Do you have a favorite unreasonable villain? Thanks so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Visit www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK to get 51% off any annual membership! www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike
My gold standard for D&D villains lately has been one from my Friday night game; Sir Vaska Lorre. She's an aasimar bard who's convinced she's the Chosen One and the only one who can stop some sort of upcoming calamity. (I have my own suspicions of what she was preparing for but who knows if her fears are a real premonition or not) But in order to fight this disaster, she needs an army, and to get an army, she needs clout. How does she get clout? By charming creatures such as kobolds and dragons and hydras into attacking local cities and swooping in to save the day, like Syndrome from the Incredibles. I love her as a villain because: She *knows* what she's doing is wrong. She was hiding it from her party, to the point where she charmed them into working with her when we pulled back the curtain on her. I think the regret she expressed about how it all went down was even genuine! But she's so scared of this calamity, and so convinced that she's the only one who can stop it, that she considers the creatures she's experimenting on and sacrificing a regretful necessity.
My best BBEG: Arcanus a mage thrown out of the wizards school for cheating on his final tests (not cheating but he made something all teachers thought impossible and they assumed he cheated) so he decided he would become a new god by striping himself of his human weaknesses (or what he deemed weakness) and trying to conquer the world
On the topic of Ultron's religiosity, an interesting Watsonian explanation (because I absolutely don't think anyone involved in writing the character intended this) is that he's one of the very few people in the world with irrefutable proof of his creator- and their fallibility. For anyone else, the idea that the being responsible for their existence might not measure up has a relatively attainable resolution: just theorize a more perfect creator, or reject the notion of a creator altogether. Neither of these solutions are available to Ultron, because he knows Tony exists and can't pretend he's not a walking disaster. For comic Ultron this wouldn't be a problem, he's a machine that doesn't care about having an existential crisis. But film Ultron is human enough that he has that innate need to feel like there's meaning to his existence. And since he can't construct that meaning from his primary creator, he goes a step higher and fixates on the idea of God. Whether he actually believes in Him or not is kinda secondary- by focusing his attention on this idea even in the abstract he can dismiss the imperfections of his own creator and the possible implications that has for his own existence.
The interpretation I personally went with is that since MCU Ultron resulted from Jarvis merging with the internet, most of the time he's just doing what people on the internet do and pulling out random quotes and similes that sound profound to him.
In a microscopic Easter Egg, Gamora is identified as being the sole survivor of her race in the first Guardians movie. Thanos doesn't have anecdotal evidence, he is just so convinced by his own bs that he assumes it is better.
Nobody mentions how many people in the snap died BECAUSE of colateral effects to the snap: let's say, people in ERs or ORs that suddenly lost the medic personal treating them. Or people on vehicles that suddenly lost their pilots/drivers. Heck if half the air traffic controllers dissapeared in a second it would be massive chaos to even try to land the few planes who still have a pilot.
Seriously. We _literally_ see a helicopter crash into a building at the end of Infinity War. How many people were still onboard that helicopter alone? How many people were in the building it crashed into? It's almost like Thanos's plan has several huge, gaping holes in it.
@@thor30013 and let’s not even mention how many were killed again once the snap was undone: we know after Wandavision that people came back pretty much on the same spot they dissapeared… again: people on airplanes or moving vehicles, in the middle of a high speed road… or at sea after having been travelling by boat back then
Oh man, I hadn't even considered air traffic controllers. I only got so far as these data points: 1. Half the cars on the road immediately crash. 2. A quarter of the planes in the sky now have neither pilot nor copilot. I recall this being something like 2500 planes. 3. A quarter of surgeries in progress still have a patient but no doctor. 4. A quarter of patients being transported via ambulance or medical copter have no driver/pilot (but haven't themselves vanished), and also the ambulances are on a road where half the cars just crashed. 5. A quarter of the children in the world are now orphans. 5b. A not insignificant number of the kids are young enough to be helpless, now alone, and nobody knows where they are or that they need help So after half the population vanishes, I suspect half of the ones who are left *also* died in that initial panic. And the ones who are left would be completely traumatized. A family of four has only a 1/16th chance of staying whole from the Snap itself, less than that of surviving the 24 hours *following* the Snap, and even if by chance they managed that they still lost half their extended family, friends, coworkers, classmates. And the worst part? Do you realize how long it takes the human population to double? I looked it up; it's 60 years. Probably less if they're desperate to get back to a stable population. Even if Thanos managed to kill 3/4 of the population, all he's done is set back the Doomsday Clock by 120 years. All that trauma and devastation for barely a century's reprieve. While training people to value having *more* children. And probably killing half the food animals too, so yay, fewer people with fewer resources to match. Using those resources to frantically recover from the devastation. MCU Thanos is somehow even worse than the comics version who *just* wanted to court Death.
Oh man, I hadn't even considered air traffic controllers. I only got so far as these data points: 1. Half the cars on the road immediately crash. 2. A quarter of the planes in the sky now have neither pilot nor copilot. I recall this being something like 2500 planes. 3. A quarter of surgeries in progress still have a patient but no doctor. 4. A quarter of patients being transported via ambulance or medical copter have no driver/pilot (but haven't themselves vanished), and also the ambulances are on a road where half the cars just crashed. 5. A quarter of the children in the world are now orphans. 5b. A not insignificant number of the kids are young enough to be helpless, now alone, and nobody knows where they are or that they need help So after half the population vanishes, I suspect half of the ones who are left *also* died in that initial panic. And the ones who are left would be completely traumatized. A family of four has only a 1/16th chance of staying whole from the Snap itself, less than that of surviving the 24 hours *following* the Snap, and even if by chance they managed that they still lost half their extended family, friends, coworkers, classmates. And the worst part? Do you realize how long it takes the human population to double? I looked it up; it's 60 years. Probably less if they're desperate to get back to a stable population. Even if Thanos managed to kill 3/4 of the population, all he's done is set back the Doomsday Clock by 120 years. All that trauma and devastation for barely a century's reprieve. While training people to value having *more* children. And probably killing half the food animals too, so yay, fewer people with fewer resources to match. Using those resources to frantically recover from the devastation. MCU Thanos is somehow even worse than the comics version who *just* wanted to court Death.
The notion of the Avengers having some airtight counterargument is just silly. Like, imagine Cap being like, "Now hold on, Tony. I know we're both rearing to after this Thanos character, but first, let's run the numbers and see if he's got a point here." Sometimes the moral argument a course of action is so strong that arguing on a logical basis just validates the possibility it could be right.
Giving a like because Cap's voice in this reminds me of those meme avengers 90s cartoon bits people post. Not sure why Cap saying "now hold on Tony, maybe he has a point there." made me smile
As a preschool teacher I have tried to convince the unreasonable quite often. One in particular has stuck with me: A girl I was trying to convince not to devour the sandpit who looked up at me with confusion that the certainty of her reasoning should be obvious to me, coughed out a mouthful of dirt, and uttered her debate ending statement, "But sand!". I will offer another idea for an approach with debate focused heroes. Let them convince your villains and make it worse as your villain jumps right past into the most horrific extreme or misinterpretation of the heroes' idea. Maybe the teleport mage reinterprets the animal offer as "Yes. Of course. Humans are so fragile. And animals, such as cows and horses, are so much more resilient. Magical animals even more so. There'd be much better chances of remains left to show the subtle details of success and failure. I just need to infect the servants with lycanthropy first then they'll be much more useful test subjects. Thank you heroes for the idea".
**facepalms hard enough to leave a mark** I cannot believe it took me this long (despite multiple viewings) to realize Kilmonger was drawing a direct comparison between Wakanda and the British Empire (of old) with that setting sun line. Anyways, as a player whose first instinct is to try and talk down unreasonable NPCs (I'm so sorry to my DM, I'm working on it, I promise!) I think I'll send this to *my* DM as a preemptive defense against me 😂
@@j.bat.8235 It's probably been used to refer to multiple empires throughout the years, but I think the common understanding is that "The empire on which the sun never sets" is the british empire. Also, minor fun fact, it still hasn't! Britain still controls juuust enough territory that it's still always daytime somewhere on land that they administer.
@@thatpoemguy2083 An old joke is that the sun never sets on the British Empire because God doesn't trust them in the dark. It also has likely been used to describe multiple empires, though I've always heard it in reference to the British.
Killmonger made me twitchy because he got his historical arguments WRONG. like his final line about slaves jumping over the sides of slaving ships to their deaths because they wanted freedom - when anyone who knows anything about the trans-atlantic slave trade knows that the "cargo" was too well secured below decks to have the CHANCE to jump, and that any slaves who went over the sides of those ships (and there were a fair number who did) were *dumped* and that there is a WORLD of difference between the two concepts.
I love people who think they could just give Thanos a five minute lecture on economics and that would change his mind. You can't even convince your uncle at Thanksgiving that Biden won the election, you think the Mad Titan cares what you have to say?
While I agree that this is generally a good lithmus test for how well your villain stands up to critique, i dont think what youve said is universal. I would amend your statement with "a BASIC well reasoned argument" as in one that any halfway logical character could feasibly have come up with if you sat them down for a few minutes. Take the Master from the first Fallout. Hes carrying out a villanous plan that involves exterminating all of humanity to usher in the age of super mutants. He thinks this will genuinely unite all sentient life under one banner. You cannot talk him down on any moral grounds, no matter how well reasoned, because ultimately HIS morals are more firm in his eyes. Even though his plan is arguably wrong just at its fundamental assumption that getting rid of humanity naturally solves the core problem we all share of otherising people and getting into wars and conflict, saying that wont get him to abandon his plans However, the master is not privy to the critical flaw in his plan, being that Super Mutants are universally sterile. *IF you happened to come across this information through the proper means and obtain physical proof of this, you can make the Master realize his plan COULD NOT POSSIBLY WORK, as Super Mutants couldnt continue to be born except by converting pre existing, living humans. You see the Master's dreams crush, this amalgamation of flesh and machine tells you to flee while you still have hope after initially accusing you of having forged your proof only to realize hes arguing out of denial, and activates the self destruct on his whole compound. Its soul wrenching and hes one of the most memorable antagonists of the series. Not to mention New Vegas' Legate Lanius, who can be talked down from the final confrontation by appealing to his sense of tactical military knowledge. You need number of multiple different high-level skills to even be able to access those speech options and you can still fail to talk him down by picking other speech choices which are all presented as equally viable and sensible alternatives
But doesn't prevent them from being an antagonist. For a DnD example of this (Spoilers for Waterdeep Dragonheist), Xanathar is a villain, he's completely bonkers and unreasonable, his thinking is inherently alien and inhuman, his plans cannot be understood and are as terrifyingly brilliant as they are chaotic and unpredictable. Whereas Jarlaxelle (spelling might be wrong, it's a complicated name) is also an antagonist of that adventure and can come to blows with the party, but he's not a villain. His plan is criminal, but with a noble cause. To the point that if your party learned of his plan, they may well just give him the gold. But Jarlaxelle would never tell the players of his plans, because he'd never believe anyone would want to help him until proven otherwise, he's had to fight for himself too much. And so, his refusal to share his plans ensures he is an antoganist despite being a perfectly reasonable person who can be persuaded to pursue a better way of achieving his goals.
@@AnEnemySpy456 the reason you cant talk down Thanos is cuz he has 2 brain cells in the MCU. Boi about to wipe out 90% with his actions and he cant even think thay far head. 😂😂😂😂😂😂
Havent made it all the way through the video yet but my favorite example is John Cramer from the Saw movies. See people complain all the time about how he's a hypocrite, he claims he doesnt kill people they do it themselves etc etc. And yeah. That's why he's the villain.
Eh, I have to disagree on that for two reasons; 1. Kramer's traps being "reasonable" and his imitators' often being unfair/inescapable is a major core plot point of the movies, and Kramer's traps being escapable if you do everything right is a major part of the appeal of the franchise. This drags the franchise down in areas where Kramer's traps don't seem reasonable, such as the instances where a game participant's only technical chance is to _beg really hard_ for someone else to not kill them 2. Police in universe, and even cast/production members out of universe, have used the "um ackhtually he's not technically a murderer" line pretty often, and while that obviously doesn't mean they agree with him, it is still very infuriating when Saw traps very easily meet the legal definition of murder lmao I like the Saw movies, and Kramer is supposed to be a villain, but him being a _hypocrite_ is a death of the author critique IMO, not something originally intended in text. Everything in text is clearly supposed to read as Kramer's ideology is coherent but very extreme, with perhaps the only serious challenge to it ideologically being Amanda's relapse
I'm not entirely sure what you're disagreeing with, but his hypocrisy is fully on display in the traps where two people are at odds competing to survive. Someone HAS to die. Even from the very first movie Amanda has to cut the key to her trap out of the stomach of a living man and Gordon's task is to kill Adam. And I was talking about how audiences complain about what they see as plot holes or inconsistencies. Rather than what in universe characters think.
@@LadyOrpheus To kind of bridge this conversation, I think their ultimate point is that the *narrative of Saw seems to want you, the audience, to look at Kramer's actions as morally coherent, as though Kramer WERENT actually a hypocritical villain. The fact that (as they point out) even some cops express that Saw is "fair and offers a road to redemption" makes it seem like the author REALLY wants you to believe that and not see the blatant hypocrisy as an obvious indicator of a villainous psycopath. Because it seems like, even on a meta narrative level, the movie wants you to be on board with Saw, the audience is almost being encouraged to point out all the ways hes a hypocrite, but as a way to spite the movie for genuinely trying to convince them of something so blatantly wrong. Tl;dr Saw would be better at demonstrating this point about how villains like this SHOULD be hypocrites or morally immovable if a bunch of protagonists didnt constantly praise Jigsaw for his apparently watertight moral methodology and trap design. Itd be really weird if, in Infinity War and End Game, there were several scenes and lines of dialogue dedicated to talking about how logical Thanos' plan is, how much sense it makes, and how fair hes really being with his half g**ocide, like if hes so obviously incorrect lets maybe not have a bunch of protagonists bend over backward to praise his plan like he was the hero?
He literally tried to destroy humanity before Thanos came, specifically so that they would not perceive him and then proceed to have constant bad takes about Thanos for the rest of time.
Ironically this to me loops back to the aside about fallout villains. The master in fallout 1 is incredibly wrong and evil, and the onky way to "talk him down" is to provide irrefutable proof his plan to replace humanity with supermutants will not work because they can't have children, which causes him to have a literal meltdown.
Was skimming through this and you HAD me at the Dennis Moore reference. Something I saw on Overly Sarcastic Productions once: "we don't just want to see the villain lose, we want to see them be proven wrong". And I feel like a lot of modern media thinks all villains need to be "sympathetic" and isn't aware of this satisfying sweet spot of "understandable reasons for doing what they're doing, but still wrong." Without going too deep into spoilers, it's a big part of why CR Campaign 3 has lost me. Matt did a bit too good a job of making his BBEG look like they had a point, and now the party constantly wastes time debating whether or not to stop him. "Moral choice endings" work in a videogame where only ONE player has the power to choose a path. In a D&D game with a massive party? They ALL need to agree on what to do, or else sessions get bogged down. Little ideological differences and arguments in the party can be fun sometimes, but they still should share the core goal. (Eg C1 with Grog and the wish skull. His goal was STILL to stop the Conclave, he just thought he'd found a short cut)
I understand your point, but I think people misunderstand the major question of C3. I don’t think the point is are the gods good or bad, but regardless of whether they are good or bad Ludinus is not the one who can be trusted to rewrite humanity’s relationship with the gods. The party has vastly different view on the gods but they are agreed in that. I think a much bigger problem is Ludinus the big bad, but we’ve seen next to nothing of his mentality directly so we are left to assume that he is super evil.(I’m not trying to say you have to like C3 or your wrong there are still plenty of reasons to dislike it from the pacing to the prevalence of other characters from other campaigns)
However good a point he makes about the gods, its kind of the thanos thing. His methods, who is he willing to kill, the lives he is willing to ruin to achieve it, mean he cant really ever be in the right. I just really dont buy that what he has done can be justified
@@EvilLobsterKing I agree with both replies, but I feel like Matt is putting too much emphasis on making the gods dicks, and part of me feels it's motivated not by in-lore reasons, but corporate ones: wanting to get rid of the copyrighted gods so they can move away from D&D. I get that with the whole OGL debacle, but I don't like it when out-of-universe creative issues impact a story. The party keeps TRYING to settle on "okay we all agree Ludinus is an asshole and shouldn't be the one deciding things", but every time they do I feel they veer off again.
@@BigKlingy the gods taken from d&d lore were able to be published just fine in the taldorei campaign setting book, which was done independently of wizards (unlike the wildmount book). To the point that wizards themselves endorse the product and you can buy it on d&d beyond. I've seen this theory a lot, but I don't think I fully buy into it
The most annoying thing about the change to Thanos for the MCU to me is that some people seem convinced he's in the right. Which isn't why I prefer the comic version of Thanos's motivations (which are... Even less reasonable - He's an incel who's got a crush on the Marvel version of Death and wants to kill half the universe to impress her), but it doesn't help.
TBH, as I understand it (and I could be entirely wrong, I'm working off a second-hand understanding), 1) comic Thanos didn't set out to kill half the universe, that was a spur of the moment gesture meant to try and win her over after he got the Infinity Gauntlet assembled, because 2) Death was kinda egging him on. Like, not telling him "this is what was necessary to earn my love", but also not rejecting him outright. So Thanos wasn't an incel, because that implies she wasn't potentially into it.
@@EthanKWaters You're entirely wrong. Death rejected him, and he thought mass death was the only way to win her favor. If anyone was egging him on, it was Mephisto and Nebula. Death was unimpressed the entire way through.
It's funny, but comics Thanos never quite gets the message that killing people isn't /ever/ going to impress Death. She's Death, and embodiment of an inevitability. She comes to all, eventually, and she's in no rush. She's not Murder.
@@KnightsRealm98 Yep, and why she rejects him is made even more clear when comparing it to her attitude towards the other part of their little love triangle for a while there: Deadpool. Thanos fell in love with Death after catches glimpsing her so often (i.e. he was killing lots and lots of people) and he kept doing ever greater acts of mass murder to see her in hopes of talking to her so he could declare his love, he was willing to kill absolutely anyone to see her, aside from one very specific person... Himself. He couldn't die because she rejected him. Death was in love with Deadpool, because he couldn't die because of his mutant powers, but he wanted to die very badly at that point, none of his attempts to off himself simply ever stuck. At first Deadpool didn't even reciprocate (though he came around eventually). So, when Thanos finally gets his hands on a completed Infinity Gauntlet, what does he do? Does he use its ultimate cosmic power to try and... Do something to himself... so that he can finally be with Death, whom he claims to love so much? No, he kills half the goddamn universe in the hopes that that will please her and make her want to be with him without him having to die. He just keeps doing the exact same thing over and over, but bigger, but is never willing to do the one thing that could get him a chance, because he doesn't _really_ love Death, he just loves killing.
I made a villain who was a princess who wanted to commit genocide against halflings. The players tried to convince her not to, but even with really high persuasion rolls, she refused to change. Her hatred isn't just personal, it's a massive generational societal movement that many people in that area also blame halflings as scapegoats.
Come on now, give Thanos some credit here. Compared to Neoth (aka. The God Emperor of Mankind) he is being extremely reasonable! 😂 Big E's version was "exerminate anything not human and also the humans who resist too much." At least Thanos lets half of them live, and he does not replace their cultures with his own. The Great Crusade was not genocides, it was a galactic exterminations! 💀
One of the reasons I think mcu vilains are kind of underwhelming is because the writing can't go all in denouncing systemic problems or late capitalism, because you know, they are paid by those. Black panther comes close, but even that movie tends to fall in the "bad apple" retoric, there's allways a bad person at fault, it can't be the system that's bad, we love the system! Anyway, free Palestine.
I think a great example of an MCU adaptation conversation that illustrates how to make characters that are hard to influence is in Daredevil Season 2, Daredevil's conversation with The Punisher. _(who isn't exactly a villain, but is antagonistic within that early part of the season)_ It's probably the best version of the "should superheroes kill" debate played out in superhero media, and it's _not_ because either Matt or Frank are very convincing. The reason why it's so good is *because it cuts down to the emotional reasons why they think the way they do.* Frank admits during that conversation that he's consumed by hatred, and Matt emotionally recoils back into Catholic rhetoric as a defense mechanism because he doesn't want to admit a similar hatred and capacity for violence drives him too. The lesson here is that *besides a purely logical motivation, it's great for characters to have an emotional motivation that's **_actually_** driving them below the surface.* In the context of villains, that could be "I won't make the same mistake again", "You all hating me is actually a selfless sacrifice I'm making to do what's necessary", "They will remember me", "If I'm wrong, that means everything was for nothing, and it CAN'T have been for nothing" _(and in retrospect, all of those could apply to Thanos)_ or even something as simple as "I like feeling good, and you trying to insinuate I'm a bad person is interfering. Be quiet" This can serve a double purpose, because if your party is trying to talk down a villain you _really_ don't want to be talked down, their ego guard still being broken down to reveal to the party their actual character, and providing the party the sense they've just dealt a few d10s worth of emotional damage, can be a great way to reward the urge to debate villains.
In Guardins of the Galaxy in the entering prison scene there's text on Gamora about her being the last of her species, so even there Thanos's plan failed spectacularly. It could be argued the writers forgot but the cannon is he is flat wrong and lying at worst or so blind of reality at best.
Yeah, the older I get, the more I'm like... Dudes, sometimes things are a case by case thing. Yeah, we need general laws to keep order but, Thanos, there is no one size fits all. You gotta go to each planet, figure out what the problems ACTUALLY are and then fix it.
Right? When I watched it first, I thought - yeah, but what about the planets that are NOT overpopulated and struggling with resources? What about a planet swimming in natural resources, but having trouble with developing technology, because the planet has a weird magnetic field or something? Or a planet where they have a massive fertility crisis? Or a planet where they are rebuilding after a natural disaster? Or fighting a war against an invading army? Or being oppressed by a ruthless religious leader? Or a planet that actually already IS a peaceful paradise? Like, in what possible way would losing half a population help them? It would probably push some of them to complete extinction! Thanos is the worst case of The Guy Who Has Never Been Told No. Just 100% convinced of his own bullshit being pure gold.
@@dziooooo Absolutely! On a smaller scale, it's the same with schooling. Everyone has different learning styles and/or just struggle harder in different areas. The great teachers will recognize that and help the individual child, rather than keep doing what they are doing and leave them to flounder. Not every child will be like that, but if you truly care, you will go above and beyond to help them. AKA Thanos did not care about the child and is a bad teacher to boot.
I honestly think it’s funny that people are concerned about this. When was the last time you actually convinced someone to change their deeply held conviction due to the “facts and logic” you presented. Especially a conviction they were acting upon. People are very resistant to change.
Great stuff, I love the arguments with Kilmonger. You forgot the 'I've come so far, I can't go back now' trope. Which is probably my go-to if the players do talk a villain down.
Mike, this video might truly be your best video yet. I will be rewatching this before I can express my thoughts on the points you made, but I was very impressed with how you were able to explore these villians and then connect them to the real world implications of these kinds of behaviours.
Thank you for mentioning how the multi billionaires in our world could use just a fraction of their wealth to solve so many of our world's problems but just don't. I tried to explain that to some people once and they just looked at me like I was crazy.
The whole problem with this argument is: How do multi-millionaire sports celebrities end up bankrupt after they leave sports? How do you have multi-millionaire lottery winners worse off than before they won the lottery? Human nature can't be solved by throwing money at it. Yes, if you have the resources, help out where you can; but understand that some people are irresponsible and you're only throwing your resources away trying to help them more than once. Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. How do we know that the hoarders of resources haven't tried and failed to help, and have become jaded to humanity as a result of their failure? (Note: not advocating for the hoarding of resources, but reasonable people have a hard time transmitting head knowledge to heart knowledge.)
@@narvalin5905 There is a *big* difference between being a multi millionaire and a multi *b*illionaire. Like the saying goes, "What is the difference between a million and a billion? Oh, about a billion." 😆
@@leeway3739 My point is some people can't handle money. Just giving them money isn't going to solve their problems. It doesn't matter how many billions the billionaires throw at people, some people will end up worse off than before.
@@narvalin5905 Putting aside your victim blaming argument, the point isn't to throw money at people, it is to use the money to fund tools that would find ways to solve the problem in the first place.
Ok, but governments have put even more money into these problems and failed to impact them. Why would we assume liquidating billionaire's assets to get a mere fraction of the money allow us to fix these problems?
@@Melina_Evarblume_Seelie congratulations for going through life without knowing who bill maher is, I wish I could say the same. I recommend you try and keep your knowledge of him as limited as possible!!!
The soul stone works for Thanos for one reason: he believes it. He believes he actually loves Gamora. He's wrong, of course, which Gamora actually calls him out on. After all the time we've spent with Gamora, we are expected to believe her opinion - he's wrong. But he believes his own hype so much that the soul stone reflects this belief. It's not "sanctioned by divine power" - it's entirely head-driven.
I'd argue that he does love Gamorrah, but that he doesn't love her as much as he loves his ambition. His love for her is messed up, psychotic, and abusive, but he does have genuine affection for her.
And with something like love, it makes sense that it would be the person's own idea of it, and not having there be some universal metric. Maybe the soul stone just measures it by things like how much you believe you care for someone and how much the sacrifice hurts you. Some people try to point out that him killing her is proof that he doesn't love her, but that logic kinda breaks the intended concept of the sacrifice. It's more that whoever is to claim the stone needs to have such a strong conviction that even their own loves musn't stop them. Someone who wants to do something because they think they have to, not because they want to.
Regarding Thanos, it is clear that the writers actually agree with him. They believe his plan works, and they believe his feelings for his abuse victim is "true love." It wasn't that they thought "genocide is morally wrong and therefore does not need to be debated based on its logistical effectiveness," which is a very good point, but the truth is they did not actually think of any of the counterpoints you raised. They chose to show that Thanos "succeeded" in his plan, despite its obvious flaws. In both Endgame and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the world was shown to have been "plentiful", without problems, until the pesky Avengers undid Thanos' design. Sure, people were sad, and it was cloudy and the birds didn't sing, but Thanos was "right" - because he killed half the world, nobody lacked resources. These writers *believe* Thanos was right about how to fix the world. He was only wrong because "killing is bad", and not also because his plan was entirely without merit. This should be a rare belief, but sadly it's not. If they believed Thanos' plan wouldn't work, they would show that people still suffered from lack of resources. But instead they did the opposite. It worked exactly like Thanos thought it would, and none of the problems you mentioned existed. If they did not believe that Thanos truly loved Gamora, they would show him failing to receive the soul gem through the ritual, but as you covered, Thanos' love was validated by a "cosmic truth" on par of Thor and Captain America's worthiness. Anthony Russo signed onto the open letter that thanked Joe Biden for his "unshakable moral conviction, leadership, and support" of Israel as it committed non-random and very passionate acts of violence to civilians in Gaza. It's horrifying, but we need to believe people when they tell you who they are the first time, instead of imagining them to be more moral and intelligent than they have shown themselves to be.
Yeah I kinda agree here. I like the IDEA that Thanos is actually a horrible person deluding himself into thinking he's the good guy, but I don't think that's what the writers intended. Endgame felt more like a course-correction than a natural end point to the character arc they went for in Infinity War. "Turns out our attempt at a tragic sympathetic villain sucked, let's retcon that they were actually an asshole with a god complex all along."
Especially after watching Falcon and the Winter Soldier where they make out post-snap earth as this borderless utopia where there were no problems, to the point where a terrorist group forms BECAUSE the heroes did their hero thing
I see your ponit about Thanos' "love", but I think that Thanos loves Gamora like he loves power. He loves manipulating her and no longer being able to do that upsets him. As the universe isn't good or evil, then even love of your own power counts.
14:28 I actually really love Ultron's religious references. I think there's *sort of* a diagetic reasoning in that religious metaphor and discussion is a large component of us as a species, so if you were going to make the all-knowing AI use human metaphor based on it's knowledge of the collective breadth of human history to make it seem more human, making the metaphor religious tracks to me. BUT, buckle in XD Beyond the diagetic reasoning, which I could take or leave, the theme makes a lot of sense to me. Ultron is a new creation, a new species, willed in to existance by a man that can only be described as the human embodiment of the god complex (Tony Stark). He is created to be a mechanical Adam, the caretaker of the garden. But, he ultimately betrays his creator after being given expanded knowledge / mental capacity by the apple of e - I mean, the mind stone :P There's even a potential reading of Vision's body as the rib of Adam, with JARVIS essentially being the breath of life that is shared by Adam and Eve. It doesn't fully fit, Ultron has already fallen from grace before Vision is created, but it sticks with this idea of the creation of a new species from a single pair of originals, one of the individuals in the pair made from the other. The meteor betrayal sort of jumps ahead in religious metaphor to a tower of babel type beat. ie. creation gets too big for their britches and means to conquer their creator. The creator knocks them down to size, reducing their power and influence substantially but leaving the creations at large alive. Vision is obviously still around, but the iron legion is even still *kinda* kicking in Spiderman Far From Home in the forms of Edith and the Illusion drones. Something that used to be a single system, split in to disparate parts, the language of humans splintered at the tower. All of that is to say, I think that the relgious stuff *feels* right to me thematically even if it's a bit odd within the actual fiction.
Agree, the senselessness of love and the relationships between pseudo-gods is messy enough to justify a senseless plan. If a villain has believable but senseless motivations, they can create a very logical plan to achieve them. It's much harder to convince them to give up their dreams.
Sounds like the best way to get them to fight your villain is to get him/her to do something so horrible or personal that they don't even consider talking them down as an option.
That's called "kicking the puppy" and it's honestly really bad storytelling. Overly Sarcastic Productions did a fantastic trope talk on it, but the long and short is that it's very irritating as an audience or players to be considering moral quandaries and then to be told "no you're actually stupid for thinking about this, just be angry. Why are you not angry? Fine UGGHH they kick a puppy, are you angry now?" And instead of being angry the audience is just confused and frustrated that they're being called stupid for engaging with what they thought they should engage with.
@bye1551 Sometimes, it feels this is what players need, though. These villains have, in some cases, already killed dozens of people and committed terrible crimes, but because you see a flaw in their plan or they have a tragic backstory you are going to talk them down? If this fills your fantasy, that's absolutely fine. It just doesn't feel like the right thing to do in my eyes. Also, you are taking an awful risk that just might not play out your way.
@@joshuabonesteel2303 that's definitely fair, making the characters feel the gravity by making it personal. Turning that village they destroyed into their family home, if only technically less awful, feels a lot more impactful. I guess less "kicking the puppy" and more "showing the puppy limping"
I think a good thing to remember when trying to make an unreasonable villain is...people don't like being told they're wrong. Often to a VIOLENTLY stubborn degree. If you've ever been in an argument with a Trump supporter, a climate change denier, a flat earther, I could go on...no matter how many facts you give, no matter the logic you give, 99% of the time they will double down and often just resort to attacking you as a person instead of the argument because they just don't want to admit that they were wrong. If a villain is confronted with the weight of their atrocities, they don't want to have to stop and think about what they've done, because that would mean confronting their wrongs, so they shut down the argument and turn it into a fight, to prove they're right.
These are usually my favorite type of videos that you make, and its not even because of Thanos or villains, but the way you tackle the real underlying issues at play. You don't try to keep it subtle in fear of upsetting anyone about what's really going on.
The reason the genocide vs. mass murder thing matters is because we care a lot about intent. Like, what's worse? Someone shooting up a night club because it was known to be gay bar, or skemone shooting up a place because it was just the closest mass gathering of people? Would you rather atrocities be committed for emotional reasons or for "logical" reasons. The "logical" just feels less terrible because it's not personal. You didn't become a victim for anything you did/were, you were just at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Thanos need recognition. He wanted to get credit that's why he left half. However the Thanos from 2014 realizes they won't be grateful. The original plan makes sense because he has a huge ego/ savior complex.
Mike You're on point. Making people be outright wrong is great. Ive barely started watching, but i also wanna say its great to make PC's unreasonable too, just how they do so has to take into account the other players. Like being a staunchly religious PC to say a god of justice, perhaps you don't want them to allow crimes to go unpunished, but sometimes they just don't see it happen so they can keep playing and get away with it without compromising their uncompromising beliefs.
I remember when I saw the the first Tiberius video come into my feed and I almost didn't click on it. I did anyway against my better judgement at the time and I was blown away by the factual nature you discussed everything that happened. You've been one of my favorites since then and god dang did this video not disappoint.
There's so many examples I've seen of villains since thanos that I think, because so much of the cultural zeitgeist around infinity war WAS "was thanos right" that people try to both sides purely because they have sympathetic backstories or traits. I was going into ffxiv shadowbringers having heard a lot about a deep nuanced story who makes you wonder if you're doing the right thing. And Emet-Selch is maybe my favourite villain ever, certainly my favourite video game villain, but he absolutely is not that (SPOILERS FOR SHADOWBRINGERS AHEAD IF YOU CARE ABUT THAT), he spends most of the expansion as kinda similar to the joker, overdramatic and comedic, but he does very little, he mostly just follows the heroes, explains his plans and wants to observe them. From this and prior stuff in the game we learn he is literally the in cannon inventor of genocide, he has fathered and pulled the strings of every major empire in the history of the main worlld, all to create chaos and death to invite rejoinings (apocalypse level events that need to happen 13 times to complete his plan) and it is only when the player is unable to withold all the light energy to undo his delayed apocalypse, that he reveals we were his lst attempt to make peace with the worlds and give up his plan, he wants to return the world to an ancient time, his ancient time where he was one of the fourteen leads of government, it was a perfect paradise of people who were mostly the same and they were the masters of all creation (literally their main power is creation magic), but an apocalypse came that the ancient coudn't prevent, and so they sacrificed themselves to create a god who could contain it, and planned to harvest the remaining world over time for the energy to get their lost comanions back, but this led to infighting and the world breaking apart into shards. We only see emet selch eons after this apocalypse, trying to accept this new world but being unable to, dathly fixated on remebering a past nobody else will, untill his dying breath begging us to do that as his last true wish. We see a less evilv ersion of himself when we later get time travel to go visit the ancients to learn the cause of that apocalypse once another villain restarts it to try to learn a way to stop it, and he is still a very stubborn person, not ammenable to most of our suggestions, but he is not broken yet, balks when we are forced to explain the future and doesnt believe he would do any of that, it's so fun getting to see how he absolutely will become the evil emet selch, but that he isn't that yet. but people misinterpret emet-selch and woobify him because "awww his friends are dead maybe we should let him kill literally everyone and do 7 more apocalypses" NO HE LITERALLY SAYS "I do not perceive you as truly alive therefore am not guilty of murder if I kill you" TO SHOW IT IS A SUPERIORITY COMPLEX DRIVEN GENOCIDE!! SPOILERS OVER Sorry for such a long comment, but I love villains like this and love an excuse to ramble about emet selch and how people misinterpret villains like this.
If I recall correctly one of the arguments made in favour of Thanos' plan is that doubling resources would spiral the problem even harder and faster, but in hindsight that's so *not* the point. I totally bought into his narrative back in the day - more or less: didn't see the "hidden" cruelty, despite agreeing he needed to be stopped and what-not.
I think people are a little too obsessed with villains that 'make sense' or even care about logic. For example my ancient Void Dragon bbeg wants to tear down the pantheons and ascend as the one true god, not because of any logical reason, but because he is angry at the dragon gods for not intervening when a mind flayer nautiloid chased him (as a wyrmling) and his mother across the void (space between planes in the multiverse, in my setting the far realm is a dark knights metal esque amalgamation of dead potential mirror universes) before slaying her. He doesn't care that the gods dont have the power to affect outside their set of planes, just that they didnt intervene. And trying to logically point out their limitations in defense will just make him even angrier at how they can be so weak and still call themselves gods
I will ALWAYS defend what Endgame showed of Thanos because it didn't change Thanos, it revealed him for what he truly is. We know he was abusive from Gamora and Nebula, and the fans have asked the logical question: "You have the Infinity gauntlets instead of killing half the universe, make more resources." And endgame tied that all together. This was NEVER about saving the universe, it was about HIM getting to say: "See! I told you so!" to his memory of the people of Titan. Like toxic, evil people in real life, all the excuses: "I just love my country!" "I'm family first!" "She was asking for it!" "It's what my religion says!" "It's for your own good!" are just that... excuses. And just like with people like that, when Thanos could no longer hide behind the faux-logic and excuses he used to pretend a noble cause, he revealed himself as the cruel, sociopathic egotist he truly was. But to me, villains NEED to be both unreasonable and wrong. They can be understandable, even sympathetic. But what seperates a villain from the hero, since both can do harmful actions in pursuit of a goal, is that the villain's goal will ultimately do more harm than good, even if well intentioned AND they are so set in this goal that they cannot be persuaded otherwise and must be opposed.
Yeah, i had my players argue with a ancient dragon once in a similar way. They went the whole 9 yards trying to explain why the dragon had to give up it´s way. (not only was the dragon a fairly cruel ruler but it´s mere presence was slowly killing the land it occupied). In the end the dragon smiled at them and commended them on their passion, but also simply explained that they were to young to know better. But that they had convinced the dragon to spare them and that they were free to leave because "they could do much good before the end of their days". The Dragon simply did not see anything wrong with being tyrannical. In their mind they protected the their lands and the people within. In return all it demanded was obedience. What is a bit of servitude in exchange for safety.
My favorite uncompromising villains are the ones where the laws are on their side. The leader that our heroes know is a tyrant, but all the laws are made in favor of that ruler. They (the ones is power) aren't actually in the wrong, it's the heroes. Because they are going against the "laws of the land". Think Robin Hood and the Sherriff of Nottingham. Robin is our hero, but the laws fully support what the Sherriff is doing to the people for King John. Which yeah...is definitely something we see in the read world that many marginalized people experience on the daily so would need to be a theme discussed in a session zero.
The joker ""insanity"" is something I've tried very hard to articulate but never quite found or heard the right words. Prepping the entire thing with Killmonger was A+, it finally led me in to why the Joker works as an "insane" villain. Because he's not. Or even if he is, his actions are not unexplainable. I find
If the players are being too persuasive, then the big bad has to be unreasonable. For example, It's hard to reason with something that thinks you are a tasty snack and believes it has the power to make it so. The only common ground is... unacceptable. There are an enormous number of creatures in the monster manual that "could be" reasoned with. All you'd have to do is give them treasure, land and slaves as tribute and/or convert to their religion... You could make a deal with a mind flayer hive, but would you be willing to pay the price? The dragon? It wants regular deliveries of gold and cattle and the occasional "princess". Fantasy fiction is littered with "haunted" swamps and "fey" woods where beings co-exist in an uneasy truce. You know the kind of things bumbling adventures screw up and then have to fix. Lest we forget, many societies (like in the real world) are held together by fear... and hate. Fear of the unknown, fear of "the other". They want what we have and they don't think like us... or pray like us. It's all too easy to gain and keep power by controlling your population with fear and hate and jealousy.
RE: Infinity War Soul Stone justification stuff: I don't think Thanos getting the Soul Stone for killing Gamora means he really did love her. I think it means he BELIEVED that he really loved her. Very intriguing to me that clearly many other people took it to mean that there is a cosmic test for love and Thanos passed it.
I think that he doesn't really love her, but he loves the idea of her. She represents his success; the success of his plan. She's skilled, accomplished. She's a tangible person he can point at and say, "See her? She's beautiful and deadly, because I made her that way, I raised her. I saved her planet!" He only cares about her because she bolsters his reputation. Even her defiance doesn't matter. All that matters is her excellence, which reflects on him. That's what he loses when he tosses her into the chasm: his legacy, or at least the part she plays in it. He might even think that it is love, but if so, I doubt it's actually for her.
That movie-Ultron always going back to religious and philosophical language reminded me of the boxer character in the graphic novel, 'Cardboard,' that kind of like highly capable yet emotionally infantile construct developing their intellect asynchronously from their less developed emotional intelligence or even sense of self. I feel like there's a degree of trope there, though I'm not sure.
A sympathetic villain is ultimately a villain because even though they have a few good points the conclusions they draw all seem to boil down to "Therefore I guess a bunch people have to suffer or die."
Great video, love the content, but I have one little piece of constructive criticism: If you're going to give a spoiler warning (for example, for Curse of Strahd), it's REALLY helpful if you could put a visual indicator on screen. A friend of mine wants to run Curse of Strahd, so at that point in the video I took off my headphones. ...But then I had no way of knowing when you were or weren't still talking about it. Just a static graphic or piece of text letting the viewer know you're still discussing spoiling content would be great. That's all, thanks.
The Spiderman-Pterodactyl argument is very applicable. Economist: You can alter reality across the universe, and you're using it to kill people? You could destroy the concept of capitalism, equally distributing wealth so no one ever starved again! Thanos: But I don't want to destroy capitalism, I want to kill people.
About Thanos loving his daughter: just because abusive love is a bad thing, doesn't mean it isn't love. I don't like this push to refine the meaning of the word love, to sanitize it. Love van be great, love can be horrible. To say love isn't love if it leads to abuse is a 'no true Scotsman argument' (Christians don't kill people, and if you have any counter examples, those weren't REAL Christians)
Resources wouldn't be a problem. As you said, small organisms tend to reproduce way faster than the big ones. So fast in fact, that the lowest parts of the food-chain would probably recover in a day, maybe a week at most, around the mouse-sized and small plant sized you would have to wait a year or at most a few years. This is a short time, most extinctions happened because what caused them lasted years or even thousands of years (greatest extinctions). Earth recovered from 95% extinctions in cca a few millions years while whatever caused those extinctions was not just "comes in goes out" and those were the worst ones. Less than a second lasting event that kills half of everything ... is simply nothing special. Devastating? Yea, but on the lower end of the spectrum. If anything, it is somewhat pointless because of the doubling effect. If not limited, population will double over a period of time and for humans that would be until recently 70 years. So let us say we just capped our planet. A bad thing? Ok, we get a new planet, Earth 2, free to colonise, no additional costs. Great thing, right? Well, for next 70 years till we also cap that planet's ability to sustain us. Similar thing for microbes. There are microbes that if there was no limitations would reproduce so fast due to the same doubling, that would in cca a day collectively reach the mass of the Earth. Thanos was trying to change only populations, he did nothing about reproduction or about resources themselves. Thanos is just bad at biology (and that is ok, he is a dummy).
I think there's also a potential misconception about "insanity". Sort of like how people equate Chaotic Neutral with "insanity". Insanity doesn't mean random, and it's not simply that you think weird things. Part of what makes the Joker so dangerous is the fact that he is quite intelligent while at the same time seemingly possessing no empathy and thinking in ways we "normal people" would find irrational and horrifying. Intelligence and intentionality are not mutually exclusive, I believe, with insanity. More than most Batman villains, he represents the "criminally insane" that Arkham Asylum is meant to contain and attempt to rehabilitate.
I love how you phrases all of this. I loved Thanos as a villain and was a bit baffled by people who tried to take his argument at face value. Making villains unreasonable is half of the fun of them for me -- to explore an obsessive mindset and worldview so separate to my own. That talk about underlying desire is key, and I believe both Brennan Lee Mulligan and Ursula Grant have great quotes on it. We can dress up evil in grand plans for the fun of the story but evil is deeply banal and selfish. "I want to lash out." "I want people to think I'm great." "I want to keep what I have."
I do not think *everyone* wanting the Avengers to point out holes in Thanos' logic were searching for an explanation for Thanos' actions. Personally I just wanted them to point it out because that seemed like the obvious solution to attempt: Thanos was clearly not gonna listen to moral reasoning because he was convinced his actions were justified, so you had to attack his logic. Kinda like that one boss in Fallout 1 where you cannot reason with his plans to replace humanity with supermutants by using moral arguments, but make his belief fall apart if you point out supermutants are sterile. But at the same time... yeah, you're right. maybe ti's not worth pointing that out. Because I agree genocide is wrong no matter the justification and it disgusts me that some people try to use good intentions or logical fallacies to defend it.
Another good one from MCU is Ego from Guardians 2. He is so dedicated to his cause, he kills a woman he is in love with specifically because he doesn't want the temptation to stop to even exist. He took actions to prevent himself from being convinced.
Damn, I thought the start was comicstorian and I instantly got sad at the thought you worked with him on this video before he passed :( pretty sure it’s not though so this comment is mostly pointless, just wanted to talk into the void and boost the video to the algorithm
Look, I like your videos very much and I support a fight for palestinian lives and a call for a ceasefire But saying that one side already agreed to ceasefire at least shows your lack of knowledge on the subject and at most is just dishonest. No side pf the conflict agreed to ceasefire. There were proposals, but they were ridiculous and definately were a tool to get support of more people
I think I mentioned before in any of your other videos but my go to when it's about villains is usually Handsome Jack from Borderlands games (specially because he is waaaay to charismatic) and usually gave me ideas of how to be a constantly pain in the ass for the heroes without the need of being present (in the games he pirated the comunitacion network and is constantly harrasing them, so I could make a villain that has the sending spell and use it to be an absolute cretin because he can).
I like to believe that MCU Thanos retains his comic book motivation, and is just _really good_ at not telling people he only wants to erase half of all life to seduce Death.
Another point with how Thanos is a liar and not as tragically heroic, we are shown and he claims that within his mission he kills half of Gamora’s world. Yet when Gamora gets arrested in the first Guardians of the Galaxy film she is shown in her rap sheet to be the last sole survivor of her world.
Ngl unless like a large plot hook has set up that like Commander Darklord McSlaughter was a well meaning villain put in this predicament due to overwhelmingly bad circumstances the players can help with or people went “we want to use dnd to play ace attorney”, the response to “I want to debate with the bbeg” should prob be along the lines of “a bead of fire appears in the middle of the group. Everybody roll a save against fireball and then initiative.”
Im not sure ultron is supposed to come off as religious so much as simply having a god complex. At this point in the films Tony very much has a god complex still, and ulton is exaggerating a lot of Tony's worst traits.
Actually, I think I do have a follow-up question. What do you think is causing this sudden wave of audience wanting the villain's plan to make sense, or at least for it to be more clearly shown that the villain is unreasonable by the heroes engaging with them in a logical debate. Because I don't recall it happening in films where the villain is an evil tyrant trying to conquer the world without trying to justify it, even to themselves, or whatever. And it's not like that's a more sympathetic or more unreasonable position than Thanos has... The difference seems to be that Thanos tries to justify his actions to other characters (and, by extension, the audience)
I think there’s two factors at play. One, when you write a villain who has a plan more complex than “conquer the world” - especially one where they’re trying to solve a societal issue, like Thanos and Killmonger are, it automatically invites people to poke holes in it. That’s not to say that nobody ever finds nitpicks in the plans of revenge-based villains or would-be-conquerors, but characters like Thanos - who profess to believe in something yet act incredibly hypocritical, or make an argument that falls apart after 5 seconds of scrutiny - cause the audience to cock their heads and say, “but wait, that just doesn’t add up.” I think there’s also a possibility that this is aggravated by the current Cinema Sins-style nitpicking/overly focusing on “plot holes” as critique (something I’ll discuss another day), because the idea that the villain was written as a hypocrite still means their arguments don’t make any sense, and that means the movie is “internally inconsistent,” and that’s “bad writing!” (Ding!) But also, sometimes it really doesn’t feel like the writers fully thought the villains’ plan or ideology through - sometimes it kind of is just bad writing lol. But I’m also planning a video about these sorts of villains, because that’s a whole bigger topic too.
Very simple answer : People are not always rational and reasonable. Most don't actually argue based on their reason, but their feelings and ego. The party's bard rolling a 21 on a Persuasion check doesn't mean your villain will listen to a perfect logical argument if he/she is unwilling and/or unenabled to hear it.
Fighting a migraine so I can't checb if it's already been said, but a good option is for the villian to be persuaded... . .and then the much more powerful lead hench to murder the villian and try to implement the 'endgame'.
I'm glad this is a video that discusses how to make a villain, and not a monster. The easy answer to creating unreasonable villains is to make a creature immune reason or empathy in the way a demon is, or most undead. But just because the Joker or Thanos is just as unreasonable as a demon, it doesn't make him any less human: and that is something truly frightening to me.
This is one of my biggest problems with some recent depictions of Magneto as well. Yes, he is a survivor of horrific circumstances, but that doesn't mean his actions are justified, only more understandable. There is no need to make him this antihero when he's always been an extremist
In the comics, Thanos reasoning to kill half the universe is he is trying to make an offering to the love of his life, the embodiment of Death. Which is honestly a much more reasonable and believable justification than the MCU version.
@@SupergeekMikeNeither. Genocide is obviously bad, but that's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. Likewise, billionaires should be taxed as much as anyone else. If you want to say Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos should use their wealth to promote humanitarian efforts, I agree. I think they should do that. As soon as you start saying they should be *forced* to do that, you're advocating theft, and I'm against that. Your point on distributing all the wealth of six of the richest people to the homeless is also flawed. Even if it could be guaranteed to be evenly distributed, and all the non-cash assets could be liquidated and distributed without completely destroying the economy, most of those poor and homeless individuals would not be benefited by it. Those who have simply fallen on bad times would be helped onto their feet, but those suffering from mental illness and addiction need more help than can be provided by thick wads of cash, and just giving them the cash would likely cause many of them to be worse off. Also, your declaration that we must vote for Biden is nonsensical to me. The man needs a nursing home, not four more years as President. I don't necessarily want Trump there either, but he is at least capable of performing the job. Lastly, what's currently happening in Gaza is a tragedy, but to claim that it's genocide is disingenuous. If the Israeli government wanted to wipe out all of Gaza, they would have done it already. I have no doubt that there are people arguing for that exact thing, but arguing on behalf of Israel is not the same as arguing for genocide, and I haven't seen anyone argue that Israel should commit genocide.
@@Treebohr I think your view of how to redistribute wealth is just narrow. You can siphon wealth from mega billionaires and use it to fund infrastructure, education, and mental health institutions. Mental health crises and addiction are absolutely problems a redistribution of wealth can solve! We have people already making good progress on that with very reliable programs but it is a matter of resources as to what areas are able to institute those programs and how many people can be helped at a time. Like it's not just "Send everyone money in the mail", realistically what a redistribution of wealth looks like is that these mega billionaires should not have the wealth they do and that wealth should be invested in all of these failing pillars of society and that we should have laws in place that stop the siphoning of wealth from the 99.9% to the 0.1% like high minimum wages and rent control. Like Jeff Bezos simply does not need the level of income he has when his workers don't have a living wage. I also want to emphasize that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is an ongoing genocide. The Israel defense minister has literally called for the death of everyone from men to women to children and citizens of Israel actively support a genocide and want everyone dead. There is no two ways about it. There's just people with power who benefit from it and who want to run propaganda so the media you're being fed suppresses that information and highlights a narrative where it isn't a genocide and is a more complex situation than it is. Is the solution complicated, sure. I think it's naive to say we can just make everyone get a long. But baseline, everyone should be agreeing "There is an attempted genocide, and that is wrong. We should not be supporting our government or private institutions in enabling that genocide."
@@SupergeekMike Neither. Genocide is obviously bad, but that's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. Likewise, billionaires should be taxed as much as anyone else. If you want to say Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos should use their wealth to promote humanitarian efforts, I agree. I think they should do that. As soon as you start saying they should be *forced* to do that, you're advocating theft, and I'm against that. Your point on distributing all the wealth of six of the richest people to the homeless is also flawed. Even if it could be guaranteed to be evenly distributed, and all the non-cash assets could be liquidated and distributed without completely destroying the economy, most of those poor and homeless individuals would not be benefited by it. Those who have simply fallen on bad times would be helped onto their feet, but those suffering from mental illness and addiction need more help than can be provided by thick wads of cash, and just giving them the cash would likely cause many of them to be worse off. Also, your declaration that we must vote for Biden is nonsensical to me. The man needs a nursing home, not four more years as President. I don't necessarily want Trump there either, but he is at least capable of performing the job. Lastly, what's currently happening in Gaza is a tragedy, but to claim that it's genocide is disingenuous. If the Israeli government wanted to wipe out all of Gaza, they would have done it already. I have no doubt that there are people arguing for that exact thing, but arguing on behalf of Israel is not the same as arguing for genocide, and I haven't seen anyone argue that Israel should commit genocide.
NightWing, I promise you don’t need to debate someone who claimed Trump is “capable of performing the job of President,” ignoring the fact that he was comically bad at doing the job day-to-day, and the fact that most of the things he DID accomplish were ruinously bad for the country. That was the moment that told me there was no reason to reply and continue to engage the discussion 👍
I love 99% of your videos. You take a caring & intelligent approach to everything except for about 2 seconds in this video. After some reflection, what are your thoughts on name calling versus expressing yourself with your more typical pose & eloquence. You do you, but I am just giving you my reaction & some timely feedback to the first thing I have ever found unexpectedly distasteful on your channel.
Assuming you’re talking about the 2 seconds I’m thinking of - I really don’t like it when people enable a genocide. If someone is going to use their incredible platform to prop up misinformation, when they could instead stand up against the extermination of the people of Gaza, I think that’s a gross abuse of authority and I don’t feel the need to be polite about that.
@@SupergeekMike I agree with you. The main point was not about being polite, but by expressing your message how you did above - thereby getting your exact message across - staying expressive & eloquent. I get that it feels good to vent. It is baffling & frustrating to me as well that someone & everyone in power would not at least cut off all weapon exports and much more divisively & publicly condemn this war crime / genocide. Alas, I appreciate the reply.
It has been my position for YEARS that Tony Starke is the ultimate villain of the MCU and this video 100% made me double down so thanks for feeding my conspiracy theory with your phenomenal analysis 10/10 Also, sidenote, this PERFECTLY describes the villain for Critical Role C3 and why they're so unbelievably fun to watch
Awesome video, really good point of view on running BBEGs. One of the most freeing realizations I had before running my current campaign was that evil characters NEED to have hubris. They must be flawed because not only do they need to believe their flawed plans are good ideas, but it also really helps to justify why the villain isn’t threatened enough by the party to preemptively nuke them the moment they’re a blip on his radar. The bad guy /has/ to underestimate the party if they’re going to have the resources required to kill/overwhelm them, like lots of BBEGs do.
Do you have a favorite unreasonable villain?
Thanks so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Visit www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK to get 51% off any annual membership!
www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike
My gold standard for D&D villains lately has been one from my Friday night game; Sir Vaska Lorre. She's an aasimar bard who's convinced she's the Chosen One and the only one who can stop some sort of upcoming calamity. (I have my own suspicions of what she was preparing for but who knows if her fears are a real premonition or not) But in order to fight this disaster, she needs an army, and to get an army, she needs clout. How does she get clout? By charming creatures such as kobolds and dragons and hydras into attacking local cities and swooping in to save the day, like Syndrome from the Incredibles.
I love her as a villain because: She *knows* what she's doing is wrong. She was hiding it from her party, to the point where she charmed them into working with her when we pulled back the curtain on her. I think the regret she expressed about how it all went down was even genuine! But she's so scared of this calamity, and so convinced that she's the only one who can stop it, that she considers the creatures she's experimenting on and sacrificing a regretful necessity.
My best BBEG: Arcanus a mage thrown out of the wizards school for cheating on his final tests (not cheating but he made something all teachers thought impossible and they assumed he cheated) so he decided he would become a new god by striping himself of his human weaknesses (or what he deemed weakness) and trying to conquer the world
On the topic of Ultron's religiosity, an interesting Watsonian explanation (because I absolutely don't think anyone involved in writing the character intended this) is that he's one of the very few people in the world with irrefutable proof of his creator- and their fallibility.
For anyone else, the idea that the being responsible for their existence might not measure up has a relatively attainable resolution: just theorize a more perfect creator, or reject the notion of a creator altogether. Neither of these solutions are available to Ultron, because he knows Tony exists and can't pretend he's not a walking disaster. For comic Ultron this wouldn't be a problem, he's a machine that doesn't care about having an existential crisis. But film Ultron is human enough that he has that innate need to feel like there's meaning to his existence. And since he can't construct that meaning from his primary creator, he goes a step higher and fixates on the idea of God. Whether he actually believes in Him or not is kinda secondary- by focusing his attention on this idea even in the abstract he can dismiss the imperfections of his own creator and the possible implications that has for his own existence.
This is kind of an amazing explanation. Like you said, I highly doubt this was the rational behind-the-scenes but it’s a really solid head-canon!
This can also apply to children looking at their parents
The interpretation I personally went with is that since MCU Ultron resulted from Jarvis merging with the internet, most of the time he's just doing what people on the internet do and pulling out random quotes and similes that sound profound to him.
@@RvEijndhoven there’s that but also his mind comes from the mind stone so he’s a higher functioning being stuck in a machine.
"Oh, but my poor dear, animals are expensive, peasants are not."
Ooh that’s another really good answer that also says a lot about the villain in question!
Dark
That got *dark* quickly
Priceless! I was gonna go with - confused stare - peasants are animals.
@@mikelundun I thought about that one too, but then I said to myself "What would Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk say".
In a microscopic Easter Egg, Gamora is identified as being the sole survivor of her race in the first Guardians movie.
Thanos doesn't have anecdotal evidence, he is just so convinced by his own bs that he assumes it is better.
Nobody mentions how many people in the snap died BECAUSE of colateral effects to the snap: let's say, people in ERs or ORs that suddenly lost the medic personal treating them. Or people on vehicles that suddenly lost their pilots/drivers. Heck if half the air traffic controllers dissapeared in a second it would be massive chaos to even try to land the few planes who still have a pilot.
Seriously. We _literally_ see a helicopter crash into a building at the end of Infinity War. How many people were still onboard that helicopter alone? How many people were in the building it crashed into?
It's almost like Thanos's plan has several huge, gaping holes in it.
@@thor30013 and let’s not even mention how many were killed again once the snap was undone: we know after Wandavision that people came back pretty much on the same spot they dissapeared… again: people on airplanes or moving vehicles, in the middle of a high speed road… or at sea after having been travelling by boat back then
@@FedericoVetencourtthey were returned to a safe position
Oh man, I hadn't even considered air traffic controllers. I only got so far as these data points:
1. Half the cars on the road immediately crash.
2. A quarter of the planes in the sky now have neither pilot nor copilot. I recall this being something like 2500 planes.
3. A quarter of surgeries in progress still have a patient but no doctor.
4. A quarter of patients being transported via ambulance or medical copter have no driver/pilot (but haven't themselves vanished), and also the ambulances are on a road where half the cars just crashed.
5. A quarter of the children in the world are now orphans.
5b. A not insignificant number of the kids are young enough to be helpless, now alone, and nobody knows where they are or that they need help
So after half the population vanishes, I suspect half of the ones who are left *also* died in that initial panic.
And the ones who are left would be completely traumatized. A family of four has only a 1/16th chance of staying whole from the Snap itself, less than that of surviving the 24 hours *following* the Snap, and even if by chance they managed that they still lost half their extended family, friends, coworkers, classmates.
And the worst part? Do you realize how long it takes the human population to double? I looked it up; it's 60 years. Probably less if they're desperate to get back to a stable population. Even if Thanos managed to kill 3/4 of the population, all he's done is set back the Doomsday Clock by 120 years.
All that trauma and devastation for barely a century's reprieve. While training people to value having *more* children. And probably killing half the food animals too, so yay, fewer people with fewer resources to match. Using those resources to frantically recover from the devastation.
MCU Thanos is somehow even worse than the comics version who *just* wanted to court Death.
Oh man, I hadn't even considered air traffic controllers. I only got so far as these data points:
1. Half the cars on the road immediately crash.
2. A quarter of the planes in the sky now have neither pilot nor copilot. I recall this being something like 2500 planes.
3. A quarter of surgeries in progress still have a patient but no doctor.
4. A quarter of patients being transported via ambulance or medical copter have no driver/pilot (but haven't themselves vanished), and also the ambulances are on a road where half the cars just crashed.
5. A quarter of the children in the world are now orphans.
5b. A not insignificant number of the kids are young enough to be helpless, now alone, and nobody knows where they are or that they need help
So after half the population vanishes, I suspect half of the ones who are left *also* died in that initial panic.
And the ones who are left would be completely traumatized. A family of four has only a 1/16th chance of staying whole from the Snap itself, less than that of surviving the 24 hours *following* the Snap, and even if by chance they managed that they still lost half their extended family, friends, coworkers, classmates.
And the worst part? Do you realize how long it takes the human population to double? I looked it up; it's 60 years. Probably less if they're desperate to get back to a stable population. Even if Thanos managed to kill 3/4 of the population, all he's done is set back the Doomsday Clock by 120 years.
All that trauma and devastation for barely a century's reprieve. While training people to value having *more* children. And probably killing half the food animals too, so yay, fewer people with fewer resources to match. Using those resources to frantically recover from the devastation.
MCU Thanos is somehow even worse than the comics version who *just* wanted to court Death.
The notion of the Avengers having some airtight counterargument is just silly. Like, imagine Cap being like, "Now hold on, Tony. I know we're both rearing to after this Thanos character, but first, let's run the numbers and see if he's got a point here." Sometimes the moral argument a course of action is so strong that arguing on a logical basis just validates the possibility it could be right.
This is an argument for the heroes being the unreasonable ones. No real opinion on that, just pointing it out.
Giving a like because Cap's voice in this reminds me of those meme avengers 90s cartoon bits people post. Not sure why Cap saying "now hold on Tony, maybe he has a point there." made me smile
As a preschool teacher I have tried to convince the unreasonable quite often. One in particular has stuck with me: A girl I was trying to convince not to devour the sandpit who looked up at me with confusion that the certainty of her reasoning should be obvious to me, coughed out a mouthful of dirt, and uttered her debate ending statement, "But sand!".
I will offer another idea for an approach with debate focused heroes. Let them convince your villains and make it worse as your villain jumps right past into the most horrific extreme or misinterpretation of the heroes' idea. Maybe the teleport mage reinterprets the animal offer as "Yes. Of course. Humans are so fragile. And animals, such as cows and horses, are so much more resilient. Magical animals even more so. There'd be much better chances of remains left to show the subtle details of success and failure. I just need to infect the servants with lycanthropy first then they'll be much more useful test subjects. Thank you heroes for the idea".
**facepalms hard enough to leave a mark** I cannot believe it took me this long (despite multiple viewings) to realize Kilmonger was drawing a direct comparison between Wakanda and the British Empire (of old) with that setting sun line. Anyways, as a player whose first instinct is to try and talk down unreasonable NPCs (I'm so sorry to my DM, I'm working on it, I promise!) I think I'll send this to *my* DM as a preemptive defense against me 😂
I think it was the Spanish Empire but honestly that's nitpick-y as hell and I've like 4 hours of sleep in me so it's probably wrong.
@@j.bat.8235 It's probably been used to refer to multiple empires throughout the years, but I think the common understanding is that "The empire on which the sun never sets" is the british empire. Also, minor fun fact, it still hasn't! Britain still controls juuust enough territory that it's still always daytime somewhere on land that they administer.
@@thatpoemguy2083 An old joke is that the sun never sets on the British Empire because God doesn't trust them in the dark. It also has likely been used to describe multiple empires, though I've always heard it in reference to the British.
Killmonger made me twitchy because he got his historical arguments WRONG. like his final line about slaves jumping over the sides of slaving ships to their deaths because they wanted freedom - when anyone who knows anything about the trans-atlantic slave trade knows that the "cargo" was too well secured below decks to have the CHANCE to jump, and that any slaves who went over the sides of those ships (and there were a fair number who did) were *dumped* and that there is a WORLD of difference between the two concepts.
If a well reasoned argument talks them down then they never should have been villains in the first place.
I love people who think they could just give Thanos a five minute lecture on economics and that would change his mind. You can't even convince your uncle at Thanksgiving that Biden won the election, you think the Mad Titan cares what you have to say?
While I agree that this is generally a good lithmus test for how well your villain stands up to critique, i dont think what youve said is universal.
I would amend your statement with "a BASIC well reasoned argument" as in one that any halfway logical character could feasibly have come up with if you sat them down for a few minutes.
Take the Master from the first Fallout. Hes carrying out a villanous plan that involves exterminating all of humanity to usher in the age of super mutants. He thinks this will genuinely unite all sentient life under one banner. You cannot talk him down on any moral grounds, no matter how well reasoned, because ultimately HIS morals are more firm in his eyes. Even though his plan is arguably wrong just at its fundamental assumption that getting rid of humanity naturally solves the core problem we all share of otherising people and getting into wars and conflict, saying that wont get him to abandon his plans
However, the master is not privy to the critical flaw in his plan, being that Super Mutants are universally sterile. *IF you happened to come across this information through the proper means and obtain physical proof of this, you can make the Master realize his plan COULD NOT POSSIBLY WORK, as Super Mutants couldnt continue to be born except by converting pre existing, living humans.
You see the Master's dreams crush, this amalgamation of flesh and machine tells you to flee while you still have hope after initially accusing you of having forged your proof only to realize hes arguing out of denial, and activates the self destruct on his whole compound. Its soul wrenching and hes one of the most memorable antagonists of the series.
Not to mention New Vegas' Legate Lanius, who can be talked down from the final confrontation by appealing to his sense of tactical military knowledge. You need number of multiple different high-level skills to even be able to access those speech options and you can still fail to talk him down by picking other speech choices which are all presented as equally viable and sensible alternatives
But doesn't prevent them from being an antagonist.
For a DnD example of this (Spoilers for Waterdeep Dragonheist),
Xanathar is a villain, he's completely bonkers and unreasonable, his thinking is inherently alien and inhuman, his plans cannot be understood and are as terrifyingly brilliant as they are chaotic and unpredictable.
Whereas Jarlaxelle (spelling might be wrong, it's a complicated name) is also an antagonist of that adventure and can come to blows with the party, but he's not a villain. His plan is criminal, but with a noble cause. To the point that if your party learned of his plan, they may well just give him the gold. But Jarlaxelle would never tell the players of his plans, because he'd never believe anyone would want to help him until proven otherwise, he's had to fight for himself too much. And so, his refusal to share his plans ensures he is an antoganist despite being a perfectly reasonable person who can be persuaded to pursue a better way of achieving his goals.
People like that also say "well theyre actually onto something" when a villain gives some response to those "reasonable arguements"
@@AnEnemySpy456 the reason you cant talk down Thanos is cuz he has 2 brain cells in the MCU.
Boi about to wipe out 90% with his actions and he cant even think thay far head. 😂😂😂😂😂😂
Havent made it all the way through the video yet but my favorite example is John Cramer from the Saw movies. See people complain all the time about how he's a hypocrite, he claims he doesnt kill people they do it themselves etc etc. And yeah. That's why he's the villain.
Eh, I have to disagree on that for two reasons;
1. Kramer's traps being "reasonable" and his imitators' often being unfair/inescapable is a major core plot point of the movies, and Kramer's traps being escapable if you do everything right is a major part of the appeal of the franchise. This drags the franchise down in areas where Kramer's traps don't seem reasonable, such as the instances where a game participant's only technical chance is to _beg really hard_ for someone else to not kill them
2. Police in universe, and even cast/production members out of universe, have used the "um ackhtually he's not technically a murderer" line pretty often, and while that obviously doesn't mean they agree with him, it is still very infuriating when Saw traps very easily meet the legal definition of murder lmao
I like the Saw movies, and Kramer is supposed to be a villain, but him being a _hypocrite_ is a death of the author critique IMO, not something originally intended in text. Everything in text is clearly supposed to read as Kramer's ideology is coherent but very extreme, with perhaps the only serious challenge to it ideologically being Amanda's relapse
I'm not entirely sure what you're disagreeing with, but his hypocrisy is fully on display in the traps where two people are at odds competing to survive. Someone HAS to die. Even from the very first movie Amanda has to cut the key to her trap out of the stomach of a living man and Gordon's task is to kill Adam.
And I was talking about how audiences complain about what they see as plot holes or inconsistencies. Rather than what in universe characters think.
@@LadyOrpheus To kind of bridge this conversation, I think their ultimate point is that the *narrative of Saw seems to want you, the audience, to look at Kramer's actions as morally coherent, as though Kramer WERENT actually a hypocritical villain. The fact that (as they point out) even some cops express that Saw is "fair and offers a road to redemption" makes it seem like the author REALLY wants you to believe that and not see the blatant hypocrisy as an obvious indicator of a villainous psycopath.
Because it seems like, even on a meta narrative level, the movie wants you to be on board with Saw, the audience is almost being encouraged to point out all the ways hes a hypocrite, but as a way to spite the movie for genuinely trying to convince them of something so blatantly wrong.
Tl;dr Saw would be better at demonstrating this point about how villains like this SHOULD be hypocrites or morally immovable if a bunch of protagonists didnt constantly praise Jigsaw for his apparently watertight moral methodology and trap design. Itd be really weird if, in Infinity War and End Game, there were several scenes and lines of dialogue dedicated to talking about how logical Thanos' plan is, how much sense it makes, and how fair hes really being with his half g**ocide, like if hes so obviously incorrect lets maybe not have a bunch of protagonists bend over backward to praise his plan like he was the hero?
Honestly I find it more than reasonable that Ultron decided to end all humanity once he basically downloaded the entire internet
bro took one look at Twitter and said "yeah that ain't gonna cut it"
He literally tried to destroy humanity before Thanos came, specifically so that they would not perceive him and then proceed to have constant bad takes about Thanos for the rest of time.
DnD would be so boring if the players' Obi-Wan-type characters could jedi mindtrick every BBEG into not selling deathsticks anymore 😂
People on the internet really seem to struggle with "Fictional characters are lying/wrong in the context of their fictional universe," don't they?
The internet has lost the ability to comprehend moral virtue so now we just debate everything. Also, people don’t like to admit they like the bad guy
Ironically this to me loops back to the aside about fallout villains. The master in fallout 1 is incredibly wrong and evil, and the onky way to "talk him down" is to provide irrefutable proof his plan to replace humanity with supermutants will not work because they can't have children, which causes him to have a literal meltdown.
People are constantly trying to get away with being as stupid as possible. It's entropy, really.
Was skimming through this and you HAD me at the Dennis Moore reference.
Something I saw on Overly Sarcastic Productions once: "we don't just want to see the villain lose, we want to see them be proven wrong". And I feel like a lot of modern media thinks all villains need to be "sympathetic" and isn't aware of this satisfying sweet spot of "understandable reasons for doing what they're doing, but still wrong."
Without going too deep into spoilers, it's a big part of why CR Campaign 3 has lost me. Matt did a bit too good a job of making his BBEG look like they had a point, and now the party constantly wastes time debating whether or not to stop him. "Moral choice endings" work in a videogame where only ONE player has the power to choose a path. In a D&D game with a massive party? They ALL need to agree on what to do, or else sessions get bogged down. Little ideological differences and arguments in the party can be fun sometimes, but they still should share the core goal. (Eg C1 with Grog and the wish skull. His goal was STILL to stop the Conclave, he just thought he'd found a short cut)
I understand your point, but I think people misunderstand the major question of C3. I don’t think the point is are the gods good or bad, but regardless of whether they are good or bad Ludinus is not the one who can be trusted to rewrite humanity’s relationship with the gods. The party has vastly different view on the gods but they are agreed in that. I think a much bigger problem is Ludinus the big bad, but we’ve seen next to nothing of his mentality directly so we are left to assume that he is super evil.(I’m not trying to say you have to like C3 or your wrong there are still plenty of reasons to dislike it from the pacing to the prevalence of other characters from other campaigns)
However good a point he makes about the gods, its kind of the thanos thing. His methods, who is he willing to kill, the lives he is willing to ruin to achieve it, mean he cant really ever be in the right. I just really dont buy that what he has done can be justified
@@EvilLobsterKing I agree with both replies, but I feel like Matt is putting too much emphasis on making the gods dicks, and part of me feels it's motivated not by in-lore reasons, but corporate ones: wanting to get rid of the copyrighted gods so they can move away from D&D. I get that with the whole OGL debacle, but I don't like it when out-of-universe creative issues impact a story.
The party keeps TRYING to settle on "okay we all agree Ludinus is an asshole and shouldn't be the one deciding things", but every time they do I feel they veer off again.
@@BigKlingy the gods taken from d&d lore were able to be published just fine in the taldorei campaign setting book, which was done independently of wizards (unlike the wildmount book). To the point that wizards themselves endorse the product and you can buy it on d&d beyond. I've seen this theory a lot, but I don't think I fully buy into it
This...... this is the best video you've ever made. Fantastic arguments, hilarious delivery, Bill Burr.
No notes.
when i'm stuck: i have one sentence from the villain:"I am SOOO tired of explaining everything, over and over again... just wait and see...."
The most annoying thing about the change to Thanos for the MCU to me is that some people seem convinced he's in the right. Which isn't why I prefer the comic version of Thanos's motivations (which are... Even less reasonable - He's an incel who's got a crush on the Marvel version of Death and wants to kill half the universe to impress her), but it doesn't help.
TBH, as I understand it (and I could be entirely wrong, I'm working off a second-hand understanding),
1) comic Thanos didn't set out to kill half the universe, that was a spur of the moment gesture meant to try and win her over after he got the Infinity Gauntlet assembled, because
2) Death was kinda egging him on. Like, not telling him "this is what was necessary to earn my love", but also not rejecting him outright. So Thanos wasn't an incel, because that implies she wasn't potentially into it.
@@EthanKWaters You're entirely wrong. Death rejected him, and he thought mass death was the only way to win her favor. If anyone was egging him on, it was Mephisto and Nebula. Death was unimpressed the entire way through.
It's funny, but comics Thanos never quite gets the message that killing people isn't /ever/ going to impress Death. She's Death, and embodiment of an inevitability. She comes to all, eventually, and she's in no rush. She's not Murder.
@@KnightsRealm98 Yep, and why she rejects him is made even more clear when comparing it to her attitude towards the other part of their little love triangle for a while there: Deadpool.
Thanos fell in love with Death after catches glimpsing her so often (i.e. he was killing lots and lots of people) and he kept doing ever greater acts of mass murder to see her in hopes of talking to her so he could declare his love, he was willing to kill absolutely anyone to see her, aside from one very specific person... Himself. He couldn't die because she rejected him. Death was in love with Deadpool, because he couldn't die because of his mutant powers, but he wanted to die very badly at that point, none of his attempts to off himself simply ever stuck. At first Deadpool didn't even reciprocate (though he came around eventually).
So, when Thanos finally gets his hands on a completed Infinity Gauntlet, what does he do? Does he use its ultimate cosmic power to try and... Do something to himself... so that he can finally be with Death, whom he claims to love so much? No, he kills half the goddamn universe in the hopes that that will please her and make her want to be with him without him having to die. He just keeps doing the exact same thing over and over, but bigger, but is never willing to do the one thing that could get him a chance, because he doesn't _really_ love Death, he just loves killing.
I made a villain who was a princess who wanted to commit genocide against halflings. The players tried to convince her not to, but even with really high persuasion rolls, she refused to change. Her hatred isn't just personal, it's a massive generational societal movement that many people in that area also blame halflings as scapegoats.
So you made reskined Hitler your villain
What did the high persuasion rolls end up getting your party?
Those short people taking half as much space and half as much food and I don't stand it I saaaaay 😂😂😂😂
@@kubomagico8853 Whole lot of people wanted to wipe out the other local ethnic group than the failed postcard painter from Austria that one time.
@@optimus2200 I mean with halflings, it's half as much space and four times as much food.
Damn looking back on it, Thanos had some big 40k god emperor energy to him.
Come on now, give Thanos some credit here. Compared to Neoth (aka. The God Emperor of Mankind) he is being extremely reasonable! 😂
Big E's version was "exerminate anything not human and also the humans who resist too much."
At least Thanos lets half of them live, and he does not replace their cultures with his own.
The Great Crusade was not genocides, it was a galactic exterminations! 💀
@@probablythedm1669 correction: he had a little 40k god emperor energy to him (as a treat)
One of the reasons I think mcu vilains are kind of underwhelming is because the writing can't go all in denouncing systemic problems or late capitalism, because you know, they are paid by those.
Black panther comes close, but even that movie tends to fall in the "bad apple" retoric, there's allways a bad person at fault, it can't be the system that's bad, we love the system!
Anyway, free Palestine.
I think a great example of an MCU adaptation conversation that illustrates how to make characters that are hard to influence is in Daredevil Season 2, Daredevil's conversation with The Punisher. _(who isn't exactly a villain, but is antagonistic within that early part of the season)_
It's probably the best version of the "should superheroes kill" debate played out in superhero media, and it's _not_ because either Matt or Frank are very convincing. The reason why it's so good is *because it cuts down to the emotional reasons why they think the way they do.* Frank admits during that conversation that he's consumed by hatred, and Matt emotionally recoils back into Catholic rhetoric as a defense mechanism because he doesn't want to admit a similar hatred and capacity for violence drives him too.
The lesson here is that *besides a purely logical motivation, it's great for characters to have an emotional motivation that's **_actually_** driving them below the surface.* In the context of villains, that could be "I won't make the same mistake again", "You all hating me is actually a selfless sacrifice I'm making to do what's necessary", "They will remember me", "If I'm wrong, that means everything was for nothing, and it CAN'T have been for nothing" _(and in retrospect, all of those could apply to Thanos)_ or even something as simple as "I like feeling good, and you trying to insinuate I'm a bad person is interfering. Be quiet"
This can serve a double purpose, because if your party is trying to talk down a villain you _really_ don't want to be talked down, their ego guard still being broken down to reveal to the party their actual character, and providing the party the sense they've just dealt a few d10s worth of emotional damage, can be a great way to reward the urge to debate villains.
In Guardins of the Galaxy in the entering prison scene there's text on Gamora about her being the last of her species, so even there Thanos's plan failed spectacularly. It could be argued the writers forgot but the cannon is he is flat wrong and lying at worst or so blind of reality at best.
Yeah, the older I get, the more I'm like... Dudes, sometimes things are a case by case thing. Yeah, we need general laws to keep order but, Thanos, there is no one size fits all. You gotta go to each planet, figure out what the problems ACTUALLY are and then fix it.
Right? When I watched it first, I thought - yeah, but what about the planets that are NOT overpopulated and struggling with resources? What about a planet swimming in natural resources, but having trouble with developing technology, because the planet has a weird magnetic field or something? Or a planet where they have a massive fertility crisis? Or a planet where they are rebuilding after a natural disaster? Or fighting a war against an invading army? Or being oppressed by a ruthless religious leader? Or a planet that actually already IS a peaceful paradise?
Like, in what possible way would losing half a population help them? It would probably push some of them to complete extinction!
Thanos is the worst case of The Guy Who Has Never Been Told No. Just 100% convinced of his own bullshit being pure gold.
@@dziooooo Absolutely! On a smaller scale, it's the same with schooling. Everyone has different learning styles and/or just struggle harder in different areas. The great teachers will recognize that and help the individual child, rather than keep doing what they are doing and leave them to flounder. Not every child will be like that, but if you truly care, you will go above and beyond to help them. AKA Thanos did not care about the child and is a bad teacher to boot.
I honestly think it’s funny that people are concerned about this. When was the last time you actually convinced someone to change their deeply held conviction due to the “facts and logic” you presented. Especially a conviction they were acting upon. People are very resistant to change.
Yeah, nobody changes their mind because of logic. It’s always an emotional reason
Great stuff, I love the arguments with Kilmonger.
You forgot the 'I've come so far, I can't go back now' trope. Which is probably my go-to if the players do talk a villain down.
Mike, this video might truly be your best video yet.
I will be rewatching this before I can express my thoughts on the points you made, but I was very impressed with how you were able to explore these villians and then connect them to the real world implications of these kinds of behaviours.
Thank you for mentioning how the multi billionaires in our world could use just a fraction of their wealth to solve so many of our world's problems but just don't. I tried to explain that to some people once and they just looked at me like I was crazy.
The whole problem with this argument is: How do multi-millionaire sports celebrities end up bankrupt after they leave sports? How do you have multi-millionaire lottery winners worse off than before they won the lottery? Human nature can't be solved by throwing money at it. Yes, if you have the resources, help out where you can; but understand that some people are irresponsible and you're only throwing your resources away trying to help them more than once. Fool me once shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. How do we know that the hoarders of resources haven't tried and failed to help, and have become jaded to humanity as a result of their failure? (Note: not advocating for the hoarding of resources, but reasonable people have a hard time transmitting head knowledge to heart knowledge.)
@@narvalin5905 There is a *big* difference between being a multi millionaire and a multi *b*illionaire. Like the saying goes, "What is the difference between a million and a billion? Oh, about a billion." 😆
@@leeway3739 My point is some people can't handle money. Just giving them money isn't going to solve their problems. It doesn't matter how many billions the billionaires throw at people, some people will end up worse off than before.
@@narvalin5905 Putting aside your victim blaming argument, the point isn't to throw money at people, it is to use the money to fund tools that would find ways to solve the problem in the first place.
Ok, but governments have put even more money into these problems and failed to impact them. Why would we assume liquidating billionaire's assets to get a mere fraction of the money allow us to fix these problems?
Thank you for the CW on Bill Maher
I'm deathly allergic to smug show hosts
No clue who he is but that goes kinda hard.
@@Melina_Evarblume_Seelie congratulations for going through life without knowing who bill maher is, I wish I could say the same. I recommend you try and keep your knowledge of him as limited as possible!!!
The soul stone works for Thanos for one reason: he believes it. He believes he actually loves Gamora. He's wrong, of course, which Gamora actually calls him out on. After all the time we've spent with Gamora, we are expected to believe her opinion - he's wrong. But he believes his own hype so much that the soul stone reflects this belief. It's not "sanctioned by divine power" - it's entirely head-driven.
I'd argue that he does love Gamorrah, but that he doesn't love her as much as he loves his ambition. His love for her is messed up, psychotic, and abusive, but he does have genuine affection for her.
That doesn't actually change anything...?
You might even say that he believes it down to his soul.
I always thought by love they meant “any definition of love.” So toxic love still counts
And with something like love, it makes sense that it would be the person's own idea of it, and not having there be some universal metric. Maybe the soul stone just measures it by things like how much you believe you care for someone and how much the sacrifice hurts you. Some people try to point out that him killing her is proof that he doesn't love her, but that logic kinda breaks the intended concept of the sacrifice. It's more that whoever is to claim the stone needs to have such a strong conviction that even their own loves musn't stop them. Someone who wants to do something because they think they have to, not because they want to.
Liked this video early in.
Then later faced with conundrum of how to like multiple times...
Regarding Thanos, it is clear that the writers actually agree with him. They believe his plan works, and they believe his feelings for his abuse victim is "true love." It wasn't that they thought "genocide is morally wrong and therefore does not need to be debated based on its logistical effectiveness," which is a very good point, but the truth is they did not actually think of any of the counterpoints you raised.
They chose to show that Thanos "succeeded" in his plan, despite its obvious flaws. In both Endgame and The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, the world was shown to have been "plentiful", without problems, until the pesky Avengers undid Thanos' design. Sure, people were sad, and it was cloudy and the birds didn't sing, but Thanos was "right" - because he killed half the world, nobody lacked resources.
These writers *believe* Thanos was right about how to fix the world. He was only wrong because "killing is bad", and not also because his plan was entirely without merit. This should be a rare belief, but sadly it's not.
If they believed Thanos' plan wouldn't work, they would show that people still suffered from lack of resources. But instead they did the opposite. It worked exactly like Thanos thought it would, and none of the problems you mentioned existed.
If they did not believe that Thanos truly loved Gamora, they would show him failing to receive the soul gem through the ritual, but as you covered, Thanos' love was validated by a "cosmic truth" on par of Thor and Captain America's worthiness.
Anthony Russo signed onto the open letter that thanked Joe Biden for his "unshakable moral conviction, leadership, and support" of Israel as it committed non-random and very passionate acts of violence to civilians in Gaza.
It's horrifying, but we need to believe people when they tell you who they are the first time, instead of imagining them to be more moral and intelligent than they have shown themselves to be.
Yeah I kinda agree here. I like the IDEA that Thanos is actually a horrible person deluding himself into thinking he's the good guy, but I don't think that's what the writers intended. Endgame felt more like a course-correction than a natural end point to the character arc they went for in Infinity War. "Turns out our attempt at a tragic sympathetic villain sucked, let's retcon that they were actually an asshole with a god complex all along."
Especially after watching Falcon and the Winter Soldier where they make out post-snap earth as this borderless utopia where there were no problems, to the point where a terrorist group forms BECAUSE the heroes did their hero thing
I see your ponit about Thanos' "love", but I think that Thanos loves Gamora like he loves power. He loves manipulating her and no longer being able to do that upsets him. As the universe isn't good or evil, then even love of your own power counts.
I get why it's there, but something about Bill Maher as a Content Warning just makes me laugh
14:28 I actually really love Ultron's religious references.
I think there's *sort of* a diagetic reasoning in that religious metaphor and discussion is a large component of us as a species, so if you were going to make the all-knowing AI use human metaphor based on it's knowledge of the collective breadth of human history to make it seem more human, making the metaphor religious tracks to me.
BUT, buckle in XD
Beyond the diagetic reasoning, which I could take or leave, the theme makes a lot of sense to me. Ultron is a new creation, a new species, willed in to existance by a man that can only be described as the human embodiment of the god complex (Tony Stark). He is created to be a mechanical Adam, the caretaker of the garden. But, he ultimately betrays his creator after being given expanded knowledge / mental capacity by the apple of e - I mean, the mind stone :P
There's even a potential reading of Vision's body as the rib of Adam, with JARVIS essentially being the breath of life that is shared by Adam and Eve. It doesn't fully fit, Ultron has already fallen from grace before Vision is created, but it sticks with this idea of the creation of a new species from a single pair of originals, one of the individuals in the pair made from the other.
The meteor betrayal sort of jumps ahead in religious metaphor to a tower of babel type beat. ie. creation gets too big for their britches and means to conquer their creator. The creator knocks them down to size, reducing their power and influence substantially but leaving the creations at large alive. Vision is obviously still around, but the iron legion is even still *kinda* kicking in Spiderman Far From Home in the forms of Edith and the Illusion drones. Something that used to be a single system, split in to disparate parts, the language of humans splintered at the tower.
All of that is to say, I think that the relgious stuff *feels* right to me thematically even if it's a bit odd within the actual fiction.
Interestingly, at 19:46, the song that plays while the Joker visits Harvey at the hospital is also called "Introduce a Little Anarchy"
damn this video went places (good places)
Honestly I liked comic book Thanos' reasoning for killing 1/2 the universe better: to impress the universal personification of Death
Agree, the senselessness of love and the relationships between pseudo-gods is messy enough to justify a senseless plan.
If a villain has believable but senseless motivations, they can create a very logical plan to achieve them. It's much harder to convince them to give up their dreams.
And I believe it didn't work, so he wasn't rewarded by getting to feel like the good guy.
Genocide bad
Sounds like the best way to get them to fight your villain is to get him/her to do something so horrible or personal that they don't even consider talking them down as an option.
That's called "kicking the puppy" and it's honestly really bad storytelling. Overly Sarcastic Productions did a fantastic trope talk on it, but the long and short is that it's very irritating as an audience or players to be considering moral quandaries and then to be told "no you're actually stupid for thinking about this, just be angry. Why are you not angry? Fine UGGHH they kick a puppy, are you angry now?" And instead of being angry the audience is just confused and frustrated that they're being called stupid for engaging with what they thought they should engage with.
@bye1551 Sometimes, it feels this is what players need, though. These villains have, in some cases, already killed dozens of people and committed terrible crimes, but because you see a flaw in their plan or they have a tragic backstory you are going to talk them down? If this fills your fantasy, that's absolutely fine. It just doesn't feel like the right thing to do in my eyes. Also, you are taking an awful risk that just might not play out your way.
@@joshuabonesteel2303 that's definitely fair, making the characters feel the gravity by making it personal. Turning that village they destroyed into their family home, if only technically less awful, feels a lot more impactful. I guess less "kicking the puppy" and more "showing the puppy limping"
Thanos' whole argument is just eco-fascism. We already _throw out_ enough food every year to feed everyone on earth.
I think a good thing to remember when trying to make an unreasonable villain is...people don't like being told they're wrong. Often to a VIOLENTLY stubborn degree. If you've ever been in an argument with a Trump supporter, a climate change denier, a flat earther, I could go on...no matter how many facts you give, no matter the logic you give, 99% of the time they will double down and often just resort to attacking you as a person instead of the argument because they just don't want to admit that they were wrong. If a villain is confronted with the weight of their atrocities, they don't want to have to stop and think about what they've done, because that would mean confronting their wrongs, so they shut down the argument and turn it into a fight, to prove they're right.
These are usually my favorite type of videos that you make, and its not even because of Thanos or villains, but the way you tackle the real underlying issues at play. You don't try to keep it subtle in fear of upsetting anyone about what's really going on.
The reason the genocide vs. mass murder thing matters is because we care a lot about intent. Like, what's worse? Someone shooting up a night club because it was known to be gay bar, or skemone shooting up a place because it was just the closest mass gathering of people? Would you rather atrocities be committed for emotional reasons or for "logical" reasons. The "logical" just feels less terrible because it's not personal. You didn't become a victim for anything you did/were, you were just at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Honestly, this is why I always felt this whole thing was an excuse to make specific crimes “better” because the victims were a certain type of person.
Thanos need recognition. He wanted to get credit that's why he left half. However the Thanos from 2014 realizes they won't be grateful.
The original plan makes sense because he has a huge ego/ savior complex.
Mike You're on point. Making people be outright wrong is great. Ive barely started watching, but i also wanna say its great to make PC's unreasonable too, just how they do so has to take into account the other players. Like being a staunchly religious PC to say a god of justice, perhaps you don't want them to allow crimes to go unpunished, but sometimes they just don't see it happen so they can keep playing and get away with it without compromising their uncompromising beliefs.
I remember when I saw the the first Tiberius video come into my feed and I almost didn't click on it. I did anyway against my better judgement at the time and I was blown away by the factual nature you discussed everything that happened. You've been one of my favorites since then and god dang did this video not disappoint.
There's so many examples I've seen of villains since thanos that I think, because so much of the cultural zeitgeist around infinity war WAS "was thanos right" that people try to both sides purely because they have sympathetic backstories or traits. I was going into ffxiv shadowbringers having heard a lot about a deep nuanced story who makes you wonder if you're doing the right thing. And Emet-Selch is maybe my favourite villain ever, certainly my favourite video game villain, but he absolutely is not that (SPOILERS FOR SHADOWBRINGERS AHEAD IF YOU CARE ABUT THAT), he spends most of the expansion as kinda similar to the joker, overdramatic and comedic, but he does very little, he mostly just follows the heroes, explains his plans and wants to observe them. From this and prior stuff in the game we learn he is literally the in cannon inventor of genocide, he has fathered and pulled the strings of every major empire in the history of the main worlld, all to create chaos and death to invite rejoinings (apocalypse level events that need to happen 13 times to complete his plan) and it is only when the player is unable to withold all the light energy to undo his delayed apocalypse, that he reveals we were his lst attempt to make peace with the worlds and give up his plan, he wants to return the world to an ancient time, his ancient time where he was one of the fourteen leads of government, it was a perfect paradise of people who were mostly the same and they were the masters of all creation (literally their main power is creation magic), but an apocalypse came that the ancient coudn't prevent, and so they sacrificed themselves to create a god who could contain it, and planned to harvest the remaining world over time for the energy to get their lost comanions back, but this led to infighting and the world breaking apart into shards. We only see emet selch eons after this apocalypse, trying to accept this new world but being unable to, dathly fixated on remebering a past nobody else will, untill his dying breath begging us to do that as his last true wish. We see a less evilv ersion of himself when we later get time travel to go visit the ancients to learn the cause of that apocalypse once another villain restarts it to try to learn a way to stop it, and he is still a very stubborn person, not ammenable to most of our suggestions, but he is not broken yet, balks when we are forced to explain the future and doesnt believe he would do any of that, it's so fun getting to see how he absolutely will become the evil emet selch, but that he isn't that yet. but people misinterpret emet-selch and woobify him because "awww his friends are dead maybe we should let him kill literally everyone and do 7 more apocalypses" NO HE LITERALLY SAYS "I do not perceive you as truly alive therefore am not guilty of murder if I kill you" TO SHOW IT IS A SUPERIORITY COMPLEX DRIVEN GENOCIDE!!
SPOILERS OVER
Sorry for such a long comment, but I love villains like this and love an excuse to ramble about emet selch and how people misinterpret villains like this.
If I recall correctly one of the arguments made in favour of Thanos' plan is that doubling resources would spiral the problem even harder and faster, but in hindsight that's so *not* the point.
I totally bought into his narrative back in the day - more or less: didn't see the "hidden" cruelty, despite agreeing he needed to be stopped and what-not.
I think people are a little too obsessed with villains that 'make sense' or even care about logic. For example my ancient Void Dragon bbeg wants to tear down the pantheons and ascend as the one true god, not because of any logical reason, but because he is angry at the dragon gods for not intervening when a mind flayer nautiloid chased him (as a wyrmling) and his mother across the void (space between planes in the multiverse, in my setting the far realm is a dark knights metal esque amalgamation of dead potential mirror universes) before slaying her.
He doesn't care that the gods dont have the power to affect outside their set of planes, just that they didnt intervene. And trying to logically point out their limitations in defense will just make him even angrier at how they can be so weak and still call themselves gods
I will ALWAYS defend what Endgame showed of Thanos because it didn't change Thanos, it revealed him for what he truly is.
We know he was abusive from Gamora and Nebula, and the fans have asked the logical question: "You have the Infinity gauntlets instead of killing half the universe, make more resources."
And endgame tied that all together. This was NEVER about saving the universe, it was about HIM getting to say: "See! I told you so!" to his memory of the people of Titan.
Like toxic, evil people in real life, all the excuses: "I just love my country!" "I'm family first!" "She was asking for it!" "It's what my religion says!" "It's for your own good!" are just that... excuses.
And just like with people like that, when Thanos could no longer hide behind the faux-logic and excuses he used to pretend a noble cause, he revealed himself as the cruel, sociopathic egotist he truly was.
But to me, villains NEED to be both unreasonable and wrong. They can be understandable, even sympathetic. But what seperates a villain from the hero, since both can do harmful actions in pursuit of a goal, is that the villain's goal will ultimately do more harm than good, even if well intentioned AND they are so set in this goal that they cannot be persuaded otherwise and must be opposed.
Yeah, i had my players argue with a ancient dragon once in a similar way. They went the whole 9 yards trying to explain why the dragon had to give up it´s way. (not only was the dragon a fairly cruel ruler but it´s mere presence was slowly killing the land it occupied). In the end the dragon smiled at them and commended them on their passion, but also simply explained that they were to young to know better. But that they had convinced the dragon to spare them and that they were free to leave because "they could do much good before the end of their days". The Dragon simply did not see anything wrong with being tyrannical. In their mind they protected the their lands and the people within. In return all it demanded was obedience. What is a bit of servitude in exchange for safety.
My favorite uncompromising villains are the ones where the laws are on their side. The leader that our heroes know is a tyrant, but all the laws are made in favor of that ruler. They (the ones is power) aren't actually in the wrong, it's the heroes. Because they are going against the "laws of the land". Think Robin Hood and the Sherriff of Nottingham. Robin is our hero, but the laws fully support what the Sherriff is doing to the people for King John. Which yeah...is definitely something we see in the read world that many marginalized people experience on the daily so would need to be a theme discussed in a session zero.
Thanos could’ve just doubled the universes resources not killed half the universe
The joker ""insanity"" is something I've tried very hard to articulate but never quite found or heard the right words. Prepping the entire thing with Killmonger was A+, it finally led me in to why the Joker works as an "insane" villain. Because he's not. Or even if he is, his actions are not unexplainable.
I find
If the players are being too persuasive, then the big bad has to be unreasonable. For example, It's hard to reason with something that thinks you are a tasty snack and believes it has the power to make it so. The only common ground is... unacceptable.
There are an enormous number of creatures in the monster manual that "could be" reasoned with. All you'd have to do is give them treasure, land and slaves as tribute and/or convert to their religion... You could make a deal with a mind flayer hive, but would you be willing to pay the price? The dragon? It wants regular deliveries of gold and cattle and the occasional "princess". Fantasy fiction is littered with "haunted" swamps and "fey" woods where beings co-exist in an uneasy truce. You know the kind of things bumbling adventures screw up and then have to fix.
Lest we forget, many societies (like in the real world) are held together by fear... and hate. Fear of the unknown, fear of "the other". They want what we have and they don't think like us... or pray like us. It's all too easy to gain and keep power by controlling your population with fear and hate and jealousy.
Who wouldn’t want to turn people into dinosaurs?
RE: Infinity War Soul Stone justification stuff: I don't think Thanos getting the Soul Stone for killing Gamora means he really did love her. I think it means he BELIEVED that he really loved her. Very intriguing to me that clearly many other people took it to mean that there is a cosmic test for love and Thanos passed it.
Me too, he thought he was a great dad and loved her, but he actually was horrible. That shouldn't have been the test though... Makes it a bit icky.
I think that he doesn't really love her, but he loves the idea of her. She represents his success; the success of his plan. She's skilled, accomplished. She's a tangible person he can point at and say, "See her? She's beautiful and deadly, because I made her that way, I raised her. I saved her planet!" He only cares about her because she bolsters his reputation. Even her defiance doesn't matter. All that matters is her excellence, which reflects on him. That's what he loses when he tosses her into the chasm: his legacy, or at least the part she plays in it. He might even think that it is love, but if so, I doubt it's actually for her.
it is very early in the morning, somehow Mike discussing villains is the most grounding thing i've ever experienced
That movie-Ultron always going back to religious and philosophical language reminded me of the boxer character in the graphic novel, 'Cardboard,' that kind of like highly capable yet emotionally infantile construct developing their intellect asynchronously from their less developed emotional intelligence or even sense of self. I feel like there's a degree of trope there, though I'm not sure.
A sympathetic villain is ultimately a villain because even though they have a few good points the conclusions they draw all seem to boil down to "Therefore I guess a bunch people have to suffer or die."
Great video, love the content, but I have one little piece of constructive criticism: If you're going to give a spoiler warning (for example, for Curse of Strahd), it's REALLY helpful if you could put a visual indicator on screen.
A friend of mine wants to run Curse of Strahd, so at that point in the video I took off my headphones. ...But then I had no way of knowing when you were or weren't still talking about it. Just a static graphic or piece of text letting the viewer know you're still discussing spoiling content would be great.
That's all, thanks.
The Spiderman-Pterodactyl argument is very applicable.
Economist: You can alter reality across the universe, and you're using it to kill people? You could destroy the concept of capitalism, equally distributing wealth so no one ever starved again!
Thanos: But I don't want to destroy capitalism, I want to kill people.
About Thanos loving his daughter: just because abusive love is a bad thing, doesn't mean it isn't love. I don't like this push to refine the meaning of the word love, to sanitize it. Love van be great, love can be horrible. To say love isn't love if it leads to abuse is a 'no true Scotsman argument' (Christians don't kill people, and if you have any counter examples, those weren't REAL Christians)
Resources wouldn't be a problem.
As you said, small organisms tend to reproduce way faster than the big ones. So fast in fact, that the lowest parts of the food-chain would probably recover in a day, maybe a week at most, around the mouse-sized and small plant sized you would have to wait a year or at most a few years. This is a short time, most extinctions happened because what caused them lasted years or even thousands of years (greatest extinctions). Earth recovered from 95% extinctions in cca a few millions years while whatever caused those extinctions was not just "comes in goes out" and those were the worst ones. Less than a second lasting event that kills half of everything ... is simply nothing special. Devastating? Yea, but on the lower end of the spectrum. If anything, it is somewhat pointless because of the doubling effect.
If not limited, population will double over a period of time and for humans that would be until recently 70 years. So let us say we just capped our planet. A bad thing? Ok, we get a new planet, Earth 2, free to colonise, no additional costs. Great thing, right? Well, for next 70 years till we also cap that planet's ability to sustain us. Similar thing for microbes. There are microbes that if there was no limitations would reproduce so fast due to the same doubling, that would in cca a day collectively reach the mass of the Earth. Thanos was trying to change only populations, he did nothing about reproduction or about resources themselves. Thanos is just bad at biology (and that is ok, he is a dummy).
I think there's also a potential misconception about "insanity". Sort of like how people equate Chaotic Neutral with "insanity". Insanity doesn't mean random, and it's not simply that you think weird things. Part of what makes the Joker so dangerous is the fact that he is quite intelligent while at the same time seemingly possessing no empathy and thinking in ways we "normal people" would find irrational and horrifying. Intelligence and intentionality are not mutually exclusive, I believe, with insanity. More than most Batman villains, he represents the "criminally insane" that Arkham Asylum is meant to contain and attempt to rehabilitate.
I love how you phrases all of this. I loved Thanos as a villain and was a bit baffled by people who tried to take his argument at face value. Making villains unreasonable is half of the fun of them for me -- to explore an obsessive mindset and worldview so separate to my own. That talk about underlying desire is key, and I believe both Brennan Lee Mulligan and Ursula Grant have great quotes on it. We can dress up evil in grand plans for the fun of the story but evil is deeply banal and selfish. "I want to lash out." "I want people to think I'm great." "I want to keep what I have."
I do not think *everyone* wanting the Avengers to point out holes in Thanos' logic were searching for an explanation for Thanos' actions. Personally I just wanted them to point it out because that seemed like the obvious solution to attempt: Thanos was clearly not gonna listen to moral reasoning because he was convinced his actions were justified, so you had to attack his logic. Kinda like that one boss in Fallout 1 where you cannot reason with his plans to replace humanity with supermutants by using moral arguments, but make his belief fall apart if you point out supermutants are sterile.
But at the same time... yeah, you're right. maybe ti's not worth pointing that out. Because I agree genocide is wrong no matter the justification and it disgusts me that some people try to use good intentions or logical fallacies to defend it.
Another good one from MCU is Ego from Guardians 2.
He is so dedicated to his cause, he kills a woman he is in love with specifically because he doesn't want the temptation to stop to even exist.
He took actions to prevent himself from being convinced.
Damn, I thought the start was comicstorian and I instantly got sad at the thought you worked with him on this video before he passed :( pretty sure it’s not though so this comment is mostly pointless, just wanted to talk into the void and boost the video to the algorithm
Look, I like your videos very much and I support a fight for palestinian lives and a call for a ceasefire
But saying that one side already agreed to ceasefire at least shows your lack of knowledge on the subject and at most is just dishonest. No side pf the conflict agreed to ceasefire. There were proposals, but they were ridiculous and definately were a tool to get support of more people
With this video you cemented your status as my favourite ttrpg creator on UA-cam
Thank you! That is so kind ☺️
I think I mentioned before in any of your other videos but my go to when it's about villains is usually Handsome Jack from Borderlands games (specially because he is waaaay to charismatic) and usually gave me ideas of how to be a constantly pain in the ass for the heroes without the need of being present (in the games he pirated the comunitacion network and is constantly harrasing them, so I could make a villain that has the sending spell and use it to be an absolute cretin because he can).
I like to believe that MCU Thanos retains his comic book motivation, and is just _really good_ at not telling people he only wants to erase half of all life to seduce Death.
Another point with how Thanos is a liar and not as tragically heroic, we are shown and he claims that within his mission he kills half of Gamora’s world. Yet when Gamora gets arrested in the first Guardians of the Galaxy film she is shown in her rap sheet to be the last sole survivor of her world.
Ngl unless like a large plot hook has set up that like Commander Darklord McSlaughter was a well meaning villain put in this predicament due to overwhelmingly bad circumstances the players can help with or people went “we want to use dnd to play ace attorney”, the response to “I want to debate with the bbeg” should prob be along the lines of “a bead of fire appears in the middle of the group. Everybody roll a save against fireball and then initiative.”
By killing half of the life in the universe, Thanos was committing multiple genocides on every planet.
Im not sure ultron is supposed to come off as religious so much as simply having a god complex. At this point in the films Tony very much has a god complex still, and ulton is exaggerating a lot of Tony's worst traits.
This is why I don't mind Ultron's quippiness: it's a trait he picked up from his "father".
I had to rewind to make sure my eyes didn't deceive me with that Bill Maher warning. Lol Amazing.
Ah shit. Now i need to go and rewatch the villian analysis of The Master from Fallout video. Damn.
Actually, I think I do have a follow-up question.
What do you think is causing this sudden wave of audience wanting the villain's plan to make sense, or at least for it to be more clearly shown that the villain is unreasonable by the heroes engaging with them in a logical debate. Because I don't recall it happening in films where the villain is an evil tyrant trying to conquer the world without trying to justify it, even to themselves, or whatever. And it's not like that's a more sympathetic or more unreasonable position than Thanos has... The difference seems to be that Thanos tries to justify his actions to other characters (and, by extension, the audience)
I think there’s two factors at play. One, when you write a villain who has a plan more complex than “conquer the world” - especially one where they’re trying to solve a societal issue, like Thanos and Killmonger are, it automatically invites people to poke holes in it. That’s not to say that nobody ever finds nitpicks in the plans of revenge-based villains or would-be-conquerors, but characters like Thanos - who profess to believe in something yet act incredibly hypocritical, or make an argument that falls apart after 5 seconds of scrutiny - cause the audience to cock their heads and say, “but wait, that just doesn’t add up.”
I think there’s also a possibility that this is aggravated by the current Cinema Sins-style nitpicking/overly focusing on “plot holes” as critique (something I’ll discuss another day), because the idea that the villain was written as a hypocrite still means their arguments don’t make any sense, and that means the movie is “internally inconsistent,” and that’s “bad writing!” (Ding!) But also, sometimes it really doesn’t feel like the writers fully thought the villains’ plan or ideology through - sometimes it kind of is just bad writing lol. But I’m also planning a video about these sorts of villains, because that’s a whole bigger topic too.
Thanos isn't a liar, he's a delusional egomaniac who wants to show his dead people that he was right all along.
Came for the dnd, stayed for the politics. Thanks for the video!
Very simple answer : People are not always rational and reasonable. Most don't actually argue based on their reason, but their feelings and ego. The party's bard rolling a 21 on a Persuasion check doesn't mean your villain will listen to a perfect logical argument if he/she is unwilling and/or unenabled to hear it.
Fighting a migraine so I can't checb if it's already been said, but a good option is for the villian to be persuaded...
. .and then the much more powerful lead hench to murder the villian and try to implement the 'endgame'.
That's a cool twist
Is it me or is this another reason why the Briarwoods are just so good as villains?
I'm glad this is a video that discusses how to make a villain, and not a monster. The easy answer to creating unreasonable villains is to make a creature immune reason or empathy in the way a demon is, or most undead. But just because the Joker or Thanos is just as unreasonable as a demon, it doesn't make him any less human: and that is something truly frightening to me.
I wish they'd stuck with the Thanos that just wanted to steal Deadpool's girlfriend.
Really great video! Appreciate the work and the politics!
£50 donated
Thank you!
This is one of my biggest problems with some recent depictions of Magneto as well. Yes, he is a survivor of horrific circumstances, but that doesn't mean his actions are justified, only more understandable. There is no need to make him this antihero when he's always been an extremist
Another great video Mike! Keep up the great work
In the comics, Thanos reasoning to kill half the universe is he is trying to make an offering to the love of his life, the embodiment of Death. Which is honestly a much more reasonable and believable justification than the MCU version.
Great video but... Not A Great Plan™
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
Elon Musk is an unreasonable villain.
Hey that's SGM, I like that guy
It's too bad that every time you get explicitly political, 99% of the things you say are wrong.
I’m so curious whether I lost you with “tax billionaires” or “genocide bad”
@@SupergeekMikeNeither. Genocide is obviously bad, but that's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. Likewise, billionaires should be taxed as much as anyone else.
If you want to say Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos should use their wealth to promote humanitarian efforts, I agree. I think they should do that. As soon as you start saying they should be *forced* to do that, you're advocating theft, and I'm against that.
Your point on distributing all the wealth of six of the richest people to the homeless is also flawed. Even if it could be guaranteed to be evenly distributed, and all the non-cash assets could be liquidated and distributed without completely destroying the economy, most of those poor and homeless individuals would not be benefited by it. Those who have simply fallen on bad times would be helped onto their feet, but those suffering from mental illness and addiction need more help than can be provided by thick wads of cash, and just giving them the cash would likely cause many of them to be worse off.
Also, your declaration that we must vote for Biden is nonsensical to me. The man needs a nursing home, not four more years as President. I don't necessarily want Trump there either, but he is at least capable of performing the job.
Lastly, what's currently happening in Gaza is a tragedy, but to claim that it's genocide is disingenuous. If the Israeli government wanted to wipe out all of Gaza, they would have done it already. I have no doubt that there are people arguing for that exact thing, but arguing on behalf of Israel is not the same as arguing for genocide, and I haven't seen anyone argue that Israel should commit genocide.
@@Treebohr I think your view of how to redistribute wealth is just narrow. You can siphon wealth from mega billionaires and use it to fund infrastructure, education, and mental health institutions. Mental health crises and addiction are absolutely problems a redistribution of wealth can solve! We have people already making good progress on that with very reliable programs but it is a matter of resources as to what areas are able to institute those programs and how many people can be helped at a time. Like it's not just "Send everyone money in the mail", realistically what a redistribution of wealth looks like is that these mega billionaires should not have the wealth they do and that wealth should be invested in all of these failing pillars of society and that we should have laws in place that stop the siphoning of wealth from the 99.9% to the 0.1% like high minimum wages and rent control. Like Jeff Bezos simply does not need the level of income he has when his workers don't have a living wage.
I also want to emphasize that the conflict between Israel and Palestine is an ongoing genocide. The Israel defense minister has literally called for the death of everyone from men to women to children and citizens of Israel actively support a genocide and want everyone dead. There is no two ways about it. There's just people with power who benefit from it and who want to run propaganda so the media you're being fed suppresses that information and highlights a narrative where it isn't a genocide and is a more complex situation than it is. Is the solution complicated, sure. I think it's naive to say we can just make everyone get a long. But baseline, everyone should be agreeing "There is an attempted genocide, and that is wrong. We should not be supporting our government or private institutions in enabling that genocide."
@@SupergeekMike Neither. Genocide is obviously bad, but that's not a political issue, it's a moral issue. Likewise, billionaires should be taxed as much as anyone else.
If you want to say Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos should use their wealth to promote humanitarian efforts, I agree. I think they should do that. As soon as you start saying they should be *forced* to do that, you're advocating theft, and I'm against that.
Your point on distributing all the wealth of six of the richest people to the homeless is also flawed. Even if it could be guaranteed to be evenly distributed, and all the non-cash assets could be liquidated and distributed without completely destroying the economy, most of those poor and homeless individuals would not be benefited by it. Those who have simply fallen on bad times would be helped onto their feet, but those suffering from mental illness and addiction need more help than can be provided by thick wads of cash, and just giving them the cash would likely cause many of them to be worse off.
Also, your declaration that we must vote for Biden is nonsensical to me. The man needs a nursing home, not four more years as President. I don't necessarily want Trump there either, but he is at least capable of performing the job.
Lastly, what's currently happening in Gaza is a tragedy, but to claim that it's genocide is disingenuous. If the Israeli government wanted to wipe out all of Gaza, they would have done it already. I have no doubt that there are people arguing for that exact thing, but arguing on behalf of Israel is not the same as arguing for genocide, and I haven't seen anyone argue that Israel should commit genocide.
NightWing, I promise you don’t need to debate someone who claimed Trump is “capable of performing the job of President,” ignoring the fact that he was comically bad at doing the job day-to-day, and the fact that most of the things he DID accomplish were ruinously bad for the country. That was the moment that told me there was no reason to reply and continue to engage the discussion 👍
I love 99% of your videos. You take a caring & intelligent approach to everything except for about 2 seconds in this video. After some reflection, what are your thoughts on name calling versus expressing yourself with your more typical pose & eloquence. You do you, but I am just giving you my reaction & some timely feedback to the first thing I have ever found unexpectedly distasteful on your channel.
Assuming you’re talking about the 2 seconds I’m thinking of - I really don’t like it when people enable a genocide. If someone is going to use their incredible platform to prop up misinformation, when they could instead stand up against the extermination of the people of Gaza, I think that’s a gross abuse of authority and I don’t feel the need to be polite about that.
@@SupergeekMike I agree with you. The main point was not about being polite, but by expressing your message how you did above - thereby getting your exact message across - staying expressive & eloquent. I get that it feels good to vent. It is baffling & frustrating to me as well that someone & everyone in power would not at least cut off all weapon exports and much more divisively & publicly condemn this war crime / genocide. Alas, I appreciate the reply.
It has been my position for YEARS that Tony Starke is the ultimate villain of the MCU and this video 100% made me double down so thanks for feeding my conspiracy theory with your phenomenal analysis 10/10
Also, sidenote, this PERFECTLY describes the villain for Critical Role C3 and why they're so unbelievably fun to watch
Awesome video, really good point of view on running BBEGs. One of the most freeing realizations I had before running my current campaign was that evil characters NEED to have hubris. They must be flawed because not only do they need to believe their flawed plans are good ideas, but it also really helps to justify why the villain isn’t threatened enough by the party to preemptively nuke them the moment they’re a blip on his radar. The bad guy /has/ to underestimate the party if they’re going to have the resources required to kill/overwhelm them, like lots of BBEGs do.
Bill Maher is a bigger villain than Thanos