Avengers: OblivAeon

So I watched Infinity War the other day.  No specific spoilers, but I will say that it felt very... OblivAeon-y.  Multiple battle zones, quests with massive rewards, Scions, Aeon Men (kinda), taking twice as long as a normal game/movie, way more than 5 heroes, “ridiculous piles of HP,” and, of course, the inevitable destruction of the multiverse.  Okay, maybe not that last one, but still.  Let’s discuss other similarities you saw!

No incapacitation abilities, definitely.

It did kind of seem like Grand Warlord Deadline. But, of course, I see lots of superheroes through a Sentinels-colored lens now. (Since I didn’t read comics, the Letters Page has been walking me through a lot of the archetypes.)

I also enjoyed the trailer for RevoCorp Presents: Elastigirl.

By the way, if you do the math, it’d take a population about 35 years to rebound fully after losing half its members, assuming a reasonable 2% annual growth rate. So I guess I’m just saying Thanos’ plan is dumb and doesn’t accomplish his goals. Unlike OblivAeon!

That’s assuming equal importance in their societal roles.  :wink:

Plus, given human nature, the destruction that would likely follow such an event would be massive. And that’s ignoring the deaths and damages caused by vehicles without controllers, systems without monitors, etc. 

So I guess I’m just saying Thanos’ plan is dumb and doesn’t accomplish his goals.  Unlike OblivAeon!

Well, planning is not Papa Smurf’s specialty, and frankly he’s not the smartest universal conqueror either.  If he were, then there’s no way that he would have ever been bested by a few measly Earth heroes.  He managed to lose a fight while having infinite power at his disposal.  There’s no excuse for such incompetence.

Well it wouldn't make much of a movie if he just wiped the floor with absolutely everybody the first 5 minutes in, but I can understand your thought process.

For those not familiar with most things Marvel Comics, Thanos is somewhere along the weight class of Voss normally. A fully decked out Infinity Gauntlet puts him on the power level of someone like Wager Master, I'd say.

Considering that, in the original Infinity Gauntlet storyline, Thanos takes on nearly every cosmic entity in the Marvel Universe–Chaos and Order, Galactus, The Living Tribunal, and a pile more–all simultaneously, and wins…I think he's a few steps above either Wager Master or OblivAeon at that point.

Really, the only reason the heroes win in that series is that they're able to take advantage of Thanos' personal and mental insecurities and get him to make himself vulnerable.  

I'm hoping the new movie gets Marvel to sell a brand-new omnibus of the Infinity War event. It would be nice to re-read it...

If memory serves, Thanos was nowhere near as merciful in the original comics. He wanted to kill half the universe to impress Lady Death. Yes, THAT Lady Death.

Not only that, he does the finger snap thing in the first or second issue of the series. The heroes he doesn’t kill with that, he takes on in sequence, in increasingly grotesque ways.

Seriously… It’s a trip.

I’ll bet that Deadpool brings that up in his next movie.

I didn’t realize Neil Gaiman wrote Sandman for Marvel comics :wink:

Late to the party here (since I only saw Infinity War yesterday), but I definitely had a moment during the film where I was like  "Half of all life, that's it? Common man, a true villian wants to destroy all life across every reality!"

(Seriously though, the movie was amazing.)

“Common man, a true villian wants to destroy all life across every reality!”"

Now, that’s a REAL villain portrayal.  :wink:

 

Mistress Death… not Death from Vertigo or Lady Death from Coffin (formerly Chaos) comics.

I loved it, but man his motivation is way more immature than the writers thought it was. He's essentially throwing a cosmic-powered temper tantrum to prove that he was right in the past, when everyone else involved is dead (long dead?)

Think about how F-tastically huge the Universe is.  How many planets that weren't having resource issues, how many post-scarcity cultures, did he just kill half of the people living on?  How does that help those cultures?  They weren't having population issues. 

Let's take Earth alone: How many extra people died when airplanes started dropping out of the sky, cruise ships run aground, trains derailed in residential zones?  If this was completely indescriminate, how many people on Earth are going to die of starvation becasue half of our farmers are now dead? Farming is not gardening writ large, people.  It has a whole other list of difficulties.  How many power vaccums in the third world were just created, that will lead to war?

He didn't kill half the population.  He killed half the population immediately, and a third to two-thirds of the remainder over the next… several months or so.

Thanos honestly seems to be the embodiment of "Didn't think this through, just lashed out."

I'll be honest, watching the film my reactions were mostly along the lines of "That'll be retconned", "That'll be undone", "This is a really stupid masterplan" (for similar reasons to Blackfang108), and "Here comes the SFX budget!". It's a problem with almost every ongoing serialised work, that it keeps trying to out-do itself, a problem I also feel creeps in to AD&D (guided by the mechanics), and I think it's something that justifies the way Christopher and Adam have drawn a curtain after the once in a lifetime conclusion to the multiverse. At some point, all the escalation becomes parody, if not outright comedy.

As much as the X-Men films are derided, I can think of decent character moments in most of them (I loved how Days of Future Past after all the fireworks came down to Mystique's dilemma about killing), and the character work seems fairly weak in the MCU. With that said, I thought Ant-Man and The Wasp was the best MCU film on that level. Mixed in with the fairly screwball comedy, the antagonist had a sympathetic motivation so the arcs of the heroes and the villains complemented each other in attempting to undo things that went wrong with the science. Never quite explained how Ghost had an English accent though... (on the plus side it does give Hannah John-Kamen almost unparalleled geek credentials having been in Star Wars, The MCU and Game of Thrones!)

After having seen the movie again, I got to thinking about how awful his plan is, and… it’s not.  Killing off a majority of life in the universe is a pretty impressive deterrent.  It doesn’t much matter what his ideology was- the guy who can wish your entire planet into the cornfield isn’t somebody you resist.  And nobody knows that he doesn’t still have the Gauntlet in working order.  He’s created a state of panic across the universe.  Then, there’s another thing.  He said he wants to “Watch the sun rise on a grateful universe.”  Maybe this is supposed to be for dramatic effect, but… how is the universe supposed to be grateful if they don’t know what killed half their population?  I think that Thanos has other plans in mind, some yet-unseen Endgame that will take the post-snap universe from a state of chaos to one of balance, with him at the helm.  Maybe I’m wrong- dogma can be blinding at times- but the guy who set up the perfect opportunity to gain ultimate power in the universe doesn’t seem like the type to not have a plan.

No, his plan is awful, because there's literally no point to it.  It's a tantrum with an extremely light veneer of justification.

All the power that gauntlet gives him, and he kills half of all life because "I was totally right with that plan for my planet, which was in dire straits, and so I'm going to do it to every. Single. Planet, regardless of their situation." (did he specify intelligent life, I don't recall, if not, this is even MORE impressively short-sighted, because food comes from living things).

And again, the massive societal fallout of half of the population of a planet ceasing to exist is far higher than people give it credit.  I mean, I know people joke about wanting half of, e.g. congress to disappear, but imagine that half of the US's government actually did, imagine the fallout.  imagine how many cities quickly fall into disrepair.

It's a plan to kill half the universe and then not help the other half survive the change. 

Entire PLANETS will have their populations die off because of this.

Which is why he's the bad guy and not some cosmic saviour. :B

Yes, but a villain written in crayon. What good does destroying half of every endangered species do? Or planets which aren't over-populated? Consumer-resource relationships are not a simple linear concept, the Great Leap Forward in China is a pretty good example of what happens when some clumsy idiot starts making simple plans. Also, one of the infinity stones controls time, so he could simply save his own world by changing how things were then. Even by blockbuster standards, it's incredibly dumb.

It feels like some geekdom adaptation movies get a pass because the hardcore fans are getting a nostalgia buzz out of seeing something they love brought to the big screen. Some of Peter Jackson's writing for Lord Of The RIngs was incredibly stupid too - like Gandalf deriding Rohan for retreating to their strongest fortress when hopelessly out-numbered. In the book, they initially look to face Saruman's army at a crossing which mitigates his numbers, and they retreat to Helm's Deep when it becomes clear they are mobilising too late to use that bottleneck as a strategy. Get the look and the SFX sequences right and people just seem happy not to question when logic goes out the window.