I watched the new Marvel movie ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ a few days ago, and I have a few thoughts about its main villain Thanos, and his relationship with his “adopted daughter” Gamora.

Beware mild spoilers for ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ and ‘Guardians Of The Galaxy’!

Thanos is a galactic conqueror, traveling from one inhabited planet to the next, killing half the population of each planet in a misplaced attempt to end starvation.

On some of these planets he recruits new followers, and sometimes he “adopts” children, to train them into loyal killing machines.

Gamora was one of these children, and the most talented among them.

As a child, she was often set up in competition with her adoptive sister Nebula, and each time Nebula would inevitably lose, Thanos would replace parts of Nebulas body with robotic replacements to “improve her” so that she might one day “be good enough”.

To my mind, Thanos would classify as both a physical and physiological abuser of the worst possible kind, one which Gamora eventually escaped.

Yet at one point in the movie, without going into too much detail, the universe itself judges Thanos’ feelings for Gamora to be real love.

How?

I think this shows the difference between action and intent.

If he truly did love her, and maybe even Nebula, he may have just intended to raise them with a strict hand to make them able to take on any threat. This is, after all, a universe with space-pirates, killer robots and hulks.

But his actions were so incredibly overblown in relation to his intent, that he did far more bad in raising these girls than good, if any good at all.

I think Thanos did love Gamora. But I also think he was such a broken individual that he had no concept of how you treat people, or how you handle problems.

After all, his answer to the problem of people suffering was to murder half of all people.

And worst of all, there are real people who actually treat their kids much like Thanos treated “his daughters”.

Picking favorites, punishing inadequacies and using verbal and physical harassment.

And if these parents were asked if they loved their children, they could truthfully answer “yes”.

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I have written a post about each of the Marvel movies that has been released since I started this webpage, and I am planning to continue as long as there are interesting things to write about there.

This one got a bit heavy, but if you want to read something more light-hearted and optimistic I have also written about how Thor: Ragnarok and Dark Souls share some Norse DNA and why I want more movies like Black Panther.

Hope you enjoy 🙂