In a case of life imitating art, a Thanos-inspired subreddit plans to conduct a playful reenactment of the Mad Titan’s genocidal finger snap in Avengers: Infinity War by randomly banning more than half its subscribers on July 9.
Fans will recall that in Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos claimed he wanted to “save” the universe from suffering the fate that befell his ruined home planet Titan due to overpopulation. To “save” the universe , Thanos used the combined powers of the six Infinity Stones to wipe out half of the universe’s population. Marvel fans were shocked when, in the ending scenes of Infinity War, Thanos eliminated — with a snap of his fingers — half of all sentient life in the universe, including half of the MCU superheroes.
After the release of Marvel Studio’s Avengers: Infinity War, Thanos’ popularity soared among Marvel fans, and he acquired a large online fanbase. With fans looking forward with eager anticipation to Josh Brolin reprising his role as Thanos in Avengers 4, the Mad Titan is proving to be one of the most popular cinematic villains since Star Wars’ Darth Vader.
Several websites and forums dedicated to Thanos have sprung up online since the release of Avengers: Infinity War, with some openly declaring support for Thanos and his madcap mission to “save” the universe and achieve a perfect cosmic balance through a random culling of its teeming population of sentient beings.
The subreddit r/ThanosDidNothingWrong is one of several online forums where fans of the MCU villain meet to share their support for Thanos and defend his role in the MCU film series. Many of the members of the subreddit insist that Thanos was right to implement a Malthusian plan to save the universe. However, when confronted with the argument that Thanos should have used his powers to create more resources to support the universe’s population rather than decimate it, some members of the subreddit conceded that they wouldn’t recommend Thanos’ solution to the problem of overpopulation in the real world.
The subreddit r/ThanosDidNothingWrong now plans to ban half of its subscribers as a fun way to reenact the consequences of Thanos’ snap. Although the site administrators were reportedly wary of the plan, the site moderators moved forward with it after more than 150,000 members upvoted the proposal.
According to The-Jedi-Apprentice, one of the subreddit’s moderators, he has obtained the permission of the site administrators to ban half of the members of the subreddit on July 9.
“The admins are designing a bot for me that will allow me to do the job in a quick and easy manner,” he explained. “So, be patient, and thank you all for your support.”
He had previously planned to implement the mass ban on July 3, but the administrators objected, saying that a mass ban on July 3 was not a good idea because many of Reddit’s engineers would be observing the 4th of July with their families and thus the site would be unprepared to handle any disruptive impact of the move.
Two new subreddits, r/SoulWorld and r/InTheSoulStone, have reportedly been set up to accept members of r/ThanosDidNothingWrong who are banned on July 9. The choice of names for the new subreddits is a hat tip to the popular fan theory that the people eliminated in Thanos’ universe-wide culling ended up as prisoners inside the Soul Stone, one of the six Infinity Stones which contains the Soul World, an alternate universe or dimension.
A scene from Infinity War shows Thanos inside the orange-skied Soul World where he meets the infant version of Gamora.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of fans are rushing to join the subreddit to participate in the reenactment. Membership of the subreddit has swelled dramatically to more than 300,000 subscribers and more fans will likely join as media reports help to spread the word about the mass ban that is being described as the “biggest mass ban in reddit history.”