End credits scene #2 in Love and Thunder... let's talk about it (obviously spoilers below)

TW: Cancer, death

Valhalla is only for warriors who die during battle (as established in Sif's scene during dialouge that seemed to be just throwaway lines at the time). Jane didn't die until after the literal battle with Gorr was over.

In other words, Jane doesn't go to Valhalla for dying bravely during the battle with Gorr. Jane goes to Valhalla for dying bravely during her battle with cancer, and I just think that's a beautiful statement about people who are fighting severe, severe illnesses.

I keep seeing people say that killing off Jane was misogynistic and that they fridged her, but I really don't think that's true. They didn't bring Jane back for Thor's character development. She didn't really change him or motivate him. She made him happy and her death hurt him, but it didn't further the plot or his character arc. She was in this movie for her. This was the conclusion to a character arc that was abandoned years ago. She was in Thor's movie, but she wasn't a part of his story. She was her own story, and she lived and died on her own terms, and I think that's so much more powerful than letting her disappear like she did after TDW with only two brief, vague mentions of her afterward.

actually i think one of the things i loved most about love and thunder was thor’s character journey and the healthy representation it is for young boys that are watching this movie. how thor shows that it’s okay to show emotions and to feel things even if it hurts. how thor fights alongside two women the entire movie and it seems like the greatest honor of his life. how thor outwardly loves and shares his feelings with jane and wants her to know how much he actually loves her instead of shying away from it. how thor showed that it’s a role of a lifetime to cook and clean and get your kid dressed and take care of them because that’s what a dad should be doing too. how thor didn’t clean off mjolnir after love put makeup on it despite being a traditionally feminine thing. how thor isn’t serious and closed off all of the time but silly and goofy and just wants to live life. he is such a positive role model for young boys growing up right now, and the movie even showed us that by showing how much the kids in new asgard admire him. idk it just makes me really soft and chris hemsworth truly should be very proud of what he has done to thor over the years and how he has become that role model for so many kids across the world. ily god of thunder

my moon knight obsessed ass trying to find any tiny reference to egyptian gods in that one scene in thor love and thunder

I can’t stop thinking about the fight scene in the Shadow Realm. That scene ate so much up. 

The black and white only ever briefly interrupted by the lightning from Stormbreaker, Mjolnir, and Thunderbolt. Gorr using EVERY BIT OF HIS POWER to fight three of the greatest warriors in the universe. His prior monologue which had me on the edge of my seat, terrified. THOR ODINSON. KING VALKYRIE.

DOCTOR JANE FUCKING FOSTER. 

MY GOSH DO I LOVE THAT SCENE

You turn your back on me? You've won, Gorr. Why would I spend my last moments with you, when I can be with her? I choose love. You can, too.

THOR: LOVE AND THUNDER (2022) dir. Taika Waititi

valkyrie fighting monsters in a phantom of the opera sweatshirt i really think she could be my soulmate

Love and thunder spoilers~

Okay but Thor gathering the kids around and encouraging them, then shouting and giving them his powers was absolutely LEGENDARY, the audience SCREAMED, and it WILL be an iconic moment IN MARVEL HISTORY FOR THE LITERAL SEROTONIN BOOST IT GAVE TO EVERY SINGLE PERSON BECAUSE I DID NOT HEAR ONE PERSON WHO STAYED SILENT AND DID NOT CHEER AS IF THEIR LIFE DEPENDED ON IT

saw thor: love and thunder. i would die for bao

how many comic book bros do you think walked out of the theater at the mention of Korg's gay dads? and how many of those ended up seething when they went home and found out Korg is also gay?

A spunky li'l villain inversion, brought to you by Taika Waititi:

Thanos: sacrifices his daughter for the sake of his Big Plan TM

Gorr: sacrifices his Big Plan for the sake of his daughter 😭

CELESTIALS in Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) dir. Taika Waititi

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022)

What I like about Jane's story in Love and Thunder is that it's not her using the hammer to cheat death, but her using the hammer to make the most of the time she has left and die on her own terms.

In the Jane scenes at the beginning we're told that Jane is spending all her time in her lab and that she's hiding her cancer because she doesn't want to be treated differently. Jane is someone who has these great accomplishments and has changed the world and wants to do it again. She doesn't want to rest, she wants to keep going.

And being Mighty Thor gives her that chance, a chance to live her final days out without symptoms. A chance to keep going and to change the world once more.

She gets a chance to save the day in a whole new way.

She's always been full of wonder and she gets to explore new worlds again.

She gets to reconnect with the man she loves, fix things, and save him in more ways than one.

The repeated reference to the idea that you have to die in battle to get to Valhalla is crucial to her arc because that's what Jane wants, not to "go gentle into that good night" but to "rage against the dying of the light" (is it probably a coincidence that Jane references Interstellar which prominently features that poem? Probably. But it still works as a connection). Jane wants to go out fighting, whether that's in her lab or beside Thor on a battlefield, and that's what the powers enable her to do.

wanted to make a post ranting about how much tlat fucked over val but it's so bad that it isn't worth the brain power it would take to write an essay so here's a list of bullshit. tlat spoilers obviously

this movie just unnecessarily made val into a slutty bisexual who has commitment issues? like, why was she like "an orgy sounds great" while thorjane (the straights) were like ew

the way they reduced her to the token black friend who is there purely to support the white mains??? like that was the vibe I got from the trailer but this was somehow worse??? she got virtually nothing???

why are the asgardians respecting thor more than val when she's their king and the one whose been taking care of them while thor's been fucking around having his fifteenth midlife crisis???

tessa said that there was a version of the script where her whole storyline was just about finding a queen and she had to step in because it was dehumanizing and the focus on val needed to be about her being a person who happened to be queer... but where was this person? we got some grrl power king status scenes and a couple of blink and you'll miss them lines about the valkyrior and that's it

how did we not get a single flashback about the valkyrior even though we know an extra was cast a valkyrie

she got nerf'd and kicked out of the final battle and was absent for like most of the last 30 minutes

some kids got more of a hero moment in the final battle than val did

pretty sure she actually had more screen time in ragnarok than in tlat

she had literally no character development or plot. she is literally just a body there to fight

no fr there's this whole ass scene where she's basically a body for korg?? it was very strange and didn't serve a purpose but she had to do it while because I guess thorjane are too important to do it

thor says that zeus was his childhood hero when it was previously val, and like yeah you can have more than one hero but come on

we are three movies deep, why doesn't val have a first name??? tessa implied she would get a name and then she just didn't????

val doesn't get to talk about her beloved herself - it's just korg babbling at her about her commitment issues and mentions an ex girlfriend

val lowkey compares jane to her sisters but their entire friendship is basically offscreen

there's this bit where korg says thor doesn't discriminate who he loves and it cuts to a montage of thor with a bunch of white women and idk that feels like an attack on the idea of a black woman being his love interest

also this isn't about val but thor's characterization was just so fucking awful this entire movie like holy shit who the fuck was that man baby because that was not the person at the end of ragnarok or even iw/endgame. like, what the fuck did taika do to my man??? but that may need to be its own post

in conclusion this movie sucks ass. is it queerbaiting? no, val is explicitly queer (and korg but who cares about that pile of rocks), but it's not a good movie and just a horrible movie for val in particular. if you're a qpoc or a woc who was excited to see val finally get her moment in the sun then don't even bother