The Marvel Cinematic Universe is a sprawling web of interconnected stories working together to create a massive alternate reality where superheroes are real. It’s a fascinating undertaking, and a profitable one at that, but if you are a fan of any particular superhero, then you’ll probably be disappointed. Most of the tentpole superheroes get three movies to explore their arcs - Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor, as well as the Avengers as a group and (hopefully) the Guardians of the Galaxy - but to call these “trilogies” would be a distortion of the facts. These trilogies lack any cohesive narrative, rarely building on one another, spending their time setting up future films and reacting to those just past. If you’re lucky (like with Cap), you get 2 decent movies exploring the character and one where he acts like a massive hypocrite to save his friend, but has amazing fight sequences. If you’re unlucky, you get Thor: The Dark World.
That said, Thor has the most cohesive, coherent trilogy in the Marvel MCU, with the clearest themes and best-developed 3-movie arc, but the MCU’s treatment of the King of Asgard in Infinity War and Endgame makes me wonder if that was entirely an accident.
I know what you’re thinking. “Thor? The giant clownish space-god? They called him a pirate angel! He’s the butt of so many jokes! He was in the worst Marvel movie!” Well, yeah, but he still has the best trilogy in the MCU.
Thor’s story is a fantasy tale, and one that we don’t see all that often. It’s the story of a child learning to become a good king. No, we don’t see this in Lord of the Rings - Aragorn is naturally a good king because he is destined to rule. We don’t see this in Avatar: The Last Airbender - Aang is not the ruler of the world, he ensures balance, and that story is more about him learning how to use his powers to overthrow a dictator. There are plenty of stories about overthrowing evil rulers to replace them with someone better, but there are very few stories about people learning how to be that better ruler. The Thor trilogy explores what traits a person must have in order to be a good king.
In his eponymous first movie, Thor learns that to be a good king, he must first become a good man. His father, Odin, thinks that he has raised Thor to be a fine prince, and is ready to transfer his power to his son while he’s still alive (an excellent practice used in real history, which always helps ensure stability through transitional periods). However, when Thor walks into Jotunheim to demand redress for a perceived slight and nearly starts a war with his juvenile arrogance, Odin realizes that Thor is a vain, cruel boy, not ready to rule, not worthy of the gifts he’s been given. Odin exiles Thor to Earth and sends his hammer after, laying upon it the enchantment which states that only someone worthy can lift Mjolnir, giving Thor a concrete goal to work towards, a step to strive for on his path to becoming a good king.
Of course, Thor learns to be a better man and gets his hammer back. Specifically, he learns that his own wants and desires are not always of paramount importance. When he offers to die in order to save his friends, his loved ones, and the civilians of Earth from the Asgardian Destroyer, he proves his worth. He could have run away, let others fight the Destroyer for him, lived to see another day, but he steps up, takes responsibility for his actions, and prepares to sacrifice everything for the people he wishes to protect. All are fine qualities for a leader to have.
The next movie in Thor’s journey is the first Avengers movie, but fortunately for this article, it serves to further cement the themes of Thor I. Thor must travel to Earth to stop Loki, living up to his responsibilities and cleaning up the fallout from his past failures. This leads us straight to the second film in Thor’s trilogy: The Dark World.
What can I say about Thor: The Dark World? Well, it’s crap. Dr. Selvig is reduced from a respected scientist to a naked buffoon, the villain is barely present and completely nonthreatening, and for some reason Kat Dennings gets an expanded role, a sidekick, and a love interest, despite being little more than comic relief in the previous film. It’s not a good movie, but it should have been the film where Thor must choose between serving his kingdom and fulfilling his personal desires. We get that in the other Avengers movies, and hints of that theme exist in The Dark World. Thor is distracted from his duty as king by his love for Jane Foster. By bringing her into a world of gods and demons, she nearly becomes the catalyst for a universe-ending power. Thor almost destroys his kingdom and his love interest by attempting to have both. In the end, he must give up his personal desires to become a better king, even though this moral is undercut by Thor’s return to Jane at the end of the movie. Jane figured it out, which is probably why she unceremoniously dumped him between Age of Ultron and Ragnarok.
Honestly, I don’t have much to say about Thor, Jane, or anyone in Age of Ultron. It’s a story of Tony Stark’s arrogance nearly destroying the world, and a better set-up for Civil War than anything. I know there’s the scene where Thor goes to a cave and has a vision, but it makes no sense, was entirely extraneous, and was crammed into the movie at the behest of Disney executives against the wishes of, it seems like, everyone else on the creative team. For Thor’s story, it’s a nonentity. Nothing is gained, nothing is lost. Thor fights some robots. That’s all.
Finally, we come to Movie 3 in the Thor trilogy, the much-acclaimed Ragnorok. I don’t need to say that I thoroughly enjoyed this flick (BECAUSE IT’S AWESOME), but even though it is an action-comedy with Shakespearean gods, I think there is a decent message about what it takes to be a true king. In particular, Thor learns that Asgard is not a place, but a people, and he must protect those people from all comers and at all costs. Whether defending them from the fallout of a violent past, or the vicious excesses of his last living family member, Thor must keep his people safe. All this time, he feels crippled by the loss of his hammer Mjolnir, but as he resolves the festering problems left by his father and grows into the legacy of the king of Asgard, Thor comes to realize he never needed a tool to be a good ruler. He needed to accept the power inside. He sacrifices his hammer, his eye, his sister, even his homeworld to save his kingdom, and finally attains the apex of his personal journey, sitting on the throne with his now-loyal brother, standing by his side, his people firmly behind him, a kingdom united in harmony with a worthy king.
But sadly, Thor’s story keeps going.
The very next movie is Avengers: Infinity War, and it starts on a bad note. Thor just saved his people, but literally the moment they get off the planet Asgard, their transport ship gets captured by Thanos and half of the Asgardian people are slaughtered out of hand.
Really? That’s what you want to do after Thor spent the entire last movie saving the Asgardians from his insane sister? You slaughter half of them out of hand? Fuck you. Thanks for undoing everything Ragnarok set up. Also, didn’t a whole bunch of Asgardians just die during Hella’s murderous stint in power? Why kill more?
It gets worse, as Thanos then snaps half the galaxy out of existence, killing another half of the Asgardian population! The remnants of Asgard, already under threat after the losses from Ragnarok, lost three-quarters of its surviving members, reducing the kingdom to a group barely large enough to fill a small fishing village in Norway. Good job, movie. Thanks for ruining EVERYTHING Ragnarok built. And what was Thor doing during all this time? Well, he’s completely powerless during the first attack, then gets his ass handed to him by Thanos’ minions. Then he spends most of the movie looking for a replacement for his lost hammer, even though the last movie clearly showed that Thor did not need a magic hammer to be a good king. It wasn’t the hammer that gave him power, it was the power he held inside. Plus, didn’t he have the sun spear that Odin used to use? But no, Thor needs a hammer, so he spends Infinity War getting a new one. Thanks, I hate it.
And then we get to Endgame.
Avengers: Endgame did Thor dirty. His entire trilogy’s character arc is about becoming a good king, but after the Snap, he throws that all away. Even though he learned to be a good king in Ragnarok, in Endgame, he’s turned his back on the people, drinking and playing videogames in a shack, ignoring the needs of Asgard in a selfish and self-destructive pity party. He has gone from the charming, indomitable, and devastatingly sexy god-king of the previous movies to a fat, lazy, self-centered slug. His character arc, from movie one, has become a circle. He went from vain, cruel boy to vain, cruel man. But at least we get to laugh at schlubby drunken Thor! Thanks, I hate it!
But maybe this can work. Maybe the idea is that Thor feels he failed, as the moment he became king, his kingdom suffered a series of calamities that practically wiped it out. Maybe the movie will have Thor realize that no matter how small and diminished Asgard is, it is still his kingdom, and he still has responsibilities as king, and so long as one Asgardian lives, he must step up and be the king they deserve - NOPE! At the end of the movie, he abdicates his throne and goes to fly off with the Guardians of the Galaxy, a band of freewheeling space criminals who prioritize pleasure and profit over doing the right thing unless the universe itself is at stake. And he’s still fat, disheveled, and walking about in his bathrobe, a far cry from the heroic pirate-angel king who I would have loved to see pal around with the Guardians. I mean, we could have seen Thor go off with the Guardians to find a new world for the Asgardians, somewhere where the restored kingdom can live after the reverse-snap revives humanity and the Asgardians, engaging in hijinks as Thor’s kingly responsibilities interfere with the Guardian’s greedy desires, much like the hijinks in Ragnarok when Thor’s need to save his people conflicted with Hulk’s wish to stay in pop-star paradise with his friend. But no, instead we have fat Lebowski Thor giving away the duties and responsibilities he spent 3 god-damned movies learning to respect to an ex-Valkyrie who, last we saw, was a violent, drunken deserter with no leadership experience.
THANKS, I HATE IT!
Why did Thor have to give up his throne? I see this a lot, the good king choosing to eliminate the monarchy. It happens in Legend of Korra when the Earth King decides to abdicate and break up the Earth Kingdom into a bunch of tiny republics. Because Balkanization really created stability and security in the former Ottoman Empire and didn’t immediately lead to the First fucking World War! It happens in Wreck-It Ralph, when Vanellope Von Schweetz abdicates, only to become President-for-Life like a Latin American dictator, then in the next movie just abandons her realm to go fight in the uber-violent Slaughter Race. Elsa abdicates in Frozen II to go selfishly study magic in the North, Prince Navine gives up his throne in The Princess and the Frog to help Tiana run a restaurant in the Jim Crow South instead of making his wife the royal chef in their own kingdom… What do people have against good monarchs running a kingdom well? Is this left over from the American Revolution? Guys, the British king was basically a figurehead by 1776! The problem was with the elected Parliament! And anyways, it’s not like the USA has done such a bang-up job since then. Any system that can elect a misogynistic racist plutocratic ass-hat like Trump as leader of the free world is not a system worth exalting. Democracies have many problems too, in particular a weakness to ruthless opportunists preying upon the insecurities of a permanently witless and criminally ignorant populace to establish themselves as de-facto dictators. As Mather Byles said, “Why trade one tyrant 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants 1 mile away?”
But I digress. In fiction, it seems like the only monarchs who wish to remain in power are bad rulers, and good rulers immediately abdicate and give up their power. I would argue that this is a negative message to send. It says that good leaders should not rule, and instead should leave power so less competent, less capable, less responsible, less ethical people can take their place instead. Why not lean into the good message and inspiring story they set up in the three Thor movies, of a good man - flawed, but good - learning to overcome his faults and grow into the best king he can be, overcoming all obstacles to give his people the best future he possibly can?
I liked that plot. I enjoyed it immensely, and was even inspired a little to be a better man myself. And then Endgame came around and showed me that all effort is for naught, and I might as well become a fat drunkard now, because everything I do is meaningless and will have no effect on my life or the world around me.
Thanks. I fucking hate it.