Thanos was ruthless, even to his own children

The argument

Those who hold that Thanos is a villain argue that the clearest evidence lies not in what he does to strangers but in what he does to the children he claims to have saved. He 'rescued' two children, and proponents stress the word because the rescue was instrumental: they were taken in order to be trained as ruthless killers, so the apparent act of mercy was the beginning of their use rather than an end in itself. From a young age he forced his two daughters to fight each other, which on this reading is not discipline but the deliberate manufacture of cruelty, since the purpose of the contest was to harden each daughter by setting her against the one person she ought to have been able to trust. The unhealthy rivalry it produced between them was not a side effect but the intended result. The treatment of Nebula is offered as the limiting case. As the fights went on, Thanos replaced her body with mechanics in order to improve her, which proponents argue shows precisely how he regarded his own daughter: as an instrument that was underperforming and could be modified until it performed better. A father who answers his child's defeat by rebuilding her is not raising a child at all. The argument then makes this decisive rather than merely damning. Villainy, on this view, is most reliably identified in how someone treats those with the strongest claim on their protection, and a parent's children have the strongest claim there is. Whatever might be said in Thanos's defence — that his ends were large, or that he believed them necessary — proponents argue that no purpose licenses pitting one's own children against each other, and that no father, no matter what, should place that kind of cruelty on his children. That action alone, they conclude, is enough to establish that Thanos is a villain.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Thanos was simply doing what he had to do. He needed and wanted to raise strong children that would fight and work by his side without fail. He was doing what he needed to do.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Cruelty towards his adopted daughters establishes cruelty, which the opposing position does not deny; what is in dispute is whether that makes him a villain rather than a figure who does terrible things for reasons he takes to be necessary. The premise treats the two as identical and so assumes what it set out to show. [Rejecting P2] "No father should do this" is a claim about parenthood, while the conclusion is a claim about villainy in a story whose stakes the argument never mentions. Resting the whole case on the treatment of two characters also leaves out what the position is really about — what he does to everyone else — which makes this a weak route to the conclusion even for readers who accept it.