Thanos (Earth-199999)

Thanos is a Titan warlord who is obsessed with gathering the Infinity Stones and using them to kill half of all life in the universe. The mad Thanos sees this venture as ultimately benevolent, as it will allow the remaining life to thrive with their greater proportion of resources.

Biography

Razing of worlds

As part of his quest to "balance" the universe, Thanos traveled to various planets with his army, slaughtering the populations of a number of worlds. He would periodically take young people from those worlds into his thrall, including Gamora and Nebula. Those two would become his two most auspicious "daughters," as he abusively trained them to become elite assassins, frequently turning them against each other to fight for his shallow approval. Thanos considered Nebula inferior to Gamora, and repeatedly brutalized her body with mechanical upgrades until she was essentially a cyborg. Gamora and Nebula each grew to detest Thanos, but had trouble escaping a certain level of Stockholm syndrome in the process.

Failed intermediaries

By 2012, Thanos had acquired the Mind Stone and a legion of Chitauri forces, as well as the Other, who acted as his right hand. After learning that the Tesseract, containing the Space Stone, had surfaced on Earth, he recruited the malevolent Loki to retrieve it for him: in victory, Loki would himself become ruler of Earth. He granted Loki the Mind Stone, imbued in the tip of a scepter—which Loki used to great effect in turning enemies to his side—as well as an army of Chitauri. Nonetheless, the invasion was repelled by the newly formed team of heroes called the Avengers. In the process, the Mind Stone fell out of Loki's, and thus Thanos's, hands, and the Tesseract was also moved offworld. In 2014, Thanos struck a similar deal with Ronan the Accuser to get him the Orb in exchange for helping Ronan destroy the people of Xandar. He entrusted Ronan with the assistance of Gamora and Nebula. Thanos knew that the Orb contained the Power Stone, but withheld this critical information from Ronan. Gamora was secretly concerned about the widespread death and destruction that Ronan and Thanos would soon wreak, and decided to betray them and sell the Orb to a third party herself. Ronan eventually obtained the Orb from a ragtag group of heroes who would come to be known as the Guardians of the Galaxy, including Gamora, and was shocked to find the Power Stone inside. Ronan turned on Thanos and attempted to use his own fleet with the Power Stone to destroy Xandar—Nebula swore allegiance to him, seeing an opportunity to flee her tyrannical patriarch. He was defeated by the Guardians along with the Ravagers and the Xandarian Nova Corps, and the Nova Corps stored the Power Stone away on Xandar. Nebula fled from the battle, stealing a spaceship and flying off to parts unknown. Once again, Thanos had put his quest in the hands of another and they had failed.

Infinity War

The frustrated Thanos decided to take matters into his own hands. He knew the immense power of the Infinity Stones, and knew that to control all of them he would need a powerful conduit. In 2015, he and his army invaded the dwarf world of Nidavellir and coerced master blacksmith Eitri into constructing such a device for him, threatening to massacre the other dwarves if he refused. Eitri did as he was told and crafted the Infinity Gauntlet, a powerful metallic glove with six depressions for holding the stones. Thanos's army killed the dwarves anyway, and though he spared Eitri's life, he maimed his hands to prevent him from forging anything else.

Thanos spent the next few years tracking down the Infinity Stones, more focused than ever on achieving his life's goal. His tactic seems to have been to locate all of the stones and then collect them in quick succession rather than to obtain them one at a time as he had tried previously. A vengeful Nebula snuck onto his flagship and attempted to assassinate him, but failed, and Thanos took her captive. By 2018, he had learned the locations of most of the Infinity Stones: the Power Stone remained on Xandar; the Reality Stone was held by the Collector on Knowhere; the Space Stone, inside the Tesseract, remained in the treasure vault on Asgard; and the Mind Stone and Time Stone were on Earth, held by Vision and Doctor Strange, respectively. Only the mysterious Soul Stone remained at large: Gamora and Nebula had worked to locate it when they were loyal to Thanos, and he scoured Nebula's memory banks to find where it was. He learned that Gamora had found a map to the Soul Stone years ago, but had destroyed it to prevent Thanos from finding it. Thanos knew that he would have to find and capture Gamora and force her to lead him to the stone.

In 2018, Thanos's army assaulted Xandar and massacred its people as he had done to so many before, successfully making off with the Power Stone and securing it in his Infinity Gauntlet.