focus that he can’t stop when it’s time. All at once he has every tool in the world, but all his psyche wants to do is hammer. What’s interesting about Thanos isn’t that his original motivation was harm mitigation, it’s that at some point he stopped wanting that.