@nightgate said:
Can someone explain why Thanny the Manny is the better villain?
Zod is the DCEU's greatest villain, but he's artificial to the point that it actually prevents him from thinking about how to best save his people. But it's in his genes, so we can't really blame him for being misguided. All the same, despite the idea being poignant in its own way, it doesn't do any favor to his patriotism. Zod's gene-driven obsession to that goal is what blinds him to something that could have worked bloodlessly.
IW made Thanos better because it made him relatable - both his drive and character. His logic is the product of deductive reasoning tested and proved over and over again - his drive is strong because as far as he knows, decimating 50% planet by planet is working. He's only acting like a man who has seen his world burn down after spurning me and simultaneously could wield the power to make sure that never happens again.
Yet at the same time, even IW reveals his darker side. When he kills Loki, when he's torturing Nebula, when he makes that face while walking toward Stark after a beatdown -
and when he pries the MS out of Vision heads and tosses him away. Endgame reveals more of this, especially in his speech to Cap and when he's pushing SB into Thor's chest. Thanos' darkness was genuinely alarming and intimidating and Zod's was that of a broken man whose programming was self-destructive. The fact that he was broken was more poignant than Thanos's dark moments, but it fell under the contrivance I was talking about more than most moments in MoS - after all, it was the end result of said contrivance.
But between those moments, he is loving and considerate and sentimental, and he doesn't view humans as ants. He captures a human experience although being more separate from human frailty than any of the Kryptonian invaders could ever claim to be. A single taste of power and they immediately succumb to notions of infallibility. Even as complex as Zod is, he's unable to empathize with Superman's struggle and upbringing that shape his drive - for someone who existed only to protect Krypton, I thought he'd have understood why Supes would be Clark with the humans, not Kal with the Kryps. But he didn't, as seen with his conversations with Supes and the Jor-el AI. The fact that he's willing to eliminate all of Earth's species to spare the pains of adaptation is even more artificial - it's the genes talking for sure. If it were a god-to-insect point of view, then that makes it even more contrived, as the immediate rush of power makes no man a god. No god would have broken like Zod did in the end. He was a man that was slave to his genes, which made him lesser than most, no matter how much power he drew from our star. Even Thanos handled being broken in a way more mature form. And one that succeeded while he was doing it, if we consult the canon statements that account for it.
I'd say that Thanos has more to feature beyond his plot-featured drive, and that's what makes him compelling, because he has all these character traits that give him complexity, even though he had every excuse to be more impersonal to humanity like Zod had. And even though I liked Zod being the way he was in that regard, the gene editing kinda made it less poignant. It's not even a god looking down at ants as a byproduct of natural interaction, it's him being "Krypton first" via plot-induced characteristics. It separated him from me - from what I've understood of the world, it reduces the complex variables that it takes to build that persona into a byproduct of a genetically shaped caste system that doesn't get much exploration. In the end, Zod's drive and character are somewhat less moving to me than that of Thanos. Nothing about Krypton was extraordinary enough to justify such measures to materialize motivations, and the sun bears no merit because this contrivance was integrated into Krypton's society as a whole - back when they were advanced humans. Thanos was more than a man independently of his power, and he didn't need a contrivance to justify his characteristics that were external to his drive. And when it came to drive, we know who was stronger. It does not need to be said.
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