Something moves in the dark between the stars, and where it passes, worlds end. Galactus does not arrive the way conquerors arrive—there is no fleet, no ultimatum shouted across the void, no hatred in it at all. He simply comes, vast beyond the scale of the thing he intends to eat, and lowers himself over a living planet the way a man lowers himself over a meal. In The Fantastic Four: First Steps, the horror of him is precisely that he feels no horror. He devours the biosphere of an entire world, every history and every love and every frightened upward-looking face on it, and registers none of it as death, because to him it is not death—it is feeding, the oldest and most innocent act there is. He is older than morality, he tells us; he was consuming worlds before there was anyone to call it wrong. And he insists, in a voice with no anger in it, that he cannot choose otherwise. He does not devour because he is evil. He devours because he is hungry, and because he is what he is. That is his defense, and it is the deepest defense any accused has ever offered.
// The theoryThe oldest question: could he have done otherwise?
Every system of justice ever built rests on a single unspoken assumption: that the person in the dock could have done something else. In the eighteenth century, the founders of the Classical School of criminology—Cesare Beccaria in On Crimes and Punishments (1764) and Jeremy Bentham after him— made that assumption explicit and built a whole theory of responsibility on it. The offender, they held, is a rational agent who weighs pleasure against pain and chooses to break the law; punishment is justified precisely because the choice was free, and it works by adjusting the calculation so that crime no longer pays. No free will, no responsibility—the entire edifice stands or falls on the premise that the person could have chosen otherwise. Against this stands the long determinist counter-tradition: that human action is caused, link by link, by forces the agent did not author—heredity, upbringing, circumstance, neurochemistry, appetite—and that the felt experience of "choosing" is a story we tell after the causes have already decided. If the determinist is right, the offender is less a sinner than a symptom, and blame begins to look like blaming a rock for falling.
Galactus takes this ancient argument and pushes it to its breaking point. He is not offering the ordinary determinist plea—bad childhood, desperate circumstance, an impulse he could not master. He is claiming to be, quite literally, a force of nature: not a person who was caused to act but a phenomenon that acts the way gravity acts, without deliberation, without alternative, without a self that could have wanted anything different. And this is a genuinely sharp version of the question, because our moral intuitions really do bend around it. We do not prosecute hurricanes. We do not put an earthquake on trial or hate a virus for replicating. If Galactus is truly of that order—a cosmic appetite with no more choice in the matter than a black hole has in swallowing light—then the vocabulary of crime and punishment simply does not reach him. He would not be a villain. He would be a weather system with a face. The whole case against him turns on whether that is what he actually is—or only what he says he is.
Necessity is the plea, not the verdict
The reason Galactus belongs in a criminology file at all—and not merely in an astronomy one—is that the plea of necessity is not exotic or cosmic. It is the most ordinary excuse in the whole catalogue of wrongdoing, scaled up to the size of a god. "I had no choice." "It was in my nature." "I couldn't help myself." "Anyone in my position would have done the same." These are the everyday sentences of the courtroom and the confession, and they are all doing exactly what Galactus does: converting an action into an event, a decision into a symptom, an agent into a mechanism—so that the question of responsibility never has to be asked. The determinist argument, taken seriously, is a real and difficult idea that honest criminology has wrestled with for three centuries; it deserves to be understood, not waved away. But there is a crucial difference between the philosopher who argues that free will may be an illusion and the offender who invokes that argument to slide out from under a specific act he is about to commit. The first is doing philosophy. The second is doing what Thanos does (see his file) when he calls genocide "mercy" and "balance": dressing a choice in the language of law-of-nature inevitability so that no one, least of all himself, will name it as a choice.
// The subjectThe being who calls himself necessity—and then makes an offer
Watch what Galactus actually does, not only what he says. A pure force of nature does not weigh options, because a pure force of nature has no options—the hurricane cannot decide to spare the coast, the fire cannot elect to leave one house standing. But Galactus, confronted with the Earth, does something no weather system has ever done: he negotiates. He offers a bargain. Spare this world, he proposes, and in exchange give me the child—Franklin Richards, whose power he covets, whose existence changes his own calculation. In that single sentence the entire necessity defense collapses, quietly and completely. A being who can say "I will spare you if" is a being who has just admitted that sparing is within his power—that the devouring was never the only thing he could do, that there is an if, a lever, a choice. He has priorities: his survival over billions of lives, one child's power over one planet's population, this outcome weighed against that one. He deliberates. He trades. He values one thing above another and acts to secure it. Every one of those is the signature of an agent, not an avalanche. The Galactus who claims he cannot choose is, in the same scene, visibly choosing—selecting which world lives and which dies according to what serves him best. The necessity is a mask, and the bargain is the face beneath it.
Galactus
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// The flawA being who can bargain can abstain
Here is the crack, and it runs straight through his defense. "I have no choice —it is my nature— it is only hunger": this is the ultimate denial of responsibility, the necessity plea in its purest form, and the film itself refutes it. The refutation is not an argument we impose from outside; it is Galactus's own conduct. He bargains, and bargaining is choosing. He offers to spare the Earth, and an offer to spare is proof that destruction was optional. He prioritizes his survival over the lives of billions, and a priority is a value ranked against another value—the very definition of a choice made, not a compulsion suffered. A hurricane cannot be bribed. An earthquake accepts no terms. The moment Galactus names his price, he steps out of the category of catastrophe and into the category of agent, and the whole "force of nature" defense falls away behind him. And notice what the necessity plea was doing all along: it is exactly the move real offenders make, dressed in cosmic scale. To explain the determinist argument—to take it seriously, to grant that appetite and circumstance and nature exert real pull—is not to concede it, and it is certainly not to accept it as an alibi. The pull of hunger is real; so is the pull that every offender feels toward the thing they want. What Galactus proves, in the act of haggling for a child's life, is that a pull is not a chain. He could have abstained. We know he could, because he was willing to—for a price.
Explaining determinism is not conceding it
Galactus matters because his is the excuse underneath all the other excuses—the foundation stone of denial, the one every lesser rationalization is built on. Techniques of neutralization, appeals to a higher cause, pleas of trauma or circumstance: all of them are, at bottom, versions of "I could not have done otherwise," and free will is the question that either grounds them or dissolves them. This is why the determinist argument has to be handled with such care, and why it is worth handling at all. It is a serious idea. The forces that push a person toward harm—biology, poverty, appetite, the whole causal weight of a life—are real, and a criminology that pretended otherwise would be a stupid one. Understanding those forces is not softness; it is the entire point of the discipline. But understanding the pull is not the same as excusing the act, and this is the line the necessity plea is forever trying to blur. To explain why Galactus hungers is not to agree that Galactus had no choice—the film settles that question for us the instant he makes an offer. The determinist says the choice may be an illusion; the offender says therefore do not hold me responsible; and the gap between those two sentences is where all of justice lives. A being who can bargain can abstain. A person who can weigh can be held to the weighing. Explaining the argument is not surrendering to it—it is the only way to see clearly enough to answer it.
Three key takeaways
- Galactus, the world-devourer of The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025), is the limit case of criminology's oldest question—free will. The Classical School (Beccaria, Bentham) grounds all responsibility in the premise that the offender could have chosen otherwise; determinism counters that action is compelled by forces beyond the self. Galactus pushes this to the edge: if he is a pure force of nature, is he a criminal or a hurricane?
- His defense is the necessity plea in its purest form: "I have no choice —it is my nature— it is only hunger." We do not prosecute earthquakes, and if he were truly a cosmic appetite with no alternative, the language of crime would not reach him. But that plea is also the most ordinary excuse there is, scaled to the size of a god—the move every real offender makes when they convert a choice into a symptom.
- The flaw: a being who can bargain can abstain. The film shows Galactus negotiating—offering to spare Earth in exchange for the child Franklin Richards, ranking his own survival above billions of lives. An offer to spare proves destruction was optional; a priority is a choice, not a compulsion. Explaining the determinist argument is not conceding it. The claim of no-choice is itself a choice.
Sources · further reading
- Beccaria, C. (1764). Dei delitti e delle pene (On Crimes and Punishments).
- Bentham, J. (1789). An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. T. Payne & Son.
- Harris, S. (2012). Free Will. Free Press.
- Morse, S. J. (2011). “Determinism and the Death of Folk Psychology: Two Challenges to Responsibility from Neuroscience”. Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, 9(1), 1–36.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
Who is Galactus?
Galactus (“el Devorador de Mundos”) is a villain from Marvel, analysed on KRIMINIS through the lens of criminology. He arrives across the dark between stars to consume a world, and he says he cannot do otherwise—that he is not cruel but hungry, a cosmic necessity older than morality, a force that simply IS what it is.
Why does Galactus become a villain?
Galactus in The Fantastic Four: First Steps and the oldest question in criminology—free will. The Classical School (Beccaria, Bentham) versus determinism: is the world-devourer a criminal or a hurricane? The film answers for us—he negotiates.
Which criminological theory explains Galactus?
Galactus's case is analysed through Free will. Free will is the oldest question in criminology, the foundation the Classical School (Cesare Beccaria, Jeremy Bentham) built the whole idea of responsibility upon: a person can be held accountable only because they could have chosen otherwise. The determinist counter holds that the offender is compelled—by biology, circumstance, appetite—by forces beyond the self. Galactus, the world-devourer of The Fantastic Four: First Steps (2025), is the limit case that sharpens the debate to a point. He consumes planets not from malice but from hunger, and claims he has no choice: it is his nature, it is only survival. If he is a pure force of nature, is he a criminal at all, or a catastrophe? But the film itself answers: Galactus bargains. He offers to spare Earth for the child Franklin, he prioritizes his own survival over billions, he weighs and chooses. And the flaw is decisive: a being who can bargain can abstain—the claim of no-choice is itself a choice, and invoking necessity is the very move real offenders make.
