I’m really glad so many people loved Thor: Ragnarok and that the movie has been widely enjoyed and brought new folks into the Thor fandom, but I’m also getting really fucking sick of folks shitting on all the movies that came before and acting like the entire rest of the franchise was garbage up until Ragnarok happened. Some folks liked the movies that came before. (Hell, some folks like them better.) Many of us have been here loving these overly-dramatic space vikings since 2011 or earlier, and it’s really irksome to have the movies and characterizations we love treated like a mishandled mistake rather than a valuable part of the canon and critical stepping stones in these characters’ evolution and story, just because people want to elevate the newest installment.

You can like Thor: Ragnarok best without being an asshole about everything else in the franchise.

A note about intertextuality

Here is a basic interpretive principle that I think is generally agreed upon in literary scholarship: if Text A makes a reference to Text B, then you can use Text B to gain a better, fuller understanding of Text A. You do have to use your judgment to figure out which elements of Text B are relevant, but it’s just good interpretive practice – not “headcanon” or “fanfiction” – to use Text B as a lens through which to view Text A.

If you know something about Norse mythology and/or the Thor comics, you will have a better understanding of the MCU Thor films. You can understand them on one level if you don’t have the background of the texts they reference, but your understanding will be shallower (or, as my advisor prefers, narrower). You can understand the first Thor film on one level without knowing anything about Shakespeare, but you won’t appreciate all of its complexity.

People who insist that the only things relevant to the interpretation of the films are the films themselves, and you’re supposed to ignore all the other texts in the background*, might be extreme modernist formalists obsessed with the purity of the text (or maybe with the Protestant/democratic principle that any schmuck can read a text just as well as someone with a broad literary education). But it’s far more likely that they’re just bad readers.

* Except the internet commentariat’s version of Maori culture, apparently. That’s relevant; Norse mythology isn’t.

I came into the fandom because of Thor: Ragnarok, mainly because I love Valkyrie. I thought Thor’s character was sort of off-putting. How is his characterization different in the other movies?

Hi Anon, are you here to join the club of racists (apparently) who don’t understand why we’re supposed to like Taika Waititi’s interpretation of Thor? Welcome!

Honestly, I think the best thing you can do is to watch the other movies if you haven’t. In the first movie, Thor starts out as an arrogant warrior who loves to fight and thinks violence is the solution to every problem, but his father strips him of his powers and banishes him to Earth to learn humility. Aside from the arrogance and eagerness to fight, he’s very loyal to his friends and he has a gallantry about him… well, he’s representative of an ancient warrior culture, really. He loves to fight and feast and flirt; he’s a bit bombastic, but has a sense of chivalry; he picks on little bro Loki sometimes, he can be a bit of a jock/bully, but he loves and trusts Loki (more than he should) and isn’t willing to give up on him even when he’s descended into madness and is doing horrible things.

Thor tells the story of Thor’s maturation into a more patient and self-sacrificing person, and he continues that process of maturation through the other movies we see him in: The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. He’s still a little too ready to solve problems by hitting things in The Avengers, still a little arrogant and Homeric-warrior-bro (he’s Achilles, basically), but he’s getting better, learning how to be more of a team player. In TDW and AOU he becomes progressively more serious and thoughtful, largely because terrible things keep happening in his life… he still has a sly sense of humor, and he spends much of AOU subtly trolling the human Avengers, but he’s also become very canny and perceptive.

Ragnarok just gave him a complete personality makeover with almost no regard for the way he’d been portrayed before. He was never that inarticulate – the Asgardians used to speak in an elevated, slightly archaic register, the way they do in the comics – and he was never as… mean as he is in Ragnarok. I mean, he’s a bit of a douche in Thor, but the point was that he got better.