Only going to comment to say that this view is elitism, and many, many, many people take issue with this view.
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"Thanos is the protagonist - How Infinity War works" and "Thanos deserved to win", two video essays.
- Thread starter ZattMurdock
- Start date
Only going to comment to say that this view is elitism, and many, many, many people take issue with this view.
I must have missed something then. Someone tell me, could Titans really not have left their planet and gone for a new one? Was nobody a sorcerer there who could solve all their resource ills?
Erik loved his pops and lost his pops. His dad was all he had, and losing him broke him, probably long before the reality of being a fatherless Black boy in America did.
Dude lost it, but it's reductive to say he didn't rise above his station. Went from the streets of Oakland to an MIT graduate. It's also reductive to discount the amount of people who grow up without their parents and are pretty much fucked sideways their whole lives as a result.
While I can see some positives out of it, such as species the universe over deciding it isn't worth killing each other any more, I don't think people would begin to feel guilty because they start believing the loss of life was worth it.
It might force the Avengers to ask if they should undo The Snap, though. While the ends didn't justify the means, if those ends really are beneficial on some level and have already been achieved, do you take everyone back to how things were whether they want you to or not? Even if years have passed, many have come to terms with their grief and moved on in some capacity?
On an emotional level, there's no doubt in my mind that you'd bring everyone back. On a practical level, I can't help but wonder if you're just bringing people back from the dead so they can die again later on and their loved ones have to cope with that loss twice.
At what point does it no longer become worth undoing what Thanos did?
The avengers as a group are the main characters, each of the team member's interactions with Thanos are told from their points of view. Thanos, however, is the protagonist; we follow his goal of trying to acquire the infinity stones, through the point of view of our main characters, who also are the antagonist.
Yes, true. But, typically those movies (at least the good ones) are continually testing the protagonist's character and views such that his/her struggle is to retain their original position. I'd actually argue that Cap in the First Avenger is weak because his core character isn't tested fully enough. It's not completely absent as Thanos is, but it is wanting. His main test is retaining his core goodness after being granted remarkable powers and physique. He goes from a loser chump with dreams of fighting bad guys, to an uber soldier who can actually crush bad guys. And, we see some struggle as he deals with his new fame but it's not enough, in my opinion, which is what drags down the movie. His character isn't tested enough.
Thanos isn't tested at all.
I didnt say station, i said situation.
Killmonger goes to MIT, works for the CIA, whatever. But holds onto that grievance through his entire life, killing thousands of people all over the world "just so he can get to whoever is sitting on the throne of Wakanda" to prove a point.
Being "fucked sideways" by losing a parent is one thing, but i will judge people who go on killing sprees because of that all day.
Those people that Killmonger killed to satisfy his bloodlust and grievances, did they not also have families? Did killmonger spare a thought for them or was his single minded pursuit on getting what he thought life owed him?
Nothing that was in the actual movie alluded to him ever being a protagonist. People are overanalyzing this, as they always do.
He's done nothing but push an agenda about murdering half of the galaxy. That's it. It's never explained with enough context to justify supporting his actions. Why would anyone be okay with what he's doing?
Maybe in the next movie we'll get that. Otherwise he's just a compassionless doomsday villain.
He's done nothing but push an agenda about murdering half of the galaxy. That's it. It's never explained with enough context to justify supporting his actions. Why would anyone be okay with what he's doing?
Maybe in the next movie we'll get that. Otherwise he's just a compassionless doomsday villain.
OP
OP
You writing your trademarked wall of texts and hot takes don't make you right, homie. But you do you.
So, we should just trust what a writer says about a film and accept it as fact? In that case, BvS was a deep masterpiece that challenged the notions of a hero film whilst properly deconstructing our two heroes.
Again, I don't give two shits what the writer thinks of his own work. The text of the film must support it.
I mean, you could actually try refuting and engaging in the points I made.
A writer's opinion is not valuable by itself, especially since they have bias. Rather, their thoughts must be judged against the actual text of their work.
There's is no reason to think the snap offers even a temporary reprieve for anyone. You can't just take the global economy and remove half the people in it and expect everything to scale down without a hitch. Half the agricultural base disappearing at once is a good way to give a planet a food production problem if it didn't previously have one, together with the resulting economic collapse and high likelihood of war. On a planet with nuclear warheads all over the place. People can fight over resources on a planet with three billion people just as well as they can on one with six. In fact we had around that number as we just recovered from a war that killed 50 million people and were embarking on a cold war that might have killed everyone. As liberal interventionists go, Thanos is on the reckless side.
Also the common sentiment that we don't need to find Thanos plan comprehensible since he's just a mad villain doing mad villainous things seems at odds if not with the idea that he's the protagonist, then certainly with the idea that he's a satisfying protagonist.
Also the common sentiment that we don't need to find Thanos plan comprehensible since he's just a mad villain doing mad villainous things seems at odds if not with the idea that he's the protagonist, then certainly with the idea that he's a satisfying protagonist.
I like the videos, because they don't include an objective view of Thanos plan and only use the impression he makes on the audience from his actions and how he presents himself. It's hard to argue that this inspires admiration to some extent.
If you include his plan and play the no fun police then of course that shifts a bit, but they've done their best to keep this problem down imo (the movie makers). It's quite hard to completely tackle that problem with what the infinity gauntlet represents, of course that would paint Thanos as a bit naive if he can't come up with a better solution, the best they could do is have him and his followers act aggressively villainous most of the time (Black Order & Co). It makes his plan a bit more understandable and paints it in the light that this is what Thanos wants to happen, despite of other possibilities the gauntlet gives him! And then it is the only way not because it really is the only way, but because it is the only way he wants it to happen!
If you include his plan and play the no fun police then of course that shifts a bit, but they've done their best to keep this problem down imo (the movie makers). It's quite hard to completely tackle that problem with what the infinity gauntlet represents, of course that would paint Thanos as a bit naive if he can't come up with a better solution, the best they could do is have him and his followers act aggressively villainous most of the time (Black Order & Co). It makes his plan a bit more understandable and paints it in the light that this is what Thanos wants to happen, despite of other possibilities the gauntlet gives him! And then it is the only way not because it really is the only way, but because it is the only way he wants it to happen!
The movie is not portrayed from Thanos' perspective but he is basically the driving force of everything that happens in it.
His logic actually makes sense. Its similar to controlling populations of animals with hunting. You cut the population in half every 30ish years. If you continually double the resources the population will exponentially grow into infinity, and eventually the infinity gauntlet wouldn't be able to handle doing it. It already look pretty beat up after infinity war.
I'm not very enamored with Thanos myself. He's a villain straight out of any shonen anime in a lot of ways. Brolin did a good job with the role but I feel people really overplay what an amazing villain he is. That said he is certainly the driving force of the film.
We assume everyone on Titan died, but we dont know the backstory. Maybe one or two escaped, but obviously almost all of them died otherwise killing half wouldn't be much of an improvement. The planet is uninhabitable, the race is dead. We take this for granted.
"Why dont billions of people just leave?" Is a curious statement. Where do they go? M-class planets don't grow on Trees. Thor is thousands of years old, has gone traipsing through the 9 realms all his life and STILL cant think of anywhere better than "Earth" to stick the few hundred people that are what remain of Asgard.
Now imagine instead of 200 People, Asgard is 8 billion refugees. How fucked is Thor right now? Pretty fucked, honestly. Hell, he only even managed to save 200 because LOKI convinced Korg to let him take his starship to Asgard to feed his ego. If not for Loki, everyone on Asgard dies fruitlessly trying to fight Hela.
And speaking of Thor, his best solution (which was really Odins, not his) to the Ragnarok problem was to allow a huge fire demon to BLOW UP Asgard.
This despite: knowing there was an infinity gem in the throneroom the whole movie that could have made short work of Hela
And
Encountering Dr Strange at the beginning of the film who made it known it was his job to stop things like rogue threats from Asgard, and who easily tossed Loki into an endless void he couldn't get out of in seconds.
Thor is known as the Dumbest Avenger for a reason. His plans arent exactly well thought out.
Okay, that makes more sense. Personally, I would've just made every other person sterile, but I understand why he couldn't think beyond just killing.
The book for his origins goes into this a bit more.
Thanos's father was working on new buildings and slef sustaining towers for people to live in, that would help with the overpopulation. But the construction of those was going to be to slow and the resources needed for it would cause ecological harm that would decimate the planet. It's essentially us needing to produce greenhouse gases to mine material for batteries, with that greenhouse gas emissions causing severe storms and weather that would destroy whatever self sustaining resources we would have. Thanos ran all the possibilities, and deduced that population reduction and time for the planet to heal was the only outcome. When he returned to his planet, everything he predicted in his calculations had come to pass, and the inhabitants tried every method to save themselves from ecological destruction.
He then went on a crusade, stopping other planets from having the same fate and ultimately deduced the rate the universe itself would run out of habitable resources, and decided that it was better to kill half of everything now and kill trillions, rather than hundreds of trillions all dying hundreds of thousands of years from now.
The problem with Thanos is he doesn't understand the value of life, his entire upbringing was in near isolation and he was scorned from society. The empathy most people have, he never grew up with due to his father and his planets distaste for him since he had several genetic mutations.
The story with Thanos works because he is making a decision that if happened today, would save our planet from severe ecological destruction and a snap would effectively bring our CO2 emissions under control. We're all in the family car ready to drive off a cliff, but because we have human connection and are emotional, we'd never kill those who know how to drive to prevent it. Thanos see's the people as simple numbers, unlike every other living being he doesn't see the importance of each person or what they mean to other people.
It's an impossible choice, if you were told you had to kill half your family so the rest of your family could live, could anyone be able to pull the trigger on that? No. But he sees himself capable of making the sacrifice of making that choice for everyone and being able to take the burden away from them.
Thanks for this one. I usually skip tie in books but this one looks like it might be worth the read.
I think you could knock it out in about 6 hours. It has some slow parts but if you enjoy the character, its well worth the read. It's based on the original script for infinity war too, so its not just like some half assed tie in novel where some third party was told to write the backstory for him.
You did say situation. My bad.
I'm not arguing the dude's actions were excusable, just that you're ignoring children in his position fail to rise above as often as they succeed.
And "just to prove a point" is absolutely reductive, but I'm sure you know that and were just being hyperbolic.
I don't think that's what Thanos expects.
His whole thing is sacrifice and being strong enough to make the right choices to survive. I can believe he fully expects some civilizations to fail to adjust in the wake of the snap, and is fine with that knowledge.
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He had to toss someone he loved off a cliff. Like wtf are you talking about.
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[Citation Needed]
I already discussed how this was not a test in that post.
I'm only here to see my fellow nerds throw pies at one another. Carry on, nerdlingers. Carry on, you beautiful dingalings! \m/
Elitism to a certain extend is truth though, especially in a case like this. If, let's say, through complete random chance in the snap 95% of a surgeons disappear (which is completely possible in a completely random situation), a lot of people on Earth undergoing surgery are going to be fucked. You can't just pick up a random person on the street, give him a scalpel and say "Let's do this!".
I do think every person has the possibility to excel given the training, but you don't have time to retrain milions of people in a freak incident like Thanos deleting half of humanity (and thereby killing slightly more than half, because there will be massive traffic collisions, planes crashing, trains derailing, etc. if something like this would happen).
It being a test he passed with flying colors without hesitation doesn't really make it less of a test, does it?
I'm surprised by those that defiantly proclaim Thanos can't be the protagonist by definition when I would argue by definition nobody else in Infinity War can be described as the protagonist but Thanos. He has the most screen time and is the character who sets things in motion. Not to mention the whole hero's journey subversion, which is to say all of the Marvel characters (I believe) remain pretty much static while Thanos grows and changes by the end of the movie. I think there is this superficial notion that protagonist means hero when that is simply, objectively, not the standard by which we measure such things. This is actually pretty cut and dry yet some in here make it seem like it's the exact opposite. It's strange.
I think a more interesting debate is whether Aaron Burr is the protagonist in Alexander Hamilton because that's a nuanced discussion.
Thanos IS the protagonist of Infinity War and that's one of the things that makes him and the movie so interesting.
I think a more interesting debate is whether Aaron Burr is the protagonist in Alexander Hamilton because that's a nuanced discussion.
Thanos IS the protagonist of Infinity War and that's one of the things that makes him and the movie so interesting.
Citation is in the movie. It's the rule of the test. If he could just throw anything anyone off the cliff he would have thrown Nebula off. Not to mention Thanos has always been portrayed as a reliable narrator.
Red Skull: In order to take the Stone you must lose that which you love. A soul, for a soul.
It's right there.
There's not a single scene in the movie where Thanos is just amongst his generals, or by himself. He's always interacting with the heroes. Except of course for the ending shot on his farm.
The story is not told from his perspective. This is matter-of-fact
Thor exists.
The story is not told from his perspective. This is matter-of-fact
Thor exists.
The antagonist opposes the protagonist, if we just simplify it. The protagonist isn't the hero and the antagonist isn't the villain. Thanks is the main character of the movie who grows and changes by the end of the movie and the Marvel heroes are opposing him throughout the movie.
I respectfully think you should brush up on your understanding of these fundamental literary terms and ideas if you are going to criticize others for "misusing" or "misunderstanding" them.
I feel like this would be a semantic argument, and those suck. So yeah, I'm willing to say that between the end of Thor: Ragnarok and the end of Infinity War Thor does grow, although what's interesting to me is that his growth seems more temporary. Again, no semantics though!
But his growth, as well as screen time, are outdone by Thanos. Not to mention how the movie is framed around Thanos.
And I haven't thought about this much so there might be a little character growth here and there for some other characters (I think Bruce Banner/Hulk is maybe the only other one) but the point is Thanos has the most screen time, undergoes the most character growth and arguably the most emphasis on character building moments, the movie is constructed around his journey and hell it even ends with "Thanos will be back" so there really isn't a debate on who the main character of the film is.
EDIT: Also, who in Infinity War gets a scene by themselves? And why is that a determining factor in an ensemble movie like this anyway?
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I haven't watched videos on it yet because I kinda agree that he's the main character if we're going by just screentime. Though when I think about it, it is hard to say if the movie is primarily told from his perspective. If it was entirely told from Thanos's perspective, I feel we would have seen a scene like Thanos going to Knowere and the process of him getting that stone.
Thanos doesn't change at all. He learns nothing. Isn't really challenged in achieving his goals (the Gamora scene tries to tell us this, but because he is not really developed as a character, it doesn't ring true), he doesn't have a 'need' to discover. The story isn't told from his perspective (when the Avengers are in the same scene as Thanos, we follow it from their perspective). I'm not even sure if he has that much screentime (been a while since I've seen the movie). Maybe when you take all characters one by one, but I had the impression the Avengers have a lot more scenes than him.
It's true nobody in IW changes. That's one of the main issues I have with this movie. It's a superfluous plot that feels like one big set-up for the next one, and ends when the story finally begins at the snap. Barely anything happens on a character level, there is barely an arc in sight. It's McGuffin chasing for 2 hours. It could easily have been condensed to the first act of one movie, and would've been way better for it.
And I'm not saying every movie needs a protagonist that changes, but every story needs a form of substantial change. If the protagonist doesn't change, he is often in a society that doesn't fit his character or worldview, and which he has to change. Paddington is an excellent example of that. (You can argue that Thanos changes the world around him, but it's superfluous as it's just a plot device. The world hasn't changed. It just loses 50% of it's population. And added to that, Thanos is never really challenged or tested.
Thanos is not the protagonist, not because he's a villain, but because the text and the way the movie is told doesn't support this thesis at all. It might have been that it was the writer's intention to have him as the protagonist, but than they didn't go all the and ultimaltely have not succeeded in what they set out to do.
Max is the titular namesake of Fury Road but Furiosa is arguably the protagonist
Yeah, "Thanos being placed in the role of protagonist" can describe at least a half dozen Jim Starlin books written in the last few decades.
I agree Thor definitely fits the role of The protagonist as well or better than Thanos, but whynotboth.
"You know what would solve all the worlds problems? Killing people!"
"You know what would solve the homeless problem? Killing homeless people!"
"I can't take care of this baby! I'll leave in the car during the summer heat."
"Jews bother me. Let's gas them!"
Ask yourself, do these sound like heroes?
"You know what would solve the homeless problem? Killing homeless people!"
"I can't take care of this baby! I'll leave in the car during the summer heat."
"Jews bother me. Let's gas them!"
Ask yourself, do these sound like heroes?
The main argument is that "Thanos deserved to win". Like we were supposed to cheer him on like the heroes of these films.
It's not that you're supposed to cheer him, it's that he didn't hesitate to do what he needed to do no matter the personal cost, that is why he "deserves" it more. Cap and the Avengers cause how many deaths in Wakanda and ultimately the universe because they wouldn't sacrifice a robot, they didn't deserve to win anything. Thanos sacrifices all his Black Order and Gamora for something he doesn't get any benefit out of it, just something he thinks is the right thing to do.
I don't believe this is true. In fact, the central rebuttal to this is kind of funny because it specifically points to fan expectations of Thanos as a character and how, even after being subverted, some cling to their preconceived ideas of who he is and this is ironically even brought up in the movie. In order to get the Soul Stone, he has to sacrifice somebody he loves. Not only does this prove that Thanos loves Gamora, or else he wouldn't have gotten the stone, but this shows the level of his conviction in his plan. It's the underlying reason why the prevailing notion of "he deserved to win" has legitimacy. And if you remember an earlier scene where Thanos uses the Reality Stone to trick Gamora into revealing her true feelings towards Thanos - that some part of her cares about him and would mourn him - that is the sort of character growth from before the movies, on into the first scene where he seems so heartless, is shown.
I'm not sure where you get the idea that he isn't challenged. Iron Man and company almost get the glove off and Thor almost kills him.
To me that's what is interesting about this film. In terms of film language, which I'm so not an expert, you are mostly right. There aren't many shots that are from his perspective, though there are a few. However, why people say it's a subversion of the hero's journey is A) the text of the movie does suggest he is the protagonist and B) he's a villain who is fulfilling these story beats. As for parsing screen time, I don't know that it's necessary. At some point some mixture of heroes would collectively have more screen time than Thanos, but the character who has the most time and who propels the plot forward the most is Thanos. That is what makes it his movie and why I say it is framed around him. It''s not as clean cut as most movies, especially blockbusters, but I do think it's pretty obvious who is the protagonist.