Because there must be balance in all things, of course.
As you perhaps have noticed, Thanos has built up quite the fanbase since his star turn in Avengers: Infinity War. Some might be drawn to the Mad Titan more... physically, shall we say, but others have taken it upon themselves to champion Thanos’ earth-shattering plan from the movie in the name of their new problematic fave.
You know, that plan. The one where Thanos decides that instead of using the vast reality-altering powers of the Infinity Gauntlet to help proliferate renewable resources across the galaxy, he’s just going to randomly dust half of the entire population of existence so those that are left can... eventually build back up to that point and be culled again? It’s not the best plan! After all, he’s the mad Titan. Not the logically sound Titan.
While it’s kind of weird that such an ardent fandom has dedicated itself to such a Malthusian mission, this is the internet, home of weird stuff—and so we have r/ThanosDidNothingWrong. The subreddit, created in the wake of Infinity War’s release, has grown to over 300,000 subscribers over the last three months to celebrate all things Thanos. But as Polygon has noticed, given the subreddit’s rapid expansion, it kind of became a meme among users that at some point half of the subscribers should get banned, a random massacre of hundreds of thousands of redditors in the name of perfect balance.
Once again, however, this is the internet, home of weird stuff. So after some discussion with Reddit’s admins at large, and a decision to delay the culling from today, July 4 (to avoid engineers having a headache about thousands of disappearing users on their day off), it was decided that the snapture would come July 9. To much rejoicing, despite the impending ban of hundreds of thousands of users!
Given that the subreddit has grown considerably since Polygon highlighted this peculiarly dedicated slice of Infinity War fandom this week , by the time the 9th comes around the randomized culling will be one of the largest mass-bans in Reddit’s entire history. And it’s all out of love for one of Marvel’s most intriguing cinematic villains. But hey, at least half of them will still exist afterwards, right?
[Polygon]