The "I Didn't Comment in Another Thread" Thread

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I'm now imagining the swapping the Marvel Death and the Sandman Death and her potential reactions to Thanos

Death of the Endless would have made very short work of him. If she wasn't so nice, she would hand him over to one of her siblings.

 

[Umbran]

What stuck me particularly was how extremely obviously stupid it was, that was what made it so disappointing as a villain motivation. It broke the sort of immersion of the story because it immediately made me start thinking about how ill-educated and/or irrational Thanos would have to be to believe that, and then, when none of these "genius" characters attempted to point this out to him (you'd have thought someone hard-nosed like Tony Stark would have at a dead minimum)

Even more effective if one of the characters who doesn't play the "smartest guy in the room" card to point it out - like, if Ant-man or Cap turns to Tony and goes, "Wait, isn't that dumb? The population's just going to bounce back eventually, right?" and Tony says, "Yeah, in like 70 years. His plan is pointless! ... Hey, purple guy, do you know your plan is pointless, or do you just not like to think that hard?"

When I first heard it, I genuinely instantly expected someone to attempt to talk some sense into him, to say "In a hundred years you'll just need to snap again!", and maybe we'd eventually get a revelation that the faux-Malthusian logic was just a smokescreen

Well, since we are talking about writers being dumb, let us think that through a bit.

Hans Gruber does it as misdirection, so that the feds will cut power to the building, and they can escape with the money and have the feds think they are dead afterwards. The ruse is to get people to do things they wouldn't if they knew your true goal, so that you can get to that true goal.

Thanos' false Malthusian logic makes people attack Thanos. He doesn't care, because he's personally the most powerful individual we've seen in the MCU to that point. Resistance is futile, an annoyance, and ultimately doesn't stop him, only barely delaying the inevitable. If the heroes can't stop him, why does he need a smokescreen?

And the movies' portrayal of him as this sort of "guy with a noble goal but bad methods" just seemed demented as a result. He didn't have a noble goal, he was a blithering idiot!

Agreed.

In addition, if we were talking about, say, Ronan the Accuser, whose real power base is religious and political, the false Malthusian logic would be a great reveal and allegory on the cynicism of modern politics and extremism.

But Thanos doesn't care if anyone believes in his cause. His power is based on fear, and his personal ability to squash you like a grape. He uses faceless stormtroopers, mindless ravening beasts, and a small cadre of thugs who seem to be in his employ because it gives them opportunities to hurt people. Who cares what Thanos believes? It isn't actually relevant to the plot.

 

[payn]

The thing thats not ever sat well with me is undoing Thanos snap. I mean, half the population gone for 5 years. How much less food, energy, housing has been made and kept since then? Now, suddenly the population doubles in a blink. I think that would accelerate Thanos fears ten fold. Maybe im wrong.

 

[Umbran]

I think his reasoning was the "snap" would be a soft-reset to give others the chance to live more sustainably. If in a hundred years they failed again, he'd just snap again (or double-snap to be extra punishing).

Nope. In the beginning of Endgame, we learn he's destroyed the Stones. He can't snap again.

 

[MarkB]

The thing thats not ever sat well with me is undoing Thanos snap. I mean, half the population gone for 5 years. How much less food, energy, housing has been made and kept since then? Now, suddenly the population doubles in a blink. I think that would accelerate Thanos fears ten fold. Maybe im wrong.

Probably not. The Blip and its aftermath are endlessly fertile for speculation, but I don't think we'll ever see them fully explored officially. Falcon and the Winter Soldier did an interesting job of exploring how national boundaries seemed to have collapsed during those five years and people were becoming more mobile in finding work and homes, only for those boundaries to snap rigidly back into place after the Unsnap, leaving huge numbers of people displaced from homes and jobs whose former owners had suddenly come back into existence. But it really only scratched the surface.

I'd love to sometime see a series that takes an Andor approach to the whole thing, charting personal stories during the Blip and showing the costs and realities of living in that world.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The thing thats not ever sat well with me is undoing Thanos snap. I mean, half the population gone for 5 years. How much less food, energy, housing has been made and kept since then? Now, suddenly the population doubles in a blink. I think that would accelerate Thanos fears ten fold. Maybe im wrong.

The food thing alone would have been a huge issue - losing half the world's population, best case, halves food production (realistically it would probably destroy the entire supply chain, but let's pretend not), and when 100% more people appear again, you might possibly, with massive coordination, avoid mass starvation - though everyone would be hungry, but goddamn, society would have to be transformed, world-wide. You'd absolutely need a wartime-style command economy to do this.

Then there's other stuff too - like, if this was evenly distributed, 50% of world leaders vanished. Then five years later they're back? Who is now the legitimate leader? The sheer number of countries which would face at a dead minimum huge constitutional crises, or more likely, coups or even civil wars, would be staggering. The world would catch fire (metaphorically at least). I feel like there's a sort of implied technocratic "one world government" in Falcon + Cyberarm Guy (sorry) which could potentially tamp down on that (in a rather fascist and anti-democratic way), but it's never explored.

Wealth would have been massively redistributed too.

It's a gigantic can of worms which would make for an amazing SF setting or for an RPG, but which the MCU writers having just attempted to cram all the worms back into.

I'd love to sometime see a series that takes an Andor approach to the whole thing, charting personal stories during the Blip and showing the costs and realities of living in that world.

That'd be incredible though I think too inherently challenging to developed nations and their political (in the structural sense particularly) and economic approaches to actually be allowed by Disney.

 

[CleverNickName]

I didn't post this in another thread, because I didn't want to bump it. But it's hilarious.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Narratively, I think the answer would be that Thanos' followers/slaves/sycophants know that it's dangerous to point out the flaws in the plan, presumably after the original advisors were killed for pointing it out.

But yes, Ant-Man and Iron Man doing the math and mocking it to his face would have been a nice and appropriate extra 15 seconds to include.

 

[overgeeked]

Narratively, I think the answer would be that Thanos' followers/slaves/sycophants know that it's dangerous to point out the flaws in the plan, presumably after the original advisors were killed for pointing it out.

But yes, Ant-Man and Iron Man doing the math and mocking it to his face would have been a nice and appropriate extra 15 seconds to include.

Don't forget Professor Hulk.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The food thing alone would have been a huge issue - losing half the world's population, best case, halves food production (realistically it would probably destroy the entire supply chain, but let's pretend not), and when 100% more people appear again, you might possibly, with massive coordination, avoid mass starvation - though everyone would be hungry, but goddamn, society would have to be transformed, world-wide. You'd absolutely need a wartime-style command economy to do this.

Then there's other stuff too - like, if this was evenly distributed, 50% of world leaders vanished. Then five years later they're back? Who is now the legitimate leader? The sheer number of countries which would face at a dead minimum huge constitutional crises, or more likely, coups or even civil wars, would be staggering. The world would catch fire (metaphorically at least). I feel like there's a sort of implied technocratic "one world government" in Falcon + Cyberarm Guy (sorry) which could potentially tamp down on that (in a rather fascist and anti-democratic way), but it's never explored.

Wealth would have been massively redistributed too.

It's a gigantic can of worms which would make for an amazing SF setting or for an RPG, but which the MCU writers having just attempted to cram all the worms back into.


That'd be incredible though I think too inherently challenging to developed nations and their political (in the structural sense particularly) and economic approaches to actually be allowed by Disney.

It was disappointing that they clearly started to address this in Falcon & The Winter Soldier and then someone -- probably an exec -- said "wait, this is way too much for a superhero story" and cut out 99% of it. So there's a vague hint of it in the news reports, some allusions to it in the antagonists' motivations, but it never comes together and we never actually got to see how this stuff played out.

I do like that the MCU has addressed these issues on a character's personal level -- "holy crap, my kid is five years older and she lost me again even if I wasn't in prison this time" -- but from a worldbuilding standpoint, you can't just disrupt the world this way and then say "it all worked out fine; don't worry about it."

Modern Doctor Who has similar issues with aliens repeatedly going public, etc., only to be ignored by the next showrunner, but at least that franchise doesn't pretend it's got tight continuity. Plus, timey wimey, wibbly wobbly.