“I am the god of thunder.”
The original avengers are loosely based on archetypes -
soldier, knight, monster, spy, the… hawkeye.
But Thor is the only one who is based on a specific preexisting myth.
The legend of Thor, the Norse god of thunder, has been told for nearly two millennia.
The MCU explains away the mythology by saying
ancient Norwegians mistook Asgardians for gods.
“A primitive culture like the Vikings might have worshiped them as deities.”
But while Thor begins as god-like,
what eventually makes him a good king is embracing and understanding the human.
Thor’s true goal isn’t fighting evil brother or defeating the space elves—
it’s gaining the wisdom he needs to rule his home world, Asgard.
“You will be a wise king.”
Over the course of the franchise,
Thor has to master three important traits to become a good king.
Humility, the will to build instead of destroy, and deep self-understanding.
So, let’s take a look at Thor’s steps to becoming worthy.
“*I* am Thor, son of Odin, and as long as there is life in my breast,
I am... running out of things to say!
Are you ready?”
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“I really wish I had my hammer.”
“Hammer?”
“Quite unique, it was made from this,
this special metal from the heart of a dying star.”
Like any warrior, Thor has a might weapon:
his hammer Mjolnir.
“Sounds like you had a special intimate relationship to this hammer,
and that losing it was almost comparable to losing a loved one.”
This weapon has become synonymous with Thor,
and it symbolizes the character’s arc over six films.
When we first meet Thor, he holds the hammer high,
as a symbol of his superiority and pride.
But the hammer soon becomes a test of Thor’s humility.
“Whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy,
he shall possess the power of Thor.”
Unlike when Arthur drew Excalibur,
royal heritage is not enough to wield this weapon.
Thor has to prove he has the wisdom and temperament to lead.
“As King of Asgard…”
“But you’re not King.
Not yet.”
On the surface, Thor seems perfect for the throne.
He’s the first son of a king, handsome, a fearless fighter,
handsome, bestowed with superhuman strength, and also very handsome.
“It’s like his muscles are made of Cotati metal fibers.”
As a child, Thor longs for the glory of battle.
“When I’m king, I’ll hunt the monsters down and slay them all.”
When we catch up with him years later,
he’s a celebrated warrior about to ascend to the throne of Asgard.
He’s like the captain of the high school football team,
on the cusp of winning the state championship.
BUT when the coronation is interrupted by a frost giant invasion,
Thor doesn’t take this well.
[Screams]
His first reaction is always violence.
Like the expression says:
everything looks like a nail when all you have is a hammer.
“You want me to put the hammer down?”
He defies his father’s orders and attacks the Frost giants.
“These are the actions of a boy.”
He’s petulant, temperamental, and -- above all – arrogant.
“You are a vain, greedy, cruel boy.”
“And you are an old man and a fool.”
Odin strips away his son’s powers, title, and weapons,
and casts him out to live among mortals.
“You’re unworthy!”
Thor finds himself on Earth, unworthy to lift his hammer,
and he begins a path toward humility.
“First time in my life I have no idea what I’m supposed to do.”
Instead of breaking dishes, he serves them.
When Loki usurps the throne and sends the Destroyer to kill Thor,
he thunder god sacrifices himself to save innocents.
“Taking their lives will gain you nothing.
So take mine.”
This selfless act proves he’s recognized he’s not the center of the universe.
He’s learned humility.
This is his first step to worthiness, essentially, recognizing that he’s unworthy,
and developing the will to be a better man.
“I have much to learn.
I know that now.”
“As weapon to destroy, or as a tool to build.”
Next, Thor must learn to use his strength to build a kingdom.
In the Avengers and Thor: The Dark World, he repairs the destruction Loki caused,
metaphorically using his hammer to rebuild, rather than destroy.
“I had to put an end to the slaughter.”
And yet, Thor doesn’t swear vengeance on his brother.
He attempts to reconcile, to rebuild their family bond.
“We were raised together.
We played together, we fought together.”
At the start of the first film, he may have been quick to fight Loki.
But in the final battle, he appeals to his brother with love and understanding.
“We can do it together.”
Of course, he’s betrayed.
Even though this more human openness is a step toward his becoming worthy,
it’s also a vulnerability; it makes him less invincible, less god-like.
“I can’t believe you’re alive.
I saw you die.
I mourned you, I cried for you.”
At the start of Dark World, Thor has brought all the rebellions to heel
and imprisoned Loki.
Yet, he’s no longer the happy warrior, for the first time, winning isn’t enough.
“Embrace it, celebrate what you have won.
Revel in their celebration.
At least pretend to enjoy yourself.”
All of Asgard is now ready for him to be king,
but Thor is experiencing another human rite of passage,
he’s fallen in love.
“I will return for you.”
Up until now, Thor has been a bit of a party boy.
“There was a time when you would celebrate for weeks.”
It’s easy to imagine that he used to be a ladies man,
“I love women.
Sometimes a little too much.”
in the mold of a proto-Tony Stark.
“You ever lose an hour of sleep in your whole life?”
“I’d be prepared to lose a few with you.”
After all he is a 1500 year old bachelor.
Now, his pining for Jane Foster,
“So who’s Richard?”
“Really?”
is a sign of his newfound maturity.
After one and a half millennia,
Thor is finally ready to settle down and build a future with someone.
“Nothing out of order except your confused and distracted heart.”
Thor has been cautioned against valuing Jane over his other duties.
“There are nine realms.
The future King of Asgard must focus on more than one.”
This is a far more admirable flaw than a temper.
Still, Thor recognizes that a ruler who loves one person
more than his kingdom isn’t ready to rule.
So, he decides to take a break and work on himself for a while.
“I’d rather be a good man than a great king.”
This more thoughtful and open Thor is able to look more deeply at the world
than the cocksure, invincible warrior ever could.
“I saw something in that dream.
I need answers.”
After Wanda gives the Avengers cryptic visions in the Age of Ultron,
Thor is the only team member who seeks a hidden meaning in the message.
“I’ve had a vision.
A whirlpool that sucks in all hope of life, and at its center is that.”
Armed with this new knowledge, Thor uses the hammer to give the vision life.
This is the ultimate of act of using the weapon to build, not destroy.
“I am on the side of life.”
“Okay so Ragnarok, tell me about that.
Walk me through it.”
Ragnarok is the event from Norse mythology that describes the end of all things,
and the rebirth of the universe.
And fittingly, the film Thor: Ragnarok destroys Asgard,
but also reinvents the character of Thor.
“What happened to your hair?”
“Some creepy old man cut it off.”
“It looks good.”
“Oh, thanks.”
Thor’s first loyalty has always been to his homeworld.
“I will protect Asgard and all the realms.”
So his greatest challenge is reckoning with what it means to be an Asgardian,
even examining his core assumptions about who he is.
“This doesn’t make any sense.”
This hard-won self-understanding is the final step towards wisdom.
“See Loki life it’s about growth, it’s about change.”
Hela’s destruction of Thor’s hammer Symbolizes the destruction of not just Asgard,
but our preconceptions of its culture.
“Odin and I drowned entire civilizations in blood and tears.
Where do you think all this gold came from?”
She reveals that Asgard wasn’t built through peace treaties, but through conquest.
“I was his weapon in the conquests that built Asgard’s empire.”
The kingdom is a stand-in for real-life colonial empires,
and Hela is colonialism personified.
“Hela is ravenous.
If I let her leave she will consume nine realms and all the cosmos.”
You can see hints of this revelation woven throughout the franchise:
in the way the frost giants describe Odin,
“Your father is a murderer and a thief.”
in Odin’s disdain for humans,
“Human lives are fleeting, they’re nothing.”
especially Jane Foster,
“She does not belong here in Asgard,
any more than a goat belongs at a banquet table.”
or in the way he coolly celebrates the genocide of the Dark Elves,
“What happened?”
“He killed them all.”
Thor has always had a touch of space racism himself,
“You people are so petty.
And tiny.”
believing Asgardians to be above all other races.
“This is beyond you, metal-man.”
And his faith that Loki is still worthy of reverence,
despite his crimes, is in part due to a regard for their shared ancestry.
“Have care how you speak.
Loki is beyond reason, but he is of Asgard.”
Even Mjolnir, the symbol of Thor’s heroism, Is revealed to have a dark past.
The hidden mural in Odin’s throne room
shows Hela wielding the hammer to conquer the nine realms,
So the hammer, like Asgard, was born of bloodshed.
As the embodiment of nationalism, Hela draws strength from the physical land.
She wants to return the kingdom to its colonial roots,
to help make Asgard great again.
“We were once the seat of absolute power in the cosmos,
our supremacy was unchallenged.”
“Our destiny is to rule over all others.”
Now Thor’s banishment takes on a new meaning:
Odin didn’t want to father another warmongering Asgardian.
“Teach them a lesson.
Break their spirits and they’ll never dare try to cross our borders again.”
“You’re thinking only as a warrior.”
Up to this point, Thor has always had a clear idea of who he is.
“Because, that’s what heroes do.”
But now he has to ask a question that challenges the foundations of his identity:
Does serving Asgard really make him a hero?
“I choose to run toward my problems, and not away from them.
Cause that’s what….”
After the destruction of his hammer,
Thor is forced to witness the horrors of a dictatorship firsthand,
when the Grandmaster makes him a slave.
“I don’t like that word.”
“Sorry the prisoners with jobs.”
So Thor must fight Hela and the ideology she represents,
but when they do, she overpowers him and cuts out his eye.
This is inspired by ancient Norse mythology, when Odin trades his eye to gain cosmic wisdom.
In the movies, he loses it in combat, so the disfigurement is a permanent reminder
that it’s better to build a kingdom through peace, rather than war.
Thor also gains wisdom when he loses HIS eye.
“Even when you had two eyes, you see only half the picture.”
Realizing that Hela cannot be defeated through brute force,
“She’s too strong.
Without my hammer I can’t.”
he learns to access a deeper inner strength.
“That hammer was to help you control you power, to focus it.
It was never a source of strength.”
Nations change, empires fall, but people can never be replaced.
“Asgard is not a place, that was.
Asgard is where our people stand.”
Couple with this revelation, the loss of his eye symbolizes that
Thor has become the new Odin, and at last is ready to be king.
“You saved us from extinction.”
He allows the realm to be destroyed, so it can be reborn.
By separating Asgard from a physical space, he transforms it into a nation of refugees,
ready to be more inclusive.
“We will rebuild this place.
It will become a haven for all peoples and aliens of the universe.”
Of course, Thor and his people don’t get an immediate happy ending
in response to their repentance.
Instead the Asgardians must endure karmic payback for their past crimes,
when Thanos decimates half of them, bringing Thor full circle.
“I know what it’s like to lose.
To feel so desperately that you’re right, yet to fail nonetheless.”
Avengers: Infinity War wasn’t kind to the thunder god.
“And you said your sister and your dad?”
“Both dead.”
“But still got a mom, though?”
“Killed by a dark elf.”
“A best friend?”
“Stabbed through the heart.”
To cope with his grief and trauma, Thor reverts to his old ways:
storming into battle and demanding justice from his enemies’ leader.
“Bring me Thanos.”
He retreats into one of his defining character traits: arrogance.
“Well he’s never fought me.”
“Yeah he has.”
“Never fought me twice.”
In Ragnarok he learned he didn’t need a weapon,
“Are you Thor, the god of hammers?”
but he spends most of Infinity War building a larger weapon of destruction.
It’s easier for Thor to fight through his pain
than to let himself feel it, and admit weakness.
“Rage, and uh, vengeance, anger, loss, regret,
they’re all tremendous motivators.
They really clear the mind,
so I’m good to go.”
But Thor’s reverting to his crutches of ego, rage, and short-sightedness
spells his undoing.
Instead of striking a killing blow against Thanos,
He just has to get in this callback.
“I told you…”
“You’re going to die…”
“You die…”
“…for that.”
And the universe pays for his arrogance.
“You should have gone for the head.”
Thanos teaches him a heartbreaking lesson,
that a true leader never lets passion overwhelm reason.
It’s sad that so much of the growth we witnessed
in Ragnarok and the earlier films
is undone in Infinity War.
Yet what we’re seeing here is most likely
Thor’s arrogant-god persona flaring up one last time
before it’s truly destroyed to make way for
his humbler, more human self.
Throughout his story, each of Thor’s lessons has been learned through pain and loss,
so it will take the ultimate loss for him to
finally overcome his worst habits for good.
We don’t know Thor’s final fate or how he’ll be redeemed in Avengers: Endgame.
But we can relate to Thor because, as much as he seems like a god,
he’s humanly flawed like us.
“Sorry to hear that Jane dumped you.”
So we, too, can follow his steps to worthiness.
We have to overcome our vanities and stay humble.
Understand the importance of being vulnerable and open.
Build, instead of destroy.
Question the assumptions we take for granted.
And always value people first.
Only then, can we be worthy.
“It’s a very, very interesting theory.
I have a simpler one.
You’re not worthy.”
This is Matt Bellassai.
Matt is a writer and social media influencer,
who hosts the podcast Unhappy Hour, and the video series To Be Honest.
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