Fans can’t help but think about Marvel’s next crossover, wondering how Avengers will deal with the aftermath of Infinity War.

MCU has set up a major conflict between Iron Man and Thanos, as everyone had a bone to pick with the Mad Titan. Tony had already said that ever since the New York attack, this was all he could think.

A new fan theory reveals why this dichotomy is so prominent, and it takes us back to the Mind Stone, the final stone he acquired and the first stone he gave to Loki in the first Avengers film.

“A whirlpool that sucks in all hope of life, and at its center is”…the mind stone.

First off, props to whomever posted the original ‘mind stone is the true villian’ theory….it got me thinking. From the bonus A3 features, we know that in response to Tony asking “how do you know my name?” Thanos replies “I know your soul…it is much like mine, cursed with knowledge”. Great line, but I don’t think Thanos and Tony are necessarily “cursed with knowledge” per se; rather, I think that they are both suffering from some intense PTSD inflicted by the mind stone.

You could argue that the “endgame” actually started at the beginning of AoU, when Wanda showed Tony a vision of dead avengers and an unstoppable alien invasion. Tony’s vision, which directly led to Ultron, the disbanding of the Avengers and his inability to move on with his life with Pepper, emanated from the mind stone. In an inception-y kind of way, it instilled in Tony a drive to “do anything to make things right” which, in the most basic sense, was to prevent the outcome he witnessed and believed would come true. But his actions were premised on a “vision” that seemed more an induced hallucination (even the movie sequences looked all ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’) rather than a true revelation of the future. Regardless, it changed the paradigm for Tony personally and would impact Earth and its population forever.

I think it could be altogether likely that, at some point prior to the MCU timeline, Thanos was shown a similar vision – one where his beautiful home planet had withered away and population of Titan starving, suffering & dying. Thanos would, in that light, be similarly driven to “do anything to make things right” which, if fueled by the same fear and irrationality that drove Tony to create Ultron, could otherwise explain his moral ambivalence to the atrocities he and his followers had been committing in the names of ‘life’ and ‘survival’.

As a result of their respective visions (hypothetically of course), both Tony and Thanos would become self-fulfilling prophesies of their worst fears – Tony’s obsession with protection of Earth could have very easily resulted in the total extinction of the human race; Thanos obsession with ensuring that what happened (or what he *saw happen) on Titan would never happen again, ultimately led him to murder trillions during the snappening. Both would, through their actions or creations, become the personification of the mind stone (according to Thor, at least): a whirlpool that sucks in all hope of life. Where the mind stone goes, death and destruction follow.

First post, thanks for reading (and thanks to those who might’ve already advanced these thoughts, didn’t mean to steal!)

However, it’s unlikely that this theory would exactly work as the Russos do stick to the comic book material. And while many fans wonder about the film’s ending, it turns out that it got finalized during the recently finished reshoots.

“Which we don’t even know what it’s gonna be yet,” said Hulk actor Mark Ruffalo, speaking about the reshoots on the Marvelists podcast. “We’re not just doing reshoots, we’re going to finish the movie, which we really didn’t get to finish totally when we left it last year … I don’t even know that they really know exactly. Some of it is happening while we’re there. It’s pretty amazing. And we’ll shoot some stuff and a few days later come back and reshoot it cause we wanna take it in another direction. It’s a very living organism, even as we approach it being a locked picture, we’re still working on it.”

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