Thanos: The name itself is thunderous. And we all love to hate him. He is one of the most terrifying and formidable villains ever created in fiction. In the most recent edition of the Marvel’s Avengers, he displays his ferocity with all its force.
Over the years, in earlier stories, he has been shown destroying planets and civilizations like crushing ant colonies (no offence to Antman). The sheer motivation for his brutal acts so far has been mostly the hunger for power to rule the entire universe. In some other narratives, by gifting deaths to multitudes, he has been trying to impress his romantic interest Mistress Death (Oh! The things people do for love).
As every other villain nowadays would speak of such cliché reasons for their deeds, it was needed that Thanos rise up above them and come up with something to stand out from others. Just like a very dangerous but an offbeat motive that made the Joker such a memorable character. (I know The Joker is from the DC Universe, but I’m sure if you’re a Marvel or a DC fan, you do believe in inter-universal travel.)
Therefore, the Marvel Studios writers came up with a unique and concrete motivation for Thanos’ actions this time. He cites the reason of overpopulation of the universe for the havoc that he has been seen wreaking in the film. And he further emphasizes to Stark that he would lead the killing with stark indiscrimination, clearing himself of any allegations of ethnic cleansing that would come his way. We can say that he kept his word in that matter, as not only ordinary lives, but even some of the superheroes kicked the bucket. But, let’s see how valid is his point?
Although we utterly disagree and unanimously reject his methods of achieving his purpose, the point he made is Stone solid. Overpopulation is a matter that even the WHO is taking very seriously. However, we prefer that Thanos should have arranged a meeting with some sort of Universal Health Organization and sorted out the issue. But in that case, the movie would have become a political science-fiction thriller instead of an action blockbuster. And I doubt that, after knowing the plans of Thanos, the Hulk would have agreed for a meeting anyway!
The same point was raised by another fictional villain Bertrand Zobrist in Dan Brown’s novel and Ron Howard’s film Inferno. Although unlike Thanos, he was only concerned about our planet. It is to be duly noted that it took mankind about a million years to reach the population of 1 billion. That is what our number was in the year 1800. But it doubled in the next hundred years and became 2 billion in the year 1900. Right now, we are more than 7 billion. We are growing at an alarming rate and the resources we have are limited.
In real life, we don’t need someone like Thanos to come and open our eyes. He is certainly not there on Titan. If he was, our Hubble Telescope would have by now easily spotted someone his size or the fireworks that he might have been setting off there. The responsibility lies on us, the people and the governments, the true Guardians of our beloved planet and the galaxy, to make sure that that day doesn’t come when our own rapid rise becomes the very reason for our Ragnarok.