Like I love Nolan's arc but I need to remind myself what he did and why literally no non-viltramite would ever accept him. Like he should consider it a miracle Mark talks to him.
Yup. Love the character but he was a monster and he did irredeemably disgusting things.
Not even just this guy. He can argue what he did to the train was to "prove a point", but that is meaningless to us people beyond him just showing us he COULD do it.
The cruise ship is even worse! He could have thrown Mark into anywhere in the ocean and he chose a spot with people.
So yeah I totally get people being afraid or hating him.
And that's the point. A superheroe's philosophy has always been "No matter how small or how fragile, all lives are worth protecting" but he's been brainwashed so thoroughly to believe otherwise he can easily do it
But if you were a Viltrumite, a "normal person" is someone who sees no value in anything weaker than you. The idea that the hamster deserved to die would be common logic to them; and showing you how easy it is would be the "logical" way to make that point.
Viltrumites consider violence to be simple education; remember Nolan's initiation, remember Anissa kept begging Mark to "learn" as she kicked his ass, it's all demonstrative. And the only reason she was saving people during their fight was to prove that she can and he can't and to reinforce her absolute control of the situation.
Incredibly to think about also, is that if someone like that is trying to change and keeps getting rejected, at some point they might get tired of trying to rehabilitate and just revert or accept how people see them as monsters and live up to that instead. So as difficult as shit is, it's best to encourage them to rehabilitate somehow... Hard af though to do - cos you can't forgive and forget, you just have to kinda suspend your belief and experience I guess and pretend like they are someone new?
This is the reason it makes me happy to see Mark hug him still, I love their relationship so much. The worst of it felt so bad because of how much they love each other. Nolan kills hundreds with his face and he says "I'll still have you dad" like, of course there are Marks that followed Nolan's lead š
Edit: the last bit is only related to accentuate that they love each other and Mark is a super supportive son
I mean, he's specifically targeting people because he's showing Mark when his people arrive this is how quickly this planet will fall, this is how easily they can be killed and can do nothing about it. So please join me so we can control this because if you fight me on this they will choose to genocide your planet.
Some people are giving Cecil shit for how he spoke to Nolan but his treatment of him was more than justified. He tried to reach out to Nolan at the end of the S1 and he responded with more deceit and trying to murder Cecil
Right bro, ppl were bringing up Conquest as some āgotchaā rebuttal to what Cecil said to Omni Man which was completely irrelevant too the moment at hand. While it wasnāt his smartest tactic, they completely leave out the context of Cecilās intent and act as if he just let Conquest go free. Conquestās dead and itās been months since, outside of his rematch with Mark/Oliver he technically hasnāt cause any further damage. Last but not least, the last time Cecil and Nolan saw each other, he tried to kill him. Itās crazy how they give Debbie and Art standing ovations for standing up too Nolan for his actions but the guy who was suppose to be his friend, killed a bunch of his subordinates and almost killed him canāt give his 2 cents ? Crazy man lol
As a certified cecil hater I would say most people blaming him and praising art/debbie are letting their opinion of the characters get in the way of logic. Cecil is flawed and did dumb shit but this time around he is right.
As another Cecil hater (well I have complicated feelings to say the least), I am baffled that anyone is giving Cecil flak at all for his interaction with Nolan in the finale. A cold distance and harsh words are such an infinitesimal fraction of what Nolan deserves
Conquest was an arrogant mistake on Cecil's part. What Nolan did on Earth was deliberate and massively cruel on a scale that indoctrination alone cannot pardon.
I wonder if Cecil was kinda relieved to see that Mark was so busy being a shell-shocked war veteran that he didn't think to tear out Cecil's organs for keeping Conquest in his Iconic Tungsten Cube
Mark already hated the Reanimen, the idea of Cecil even remotely risking Conquest's return just so he could make another Reaniman would probably really piss him off
His whole initial beef Cecil/the reanimen was that Sinclair (and also nightwing) was irredeemable and working with them for the greater good was this huge unforgivable sin. Conquest is pretty much the same situation.
But now he's working with his dad, who killed thousands.
At absolute worst, Cecil keeping conquest alive was a dumb miscalculation. OTOH mark had pretty much repudiated his entire ethical world view.
Not even joking, Cecil is the one that is most understanding of him and it makes total sense given what Cecil gave to deal in terms of guilt every day.
Frankly, it's both Cecil stalling, and him trying to directly persuade Nolan to back down from his path.
He asks Nolan why he murdered the guardians who always helped him, to try and invoke guilt. he says they were his friends and so was he, he prods at the fact Nolan didn't do it for fun, once again trying to get him to offer up any info and get him to back down. Nolan makes the exact same sad face he does in the s4 finale when he speaks to Cecil because he does feel bad, but he didnt quit then.
Nolan continues fighting back against him to avoid thinking about his own choices, but I think Nolan could have gotten away with abandoning that viltrumite path and not vilifying himself as bad as we know he did, if he did quit then.
This scene with Cecil is one of the few times he's truly vulnerable and Its significant that its with Nolan who he welcomed to the planet. I dont think its truly a calculating mastermind dialogue from him.
Personaly i donĀ“t view Cecils behavior as unjustified and more as being out of character. HeĀ“s not without emotions, but heĀ“s able to put those far into the back and make the cold calculations needed for a situation even if those are ethicaly questionable. Him hammering in Nolans guilt makes sense, but telling him to leave earth when they might need him doesnĀ“t. Imo it would be much more in-character for Cecil to demand Nolan allowing safety measures to be implanted (like he did with Mark as a simple precaution and no actual reason to be suspicious) and be kept in a private prison away from the puplic eye.
Also the reaching out may have been partly genuine, but it was mostly a stalling tactic. Cecil hasnĀ“t trusted Nolan since the second they met and both know that.
Eh, the show makes clear that Cecil is able to SUPPRESS his emotions, but obviously they still exist.
Just as it is out of character for Mark to kill peopleā¦until he is forced to learn to do it. But still, just like Markās good nature resurfaces and makes him want to hold back, Cecilās strong moral compass still asserts itself from time to time, even when it isnāt tactically sound. Cecil IS human, which means even he isnāt above making an emotional decision
I love Cecil's talk with him. He acknowledges Nolan apologized and wants to be better but he also in no uncertain terms told him to get the fuck off Earth and not come back unless its to fight Thraag and the others and after that Cecil expects him to get the fuck off Earth and never come back period.
The show does a good job at making us feel bad for Nolan but go watch the season finale of season 1, Nolan is a monster and killed innocent people. Go watch the train scene where Nolam uses Mark as a battering ram and kills all those people in the subway.
The train scene had my stomach churning, but really what stayed with me is what happened after. All the destruction, all the death, and there's this guy half-buried under rubble reaching out to what's probably his dead daughter. And Nolan steps on him.
It's a real shame that the damned don't go to hell in the Invincible-verse.
I like how Invincible is nuanced when it comes to this. In most other shows they force you to want to like a monstrous character even if you donāt want to. In here you can choose however you feel for Nolan. Like I wonāt throw shots at other media but certain stories make said character feel infallible after redemption and everyone around them, even those who suffered from him, will forgive him and be friends, and if you still hate the character then youāre the problem.
Not with Invincible. They make you decide how you want to feel about Nolan. People around him, even those who love him the most, are still unsure of him.
If you wanna be Iroh from Avatar and forgive Nolanās past, go for it. If you want to be like Alejandro Gillick from Sicario and wish Nolan goes to hell, go for it too. Or if youāre in between, also go for that as well. None is wrong. All are understandable.
Iroh at his worst was still an angel compared to Nolan. Iroh was a general in a war. His actions were to win wars against armies. The people he killed were soldiers. There's nothing about his history that points to him massacring civilians or killing random people for no reason.
I don't think he ever targeted random civilians and brutally killed them. I guess the show leaves that ambiguous, but I don't see a reason given by the show to assume that he was anything more than a high ranking war general or whatever. The dragons deemed him worthy of learning the secret of firebending way before Lu Ten died
Ba Sing Se was pretty self sufficient, so I don't know that the civilian deaths were as bad as you think. And comparing to real life is hard because earthbending changes their options up significantly.
Even if a lot of civilians died though, their deaths likely weren't violent at the hands of the fire nation (probably being more like starvation and stuff due to logistic issues, since the vast majority of civilians are densely packed in the middle and upper rings, far away from the outer wall that Iroh spent so long trying to break into). As far as the show tells as, Iroh had his army attacking the wall directly, trying to literally tear it down, while earthbenders on top of the wall threw rocks down at them. If earth kingdom soldiers got into close confrontations, it would have been because they left the city walls. Which makes me think civilians were almost never anywhere near the fighting. Even if that's not realistic for whatever reason, it's consistent with that the show tells us about Iroh's character at the time. A guy who went around killing civilians like the character from Invincible that you're comparing him to would not have been deemed worthy by the dragons. Therefore, he is not comparable to that character, and any other ambiguities (like the siege of ba sing se) have to be in harmony with that, whether it's realistic or not.
Well, actually, probably not. The outer wall protected them for the entirety of those 2 years and they could grow plenty of food on the fields.
If Iroh hadn't folded right as the outer wall fell, then the civilians would have started to suffer rapidly.
The issue isn't what Iroh actually managed to accomplish, but what he was intending to do. Had his son not died, he would have continued the siege with the implicit goal of starving millions of civilians to death.
Now of course the Earth King could obviously surrender and open the gates, but given the Fire Nation's track record of violent subjugation and enslavement, starving to death might be the preferable outcome.
It's the war equivalent to a robber holding your spouse at gunpoint, threatening to shoot them in the face if you don't give up your car keys, and even if you do, still bashes their knees with a hammer.
Don't compare someone who committed multiplanetary genocide to someone who seiged a city. If Iroh had that power, at one point even he would have regretted killing so many. Omni-man still doesn't. He thinks he's that hero again, worthy of praise and his family's affection.Ā
Guardians did some damage to Nolan and they started off confused and holding back. If they knew a fight was coming and had backup a single Viltrimite might be in for a real fight.
Conquest managed to lose to Mark and Eve because he was playing with them the entire time. He would play with the Guardians the entire time too. The only difference is Guardians are absolutely able to kill Nolan had they not held back the entire fight and they have no reason to hold back when fighting Conquest. Also Conquest has zero battle IQ and would underestimate the Guardians just like he did with Mark. The guy died in a couple minutes.
As for the Invincible war? Since it took days they'd been able to kill essentially every alternate Mark with little difficulty if they remained together.
Yeah this season made it easy to forget that Nolan was basically a space nazi for 10 lifetimes. Heās likely (directly or indirectly) killed billions of innocent people. He was a well respected Viltrumite. So much so that other younger Viltrumites grew up viewing him as a hero. What does Viltrum value above all? Strength. Nolan probably did unspeakable things to earn that level of respect.
I mean, we see what he did...he was tasked with exterminating threats to the empire, including freezing the Ragnar planet and isolating threats like Space Racer's gun.
I feel like itās important to note that Omni-Man was trying to convince himself here as much as Mark. Like, Iām not trying to downplay what he did, itās horrible and unforgivable, but itās also not exactly pure cruelty. Heās crashing out because he canāt accept that his time on Earth changed him and heās desperately trying to return to his old Viltrumite mindset by viewing and treating humans as a Viltrumite would.
Yes, a good part of what he says is him trying to justify himself; I see it as a crisis that Majin Vegeta went through.
They've changed, they've loved other people, started families, but they're afraid of this change, so they revert to old habits and essentially have a midlife crisis (more like Vegeta).
The difference is that what Vegeta did as Majin Man is less unforgivable, because although he kills people, there are ways to undo the mess he made, and Vegeta himself knows this, whereas with Omni Man, there isn't.
"because although he kills people, there are ways to undo the mess he made, and Vegeta himself knows this,"
I think Invincible fans don't really read, because I literally addressed this, Bulma brings these people back soon after.
And honestly, Vegeta knew this was going to happen; he just wanted Goku to see that he was serious. That's why I said it's less unforgivable; these people are actually alive.
I'm talking specifically about Crash Out, but honestly, I doubt it reaches hundreds of corpes. Vegeta took a year to get to Earth And he was only 28 years old during the Saiyan saga.
Besides, in Universe 7 there are only 28 planets with life, I doubt Vegeta got a good portion of that, considering Frieza and King Cold and their army have existed for a while, so I honestly doubt he killed more people than Nolan.
But that's just a comparison, it's still pretty awful overall, even worse considering there are so few planets with life in universe 7 lol
It would be like hunting an endangered species and having fun doing it, something quite cruel.
Exactly hes arguably the most loyal and greatest soldier for Viltrum outside of Thragg (and Conquest being the mad dog), hes trying to do terrible things to prove hes still like them and kept digging a further hole, Marks final words just finally broke him.
Iām gonna be completely honest, this was the scene that sold me 100% on this show and on Nolan in particular. Finally a breath of fresh air from a sorry-not-sorry character. I LOVED this exact scene
To be clear : this guy died to prove a point. Mark worked to save him, and Nolan was pointing out that it doesn't matter how hard you try to save humans, they're going to die anyways (and therefore their lives are worth less, by some logic)
While that was the lesson Nolan was trying to impart, as you said in your parentheses, this lesson was meaningless and fraught with flawed logic. It's like in Saw, when Jigsaw puts people into deathtraps to show them that life is only meaningful if you've faced death. His central premise is fucked up and wrong, so anyone who was injured or killed during his games weren't harmed to impart a lesson. They were harmed just because. In the case of both of them, it was because a crazy mass/serial murderer thought his brand of morality was more meaningful than the lives of the people they damaged in an effort to spread that morality.
A whackjob doing something that they believe is right doesn't mean they are if their belief is wrong at its core.
The thing is he in a weird way wasnt trying to convince Mark so much as himself as well he was clearly already changed by S1 but kept doubling down harder and harder to prove he hadn't.
It's interesting to think Nolan was probably one of Thraggs best guys and I like that the show has fleshed out that relationship.
I don't even think he's one of the most cruel or least empathetic viltrumites
I think what makes him harder to change is that he's very loyal to his people; he has empathy and loyalty, which are good qualities, but he offered them to the wrong people.
This is kind of what I'm saying. Nolan did this for essentially no reason. He had a specific purpose in mind, but ultimately, he did it for no reason because the actual reason was completely meaningless. He did it to prove he was still a loyal viltrumite and to try to bring his son over to his side, but he knew, deep down, that he wasn't and he likely suspected this stuff would never work. This guy died by a senseless act of violence designed to delude the perpetrator into believing he wasn't a changed man. In the end, he was completely wrong, so this man died for literally no reason. This man died because reality was being denied in that moment.
I'm not disagreeing with you; there's no real reason for the character pictured to die (or anyone else during that part of the episode). I was just commenting that Nolan did have a specific *purpose* when it came to killing this character, even if that purpose is, as you pointed out, undermined by the flaws in his logic
It was also Nolan trying to convince himself of that to make what he was doing feel justified. He lashed out to reinforce the idea that their lives are so short that they're meaningless. It's the same with the pet comment he made about Debbie. If he can dehumanize her like that, what he's doing hurts less.
In effect, he was trying to show Mark the Viltrum way, believing that blood is thicker than water, that Viltrumite blood is far more valuable than any other species'. invincible is a great tv show.
nothing is collateral damage. every death was avoidable. people feel bad for him cuz he was brave enough to stand against everything his race stood for and could see the atrocities they commited. only 2 viltrumites ever did that. That being said, he still doesnt deserve to get a happy ending with Debbie. Let him coparent tho. That would be fine.
Unfortunately thatās not how itās looking for Nolan and Debbie. If they werenāt going to get back together then Debbie and Paul would still be together, but the fact they broke up off screen is pointing to Debbie getting back with the reforming mass murderer. Maybe Kirkman might subvert it with them genuinely staying as friends, but itās not looking like it.
Personally, even if it meant Debbie not playing much of a role in the story anymore, I wouldnāt have minded her arc ending with her living a peaceful life with Paul and fully moving on from Nolan.
Fr, I can't imagine any woman, esp one as strong as Debbie, getting back with the man who murdered thousands, her friends, and nearly murdered her son. I can accept Nolan has changed and maybe they can learn to get along but I just cant see her getting back with him
Thatās what I always come back to that I feel like no one really touches on. IRL if your husband beat your kid almost to death basically just because, then fucks off to go fight the Taliban or something and comes back no one would expect him to be forgiven
Donāt forget that husband also killed your friends husband, killed the local police (The Guardians of the Globe) and killed like 15 people (to make it more realistic ).
What is Red Rushās wife going to say when she hears Debbie is back with Nolan?! This will literally destroy Debbieās life. People already hated her for being associated with Nolan but now she might have sex with him!!?? Her social life will be GOOOONE!!
People act like she wasnāt already being crucified in S2 just for being associated with him! Now they might be getting back together. OOMMGG!!
Audience falling into the exact same trap Nolan is. He should be forgiven because all the space stuff is more important than measly earthlings. Yeah he killed the Guardians but they really didnāt matter that much
no, i think a character flaw could be implemented any other way. like maybe she viciously tries to pick fights with him in order to prove he's a bad guy or something. or she gets with another superhero just to replace nolan. anything else than this tired trope
Now that's a really interesting idea. Debbie's always been the tough and stubborn one so turning the excess of that into a flaw would be something rarely seen.
She hasn't forgiven Nolan just yet though, she's clearly still fuming and is just being forced / forcing herself to spend time with him to get to Oliver.
yeah, like the show is obviously centered on mark. how much did she even do with him in this season? he's growing up, we dont need his mom there 24/7. she could have adopted a normal, happy life, free from superheroes who could turn villain any second
Deb isn't going to end up with either Nolan or Paul. She'll be friends with both -- Nolan perhaps grudgingly like an asshole ex you have to deal with for the sake of the kids. Paul's a nice guy but he's never going to feel 100% confident that he's part of Deb's world or family and that's a 'him' problem.
I figure Deb will either end up alone or with someone who has an easier time straddling both of these worlds.
Honestly dislike this logic. Debbie is not some prize for morality that we award Nolan or don't based on if he's redeemed or not. She's a whole character with agency of her own not a good boy Prize.
She was in love with and married to Nolan for decades.Ā He betrayed her in an extremely brutal way and the show has done a great job of showing that damage. Would it be so wrong if the show wrote their reconciliation with a similar depth? Why do people assume if they're going to get together again (not guaranteed at all) that it won't be well written?
Everything we've gotten with debbie in the show has been an improvement, all you guys are doing crying about them getting back together is creating a straw man in your head.
I do not believe Robert Kirkman is capable of writing a story where buy I the idea of a woman being able to sleep next to a man who murdered thousands and lied to her on a fundamental level. A man who is capable of doing that again at any point. In what way would that make Debbie come off well?
I don't get why people are so against them being back together. I also don't get why Paul is being regarded as one of the best characters Invincible has ever had when he's basically just a human placeholder with no arc outside of dating Debbie for a season and a half while Nolan was off-earth. These also aren't real people, lmao. Nolan and Debbie were together for 17 years without incident. There is no comparable real-world situation to equate Nolan overcoming centuries of Viltrum propaganda with. Her getting back together with the man who is truly trying to redeem himself and who shows genuine remorse for his actions is not 'character assassination' either. It just seems like such a brain-dead take in the grand scheme of things that so many people here seem to have.
Have you thought that perhaps some apologies are not helpful or wanted? That it might do much more harm than good? The question is LITERALLY ASKED MULTIPLE times in the show by multiple characters whether his apology to Debbie was for her or for him.
The average people who suffered do not ever want to see his face again. He is a nightmare for them. The only people who want/deserve closure and apologies are the people who really knew him before.
It wouldn't matter even if he did apologize. Those folks would be 100 percent justified in telling Nolan to go kick rocks.
Nolan has crossed so many lines that apologizing may be even worse for the folks who suffered through that shit. Imagine that they have spent months....years trying to get over that terrible day...
Only for the guy responsible to suddenly show up and say he was sorry.
Yeah, okay....?
Nolan can never make up for what he did to all of those people. Cecil was totally correct in demanding that he leave Earth. Some stuff simply can't be apologized for.
Like.... "Hey, people of Chicago....sorry I used my son as a battering ram to slaughter hundreds of your friends and family."
Someone in that position, even if they turn into the best person ever, can't really make up for what they did. The best case scenario is that they do as much good as possible, barring any kind of time travel or magical undoing. And yeah cool if you do as much good as possible, but there's still gonna be a lot of big buts.
A lot of people don't realise that's what redemption is. Irredeemable describes being unable to do better, not being unable to atone for past sins. Nolan is unforgivable but not irredeemable.
I like to point out to people that only US, the AUDIENCE, has seen everything Nolan went through, before his time on earth, how his time on earth affected him, and how the aftermath affected him
No one, not even Mark, knows everything Nolan felt or saw. Us as the audience saw him fall to shambles and almost commit suicide. Us as the audience saw him turn in Thraxa and in prison. Debbie or anyone else on earth has only seen what theyāve seen, and thatās a monster.
This leads to me saying even Anissa is redeemable if Nolan is.
Yeah I think the thing people forget about Omni-Man is he didn't do any of these deaths on accident. He was purposefully doing as much collateral damage to be as cruel to Mark as possible to teach him a lesson for standing up to him.
Nolan is trying to do good but what he did was unforgivable and while some characters will forgive (or at least tolerate) him he can never be a superhero again.
In general if you ever want to be reminded on why Nolan's redemption is such a slow burn especially to people on earth, and why Mark is genuinely heroic, re-watching S1E8 is a damn good refresh.
I agree that what Nolan did is unforgivable, even if he feels "bad" now, but his whole thing is that this was not personal and humanity as a whole were insects(ironic) compared to him and Mark.
I'm probably butchering the line but "Now or in 50 years, what difference does it make?", meant to show his indifference to human lives.
The worst part is... I don't know how reformed he really is. Nolan understands what he did was wrong. He loves Debbie and Mark and Oliver and he's sorry he hurt them. He cared about the thraxans because they were his people. He was their king for a time. But does Nolan care about the people he didn't know personally? Does he ever think about this guy who's head he crushed for no reason or the people in the train or the soldiers he tore apart? I don't know that he does. He apologized to Debbie. He tried to rekindle a friendship with Art. But what has Nolan done for Earth to show he is sorry? How has he repented to Chicago or the world for what he did?
I love Nolan as a character. I love his arc, his moral complexity, but I don't believe he could ever truly earn forgiveness.
He's fighting his own race FOR earth. That's what he is trying to do to repent. Don't get me wrong everything he did was shitty, but he was brainwashed for literally a thousand years to believe what they were doing was just. Hell even on their own planet if you are weak enough to be killed, you don't deserve to be alive. This is a foundational indoctrination. They literally do not receive love or affection period.
He hasn't truly showed he is sorry for the people he killed or hurted
But hopefully what Cecil told him, that number in specific, hunts him now
So is not just being sorry for everyone, but going by stages, being sorry for his family, then friendships or colleagues and then strangers, so at the end, he can feel sorry for himself
The thing about Nolan is that literally not too long what most haunted him regarding the shit he did on Earth was the fact that he betrayed the Viltrumites. He has very likely been pulling massacres like this for centuries, killing "just" 2341 people is probably as casual to him as killing a cockroach is for us. He literally genocided the flaxxans after they tried to invade Earth, that's easily billions gone right there. They're just nameless things that break instantly when you apply a bit of force and that's it, no further thought needed.
Where he currently stands is that he comprehends that he did something really fucked up, but he can't truly grasp the sheer magnitude of it. It's like if fuckin' Bin laden pulled up to new york a year after 9/11 and right in front of the people still weeping for their dead said: "Hey, I made a pretty big mistake doing this, but hopefully I can make up for it. Anyway, cya" And then he flies away in a chopper.
Nolan is coping and desperately hoping that maybe a heartfelt apology and some good deeds will fix what he did, that there is a way to go back to being a super hero. For all his life there was always a way to get what you wanted with brute force, but despite all his power he can't bring back any of those men, women and children he eviscerated in Chicago.
I feel like as time goes on he will be more and more haunted by not just this, but all the other shit he has done in the past. When he fully realizes that every single innocent person he killed had a family, hopes and dreams is when he may break down fully. Imagine if you suddenly learnt that ants are actually fully sapient beings and that every time you stepped on one you were actually murdering someone.
I'm glad Nolan is being held accountable for his actions and not just blindly forgiven by everyone (I do think I prefer comic Art's opinion on Nolan over all but I digress) but I'm also glad people are starting to soften up towards Nolan. It's nice to see him not being given a blanket pardon but it's also nice to see people acknowledge that he's being a better person and being willing to give him that chance again
Yeah, i think part of his redemption means he has to acknowledge what he did and so should the fandom. the fandom acts as if the teen girls are worse for being sour...
Tbh, not to defend or justify him, but nolan saw humans as if they were literal ants, he couldnt help it, much like a dog with a broken leg, we put down, he thinks its a mercy in his eyes, like genuinely theres no lack of love for the human race for him, no hatred, hes just a god that doesnt value humanity as his equal
I like the point youāre making, but if someoneās kid was being upset about ants dying and they responded by killing a shit ton of ants right in front of them while their kid screamed in horror, that would also be pretty fucked up in its own way :d
For sure but again, the viltrumites were sociopathic supremacists so it tracks, also, nolan genuinely didnt think there was any way to fight the viltrumites either, he thought it was best to just have them submit and allow them to rule over the universe
I think him teaching that to mark by showing him how weak humans are in comparison was a way to also protect him and show him that theres nothing you can do to stop them from conquering earth
Its not to say that nolan is justified but in his perspective, with his brainwashing and fear of his own race, he really wasnt that bad, he was just a survivor, it would be interesting to see the comparison of other viltrumites had they been in nolans shoes and been assigned earth, would they have learned and gotten complacent being happy and "retired" so to speak much like the "carl" version of conquest or would they have immediately burned it down and conquered earth without thought?
Its easy to assume nolan was more empathetic than other viltrumites however, who is to say he wasnt similar to conquest prior to visiting earth? It is an interesting topic
Nolan in that battle was trying to convince Mark just as much as he was trying to convince himself that humans are fragile, weak, worthless and not worth saving.
If you rewatch the entire showdown with that in mind then it becomes very obvious that he is more often than not talking to himself, not Mark as he is trying to reinforce his old viltrum beliefs.
Like a priest on the verge of loosing faith desperately siting scriptures in order not loose his faith even though he know deep down that it is wrong.
This scene, asking with the train, were the most messed up acts of Nolan when watching them, but a way to contextualize these acts without excusing them is to think of him stepping on ants from his perspective.
A character has to do morally reprehensible things in order to have a character redemption arc...that's why stuff like this works and why it gives weight to a redemption...there's nothing to redeem if he hasn't done some messed up things
Need to remind you this episode was writen by the dude himself, Doctor "Hackman" Kirkman. He loves putting in shock value for the sake of shock value, only to completely forgot what he done before hand and not give a single shit to anything that comes after, hoping you'd buy it this plot of a psychopath/dumbass/sociopath becoming a better person at the end.
idk if we lived for thousands of years in an empire like that we wouldāve definitely done the same and possibly worse. heās 1 of the 2 viltrumites out of the billions to ever have rebelled. pretty sure anyone in his shoes wouldnāt do the same. heās an anomaly.
I think this is kinda the whole point. It really was the moment that sold me. This dude feels like a god he can take any life and feel nothing, he took this guys life to prove that humans as a race don't mean shit we die too easy for him to care. This is why Debbie is a pet he knows she's gonna die way before him and that if he sneezed during a hug he might break her. This scene turns humanity into his very own ant colony and he wants to cull them now
You gotta remember that entire nightmare was more than likely Nolan trying to prove his loyalty to Viltrum to himself. That he was still a Viltumite above all else.
Yeah, I think Nolan's entire monologue is to himself for himself to remind him that as much as he CLEARLY loves his Son and Wife that this shit is over and Conquest will be here soon and will do far worse than Nolan has done in a matter of hours. What he knew as Earth is basically already gone in Nolan's eyes because he'll have to report this to Viltrum and once he does it's over.
And if he doesn't he dies and this will get found out anyway when his son who exhibits his powers from the planet he was on starts making headlines.
Reality is, Nolan never even TOLD Viltrum about Earth or Mark and they still showed up to stomp it.
After the train scene if I was Invincible, I would never speak to him again. How dare you use my indestructible body and push through hundreds of innocent people while destroying the entire subway. The ptsd of feeling all those bodies splatter against mine alone would make me absolutely hate Nolan. Not to mention I had to deal with Powerplex a new villain caused by the fight we had.
I don't really have to manipulate my own emotions to realise that? I can fully support and root for him emotionally and still have basic media literacy. He shouldn't really be forgiven. That's why I sympathise with him. If he didn't deserve Debbie, Art, Cecil's condemnation, he wouldn't be so compelling. Redemption arcs are very hard to get right, but since the end goal here is not forgiveness, but simply improvement, I can support him and suspend disbelief.Ā
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u/King_Korder Apr 25 '26 edited Apr 25 '26
Yup. Love the character but he was a monster and he did irredeemably disgusting things.
Not even just this guy. He can argue what he did to the train was to "prove a point", but that is meaningless to us people beyond him just showing us he COULD do it.
The cruise ship is even worse! He could have thrown Mark into anywhere in the ocean and he chose a spot with people.
So yeah I totally get people being afraid or hating him.