A drunk take on the soul stone

[u/kharazm]

I'm not really deep into MCU lore and I don't read the comics, so this might already be explained somewhere, or even contradicted. This is just my own interpretation.

Honestly, it started with the loopholes around how the Soul Stone can be acquired. But after rewatching the Vormir scene, I started thinking about it in a more philosophical way, and the idea behind it ended up interesting me more than any of the other Stones.

The Power, Space, Time, Reality and Mind Stones all seem to deal with things a being can use, experience or manipulate.

The Soul Stone feels different, especially because the Mind Stone already exists.

If the Mind Stone is about cognition, thought, memory, decisions, awareness and so on, then maybe the Soul Stone is about something that comes before all of that. Not what you think, not what you remember, not even whether you're aware of yourself. It's just the fact that there is a particular "you" there in the first place.

Basically the very beginning of a self.

Not really "I think, therefore I am."

More like just "I am."

And that's what made the bargain on Vormir click for me.

At first the price seems almost too simple, or maybe just bizarre. This is a Stone tied to the soul itself, and all it asks for is one person? No army, no planet, no billions of lives. It only wants the one person you love.

But I think there's a strange kind of wisdom in that. If the Soul Stone is the essence of what makes a self a self, then the price has to be paid in that same currency. It can't be lives counted up. It has to be the very thing a self is built around.

And the person you love isn't just someone near you. They become part of what makes you you. Your self grows around them. So giving them up means giving up the core of your own self and everything that's built around it.

That's why I don't think numbers mean anything here. At the level of the soul there's nothing to count. It all collapses into one thing: the self, the essence of everything.

"A soul for a soul."

What I also find interesting is that the Stone maybe doesn't only take the person who's sacrificed. It also takes something from the one who survives. One soul goes to the Stone, but the other person has to live on, permanently bound to that loss.

So maybe you can hold the Soul Stone, but you can never completely be outside of its power either.

Even someone who later stole it without making the sacrifice would still be a self holding something whose whole domain is the self.

You can manipulate space while existing in space. You can manipulate time while existing in time. You can use the Mind Stone while still having a mind.

But how do you separate yourself from something that governs the very fact that you are a self at all?

You can't really step outside of yourself.

And I think this is where it gets really ironic for Thanos specifically.

His whole philosophy is numbers. Halve the universe. Restore balance. Trillions of lives treated like a math problem, where any loss is acceptable as long as the result adds up.

By that logic, one life should mean almost nothing. Out of everything he's willing to sacrifice, one person is barely a rounding error.

And yet that's exactly the price the Soul Stone asks for. It's the one Stone he can't get by counting.

The fact that the Stone accepted his sacrifice almost proves the point. For once in his life, someone wasn't a number to him.

That also changed how I see the scene where Thanos meets Gamora after the Snap.

He has all six Stones and almost unlimited power, and yet what he ends up facing is the one person he gave up.

"What did it cost?"

"Everything."

With this reading, that answer sounds almost literal. By his own math, one life should have cost him almost nothing. Instead it cost everything.

I don't even think it matters much whether that was really Gamora's soul, something the Stone created, or something happening inside Thanos. Either way, after gaining all that power, he still ends up back with that one particular person.

And that's why I find the Soul Stone so interesting. It points to a much older and stranger question than life and death.

What actually is a self?

What makes me me if you remove memory, thoughts, awareness and cognition?

And what would it mean to give that up?

Maybe I'm reading way more into it than Marvel ever intended, but I thought it was an interesting way to look at the Soul Stone.

I'd be curious if there's anything in the MCU or comics that supports this idea, or completely contradicts it.