Warning! Spoilers for The Thing #5 ahead!
Fans of the Mad Titan Thanos surely know about his infatuated obsession with Death. At one point in time, everything that Thanos did was in an effort to please Death and earn her love. Death certainly seemed like she was into it, but a recent revelation has the cosmic entity admit that she never loved Thanos and was leading him on the whole time, something that might not only shock the Mad Titan, but break his heart as well.
Thanos’ love affair with Death is long and convoluted, but essentially, she has been manipulating him since he was a child on Titan. Seeing that he was half-Eternal, half-Deviant fascinated her, and she decided that he would be instrumental in her plans. She pushed him to kill for the first time, which ultimately led up to the events of Infinity Gauntlet, where Thanos’ iconic moment of wiping out half of all life takes place. All of it was done to win Death’s love, but Thanos never realized that it was never meant to be. Now, Death has a new love interest, one that’s bound to make Thanos jealous.
In the recent The Thing run by Walter Mosley, Tom Reilly, and Jordie Bellaire, Ben Grimm strikes up a relationship with choreographer Amaryllis Dejure, who is captured by an obsessed fan of hers. With the help of a young boy named Bobby, Ben rescues Amaryllis, and the three are suddenly teleported to the moon. The end of The Thing #5 reveals that Doctor Doom needs help and that Amaryllis is really an embodiment of Death, and she says to Ben, “For the first time since the dawn of time, I have felt love.” She then calls him “Beloved“.
If Thanos catches wind of this, Ben better watch out. Whether or not Death means what she says remains to be seen, but given her track record, and her reveal that helping Doctor Doom interferes with her plans, it’s safe to say that she is probably manipulating Ben here, too. Ultimately, this means two things. Death never loved Thanos, and she makes it a point to lie to and manipulate mortals into doing her bidding. She did the same to Deadpool in the past, and that resulted in the hilariously epic Deadpool vs. Thanos series.
So it seems that Thanos is not a cosmic warlord able to court Death, but just an ignorant fool. Not only will his heart be broken, but his ego will be crushed, too. Although Thanos has his own twist in his love of Death, there’s a pretty good chance that he will seek revenge on her for this assault on his pride.
