#like girl i have my own opinions about dc sometimes but blocking and looking away works much better than whatever the fuck
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Thoughts on Infinity War, and Thanos' Motivation
Disclaimer: I'm not a Marvel expert. Some of my information on comic plots was collected from wikis and secondary articles, due to a lack of access to a primary source or the simple inaccuracy of my own memory. I also mostly enjoyed Infinity War, and any criticism herein should not be taken as decrying the whole.
Spoilers behind the cut. Please close your eyes and scroll super fast, block tags, duck and cover, etc. if you’re on mobile, because, seriously, spoilers.
An extremely simplified version of movie production:
From a production standpoint, Iron Man was a huge risk for the studios fronting the money for it. After critical and box office flops from 90s Batman films and other various superhero action flicks, studios typically found comic book movies to underperform in comparison to budgetary requirements for good visuals, making them unattractive. Marvel has taken a large step away from making comic book movies, to making comic book adaptations, because what works on the page doesn’t work in a moving picture.
Marvel Studios’ cinematic success has almost nothing to do with how compelling the source material is – because some of Marvel’s library is pretty much slush pile garbage. This was before your average artist or consumer realized you can get pretty literary while still having cool pictures on a page. They’re valuable because they propelled the comic industry to widespread success, but the source is best examined with a critical eye towards tone deaf and anachronistic viewpoints on race, sexuality, gender, and pretty much everything else. Marvel Studios has done a fairly consistent job of divorcing the cinematic canon from the original medium’s baggage, to which I attribute a large portion of the films’ success in comparison to very lukewarm iterations of DC or X-Men.
As media consumers, we’re accustomed to having a finished product to hold and analyze. When considering story, in terms of plotting and pacing, I personally believe it’s most helpful to compare the scope of the MCU production to be similar to that of a television show, rather than a traditional movie or movie series. It may be startling to know that even very successful television shows, like Breaking Bad or Stranger Things, often don’t even have all the episodes completely written out prior to beginning filming of a season.
Marvel Studios’ movies have been in production for ten years, with many, many different hands in the pot, and earlier scripts don’t always set up the best planting and payoff of character or plot elements later in the continuity. (For visual learners, Lindsay Ellis has a very layman-friendly example using clips from Mad Max: Fury Road.)
You can see where this might start to cause some consistency issues.
Crossover event comics and the necessary sacrifice of emotional development:
For anyone walking in to expecting Avengers: Infinity War to have a lot of character development, I’m very sorry for your loss.
There was never going to be a grand emotional reunion for Steve and Bucky, and there was never going to be whole hours dedicated to bonding and witty bickering and new friendships that weren’t absolutely vital to the plot. That we got things like the Steve-and-Bucky hug, the jealous Star-Lord vs. Thor moments, and Steve introducing himself politely to Groot were for the benefit of the audience more than advancing the plot, which is a huge victory in terms of crushing as much as possible into a theatrical cut.
A film production has a finite amount of screen time to allocate before a movie becomes bloated. When people joke about Infinity War being the most ambitious crossover event, I don’t think some of them realize how on the mark that is from a production standpoint. Hard decisions have to be made between what isn’t vital to advancing plot in a compelling way and what was retained to meet audience expectations. Infinity War often felt like it tried to recapture that Joss Whedon-ish sassy-but-kinda-flat comedy from the first Avengers, and that meant punchlines for jokes sometimes land at emotionally inappropriate times because characters just don’t have cinematic space for witty banter between shooting aliens and losing everyone they ever cared about.
There’s a difference in author-audience expectations of what’s important in these team-up movies, and also gaps between fans actively participating in fandom because they love the characters and casual moviegoers looking for a blockbuster. It all comes down to how much each party in the creative transaction is willing to settle for. Traditionally, Marvel has set up the character-driven plots and subplots in individual comics with occasional crossover cameos for a few issues when another character or baddie is relevant to the plot. The large crossover events, like Civil War, Contest of Champions, or Infinity are almost always plot-heavy and character-light.
This is so much easier in comic book format, where multiple series can be coordinated in regular, paced releases, and different comic issues may happen parallel or directly before/after the event crossovers. Movies take a significantly larger amount of time to produce, through pre-production, filming, post-production, marketing, and distribution.
A brief (I’m serious, they’ve been making comics since the 1939) explication of source material:
One of the largest disconnects for me, as a fan of both the comics and the movies, was the change in Thanos’ motivation, but not his mission. For those who aren't aware of the origins of his character, he essentially wants to murder people to impress a girl – Mistress Death, to be specific. He wants to kill half of all life in the universe so that he can be her equal and win her affection.
Dorkly did a pretty solid breakdown of some of Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet story and the innate misogynistic slant of his character, including comic panels from the original source material, that paints comic!Thanos an internet Nice Guy™. (Feel free to skim the article; it's a bit slow to get to the point.) Perusing the comic panels, you can see Thanos is hella into negging and is spiteful when Mistress Death shows interest in another dude (spoilers: it’s Deadpool). He clearly believes love is possession, and if he can’t have what he wants, then, good golly, no one can.
He’s also really off the rails – dubbed the Mad Titan even before his objectification mega crush on a badass corpse with a wicked bod – and is personally responsible for destroying Titan. He’s not a villain that believes he’s the hero, and this shift away from his motivation being dangerous-and-horrible to dangerous-and-misguided casts the first shadow on the premise.
My (very personal) opinion on the execution:
MCU essentially played keep away with some of the more supernatural elements of the source material, at least until introducing Dr. Strange. In doing so they had to construct Thanos’ motivation for a comic-book-inspired task out of whole cloth. There is no Mistress Death. Secondary characters that were discrete entities are often pulling double duty*.
(*Or triple. See also: Bucky Barnes, who is wearing the backstory of Captain America's gay best friend Arnie Roth and now White Wolf. If you were previously unaware of this factoid, please enjoy the irony that Marvel’s biggest pro-American propaganda piece had an openly gay best friend circa early 80s but Civil War ham-fistedly had to work in that awkward-as-fuck smooch between Steve and Peggy Carter’s hot young romantic surrogate niece.)
So, okay, they have to reinvent Thanos, who we've only seen in a handful of post-credit scenes and vicariously learned, through Loki in the first Avengers movie and then Gamora in Guardians, is a conqueror and also really Bad News™.
I buy everything so far. And why not? Black Panther made me love Killmonger and his rage, and the parallels to contemporary issues made him fairly empathetic without highlighting that his perspective was necessarily the ‘correct’ one. Similarly, Spider-Man: Homecoming’s villain, Vulture, was believable in the sort of suffering everyman-turned-desperate way, highlighting the fallout of the Space Invaders vs. Avengers destruction without suggesting the audience should root for Vulture.
In general, I am on board for these movies going straight for the throat on the big baddies of the comic universe because movie production is lengthy, expensive, and time-consuming. Dear Marvel Studios, Give me Avengers vs. Dr. Doom. Love, Me.
A villain can be built up over the course of a single movie (or two). Armed with this optimism, and heartened by recent Marvel Studios successes in characterization, I walked into Infinity War expecting as much gratuitous violence, universe-cleansing genocide, and genuine fear of Thanos as I could possibly expect from something Disney-adjacent.
I knew people were going to die. Let me say – there was no way to spoil this for me. The Infinity Gauntlet comic series starts with half the universe dying. I expected there to be ‘casualties’ and even though the Russo bros said that this wasn’t two parts of the same movie, it’s certainly serial. At minimum, I was expecting Thanos bent on conquering the cosmos, worshiping at the altar of death in the abstract, if not groveling for an inevitable-cosmic-force-turned unattainable woman.
And yet. And yet.
We got the purple version of the Kool-Aid man with some seriously unaddressed parent-child issues (mirrored in Tony Stark’s loss of Peter Parker) and a wholly unimaginative motivation. I won’t go too far much into the movie’s alarming efforts at framing Thanos as a sympathetic character despite his genocidal and horribly abusive tendencies, because I am A) not an expert at identifying film technique and B) the push for Thanos to be an empathetic villain has been analyzed elsewhere.
Phenomenal, limitless cosmic power and all you want to do is break shit? For all the immaturity of it, Thanos’ comic book motivation was more believable.
To those arguing that the his motivations in the movie are predicated off of him being the Mad Titan and therefore not rooted in logic: The film did not explicitly plant the idea – except in the way that we know genocide is bad due to an innate sense of morality – that he was unhinged and power-mad, nor did they really give the audience any payoff.
Instead, we get, ‘I don’t really want to do this, but I must.’
There was a point where I started wondering why the hell he wasn’t just being steadily roasted by the Avengers for not receiving some sort of basic education in the evils of wealth disparity and resource distribution.
As an audience member, was I meant to believe this incredibly powerful entity at the center of a massive fleet, accompanied by a group of talented and sycophantic followers, couldn’t think of a better way to bring ‘balance’ to the universe?
Perhaps Thanos’ justification is simply the conceit of the way the universe operates, required to propel a plot forward. However, this is also poorly explained. There are many unanswered questions: Why is it a given that killing half the universe will create balance? What does balance look like? Is this state permanent or is it a routine, necessary evil in order to stop entropy? Is balance a socioeconomic state, or does it have some greater cosmological significance? We know that Titan fell after rejecting Thanos’ extreme solution, but would the population have actually endured and flourished if his plan had been carried out?
For a movie that did so well at handling a cast so phenomenally large as the one involved in its production, Infinity War really didn’t go in very hard on selling Thanos. I would have been perfectly happy if Marvel Studios had taken the risk to lean in hard on making the movie Thanos-centric, given Thanos even more screen time to develop his character, motives, and the rules of the universe – and then make Avengers 4 about, you know, the actual avenging.
Parting notes:
What are we left with?
Infinity War gifted us with some badass action clips, a fairly jarring death performance by Tom Holland, Cheerful Goatherd Bucky Barnes, and emotionally traumatizing bubbles. It never really sells the conundrum it sets up via Thanos. You'll never hear me insist a peice of art or entertainment is required to carry some sort of social commentary or moral message, but I feel like this could have been, tonally, a vastly different film had it considered the core of Thanos' motivations the same way it considered Vulture's or Killmonger's.
Also, where the hell is Adam Warlock (set up at the end of GotG: Vol. 2; revisit planting and payoff) to shit talk Thanos’ lack of villainous veracity when we need him?
#infinity war spoilers#infinity war#thanos#spoilers#seriously hella spoilers#mcu#marvel comics#infinity gauntlet#there was whiskey involved in writing this#so many links#thanos' motives#review#explication#meta
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Salty ask meme
Because I was asked by @luckydragon10. Here goes a dragons response. And why can't I format anything on my phone?
What OTP in your fandom do you just not get?
Huh. That’s actually a hard question because I honestly don’t care what other people ship. I personally ship only characters I find attractive. I don’t have time to wonder about other people’s likes and dislikes. Those are fictional characters. I only ship the pairings I like. I do tend to try on pairings for size from time to time. Can even be convinced if the writing is hot enough. it’s mostly about how attractively they are written.
Are there any popular fandom OTPs you only BroTP?
Lol no. It’s all about hot, filthy, dark, sensual desire for me.
Have you ever unfollowed someone over a fandom opinion?
Because they like something? Never. I DO NOT CARE what anybody likes. Like, could not give a single fuck about it. However if someone tries to force their opinion on me? Oh, then I block them and probably most of their followers. Have no time for assholes.
Do you have a NoTP in your fandom. Are they popular OTP?
OMG those questions are hard as hell. Considering I ship/read/write for over 30 fandoms this is impossible. Probably? I sometimes find the main ships boring - not even because they don’t make sense or look good - but because I oversaturated on them.
Has fandom ever ruined a pairing for you?
Only in a sense I have read too much about them :D But even then I eventually come back a year or two later. But that’s a case of boredom not ruining a pairing. Unlike the general trend I observed the recent years i do understand those a fictional characters and fics are fiction, so what if somebody writes a character as a dumb asshole or an evil mastermind? If i like the theme I will read it, if I don’t I will just not read it.
Has fandom ever made you enjoy a pairing you previously hated?
I don’t hate pairining. I don’t enjoy some of them. But yes, definitely. Some fics are just so brilliant they sold me on a pairing. I am easy like that :D
Is there anything you used to like but can’t stand now?
Not really. There are things that I feel have been overly often used, like bucky or Steve using the forties slang a lot. First I just disagree with language working this way. That you speak 99,9% modern language and then out of nowhere use words from old times. But that is also a case of seeing it too often and it just lost it’s shine.
Have you received anon hate? What about?
Hm, not much but yes. Mostly about an writer that claimed she had the right to tell me what I can and can not think, and what I can and can not write. You can not own an idea. Deal with it and get lost. And looking back I am convinced it was just a publicity stunt.
Most disliked character(s)? Why?
… small Steve. Can’t forget the strange proportions given him in the movie and the fact he would probably reach my elbow? But that’s purely aesthetic thinking. I have nothing against him as a character. But that was the reason I pretend Captain America movie started at the point of transformation, or was a radio drama before.
Most disliked arc? Why?
Civil War. I just hate the breaking apart of my fantasy team. And I also hate all the things that were implied about Tony in his actions. In my mind he is not a violent man, not towards others. That moment he attacked Bucky - that was like throwing away all three iron movies for me. So I wasn’t all that pleased with it.
Is there an unpopular character you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?
So, I sometimes enjoy het and women seem to be generally vilified in fandom. Anything that has a vagina and is not an old grandma is considered evil in some way. I love her and I refuse to vilify women in fiction just because.We have enough problems in real life than bringing the RL problems into fiction just because everybody else does it. If everybody else jumped off a cliff, would you too? I wouldn’t so don’t even start this shit with me. Everybody = nobody in my book. So if anybody else wants to write her as a bitch, fine, but don’t expect me to do it just because.
Is there an unpopular arc that you like that the fandom doesn’t? Why?
Not really. probably because I don’t read Marvel or DC comics, and my other fandoms don’t seem to have as much problems as the predominantly american ones. Maybe because smaller fandoms are calmer, less people make the fandom their whole life and are generally more distanced from it.
Unpopular opinion about XXX character?
Hmm, I don’t like sub Bucky when it’s after Winter Soldier? I think a large part of it is that a lot of sub fics I read at first were not very well written or just ignored his issues altogether. And my personal opinion. I have no beef with those fics existing, I just don’t read them.
Unpopular opinion about your fandom?
Too many people unable to distinguish reality from fiction. I’m in different fandoms for a very long time. It was never this bad before. People acting as if a fictional character is real and has right or feelings. It doesn’t. It’s a thought. It does not exist. It is not hurting anyone or anything. People claiming fictional characters are protected by consent laws and what else. All those pseudo ‘social justice warriors’ that try to convince authors that writing underage is in any way bad or affects real life. It doesn’t.
If you could change anything in the show, what would you change?
I would let Steve have more time. Show more of his feelings. I think in Civil War his struggle was cut off in favor of action and okay, I like action. But if I could, I would make him a focus, give him time to process the emotions on screen.
Instead of XYZ happening, I would have made ABC happen…
I know it’s never going to happen but I would either have Steve and Bucky fuck (on screen preferably!) or in Civil War Bucky being more of a badass. I know he wasn’t the main character, and had very little screen time but I would love him kicking ass left and right. And I would give him a better arm. The one he had seemed to break in EVERY FREAKING SCENE he had. I have ranted and ranted and ranted about the supposedly destructive arm breaking every time he used it :(
Does not shipping something ‘popular’ mean you’re in denial and/or biased?
Again, my firm opinion is everybody = nobody. Just because someone does it, it doesn’t mean I have to do it too. I’m unmovable on this point and have very, very firm stance on the ‘thought police’.
What is the one thing you hate most about your fandom?
Lack of distance. Too many people take it personally and make it a war, what should only be done in fun. We don’t go to war over books in bookstores. Why the double standard for fic authors? Before the era of social media - this wasn’t something that happened before. Sad to see it develop now.
What is the purest ship in the fandom?
Whatever one you enjoy the most.
Popular character you hate?
No such thing :D Well, maybe my preference that skinny Steve should be a radio drama. I can deal better with the way artists draw him - more proportional, more like an actual human male. But in general - nope. Oh, and I love to hate Brock Rumlow.
Unpopular character you love?
Don’t have any specific one.
Would you recommend XXX to a friend? Why or why not?
Fics? oh I recommend plenty. Movies? I tend to drag all my friends to all marvel movies whether they like them or not, so I’m the last person to ask the question. Because if I enjoy it I will find a way to make my friend go see it with me, if only for pure enjoyment. Granted, I did have to literally sit on two of them to watch the new Star Wars and listen to them moaning about how much they hated it, but they DID watch it with me :D I do have a feeling making them watch the last one is going to be so much harder, but I will find a way. Eventually.
How would you end XXX/Would you change the ending of XXX?
Civil War. That is the movie that I would change for the reasons I mentioned before. Oddly enough it’s Tony i feel protective about and the disassembly of the values he represented to me before. I can very much see him beating some on Bucky (he can take a beating, no problem) but the outright attempt at murder… no. I disagree. And I would change it.
Most shippable character?
All of them. If i find them hot I am perfectly willing to make them a fandom bicycle and have everybody ride them. I am a Bucky girl though - but not the broken, fragile Bucky that is popular but the strong, dangerous one. The badass.
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