Yes, MORE violent.
This episode was difficult. There are some extraordinary moments, but the overall story is so relentlessly bleak that it was probably the toughest for me to watch so far. I’m also not sure I’m okay with how they handled Killmonger, who was, after all, right about a lot of things? (Although so was Nakia, obviously, and I prefer her methods.)
Let’s dive in!
Summary
This episode opens with… the opening scene of the entire MCU. We’re with Tony Stark, in a military caravan, on the way to a weapons demo. It’s all fun and games until the Ten Rings strike! But this time, when Tony stares in horror at one of his own missiles, Killmonger walks up and nonchalantly chucks it into the distance.
Naturally, Tony decides to make him his new BFF.
But as The Watcher informs us, without the ordeal of building a new sense of purpose in a CAVE from a BOX of SCRAPS, Tony doesn’t become the hero that we know from the MCU. Instead, he decides that the best way to protect U.S. soldiers is a new commitment to Stark Industries’ weapons tech. While he’s announcing this at a boozy press conference, Killmonger reveals that Obadiah Stane was behind the Ten Rings attack, Happy punches Obadiah out, and Tony gives Killmonger Obadiah’s old job.
Pepper is… not pleased.
She’s used to people buddying up to Tony to get something out of him, but she can’t figure out what it is Killmonger wants.
Tony, meanwhile, is just happy to have a new gearhead friend. He brings Killmonger to his lab, and the two of them work on finishing Killmonger’s old MIT thesis, “Project Liberator,” the one that proposed replacing the U.S. Army with drones. And the drone he’s proposing is a straight up GUNDAM.
OK, Killmonger being an anime fan was a lovely touch, as was Tony’s response. (“Worst case scenario, we’ll end up with the world’s most expensive Gundam model”??? Are you fucking KIDDING ME???) But if you’re going to tease us like this, What If…?, can Season 2 please include a riff on Evangelion or Mobile Suit Gundam or something? Or hell, mash ‘em up? Give Killmonger Char Aznable’s storyline, and Tony can have Shinji’s? And they fight but also…fall in love? And Howard the Duck can be Pen Pen! And, and…sorry. Ahh, back to the plot: the drones need more power than Tony can supply! R&D is at a standstill! Until Killmonger proposes a way to get more vibranium. There’s the fellow named Ulysses Klaue…
In the interest of keeping Stark Industry’s corporate nose clean, they send Rhodey to negotiate with Klaue, but then the Black Panther crashes the deal, which, of course, turns out to be the point. Killmonger uses Obadiah’s sonic taser to murder T’Challa, then uses one of the Black Panther’s claws to stab Rhodey. Klaue steps out of the shadows and applauds Killmonger, revealing that the two were in on this all along.
Having framed the Prince of Wakanda for the murder of a U.S. Colonel, Killmonger plans to sit back and watch the international incident play out… except Tony has a full thermal map of the fight, and knows it was a double-cross. When Killmonger asks him if he’s going to call the police, Tony replies that he wants “justice,” and unleashes one of the Project Liberator drones on him. But Tony is still thinking like a computer nerd, not a fighter, and doesn’t realize that of course Killmonger has more moves than the ones he programmed into the drone. Over the course of the fight, we finally see all of his self-inflicted battle scars, and he explains them to Tony, right before he kills him. He uses a Wakandan spear to make it look like a hit, and the international incident is back on.
General Ross seizes Stark Industries assets, meaning that Pepper is now a military employee, and Happy’s obsolete. They put the Liberator drones in production and send them off to Wakanda.
Not Killmonger, though. He and Klaue travel to Wakanda by a back route, Killmonger shoots Klaue, then brings his body to the Dora Milaje as a peace offering. He presents himself as a loyal child of Wakanda, and T’Chaka takes him in. On Killmonger’s advice, the royal family permits the drone army to march inside the barrier, where the Stark Industries tech fails and the drones shut down. Except! Killmonger has a secret back-up installed and wakes them back up, so King T’Chaka and Princess Shuri have front row seats as he heroically charges into battle beside Okoye and General Ramonda. Once they defeat the army, he is fully accepted by the family, and T’Chaka makes him the new Black Panther.
On the immortal plane, Killmonger and T’Challa finally have a conversation, and T’Challa warns his cousin that unearned power is going to come with consequences—possibly on the earthly plane, possibly on the spiritual one, but consequences either way. Killmonger doesn’t seem too bothered.
He immediately starts speaking with T’Chaka about freeing their brothers and sisters around the world, and this time, T’Chaka seems willing to listen.
Meanwhile General Ross is launching a full war on Wakanda, despite Pepper pointing out that most Americans can’t find it on a map. When Ross responds that soon they won’t need to, she retreats to her office in despair, only to find Shuri standing behind her desk. The Princess of Wakanda has evidence that Killmonger murdered her brother and Tony.
How?
“Mr. Stark was a genius, but he wasn’t the only genius.”
The episode ends with the Watcher reminding us that heroes will always exist, and always inspire others.
Commentary
Okay.
First, like I said, this episode is bleak as hell. Killmonger never gets what he wants, really. He’s clearly aching for acceptance and family, but keeps selling that out for his enormous revenge plan, which is almost certainly not going to work, even with Wakanda’s might behind him.
Tony is a straight up alcoholic in this timeline. Not the lightly implied problem that gets sorted out offscreen by the end of Iron Man 2—in this episode I think we only see him once without a drink in his hand. This is good, obviously, because it’s an interesting part of his character arc, especially given that in this timeline he’s never forced to reckon with it. It’s just upsetting to see.
Watching Black Panther and Rhodey die within seconds of each other? Not fun!
Watching Klaue die after he calls Killmonger “boy”??? EXTREMELY fun.
General Ramonda??? Hell yeah.
Watching Stark Industries turn into a fully armed and operational war machine with Ross at the helm? Fucking horrifying.
More to the point, though, the Killmonger plotline in Black Panther is very complex, and rooted in issues I am not qualified to discuss—but having said that I’m not sure interrogating it in a short cartoon format really works? There is a lot to tease out in the relationship between T’Challa and Killmonger, their fathers, colonialism, military force, the justification of violence, whiteness, Blackness, etc., and I’m not sure this episode has enough space to deal with all of it. Much like the way “What If…Doctor Strange Lost His Heart Instead of His Hands” became a bit too dark to work in such a short format, here Killmonger becomes such a single-minded villain that it robs the character of much of the nuance he had in Black Panther. But that’s the only way the episode can work as an episode because they only have about thirty minutes to work with.
So what we end up with is Rhodey, a Black career Army official, telling Killmonger he has to work within the system in order to save it, and T’Challa, a prince with a heroic birthright, telling him his unearned power will be his doom—without acknowledging what his father did to Killmonger’s father. (It’s possible that in this timeline he doesn’t know? We never see T’Chaka admit his role in his brother’s death, and I’m not sure how the spirit plane works.) We have a lost young Black man, with no home, offered a sort of brotherhood by a very rich and powerful white man, but in probably the best line of the episode, Killmonger tells Tony “The difference between you and me is that you can’t see the difference between you and me.” Which, if I want to give the writers the benefit of the doubt, and I do, I think that’s what they’re getting at with Pepper’s arc. She misses what Killmonger wants from Tony, because she literally can’t see Killmonger. His life and struggles are so far beyond her own that he’s a blank slate to her.
And speaking of that: as much as part of me loves the idea of Shuri and Pepper teaming up to save the world from war, how did Shuri get that intel? You can’t just say the word “genius” and handwave that shit. I mean, maybe in that timeline having evidence of criminal activity, and sharing that evidence with trusted authorities, will actually yield results?
What a weird timeline!
Favorite Lines
This episode has my very favorite What If…? line so far, and that is…(imagine a drumrolll):
- Tony Stark, upon being asked if he was injured in the attack: I did spill my drink. And it was a twenty-six Macallan, so I’m pretty sure that’s a war crime.
- Rhodey, on Killmonger: He’s done pretty good for a kid from Oakland.
- Tony, on his R&D suite: I built everything in here myself… except for the Lambo, thats 3D printed.
- Tony: If we miniaturize an arc reactor? Nah, that’s a dumb idea.
- Rhodey: You have to be part of the system to change the system.
Killmonger: Nah, you can burn it down. - Killmonger to Tony: The difference between you and me is that you can’t see the difference between you and me.
I liked this one. I always wanted to see more of Jordan as Killmonger, and it’s a clever idea to have him short-circuit the entire MCU age of heroes just by saving Tony Stark at the beginning of it all. I like the insight that they’re both obsessive men driven by the loss of their fathers, so they basically enabled each other. Mick Wingert did an impressive job as Tony, though the other impressionists for Pepper, Stane, and Ross weren’t quite as good (the stand-in for Shuri was fine, though).
In some ways, though, it was just an alternate route to get Killmonger to the same place he reached in Black Panther. Some of the beats of his plan, especially with Klaue, are pretty much the same. So maybe not as different as it could’ve been.
“So what we end up with is Rhodey, a Black career Army official, telling Killmonger he has to work within the system in order to save it”
Which resonates nicely with Rhodey’s scene in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.
For shuri getting the intel, maybe she found the back up transmitter and traced it to Jarvis, who would have all the available footage. Or she hacked into the drones and access jarvis that way.
Haven’t seen this episode yet, but has anyone else been disturbed by how misogynistic the series is?
In episodes 3-5, not a single woman has survived to the end of the episode with the exception of Sif, and she’s treated as an afterthought.
@3: No. Tony has died in, I think, every one of his appearances. And in this episode, again without rewatching it, every female character survives. You might need to recalibrate your Fridge-o-meter™.
Episode 3 ends with Captain Marvel showing up to presumably free Earth from Loki. She’ll have Captain America at her side, but she’s going to far outclass him. (It would actually be pretty interesting to see the two of them teaming them up — both US military but from a half century apart.)
Episode 4, pretty much no one survives. I suppose an alternate ending could have been Strange dying to preserve Palmer but then she’s alone in a bubble universe which is even worse….
Fair point about episode 5, they probably could have switched Hope and Scott.
My point was that the death of a woman was the impetus for Episodes 3-5. Each of them are almost textbook definitions of fridging. And in 5, Hope said that the outbreak was her fault for wanting to see her mom again, and the episode duly punished her for it.
While I get that the show likes to focus on character moments, this still seemed to end mid-story. I feel like the real “what if” is the US going to war with Wakanda and Killmonger’s plan for the War Dogs. A little bit more big picture would have been nice.
The battle scene was also absurd but fit the style of the MCU
@7 – that’s my chief complaint about this episode. It’s 2/3rds of a story. These episodes try to rewrite and stuff a 2-hour movie into a half-hour(ish) show, but this one’s actually much worse. They tried to stuff roughly ten years’ worth of movies into a half-hour(ish) show.
@6/hihosilver28: You have a point where episodes 3 & 4 are concerned, but I disagree strongly about the zombie episode. I don’t think you can call it fridging if a woman is killed to motivate another woman. There’s nothing intrinsincally wrong with killing a character to motivate another character; the problem that defines fridging is the culture’s systemic pattern of doing it to women to motivate male heroes, as part of the larger pattern of denying women in fiction their own agency by reducing them to mere extensions or catalysts for men’s stories. That is not the case in the zombie episode. The narrative spine there is Hope’s story rather than one of the men’s. Also, she’s not just motivated by Janet’s death; she’s motivated by her guilt that her desire to save Janet was what unleashed the zombie virus on the world. So she’s on a journey of atonement for her own guilt, and chooses to sacrifice herself as the culmination of that journey. That’s not fridging, because the female character herself is the one with the agency, the one whose personal journey drives the narrative rather than being in service to a man’s journey. Yes, she gives her life saving male characters, but narratively, it’s the culmination of her own character arc rather than a device to advance a man’s character arc.
@9/ChristopherLBennett
You have a point about the motivations. But the episode left a really bad taste in my mouth that there was a writing decision to have every single woman sacrifice her life to save a man. The episode ends with zero women alive.
@10 I mean the episode also ended with the only theee people alive and teonof them are half eaten already, and the others a teenaged boy. A lot of other men did die that episode too; and it’s a zombie episode so people are going to have to die. As for the others, episodes 1 and 2 had great female empowerment with captain carter and nebula, and seeing what happened to korina in guardians, a great power play by her.
@10/hihosilver: “But the episode left a really bad taste in my mouth that there was a writing decision to have every single woman sacrifice her life to save a man.”
I don’t think that’s accurate. Sharon is infected and killed when Zombie Cap attacks. Hope sacrifices herself to save the whole group, which includes Okoye at that point, and to preserve the effort to save the world. Wanda was already a zombie when we first encountered her, and Vision was sacrificing people to her. And Okoye fell to Wanda during the retreat.
Anyway, it’s not about keeping score, it’s about how well the characters are served. A character dying or making a sacrifice for others is a perfectly valid way to end their narrative arc. What matters is that they have an arc of their own, and it was Hope’s redemption arc that was the spine of the zombie episode. How a story ends is not the only part that matters. The important part is the journey to get there.
I hate to step into the fridging discussion as it can be very subjective – there isn’t even anything inherently wrong with a woman’s death motivating a male, it’s just that it becomes such a shorthand/pattern that women characters often end up existing solely for that. I personally haven’t found that to be the case in What If (with the exception of the Strange episode but that really did feel like it was being a bit satirical) because the stories/characters resonate with me already, but I think some people will see it differently and that’s fine too.
Likewise, I do get the limitations of the 30 minute format but it at least gets us thinking about/discussing the issue (although I’m admittedly also an outsider when it comes to talking about issues of Blackness), and in a way it is interesting that two of Killmonger’s most prominent victims are themselves Black men that he feels have betrayed the cause in some way (either by working within the system or just via isolationism).
To go on a lighter tone, I have to admit I was getting more than a few Star Wars vibes, from the pure beskar – I mean vibranium – spear defeating the previously indestructible drone, to the entire Wakandan battle which had several elements (visual and otherwise) that felt straight out of the Phantom Menace. (I mean, I get it, it’s a trope – “primitive but technologically advanced race battles mass produced robots”). The Wakandans at least have some more dignity ;) And General Romanda was an absolute delight. More effective, certainly, than other bombad generals ;)
I also wondered where Shuri got the intel but figured she must have hacked into the drone intel system somehow. *shrugs*.
My son & I watched this one last night & while we both liked it, we felt it needed more.
I really think these episodes need to be 45 minutes(ish). Just to flesh things out just a little more.
I do like the Killmonger story arc in the Marvel comics & feel killing him off at the end of Black Panther was short-sighted on Marvel’s part. Plus it didn’t make any sense considering T’Challa stops Zemo, his father’s killer, from killing himself, to stand justice. Add in T’Challa’s ‘building bridges’ mentality & overall character arc theme, it seemed pointless.
Regarding where Shuri got her info, I assumed Stark sent her things as a backup/failsafe plan in case his revenge for Rhodey didn’t go the way he wanted it. Alternatively, Shuri did he own snooping & was somehow able to reboot JARVIS. Perfectly reasonable as she is supposed to be on par with the likes of Stark, Banner, & Mr. Fantastic (off-camera implication); if not ‘superior’ to them in her own areas of expertise.
I am hoping that next week’s episode in a lighter one; more in the vein of the Guardians of the Galaxy What If…? The last three in a row have been rather grim with bleak endings with limited, little, or no hope.
Kato
The MCU usually does a good job with military details, but Killmonger appears in a 4 star admiral’s dress uniform, which he continues to wear even after being hired as Stark’s head of security. What’s up with that?
@14/Kato: “Plus it didn’t make any sense considering T’Challa stops Zemo, his father’s killer, from killing himself, to stand justice.”
It makes sense because he had more understanding and respect for Killmonger’s motivations, his wish for the freedom to die with dignity on his own terms.
@@@@@danielmclark
I actually don’t think we need to see any more of this universe because the episode doesn’t need to explain why Killmonger’s plan is not only going to fail but it is going to be an epic tire fire akin to the one in the Simpson’s Springfield. Killmonger has started World War 3 and while it’s entirely possible Wakanda could beat the United States, it’s not going to go down easily. Especially with Ross likely to break out every single deranged thing in SHIELD’s vaults from Abominations to Hydra experiments.
We also note that Killmonger’s arguments are nonsensical as his claimed desire is to help the oppressed black man but he kills Rhodey and will undoubtedly kill many-many more black Americans while also making Wakanda a pariah state. After all, does Killmonger really think he’ll be able to annex the United States and the rest of the world won’t realize they’re next?
With the tease at the beginning, I am very curious how the events of Avengers and Endgame played out in this universe.
@17/CT Phipps: “Killmonger has started World War 3”
How so? It’s a war between only two countries, Wakanda and the US. That’s hardly a world war, any more than the US invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq was a world war.
“After all, does Killmonger really think he’ll be able to annex the United States and the rest of the world won’t realize they’re next?”
I assume Killmonger’s plan here is the same as in Black Panther — to arm a global uprising of the African diaspora using Wakanda as his base. I think he believes, perhaps with justification, that there are quite a lot of black Americans who’d be perfectly okay with seeing the current authority structure in the US overthrown and an Afrocentric regime installed in its place. Or at least who, like Isaiah Bradley, would feel no particular loyalty to the old regime.
@Christopher
I imagine that’s Killmonger’s argument but it also falls very much into the kind of rhetoric used against blacks in America given their heroism in The Civil War (which made the South furious), WW1, and WW2 in particular that showed them as people ready and willing to fight for their country. As we see with Rhodey and T’Challa, there are plenty of people who don’t want to join a fascist ethnostate just because they would be the ones on top.
Killmonger is a bit like the Red Skull in that he’d be mystified or angry that someone who looked like him doesn’t share his ambitions.
But as we see with Shuri and Pepper, his regime is not long for the world even if he kills T’Chaka.
@16ChristopherLBennett, I can see that.
I just think it was still a waste and goes against what characterization T’Challa had gone through. Letting Killmonger die instead of getting him healed & then putting him into a prison makes sense to me. T’Challa honors his cousin’s dying wish.
I just wish the writers had been more clever about it all. I may just be influenced by the ‘What if…?’ where T’Challa bonds with Thanos & diverts him from his mad plan.
Kato
@Christopher
[[How so? It’s a war between only two countries, Wakanda and the US. That’s hardly a world war, any more than the US invasion of Afghanistan or Iraq was a world war.]]
The same way the Soviet Union and America attacking each other is a war that can’t be kept short. The Wakandan military is possessed of such incredible super-technology that it will be the equivalent of two superpowers duking it out and we know Killmonger is willing to burn the world to the ground to achieve his goals.
The difference between Afghanistan and Iraq will be when Killmonger reduces New York or LA to ashes. Then starts on other nations.
@22/charlie: But why is that any different from Killmonger’s plan in Black Panther itself? If it’s implausible here, surely it’s just as implausible there.
The story kind of doesn’t end in this episode. Compare this to the Tchalla Starlord story. That one ends in a cliffhanger that affects the world (Ego finding Quinn), but the character arc is done (Tchalla and Yondu have their fall out and reconciliation, Tchalla unites his two families, etc). This one is incomplete because both the world story (USA x Wakanda) and the character story are incomplete. The story is kind of leading to Killmonger getting his comeuppance, but we never see that. Or maybe there’s a twist and he actually wins in the end. Everything is left to our imagination and it feels unfulfilling to me.
@24/Ryamano: Many stories end with a beginning or a point of transition. Look at Casablanca. It ends with the main characters deciding to join the fight, not with the end of the fight (which hadn’t happened yet when the film came out). Its last line is literally a commemoration of a new beginning.
This was the story of the alternate Killmonger’s rise to power. So it ended with him getting what he wanted, completing his journey to that point. What happens after that is a different story. As Orson Welles said, if you want a happy ending, it depends on where you end the story — implying that every happy ending is temporary. This was Killmonger’s story, and it ended at the point that was a happy ending for him. Just as a lot of these episodes end at a moment of success for the main characters while foreshadowing further crises to come.
I’ve decided that I don’t see the open-ended conclusions of these episodes as a negative. The conceit here is that we’re seeing real alternate universes, and that means that in each one (Dark Strange excepted), there would be more than one story to tell. The idea is that we’re getting samples of continuing sagas just as open-ended as the main MCU — pilot episodes, as it were. So they’re not supposed to be “complete.” If they give the sense that the story will continue after we turn away, that it’s a whole evolving reality beyond the part we glimpse, then they’ve succeeded at what they’re meant to do.
After all, the title of the show is a question, not an answer. It’s inviting us to wonder and speculate.
I liked this episode, even though I liked the Captain Carter one best (because of WW2 and Cap stuff), this one might be the best written so far. It provides a movie’s worth of story in 30 minutes, very well paced and acted. And yes, once again, N’Jadaka is right, but that still doesn’t justify his methods.
As for N’Jadaka’s nuance, we don’t need to get that in this episode, because we already know the character, and he, unlike Tony, is not changed from the film he’s appeared in.
Two weird things: why is Ramonda fighting like a Dora? Why is Shuri just standing idly watching a battle against robots?
@5 – Andrew: Just a slight correction, Carter is not US military.
@7 – noblehunter: That’s the way What If? stories usually work in the comics, they present a change, they play it out in the short run, and then they don’t stay to explore the rest of the universe beyond that. It’s not a series focused in one alternate universe, just a series of short looks at those alternate universes.
@13 – Lisamarie: I don’t have a problem with the vibranium spear defeating the drone, because the drone is powered by vibranium, nad maybe it interacts in some way with the power core. :)
@19 – Chris: That’s an interesting twist for another story, Bradley joining up with N’Jadaka.
@20 – CT: No, N’Jadaka perfectly understands there are people like Rhodey or T’Challa that look like thim and don’t share his views. They’re just obstacles.
@21 – Kato: Thanos being treated like “the wacky uncle” in that episode really rubbed me the wrong way. He already was a genocidal tyrant BEFORE he got the gems.
@22 – Charlie: As technologically advanced as Wakanda is, it’s still one small country. The Soviet Union was not actually a single country, but a union of countries that covered 1/7 of the world, and had another portion of it as allies.
@24 – Ryamano: And we don’t know if in that episode, the Guardians/Reavers didn’t learn about Ego and Quinn and are on their way to rescue Peter. That story is still open.
@25 – Chris: “After all, the title of the show is a question, not an answer. It’s inviting us to wonder and speculate.”
Exactly.
@26/MaGnUs: “why is Ramonda fighting like a Dora? Why is Shuri just standing idly watching a battle against robots?”
This takes place in 2008, a decade before Black Panther. Presumably Ramonda was Okoye’s predecessor as the general of the Dora Milaje. And Shuri is ten years old, precocious but presumably not yet in a position of authority.
“As technologically advanced as Wakanda is, it’s still one small country. The Soviet Union was not actually a single country, but a union of countries that covered 1/7 of the world, and had another portion of it as allies.”
Good point. What defined the World Wars is that their combatants were members of wide alliances, so many other countries around the world (hence the name) got drawn into the fights between the main combatants. Wakanda is an isolationist country and thus has few, if any, allies.
@Magnus, I liked the idea that T’Challa’s idealism, intelligence, & passion worked Thanos over to put away his mad plan to ‘fix’ the universe to a better plan. Seemed more hopeful to me as he tried to reason with Thanos instead of simply oppose him.
A little simplistic I know but I like the idea that T’Challa’s personality wins out. Building bridges instead of burning them.
So many ‘heroes’ in so many shows state that they have to all ‘find a better way’ without ever really trying to do so. T’Challa’s charm, in the MCU anyway, is that he always attempts to do that.
Kato
@26, oh, I didn’t have a problem with it, it just made me grin a bit. As soon as he got that spear I knew he was going to use it :)
@27 – Chris: Ah, right, I never took into account the time difference. Silly me. I also kept thinking of Ramonda from the comics, who is not Wakandan.
@28 – Kato: Thanos was a genocidal maniac long before.
@30/MaGnUs: Thanos was genocidal, but never a maniac. He had a sincere, basically rational, yet incorrect belief that it was the only way to save the universe. Yes, he was stubbornly fixated on his view of things and closed to alternatives, but so are most people. At most, he was a fanatic, but fanaticism isn’t a recognized mental illness, just unwavering devotion to a cause. All Star Lord T’Challa had to do was get him to waver, to convince him there was another way. But the episode repeatedly hinted that Thanos wasn’t entirely convinced, that he still might choose to go through with his plan one day.
Also, technically Thanos wasn’t genocidal, because genocide is targeted at a specific group, and Thanos’s plan was totally egalitarian. It was mass murder, which “genocide” is sometimes used as a synonym for, but strictly speaking, it wasn’t genocide (literally “killing a race,”) just, I dunno, semicide (“killing half”). Or maybe demi-democide — killing half the population.
Thank you for the corrections to my colloquialisms, but my point still stands: Thanos is a mass-murdering zealot, and unworthy of redemption. It’s not about his plan to kill half of the universe’s sentient population, but the fact that he had been doing it already by more traditional means.
There are no indications that his massacre of Gamora’s planet (half of it) was his inaugural atrocity. Him being treated as the “wacky uncle” is the same issue I have with Emperor Georgiou’s treatment on Discovery; or the whole meme about (mainline MCU) Yondu being a model father… yes, he didn’t let Ego consume Peter, but he still basically abused him.
@32/MaGnUs: Is it really about redemption, though, or is it about finding a way to keep him in check with minimal loss of life? As I’ve said before, the episode made it quite clear that Thanos still thought his plan was a good idea in principle, so I think it’s overstating it to say that he was redeemed. He was just redirected.
And yes, he was a horrible murderer played for humor, but how is Yondu any different? He knowingly kidnapped children and sent them to be murdered by Ego. His upbringing of Peter Quill was presented as an act of kindness, but he was a pretty cruel, abusive surrogate father. A lot of the characters in Guardians are pretty bad people, people who’ve done awful things, but they’re still played comedically and sympathetically, because that’s the style of those films.
It’s a trend I dislike, even if it’s in humoristic media.
@34/MaGnUs: I wouldn’t say it’s a trend. There’s always been fiction that painted villains or murderers as sympathetic or played them for humor — film noir, black comedy, that sort of thing. I’m not a huge fan of it myself — for instance, I particularly hate the subgenre of movies whose protagonists are hired assassins — but it’s certainly not a recent development.
Okay, it’s a trope then.