Spoilers Avengers: Infinity War grade and discussion thread

What I don’t get about the Thanos approach, if halving the population eases pressures on resources, improving life for everyone. Why not just finger snap the doubling of resources.

 

Put a goldfish in a bigger bowl it'll just grow to a bigger size.

 

But surely, that’s the same thing. Removing half the goldfish, or doubling the size of the bowl. The population will grow to exceed the resources, either way.

 

I'm not sure of it was rumors, or if Feige actually said so himself, but at some point Gunn was supposed to set up the next phase of the MCU which would be more space oriented. So Galactus seems like a good call then. Dormammu... I don't know. First off, he was already featured in Dr Strange, and he did bargain. Second..... I never read a lot of Marvel comics, since in the Netherlands it's not easy to actually get them. I did saw a lot of the cartoons, and Galactus was pretty big there. And he's already kinda known thanks to F4 2. Is Dormammu a pretty big Marvel villian? Serious question, I never heard of him untill the Dr Strange movie.

 

I suppose. Maybe it's a case of not thinking fourth dimensionally. Thanos gains all the power in the universe, but still sees every problem as a nail because he spent so long having nothing but a hammer. IE, it never really occurs to him that the power could be used to create as easily as to destroy, to the same general ends.

 

Kang seems like the natural next step. I'm not sure how that would tie in with theenglish's theory but I would love to see that idea used.

 

Marvel Unlimited is pretty cheap if you just want to read rather than own or collect.

I don't think Dormammu is big as in popular, but he has the power level to qualify as a step up from Thanos. And I'm sure that bargain is toast sooner or later, anyway. Probably around Dr. Strange 3, since 2 should focus on Mordo.

 

I don't think Marvel Unlimited is available here unless you go the specialty shops in the big cities or online. Comics aren't that big of a think in the Netherlands. Kids don't really grow up with them like they do in the US. We have 'stripboeken', like Asterix And Obelix, Suske and Wiske. Stuff like that.

And yeah, it would be silly to introduce a villian as powerfull as Dormammu and NOT us him again. But I also agree that Strange2 should be about Mordo.

 

You can get MU straight off the website (just don't choose the deluxe version with the physical perks, they don't ship those). Then read the comics in the app (website reading sucks, unfortunately, but the app has gotten quite good.) I'm in Brabant and I've been going through the backlog for the last year and a half. May need to use a credit card, though. I can't remember if paypal was an option.

 

Oh cool! I look into that.

 

It's entirely possible that the Gauntlet CAN'T just permanently create new resources or double the size of the Universe. Anything the Reality Stone did to change something always was undone once Thanos stopped concentrating. Possibly it can destroy, but not create.

 

The Reality stone only ever seems to mutate matter on some level. The converting the universe to dark matter thing in The Dark World was more using it as a catalytic agent. Some changes can be more permanent like that, mentally created changes fade.

We haven't seen them do much more than affect a set amount of matter in a certain way, so I don't think they can generate new material either.

 

The limits of the reality stone aren't really relevant. He needed all six stones for the snap, so it's clearly different from just using the reality stone.

 

I was replying to Anwars specific point, but yeah, jump right in there with...whatever that was.

 

The Reality Stone doesn't have the same powers that it does in the comics. In the movies, changes made by the Reality Stone seem to only to remain in effect while Thanos has his fist closed.

 

The only place I hope they don't go is...Marvel ZOMBIES! But, in seriousness, Kang is probably a good villain. Perhaps something more along the lines of the Kree/Shi'ar war which results from overpopulation and expansion that wouldn't have happened if half of them would have been wiped out.

 

Can somebody explain how the “We don’t trade lives” thing is supposed to work? When Steve asks T’Challa to order Wakandan soldiers to lay down their lives, and risks (and ultimately loses) half the universe, all on a desperate plan to save Vision, how is that not trading lives?

 

T'Challa could have said no, and the soldiers could've objected too but none of them did. So it wasn't a "trade" because they weren't just giving up their lives for nothing.

I guess.

 

Is that how the Wakandan military works? The King doesn’t order his soldiers, he just makes suggestions? How unusual. Kinda makes me wonder why so many went along with Killmonger in BP.

What about the trillions who died in the Snap? Did they have the opportunity to object to this plan to risk their lives on a desperate attempt to save Vision?

 

It's about ethics and moral philosophy, man.

The movie contrasts Captain America's rigid deontological or Kantian perspective with Thanos' extremist utilitarian perspective; think Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill turned up to eleven (trillion). To put it in a Trek context, it's Kirk's "Because the needs of the one . . . outweigh the needs of the many" ("But at what cost? Your ship? Your son?") versus Spock's/Surak's "The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one" writ large. Immanuel Kant would say you can't intentionally sacrifice a life for the greater good, while Mill would say to do "the greatest good for the greatest number" of people, which Thanos takes to the fullest extent possible and perverts into his fanatical "kill half the universe to save the other half" philosophy.

We've seen Cap take this stance before, albeit on a much smaller scale, in Civil War, when instead of letting the authorities or his fellow Avengers capture or kill Bucky, he put the entire Avengers team at odds with each other and made half of them criminals in order to not sacrifice his friend, whom he knew was brainwashed and therefore an innocent who was not culpable for his crimes. It's an essential aspect of his character, his moral inflexibility and respect for individual liberty and the sanctity of every life, even when it sometimes can be detrimental to the cause or his friendships or to the greater good.

In the trolley problem, Cap would let the runaway trolley car run over a thousand people on the tracks if it meant not intentionally diverting it to kill only one person, because the choice to intentionally kill one is worse than multiple people killed by circumstances you could have prevented but aren't directly your doing.



Either perspective can be used for good or can be taken to an extreme and manipulated to do horrifying things. In the end the best path is to find a healthy compromise between the two philosophies without drifting to the extremes.

Obviously the ethical dilemma presented in the film is not one of equal weight, as Thanos' morals and actions are horrific while Cap's are perhaps just a little too Ned Stark-ingly stubborn and naive about the bigger picture. Yet there are still people out there saying "Thanos was right." Probably the same kind of misanthropes and misguided souls who propose killing off billions of people to save the environment in real life.

Bottom line, to Cap, soldiers voluntarily dying for a cause by the thousands is a terrible but acceptable loss while intentionally killing an individual to prevent a potential disaster that can still be stopped by other means (as far as they knew at that point) is not.

So that's how we ended up with half the world getting dusted.

Spoiler: Minor out of context spoiler for The Good Place S3 if you haven't seen it