Thor: Love and Thunder sells Valkyrie out in the worst ways

For a certain subsection of Marvel fans, hope for future features springs eternal — no matter how much common sense and past history suggests those hopes won’t bear fruit. In the case of Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, some fans were vocally hoping that the overwhelmingly positive response to Tessa Thompson’s turn as Valkyrie in Waititi’s Thor: RagnarokThe new movie would give the character a larger role and allow for more screen time. MCU-watchers who somehow haven’t noticed Disney’s consistent history of queerbaiting even hoped Valkyrie might get on-screen acknowledgement of her bisexuality, rather than leaving it to Thompson (who’s bisexual herself) to play it as one of the character’s hidden, unrevealed nuances. Thompson promising in a 2019 Comic-Con presentation that finding a love interest would be “the first order of business” for Valkyrie in the sequel fanned the fan flames.

But in keeping with the film’s pattern of constantly undermining its characters for jokes or for plot convenience — and the MCU movies’ similar pattern of setting up exciting female characters and then killing them off or sidelining them — Valkyrie gets cheated in some pretty profound ways in Love and Thunder. And the specific ways she’s cheated are particularly baffling, because it would have taken so little work to make the exact same character beats meaningful and resonant and let her feel like a developing person with her own story, rather than random set-dressing in a story that doesn’t care about her even slightly.

[Ed. note: Plot spoilers ahead for Thor: Love and Thunder.]

Photo: Jasin Boland/Marvel Studios

The events of Thor: RagnarokValkyrie was appointed King of New Asgard. This Earth settlement is for Asgardian refugees. (Thompson, always talented at making a sandwich when a role hands her crumbs, has been vocally enthused about being called “king.”) Love and Thunder’s script sets her up with the kind of background and dilemma that could take an entire Valkyrie-focused movie to unpack: She’s an action-hungry warrior relegated to a task that’s heavy on bureaucracy. She’s clearly doing good and meaningful work to make New Asgard safe, secure, and self-sustaining as a tourist trap — maybe doing too good a job, given that when crisis strikes, everyone immediately runs to her personally to solve their problems.

There’s a sense that she’s relieved to finally face a problem that can be hit in the face with a sword, but Waititi and co-writer Jennifer Kaytin Robinson don’t pull on that thread. It’s reasonable enough that they wanted to keep the story more invested in Thor’s usual struggle to deal with a complicated world while being an uncomplicated character — and on his ex Jane Foster (Natalie Portman), who’s simultaneously living as a godlike empowered superhero and dying of cancer. But Valkyrie is so underdeveloped and unspecific in this movie that she’s basically just an uncomplaining, empty-of-personal-desires support system to highlight Jane’s pain — an irritatingly familiar role for both queer characters and characters of color.

Valkyrie appears onscreen for significant amounts of Thor: Love and ThunderHowever, she doesn’t get to do anything special or noteworthy. She gives some humor and exposition. Jane goes to the exact same places as Thor, Jane, and fights in many of the same battles. She also fails at the same spots. A little kiss on the cheek for an unidentified extra is her big moment in a relationship. There are a few brief references to the tragic loss in her backstory, which come with so little detail that it’s hard to tie them to any present development or nuance in the film.

But while response to her character’s negligible role in the movie has mostly focused on disappointment over Kevin Feige and Marvel walking back specific promises for a LBGTQ love story in Valkyrie’s movie future, the real betrayal is a bigger, stranger one. Valkyrie decides not to go to the final battle against the film’s antagonist, Gorr the God Butcher, for absolutely The dumbest possible reason.

Valkyrie, in an earlier movie battle, is attacked and ends up being stabbed. Jane is still recovering from her setback against cancer. Talking to Thor about plans to renew the fight, she tells him she isn’t going to go because, loosely, “I might die, and that wouldn’t do anyone any good.”

It’s clear in that moment that Valkyrie is downplaying the severity of her injury and the degree to which she feels unfit for combat. But even so, she’s an Asgardian. She’s meant to be a Norse warrior (or at least a highly fictionalized, romanticized, Americanized version of one), from a culture that values dying in combat above everything else. As we’re Expressly Reminded earlier in the movie when Thor finds his old friend Sif wounded after a battle, Asgardians who die in honorable combat against a worthy foe get the ultimate reward: They go to Valhalla to drink and feast with other worthy warriors until they’re needed to fight the last battle of all, during Ragnarök. She isn’t just “Valkyrie,” she’s literally a Valkyrie, the warriors meant to escort the worthy souls who fall in battle up to Norse heaven, where the mead flows eternally. (From the udders of a magic goat, but let’s not get into that here.)

Remember that Valkyrie is our first encounter when we meet her. Thor: Ragnarok, she’s the last survivor of Hela’s massacre of all her sister Valkyries, and she has profound survivor’s guilt. She tells Thor that she settled down on the planet Sakaar, where he meets her, because it “seemed like the best place to drink and forget and to die one day.” Why would she pass up on the chance to die gloriously in a face-off against the monster who’s stolen her people’s children, rather than drinking herself to death in a guilty haze or spending the rest of her life on the New Asgardian paperwork she hates so much?

“If I’m gonna die, well, it may as well be driving my sword through the heart of that murderous hag,” she tells Thor in RagnarokShe heads with him on to Hela’s battlefield. She knows in that movie how minimal their chances against Hela are — Hela took down her entire Valkyrie army without visibly breaking a sweat. But she’s regained her pride and defiance, and she realizes she can still earn Valhalla even if she didn’t die along with the rest of her sisters. Is there any cultural conviction or defiance left? Love and Thunder?

The easy, obvious answer is that Waititi and Robinson didn’t want her to be part of the climactic battle, because her presence would complicate the Thor/Jane story they were trying to tell, and possibly steal a little thunder from one or both of the leads. But the way they set that up is so dismissive and ridiculous, given Valkyrie’s history and literal identity as a Valkyrie that it’s downright insulting — and characteristic of how little the writers cared about her motives, her story, or her most basic identity. With a brief, indifferent shrug, the entire scene ends. Valkyrie then disappears, only to reappearance as another set piece during the last montage.

Photo: Jasin Boland/Marvel Studios

This problem was easily solved by many stories. Valkyrie could have come to the final battle, focused on the children’s safety and on leading her new generation of warriors, and could have left when the children did, after realizing their safety is her first duty. It could have been an emotional moment, as she realizes that the responsibilities she’s taken up in New Asgard are more significant than her desire to find death in battle, like her sisters did. (It’s particularly insulting that Waititi and Robinson can’t find room for Valkyrie in the final conflict, but can find room for a few dozen largely nameless kids roaring into combat instead.)

Waititi or Robinson might have used the additional 60 seconds to discuss her decision, even if it meant she had to be removed from the story. What does it mean to a Valkyrie to reject her cultural heritage and realize she’d rather live and serve her people than die in a battle she’s too wounded to contribute to meaningfully? What does it mean to a Valkyrie to admit that she’s so weakened that she fears she’d just get in the way of the people doing the real fighting? This should have been a major decision for Thompson’s character, a beat with some significance to her development. It would have taken so little effort, but she didn’t even get that.

Perhaps this apathy towards established characters is normal in the MCU. The universe grows increasingly crowded and complicated, so characters are more commonly present to show continuity and jokes for fans rather than because of their real reason to be there. But look at Awkwafina’s character, Katy, in Shang-Chi & the Legend of the Ten RingsWong, Benedict Wong in Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness — similarly backgrounded characters who don’t get marquee treatment and aren’t the Names Everyone Knows, but who still get their own development, their own triumphant beats, and their own chances to make a mark.

Their stories — among so many others in the MCU — prove it’s certainly possible to give a third-wheel character a little time and space of her own in a movie like Love and Thunder, particularly a fan favorite who’d been promised a whole lot more than she got. The filmmakers just didn’t care to fulfill those promises. MCU enthusiasts should be more cautious about making similar promises in the future.