As if Natalie Portman as the new Thor wasn’t enough, Marvel has announced another piece of glorious news. Thor: Love and Thunder will feature the MCU’s first LGBTQ superhero: Valkyrie.
Tessa Thompson made the announcement herself during San Diego Comic-Con. “First of all, as new king, she needs a new queen,” she said, to thunderous squeals from the audience (god, we wish we were there). The news was later confirmed by Kevin Feige, who said Valkyrie will definitely have a queer storyline.
“The answer is yes,” he told io9. “How that impacts the story remains to be seen with that level of representation you’ll see across our films, not in just Thor 4.”
Previous attempts to represent Valkyrie’s bisexuality have been less than satisfactory, to say the least. Although Thompson has stated that Valkyrie is bi and Taika Waititi shot a scene in Thor: Ragnarok that would have had a woman coming out of her bedroom, according to io9, the scene was cut for being a “distraction.” (Big ugh.)
Still, it looks like Marvel knows what it did wrong and is taking some small steps to rectify its past screw-ups with queer representation. Until Thor: Love and Thunder comes out, we’ll keep our fingers crossed.
“Previous attempts to represent Valkyrie’s bisexuality have been less than satisfactory, to say the least. Although Thompson has stated that Valkyrie is bi and Taika Waititi shot a scene in Thor: Ragnarok that would have had a woman coming out of her bedroom, according to io9, the scene was cut for being a “distraction.” (Big ugh.)”
I can’t say I disagree with their reasoning. Just having the quick scene as described would have drawn a lot of attention but added nothing to the story and would have been seen as tokenism and no doubt would have resulted in numerous “why this scene was not enough” articles (likely 1 or 2 at this very website). Instead, it appears they tabled this reveal until they could handle it properly, and give it the full narrative space it deserves.
Thor: Love and Thunder will feature the MCU’s first LGBTQ superhero: Valkyrie.
Apart from the two that appeared in an MCU movie last year, as discussed in about five articles on this very website.
I’ve already seen the internet shipping her with Jane Foster. That would be cool, but might seem too much of a deviation from Jane Foster’s previously established character. Plus, with Thor still there, talk about awkward!
@2 – ajay: Which heroes?
Wait, though they were Marvel characters in a movie, they apparently weren’t part of the MCU. Ignore 2.
@3 – Valkyrie would never do that to Thor. Thor and Valkyrie are friends and shield brothers/sisters. This would be totally outside her character. Banner and Thor are tight with Valkyrie.
Will she finally get a proper name, too?
I think it’s going to be interesting to see how this is played out. Thompson is a very good actress IMO, and I think she can handle however it’s done. What I’d worry more about is either it really being a case of “hey look, alternate sexuality” in the ham-fisted way they did “hey look, strong female character” with Captain Marvel… or the opposite direction with “we have a non-CIS character, and she’s a pretty young woman, now here’s some fanservice of her making out with another pretty young woman!”. Finding that positive middle area between adolescent boy daydreams and iodiotic “wokeness” is going to be the challenge, but I do take heart that Waititi seems to be a writer and director who could manage this in a way to please the majority of audiences.
It’s been established that Jane and Thor broke up. So…not sure what they awkwardness would be if Valkyrie started courting a female Thor (particularly if the Odinson was still flying around in space).
Wouldn’t you feel awkward if a friend of yours started dating your ex? Wouldn’t you think twice about dating the ex of one of your friends?
Of course this does happen all the time, but personally I’d shy away from it.
It doesn’t matter what they do. If they exclude LGBT characters, that’s a bad thing and people will complain. When they do include them, people complain anyway. Something as simple as Russo’s character in Endgame, there’s a great example of organically weaving an LGBT character into the story, and it still got complaints for not being good enough.
Doesn’t matter what they do with Valkyrie. People will complain.
I think it’s great that Valkyrie is an LGBT character, and I hope it seems natural on screen. That’s all I personally ask. Others have different expectations. The only thing a filmmaker can do in a situation like that is whatever they want. Film what feels right as the filmmaker. Because anything else is inorganic and audiences absolutely know when you’re tokenizing characters.
Do you think perhaps now she could get an actual name instead of simply being referred to by the name of the military unit she was once a part of?
@12, that can happen, but yeah, her real name would be nice! She’ll always be ‘The‘ Valkyrie though, regardless.
@8, Valkyrie has only been portrayed and described as being bisexual at this point, so she’ll probably still be cis-gendered, as opposed to trans or non-binary. Would be interesting to go there though, but the more they diverge from the straight-cis-white default, the more work they have to put into a portraying a character well, or at least, the more work they’ll perceive is needed putting in to sell it. That, justified or not, can detract from the rest of the film.
Hell, I’ve been waiting for years to get as far as this, I think I can wait a couple more to get the rest of the spectrum. Hell, It still seems like yesterday that Marvel having any gay character in a comic was never gonna happen, and then, all of a sudden, we had Jean-Paul and Kyle’s marriage on the Front Cover of Astonishing X-Men #51!