Moments when a piece of entertainment completely lost you.

[virgil]

Gilgamesh (of Girl Genius), I feel, fits the category of being a good guy with an evil plan/methodology.

[Longes]

Yeah, I was struck by that literally the second Thanos unveiled his we'll-charitably-call-it-a-plan.

It's kind of frustrating because if you basically gloss over how absolutely stupid the actual specific plan is, MCU Thanos serves as a great example of a type of villain we don't often get to see. A villain who doesn't want to subjugate the world out of some megalomania, and doesn't even have a specific desire to kill (more or less), just a desire to solve a very real problem in a way that happens to be horrific and villainous. With Mark Rosewater talking about it on his tumblr blog, it kind of makes me hope that maybe we'll see a set with a real white aligned villain in a Magic set five years from now.

Actually, rereading over what I wrote, it makes me wonder- does such a villain, one who wants to accomplish something technically good, just with an evil plan, basically require the villain to be dumber than a sack of rocks?

Killmonger is a villain who raises a very real problem... and abuses it for his own horrific goals.

[Longes]

Actually speaking of Killmonger, fuck Wakanda and its presence in Infinity War. They are insufferably smug elitists. I don't see you building sapient AIs, Shuri, so maybe shut your smug mouth.

[maglag]

You never heard that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?

Plenty of bad people think they're "making the world a better a place" or something along those lines.

Yeah, I was struck by that literally the second Thanos unveiled his we'll-charitably-call-it-a-plan.

It's kind of frustrating because if you basically gloss over how absolutely stupid the actual specific plan is, MCU Thanos serves as a great example of a type of villain we don't often get to see. A villain who doesn't want to subjugate the world out of some megalomania, and doesn't even have a specific desire to kill (more or less), just a desire to solve a very real problem in a way that happens to be horrific and villainous. With Mark Rosewater talking about it on his tumblr blog, it kind of makes me hope that maybe we'll see a set with a real white aligned villain in a Magic set five years from now.

Actually, rereading over what I wrote, it makes me wonder- does such a villain, one who wants to accomplish something technically good, just with an evil plan, basically require the villain to be dumber than a sack of rocks?

We already had Akroma, Angel of Wrath as a big white bad in Magic The Gathering. Later on Champions of Kamigawa had White legendary kamis joinining the "exterminate the puny humies" plan. New Phyrexia had Elesh Norn.

Plus you know, White is the color with the original Wrath of God and most of its variants, aka the color of LET'S ALL DIE TOGETHER!

[Stahlseele]

Thanos, in the Comics, is a tragic personality really . .
In the Marvel Universe, DEATH IS FEMALE . . And Thanos is very much in Love with her.
He basically does all he does for her, to impress her, to get her to notice him. Because, sadly for him . . Thanos, lover of death . . is basically immortal . .

And just to add insult to injury: Death has taken an interest in one Wade Wilson. Because he keeps coming by and leaving again. No time for her to actually get to know him and get bored with subsequently.

[Longes]

Thanos, in the Comics, is a tragic personality really . .
In the Marvel Universe, DEATH IS FEMALE . . And Thanos is very much in Love with her.
He basically does all he does for her, to impress her, to get her to notice him. Because, sadly for him . . Thanos, lover of death . . is basically immortal . .

Are you telling me Thanos is an incel?

[Stahlseele]

Translation/Explanation?
Remember, german here, english is not my native language and i have just seen that word for the first time . .

[virgil]

You never heard that the road to hell is paved with good intentions?

Plenty of bad people think they're "making the world a better a place" or something along those lines.

Uhmm...nobody here is even vaguely confused at those ideas. They're very specifically pointing out how villainous depictions of Well Intentioned Extremists are stupid

incel = involuntary celibate; a commonly used term by people who are aggressively misogynistic, seeking an outside excuse for why nobody wishes to be intimate with them.

[Stahlseele]

Then no, no he is not.
A.) He sired several children somehow in the comics. Killed them all at one point though.
B.) He deems only her(Misstress Death) worthy of him(Thanos) and thus simply has no desire for another.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Yeah, changing Thanos' motivation to something ostensibly beneficial that he can only pursue through horrible means is a nice effort, but it completely falls apart when he gets total power. At that point he has access to whatever means he wants, and the only reason to choose murder is because murder was actually the goal all along.

The only way I can think to square that is if the guy's been stuck on 'regrettable killing' for so long that it has worn neurochemical grooves in his brain and he no longer has the imagination to consider other methods. That'd be fairly tragic.

In related thoughts, I am disappoint that Loki did not join Thanos as his unreliable toady-advisor in the role originally played by Mephisto.

[virgil]

Then no, no he is not.
A.) He sired several children somehow in the comics. Killed them all at one point though.
B.) He deems only her(Misstress Death) worthy of him(Thanos) and thus simply has no desire for another.

It's a cultural thing. He's justifying ultra-genocide in an attempt to 'convince' a woman who denied him a relationship. There are a non-zero number of people who identified as incels who, when rejected by women for their sexual harassment, murdered them. Those examples are commonly thought of when the term 'incel' is brought up, and the fact this community tends to unironically agree with this quote by Scott Adams

Men like hugging better than they like killing. But if you take away my access to hugging, I will probably start killing, just to feel something. I’m designed that way. I’m a normal boy. And I make no apology for it.

[Stahlseele]

And again. No.
He sired several children.
He is celibate because he so choses.
Barely anything could stop him from taking and havin his way with anybody in the marvel universe. Aside from himself deciding:"nah, beneath me"

[virgil]

You do realize that calling him an incel was a joke, right? Not a serious attempt at prescriptive nomenclature. A major facet of his character has enough similarities to a group of people who heavily overlap with these people to make the comparison humorous in its connections.

[hyzmarca]

Thanos, in the Comics, is a tragic personality really . .
In the Marvel Universe, DEATH IS FEMALE . . And Thanos is very much in Love with her.
He basically does all he does for her, to impress her, to get her to notice him. Because, sadly for him . . Thanos, lover of death . . is basically immortal . .

Are you telling me Thanos is an incel?

Comics Thanos is really a a horrible person who can fake being a good guiy if you don't hang around him for too long. He's an extreme nhilist. He loves Death because the fact that Death is a woman you can hypothetically date fits his nihilism. But Marvel death isn't actually a nihilistic sort. Death herself is pretty exacerbated with him. He's like the cat who keep bring you dead rodents to show you affection. The first time is cute. The 200th time, less so. She sent him on an impossible quest to kill half the universe in order to get rid of him. And then he made himself omnipotent and did it. But he still doesn't actually get her. So his grandiose attempts to prove his love instead disgust her. Their relationship gets better after he mellows out and stops trying so hard.

[Kaelik]

You absolutely could have a Well Intentioned Extremist villain that isn't stupid.

I mean, you could literally paint EVERY SINGLE REVOLUTION as that, even though we all agree that Tsars and Kings and aristocracies are actually problems that need solving and often can't be solved without violent revolution.

The problem with Thanos is he's trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist because he's too stupid to see the problem that does exist accurately.

If you look at the real world, we can absolutely give everyone in the world food, but we don't, because even though we have the ability, we have a system of inequality that devotes resources to whatever rich and powerful people want, and that means lots of poor people starve, both relative poor in america, and globally poor people in countries that don't have enough food while the US is blowing millions of dollars of resources on competing billionaire space races.

The same problem is present in Marvel, there might perhaps be single planets with specific overpopulation for resources, but there are also space utopias with infinite energy devices and matter fabrication that don't even run on infinity stones. There is no reason to kill half the people on some barren planet when one infinite energy device and some matter fabricators could turn it into a paradise.

Nor even if you were committed to the arbitrary dumb as shit 'we must have inequality, and only murder can be used as a solution' is there any reason for Thanos to go kill off half the people on some high tech utopia with a fertility problem, of which there are probably several.

It's just dumb failure to understand the problem on top of dumb failure tot understand the problem all the way down.

[Username17]

The question of good goals / evil methods is actually much dumber than it seems. The reality is that all actions can be reduced to components and all actions can be amalgamated into plans. Every cause has effects both direct and indirect and they be evaluated separately as well as holistically. It is literally impossible to do or not do anything which does not have negative and positive effects when dissected in sufficient detail or perceived from the appropriate perspective.

But even without getting into the nitty gritty about how the shirt you are wearing is subsidizing a corrupt cabal of child slavers in Cambodia and this does not in fact invalidate you attempting to improve the world in any other way today, we're still at the uncomfortable truth that delineation of actions into Kantian deontological mandates is not possible. The general rule that "killing is bad" is a pretty good one, as it is very likely that in your civilian life you will never encounter an instance where following that rule would steer you wrong. Indeed, many people go the full pacifism route and declare that violence and killing is simply evil and wrong across the board - and that is a reasonable stance to hold. But it's obviously trivially easy to imagine a scenario in which killing would be "justified" or even heroic, and heroic fiction is obviously filled to bursting with such scenarios.

More generally, every choice you ever make results in a world where every single person dies. And many of those people will die substantially earlier in some of those scenarios than in others. Determining where your choices are good or bad requires the establishment of a baseline, and your choice of baseline is completely arbitrary. I mean, I could choose a baseline where you spend the next ten years volunteering with Jimmy Carter's crusade to wipe out communicable diseases in Africa compared to which every method and goal you are likely to actually choose is going to be comparatively rotten.

Let's just say that in ordinary society, the methodology of giving weapons and surveillance equipment to a teenager and then encouraging them to tresspass on peoples' rooftops while looking to get into fights with gang members doesn't sound like the methodology you would label as "good." And yet, people are supposed to accept Tony Stark's patronage of Spiderman fairly uncritically.

-Username17

[Longes]

Let's just say that in ordinary society, the methodology of giving weapons and surveillance equipment to a teenager and then encouraging them to tresspass on peoples' rooftops while looking to get into fights with gang members doesn't sound like the methodology you would label as "good." And yet, people are supposed to accept Tony Stark's patronage of Spiderman fairly uncritically.

-Username17

[Occluded Sun]

And yet Peter Parker was trying to be a hero all by himself - and he's probably get himself killed doing it.

Is it better to give him a protective and useful suit to keep him safer while doing what you can't stop him from attempting, or keep your hands clean and let a teenager doing what he thinks is the right thing get killed?

(BTW, does Parker have inherent damage immunity or something? Because he didn't seem to be wearing much armor back in the handmade costume period, not even a cup.)

[angelfromanotherpin]

(BTW, does Parker have inherent damage immunity or something? Because he didn't seem to be wearing much armor back in the handmade costume period, not even a cup.)

Spider-man isn't bulletproof, but he's pretty tough. He was once so tired that he took a rest while being beaten by a bunch of goons because that's how little their punches meant to him.

[Stahlseele]

You do realize that calling him an incel was a joke, right?

Nope.

Not a serious attempt at prescriptive nomenclature. A major facet of his character has enough similarities to a group of people who heavily overlap with these people to make the comparison humorous in its connections.

I just wrote that i had read that word for the first time there . .
I have literally no clue about that group of people you write about . .
Aside from them being kind of like Thanos if i go by this thread here.
And if they are kind of like Thanos . . i am not sure if i want to know.

[DSMatticus]

Incels are a "what horrors dwell in the dark corners of the internet" thing, and probably (for the time being) a mostly English-speaking phenomenon.

It stands for (in)voluntary (cel)ibate, i.e. "I would like to have sex, but no one wants to sleep with me." On its own, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Dating can be hard, especially if you have even mild social anxiety or self-esteem issues, and lots of people do. Not to mention our social circles tend to become more constrained as we get older; to be honest, I have no idea how I would start a new relationship if my current one fell apart. I've been in it long enough that this whole 'dating' thing is a baffling, confusing thing the kids do and I'm too old to understand.

Unfortunately, someone at some point invented the term "incel" and built a community around it - an entire internet subculture dedicated to young men who can't get laid. These communities are... increasingly violent. These are not self-help / self-improvement dating advice communities. These are bitter, angry young men who are lashing out at the world because no one will sleep with them. Several subreddits about this were shut down because 'legal advice on how to get away with rape' became a serious topic of discussion among their members. We've had a couple mass murderers now whose motivations boiled down to "I'm killing people at random because women don't want to sleep with me." It's probably the world's single most bizarre violent radicalization mechanism, but that's what it is.

So when you phrase comic Thanos's motivation as "I'm going to murder lots of people because a woman won't sleep with me," you are nearly describing the motivations of the two mass murderers Elliot Rodgers (7 killed, 14 injured) and Alek Minassian (10 killed, 16 injured). It's not quite the same, of course, because Thanos is obsessing over one specific women and incels are bitter about women generally, but it's certainly close enough for a joke.

[Pariah Dog]

You absolutely could have a Well Intentioned Extremist villain that isn't stupid.

Hell, Zemo from Civil War was a more sympathetic character and his only goal was to shit on the friendship between Tony and Steve.

Actually speaking of Killmonger, fuck Wakanda and its presence in Infinity War. They are insufferably smug elitists. I don't see you building sapient AIs, Shuri, so maybe shut your smug mouth.

Yeah because look what the fuck happened when Tony thought it was a good idea.

[maglag]

You absolutely could have a Well Intentioned Extremist villain that isn't stupid.

I mean, you could literally paint EVERY SINGLE REVOLUTION as that, even though we all agree that Tsars and Kings and aristocracies are actually problems that need solving and often can't be solved without violent revolution.

The problem with Thanos is he's trying to solve a problem that doesn't exist because he's too stupid to see the problem that does exist accurately.

If you look at the real world, we can absolutely give everyone in the world food, but we don't, because even though we have the ability, we have a system of inequality that devotes resources to whatever rich and powerful people want, and that means lots of poor people starve, both relative poor in america, and globally poor people in countries that don't have enough food while the US is blowing millions of dollars of resources on competing billionaire space races.

The same problem is present in Marvel, there might perhaps be single planets with specific overpopulation for resources, but there are also space utopias with infinite energy devices and matter fabrication that don't even run on infinity stones. There is no reason to kill half the people on some barren planet when one infinite energy device and some matter fabricators could turn it into a paradise.

Nor even if you were committed to the arbitrary dumb as shit 'we must have inequality, and only murder can be used as a solution' is there any reason for Thanos to go kill off half the people on some high tech utopia with a fertility problem, of which there are probably several.

It's just dumb failure to understand the problem on top of dumb failure tot understand the problem all the way down.

I guess we could do that.

But if Thanos does turn the universe into a paradise to everybody, does he still counts as a villain?

And wouldn't that make captain murica and his cronies actually the villains by trying to violently stop Thanos from making the universe a paradise to everybody?

The question of good goals / evil methods is actually much dumber than it seems. The reality is that all actions can be reduced to components and all actions can be amalgamated into plans. Every cause has effects both direct and indirect and they be evaluated separately as well as holistically. It is literally impossible to do or not do anything which does not have negative and positive effects when dissected in sufficient detail or perceived from the appropriate perspective.

But even without getting into the nitty gritty about how the shirt you are wearing is subsidizing a corrupt cabal of child slavers in Cambodia and this does not in fact invalidate you attempting to improve the world in any other way today, we're still at the uncomfortable truth that delineation of actions into Kantian deontological mandates is not possible. The general rule that "killing is bad" is a pretty good one, as it is very likely that in your civilian life you will never encounter an instance where following that rule would steer you wrong. Indeed, many people go the full pacifism route and declare that violence and killing is simply evil and wrong across the board - and that is a reasonable stance to hold. But it's obviously trivially easy to imagine a scenario in which killing would be "justified" or even heroic, and heroic fiction is obviously filled to bursting with such scenarios.

Now Frank we both know that's not really true.

It's not "killing is bad" that most people try to follow in their lifes, it is "killing fellow humans is bad". Killing cows and pigs and chickens and bugs and other animals is totally a-ok (even if you're a vegetarian, you're still a-ok with killing animals to make room for your farms, and then butchering plants by the millions to feast in their young).

And it just happen that when a fellow human does something that some other humans consider bad, said other humans will hurry up to de-humanize them. Then it is a-ok to kill them too! Like both christians and islamists considered the non-believers didn't have souls so it was fine to kill them (and the islamists raised armies of non-believer slaves precisely to kill other islamists).

There's a reason why Thanos looks like a purple hulked out freak. Because he's supposed to be the inhuman villain that can only be stopped by violence and killing.

Let's just say that in ordinary society, the methodology of giving weapons and surveillance equipment to a teenager and then encouraging them to tresspass on peoples' rooftops while looking to get into fights with gang members doesn't sound like the methodology you would label as "good." And yet, people are supposed to accept Tony Stark's patronage of Spiderman fairly uncritically.

-Username17

Well to be fair Tony Stark is precisely supposed to be a more flawed character that makes plenty of bad decisions, that with constantly getting drunk and starting a civil war. But he's not a purple hulked-out freak so he eventually recognize his mistakes and tries to fix things.

[Longes]

You absolutely could have a Well Intentioned Extremist villain that isn't stupid.

Hell, Zemo from Civil War was a more sympathetic character and his only goal was to shit on the friendship between Tony and Steve.

Actually speaking of Killmonger, fuck Wakanda and its presence in Infinity War. They are insufferably smug elitists. I don't see you building sapient AIs, Shuri, so maybe shut your smug mouth.

Yeah because look what the fuck happened when Tony thought it was a good idea.

Vision and Jarvis turned out good, so I'd say Tony has a good track record.

[Longes]

But if Thanos does turn the universe into a paradise to everybody, does he still counts as a villain?

And wouldn't that make captain murica and his cronies actually the villains by trying to violently stop Thanos from making the universe a paradise to everybody?

"If killing all the jews made Germany into an aryan paradise would Hitler be the bad guy?"

YES! He fucking obviously would be.