I find myself, for the most part, in the minority of people who didn’t quite enjoy Avengers: Infinity War.
To be clear, this is not me saying that that the movie is bad, or unenjoyable in a general sense. The action was engaging for the most part, and there are some character progressions that I think elicited real dramatic effort from the film. I like how it sets up Tony Stark’s pained, traumatic franchise-long journey from selfish, egotistical brat to responsible, self-sacrificing, if conflicted leader, which I hope they go all in on in upcoming installments. Thor, being my absolute favourite character from the franchise in general, has one really committed throughline, from losing everything that ever mattered to him in two back-to-back genocides to literally taking a beam of white-hot suffering through his body just to regain trust in his own heroic potential. Individual moments, like when Captain America, Black Widow, and Falcon have their first fight with Thanos’ Black Order goons in Scotland, are delightful to look at, visually. And some of the more unlikely on-screen team-ups, like Tony with Doctor Strange, or Thor with Rocket, actually make room for really interesting dialogue.
But ultimately, there’s one aspect of the film that I simply can’t get past. We need to talk about what happens to Gamora.
Sure, there are plenty of other issues and complaints that can and have been addressed elsewhere, but I’m not going to talk about how this shift away from Thanos’ comic-book intentions made his villainy seem weaker to me. I’m not going to talk about how frustrating it is that a villain’s intentions are to save the universe from resource depletion by reassembling the forces that created that very universe and insisting upon destruction, while no one even tries to suggest that he could just as simply create more resources with the same infinite power, and how refusing to do so makes the entire story feel hollow and mindlessly plot-driven instead of legitimately challenging. I’m not going to talk about how many of the character deaths are meaningless and adds no emotional value or weight to the movie—like how T’Challa says all of six lines of dialogue, more than half of which are comical, in the movie where his entire nation sacrifices their lives for the sake of the world; or how Vision spends most of the film reduced to a sentient MacGuffin.
Instead, I’m going to just talk about Gamora.
Just Gamora. Because all the rest of these problems pale in comparison to her treatment in this film.
Going all the way back to the first Guardians of the Galaxy film, the promise has been built into the narrative: clearly, Gamora’s toxic, abusive ‘family’ relationship with Thanos would be one of the dramatic concerns of the franchise. We knew on some level that the two would have to confront each other, and that it makes sense that this moment would occur in the lead-up to the fulfilment of Thanos’ grand scheme.
I was particularly looking forward to that confrontation going into this film, but I was also looking forward to getting further insight into Gamora’s past, and further context for their relationship. Remember, everything we know about Gamora and Nebula’s relationship with Thanos has been delivered entirely through dialogue up to this point, and most of it has been centred around their communion as sisters more than its been about Thanos at all. Which makes sense up to this point, but I was hoping that Infinity War would properly establish for the audience that these two women have suffered unspeakable trauma as children as a result of their very proximity to him.
Instead, the movie gives us but one momentary glimpse into that past trauma: the day that Thanos murdered half the people of Gamora’s homeworld. I want to make clear that I’m not saying that this scene doesn’t add any additional context to Gamora’s pain. However, between that moment and the events of Infinity War lie decades of torture, mental and emotional manipulation, and servitude to Thanos. Expanding on the true extent of her trauma would have been much more useful than this single scene.
But then again, considering how their confrontation ultimately ends, it seems Gamora’s experience and suffering was far from the film’s primary concern. Or even, arguably, a concern at all.
Which… troubles me. (I could use so many other words than “troubles,” but I’ll be generous for now.)
Let’s trace out Gamora’s entire plot strand, as briefly as possible: after rescuing Thor from his destroyed ship, the Guardians split into two groups: Groot and Rocket go to help the God of Thunder forge a new weapon, and the others head to Knowhere in hopes of retrieving the Reality Stone before Thanos arrives. Before they get there, Gamora gravely and urgently asks Peter Quill for his promise, if things go wrong, to make a demanding sacrifice—to kill her if Thanos captures her, because only she knows where the Soul Stone is, and would rather lose her life than share that knowledge. Surprising no one, Thanos does capture her, after using the Reality Stone to convince her that she had finally succeeded in killing her tormentor once and for all. Thanos disappears with his adoptive daughter (read: orphan hostage) and the stone in one fell swoop.
After displaying the barest modicum of compassion for her by offering a bowl of food, he asks Gamora to finally share the location of the Soul Stone, and she insists she knows nothing about it. Thanos’ ace in the hole waits behind a door on his ship: Nebula, her sister-in-trauma, being tortured—slowly and painfully disassembled—as a final attempt to compel Gamora to confess the location of the stone. She does, and the two venture to the planet Vormir to retrieve it.
Apparently, Vormir has rules. A spectral Red Skull appears at the summit of a mountain to relay the terms to Thanos and his captive: the world will only bestow the Soul Stone to someone who sacrifices the person they love most. Gamora, in hesitant but unreserved schadenfreude, finally faces her abuser in triumph. “You love nothing,” she hisses. After his entire crusade, the fact of his own essential, all-consuming malevolence has finally laid him low. Or so we think, momentarily.
When Thanos turns, he is crying. Gamora scoffs. A hulking, powerful Titan, driven to tears because he doesn’t get what he wants?
Red Skull corrects her. Apparently, somehow, that’s not why he’s crying.
Thanos is crying over the terrible sacrifice he’s about to make.
This singular moment, of all the elements and choices in this film that disappointed me, is the one that truly incensed me. (Again, “incensed” is another overly-generous word choice, here, in terms of describing my feelings.) Thanos doesn’t even hesitate to throw the woman he claims to love as his own child off the edge of a cliff in order to gain power. He doesn’t pause. He gives no consideration to Gamora’s feelings, and uses the taste of infinite power he already wields to prevent her from fighting back. It happens in an instant, as a single, salty tear runs down his pastel purple cheek, accompanied by the painful, buffered wailing of his victim as she falls to her doom.
Follow my train of thought for a moment:
We’re supposed to believe that a man can tear apart, physically and emotionally abuse, psychologically torture, and utterly break someone’s spirit over the course of their entire childhood, and accept that the name for what he feels for is victim is “love”? When Thanos is called upon to make this sacrifice, and is somehow able to do so without ever taking stock of his own cruelty or facing the horror that he has put Gamora through, I submit that what he feels for her should never be described as anything approximating love.
That’s obsession. That’s manipulation, and oppression. That’s egomania.
That’s abuse.
And you mean to tell me that, in this universe—that is, both the cosmos of this story and the Marvel Cinematic Universe as constructed by writers Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely—we’re supposed to accept that this somehow counts as “love”? That just because Gamora is, in some intensely twisted fashion, the person Thanos somehow meant to hurt the least, their relationship (at least on his end) qualifies as genuine compassion or devotion?
Because I’m not frickin’ buying it.
When you make the case through your work that all that matters for a relationship to be considered one of sincere love is that an abuser believes that he or she is in the right, you teach viewers that all kinds of terrible behaviour is acceptable, irreparably and irresponsibly blurring the lines between victimization and affection. The fact that so many of the people seem to consider Thanos’ behaviour in the film “reluctant” or “pained” already says a lot to me in terms of how easily the media, and society at large, writes off the actions and consequences of abuse.
I have no doubt in my mind that Thanos thinks he is motivated by some aggressively misplaced sense of fatherly affection. I’m sure that’s what he thought about murdering half the people on Gamora’s home planet, too. But when you take away the Infinity Gauntlet and the extra body mass and the stone throne and the silly cosmic crusade, what you have left is a man saying that he killed a woman because he truly cared about her—and the universe rewarding him for doing so.
Infinity War, to me, is laden with moments where characters pick up the Idiot Ball just because the plot requires momentum. This plot thread is more than that. Every part of this reads like the worst parts of Idiot Plot combined with a core misunderstanding of the character stakes that previous movies established, and a lack of empathy or introspection in general.
I already expect that by the next Avengers film, or possibly even before, many of the more intense elements of Infinity War will be swiftly walked back. The dead will rise from their graves, the hard work will all have somehow paid off, the good guys will have their chance to watch the sun set on a grateful universe.
But no matter what, this happened to Gamora. A lifetime of torment and victimhood, all leading up to the horror of her final moments—her horrified realization that her tormentor is able to use her broken body as the gateway to his ultimate desire because what he feels for her is truly love.
The film accepts this, never questions it, even creates its own tortured reasoning for it, and asks you to trust that reasoning.
I don’t. And I think it’s beyond troubling or offensive to ask us to do so—it’s dangerous.
Brandon O’Brien is a performance poet and writer from Trinidad. His work is published or upcoming in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, Sunvault: Stories of Solarpunk and Eco-Speculation, Arsenika, and New Worlds, Old Ways: Speculative Tales from the Caribbean, among others. He is also the poetry editor of FIYAH Magazine. You can find his blog at therisingtithes.tumblr.com or on Twitter @therisingtithes.
You make a very good point. I remember being a bit blindsided when I first watched the movie because all we’ve ever seen of Thanos and all that’s ever said of him is that he’s a hateful, hateful creature. To think that he actually felt empathy or love for Gamora was almost comical to me. Did not make sense at all. And I can’t believe it made sense to the writers.
Still loved the movie though!
Agreed.
I have big problems with the way the movie treats Gamora too, and it basically cuts the heart out of the movie. Here is what we know about Gamora: that she was abducted at a young age by Thanos; that she survived roughly two decades as his favorite ‘daughter’, consistently beating out Nebula and perhaps other ‘children’; that she characterized her competitive streak with Nebula as sheer need for survival; that she is very tough–possibly the Deadliest Woman in the Galaxy.
All of this suggests that Gamora should know Thanos better than anyone. She should be an expert on Thanos; both personally and strategically, she should understand how he thinks. Predicting the moods and whims of an abuser is part of how abuse victims survive. If they were at all serious about this being a story of an abusive family, they needed to get this right.
The Gamora we see in the film doesn’t really know or understand Thanos at all. Forget for a moment what Thanos’s sacrifice says about him or the Infinity Stones; it’s totally believable that Thanos might think that he loves Gamora, and willingly sacrifice her for his vision. That is straightforward and blindingly obvious to us as soon as the words are uttered; how can it possibly shock Gamora?? But as we see her in the film, she never really talks to Thanos like someone who knows him.
I don’t have as much of a problem with the idea that Thanos would sacrifice her, or that it would work; that just means the powers of the MCU are sadists. But this was the culmination of Gamora’s story, and the end of one chapter, even if she comes back, and well–it stinks, it doesn’t work. She is a prop in her own story. I’m appalled that given the scrutiny the MCU gets over its lack of women heroes that no one scrutinized what they were actually saying about Gamora.
I would possibly agree that such a concept was misplaced in this particular movie. That said unfortunately I can think of a few real life examples where love gets really ugly. You can rationalise it as obsession, oppression, manipulation or whatever else from an outside lens but if a person feels he loves another person well the words ‘love’ and ‘rational’ rarely see eye to eye.
I think it is important that you glossed over part of the story here for gamora. On nowhere she fights thanos and believes she killed him. It is all a trick, but her emotional reaction isn’t just a overwhelming joy she killed a monster, but her breaking down that she killed her father. there is grief. there is something more than just this abuse.
I am not saying that Thanos himself isn’t any of the things you listed, but somewhere he and gamora actually started viewing each other as father and daughter. All of those things that you correctly point out he is, within him can be seen as a crazy demented fatherly love.
So to a Being who saw a problem and came up with a solution to it and what happens when it isn’t done, then see what happens when it is done. Yes the solution is utterly mad, but he sees himself the hero willing to sacrifice everything to fix the issue.
Your asking the movie to be some super deep non super hero movie it’s not Shakespeare it’s comic adaption
There’s at least one way the movie can redeem itself in this regard, which is for the sequel to reveal that he did not, in fact, truly love Gamora. And so somehow *didn’t* get what he thought he was getting by killing her. Because how that death scene played for me, at any rate, was that there was no *way* Thanos’ love could be true if he was willing to kill her. (Hell, if he just was who he was.)
Everything you just write is why I loved how they did it. Thanos is not an one dimentional villain. He has a past that twisted him. In his mind, he is doing something necessary and good. To him not doing what he decided to do would to allow the universe to be like his home planet. The power was a means to an end, and his end, in his mind, made it worth the sacrifice. Plus, someone like Thanos can really love someone even ifche does some crazy shit to them. You need to leave the fairy tale, not calling it love just because its a twisted form of love is not adult.
Thanos is a complex being, driven by insanity and selfrighrousness. You dont get to look at his actions from YOUR perspective, you need his.
I don’t share your sentiment. The operative condition for obtaining the Soul Stone is sacrifice, something that is entirely subjective to one experiencing it. I never got a feeling that there was any objective standard to be met, that the sacrifice had to be “good enough,” the criteria was simply “loved most.” That Thanos’s greatest love was woefully pitiful compared to almost anyone else’s, if anything, emphasizes the severe moral deficit in him.
From the perspective of a violent narcissist, she is his best weapon/warrior. He loves nothing, but values her, and in his stupid ugly twisted brain, that means he loves her most maybe?
It’s a stretch.
Off topic, but in the comics, does Gamora have any type of powers? Or is she the alien version of Black Widow?
Good article. Enjoyable read, but 2 things:
– you’re way overthinking a comic book movie
– you assume Thanos is a “man” and subject/enslaved to the same constraints of the human emotion motivations.
I get the desire to relate & sympathize, but the Mad Titan is crazy content in the end scene so he is probably driven by a different set of action influencing emotives. Maybe that tear was an alien eye irritation caused by the combination of green and red skin flakes mixed with the rotting carcass breath of the Red Skull.
I assume my dogs & cats love me but would probably eat me if I stopped feeding them and then not think too much about it, with full belly, afterwards, because they aren’t subject to the same emotions as my species. If this were not true, the Hulk might be known more for sexing up elephants than smashing…
‘Nuff said… ;j
It’s a movie, how fleshed out could it be? There’s also a skew that we aren’t privy to. Gemora remembered growing up on a paradise, which was not the case. She grew up starving and fatherless, perhaps Thanos wasn’t the monster parent we were led to believe.
that being said you can’t cheat the soul stone, he absolutely loved her
The explanation seems pretty simple to me; in Thanos’ twisted mind, he believes the feeling he has for Gamora is love, and so the sacrifice works. It has nothing to do with “true” love – it has to do with what the person (in this case, Thanos) who is making the sacrifice feels and believes. Also, you don’t have “a man saying that he killed a woman because he truly cared about her—and the universe rewarding him for doing so” – you have one person killing another person because they cared about power more than they cared about the other person, which is neither a new nor particularly shocking thing in fiction, whether it’s a man killing a woman, a man killing another man, or a woman killing another woman.
Thanos is a self centered egomaniac. In his mind he believes he loves her. Thats the WHOLE point.
What? So the audience can’t buy a psychopath hell bent on the destruction of half the universe to also have a scewed outlook on what love is? The dude murdered half of her planet without batting an eye, went on what essentially is a crusade throughout the Galaxy trying to find these infinity stones, yet you can’t buy that he doesn’t know how to properly show affection to his adopted daughter? Thanos killed her for his motives because in his mind, the greater good of the universe is more important than that of his own “love” of his daughter. The same sentiment can be shared within the comic books for his love of Mistress Death was more important than that of even his own well-being. Logically, nobody would drive themselves to the brink of insanity, willingly making themselves public enemy #1 throughout the universe and multiverse, killing half the population in cold blood, all for the “love” of an entity that still scoffs at the sight of you…
It’s a comic book. These are comic book villains. Thanos is an interesting villain, but what makes him interesting is his hell-bent nature for his true love, fighting
Yeah but you know what’s worse?
Fans that admire, aspire, and love the Joker’s and Harley Quinn’s relationship. That one revolves around abuse, torture, and manipulation and people love it so much. I don’t get people sometimes.
Respectfully, I think you’re wrong about this. I think you’re wrong because you’re coming at it from the point of view of Thanos as a hero, or as someone we’re supposed to look up to, or someone we’re supposed to take lessons from. But we’re not. He’s the villain. He’s twisted and, to most of us I hope, evil. His definition of “love” was enough to satisfy the Soul Stone, that’s true – but that’s a technicality. The Soul Stone said “Sacrifice someone YOU love” – and that’s vastly different to “Sacrifice someone according to the normal, healthy definition of love that most people on 2018 Earth share.”
The movie was a downer because it was supposed to be. We’ll get the resolution next May.
I’m sorry, but your argument is incorrect, you’re saying Thanos doesn’t love? Or is it his love is abusive? Just because he’s abusive doesn’t he doesn’t love Gamora, she betrayed him in Guardians of the Galaxy, he let her live, isn’t that prove that he loved her? Or did you forgot all Nebula comments in previous films? She hated Gamora because Thanos loved her and not Nebula, and did you forget? Thanos said it himself, he wants Gamora to INHERITED his universe after he finished “working” on it. That is LOVE. Even in a demented, abusive and psychotic way it is.
I see where you’re coming from but remember perception is reality. For Thanos what we see as abuse was him. Trying to. Love her. He pushed her to be a warrior out of “love” it’s twisted because in his mind that’s what love is. In our minds that’s the definition of abuse. But that’s the trick the same reason Thanos thinks killing half of everyone is the best way to get resources. He’s “mad” his reality is so torn he feels what normal people feel. But for the wrong reasons. And that’s why it’s hard to hate him. Because in his own way he is a sympathetic villain. He is suffering in his own reality apart. From ours.
My guess… The only “winning path” that Dr. Strange saw was letting Thanos execute his full plan only to eventually realize it wasn’t worth it (because of what he had to do to Gamora) and he turns back time. He basically unwinds his entire plan due to his love for his daughter.
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You’re making the leap here that someone who is capable of great evil is also not capable of love. Yes, it was abusive, but even abusers “love”. It’s demented, but they are still capable of the emotion.
To your point about creating more resources, his long-determined solution to the problem was wiping out half of the universe. That’s his whole motivation for what he does. He assumes it’s kindness and the right thing to do, therefore it only makes sense that after discovering an “ultimate power” that he’d connect that to his predetermined solution to the problem. Humans do this all the time.
Thanos is a villainous character, he is deeply and horribly flawed – either insane or deeply deluded. I’m not surprised at all that his concept of love is horribly manipulative and unhealthy. I certainly didn’t get the message that there was anything to redeeming in Thanos – just because he experiences emotion.
@14 Jan Michael
(from my wife’s comments)
It may be true that you can’t cheat the Soul Stone, but you can certainly delude yourself. And if the self you delude carries the Reality Stone, then *how do you know the reality he experienced was the same one everyone else experienced?* Maybe Thanos is still standing on the brink of that precipice lost in a dream. And we’ll find that out in the next movie.
You missed the point entirely. The movie does not reward Thanos nor condones his abusive actions. The movie is not at all trying to say love is to abuse or could be torturing someone else as well.
The problem with Infinity War and the rest of Marvel movies are the viewers themselves. All these movies, especially Infinity War, are based on the comics and in this case a mesh between Infinity Gauntlet, Infinite Wars, and the modern version of Infinity Gauntlet. The story was supposed to be dark. Thanos had to be victorious, not to give the impression to the viewers that it’s okay for bad guys to win or be rewarded; rather, the emphasis is building the antagonist so mighty and so dark that it would take the protagonist so much more to overcome such a beast. The point is to make the protagonists, in this case The Avengers, to become the almighty heroes they will become which you will see in Avengers 4. But before you see the entire story unfold, you must first witness the storm, the horror, the darkness that Thanos brings.
His unflinching action to take Gamorra’s life was supposed to be exactly that. Love is not based on your sole definition. In fact, love is an abstraction, an emotion that can be manifested in an enormous display of actions. Through our very own history, love has been expressed in stark variety of spectrums that will absolutely be frowned upon today and our way of showing love would be frowned upon by our ancestors if they saw how kids today are raised and family eat together and do things on a normal basis. Love is subjective without question. We know Thanos’ idea of love is completely a distortion to our concept of love and it’s supposed to be that way.
I think Thanos doesn’t know what real love is like. So he’s equating his affection towards her as love. That makes him even more the monster.
You’re giving him WAY too much credit for being a loving father. Of course it’s terrible and abusive. HE’S THE VILLAIN.
I think your critique is valid, but only in that it highlights a cultural/sociological problem in western society (specifically America). The best answer to how love is defined for the soul stone is that the sacrifice offered to it needed to be of sufficient cost to the one offering it. The emphasis is upon how Thanos perceived the cost of his sacrifice rather than the soul stone holding the sacrifice up to a standard it possessed in itself.
The bigger question is who defines what love is? The reason this felt hollow to you (beyond poor narrative construction which undercut the depth of the relationship, at least to Thanos) is the ‘acceptable’ conception of love in the narrative was unacceptable to you. But it was good enough for the writers, and it is passable for many in our culture. Should it be? Not in my mind, but no one wants to offer a standard for what love truly is which invalidates how others define it. In our culture, who has a right to define what love is for everyone?
My hope is the writers will exploit this ‘hole’ in the plot in the next film, but I doubt it. Could an inadequate sacrifice make the stone susceptible to someone who offers a ‘truer’ sacrifice?
The movie was fun eye candy, but in many cases it had ideological candy as well: concepts which were fun to hod in the moment but which were much more troubling and dangerous upon closer inspection. I enjoyed the movie and look forward to seeing the next one, but it did have some moments which ‘soured’ the experience for me as well.
I suppose the only real thing to say is “congratulation on understanding the character relationships in the way that the filmmakers intended you to.”
I understand why you and others feel the way You do..however…major point being missed is Thanos is “Mad” hence the name The Mad Titan. As in real world, people suffering from mental issues have their own sense of reality/love etc….You are expecting a normal representation of Love which for a Mad person is far from it.
Yes because the emotions of an insane, genocidal alien will be the same as a humans. Makes sense.
Probably one of the best commentaires i have ever read. Profound in its realizations and the depths it explores. I am proud of the commentator for taking a stand over the numbing direction we as a society are taking.
I’d also add that in contrast to Gamora, the two men who have feelings about Gamora do get comprehensible plot threads in Infinity War. Peter Quill is both consistently in character with who we know him to be, and yet also has forward momentum. He is a selfish and childish man, but he has grown enough that he can respect Gamora and try to kill her. This pushes him far outside his comfort zone, but he does it–and it is actually a tense and effective scene, because we understand: 1) How he feels; 2) Why killing her is necessary; and 3) Why Peter Quill’s nature makes this a difficult decision for him. That is how narrative and cinematic tension work. It works well!
I’m less enamored with the scene late in the movie where he loses it, but that is also not out of character for him. He lost control in GotG2, and that ended up saving the day, so it’s not out-of-character that he might do that here, after already having been pushed so far. Either way, these are both good scenes that work with what we know of the characters. Tony Stark and Thor similarly get scenes that build upon what we already know of these people.
They had a huge opportunity here to do similar things for Gamora, and they blew it.
I agree. Gamora’s treatment in the film was abysmal. She deserved much better.
My personal read on the film was that Thanos was self-deluding, and the great betrayal being that the Soul Stone didn’t see through that somehow. Gamora was treated unjustly to the end.
The only possible saving grace would be if it turns out the Soul Stone preserved her inside of itself specifically to upset/reverse Thanos’s accomplishments in the next film, but even if that was the case, it wasn’t properly foreshadowed here.
I still enjoyed the movie overall—the whole “why not make a universe that’s twice as big?” argument doesn’t really phase me, since Thanos’s counterpoint would be that then everyone would expand to fill it up and they’d just run into the same problem again later—but stuff like Gamora’s shallow and thoughtless treatment kept me from being totally invested.
The entire movie hammered home the point that love is stupid and not rational. Someone really had a hate-on for “love” as a noble ideal because it screwed the universe at least three times in the movie (Gamora and Peter Quill, Gamora and Thanos, Wanda and Vision).
That said, I think the article-writer has a skewed idea of love. Sure, it’s nice when it’s self-sacrificing, kind, and generous and so-on, but it’s also petty, selfish and cruel. Or as the song once said, “sometimes love isn’t enough”. If you try to define away the dark-side of love then sure, as Gamora said “that’s not love”. But human history shows that whatever era werew in, sometimes that *is* love.
Which isn’t too say I like how the movie treated Gamora. It basically fridged her to make Thanos and Quill more angsty. And all the Guardians movies have undermined her position as “most dangerous woman in the Galaxy” because they wanted to add a romantic sub-plot. But the “love” bit? Sometimes love is pretty monstrous.
I think you’re over-thinking it. It’s a good point, but you’re applying a quantifiable measurement to a feeling. It’s like when Christians try to apply a similar measure to sin. The rule is just basic binary: it is or it isn’t. Red Skull informs Thanos he must give up what he loves most (or something to that effect, I forget the exact words) and in his own mind his greatest love is Gamora. Obviously how he approaches his love for children is different than mine and yours but it still falls within the binary rules set forth by Red Skull. He loves Gamora most. Additionally, he put little thought into killing her. Knowing all this it shows a deep feeling of commitment to his cause. Keep in mind Thanos clearly has issues, hence the title Mad Titan. That doesn’t mean he is incapable of love. He’s not pissed off. He’s crazy. Crazy people can love their kids. My ex loves our child and is ten shades of bat-shit crazy.
You sacrifice yourself for love, not the other way around.
Shouldn’t the real problem be the Soul Stones perception of what love really is? My problem was that there was no way in the Comic Book World, which I woukd consider, (I’ll get attacked for this)more of a fairy tale, or have you, supernatural world-and in my thinking NO WAY does Thanos “love” for Gamora qualify as real love. The Soul Stones definition of true love certainly differed from mine.I liked your critique better than anyone’s I have read!
this Toni Morrison quote from The Bluest Eye immediately came to mind as I was reading the article:
You forget that Thanos is known as the MAD Titan. Literally insane.
“Love” is a concept that has no value outside of the context of the person who is feeling it. It is a complex word that even human beings have difficulty for what it means. I get the feeling that Vormir perhaps has a similar approach in that it’s all in the perspective of the person in question.
I’m sure Thanos thinks that what he felt was “love,” though more likely we would attribute it to something far more sociopathic… kinda like how Thanos feels that his cause is noble and pursues it with the same zealotry, yet we all know it to be genocidal and evil.
You’re talking about a character whose entire moral code is a Polar Shift from any rational being’s, so… I’m not sure what there is to be “incensed” about.
I think your view on out is overly simplistic and shortsighted.
From YOUR perspective and assessment of his feelings are accurate. But putting your values onto another character and claiming them false is wrong.
There are millions of examples of people who do horrible things to people they “love” in their minds.
If you want to get really analytical, sure, he doesn’t love her, he loves the idea of his legacy and being able to live on in perpetuity through her. So it’s really about him and his love for himself than anything having to do with her.
But in his mind, in his world, that IS love of her. We can argue that by our definitions that isn’t real love, but you can’t argue that in his mind, and heart that is absolutely love. Not exactly the kind of love it’s framed as, but love none the less.
The only definition of love that matters here is Thanos’s. He feels love towards Gamora, more than he feels towards anyone else, and so the sacrifice works. The movie is not asking us to buy that Thanos’s love is healthy or acceptable, just that it’s real to him. It’s not possible to objectively judge the depth of another person’s emotions; there are no scales and no units of measurement.
night in comment #9 nailed it. The author here is focusing too much on Gamora’s perspective, when there’s a three dimensional character in Thanos. Yes, he’s an awful, abusive person. This is clear, and for the viewer’s sake, I think they showed and implied enough in the three films this story arc carries through that we get the point: The relationship has serious problems. The love Thanos has for Gamora is, from his point of view, well-intentioned. That is why his heart is broken. He’s loves his agenda and goal more than his daughter. Infinity War is a multi-faceted chapter of this story, so only looking at it from one character’s perspective does it a disservice.
I thought it was because Thanos is so twisted, so warped, that the closest thing to love he could sacrifice was what he felt for Gamora. After all, regardless of whether or not what he feels is love, it does seem that he “loves” her the most. At the very least, that relationship is what he believe he loves the most. I think it says a lot that the relationship he “loves” the most is still a dark, twisted relationship with no redeeming qualities.
Other people have already said this, but I’ll chip in. The sacrifice to get the Soul Stone isn’t about other people’s feelings or thoughts. It’s not about any complex web of interactions that led to that moment. It’s about what the petitioner loves most, and their capability to sacrifice it. It’s about the petitioner’s perceptions, not about some hard and fast rule on what love is or isn’t. From Thanos’s perspective he loved Gamora. Yes, he stole her from her family. Yes, he trained her by forcing her to fight her sister, and by winning hurt her sister more. Yes, Gamora escaped Thanos at the first chance she got at buying her freedom.
But that doesn’t cut into how Thanos sees things. He still, if the moment after the Snap means anything, sees Gamora as a the child who he “rescued” from one of his own purges. She becomes the avatar of his choice, tacitly giving approval for what he has done and what Thanos has supposedly sacrificed. It perfectly encapsulates Thanos and how he sees Gamora (if not the universe): as a child who he’s not angry with, but merely disappointed in their choices. In the moment on the cliff, Thanos believes that Gamora is the person he loves the most. And, as far as the Soul Stone cares, that’s all that matters. Thanos is a monster, but that doesn’t mean he can’t have some perception of love and compassion. Even if it is horrific from the outside.
You are overcomplicating this. Thanos does love Gamora as a daughter, but Thanos is also insane. He is called the “Mad Titan” for a reason. An insane person can love someone and hurt them at the same time.
Maybe Thanos does not appear insane, because he has a calm and thoughtful demeanor, but he is. Insanity, after all, is just a warped perception of oneself and/or the world around him, and that pretty much sums up Thanos.
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I agree not only with your commentary about the Gamora storyline, but also your comment about the whole “why not make more resources rather than murder half the universe?” issue. I don’t mind suspending belief during a movie, but the movie should at least be internally consistent from a logic standpoint. That is why I also was pulled right out of the movie by all the logical lapses displayed by Doctor Strange, from how he didn’t use the Time Stone to correct a huge strategic mistake to how he said he would do one thing and then did something directly contradictory because the plot demanded it. Similarly, when the heroes literally had an opportunity to “disarm” Thanos, why did no one think to do so? Answer: because it would have also amputated the plot and thus prevented the billion dollar grossing sequel that will come out next May.
Coming after the brilliant Black Panther movie, Avengers: Infinity War was a real letdown
I don’t understand this objection. Gamora says “this is not love”, and the audience is supposed to agree with HER, not Thanos.
The movie isn’t saying that Thanos is right, just that he believes in his own self righteousness and will do anything to justify the things he’s done. His misunderstanding of what love is is just another way that he’s wrong.
The premise of your argument, that because he abuses her means he can’t love her, is flawed, IMO. Defining what love is is an impossible concept for humans, it means something different to everyone and it expressed different by everyone. I love my family differently than others love theirs, and people love their significant others in many different ways. Do the devoted spouses love each other more than the couple in an open relationship? Weird analogy, I know, but I think the point comes across. It seems to be that what we see as abuse Thanks sees as forcing her to become stronger, which from his point of view is an expression of love. That’s easy to accept when we are aware that live is not a ‘capital L’ objective thing with a set definition. It’s very subjective.
Clearly there is love between then. Gamora cries tears of despair when she thinks she kills him! It’s a weird twisted love many can’t relate to, but the movie establishes it. I do think they could have spent a little more time making it clear with a different flashback, perhaps something during her “training”, but they do briefly establish an affection between the two characters in this movie.
Thanos is called “The Mad Titan”… he is CRAZY. He even states that what he is doing requires a strong will. Who knows how the Soul Stone judges our definition of the word “Love”… maybe its just an emotional sacrifice. He has been wiping out half of whole planet populations for a long long time. Like a serial killer justifies his actions, Thanos feels that he is totally and completely right in his actions. Think Dexter Morgan killing serial killers or Hannibal Lecter eating his victims. Thanos is nuts! The Stone judged Thanos emotional loss of throwing his “daughter” to her death as fulfillment of its requirements. Thanos actions should not make sense to non-crazy and non-genocidal normal comicbook lovin’ people.
I think lorq may have it right – Dr Strange’s use of the time stone or some other shenanigans will prove to have tricked Thanos into a delusion that he won his goal. But we won’t know this until the next movie, and with very little pointing to the possibility, we are left with the problems you outline.
Here is the thing about abusers. They think of themselves as the heroes not the villians. I was raised by an abuser and i know for certian they belive they gave me a life of love. In their reality of abuse and manipulation it is true. Whereas after yeara of trauma and gaslighting i know differently. Gamora even says “this is not love” and she is right. From her point of view and anyone seeing her situation from the outside, it is not love.
Makes me think about how thanos would respond if he had the sword from marvel comics that forces you to confront the truth. For those who are so deluded and belives in their own lies, the sword can kill them with the power of truth and reality. But thats another story from the marvel comics and not likely to do gamora any good in thr mcu.
I think you are over thinking the movie. Here’s a question, has there ever been a moment in time where a person thought sacrificing one person would save more? Of course. That’s the point. It was a test. As a response to what is love, it is simple. Thanks loved Gamora like a daughter, she was his favorite. Thanos had a choice to throw away the only thing he truly cared about and loved or watch the universe overpopulate and
The obvious problem with this scene is not what you say it is.
“the person they love most.”
Thanos sacrifices her because he loves her more than anyone else. This is a purely subjective requirement that must be true if his sacrifice worked.
The real problem…
Gamora didn’t see it coming. Super obvious plot turn.
Would have been better for her to immediately assume he would sacrifice her. She could have tried to convince him that it wouldn’t work.
Instead she thinks his tear was because he thought he had no options to fulfill the requirement??
So stupid.
As a 12 year child protection prosecutor and a survivor myself, it is a very real moment not false at all. It struck me as true, the abuser does earnestly believe “they love their victim” that doesn’t make it love as pointed out in numerous threads and unfortunately a movie like this doesn’t have time to delve into the abusers psychosis and cop outs, but from cat horders that starve their cats to “save them”, to the mother who poured boiling water on her child’s feet to teach him not to lie, when he said he couldn’t feel them after being hung upside down all night for “stealing” food; all these evil people would say and believe they acted out of love. That’s why they are truly evil.
Gamora is possibly the most poorly handled character in the entire MCU. Someone else already mentioned that she’s regarded as the galaxy’s deadliest assassin, and yet she constantly plays second fiddle in the Guardians of the Galaxy series. We’ve never seen Gamora show off her abilities. For that matter, if she’s such a skilled killer, why can’t she use that ability to kill herself before Thanos gets the information out of her about the stone. Why hasn’t she had someone plant a bomb in her head or something like that?
Most frustrating for me is that her relationship with Starlord makes no sense. He’s a dreadful person. I’m constantly baffled by why so many people seem to love his character. He’s a self-centered, egotistical jerk. The films have failed to earn the relationship between Gamora and Starlord. Ironically, the only reason the relationship comes across as well as it does in Infinity War is because, unless you’ve seen the two Guardians of the Galaxy films, you don’t realize how absurd any attraction between them is. Starlord is almost everything society is coming to realize men shouldn’t be, and the MCU constantly rewards him for it.
I just wanted to point out the ridiculous nature of claiming that Thanos could have created infinite resources. First off he is driven by a certain set of motivations. Why would he change those because someone like Tony Stark says a throw away line about infinite resources?
Second off that wouldn’t work. How do you make infinite resources? Lions eat Zebras right? So you make an infinite amount of zebras? And zebras eat certain plants so do you make an infinite number of those? That doesn’t make any sense. The world would be so overcrowded that it would lead to the same problem as Thanos was trying to prevent, overpopulation. Sure people would have resources but there’d be too many. The environment and food chains would fucking collapse. And you can’t make extra planets for all these resources because then where do all these planets go? Would he just overcrowd the universe with infinite planets for infinite resources? Besides there are more than food resources so what happens then? Make a whole planet full of Iron Ore? Do you realize how insane and outrageous this would be. It would be more detrimental than his original plan.
Besides there is so many alien species that eat other alien species. Infinite resources would kill everyone rather than half.
I had low expectations for the film for several reasons, and am not surprised it has gotten such mixed reviews, though I’ve not seen it myself, and doubt I will unless it’s on dvd. I was an avid reader of all the original epic marvel crossover series back then, my fave by far being Secret Wars. I wish that’d been done 1st, it was a damn good series that set up many parameters for the series that followed like Infinity Gauntlet, Infinity Wars, Infinity Crusade, and others.
That being said, I had very low expectations for reasons that directly relate to many of the issues mentioned in this article. Simply put, 2 movies is by far insufficient to complete the task, 3 might not have done it justice either. There was no way all the events could be put in the film, no chance some things wouldn’t be left out or added or changed, not a single hope in hell of telling the story in its entirety in 2 films. Of course characterization was going to suffer: with that many Marvel characters involved and so little time to tell how Thanos not only found out about/obtained the Stones, but also how he loses his (heh heh) marbles how then could characterization even get a few minutes airplay? Some for Thanos and new characters, but no way time for already established (if only barely and quite vaguely indeed for some) franchises.
I totally agree, it sounds incredibly shameful the treatment Gamora gets, and that Thanos could get the soul stone this way is beyond mind boggling. May as well give it to Kylo Ren for killing his father! Once all is said and done though, all that could really be expected of a 2 film Infinity War was a boatload of cgi/stuntman/woman violence and a plot as thin as the atmosphere a mile above Everest’s peak.
Those were MY expectations anyhow, and from all I’ve heard and read, they delivered that. Perhaps it was a diverting and entertaining ‘X’ hours for some, but also, as shallow as a movie gets.
This didn’t bother me. Not because I disagree with you about what a hideous, awful relationship this was where Thanos murders Gamora’s family and people and then kidnaps her. But simply because I assumed the use of “love” here by Red Skull was just English being its usual imprecise self. This is “give up what you love” in a possessive, general sense. After all, would the soul stone simply be inaccessible to someone who loves sunrises or some other thing that would be effectively impossible to give up?
The best argument for this as an imprecise definition that doesn’t care how unhealthy or one-sided your love is would have to be what Thanos isn’t required to give up: his quest to amass all the stones. Obviously he cares more about his mission and assembling this tool than he does for Gamora, else he wouldn’t be willing to sacrifice her. But the request isn’t “give up what you love second-best,” so clearly there’s some fudge here.
This isn’t the only time Marvel has done this–see Yondu in GotG2, who we’re suddenly supposed to view as the *better* father-figure for Quill, and ignore all the trauma and abuse Quill suffered at his hands as a child.
Hollywood and society in general has this problem, this idea that somehow abuse equals love. It’s propagated in our entertainment media, as evidenced by GotG2 and Infinity War. It’s in the idea that we must always forgive our abusers, that “I’m sure they had reasons for what they did,” that we owe our abusers compassion and a “second chance,” or even third, fourth, a thousand chances.
This idea needs to die a painful, fiery death.
Being that Gamora was used as a sacrifice for Thanos to get the soul stone, her soul, like all of those that disintegrated, will be currently and temporarily trapped in the soul stone. All of which will be reversed in the next avengers movie.
People seem to forget that when it comes to human elements (read: love) it’s all very subjective, what you consider love might not be in line with what I consider love. Same goes for Thanos
Clearly Thanos and Gamora had some very different views on how their relationship worked
I don’t think this takes into account the Egomaniacal, zealot level god-madness that Thanos has – I believe he’s capable of love, that he loves her genuinely and completely in the only way he can. But he’s willing to literally kill BILLIONS of beings everywhere in the everything because he believes it’s the right thing and his responsibility to do so. Frankly this is just the Jesus story – if you believe the angry cloud monster loves his son but allows him to not just sacrifice but be horribly tortured, abused and die slowly and painfully, it isn’t a leap to see the same with Thanos. (And yeah, I just compared a Marvel movie to the Bible.)
This article is another attempt to humanize someone who is not human. Thanos is not normal. In the books he loves Death and kills to impress her. Even a psychopath can love, it may not be what we call or think if as love but it is for them. Gamora represents the last piece of Thanos’s “humanity”. He says as much with his “failed before” line. This is also why Gamoras child self confronts him after the snap. And to address the idea of why Thanos didnt simply double the resources…they are finite. Even energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be changed. (meaning there is no God…that is another convo). You cannot create something from nothing. Not to mention the logistics of putting double resources on every life giving planet. It is easier to cull than grow.
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Part of the problem here is that love is a horribly overloaded word in the English language. Love can mean many different things, some of which unfortunately support the position that this movie takes. Love, as far as I am concerned, properly speaking means that one desires the best of all possible things for the beloved. If that is the case, then it is hard to argue that Thanos loved Gamora.. in fact if we apply that definition of love, then it would be impossible for anyone to get the Soul Stone, because by definition, no one who truly loved another could ever actually sacrifice the beloved for their own gain. (Note, though, that this definition, does, in a twisted fashion allow for the way Thanos treated Gamora since it is possible he really believed he was helping her to be gain the strength that he felt she might need one day). On the flip side, usually, when we say we love someone, that is not usually what we mean when we say “I love you.” We generally mean, I like being around you, I take pleasure in what you do and accomplish, etc. Using this definition of love, it is possible, without much stretch to see how Thanos could have “loved” Gamora and at the same time been willing to sacrifice her.
For Thanos, who is committing a sick and twisted act, not only premeditated but as part of a lifelong work, it is not a surprise that his idea of love is sick and twister. Whether the soul stone rewards a sacrifice based on the universe’s ideal of love (would we even meet it?), or the individual’s personal version of love, that is up to debate. Yes, it is dangerous, but that is the irrational threat that Thanos presents.
You had me until the moment you tried to analyze the titan’s love for the first of his adopted daughters.
It appears your disdain for the portrail of Thanos and his apparent lack of “Vader” evil has clouded your judgement young Padawan learner. Barney’s menacing doppleganger can absolutely do all the horrible things he did to Gamora as a child and still have genuine love for her.
Parents (bad ones) are notorious for implementing techniques for making their children stronger as people, even at the expense of torturing and exploiting the very child they love so dearly. Nothing is different in this case. I’m sure until he found out about the Soul Stone’s unfortunate trade off, he probably intended to hand the universe over to Gamora eventually.
No matter how abusive a person can be to another, that physical, mental, and spiritual abuse do not equate to a reduced amount of genuine love, as hard as that may be for normal folks like us to understand. Thanos truly loved the little girl he abducted. Whether it was instantly or over time is a matter of debate, but the the possibility of him having genuine love for Gamora is 100% plausible.
Why did she say anything at all? All she needed to do was to buy a little more time to allow Vison’s stone to be removed. One minute she is willing to die to protect the location of the stone and the next she is telling Thanos where it is.
Wou could make the argument that she wanted to save her sister, but she should know Thanos enough by now to know that he has no interest in saving her.
What the movie portrays is not an opinion that this twisted love is acceptable, but simply to show what is happening to Thanos and what he is thinking. When one views through a lens of established right and wrong which is immovable, one displaces that morality unto the subjects of what he’s viewing. If you put that lens aside, you attempt to see the subject’s point-of-view. Thanos is being sincere. It is sad and it is wrong, but it is true – the conflict we, the viewer, must confront. Reality and morality are separate, not intrinsically tied.
Example: If your child was an evil psychopath who murdered people, how would you feel? Probably you won’t condone the evil behavior, but… that person is your child. If you stated you loved your child, do you think it’s okay for people to say you’re wrong for doing so?
I think the premise of this article is wrong. It seems to me that you reject the notion that someone with a broken moral compass and abusive tendencies is somehow incapable of love. Thanos is a sick and twisted monster, but he isn’t a robot. He can still feel strong emotions for Gamora while engaging in an abusive relationship dynamic. The movie tried to illustrate this in several ways. Firstly, he dud hesitate before flinging her. He even cried and apologized. That’s a big deal for someone who deals death on a planetary scale regularly. Secondly they movie even has Mantis read his emotions and tell the audience that he experiences great pain and loss over Gamora. He would be a boring Hollywood psychopath stereotype if he was portrayed as incapable of feeling a connection to other beings. He is presented with an actual personality (even if it is still a reprehensible one.)
First of all, the film isn’t saying or even suggesting that THIS is love, or that it’s PURE LOVE. Only that Thanos, by the criteria the Soul Stone has, truly believes he loves Gamora.
Second, it’s not THE UNIVERSE that is rewarding him for killing Gamora. It’s the Soul Stone, or the Stones all together, by whatever criteria the beings or entities that created them set.
But all this discussion has made want to share this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEXWRTEbj1I
If I read your argument correctly, I think the problem with your reasoning is that you possess an overly simplistic/naive conceptualization of love.
Love is not something that is axiomatically a force for good, it is a feeling that can drive a person do do stuff. Sometimes the things done are good, other times… not so much. Love has the potential to blind (such as with Quill in the movie), but it can also be over ridden. No one would disagree that the relationship between Thanos and Gamora is unhealthy and twisted, but that does not imply a lack of love. Nor does the swiftness in which Thanos carries through with the sacrifice of Gamora, the important thing to relies about Thanos is that he is a fanatic. He is knows that he is doing the right thing, others are all to weak to understand that he is correct.
It is his fanaticism that allows him to over ride his love for Gamora and follow through with the sacrifice. Fanatics through out history have taken analogous actions, because they know that what they are doing is ultimately right and for the best. People have blow themselves up to further causes, stoned family members, and many other atrocities all in the name of what they know to be right and for the best. The people who do these things aren’t all psychopaths or insane, they merely have a strong enough conviction to go through with what must be done, given there particular ideology, that they know to be correct. To say that such people don’t love some of those negatively affected by there actions is to go down the all-to tantalizing path of dehumanizing the opposition, a tactic that aids in the digestion of atrocities but is ultimately an incorrect representation of events.
Obviously Gamora’s fate is terrible, but it still serves a great purpose. It showcases the horrors of fanaticism, we are never meant to accept Thanos’ sacrifice as some bitter-sweet action. Nor are we suppose to be happy about Gamora’s end, indeed quite the opposite we should feel sorrow at her loss and allow those feelings to galvanize our wariness of fanaticism.
Might I suggest that what is lost in all of this, is the scene where Thanos returns to Titan to an apparent child version of Gamora. To which she asks, (as if she was aware of the plot twist), did he accomplish what he set out to do and how much it cost him. He answers everything, perhaps the trade off for what he sacrificed was the adult Gamora only to regain the child. Maybe we do not know Gamora as well as we think? Was she on board with the entire plan? It may not be as foolish as it looks, but far more dysfunctional in its progresseion revelation of their relationship. I could be wrong lol.
@@@@@ 68,
“Gamora is possibly the most poorly handled character in the entire MCU. Someone else already mentioned that she’s regarded as the galaxy’s deadliest assassin, and yet she constantly plays second fiddle in the Guardians of the Galaxy series. We’ve never seen Gamora show off her abilities. “
Go back and watch Guardians of the Galaxy (the Kyln scenes) and you’ll see the “most deadly woman, assassin of note, original badass” go all meek when a bunch of prisoners – who couldn’t intimidate my grandmother – confront her. She shrinks back within herself, basically runs to her cell and sulks. Seriously? This is Gamora the assassin? She would have sneered at them and threatened to rip an arm off and beat them to death with it.
Totally mishandled as a character.
This was an interesting take, but I feel like it assumes a certain level of approval from the filmmakers – as if allowing Thanos to gain the Soul Gem justifies his belief that he really “loved” Gamora – and I’m not sure that’s true. It’s a magic rock and planet and have no reason to believe it somehow determines objective truth in what a seeker thinks of as love.
Still, reading these comments, you can see a few folk that believe just as you feared, that poor Thanos does really love Gamora in his own special way. Yuck.
This article gives a real interesting take on how the filmmakers might have interpreted the sacrifice of a loved one as a theme throughout the film!
http://atomicjunkshop.com/into-the-endgame-infinity-war-analysis/
You’re completely wrong. He thought he was saving the universe by thinning the herd and he sacrificed his adopted daughter, who he loved, in order to reach that goal.
” Norotic” people build sand castles in the sky…
“Phycotic” people live in those sand castles …
(sorry my spelling sucks )
One word best describes the issue at hand here…
“Perception”
Thanos , perceives himself as “rightgeous” , and his mad
mind is telling him that the “only” way to save the universe
from itself is to sacrifice half of it to save the rest … ( this
guy has
squirells juggling knives in his brain)
and a band of yes men & women telling him he’s
the best thing since sliced bread.
Ummm he is “Mad” , Pyco, nuts , 2 cans short of a 6 pack…
Some of you are trying to put “reason” into play where
none can be found.
I agree , Gamora got the short end of the stick , but
we will have to wait until the next movie.
I still loved the movie reguardless .
Clear ether and power to your tubes…
Great article. I feel the problem is that there wasn’t enough build up in the relationship between Thanos & Gamora. Rushed flash backs and Thanos shedding tears did not make the “love” and consequential loss believable. It went from 0-100. And I was sitting there thinking, “huh?” Granted the movie was already 2.5hrs long, but maybe the MCU could have done a better job providing background to that relationship in previous Guardians movies so that the audience could swallow how difficult it was for Thanos to let his “daughter” go. I liked the movie and wanted to feel the loss too, but unfortunately it was rushed, and so it didn’t pull at the heart strings like it could have, had it been written differently. Still…looking forward to the conclusion. Fan for life!
I agree. I saw that too. In my mind, since I define love as putting another before yourself, the moment Thanos put himself, or his crazy, bizarro world quest to save the universe by killing it, before Gamora, well, that was the same moment any love he may or may not have had for Gamora, to me, would have become invalid. In other words, this test that Red Skull forced him to take should be impossible to correctly answer. It’s the unsolvable riddle. Some movies might have solved this if it were a hero who answered by not putting themselves before others and then being rewarded in a revelation that it was a trick question to test their morality. We should have had Red Skull laughing as Thanos watched over Gamora’s lifeless body, wondering where his blasted soul stone was. But, nope, not in infinity war.
I have to respectfully disagree. I believe that the author misses a lot of the point regarding Thanos and his relationship with Gamora. I would also further say that the subtext of Infinity War’s narrative is not only an excellent adaptation of the source material but also refutes a good number of the points in this article.
Thanos loved Gamora as only a cruel narcissist could. It’s not shared love, but greedy and obsessive. That he only loved his way of seeing her and not actually her as she is displays his very wickedness. The scene on Vormir made me hate Thanos deeper than anything else we’ve seen of him to date.
I believe there are 2 ways to understand the “sacrificing someone you love” condition. The one you describe is basically that there is a true love scale, and the relationship has to score highly on that scale for the sacrifice to pay off, which makes infinity way really disgusting, since it parades abuse as true love. The other way, which is the way I understood it, is that the person doing the sacrifice has to truly feel like they love the person they sacrifice. Knowing Thanos, it is very believable that he would feel he truly loves Gamora and still be able to kill her, considering he wants to kill every other person to save the universe. That doesn’t mean their telarelation is based on true love, simply that his understanding of the feeling is completely off base.
Yeah I didn’t buy that he had any love for Gamora either seemed like a major plot hole to me. I guess the “loved most” clause counts as “hates least” when it comes to Thanos. Lets just say the security on the soul stone might need some review.
Agreed, mostly. I didn’t come away from this Avengers movie feeling that “loved it” movie high. That’s sad because with all my fav heroes together, you’d think it’d be an awesome thing. But I don’t think Gamora is forever gone. Do you watch Agents of Shield? Anyway, there’s Dr. Strange too. The script, well, life sucks. So do villans. Hopefully, the next will be better…right??? The cheesy laugh lines will be better content, maybe???? Let’s hope this gets back to them. Goodness knows they made an ungodly amount of money off of this movie.
As someone who has suffered at the hands of an abusive father, I didn’t have any qualms with how Gamora was treated or that Thanos believed he loved her. We are shown he thinks he’s doing what’s right, that he will go to any lengths to achieve his goals. And we are shown the ‘softer’ side of him. A lot of people think that abusers are just awful 100% of the time. Guess what. They aren’t. There are legitimately good times I’ve had with my own father. That doesn’t negate all of the wrong he did or how he literally almost choked me to death when I was 14. Often, depictions of abuse are redneck wife-beater wearing alcoholics that /everyone/ knows are abusive dicks. Mine was at the hands of a high-functioning abuser. Everyone on the outside commented often how we had the perfect family and they loved having us around. The abuse was swept under the rug. For all of my attempts to reach out for help, I was written off as a kid who was over-exaggerating because my abuser seemed like such a nice guy; so smart, kind, and giving to those around him. There is no doubt in my mind that my abuser believed he loved me.
Frankly, I appluad this depiction of abuse. Because for a lot of us, this is the reality of it. Your abuser can be the worst monster, but they convince you they aren’t through these softer moments. The moments that make your question your own sanity, because yea, they did these awful things, but their apologies seem heartfelt and thoughtful and they ‘care about you so much’, they say. I’m pleased that this depiction is able to open up discussions about abuse and the many faces it wears.
The thing is you are all looking for a reason to criticize this movie but everything you have written about is what makes the movie unique. I mean, if they wanted to make Thanos the same as the one in the comics, how different does it make the movie? How different will he be from villains like Ronan? I like Marvel because they are making the plane of comics and superheroes different. They are starting to help us understand a story rather than just watch 2 hours of fighting and picking sides. That is what makes Black Panther and Infinity War unique. And if all you do is criticize and make things logical, then continue to do that while the rest of us enjoy these movies. You will catch up later. Am saying this coz am tired of seeing all kinds of critics looking for the slightest of problems to criticize this movie. Yet in a sense, you look at this from only your point of view and you don’t even take time to understand why Thanos or the other characters did what they did. I don’t think the executives in Marvel chose this storyline for nothing.
ugh. it’s not about what love is, but what love is FOR THANOS. in his journey of knowing what the universe “needs” (the real problem of the movie, by the way), caring for Gamora, in a obsessive way or not, was the only thing that counted as love for him. it’s called soul stone, not love stone.
You failed to see the insanity inside the man that made him a monster. He was motivated by a false sense of righteousness to do terrible things. It has been going on for generations with humanity. Why would it be hard to believe?
Although I havent seen the movie yet, I’m sad this is the state of what happened. Thanos is in love with Death. The entity not the state of being. He willingly chooses to gather the stones to erase half the universe to appeal to her. Goddamnit. Is the movie even worth watching if the main plot is so far off it doesn’t even make any sense?
@@@@@ 68 and @@@@@ 92,
Gamora is possibly the most poorly handled character in the entire MCU.
100% accurate. The first GotG movie reduces her to a secondary character in her own story. She is the only character with a personal stake in the plot (redemption, rebellion, etc), but the film turns it into Quill’s journey. The MCU hasn’t done right by her from the get-go.
I think the article is correct that the history between Thanos and Gamora is too underdeveloped to carry the narrative weight placed on it, and that the movie doesn’t do enough to challenge Thanos’s perspective.
When she thinks she’s killed him and sinks down crying, her reaction (in my opinion) is too simplistic. Her tears make sense, because – no matter what – he has been the most significant influence on her life: he has destroyed her childhood, shaped her upbringing, etc. Simultaneously hating and mourning someone is normal. In the film, though, she appears only to grieve. If she’d been crying and laughing, for example, something of the complexity and conflict in their history could have been shown.
On Vormir, the dialogue and direction of her last scene give unchallenged credence to the idea that what Thanos feels for her is love, and therefore (the real problem) that we the audience should not doubt it. Even something as simple as having Red Skull say “to him it is” when Gamora says “this isn’t love,” could have usefully complicated that message.
Here’s the fix for you; Thanos SAW it as love and that was enough for the Soul Stone. Shit like this is a matter of oerspective, and even though we see an abusive asshole of abusive father figure, he genuinely believed what he was doing was for her own good all these years, making her stronger and lethal. To him, he was giving her the ultimate gift of power. Making her the deadliest woman in the galaxy. In his own very twisted way, yes he did love Gamora.
Just because you see something doesn’t mean everyone does. Least of all the person you are trying to contradict. Thanos loved Gamora, and even though it was his own fucked up love, it counted enough for him.
A sidesnote to the primary subject of the article, I’d like to say I don’t believe the Infinity Stones can actually create resources. They were formed during the Big Bang, which suggests they’re still constrained by some kind of law. They can only manipulate. They cannot create. For example, the Time stone only manipulates timelines forward or backward. It cannot create nor destroy time. Reality stone manipulates our perception of reality, but it doesn’t change anything. And so on.
The whole point of their dynamic was that it was an abusive relationship. As someone who grew up in an abusive household, the scene actually made perfect sense. Of course in his mind he loved her. He’s an abusive parent. His view of Love is skewed and a very unhealthy way. He thinks he raised her to make her strong. The fact that you care more about the cultural implications of her representation then the story and it’s themes kind of makes it seem like you’re only looking to validate what you believe to be right rather than be entertained by what is essentially a tragedy epic. It’s fiction. People have to understand that horrible things happen all the time and to portray them in a seemingly realistic way isn’t necessarily going to send a positive message. Nor should it. Thanos is a villain not a role model. He’s supposed to do things that make you angry. People thought killmonger was very sympathetic villain and he definitely was but his thought process was almost identical to that of the Nazis before the Holocaust. He wanted to genocide the the oppressors. And kill their women and children too (his words)
Thanos is insane. What bothered me about the movie and the response to it was how his insanity was accepted, even encouraged as somehow righteous, even if maybe misguided. The Gamora sequence is just another bit of poor writing demonstrating that insanity without recognizing it.
It seems to me that there are really three issues being woven together here, and that most of the discussion has been focused on one of them — whether Thanos’ feelings toward Gamora are quantifiable as “love” within the framework of the Red Skull’s test.
It also seems to me that the majority of the gallery is in broad agreement about Thanos’ capacity to “love” Gamora: first, that he thinks that he loves her (else he wouldn’t be motivated to sacrifice her), and second, that what Thanos believes to be “love” is wildly inconsistent with most people’s definitions.
This gets us to the second issue: given Thanos’ warped idea of love, why does his sacrifice of Gamora appear to work? Thanos comes out of the encounter with what looks like a working Soul Stone. There are two broad answers to this; the more popular explanation I’m seeing above is that the Skull isn’t measuring Thanos’ sacrifice against an absolute definition of love (i.e. the audience’s), but against Thanos’ own beliefs. I’d like this argument better if we weren’t talking about capital-I Infinity Stones, artifacts which have nearly unlimited power in the context of the MCU. The forces governing the Stones, such as they are, should have both the ability and the mandate to judge on absolute rather than subjective criteria; anything less is insufficient protection against exactly what happens over the course of this movie.
As a result, I am inclined to the other answer: what Thanos gets is not in fact the Soul Stone, but a knock-off of some kind reserved for those who attempt the test and fail the Stones’ absolute standards. It works well enough to make Thanos think he’s passed the test, but will ultimately backfire on him in the next movie. I am actually surprised that this seems to be the minority viewpoint, not least because it’s the Red Skull of all people arbitrating the challenge, which strikes me as a sure sign that the game is rigged. That it is rigged really isn’t in dispute — we as audience know that Thanos will be toast by the end of the next movie — but I’d submit that Thanos’ Soul Stone being a ringer is a stronger thematic resolution than one in which Thanos’ idea of love allows him to “win” an Infinity Stone.
Yet none of the foregoing really touches on the original essay’s primary thesis: specifically, that Gamora’s character arc in both Infinity War and the Guardians of the Galaxy movies has been badly mishandled. And on that point, with some reservations, I generally agree. The flashbacks in Infinity War are pretty clearly designed to promote Thanos’ view of his relationship with Gamora, in support of the subsequent sacrificial moment. We don’t get nearly enough of Gamora’s own perspective in flashback, and she should certainly have had a stronger dying moment than she did — my guess is that the writers were too worried about telegraphing plot points from the next movie to craft a proper Obi-Wan Kenobi exit line for her.
Mind you, in some respects the writers of Infinity War are the victims of pure bad timing on this point. In the last year or so, popular culture’s eyes have opened far more widely than they ever have before to the issues of psychological, physical, and sexual abuse and misconduct — to the extent that it’s much, much easier now to recognize and criticize these elements of Gamora’s character arc than it would have been when the film was actually being scripted and shot. I emphatically don’t mean to frame this as an excuse: Gamora’s unique history has been on the table since the first Guardians movie was written, and I agree with the premise that it could have been dramatized a great deal more effectively than has been the case. But I have to think — or at least hope — that the writers and producers have to be looking at Infinity War as released, saying “we could have done this better,” and perhaps doing some retooling of the next film in light of the new expectations their audiences have adopted in the wake of so much awakening.
Just to play Devil’s Advocate for a moment – this piece takes a lot on faith.
For example, as noted, all we really knew about Thanos prior to this movie was what we got from Gamora herself. That he’s cruel and sadistic and loves nothing? We’re never shown that. We’re told. I’m not saying this is healthy, or a good message, but why can’t it be that Gamora herself is not a hero, that she is a psychopath, that she was the one tormenting Nebula, that she willingly abandoned half her planet, etc? The galaxy at large seems to have an extremely low opinion of Gamora, as we see in GotG v1. She redeems herself in the viewer’s eye by keeping the Power Stone from Thanos, and by disavowing him, but we have no actual indication she’s genuinely fighting for the good guys. For all we know, she’s a more personable Ronan, working and killing for Thanos for as long as convenient and turning on him when their aims diverge.
Basically, it’s a little weird to accept that all that Gamora alleges about Thanos is true (that he’s cruel, doesn’t love anything, etc) and then say that the filmmakers screwed up by showing a Thanos who doesn’t necessarily act that way, and exclaim that this cheapens Gamora’s character arc. It’s equally possible that it’s Gamora who exaggerates Thanos’ bad qualities and minimizes his maybe-sorta-decent qualities. Maybe Thanos DOES love Gamora, and the stories of her abuse weren’t all we were led to believe, and thus despite his overall Madness-with-a-capital-M, Thanos is capable of loving someone.
@82 – Chuck: I don’t think Gamora knows anything about the plan to remove and destroy Vision’s stone.
@84 Ryan: Also, we know robots are capable of love. :)
@125 – John: Interesting theory about the knock off Soul Stone.
As a victim of unspeakable violence and torture at the hands of the ones who raised me I can say you make some good points but also some bad ones. For example even though the things they’ve done to me will never leave my mind I do believe the loved me. Now saying that doesn’t excuse what they did I’m just saying that although they were very abusive doesn’t mean they didn’t love me. My parents grew up in violence too and so instead of learning from it they repeated the cycle. So to them it was all they knew and it doesn’t make it okay so please dont think for a moment I’m advocating for abusive parents I’m just saying that parents who abuse their children are capable of loving them. That being said I grew up and raised 4 children whom I’ve never laid a hand on nor do they know any of the pain I suffered. I’m diagnosed with PTSD due to my past but yet I ended the cycle and my parents have come to realize that all that they did was wrong. My point being is I believe your generalizing anyone who’s capable of abuse is incapable of love.
Well, if you don’t see why Thanos’ screwed up/Sacrificial Love for Gamora will be juxtaposed with the person who will have to make the same decision as Thanos’ in the next movie. It’s building up tension it will be used to show what real love sacrificed will look like.
THANOS can bring her back..he has the sole stone
I am pretty sure this is what will happen…
I really do see what the author is saying, but I would offer this up. What we know (and Thanos doesn’t) is that he will eventually lose and good will win. We might not know how he loses, but there ultimately will be no reward for him. I also suspect, and this is likely no spoiler, but we suspect that many if not all of these characters are coming back. I think that might be where the suspension of moral repentance – for now – might be coming in for the audience. Like the willing suspension of disbelief, we know the comeuppance is coming, and it may well come from Gamora.
Haven’t seen it yet but true love and what you love the most are 100% of it is the way you stated that giving up the thing you love the most then it would make sense that the tiny feeling he has for her is bigger then the complete hate for all else. Basically reversed the think he hates the least
You fail to realize these characters are not human. Their brain chemistry, feelings, thoughts, and emotions would be different from our own.
Thanos is not a man. He is naturally exempt from homosapian standards for feelings. Sacrificing the person he loves most just translates to sacrificing the person you hate the least.
Here’s the real answer:
https://old.reddit.com/r/marvelstudios/comments/8jur9m/why_thanos_plan_makes_him_one_of_the_most/
You should know the makeup of Thanos. As someone said he’s the mad Titan. His comic book version is far more devious and cruel though Marvel would be edging to an R rating if they brought the full heartless version of him to the big screen.
Other thing the movie is long enough too many characters to have to focus backstory on. That’s why T’challa and company get glossed over.
Gammora isn’t a problem for me cause I’ve read the comics and the onscreen chemistry and relationship they have is similar to the source material. Thanos is cold and logical. For some reason Gammora always interests him even when she tries to kill them. And not saying that to be a snob. Their relationship is complicated and barely even talked about in the Infinity Gauntlet cause so many other issues are happening . Hell the movie covers it way better than the book. In the biok they just mentioned how Thanos raised her, that’s it.
You should see his other relationships with family like his brother Eros. That level of abuse make him and Gammora seem heartfelt in comparison.
I dont agree with you solution that to correct limited resouces Thanos should just make more. To control a fire you wouldnt just add more wood. I didnt read beyond that part.
I was troubled by this too – in a different story, the thing Thanos “loves most” would turn out to be a) himself or b) either a stone or the gauntlet. This gave Gamorra a tragic end, but really it didn’t feel like it bothered Thanos that much to sacrifice her. It would have been much harder for him to give up any of the other infinity stones, and giving up his goal would be a real sacrifice for him.
All of your points are valid but as my wife reminded me last night as I was picking apart flaws in the Flash tv series, most ppl just watch what is on the screen with a dumbfounded look & nevr give a single thought to why or how any of the characters do what they do or how they got to that point in thier lives. Not sure whether ignorance is bliss or not since I am not one that it was bestowed upon. Lol
The red skull says the soul stone requires a sacrifice of something you love. However the definition and act of love is different for everyone. Whether or not you think Thanos didn’t love Gomora he did. Thanos believes that how he raised and treated gamora was out of love thus the soul stone accepted his sacrifice.
Sympathizing with a villain doesn’t mean people will start believing their ideals. People watch these kinds of movies to be entertained not to be educated in what’s good and bad human behavior.
If people take Thanos’ and other science fiction villains ideals to heart or get offended by them, then they need to stick to historic movies. The creators of Thanos wanted people to see his version of love not there own. The makers of this film are not trying to force anyone to believe that abuse can also be a form of love, but to show how twisted Thanos beliefs are.
I think the point is that Thanos believes what he feels for Gamora is love, in the same sense that he feels he’s doing good for the universe by blinking half of it out of existence.
Your article is very interesting, and I believe hits the nail right on the head. The comments are interesting as well, but most appear to me to view the film, the story, as a fictional and entertaining piece. In other words, I believe we are giving Thanos a break because we see him as a fictional character driven by fictional rules. In an abstract argument all sides are equal because all of them are equally immaterial in our physical reality.
In fiction anything goes.
But fiction has two problems.
It creates an inundation by its repetition that desensitizes our reactions. For example watch a dozen killings a day for a year and we don’t react to killing as perhaps we ‘should’, with shock and grief. We yawn,or say how uncreative the death was. Also,and not inconsequentially, these deaths are at a distance. We see them from the comfort of our theater chairs, or from our couch, where we munch popcorn and drink soda and divorce all our reactions from the act we are witnessing.
The second problem is,as you correctly stated, such actions in our fiction teaches the audience what is acceptable. Our unconscious is not moral or discriminating. It accepts, and over time, so our conscious becomes convinced. Perhaps we justify our own points of view to ourselves?
Lastly, if we were to remove the dramatic, story telling elements, as you mention in your article, then perhaps all of us would be horrified. If this were a n event that happened in front of us, give feet from us, this abuse, this killing, if this happened in real life, not as a story, not as some remote, abstract character, but as someone we know, someone down the street we have seen a hundred times go into their driveway in their pajama’s and get their newspaper, and we see them killed, right in front of us?
then maybe we wouldn’t be abstract and so intellectually argumentative of what it means, or the motivation s of the killer.
we might be appalled, and horrified, and scared. And fearful and angry, and sad, depressed, emotionally scarred by the experience.
this is not far-fetched.
we live in a civilized country and go to our jobs, go to dinner, go to the movies or read our books. Our lives are safe, and removed, and by large degrees non-violent.
but if we lived in Syria, or Senegal, or Afganistan, or Israel or Florida, or New York, or California, or Oklahoma or any of dozens of places where violence is not an entertainment, then our perceptions, our opinions and how we would feel, would be different.
I don’t think the problem is that Thanos and Gamora are in an abusive relationship, and I don’t think anyone doesn’t understand that. The movies never cease telling us that–it’s almost literally all we know about Gamora. That’s the problem; we are only told, we never see anything. The relationship is entirely surface-level and referred to in a past-tense. Talking about what love Means to Thanos is pointless, because we don’t know anything about his personal relationships. His killing Gamora is about as meaningful as if they had just dragged a character we had never met before into the scene and killed them, then held up a cue card saying “Audience should feel sad now.”
I do not buy that Marvel movies cannot be serious about their storytelling–we have 18 movies that all took their basic relationships between characters seriously. CA: The Winter Soldier tells a serious story and has interpersonal relationships that make sense. Black Panther has a villain whose motivations and personality was fully-formed. We had a scene in this very freakin’ movie between a god and a talking raccoon that felt more real and moving than anything expressed between Gamora and Thanos. These movies are capable of functioning at a dramatic level–they just didn’t bother to develop Gamora enough for it to work here.
Personally, I thought the film did an excellent job at showing us precisely that Gamora couldn’t see or understand or even imagine that Thanos might love her. She rightfully could never forgive him for kidnapping her and brutally training her and slaughtering half of her home planet. But all of that caused her perception of her situation to be clouded by righteous hatred. She never noticed that he treated her significantly differently than the rest of his adopted children.
We see this demonstrated the movie several times. He explains himself to her. He is patient with her even as she throws a tantrum. He compliments the moxie of Starlord, the man SHE loves, AND HE LETS HIM LIVE. He doesn’t torture her for information about the soul stone – and this is how the point is made most clearly – by contrasting how Thanos interacts with Gamora with how he treats Nebula. He doesn’t hesitate to torture Nebula. When she yells and screams at him (just as Gamora does) he instantly rises to the bait (“It would’ve been a waste of parts!”). He doesn’t love Nebula.
Yes his love is twisted because he is twisted. But we CAN see how his love for her is still very real. He is softer towards her. He values her life. He approaches being something you could almost describe as vulnerable with her. She is the only person in the film (also Tony a bit, because Thanos respects him) that he genuinely tried to make her understand his motivations.
Those are all characteristics of love. I think the argument that Thanos should not be portrayed as being capable of love is fallacy. He’s not the hero – he’s a frickin’ super villain. They’re not trying to portray his version of love as something truly virtuous. He’s not supposed to be a role model here. The only thing his love for Gamora is supposed to represent is that he’s not a robot. He DOES have some small vulnerabilities, both physical and emotional.
This is the issue? Really?! I thought it was the fact that Gamora is the most feared woman in the Galaxy and she dies by being thrown off of a cliff. I mean, yeah she can’t fly or anything, but if he stabbed her and then thrown her off I think that would have made more sense. Anywho, it doesn’t matter because she’s not dead and this is a two part movie for a reason.
I can kind of explain why Thano’s love her. Like i agree that it’s an abusive love and a sad tragic that Gamora’s home world is destroyed. And when Gamora made Peter Quill promise to kill her. Both Thano and Peter has the same fierce love for Gamora. Thano hated Peter because Gamora loves him. So that’s why he was like, “I like you,” cause two men, like i said, have the same fierce love for her. And at the end, Gamora’s soul is in the soul stone. Like Red skull said, “A soul for a soul” so clearly she’s not dead. Even though it should a younger Gamora, I believe she’s in the soul stone bc when Thano snapped his fingers, some of the people are sucked into the stone.
He’s a bad guy who does bad things. [shrugs]
“Love the most” doesn’t have to mean love, you can be in a group of skinny people and be the fattest without being fat. Thanos can love Gamora the most while still barely loving her.
The Soul Stone is about sacrifice not meeting some arbitrary, objective definition of love. The requirement is only that someone sacrifice a person they truly believe they love. Whether or not their understanding of love fits the conventional definition, your’s or mine is irrelevant.
If Thannos’ definition of Mercy is killing half the universe, why would his definition of Love be any less fucked up?
The idea that he is “rewarded” for this and all his other evils ignores the fact that this is Part 1 of a 2 part series. That’s like having a cow over “Empire Strikes Back”
Look, I don’t mean to disagree with you. This is something that bothered me to some extent as well. But let me frame it the only way I knew how. I grew up in an abusive household (something I struggle with, but it helps to talk about it anonymously. And to compare it to a story is also probably healthy). My parents abused each other. My father was a physical attacker and my mother was manipulative and cruel. It was disgusting to be a part of that household and I was terrified of having to go home from school. But the messed up thing was, underneath all the abusive activity, they still loved each other in some really complicated, unrealistic way. I’m not saying it’s okay. Not at all. After 20 years of that crap, they got divorced, and my whole life I was wondering why they didn’t break off the relationship sooner. But I think that’s because breaking it off was also sort of like breaking yourself. Let me put it another way. My father was very cruel and violent with me when I was a kid and a teenager. I stopped speaking to him long ago. But, I really loved him when I was growing up. He was my father. My male role model. I mean, I HATED him. But I was a kid and he was my parent, so it’s not like I was going to call the police and have him taken away from me and my family. The emotions surrounding any kind of family abuse are so internal and complicated, that to make a black and white statement like ‘people that hurt each other do not love each other’ doesn’t work. It simply doesn’t add up. With that said, yeah, there were so many better opportunities they could’ve used for the backstory scenes and things didn’t pan out well in that scene. But the movie clearly defines its point. Gamora says what you’re saying, that cruelty and possession don’t add up to love. We as viewers are not supposed to agree with Thanos and his twisted mind. But again, it’s so much more complicated than what most people understand as love.
I agree with everything you said and you said it very well. My problems with the movie had to do with two things: battles so low-tech they may as well be fighting at Bosworth Field and men who screw up everything because they can’t control their emotions. And I’m not talking about Thanos. Here’s my blog post on the subject: http://bit.ly/2IAMSzA
You make a lot of good points but you’re trying too hard to rationalize the thoughts of a person who wants to destroy half of all life. A MAD TITAN who feels a pride for the girl he watched grown into a strong warrior, which he obviously misconstrued as a fatherly love. He didn’t know going to get the soul stone would cause him to make the choice but like Stannis Baratheon, he is a man of fierce will and dedication, no matter how misguided it may be. He made his choice before he let himself think on it (poor shareen). His goal must be reached.
The other thing is that this is a fucking super villain we’re talking about here. These are attributes that you should abhor and they are showing you straight up that this is a bad person who has done horrible things that good peoole should fight their hardest against people who would see others suffer and die. I can’t see how this would justify or lighten the serious negative impacts of abuse when they literally assemble earths mightiest heroes to stop the abusive father. Good read though.
— the following is once again why thanos can’t just make more resources for everyone —
the reality stone can transform anything seemingly, so in theory yes you could transform a small asteroid into food of equal mass. that said, using the stones obviously still takes effort/energy and most importantly, time, and despite the name ‘infinity’ stones, the amount of change they can affect is still based on the user’s very finite capabilities, as seen in infinity war.
thanos’ little stunt fucked up his arm and gauntlet. so from his perspective, creating food for every single population in the universe would be just as impractical as visiting each world. it would take billions of years, so even if he could live that long, it would be entirely counterproductive. he needs to do something drastic all at once to have the desired effect.
so the ‘just create more resources’ argument holds no water, unfortunately, given thanos’ goals on a cosmic scale. and even thanos is presumably still subject to the laws of conservation of energy/mass.
The scene would have worked if RS would have said something like “dearest possession” instead of “Something you love”. Because that’s what Gamora really is, thanos deeply cares about her, but not about her feelings, she’s an object, that he holds dear, but that’s it. That’s not love, but I understand where they were going and I’m fine with it in the end. Just poor choice of words.
Your outrage over how Gamora’s storyline was handled in this movie approaches yey still pales in comparidon to the ire, disdain, and disgust (generous word choices), that many had with the way that that imbicile (another generous word choice) Rian Johnson in that hideous steaming pile of hyena dung (more generous word choices) of a movie “The Last Jedi” destroyed the character of Luke Skywalker and all that Luke had stood for. The problems with Gamora are skin to a first degree misdemeanor, what Johnson did with TLJ was a major felony!
The movie is obviously from Thanos’ perspective.
I think that to get the stone you had to sacrifice the person you love most and it was gamora. True it wasn’t real love like what a parent feels for a child but love for a prized objet or trophy. Gamora is strong and accomplished and thanos(like any narcissistic parent) views her accomplishments as well a her as extension of himself. It’s probably the closest he is capable of feeling love so she is what he loves MOST. It just still isn’t a lot, just more than any one else which isn’t much of a contest.
This is a common problem in the MCU, especially where the Guardians are concerned. Most of them have trauma that contains abuse. Peter, Gamora, Nebula, Rocket and Mantis. And in almost every case it’s either made fun of or not treated with the seriousness it should or retconned.
Yondu abducted a child that just lost their parent and ripped him from his family, who then has to grow up among the Ravagers (look how they treat Baby Groot and you can guess how it was for Peter) and who gets threatened by Yondu constantly that he will feed him to his crew. On top of that he uses that child to commit crime. Then they try to retcon Yondu in GOTG2, he really was just being funny and all that abuse was just him ‘not doing anything right’ and he saved Peter from Ego (originally and at the end). It’s all done so Yondu’s detah is said. And then they top it off with Peter basically being forced to be all ‘I’ve been searching for a parent all my life never noticing I had one right beside me all this time’.
Mantis was possibly abducted by Ego who constantly chipped away at her self-confidence and kept her child-like and used her for his purpose. Yet it’s supposed to be funny when Drax constantly remarks upon her ugliness and that even when he says ‘she can do it because he believes in her’, he really didn’t.
Then Gamora and Nebula who through decades of systematic abuse by being pitched against each other in fights and individual abuse have developed a deep seated hatred for each other. But they have 1 fight where Nebula wins, she gets to tell Gamora off and then all is well. Sorry but you don’t get better from that kind abuse in like 5 minutes. Specifically speaking to Infinity War, they retconned the trauma Gamora went through and additionally retconned her history to make Thanos more sympathetic. In the first movie we were shown that Gamora was the last of her people and told by Gamora herself that Thanos killed her parents in front of her. In IW, suddenly Thanos only killed half of her people. More importantly, the fact that he shielded Gamora from seeing the massacre makes it pretty much unlikely that he killed her parents (why was there only one parent in the movie btw?) in front of her. Then Gamora, rightfully, get to tell her abusive father ‘abuse is not love’ only for the movie to say ‘yes it is’.
It doesn’t matter what Thanos thinks.
Because Thanos isn’t real.
This might seem obvious, but look how much commentary is going into determining whether or not a fictional character actually ‘feels’ one way or another. Look how this swiftly elides the actual point of responsibility.
Thanos isn’t real. The writer is.
When an actual human being, with a job and family and feelings of their own, was asked to sit down and write the (current) conclusion to Gamora’s storyline of familial abuse, they didn’t write anything about her. They made her story ultimately about Thanos, the same shitty pop-culture edgy idea about how maybe the abuser does feel love, in some twisted way, as they literally are killing her. And everyone else signed off on this, and filmed it, and went home and called it a day. After all, it’s just a story; she’s not actually dead because she was never actually alive.
And most abusers probably do feel love, for someone, possibly even their victims, because they’re human beings and that’s what people do. And sometimes they kill their victims – on purpose, or by accident. And sometimes they just hurt them. Over, and over, and over.
And sometimes, they can go to the movies, and be reminded that even the most over-the-top comic book villains can still feel love.
…
So f* them.
And f* the writers and editors and film-makers who are willing to end a narrative of abuse with any hint that they might kill you, but they also love you. It’s lazy, it’s bad writing, and it’s actively harmful to people in the real world. It’s not about Gamora. It’s not about Thanos. It’s about a story that turns on what the abuser feels, about who they are, rather than their victims. And it’s a story we need to stop telling.
First off, the story is clearly not over. We’re supposed to feel outraged over what happened to her. It’s not supposed to be fair or right. But that Thanos is upset (which as others have pointed out is completely plausible if you’ve ever interacted with abusers) and kills her anyway DOES make him scarier. And that was their other intention. It’s much scarier fighting a TRUE BELIEVER bent on your destruction than a bully.
As for Gamora the character, there were more depths to be examined, and that’s a problem with the medium. With this cast, with this level of destruction and sacrifice, there is only time for a few character arcs to be fully fleshed out.
What makes it frustrating in this case is that Gamora was also shortchanged in this area in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies. I want more Gamora too, and it’s a shame we’ve traded that for more Starlord and Rocket who are far less interesting.
One final point, if the story was exactly the same and Gamora was a male, I doubt this article would have been written.
Because giving them the resources would ultimately make them even weaker.
Of course it’s not love, But that shows how twisted Thanos is.
And yes viewers could get the wrong idea about this, but that’s why we as people would need to know that what this behavior is not right.
The writers are just using this to show us it’s messed up. It makes Thanos that more “Mad”. I don’t believe it’s an endorsement by them.
I certainly wouldn’t try to make the argument that what Thanos felt constitutes “love” in a Judeo-Christian sense of the the word. But all of us love imperfectly. Therefore, “love” in that sense of the word (the thing that binds relationships), by definition, has to be a spectrum.
In the sense of the word as Red Skull uses it, its “who do you care for the most?”
I mean, after all, by the way this article sets the standard for love, what the Soul Stone is asking should be impossible–the simple fact that you are willing to kill the person for the purpose of controlling an Infinity Stone means you don’t love them. No amount of set up changes that fact. It doesn’t matter whether we could believe that this monster is capable of love. So, the very premise of what is set up means that “love” has to be defined some other way.
I think you have to look at Thanos, and his quest, and his sacrifice of Gamora the same way people have looked at the story of Abraham and Issac. Except the Soul Stone didn’t provide a lamb at the last moment.
“The film accepts this, never questions it, even creates its own tortured reasoning for it, and asks you to trust that reasoning.”
I disagree. Gamora herself says “This isn’t love.” The movie is telling you right then and there that Thanos’ behaviour isnt okay. Thanos thinks what he feels is love, and unfortunately that is enough for the Soul Stone. But what I felt during that whole scene was mounting dread, not any sort of acceptance that what Thanos is doing was okay. @177 Turock hits the nail on the head.
The actions of the Avengers are meant to imply that Thanos’ methods and reasoning is incorrect. Because why would they try to stop him if what he was doing was reasonable? We as the audience are meant to side against Thanos and be horrified by his internal logic, and when whatever actions our heroes take gets nullified by his power.
You act like love has to be kind, logical and rational. It doesn’t. And no, the next movie won’t walk anything back. They already wrote the script for the next movie and it’s filming right now. In the end Gamora will probably be alive when the dust settles. Remember, Thanos is returning in the next movie. And Steven Strange didn’t care about Tony Stark, so believing he gave up the time stone to save him is ludicrous. The next avengers movie will do what happens in the Thanos story in the comics. He will be defeated and everything he did will be undone. That is the magic of the infinity stones. You have the time stone alone can do it. But the stones also have the power to grant wishes. Thanos made a wish to destroy half the population of the universe. Should be lose the stones, his wish is undone All those characters reappear. If you want logic and true to life stories, don’t watch movies based on comic books.
You have a looking way of getting to your point, but, IMHO, you may be over looking two important very important things. One is that he is an alien from a planet, though similar to Earth, is different from ours and therefore we can do hold them to the same human sensibilities. That being said, how many human parents (especially those of athletes) push their children in ways that other patents would not even dream of. They want them to be the best, to stand above their peers, even if it means their children hate them, all because they “love” them?! The planet with the Soul Stone did not demand the love for the individual sacrificed be expressed in the way that humans express it. Only that it be the love of their life, whatever that meant for that individual! Secondly, Thanos’ own people called him a Mad man, so they knew him to be unhinged! He might have been correct, but he was still crazy and the methods of his Madness would do as much harm as good! Thanos said that his people on his Planet died because they did not need his warnings, but who’s to say that their destruction didn’t come about because he was purposely working against their efforts to save their civilization? You’ve never heard of people purposely working against management, when they’re moving in the direction that they don’t feel that they should be going in? Then when it doesn’t work out, they blame management for not listening to them, when in fact if they had went along with leadership, perhaps they could have been more successful than they were?! The fact is, surprise, Thanos is not a good person, even though he may believe he works for the greater good of the universe.
The problem you are all having is your reading to far into it the saying is the one you love most not that he loves her just that he cares more for her than anyone else in the rest of universe which is100%true because he loves none but the one who made him feel like a success
There’s a lot wrong with the movie. It’s not just the gamora problem. It came across as more of one sided, galactic trip, threw a universe full of helpless people, and overpowered villains. Hopefully if there is any more of these movies, something helps the heroes, win.
Keep in mind that Thanos “tortured” her and her sister by making them fight each other, conquer worlds or slaughtering people, but Gamora never saw or faced Thanos’ wrath as much as her sister, having each and almost every part of her body dismembered and replaced, or being punished for failing. Gamora was Thanos’ pride and joy, he was also “happy” to have her back (“kidnapping” works too). Gamora said that he tortured her but he never did anything directly to her self. Instead, SHE felt tortured. Apparently she realized he never “hurt” her when she faced his mirage in Knowhere and started crying after presumably killing him. She just held a grudge against him, not for what he did to her, but for what he did to achieve his goals. Her sister on the other hand DID hate him to her core… (get it? Her “core” because most likely her heart was replaced too!)
I completely agree with you on this seriously unfortunate aspect of the film. Abuse is not love. In any guise. No matter who is doing the abusing. A parent who abuses his or her child does not love that child. Abusers who think they love their prey don’t. Because abuse has nothing to do with the basis of affection, respect, and concern required for love. Abusers are very often abused themselves, and thus can grow up not understanding real love, only perpetuating the violence.
So…
You think the villian with the twisted understanding of salvation enacted through indifferent 50% genocide of all things has a healthy understanding of love?
You are defining love in a way Thanos would never understand. He sees hardening the universe as the way to fix it. That sentiment extends to his captive daughter who he abused to become the most dangerous woman in the entire galaxy (approximate quote as I can’t rewatch atm). He has helped her excel, not hirt her. In Thanos’s mind his abuse of Gammora is his display of love. The greatest love he can muster. To see all of that given away through her death would be heartbreaking in his villainous thinking.
While elements of Infinity War attempt to cuase us to empathize with the villian because his end goal is salvation, those attempts at fall short because his worldview is tainted by the mind of an abusive egomaniac. Ultimately the message of the movie is that the ends DO NOT justify the means (a theme in a few Avengers movies). He does not create more resources because that is not how his twisted mind works. He kills her so quickly because he has always weighed pain as less than his goals.
I mean… no one is on the other side of this issue. Thanos doesn’t love Gamora. They make that pretty clear when Gamora is screaming “this isn’t love” the entire time once she realizes what he’s about to do. Because she knows, and the audience knows (or at least is supposed to know), that what Thanos feels for Gamora isn’t love. He’s an abusive sociopath. You’re supposed to be upset during that scene. You’re supposed to be disgusted. Gamora is. But Thanos truly believes he loves Gamora. His “adopted daughter” – his favourite. And you can’t cheat the soul stone, but perception is how the soul stone works, and Thanos truly believes he loves Gamora. Because that’s the scariest thing about abusers. They think they love you. They truly do. They think that the abuse is how love is shown. Abusers aren’t all mustache-twirling baddies who strap young girls to train tracks. Some – most – are so wrapped up in what they feel is Right that they can’t be told otherwise. And that’s been Thanos’s whole character from the beginning. Not just with Gamora, but with everything.
Which is why, yeah, if you got the Infinity Gauntlet I’m sure you’d snap your fingers and double the resources in the world. As most people would. But Thanos is not most people. Thanos is a sociopath who blindly believes what he thinks is right. And to him, randomly taking half the universe? That makes sense. You’re not supposed to SIDE with him. You’re not supposed to think his plan is good. He’s a villain. That’s kind of the entire point.
The characterization in movies is often weak. But, it’s not truly shocking that someone sacrifice their most beloved for the greater good.
Normally, those truly harsh and heart breaking sacrifices are something that could mark a truly great man.
Of course, the whole premise of the movie is nonsense. Altering the population to resource ratio isn’t enough to positively change anything for long.
Well, there is the fact that American pop culture can be shaped by certain long standing American ideas and values– especially religious. Thanos beleives he is a savior, the only one that can save the universe, and to do that, to serve that incredible greater good, he has to sacrifice his beloved child.
Sounds like a Christian tale- Abraham goes to sacrifice his son because God tells him to, to prove to God that he will follow his commands. F**ed up in my book, evil and vile. But that’s Abraham’s values that shape his feelings… including love.
In the same line, Thanos’ values create his feelings, including love. His love for Gamora is horrid and warped, but its real.
I honestly enjoyed the fact that this movie has such a complex villain as Thanos that makes people uncomfortable and echoes far too closely to too many past and present public leaders and their drives to do horrible things for the greater good. We need that in our pop culture. Eugenics is part of western and American history, as well as part of the Earth’s history as a whole, whether it’s all out Naziism or the more overlooked one-child policy of China. Murder and forced sterilisation for the greater good (population control for resource management) is something that is real, beyond just the nightmare of the holocaust.
Thanos is the skeleton in our closet. Too bad more people don’t know they are the Gamora in the story.
I prefer to take a step back and accept my brother’s explanation. How do we know that someone must sacrifice a loved one to get the soul stone? Because Red Skull says so. Why believe him? It’s just as likely that you stand alone between on the cliff and you get the stone. Red Skull likes seeing people suffer.
So Gamora died for nothing, just as the writers intended when they fridged her.
The fact that the Soul Stone has can only be given to someone who is prepared to Murder someone that they love says all we need to know about it. There is no scenario where a good person can acquire it, only particularly twisted individuals can obtain it and that is what inevitably happened.
Whoever or whatever set up this ‘test’ is just as twisted to have a test that denies the type of person the Red Skull is yet rewards the type of person Thanos is. Were they stupid not to see this or did they think that it was right like this, who can say?
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I really wish people would stop hammering on why Thanos didn’t just make more resources. How do you want to make a 2.5 hour movie about that?! There would be no gravity to anything he does. In fact, then the Avengers could just GIVE him the stones. How utterly moronic a movie would that be? Use your common sense!
Then everyone is saying how Thanos can’t love Gamora. Nowhere in any of the movies before is it said Gamora was physically abused. From her scenes with Thanos, you can pick up at the very least she always had everything she needed. She was merely taught to be a fighter from a very young age. I’m oversimplifying this now, but you can compare that to a child being taught to play a musical instrument they hate.
Then Thanos: Remember, to himself he is not evil. He believes he is being merciful. Keep in mind what he went through on his home world, how that must’ve changed him. Changed him in ways no one could ever imagine. He believes that he is doing the universe a service by making sure there are enough resources for all living beings and he is prepared to make the hard choices to accomplish this. To sacrifice parts of himself for the greater good. THAT is his reason for doing this. He may be very disillusioned, but in his mind, HE is the hero. How then could he NOT truly believe that he loves Gamora?
People are missing a big point, Gamora was simply a tool to drive 2 male characters storylines further, she has 0 effect on her own fate, she’s a sacrifice/damsel in distress for Thanos and Quill, this should be unacceptable in modern writing, just like the Black characters are only there to die or crack jokes or fade away into Dust smh…I thought the movie was fun and emotionally effective albeit cheap and cliche in their treatment of secondary characters
I think the film didn’t do Gamora any favours by insisting she carry the idiot ball. In a world literally filled with deadly superpowers, fantastic weapons, telepaths with mind wipe abilities, several heavily armed companions and so on, why would she think the best and only way to stop Thanos from obtaining the stone is to ask her lover – and ONLY her lover – to kill her if Thanos gets her? And why even join the fight against her stepdad? Like that could never go wrong…
I thought the Vormyr scene was cheesy as hell, but to be fair, the ‘love’ aspect was never a problem for me. I think the love Thanos has is the intensely possessive love some people have towards their favourite things. You know, the kind of obsessive love where you’d rather destroy the object of your love than let anyone else have it.
Thank you for the article.
Unfortunately, I disagree with your characterization of Thanos. In my opinion, every action that Thanos makes in the movie is a rational step towards achieving his stated goal. This does not mean, however, that Thanos lacks emotions or has “twisted” emotions, simply that he does not let his emotions influence his actions.
To me, this explains his tears, but also his lack of hesitation in sacrificing his daughter, as well as the way that he supposedly raised both of his children. If my interpretation is refuted by some scene, please let me know!
I am not going to dispute that the film mishandled the supposed father-daughter like relationship of Thanos and Gamora but we are talking about a creature said to love Death. Thanos’ obsession with Death over-ruled any other considerations.
The film was watchable, the ending surprising. I feel betrayed yet again by Marvel and their films. On an interesting note, an audience member had questions about the film and I was able to help them a bit.
The scene of Fury contacting someone was confusing. Ms Marvel’s symbol?
I think it’s perhaps unfair to judge that scene so harshly. Nowhere in it does it talk about true love or genuine compassion. Just the thing you love most. Which at it’s base seems to only require you to love anything at all even slightly in some way. Really, it was a very low bar to handle. Additionally, Thanos has literally said that Gamora is his favourite daughter even after she betrayed him. He’s clearly insane, but I hardly think his favouritism for Gamora can be said to have come out of nowhere.
Yes!
This article fully articulate what I was feeling about Gamoram’s role in the movie.
I do not buy that Thanos loves her. He loves himself, if anything. He wanted her to understand his “great path”; the self sacrificing he had to do and then in order to achieve his goals he had to give up his prodigy? Only Gamora isn’t falling for his gaslighting.
What I saw was a man desperate to see his reflection on his “daughter.”
That isnt Love. That is narcissism.
I really
hope that in the next movie this is better addressed- that he didn’t really gain the soul stone, that it saw through his facade. Because of every gut punch this movie had to offer- this death had the least meaning.
(Sorry for any typos; I’m on my phone and it keeps trying to add words to my comment here)
THANK YOU. This. All of this. I am so angry at this movie, so disappointed, so disgusted that they resorted to these horrible ways to tell what could have been a great story – and was not. I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, after they fridged Frigga for no good reason in Thor:TDW (along with other choices along the way in the MCU). I suppose I shouldn’t have expected better for Gamora, or Nebula – except I should have been able to.
I agree and disagree with you.
I agree that it’s wrong for anyone to accept what you are describing as Love, but I believe that if we are picky about what the film tells us then technically your outrage is not well founded. I say this because what the stone asks is for him to make a sacrifice. It is not to judge whether it fits the stone’s definition of Love, or anyone else’s for that matter. It is asking he who wants the stone to make a sacrifice and sacrifice something which he loves, and while Thano’s behavior may not coincide with yours or my definition of Love, it could be considered his personal truth that he loves her and therefore be accepted as said sacrifice.
Again, I agree with your concern of teaching people to accept his behavior as just “his way of showing love”, but as an objective party I would say that at the same time, with the information that the film provides, it kinda works. That’s the thing with truth… It’s not absolute.
I think people, and thereby movie characters, are more complex than that. As a child of an abusive family, I never once doubted that my extremely abusive father completely loved me. But that doesn’t mean his love wasn’t a poison. In turn, I both still love my father and, at the same time, hate him to a point beyond reason. I just don’t think it’s such a simple thing to classify. Even if it’s a bad thing.
That being said, since the MCU also exists in a world of both advanced science and magic, you can argue that all Thanos had to do to “prove” himself was meet a chemical requirement. Yes, the Soul Stone appears to be magic and can seemingly peer into your “soul”|. But, as we learned in Thor, magic is just advanced science. So maybe all that was required for the requirement to be met was to release a certain endorphin associated with “love”.
All in all, whichever the case, I actually think it was one of the more heartbreaking scenes of the film. Gamora is a great character and this was the only death that truly made me sad.
I reject the whole premise of that article and it’s complaint. I’ve no doubt some of my abusers loved me. It’s entirely possible for “positive” emotions to coexist with reprehensible actions.
Love and abuse CAN coexist; that’s one of the things that can make standing up for yourself so hard, when you know that your abuser does (in a twisted way) genuinely love you. What’s dangerous is telling people that they’re mutually exclusive- telling people that if someone loves them, their actions can’t be abusive, when so many victims already find it so difficult to admit that someone they care about is abusing them.
Yes, if anything Thanos, being a megalomaniacal narcissist, loves himself the most. I, too, wondered how the universe could get love so wrong–the I realized it’s not the universe, it’s one planet: Vormir, a planet that has as its avatar Red Skull. Ostensibly, the sacrifice requirement is to keep the stone out of evil’s hands, but what if that is not the motivation behind the requirement? The planet itself may be corrupt, so it’s not a comment on the concept of genuine love at all.
It may be worth observing here that, Thanos’ actions (and Biblical usage) to the contrary, sacrificing something (or someone) need not involve that object’s or person’s destruction. Particularly where love is concerned, Thanos might have “sacrificed” Gamora by giving his blessing to her relationship with Quill, thereby severing all ties with her. This would be an immense price for him — perhaps even higher than that of killing her — even though Gamora herself might count it as a gift.
Which strikes me as another point in favor of my suspicion that what Thanos actually got from Vormir isn’t a true Soul Stone….
I agree with the general premise here… but there’s something that everyone seems to have missed. Even if we take it as read that in some sick and twisted way Thanos believes that he loves Gamora, and that an alien mindset might accept this (though how any reasonable judge, however alien, could think that Thanos loves Gamora more than his evil plot to kill half the universe is beyond me)… the requirement was to “sacrifice that which you love most”.
What Thanos did was NOT a sacrifice. You cannot sacrifice something which is not yours to give away.
If Gamora had agreed to give up her life so Thanos could get the Soul Stone, okay (fat chance, but okay). If Thanos had used the Reality Stone to rewrite physics so that she would be forever invisible, inaudible, and insubstantial to him, cutting himself off from any contact with her, that would be acceptable (maybe even worth bonus points for actually doing her a kindness).
But what Thanos did was no different than, say, a mad scientist conducting experiments on involuntary subjects, killing most of them to achieve some arcane end, and then explaining himself by saying “sacrifices needed to be made”. No one could possibly argue that those lives were “sacrificed”. They were TAKEN.
And for the universe to say “meh… close enough” in response to this is appalling.
I doubt the movie endorses Thanos’ sacrifice as actual love. It’s a selfish love. It’s all about how Gamora makes him feel.
That means that he can think what he feels is love and it’s enough to pass whatever bullshit test the soul stone requires. This re-enactment of the biblical sacrifice of Isaac demanded by Yahweh (which also happens on a mountain), so Abraham can prove his love (which makes God a sadist), is meant to show the cruelty and hostility of the universe, whether embodied in a cosmic or divine force. The Book of Job (and Jung’s analysis of it) makes it even clearer that a psychotic, wrathful god (for which Thanos fully qualifies) will kill and torture those under their power to prove they love him, all the while under the delusion that they understand those they persecute.
Perhaps Thanos knew all along that he would have to kill someone close to him and he cultivated Gamora as a sacrificial lamb since the moment he met her. Yes, evil and insane, but even Hitler loved a woman and his dogs. This doesn’t mean the movie endorses his killing as genuine love, as anything but a sick act.
I agree with the dissenters — Thanos’s “love” is legit enough for the sacrifice. As far as his single tear not being convincing enough to prove to you that he felt it, I would point out that he was likely preparing for that moment for a long, long time. I’m sure he knew, or at least had a good idea, what he would need to do to get the stone. why else bring Gamora along? He knew, and he was already ready.
I see the article’s point, but disagree that what Thanos feels isn’t love. What to an outside person is a destructive obsession or behavior is “love” to the bearer of the emotion.
* A celebrity stalker could convince themselves that the object of his/her affection is indeed in love with them.
* Ungrounded, unrequited love resulted in the murder of a coworker’s husband. A mutual male friend professed his love for the husband while my coworker was out of the house. When the straight husband turned him down, the friend brutally murdered him. They found the body in pieces.
Are those instances of love? To you and me, of course not. But to the criminal, yes, they were.
The mind is simply a terrible, powerful thing. It could make Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh weep watching the Waco compound raid on TV, but allow him to call the children he blew to pieces mere “collateral damage”. And I believe that Thanos could be both a genocidal maniac, and feel that he loved Gamora. Twisted? To us, yes. But to him, it was a normal state.
The author misses the point too, to an abuser they BELIEVE they love their victim. They do not see the abuse they dole out. The abuser THINKS they are treating their victim the best way possible. In their mind it’s the victim whose wrong, not themselves. So yes in Thanos mind he loves his daughter.
Thank you for this. You’ve saved me a painful viewing experience. Having recently been rejected by my abusive family for finally speaking out about how my brother abused me growing up, I will not be going anywhere near this movie. My brother still claims to love me too. The rest of my family seems to believe him. But what he did to me was not love. And I can finally admit and accept that, despite a lifetime of gaslighting by my family to convince me otherwise.
Thank you for letting me know this movie is not safe for me to watch before I’d made the mistake of thinking it would just be light entertainment. I can never be too careful these days.
It disturbs me how many people in the comments are trying to argue that abuse is a form of love if the abuser believes they love their victim.
No. Abuse is never love. Abuse is only manipulation, control, violence, using another human being regardless of their thoughts, desires and needs.
I was once sexually assaulted by a man who started crying and apologizing to me in the middle of the assault. But he didn’t stop assaulting me. He was only feeling sorry for himself, thinking that I’d see him as a bad person. Or so he told me as he asked me to forgive him while he assaulted me.
Abuse is not love. Until everyone understands that and stops arguing otherwise, domestic abuse will never end. Thanos does not love Gamora. Because abuse is not love. Period.
As for the folks saying the author is reading too much into a comic book movie: If the writers don’t want child abuse survivors to take their stories seriously and react emotionally, they should refrain from writing storylines that strikingly parallel our lives into their fiction. I know a lot of people who grew up being tortured by our families. It would be nice to see someone like us represented as a feeling and acting like a realistic child abuse survivor in fiction for once, rather than the eternal victims and unachievably badass antiheroes we usually get.
I won’t be watching this movie, and I’ll be warning other survivors to think twice before seeing it. Gamora’s plot hits far too close to home, and sounds like exactly the kind of adult-victim-of-child-abuse narrative I’m utterly sick of. It is damaging to real survivors. I wish they hadn’t written it that way.
Uhm…Thanos is really really evil, and part of that evil is having a really twisted idea of love. He’s not being “Rewarded by the Universe”
The soul stone is not the universe or the writers telling us “What Thanos does is OK.” The soul stone is obviously a super evil thing, so evil it’s guarded by the Red Skull on a horrible portal dark plane island thing. Thanos has to prove he’s evil enough to wield it.
The soul stone is not good by any means- it’s a critical component in committing genocide across half the universe. The stones themselves are not good- they’re the equivalent to like a massive nuclear arsenal. You could argue that Gamorra’s death was certainly weak sauce, but arguing that Thanos was “Rewarded” or “redeemed” or “humanized” by killing Gamorra is silly. He’s a bad person doing bad things. The movie doesn’t shy away from this. The music, the color palette, the dialog all indicate that everything he does is Capital E Evil.
Yes, it didn’t make sense to me but it did make sense to Thanos! He wasn’t shy about tooting his own horn about how he spared her life & how he molded her into his perfect little warrior. That was his version of love. Nothing she was forced to go through in order to gain her power mattered to him. Not even Nebula’s agonizing pain, cuz it was 100% necessary to use her as a practice dummy in his mind. Hell, in his mind even the act of playing favorites was more of his “love”!
“we’re supposed to accept that this somehow counts as ‘love’?”
Well, we’re supposed to accept that it’s what the Soul Stone — an evil cosmic force — counts as love. Its standards might be a bit looser than ours.
Thanos was probably wondering why she didn’t just collect all the bits and pieces of her sister and display them as war trophies while thanking him for the training.
I can understand that it offends you that a story would humanize an abusive and maniacal person. Out of respect for people that have been victimized and abused, we avoid allowing redeeming qualities to be associated with their oppressors. However, it is not a stretch that very bad people often hurt those they love the most.
First off he is the villain and a villain who thinks he is doing good by killing half the universe, so it makes sense that every is twisted to him. Not defending him but if he thinks he is doing a good thing by killing half the universe than yea his version of love is going to be messed up. also she says herself in that scene that it is not love and he is an actual villain and if anyone has common sense that everything about him is something dangerous .
Agamemnon thought he loved Iphigenia, too. Look how well that worked out for him.
I don’t have time yet to read all the comments, but we just saw the movie yesterday, and while I do have some issues with how Gamora was underused and underexplored in the story (and also share some of your other complaints – of all the deaths, I think it was Black Panther that hit me hardest. We just saw that movie a few weeks ago and we (me and my husband) just instantly loved him – and so to lose him so soon just seems like…ugh. Honestly, it even hurt a little more than Spider-Man – maybe because even though he’s also new, we’ve had so many other Spider-Man movies it didn’t feel quite the same*. And from a meta perspective, while I can’t really speak to the experience of genre fans of color, it just seems a bit cruel to snatch him away so quickly…but sure, let’s focus on Tony Stark some more! Not that I have any particular animus towards Tony, I’m invested in his arc too. But he kind of strikes me as this franchises’s Wolverine and reminds me of some viral video from many years ago that had a bunch of action figures debating the merits of various X-Men movies and one of them finally says, to Wolverine, “aren’t ALL the X-Men movies about you?” I don’t even remember what the point of the video was, I just remember that line.)
*(I thought I had read that there are greenlit sequels for both Spidey and Black Panther so given comics being what they are, and the idea that Doctor Strange may be playing some long game, I’m won’t be shocked if they come back. Then again, the movies could focus on Shuri/Miles Morale so I suppose you never know…)
ANYWAY – all that said, yeah, I had some issues with he movie and Gamora but this actually isn’t one of them. I don’t think we’re supposed to in any way AGREE that he loves her in a healthy way. But I don’t think the Soul Stone is that choosy – I don’t think the Soul Stone has ethics. All it requires is a soul, and that a person must sacrifice something dear to them (my first thought was actually the legend in Game of Thrones of the forging of the sword requiring being plunged into the heart of his beloved). And in some twisted way, it does hurt Thanos to sacrifice Gamora – but of course he’s still willing to do it. That doesn’t make him sympathetic at all in my mind, but it just goes to show that even abusers have things they value.
Also, one other thing that just occurred to me as I parse though this – Thanos, we see, is willing to sacrifice somebody for his goals. He’s the villain and it’s also possible the eventual resolution will show how this ends up his undoing.
One of the common traits the different heroes have is that they are NOT willing to sacrifice even one person – “we don’t trade lives” – even when it seems like the expedient thing to do. I feel like this will also be significant in some way. Although there may be more to it regarding Doctor Strange’s motivations relinquishing of the Time Stone to save Tony’s life – there may be more to it than just sentimentality (and perhaps in a way that also is sacrificing lives since he knows it will result in the death of billions).
This actually reminds me (if I may switch genres) of one of my favorite old EU books from the old Star Wars canon (Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor). There’s a scene where Luke basically refuses to kill any of the mooks because he knows they are brainwashed innocents, even though he knows that he’s risking his own life. And the POV character comes to the conclusion that one of the defining characteristics of Luke Skywalker is that he will not risk even ONE innocent life to attain his goals. (I highly, highly recommend this book, which predates the sequel movies, but actually deals with many of the same themes – namely, Luke’s struggle to come to terms with the way the galaxy has lionized him and turned him into a legend that he feels in no way qualified to live up to, as well as the intense guilt he feels for being party to the death of so many people in various battles.)
A few thoughts, based on the movies (I haven’t really read any of the original comics).
Thanos & love: I agree with many others in this thread in that FOR THANOS, the feelings he had towards Gamora were love. FOR HIM, they qualified as love, even though for us they represent the worst kind of twisted notion of it. Thanos, for himself, understood “love” to mean what Gamora meant to him. So, that meant he sacrificed what he “loved the most”, and whatever planetary/Red Skull/Soul Stone requirements were met.
Gamora & love: Someone here questioned Gamora’s relationship with Quill. Yes, Quill is far from perfect, but think of his life: abduction just moments after losing his mother, years spent under Yondu’s abuse, fighting for his survival, finding his real father just to find out, well, we all know the ‘problems’ his father had… Exactly how many healthy rolemodels do you think Quill had, how many well-rounded examples of what ‘love’ and responsible adulthood he had? I think it’s rather surprising Quill didn’t turn out to be a full-on psychopath! Again, the same questions apply to Gamora. How are we supposed to expect that by some miracle Gamora would be able to make decisions on her romantic relationships which would be right out of a “Here’s what a 100 % well-thought-out romantic relationship is based on”? Is she really the first person in the history of universe to make a poor decision on matters of love? As for the scene on Vormir, the only thing that a bit rubbed me the wrong way was that Gamora didn’t see the sacrifice coming, it was evident from a mile away. However, she had been under a huge amount of stress, she’s not a superhuman robot, capable of 100 % logical & objective computing at all times…
Yondu: I think we can all agree on that, like Thanos’, Yondu’s concept of love also leaves some room for improvement. That said, he did save Quill’s life. First, by not delivering him to Ego. Second, by choosing to forfeit his own life in GotG2. For me at least, that counts for something. Does it excuse all the stuff he did that was horribly wrong? No, of course not. However, it shows that people are rarely just black-or-white, they are a mixture of all sorts of shades of grey, and inbetween all kinds of horrible things Yondu did, he was also capable of making some good, selfless decisions.
Someone here wondered why we’re spending all this time analyzing a work of fiction. Well. Like all good stories, MCU movies inspire us to ponder on real-world issues. Such as “what is love”? “What is personal growth”? These movies consistently decline giving us “perfect” characters – they will not give us characters who are 100 % textbook perfections, always making the “right” decisions (and again, by whose standards should we measure “rightness”?), somehow miraculously bypassing their own less-than-perfect life experiences. MCU characters are products of what they have gone through, traumas, losses. They have eminently “normal” faults and quirks. I for one can relate to most of the characters. They have depth, and within the confines of 2-hour-movie format, quite remarkable arcs of personal development.
wow, over 200 comments on a marvel flick, and what’s the main subject? love. in a marvel flick… so many comments just because of one small word – love… so sentimental, I’m touched.
Gamora, as said here before (post 150+) that she doesn’t strike at being deadly. In a universe where every other planet has a superpowered let’s destroy the universe supervillain and badass superheroes, I’m left dumbfounded how Marvel thought making Gamora the deadliest assasin in the Marvel universe. Being thrown of a cliff (without being knifed first)… yeah Deadly… like the Smurfs deadly… Oh no, here comes deadly Gamora…. I’m shaking…
I read the article a while ago. Well. Pretty much as it came out. I didn’t strongly disagree with it, but something bothered me about it. It wasn’t a big deal so I decided to forget about it. However. For some reason or the other I was reminded of this article and I searched for it and found it. As one can see. Anyway.
Well. Basically I am more annoyed about the fact that rest of the female good characters “had” to fight a designated evil female character yet again because… well… that’s how these things work I guess.
But love? Like the most abstract and absurd thing of all? And you want a reason or an explanation? Love is love. If it even exist. Which. I guess makes it even more complicated.
Sure. The storytelling is a bit weak in the matter, but then again it has a very limited time to do so and one of the most difficult things to show on screen is to show the inner side or feelings of a character without vocalization. Especially if they seem to act in a completely different or opposite manner.
Anywise. I did not once doubt in Thanos’ love for Gamora. Did not question it at all. Love is love. It’s in all forms, shapes and sizes etc. Or at least that’s what I’d like to believe. If there is such a thing as love in the first place. But I believed that he believed. Just because youre a mass murdering maniac does not mean you are incapable of love. And vice versa. Just because you love something does not mean you can’t go around killing stuff. If anything, it’s quite the opposite.
Basically just about everything that I disagree with in this article has already been said by other commenters.
Here’s the one point nobody else seems to have made: the article author suggests that by depicting a villain having a really warped and twisted view of what love is, and then being rewarded for it, somehow potentially normalises it. Makes abusers feel that if someone in a Marvel movie does it, somehow Marvel tacitly approves and therefore makes their activities okay.
But here’s my counter: what if the reverse is actually true? In the comments generated by this article (an article that wouldn’t exist without the movie) everyone agrees Thanos’ abuse isn’t acceptable. That it clearly fits the pattern of a villain. What if someone that is a victim of abuse, but has had it normalised for them, sees the movie (or reads this article and these comments), and realises these are the actions of a villain? What if the perpetrator of abuse recognises their actions in what Thanos says and does, and asks themselves “If a villain does these things, and I do these things, what does that make me?”
I thankfully have never been the victim of abuse, but from what I know of it, frequently one of the self-justifications is that the abusers really love the abused, so what they do can’t be abuse. The film shows Thanos is clearly the villain, and just as clearly demonstrates he believes he loves her.
People talk of the cycle of abuse. That the abused becomes an abuser, passing on learned behaviour. Part of breaking this cycle is finding out this behaviour isn’t normal. To help do that we need a public conversation happening. That conversation can start by depicting it negatively on the big screen. I’m not sure how much more negative you can get than a villain that the entire pantheon of the MCU must unite to oppose, who’s actions every character on the side of “good” describes and reacts negatively too.
And what of Nebula? She’s as much Thanos’ adopted daughter as Gamora. Subject to even more abuse. Gamora may be Thanos’ favourite, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t “love” Nebula. Every justification used (apart from liking her boyfriend) to show Thanos believes he “loves” Gamora can be applied to Nebula. Just look at how many opportunities he has to kill Nebula, and doesn’t. After finding out the location of the soul stone, why doesn’t he kill her? When he kills every second person in the universe, he chooses to kill every one that attacked him on Titan except for Tony Stark and Gamora. That (at least to me) is telling.
Oh, and kudos all around for this, I think. For Brandon O’Brian to write the article (for all that I disagree with most of his points), for Tor.com to publish it, for the moderators who work so hard on making sure this stays a pleasant place, and for Marvel to make films that feature families like Peter and Yondu’s, and like Thanos, Gamora and Nebula. Without Marvel we wouldn’t be having these conversations.
Biggest kudos go to those who’ve suffered abuse and written about it here. I can only imagine the strength it takes to break the cycle and then to write about it.
Well said, thank you so much for posting this. I hate how Gamora was treated during most of this movie. (Unpopular opinion incoming) I think Gunn did a great job developing throughout both GotG movies. Sure, she wasn’t perfectly handled in GotG, but she was easily my favorite character in both. She was so kickass and inspiring, especially in Vol. 2! She killed an Abelisk, held onto the ship while saving Drax, lifted a giant spaceship gun to fight her sister. And throughout it all, she was opening up to others, namely Peter, Nebula, and Baby Groot. Gamora’s arc with Nebula was fantastic. She also had agency in that movie. Say what you will about how she was written in Vol. 1, she was still essential to the plot and she was an active hero. And I thought her arc in Vol. 2 was multifaceted and well-acted by Saldana.
Cut to Infinity War, when Gamora suddenly goes after Thanos (after telling Nebula “I don’t think it’s possible [to kill him]”), gets barely 2 seconds’ worth of fight scenes, gets easily captured, gets her agency ripped away from her twice by her abusive kidnapper, gets abducted by him a second time, and gets her backstory completely retconned to prop up Thanos as likable and correct (“He killed my parents in front of me” and she went from last survivor to hey, her planet is great now, Thanos saved her people!) She takes 5 minutes to realize he’s going to kill her, then stands around waiting for it to happen. She gets 2 seconds of a cheap transition of her falling, juxtaposed with one long loving minute of her abuser crying crocodile tears. And then everyone gets mad at Quill for “throwing a temper tantrum” when he discovered her death.
Saldana did a fantastic job with what she had to work with, but Gamora was easily treated the worst out of all the characters. She’s just handed the Idiot Ball over and over to make her abuser look competent, and it’s disgusting how the dude writers and directors told us to feel bad for her murderer and torturer. Because they did. If they didn’t mean to, they failed miserably at it because nearly everyone and their dad feels bad for that monster.
Compare Gamora’s death scene to Yinsen’s, Yondu’s, Groot’s, Quicksilver’s – they ALL got heroic sacrificial deaths. Frigga’s was disappointing, but she went out fighting like a boss and had a respectful funeral. Loki dies as a Prince of Asgard, a hero actively fighting Thanos and getting hugged by his brother. Vision got a heroic death scene looking at his lover. Gamora barely got 2 seconds of a close up shot of her being passively tossed, and she’s not even the focus of her own death scene. The disrespect toward her character infuriates me so much. She died alone and horrified, the “fiercest woman in the galaxy” barely able to fight back or attempt to run. This is the same woman who picked up a 20 ton gattling gun and landed on her feet after falling a really high distance in Vol. 2. And we’re clearly not meant to feel sorry for her, the directors were so obsessed with focusing on her poor abuser’s manpain tears before he got rewarded for throwing away his toy.
There were bright spots in the movie, like Gamora singing with Quill at the beginning, their loving moments before she was captured, and her finally saving her sister. But after that her ‘arc’ took a nosedive, and she was turned into an object to tell us her murderer wuvs her and we should feel sorry for him.
And it worked. Way too many people feel sorry for him and agree with his short-sighted plan. Thanos is still widely seen as the Good Guy while she gets victim blamed and her death mocked. I’m really glad you found her murder as frustrating as I did, because I’m certain it wouldn’t have happened to Gamaro. Thor got to work through and survive his daddy issues. Quill got to help kill his psycho sperm donor and witness his abusive father give up his life for Peter’s. Tony got to work through his daddy issues and be a badass. The difference in their stories vs. hers is staggering.
I’m sure she’s coming back in the next movie, but the fact is that she was tossed like trash to humanize her abuser in *this* popcorn movie aimed at families. It was poor form for the writers and directors to say, “Hey victims of abuse, your voice doesn’t matter. You’re wrong and your abuser is right. They can kill you but it’s cool because they love you, and the most important thing is they have feelings too!’ Pop culture media informs society, and vice versa.
I hope the writing and directing team stops playing around with this dangerous narrative in the next movie and shows us what a truly narcissistic, irredeemable monster Thanos is, and kill that child torturer for good. Then, hopefully Gunn gives Gamora, a true survivor, even more kickass scenes and a happy conclusion with her actual loving family in Vol. 3. It’s what she deserves.
Who thinks Thanos is the good guy? Unless there are some fan circles I’m just not aware of, I have never seen anybody argue that. Also I don’t think we’re supposed to take Thanos’s assertion that he saved her planet at face value AT ALL. (I don’t disagree that Gamora is way underused, btw, but that particular argument struck me as not something I’ve seen.)
There are, but you do not want to be aware of them. Trust me on this.
Tons of people all over the Internet think the child torturer is right, and praise him for murdering the woman he abducted twice, ripped away her agency, and murdered so he could kill trillions.
This is the problem with IW, it tells us over and over that Thanos is right and oh the poor baby is so sad, feel bad for him because he had to “sacrifice” so much. And it’s fine because he loved the woman he kidnapped and abused. Which, I want to point out that way too many people are arguing he didn’t physically abuse Gamora and treated her like a princess. Gamora said in Vol. 1 “He tortured me, turned me into a weapon,” and she tells Thanos and us that she hated her life with him, but her voice is, unsurprisingly but sadly, largely dismissed by the writers, directors and audience, shoving her aside to fawn over an abusive genocidal murderer’s crocodile tears.
The internet has a way of amplifying things that damaged my calm. I don’t doubt there’s a cadre of Thanos-lovers out there, that the internet, in its glory, has linked together. Just as it has done for Hollow Earthers, climate-deniers, and anti-vaccine campaigners. I started feeling a lot happier when I realised it doesn’t matter what they think, because they might be easy to find, and so are plentiful in that sense, but when you start to tally I found it’s the same people spread across the groups touring their own little media bubble. Compared to the whole, their number is small.
So advocate for films that do concentrate on agency over being handed the idiot balls. People voting with their wallets is the only way the stories we see will change.
And surely the male version of Gamora would be Gamorus?
It’s not a vocal minority that fawns over a fictional child torturer, it’s 90% of the audience. Everywhere I look on the Internet, people (mostly boys and men) praise Thanos and like that he is ‘layered.’ Because the Russos and M&M told us, over and over, to feel bad for him. This does not help us, it only encourages real boys and men to romanticize abuse in fiction to say “well but he loved her” as if that makes it ok. Fiction affects society.
Voting with our wallets is key, that I will agree with. I will not make the same mistake I did for IW and I will check for spoilers before spending a dime on A4. In the meantime, I will definitely be watching Black Panther’s sequel (and Ant Man and the Wasp’s third movie, once Reed gets back Hope and Janet.) I trust Coogler because he respects and celebrates female characters, and doesn’t toss them over a cliff like garbage to tell me, “Feel bad for abusers and murderers, they are human too and feel love, their tears are valid and that’s what’s *really* important. This female survivor of abuse you love and connect to, who had escaped her torturer and found happiness and positive love with her found family? LOL YEET!”
Gamorus would also not be the same way Gamora got treated in IW. A male lead hero like Cap or Tony would never, ever get kidnapped, emotionally tormented, and murdered by his abusive ‘father figure’ in an MCU movie.
@261 – Sam N – I might be trapped in my own little social media bubble, but my experience is far from the 90% audience “fawning” over Thanos. All the reviews and reactions I’ve seen react to him with revulsion. Nobody suggests he’s a hero or anti-hero. The only positive thing about him is that he never seems to hold the idiot ball. Unlike every other marvel villain (Dawkins’ Beard, Kilmonger, you were doing so well, but it was a rookie mistake to throw your still-breathing enemy off a cliff instead of putting his head on a pike).
That means for the movie to work, Gamora is required to carry the idiot ball. Which is (as i’ve said already) a great disservice to her.
I’m not suggesting Marvel has a positive history of handling their female characters well, either. I mean, look at X-23. She gets conditioned to be an assassin, and yet as soon as she escapes her confinement, does she get involved in barely legal violent money-making schemes (like bounty-hunting)? No, they have this apparently-underage girl turn to sex-work. Ick.
About the closest male character to Gamora’s arc is Vance Astro (Marvel Boy /Justice). Even then, he escapes his abuser with a certain amount of agency (his mutant power activates and he accidentally kills his abusive father). It would be interesting for him to be introduced in phase 4.
If we’re going with Greek formations on the example of “Thanos”, then Gamora’s male equivalent is Gamoros.
Not pleased to learn that Thanos Misaimed Fandom is becoming a thing. Ugh. I still think actual Marvel is in a potentially interesting and redeemable place, depending on how they handle the writing for the second half of Infinity War, and that it’s the misaimed fans rather than Marvel who are confusing an abuser’s emotional life with something that a decent person would recognize as love. But really, didn’t we have enough crappy Misaimed Fandoms already?
Many abusers do believe they love their abuse victims. That scene is intended to show what a monster Thanos truly is, and it’s very effective at it if you’re at all familiar with abuse. Yes, he does think he loves her. Yes, he did terribly abuse her. Yes, he was willing to, with almost no hesitation, kill this child he loves to get what he wants. He thinks he’s doing it for a greater good. He has a logical justification in his mind. And it’s completely monstrous. That’s the whole point of this movie and Thanos’ arc and why many people feel like this movie is more than just a big budget action popcorn flick. Because the villain feels real, on top of feeling like the worst fucking person you’ve ever heard of. In his mind, he has perfectly logical and reasonable, and even ethical/moral reasoning behind his reprehensible behavior. He abused Gamora and Nebula because he thought he loved them, and that his abuse was making them stronger. He thought he was doing what was best for them. This is how true monsters operate in the real world. This is what makes him such a great and compelling villain for the movie. He’s not just a stupidly evil caricature. He’s a real-world monster and abuser scaled up to a universal scale.
I could not agree more that this movie will only not suck if the people who disappeared by the snap have somehow to come back (like Ant-Man’s Wasp) from somewhere in Avengers 4. Setting aside the entire movie plot from Gamora, because that was was unacceptable in every term of it. I could not consider how much I love this character, personally, only to be literally thrown into the garbage like that. But this idea of twisted “love” and “compassion to the universe” through genocide is really dangerous to the uttermost scales of society. There are people who are literally believing that to solve man’s actions on the nature of this Earth is through genociding the population and not the actions themselves. Scaling up the the entire freaking Universe, the entire life of all the planets that can be would not only be a waste (because let’s be honest, worlds would still continue to overpopulate after this snap, it would only need so many snaps to keep it safe from self-extinction), but also the psychological damage and the worlds that would have this mystery as a curse on their society (such as collapsing the civilizations for everyone remaining alive on the universe is suffering the same psychological damage) that would lead to their direct extinction instead of giving them time. For considering the amount of galaxies counted and the possible planets to harbor life that would be an abuse to evolution itself and a genetic sacrifice because half of the possibilities to combine the DNA in some form would be extinguished and lead to various genetic errors and possible diseases, that only a biologist would agree. The natural course of all life was now abruptly changed and the procrastination of this course would inevitably lead to all these genetic errors in the long run. Not only an universe which supports the abusers more than the good guys, but an universe of psychological abuse to the whole life on it. Seeming to godfy the Human form… because such a thing would prevent better forms to evolve from the human form, leading the human form as the ultimate ability of evolution to grasp through genetics. Everyone would be too much affected… aliens through the entire cosmos would wake up to this call before it happened with premonitions all over the verse. While only Thanos would sit and watch the sunset peacefully, the rest of the life on the universe would not be in peace, but in chaos and horror, as you saw the faces of the people who remained and watched those who disappeared…! (And he doesn’t even have the clue of it, which is even more frustrating for him as a villain who considers himself a savior and might be viewed as one by many for the way some people talk about the effects of the actions of mankind on nature without considering the solutions). That is dangerous!
I agree with you about Gamora. I refused to see it in the theatre and almost resent paying to rent it. I’ll do my best to avoid mentioning the shoddy, sloppy plot of this movie and its many holes, the dumbing down and depowering of characters (one simple example: What happened to Wakanda’s warships? )
Many commenters have argued that just because Thanos is evil, sadistic and abusive, it doesn’t mean he can’t “love” someone. Others have suggested that his non-human nature renders his concept of love as fundamentally different from a human’s. But neither Thanos or Gamora are human or of the same species, yet Gamora understands love. My argument is that love is an objective reality, not a perception or an opinion. Nor does if mutate based on species – it exists to ensure the survival of any family and the next generation. Animals love their children, even predators, and do amazing things to ensure they survive – including die for them. Love is a Universal force. In Star Wars the Force didn’t alter itself based on a species:
The villain Thanos destroys everything he touches and is therefore incapable of love. No form of love tears apart one “daughter” while emotionally blackmailing the other into betraying her values and forcing her into becoming an accomplice for a crime she abhors? This is power and its abuse, nothing more. Marvel writers obviously don’t see it that way. And they’ve done similar things with other beloved villains.
There is either a trick here, as some commenters have mentioned (Thanos’ dreaming he did it) or the writers have a penned their way into an insurmountable problem: excusing years of horrific “parenting” by saying he actually loves her.
Were the demands that she and her siblings battle for supremacy and his favor a display of love? If he has love for Gamora, it is only love as a possession. If the Universe regards valued property as love, we are witness to a totally screwed up Universe. Shedding a tear doesn’t imply love, nor does choosing and training who inherits their throne. Those are pragmatic and selfish considerations for any despot.
Gamora never felt loved by Thanos. Parents can be tough on their children, but outright manipulation and enslavement isn’t love by anyone’s measure. The problem with all of MCU is that they love their villains a bit too much and often want to spend more quality time with them than with their heroes. It’s an artistic choice, but it results in a Universe that has little regard for the sanctity of a single life. It mocks the idea of true love, justice and kindness. It’s a Universe that conflates power, megalomania, genocide and personal abuse with good intentions.
In our Universe, we see writers who have attempted to grapple with morality and justice and any other number of ideals through Thanos. In my view, they have failed and not only because of Gamora’s and Nebula’s treatment. But their refusal to deal with the immorality of personal abuse in an honest manner does crystallize how far Hollywood and comic books are far from understanding that professing love doesn’t mean you feel it.
It’s not the Universe that is judging Thanos, it’s the Soul Stone. The Soul Stone doesn’t exactly need to be good or in the same alignement as the Universe. Considering the Soul Stone’s “avatar” or spokesperson is a version of Red Skull, I wouldn’t put my money in it being good as we humans understand it. The Soul Stone would probably allow Hitler to use it if Hitler killed Blondie, his beloved German Shepherd.
@@@@@Ryamano I don’t think the fault lies with the Soul Stone, the fault lies within the dude writers and dude directors who have 0 empathy for Gamora, and all the empathy in the world for her abuser.
Feige was happy to roll out 18 movies of male power fantasies, many of them focusing on male characters dealing with their Daddy Issues and being survivors. All of a sudden, Feige had to make things ‘realistic’ and show one of the few female characters in his roster weakened, kidnapped, crying constantly, tormented, and failing to beat what should be her (and Nebula’s) villain.
As a woman who has been in an abusive relationship, this abuse apologist ‘movie’ (more like a Colosseum fight) disgusts me, and it disgusts a lot of women I know as well. It hits way too close to home for us. It’s an insult that the “Most Dangerous Woman in the Galaxy” was revictimized and objectified, turned into a sacrificial lamb to push her abuser’s story forward (meanwhile Strange, Tony, and Thor all get active arcs, get their powers buffed and get long fights with Thanos, dealing actual damage to him after knowing him for all of a day. Gamora and Nebula had known him for 20 years, yet the dude writers refused to give them more than 40 seconds worth of fighting… most of which was fake.)
Captain Marvel looks to be somewhat of a reassurance that the boys’ club at MCU cares about women. But it’s still not going to make me forget that Gamora was treated like trash in what should have been HER movie, not her abuser’s.
@270/Ryamano – I agree on the Hitler point. You’re interpretation of the test to win it is that the Soul Stone itself set the test? Or that something else (perhaps the Universe itself) set the test, and the Soul Stone is “merely” the judge?
@269/Karen – this is obviously something you feel strongly about. I appreciate you expressing your feeling here.
Your arguments seem to be based on two principles: that Love is a universal force, and that you can’t separate feeling love and how that love is expressed in action.
The issue with the first principle (Love is a universal force) is that it can’t be objectively detected or measured. Grind and sift the universe to its smallest particle, and no love can be detected. We only know it’s their when we feel it, so any report can only be purely subjective.
The issue with the second principle (that you can’t separate feelings from actions) is that people express their love in different ways. Some are better than others. Some become twisted and evil.
The problem with using Star Wars to in your comment to support you arguments is that the Force *does* change depending on who is using it, and how they use it. Further, the Sith believe that you can only be considered a Sith Master is you have fully experienced Love, because all the other passions are rooted in Love.
@271. Sam N: “Gamora was treated like trash in what should have been HER movie, not her abuser’s.”
Not sure she’s well known enough, even after 2 Guardians movies, to carry an Avengers movie as main protagonist. Then again, neither was Thanos, even though they built him up since the first Avengers.
Dunno if it would help, but if you’re a comics reader, the current Infinity Wars series seems to give Gamora her due. Maybe Avengers 4 will take inspiration from it.
@Sunspear I don’t buy the ‘she wasn’t as well known’ excuse because she’s in one of MCU’s most popular franchises – all of those characters were virtually unknown by the general audience before their movies. There is no excuse to me, it’s just sexism.
The only thing in A4 that would fix the sexist abuse apologism in this movie would be that Gamora and Nebula get to kill their abuser. I won’t hold my breath for that though, because Feige usually prioritizes his male fanbase over women. So I won’t be surprised if Gamora stays passively stuck in the soul world and gets rescued by someone else. At this point the least I can hope for in that instance is Nebula gets her out, but I won’t be surprised if her abuser ends up bringing her back, to maintain the male writers’ disturbing view of him as a ‘noble father who wuvs the woman he kidnapped, feel bad for him everyone’ as they handwave his abuse and go ‘but his love is more important than abuse! Great guy!’
The male writers love the child torturer too much, and they clearly think of Gamora as an object to dismiss. Russos stated they want to depart from comics in their movies (meaning Gamora won’t get her due in A4), and Vol. 3 looks to be put on the backburner for years, so I really doubt there’s much left in Gamora’s story that will fix the garbage that was done to her in IW for cheap shock. It was lazy, vile writing, and made a lot of women like myself angry. Zoe and Gamora deserved better. Female abuse survivors like myself deserve better than being told we are trash, and that our abusers are more sympathetic and human than we are.
It’s 2018, we deserve better stories than watching women like ourselves be tormented and killed – while men like Thor, Strange, Stark, and Cap get the cool entrances, and long, heroic fight scenes instead of being passively tossed off a cliff. Male writers wouldn’t dream to do that in Thor’s third movie, Cap’s third movie, or Tony’s third movie. Female character? “Eh let’s toss her, no one cares about her.” This movie tells me that Feige and the Russos think women like me aren’t considered human, and that they think men are human and worthy of sympathy no matter what they do. It’s beyond disgusting to me.
I care about Gamora, don’t think she’s trash or dismissible. She’s as human as a green-skinned alien can be.
But I can’t see the retelling of a story that’s existed for nearly 3 decades with Thanos as the antagonist shifting enough to make Gamora the lead. For one thing, she’s not a villain. What would she do after gathering the Stones?
As I said, the current comics series attempts that new story. Maybe someday it will be told as a MCU movie.
I didn’t want Gamora to be the one collecting the stones, or to become a villain. Gamora deserved to get Thor’s arc. Ragnarok brought him from ‘character most fans are meh about’ to one of the most popular heroes. People *love* Doctor Strange because just one movie made him into a powerhouse. Gamora is The Most Dangerous/Fiercest Woman in the Galaxy. Fans have been complaining about her portrayal for years. I have loved her since GotG, but seeing as the general fan reaction toward her was shrugging, then that should have clued in the writers to make IW her time to really shine. She should’ve been given long fight scenes, memorable one-liners, and agency the whole way through (like dudes get all the time.) She should’ve been kept on as a survivor to save her dusted family, along with Nebula. But in IW, Gamora barely got 20 seconds of a fake fight scene, then spent the rest of the movie kidnapped crying, then got killed off to give her abuser a sad.
Why did Thor, a man, deserve 6 movies of being strong, but in her third movie, Gamora, a woman, went from using a 20ton space gattling gun and killing a giant space squid to… weakly batting at Thanos’s arm? Why does Thor get to mature and be smart enough to go get a weapon strong enough to kill Thanos, but Gamora goes from the most logical and pragmatic Guardian who warned Nebula, “I don’t know if [it’s possible to kill Thanos],” to suddenly right at him recklessly and then yelling at him, instead of refuting his dumb plan with logical counterpoints? Why was her backstory completely torched to pump up Thanos as a great dad?
Why is it okay to show male characters as strong and actively fighting Thanos in long scenes, but the character with the most screentime after Thanos (Gamora) is weakened and suffering the entire time? Why is it that the only two (female) characters out of everyone in the cast of heroes knew Thanos for 20 years, yet they can’t land a scratch on him? Why is it that two dudes roll up and make Thanos bleed and severely inure him after knowing him for all of a day?
The only answer I can come up with is the dude writers having no empathy or respect for Gamora and Nebula. The dude writers have no clue what it’s like to be a woman, especially a female survivor, so they just projected onto the abusive man and poured all their sympathy into him. This results in very few people sympathizing with Gamora than feeling bad for her. You and I care about her, and I appreciate that you do, but most of the MCU fanbase wants her to stay dead. A lot of fans want Thanos to live on and become allies with the Avengers. So the writers convinced a lot of people that male abusers are heroic and female abuse victims are merely objects to harm and then kill, and the only important thing is the abuser loves them.
‘Maybe someday’ isn’t really good enough for me. It’s such a bummer that my favorite character in the MCU was objectified and given such a disrespectful story in a movie where I wanted to see her continue to shine and be powerful. The dude writers were too fixated on their male proxies to give her the heroic journey she deserved (I don’t view being kidnapped and fridged heroic. Compare her ‘journey’ to Thor’s, and the difference is appalling.) I had hopes about Gamora getting her due in Vol. 3, but that’s now probably just as hopeless as the mindless, torture porn, abuse apologist mess that was IW.
Spoilers for decades old Thanos stories and the newest Gamora one:
If they follow the template of the original story, Nebula is the one who gets Thanos’ gauntlet away from him. In the current series, Gamora finishes him in a more permanent fashion (as permanent as comics get, anyway).
I agree with you that the writers have not given much agency to the female MCU characters. Black Widow wasn’t even on the radar till recently to get her own movie. Scarlet Witch’s development will be relegated to the Disney streaming service. And so on. Maybe Captain Marvel will right the ship on that. The Wasp has already begun the refocus.
I remember the original purchase of Marvel by Disney was met with much skepticism in my local comic shop. Back then Disney’s plan was to balance the Disney Princess empire (marketed at girls primarily) with the Marvel characters (with decades’ worth of backstories mostly about boys aimed at boys). The third arm was the Star Wars empire aimed at nerds of all stripes.
Marvel Studios has been very successful at that for 10 years now. You’re absolutely right that it’s been too male heavy. They may not even allow Nebula to defeat Thanos. It’ll likely be Strange’s gambit with some time travel shenanigans thrown in.
As fans and consumers, we invest these properties with emotion and devotion. Sometimes to the corporations that own them, they are just property and the content of a movie has to be marketable. Consider what the execs at WB did to mangle the DC properties. The one absolute idiot who said “No jokes.” How in hell can you make relatable movies with no humor, at all? We’ve seen the grimdark, over-serious result. That’s why Wonder Woman was such a revelation and got such a warm response.
So we’ll see next year if Marvel does better.
I appreciate your response. Thank you for that.
Coming on the heels of Wonder Woman and the positive response to Valkyrie and the female characters in BP, it feels even more insulting to me that Gamora was treated so horribly and not in terms of HER story, her pov (we are meant to feel bad for Thanos, not her; in Spidey’s scene, we are meant to feel bad for him.) The only thing M&M and Russos could think to do with her was kill her to give her abuser a sad.
I appreciate that you are also critical of MCU’s portrayal of female characters. The Russos and M&M (Gunn was complicit) screwed up so much with Gamora. It infuriates me that they literally had a few hero templates mapped out, but of course they handed them to Thor, Tony, and Strange and snubbed their movie’s second lead, instead saddling her with tears, torment, and death. Feige would have never, ever have dared to kill off Thor, Steve, or Tony in their third movies. But when it’s a woman it’s A-ok to kill her in her third movie. It’s disheartening to me, as a female abuse survivor.
I wish I shared your optimism about A4. I really doubt Nebula or Gamora will land the killing blow on the prune. Many male fans have made it clear they would riot in the theater if a female character comes even close to beating Thanos. Many male fans dislike the ‘SJW’ comics, and Feige wants to placate his biggest group of ticket buyers, so I think he will give them what they want. It makes me feel a bit better that Marvel comics gave Gamora her due in their recent run, but I highly doubt Russos will follow suit because they just don’t seem to care about her beyond ‘she is her abuser’s object.’
I appreciate your response and I do not like being all doom and gloom about A4, but IW was not a great experience for me and I saw it at a bad time. I don’t have much hopes for A4 to satisfy me. However, I’m still looking forward to Captain Marvel, BP2, BW, and the third Ant-Man movie (I would like it to focus on Hope, Janet and Cassie). The silver lining is that there are other properties in MCU that I still have faith in wrt treatment of female characters, and I will be voting with my wallet on those films.
What Russos and M&M did to Gamora was absolutely sickening, and I don’t trust them anymore to give them my hard-earned money. Watching Gamora’s death was like being spit on. I resent paying to be disrespected, so I won’t rush to open my wallet just to see 5 minutes of Nebula being an accessory to Tony’s arc, and then maybe landing 1 punch on Thanos before being shoved aside for one of the male Avengers to get her powerful moment. At this point that feels more plausible and something the Russos would do. However, I do trust Coogler to respect and celebrate Okoye, Shuri, and Nakia, so he will definitely be getting my ticket. BP2 and Ant-Man’s 3rd movie won’t have any trace of disgusting abuse apologism, so I’m looking more forward to them than A4.
At the risk of repeating myself from an earlier comment, I think the Feige and the Russo brothers should be given the benefit of the doubt. I think (and of course your mileage may vary) a line be drawn between what they intended and what resulted. What resulted seems to be villian where, for some (like me) a female character was underused in a way that set the villian up as someone who is willing to make horrifying sacrifices in order to achieve his horrific goals. For others, it seems to have made him sympathetic and have them actually empathise with his motivations. For another group, it’s nauseated them to see an abuser depicted as believing he feels love, and then seeing some kind of higher entity (maybe the universe itself) tacitly “approving” this, while the abused has all her agency taken away. There’s a few other reactions, but these are the ones we’re concerned with.
Which interpretation did they intend? Is it fair to call attribute them with frankly awful motivations until they’ve unarguably demonstrated those “qualities”?
Take Star Wars. Is George Lucas a human-centric fascist? Chewie and R2D2 don’t get medals. The victory march in the Throne Room uses staging and imagery taken from Riefenstahl’s pro-fascist films. I’ve seen that and many more examples cited, but Lucas has always been described as tone-deaf and oblivious to the connotations, rather than deliberately fascist and/or racist.
All the interviews with Feige and the Russo brothers seem to indicate they, like Lucas, are tone-deaf and oblivious to the connotations. So I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and hope they listen to conversations like this one.
Yes, I think it is fair to attribute them with abuse apologist tendencies. I think many fans (especially male fans) give the Russos and writers the benefit of the doubt because a lot of those fans are aren’t women who have been abused, nor bombarded constantly with news about women being abused and killed. I think these writers and directors don’t have any empathy for women like me, so I have no reason to give them any benefit of the doubt. They did not throw Thor (main white male hero) off a cliff. White male hero survives, woman of color is literally turned into an object. That earns none of my respect.
Had the white male writers and directors actually respected Gamora, Most Dangerous Woman in the Galaxy, she would have had long fight scenes, an active arc instead of standing around and crying and being a damsel for 1 hr, she wouldn’t have been fridged, and she would continue to be a survivor, an integral character heading into A4 with her sister to avenge her fallen family. But because the Russos and male writers have some bizarre hatred for Gamora, they objectified her, damseled her, nerfed her, and fridged her all to serve her abuser’s story. Building a male’s story on the back of a female character’s pain proves to me how little the male writers care about her.
http://fandom.wikia.com/articles/why-thanos-is-the-true-hero-of-avengers-infinity-war
That is an article detailing why Thanos is the “True Hero of Infinity War.” To me, even one person sympathizes with an abuser and romanticizes/glorifies killing a woman is dangerous. But it’s not surprising in this sexist society, that largely deems women as trash and then applauds a scene in which a woman is murdered, because a lot of people think it’s Art to watch a woman get murdered.
It is not art to me, a woman. I turn on the news and every other day I see a woman kidnapped, beaten, sexually assaulted, or murdered by a man. It happens over and over, and the violence again women in the real world is something we should not be romanticizing, but people do. This movie is not going to teach people not to abuse others. It encourages people to buy toy gauntlets and make jokes about Gamora being ‘Yeeted’ (as I have seen in many fandom spaces.) And to me, it was extremely poor form for the Russos, Markus and McFeely, Gunn, and Feige to push this narrative of encouraging men to sympathize with the male abuser, not the female abuse survivor – whom the male writers gleefully revictimized.
20 movies of men doing unrealistic things, beating their villains in 1 movie, surviving, maturing, and being framed as active heroes.
1 movie in which a woman who has known her abuser, her villain for 20 years, yet the culmination of *her* arc is tossed over a cliff to give us CGI tears and tell us ‘Abusers feeling love is really interesting and realistic!’
This movie tells girls and women like Gamora, like me (a woman of color like Zoe), that we are helpless and doomed and “the most important thing in the universe is your abuser loves you! You are an object and no matter what you do you will lose, women and girls.” This same movie tells men and boys, especially white men like Thor, like Cap, like Tony that they are powerful and can survive anything. This movie tells me women like me are trash and only men like Thanos, Tony, Cap and Thor matter.
That to me is the biggest slap in the face and I have no interest in watching another movie wherein Nebula functions as a stepladder for white male character so he can beat Gamora and Nebula’s abuser for them. I don’t have the patience for ‘waiting and seeing.’ I waited for IW and I got spat in the face while a bunch of white male characters got to be framed as active heroes (Strange, Stark, Thor, Cap), so because I don’t have the luxury of being a white man who is pandered to all the time in these movies, I don’t feel that I owe the privileged white male directors or white male writers any benefit of the doubt. They just showed me they think I’m garbage, so I don’t owe them anything.
I enjoyed reading this article, but I had to read it under the assumption that Thanos is a type of emotional humanoid. He’s an interdimemtional being, so all the sensitivity/touchy-feely stuff with Gamora doesn’t seem to fly. Good thought-provoking stuff here.
I absolutely agree with you!