How Thanos Will Actually Be The Hero For Avengers: Endgame
Who’s it going to be?
Speculation has been running rampant recently about who exactly will be the hero of Endgame. Who exactly is going to be the one that reverses the tragedy caused by Thanos’ Infinity Gauntlet? Which one of them will be wielding the Infinity Gauntlet long enough to undo what has already been done? There are quite a few candidates up for the task—some a bit more surprising than others.
No matter who gets the gauntlet, however, they have to be smart about how they use it. Infinity War showed that the gauntlet had been severely damaged after Thanos used it to wipe half the universe. This probably means that it doesn’t have the same capacity to do the kinds of things that Thanos was using it for in Infinity War. It can probably only fully use the effects of all of the Infinity Stones together one more time—if even that.
So if this is going to play a factor, what characters do we know who would have to run through a serious mental debate when deciding what exactly to use the gauntlet for?
Let’s talk about it.
Peter Parker, AKA: Spider-Man
Some have placed bets on Peter Parker. This theory is a bit of a hard one to imagine since he’s dead and all, but it does have some merits behind it. The most promising ones surround Peter's character and the fact that he’s the only known member of the Avengers who’s confirmed to come back from the snap.
One of the most iconic quotes surrounding Spider-Man is “With great power comes great responsibility.” While this quote originally appeared in the comics, it didn’t find it’s current fame until Uncle Ben said it to Peter in the original Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy. Since then, it’s been the one thing that pretty much summarizes Spider-Man’s whole motivation for being—well, Spider-Man.
If Spider-Man is the one who manages to get ahold of the gauntlet in the scramble for it, then he’s going to have god-like power at his fingertips--literally. There are so many things he could do with power like that. What would he want to do with it? You would think the obvious answer would be to resurrect everyone else who was dusted. He made it back somehow, so why wouldn’t he want to help his fellow dust piles?
Well, because now he has the power to undo the one tragedy he had the power and opportunity to prevent a long time ago, a tragedy he inadvertently chose to let play out when decided to let a mugger go. With the Infinity Gauntlet on his hand, Peter would now have the chance to bring back his Uncle Ben.
Of course, the gauntlet is damaged, so if he chooses to revive his uncle (a person whose death had nothing to do with the snap), he may waste the one chance he has to revive everyone else who died across the universe.
What better way to show off Peter’s character than to have him use the gauntlet to do the right thing rather than the thing that he probably wants more than anything else? What responsibility would be greater than using the god-like power of the Infinity Gauntlet to bring back everyone from the snap instead of Uncle Ben?
This would be some serious mental gymnastics for Spider-Man to have to go through: once again inadvertently abandoning his uncle to die. Only this time, instead of doing it for selfish reasons, it would be to prove that he’s the hero Uncle Ben wished for him to be.
Considering Spider-Man will also be the first hero to have an adventure after Endgame’s conclusion, his film will have the most opportunity to capitalize on Endgame's fallout. It would make sense to see Spider-Man dealing with the aftermath of his choices in Far From Home, especially since that story takes place only minutes after Endgame ends apparently.
Of course, before anything like this can happen, Spider-Man himself has to get out of the Soul World.
Nebula, AKA: Thanos’ Last Remaining “Child”
Another candidate to play the hero happens to Nebula, Thanos’ own daughter (forcibly acquired, of course). She’s the only one of Thanos’ so-called kids whose still breathing (surprisingly). This alone should speak to her resilience.
Nebula has changed quite a bit since having her first appearance in Guardians of the Galaxy. She’s had a character arc that’s taken her from trying to kill her sister to actually caring about her. Now the only person on her hit list seems to be Thanos.
She’s one of the better candidates to pull off stealing the gauntlet since she knows Thanos a lot better than any of the other heroes. She also probably has a bigger drive to take him down than any of the others as well. They’ve only been tormented by him recently while she’s been suffering him her whole life, so if anyone has a chance of getting the gauntlet away from Thanos, she would probably have the best shot.
In fact, in the comics, Nebula is the one to take the gauntlet away from Thanos, and after doing so, she rewinds time by 24 hours, bringing back everyone Thanos killed within that span, including those done in by the snap. If Marvel wanted to make a callback to this moment, giving Nebula the gauntlet would make perfect sense.
Besides, like Spider-Man, giving Nebula the completed Infinity Gauntlet would be a great way to show how far she’s come along as a character. Cinematic Nebula is different from her past comic iteration because she seems to have actually become somewhat of a good guy. Sure, she still has her anger issues and a burning desire to kill her kidnapper of a father, but she’s chilled out considerable when it comes to Gamura. Instead of being happy upon finding out that Gamura had died, Nebula was visible heartbroken—this coming after she spent the first two guardians films trying to kill her adoptive sister.
With this in mind, if she gets the gauntlet, she’ll probably have to debate about whether or not she’s going to use it to kill Thanos or use it to resurrect Gamura and everyone else.
Also, unlike Spider-Man, Nebula’s not dust particles drifting in the winds of Titan, so it’ll be a lot less convoluted to explain how she gets the gauntlet off of Thanos.
Basically, the results of MCU Nebula reversing Thanos’ snap would be the same as her comic iteration, but the reasons for either of them doing it would differ slightly. Comics Nebula used the gauntlet to turn herself into the new god of the Marvel universe, but MCU Nebula doesn’t really look like she has that desire.
Thanos, AKA: The Mad Titan
Didn't really see this one coming, right? Maybe you did. There are clues for it spread throughout Infinity War. Yes, Thanos himself—the guy who annihilated half of the universe in the first place—could be one of the people with the potential to reverse it.
Like Nebula, MCU Thanos is different from comic Thanos—vastly different. When comic Thanos wielded the Infinity Gauntlet, he murdered half of the universe solely so he could court the physical embodiment of death (a weird metaphor to represent the fact that Thanos just loves killing people). He failed in making death fall in love with him by the way, so he just murdered trillions of people for no reason (probably another metaphor, one claiming that his bloodlust could never be quenched). MCU Thanos, on the other hand, sparked the Infinity War for a completely different reason.
MCU Thanos explained that he was culling the populations of the universe because he watched his homeworld of Titan die from overuse of resources. He had suggested to his world leaders that they kill people at random solely so that they could preserve what little resources they had, and go from there. While this idea was, of course, insane, it didn’t spawn from a random need to simply kill people. Thanos had suggested it because he believed he could actually save the world with this method. When he was exiled from his planet and learned that it had perished, as he predicted, he took it upon himself to go from planet to planet and wipe out half of the inhabitants as a way to preserve life. In his mind, he was saving people—cutting off limbs to preserve the rest of the body. He wasn’t doing what he was doing out of an abject need to kill.
This isn’t to say that Thanos isn’t prone to violence or is a saint or anything like that. In the Infinity War trailer, he did pretty much state that beating up the Avengers as was an unexpectedly fun activity to come out of his journey to balance the universe, but this could be more associated with a born warrior rather than a natural mass murderer. Loki died for being disloyal, and Heimdal died for being disobedient, not necessarily because Thanos had a whim to do it. His treatment of Nebula was even chalked up to trying to make her stronger.
To put it simply, MCU Thanos doesn’t kill for the sake of killing like his comic iteration. He truly believes himself to be the hero in this situation—doing something that other people don’t have the stomach themselves to do.
MCU Thanos even showed that he did care for certain things. He wasn’t completely tyrannical. He loved his old homeworld, and he loved Gamura. He loved Gamura so much in fact that her death actually affected him—this coming from a man who’s organized the deaths of countless living things. In Thanos' own words, balancing the universe cost him “everything,” and Infinity War takes its time to show that. The Avengers Endgame trailer even shows Thanos retired on a farm somewhere with his armor (warrior life) hung up to be a scarecrow—it’s not him anymore.
Despite getting away with mass murder, Thanos also doesn’t look like he’s happy with the outcome of his actions. The way he brushes the damaged gauntlet against the flowers in the Endgame trailer makes it look like he’s depressed about how everything turned out—namely, having to sacrifice Gamura to do it since she was the one person that he actually cared about in all of this.
So maybe, when all is said and done in Endgame, the one who’s going to be resetting everything will be the one who caused it all in the first place. Infinity War did take enough time out of its run to emphasize Thanos’ character, and Thanos was even supposed to narrate the film originally. Infinity War was, for all intents and purposes, his story when you really look at it. He was the main character; the Avengers were his villains; he succeeded; they failed.
