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Is this a warped version of what really happened or just moral relativism in action? On the pro-Thanos subreddit, the members saw him taking Gamora in as an act of compassion rather than one of kidnapping. Say what you will about his villainy, but the fact that he was able to successfully acquire the Soul Stone confirms he did love Gamora. He gets the most screen time as the main character of Infinity War, and we spend so much time with him that you almost start to root for him. He’s humanized enough that people even genuinely wonder whether or not he’s hot. Infinity War spends the majority of its screen time developing Thanos’s story to make him a more relatable character. We see the ruin and extinction that occurred when his people didn’t listen, so Thanos then made it his mission to travel the universe systematically, halving sentient populations so they wouldn’t suffer the same fate. Thanos accurately predicted that his race’s society would crumble due to a growing combination of resource scarcity and overpopulation. Midway through Infinity War, Thanos uses the Reality Stone on Titan to show Tony Stark what his home planet looked like in its prime before it consumed itself. Most would say that mitigating many potential future disasters by manufacturing one gargantuan genocide sounds horrifying and bad, but to Thanos, who saw his own world die despite his warnings, it probably looks like a noble mission. The base concept of utilitarianism judges the morality of an action by the amount of happiness or unhappiness it produces. Thanos earnestly believes in a proactive solution, one that is technically genocide, but also one that you might argue is viable within the frame of utilitarian ethics. Though a mostly unserious breeding ground for hilarious, sometimes crassly NSFW memes, the pro-Thanos subreddit actively worships the Mad Titan as their “saviour.” The whole thing comes off as a joke, but plenty of people out there would acknowledge that overpopulation is a real-life problem that’s only getting worse. Even in moral philosophy, they’re probably not alone.įurther spoilers follow for Avengers: Infinity War. He’s much more calculated, even logical in his approach, and more than 20,000 people in the real world agree with him enough to subscribe to a subreddit called /r/thanosdidnothingwrong. Thanos isn’t a generic villain like Ultron or Steppenwolf who simply wants to destroy everything. By writing his own narrative, Thanos becomes the hero if he succeeds in wiping out half of the universe’s population from existence. Part of what makes Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War so scary is that his “evil” plan makes a certain amount of rational sense: The greatest enemy of the Marvel Cinematic Universe isn’t Thanos it’s overpopulation that will eventually lead to famine and ruin.