The Truth About Thanos and Titan

Welcome back to Marvel Maniac and MCU After Show. This is your host, Eric Cicada, aka Mr. Honest. And today I have one burning question: what the hell happened to Titan, Thanos's home planet? Seriously, like, we've spent almost a decade talking about the Battle of Titan in Avengers: Infinity War. We've argued about Star-Lord punching Thanos. We've argued about whether Tony and Peter almost got that gauntlet off, which they really did. You could see his, like, hand Almost get coming out of it last second. So frustrating. We've argued about Doctor Strange and those 14,605,000 possible futures. There's so much happening during that sequence that I think Marvel managed to hide an entire mystery directly underneath our feet. Because when the Guardians and Avengers are standing on Titan preparing for Thanos to arrive, Peter Quill scans. the planet and says something very interesting. It's 8 degrees off its axis. Gravitational pull is all over the place. Now we kind of see the effects of that take place in the fight. Kind of explains why everyone's kind of floating like as if they're in or on the moon. But everybody just kind of moves on from that exact fact. It's not really brought up again. Tony has a plan. Drax stops listening. And the biggest villain in MCU history is about to show up. Nobody has time to really ask the question that Quill literally just asked: what the hell happened to this planet? And 8 years later, I would like an answer, because Thanos gives us one, sort of. So let's talk about Thanos's version of Titan. When Doctor Strange meets Thanos, Thanos shows him Titan before the fall with the Reality Stone. And this place is beautiful. I mean, night and day compared to where we're looking at it during the fight. There are massive structures, water, green space, people everywhere. Not too many people, may I add. This does not look like some primitive civilization barely holding itself together. It looks advanced and it looks alive. Thanos tells Strange Titan was suffering from overpopulation and diminishing resources. His answer was to randomly kill half the population, and they rejected him, called him a madman. And eventually, according to Thanos, the extinction he warned them about came to pass. Doctor Strange sarcastically calls him a prophet, and Thanos corrects him and says, "I'm a survivor." This whole interaction may be one of my favorite moments in the entire MCU, but it makes me. Roll over the real question. Okay, but surviving what? Your survivors surviving what? Because there's a giant missing chapter here. Thanos tells us what Titan's problem was. He tells us his proposed solution, but he never tells us exactly what happened after they rejected it. And he tells us that Titan eventually fell. He does not tell us exactly what happened in between. And that distinction has been driving me crazy. Now, I want to be careful here. A planet having an axial tilt is not evidence of somebody blowing it up. Planets have axial tilts. Earth does. But the movie deliberately has Quill scan Titan, react to what he sees, and tells us that the planet is 8 degrees off its axis and that the gravitational pull is all over the place. The movie wants us to understand something is wrong with Titan physically. Look at the place. It's a graveyard. I mean, buildings are torn apart, debris everywhere, entire structures seemingly collapsed into the landscape. No civilization, no emergency camps, no struggling survivors walking around, no remnants, nothing. That may nod to Thanos's age. I mean, this place looks like ruins. And here's where I'm going to start drawing the giant line between MCU canon and Eric standing in front of a conspiracy board with red string. Marvel has never given us the full story of Titan's destruction, so everything from here on out is theory. But man, I mean, there's a lot to theorize about. This is the part that I can't stop thinking about. Thanos describes scarcity— too many people, not enough resources. Okay, what happened next? Did literally everybody just sit there until an entire technologically advanced civilization just died? Was there migration? Did people leave Titan? Were there colonies? Did they seek assistance from neighboring worlds? Did some portion of Titan survive somewhere else? Was there political unrest? Were there wars over the remaining resources? We don't know. And I'm not saying, well, they had spaceships, so obviously food scarcity was easy to fix. We have absolutely no idea the scope of Titan's crisis. But maybe the entire planetary ecosystem was collapsing. Maybe resources beyond food were disappearing. Maybe neighboring worlds wouldn't help them. Maybe whatever happened was already irreversible. But that's the point. We don't know. We only really know Thanos's version of the story, and I'm starting to wonder if that matters. Think about who is giving us this information. Thanos. A man who genuinely believes he's a hero, a prophet. That is one of the most important things about the character. He does not think he's committing atrocities because he enjoys suffering. He believes that he alone understands a universal truth and that everybody else is too weak to act on it. When Gamora challenges him about what he did to her homeworld, Thanos tells her that people were starving, that he corrected the problem, and the generations afterwards supposedly lived With full bellies and clear skies. Gamora's response is much simpler. You murdered half the planet. Thanos calls that a small price for salvation. There it is again. And every time Thanos describes genocide, he describes it like medicine. He's the surgeon, but everyone else is too emotional to accept the operation. And that makes me extremely curious about the way he describes Titan. Because maybe Thanos isn't technically lying. Maybe everything he tells Strange happened. Maybe Titan was running out of resources. Maybe they did reject his plan. Maybe civilization eventually did collapse. But what if he's leaving something out? This is where my theory really begins. In Avengers: Endgame, the 2014 version of Thanos tells the Avengers, in all my years of conquest, violence, and slaughter— that's how he describes his own history. Years of conquest, violence, slaughter. At some point, Thanos transitioned from a citizen of Titan warning his people about extinction to a warlord moving across the universe and imposing his solution on entire planets. What was the first step? My theory: Titan. What if Titan was the prototype? What if Thanos saw a genuine crisis happening on his homeworld Became increasingly radical as nobody accepted his solution and eventually decided that convincing people wasn't enough. Maybe he gathers followers. Maybe he became a political force. Maybe he tried to overthrow Titan's leadership. Maybe he attempted to enact his 50% solution himself. Maybe Titan descended into civil war. Maybe whatever weapons or technology were used during that conflict contributed to the destruction we eventually see. Again, theory. It's just a theory. Marvel has not told, uh, anyone what happened, but narratively it would explain so much about who Thanos becomes afterwards. Because imagine the lesson Thanos takes from Titan. Not my ideology was wrong. Not maybe murdering half the population was an insane response. Instead, they should have listened to me. That is Thanos. And the thing that irks me is there's not half a civilization living on Titan. There's nothing left. And suddenly his entire conquest across the universe takes on somewhat of a different meaning. Every planet becomes Titan. Every civilization becomes another population too weak or too short-sighted to make what he considers the necessary choice. And Thanos decides, fine, I'll make it for you. We actually watch him implement the exact philosophy he proposed on Titan elsewhere. Gamora remembers him invading her world. We even see a bit of it, separating the population and killing half of them. This isn't just generic conquest. That is Titan's solution exported to another planet, which really makes me wonder if Titan was the moment that created the Mad Titan psychologically. Maybe he genuinely loved his world. Maybe he did genuinely believe it was doomed. Maybe he watched civilization collapse all around him, but somewhere inside that disaster, concern became obsession, obsession became ideology, and ideology became, I'm the only person in the universe willing to do what must be done. And that is a terrifying origin for Thanos, because there could be a tiny piece of truth buried beneath an absolutely monstrous conclusion. And this is where Marvel has another giant unused puzzle piece sitting on the table. At the end of Eternals, Pip introduces Eros as the royal Prince of Titan, brother of Thanos, and Eros then introduces himself to the group as a fellow Eternal. Marvel has still barely explained this. I mean, are we ever going to see any follow-up from Eternals? Seemed like an important step and what they were trying to build, even in a scope bigger than the Multiverse Saga. We know Eros exists. We know he's connected directly to Titan. We know he's Thanos's brother. And that means there could be potentially another witness, someone who knew Titan, someone who knew Thanos before the universe knew the Madman. And maybe, just maybe, someone whose version of Titan's destruction sounds very different from Thanos's. Imagine that. We've spent years hearing, they called me a madman. What I predicted came to pass. I'm a survivor. And then Eros eventually tells somebody, this isn't exactly what happened. Now you have my attention. And suddenly Harry Styles appearing for 30 seconds in Eternals isn't just some random unresolved post-credits scene. He could potentially be the one, the only one of the living characters capable of telling us who Thanos was before Thanos became Thanos. And I mean, that information isn't necessarily relevant to the greater story of the MCU, but it's a dang sure interesting one for one of Marvel's, if not Marvel's greatest villain to date. And this entire episode actually began with a completely different question I was asking: how old is Thanos? And the answer is, we don't really know. The MCU has never given us a clean birth year. We know Titan's destruction is already history by the time of Infinity War. Far away history. I mean, the place is ruins. It's not like recently devastated. We know Thanos has spent years conquering worlds, and we know he's been doing this long enough to take Gamora as a child, raise Gamora and Nebula, build armies, establish relationships with people like Ronan, Loki, the Black Order. This dude has a career. But exactly how long ago did Titan die? 10 years? 50? 100? Centuries? The MCU has never nailed that down. And visually, Titan feels ancient. Like I was saying, not ancient like thousands of years necessarily, but just abandoned. Dead. Like what happened there stopped being a disaster a long time ago and just became history. Which makes me want Marvel to finally fill in that blank. And that brings me to the question I did not expect to ask when I started thinking about this. Does Thanos deserve his own movie? Because I think there's absolutely a movie here. And I do not mean a movie where Marvel tries to convince us that Thanos was secretly correct and try to explain that Thanos was just misunderstood and everybody on Titan was mean to him. I mean, Infinity War is technically already that movie. No, show me the fall. Show me Thanos before anyone calls him the Mad Titan. Show me the resource crisis beginning. Show me his first warnings. Show me people disagreeing with him. Show me whatever alternate plans Titan tried. The political tension. Eros— show me their relationship. Show me the moment where Thanos stops trying to convince his people and starts believing he has the right to force them. And then show me what happened to the planet. Because somewhere between that beautiful world he shows Doctor Strange and the destroyed remnants of a world where Tony Stark eventually makes Thanos bleed and drops a building on his head is potentially one of the most important untold stories in the entire MCU. And that is why I love going back to these movies, because Infinity War is so enormous that you can watch it 5, 10, 20 times and still have some line grab you years later. Peter Quill walks onto Titan, looks at his scanner, and basically asks the exact question I'm asking today: what happened here? The movie becomes Infinity War again. Thanos arrives, Spider-Man is flying around, Doctor Strange is multiplying himself, Tony gets stabbed, everybody is trying to get the gauntlet. It's all about the stones. We are captivated by the stones. We're not thinking too much by what seems to be a throwaway line. And you forget that you're watching the battle take place inside the corpse of Thanos's entire civilization. That is insane. And I don't know whether Marvel ever intended all these breadcrumbs to become another story. Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. Maybe they just wanted to add a little bit of mystery to it all. But Eros is still out there. Titan's history is still unexplained, and Thanos gave us only his side. So until Marvel tells us otherwise, here's where my theory lands. Maybe Titan was not simply the tragedy that created Thanos. Maybe Thanos participated in the tragedy that destroyed Titan. Maybe his first attempt to save a civilization became his first attempt to control one. And maybe every world he conquered afterward was Thanos trying to prove over and over again that his people should have listened. Because maybe Titan didn't prove Thanos was right. Maybe Titan was the first place Thanos went wrong. And that's where I'm leaving this one, maniacs. I want your theories. What happened to Titan? [email protected]. Do you think Thanos was telling Doctor Strange the entire story? Was Titan destroyed through starvation, war, something cosmic, or did Thanos himself have a larger role in its destruction than he ever admitted? And would you watch a Thanos origin movie? Because after thinking about this way too much, I absolutely would. I mean, I think I would no matter what the story would be. Thank you so much for listening, honestly. And if you enjoyed the show, try and give us a rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you're listening. It goes the longest way, and we want to assemble more maniacs to our Marvel Maniac Revolution. It's not like Thanos's revolution. We're not going to destroy the world, okay, people? But we are going to gather, talk, discuss, theorize. Join our Discord server. It's in the notes of this episode. We have some small fun conversations happening now. We'd love for you to be a part of it. There's a lot of MCU happening in the next couple months. So, you know, once we we're covering Vision Quest and I want to do a couple character-driven episodes about some of the main players. Players in Avengers: Doomsday. Doomsday is just gonna hit us like a, like a literal brick in the head, and I think it's about dang time. There's also a tip jar in the notes. Never feel obligated, but it always is appreciated. And we do have a Patreon. It's kind of offline right now until we grow a little bit bigger. If you go and check that out, there's a ton of great mini shows I made and put up on there. And if we get more people into the Patreon and wanted to get it rolling again, I'll start making those episodes again. But for now, I wanted to put all my heart into the show and make it the best it can possibly be. I appreciate you. Thank you so much again, and until next time, Avengers disassemble.