--- Title: Making Thanos Work Status: published Date: 2024-12-17 Category: literature Tags: writing, literary themes ad: god help me I'm writing about thanos marvel --- Did you know there are still people who think the MCU's Thanos is a deep character with interesting motivations? For all the CinemaSins "why didn't he use his powers to end scarcity, is he stupid" types, there are still "Thanos did nothing wrong" chuds. This is stupid, of course. But after seeing people be wrong on the internet, it occurred to me recently that there are a couple of genuinely interesting ways to spin the character without changing his mechanical role in the story. In fact, with just a tiny bit of re-framing, you can turn Thanos from a stupid dumb-dumb into a genuinely great villain. ## 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*. ### Wonder Woman This is a plot beat that was handled better in -- of all things -- Wonder Woman 1984. The plot of *1984* is a guy gets the power to accumulate power by granting other people's wishes like a genie, and also Wonder Woman is there. This causes horrible problems, not only because the wishes have ironic consequences, but because wish for stupid, naive stuff. This leads to this scene, where Wish Man gets an audience with the President of the United States, and offers him absolutely anything he wants: ![]({attach}./1984.mp4) This is the Thanos dynamic done right, I think. POTUS gets a blank check, a liberating moment where they're freed from the limitations of reality and resources. And that creates the horrifying moment when you realize how they want to *spend* their checks. POTUS doesn't want peace, he doesn't want domination, he doesn't want victory, he wants *more*. More everything, more weapons, more brinkmanship, more distance along exactly the same path he was on already. That's the perfect Thanos moment. The tragedy, the horror, is that the man has been bent into the shape of an intermediate goal. The responses these people have to power are fundamentally wrong, because the way they think about problems is dictated by the shape of themselves. They can't even conceive of genuine benefit. That's how you turn the snap from a cultural joke to something interesting: make it *real*. Do what comics do best: take an aspect of humanity and extrapolate it to mythic proportions. ::: aside furthermore style='--quip: "Thanos the healthcare CEO";' There is another interesting way to play the character. I think this is a lot weaker than the horse-blinder characterization, but it's still better than the text, so I'll mention it. One of Thanos' characteristics is a facade of neutrality. With the exception of the big fun superhero fights, he acts out his brutality through layers of constructed *systems*. Populations are carefully divided up at random The lack of criteria is part of his MO, but so is this insistence on a level of indirectness between himself and the actual suffering. He doesn't kill people directly. He doesn't stay around to enjoy the results. He's a bureaucrat. Characterize Thanos by leaning into this. He's that kind of heartless that reduces people down to numbers and line-items before making efficient decisions about them. He's Scrooge killing Tiny Tim through wage theft. He's the healthcare provider denying necessary care. He's the unjust judge who condemns men for the rest of their lives. He refuses to take responsibility for the gravity of his actions. He conceptualizes himself as a mindless force acting out a fundamental truth of the universe, not an active participant. It's not that he's indomitable, it's that he's "inevitable". And a dispassionate evil can be a greater threat, because it scales.