One Villainous Scene - Loki's Glorious Purpose

There was One Marvelous Scene. Then One X-Cellent Scene. And now, on the eve of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad, let’s talk about some bad guys. This is One Villainous Scene.

I chose to look at the opening scene from Avengers Infinity War where Thanos and Loki have a short chat about failure, Gods, and attention.

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[LabradorIndependent]

I always read "You will never be a god" as Loki taunting Thanos, as a the God of Mischief himself. But it is an interesting interpretation that actually he had identified Thanos' ambition, and was instead telling him, almost based on personal experience, "You will *never* have what you want." I'd never thought of it like that.

[PittsburghSonido]

The best part about Loki sacrificing himself to stop Thanos was that he wasn’t doing it for respect or glory or fame. He did it because he was protecting Thor.

[horatiohuskisson]

Has anyone done Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean 1? “You best start believing in ghost stories Ms Turner, you’re in one!”

[TangentialTif]

I think the “saving the world” part was much less important to him than the being right part, because otherwise he would have come up with a better plan then something that would be so traumatic and only ‘help” for like 20-40 years when the population doubled again.

[ruthielalastor]

Thanks for mentioning how the details of Thanos' plan is what makes him the villain. To me, he could have doubled the resources, yes, but how his mind went to killing half of life instead and ultimately chose to go with that solution it is what makes him abhorable. The "Thanos was right" mindset that trended a while back got me a little alarmed.

[saltedZnO]

this has got to be my favorite annual YouTube event, props to Nando for organising these!!

[ghostsurfer]

I guess I always believed there was an inherent level of pettiness to Thanos' mission statement, even though he presented it as objectively selfless, but you summed up really beautifully what that pettiness looks like and how deep it goes.

[darthbaggins]

You nailed it man. As you said thanos doesn’t want to help people he just wants to be right. He’s not a hero or even an anti-hero.

[SilverSpireZ]

Can’t wait for Filmento to not be invited again.

[aj]

I think Thanos was actually "trading" the mind stone for the space stone... With the space stone, he can travel to any corner of the universe in a matter of seconds, so it's ok, he can just recover it. The space stone basically kickstarts the whole movie ( Avengers IW). After getting it, he stops needing his own ship, he just... appears wherever he wants to

[geekgirl]

Ok it makes perfect sense that Thanos leases out the mind stone to Loki because it’s been confirmed by marvel that the stone was manipulating Loki’s emotions therefore helping Thanos ensure Loki’s victory and compliance with the deal they made.

[apollolux]

One thing I learned a long time ago when I was REALLY getting into pro wrestling (mostly WWF at the time with some ECW and later ROH) as a teen was that for villainy to be really effective in fiction the villain ("heel" in wrestling) has to behave with conviction, like the character believes their way is THE only right way. Bonus points if the character actually believes it, unless the character's villainy is supposed to be that they're untrustworthy.

[susanarecio]

Okay but there's no better redemption arch than Loki's. Him being the one "hurting" Thanos is justice.

[timogul]

I think that whatever Loki's motivations in prior projects may have been, they were at least different to that in the Loki Disney+ series. In that one, it became pretty clear that his motivation was not "credit, " it was "security." As Renslayer said, "Only one person gets . The one in charge." Loki wanted to be in charge so that nobody could take away his free will.

[WonderVis]

I kinda forgot that whole “Thanos really just wants approval” angle that I saw when I first saw the movie over the years. Thank you for reminding me the kind of character Thanos is.

[SAPProd]

Like you said, Thanos uses a stone to get another stone, so it does make perfect sense for him to lease the mind stone to Loki in order to get the Tesseract. Thanos is so long-term big-picture about his goal, losing the mind Stone is merely a temporary setback and he knows he’ll get it back when he needs to. He thought using Loki, Ronan, and others to get them for him would be all he needed, but because all were failures in doing so, he declared “fine, I’ll do it myself” and that’s exactly what he did.

[HipHopBandicoot]

Perfectly timed to coincide with the newest Marvel Villainous expansion, Mischief & Malice. Which features Loki as the box villain.
Either way, the marvel hype is real!

[TheGunman]

I like this but in Endgame Thanos secluded himself and lived as a farmer. If he truly wanted to be a god then wouldn't he want to be worshipped? Or I guess just causing the snap gives him enough satisfaction. Or even darker, maybe he just wanted everyone to suffer just like he did when Titan was destroyed.

[lordundeadrat]

This guy gets it. I've ever had to explain this aspect of Thanos' motivations to people who took him at face value. He doesn't want to save the universe. He want's statues erected to him for having done so. In his twisted understanding of how the universe works. He thinks this display of limitless power and killing half of all that lives will get him there. And that's why alternate Thanos was more than willing to wipe out all life and start over. None of that really matters. He just want's the universe to recognize him as it's savior in the end.

[lussine]

This gave a whole new meaning to him saying that he knows what it's like to lose, feel so desperately that you're right, yet to fail nonetheless .