My favorite Ragnarok headcanon is that the entire movie is a story Thor is telling the audience. That’s why it opens with a monologue, that’s also the reason of the sudden tone shift into comedy and that’s why despite all the horrible things that happen, it’s so endlessly optimistic. The real events that transpired were probably very similar, just much, much darker.
This really explains so much, like how characters like Loki and Hulk, and Thor himself, are so different from the other films- because we’re seeing them through Thor’s eyes. The dialogue is different as well, much more casual and shorthand with use of slang in place of the typical Shakespearean lines, because Thor is paraphrasing in his retelling of the events. I like to imagine that Thor’s audience is actually the asgardians on the ark at the end of the film, mostly families and children, so he’s ramping up the goofiness and drama (you are now meeting the grandmaster, please dont cut my hair, get help), using childish humor (the naked hulk), and poking fun at everything (surtur’s big eyebrow). They were all just extremely traumatized, so Thor is taking care of his people in the only way he currently can- taking comedy theatre tips from loki.
WHY DOES EVERYONE ASSUME THOR DOESN’T KNOW WHAT HE’S DOING??! He literally smiles every time someone falls for his “I’m just a dumb jock” routine. Guys, he grew up with Loki, he went to university, he’s been alive for over a millennia. His flaw in the first Thor movie was that he had too much hubris, not that he was stupid.
He knows that he can play dumb and get out of any situation. Do you all not see that sheepish smirk he always does?
Thor: Ragnarok only confirms what the first two movies were hinting at – Thor is very intelligent and can even pull one over on Loki when he wants to. After the events in The Avengers, he knows Loki’s true feelings about him and that’s why he’s so emotional in The Dark World and why he’s always teasing him in Ragnarok.
@unstatedmartini: #i’m 200% sure that they had another game called Terribly Sorry#hey. let’s do Terribly Sorry.#no. it’s humiliating.#not for me it’s not.#*cue thor being fake-stupid and fake-clumsy and fake-drunk and real loud*#*loki following along waving his hands nervously* terribly sorry! oh dear! my brother can be such a brute! terribly sorry!#and they’re long gone before anyone realizes that the Important Magic Thingy or Super Secret Map is gone
Bruce has set up a makeshift lab in Wakanda, while the world takes stock of their dead and Wakanda mourns for their king. Bruce isn’t doing anything important, but he needs to do something, so he studies Wakanda’s vibranium supply and attempts to keep Shuri busy.
Otherwise, the grief might just be too much for the both of them to bear.
Bruce also tries very hard not to think about Tony and what form of matter Tony may or may not be at this very moment. He’s only moderately successful.
It’s on the third day of the second week after half of the world has turned to ash that Thor brings Bruce a little green snake. Bruce is baffled, but he tried to be polite about it. Bruce is heartsick, though, so that makes everything a little harder.
Then Thor asks for Bruce to see if the snake is Loki, and it takes every bit of willpower Bruce Banner poses to not burst into tears. Thor is so strong and so keen to smile, he makes it so easy for everyone to forget that he has lost nearly everything.
Bruce pokes at the snake without any further complaints. When nothing happens, the grief on Thor’s face is unimaginable.
Bruce begins spending time with both Thor and Shuri, in a desperate attempt to combat his own grief by combatting theirs.
All the while, every second or third day, Thor brings Bruce a small green animal and asks Bruce to see if it his lost brother. Bruce checks every time, with care and precision, but the result is always negative. It’s awful for both of them, but Thor can’t seem to stop and Bruce doesn’t know how to make him.
This pattern holds for a few weeks, until Thor brings Bruce a beaten and battered lizard. It’d been burned somehow and it looked like one of its limbs had been badly broken. When Thor presents it to him, Bruce honestly isn’t sure if Thor had just brought the little thing to Bruce to see if it could be saved.
“Could you check?” Thor asks, the question quiet and hurt after so many weeks of negative results from Bruce’s prodding and poking.
“Of course,” Bruce says softly, adding his portion of the call and response.
He gingerly picks up the lizard, as the poor also looks like he’d been through the wringer, and gives him a quick once over. Bruce’d been right about the broken leg and the burns were pretty –
The lizard fucking turns into Loki. A damaged, burnt Loki who scuttles backward on a broken leg while spitting blood.
Thor bursts into tears. Bruce bursts out laughing. Everyone has their own way of processing grief and shock and grief turned into shock, apparently.
It’s later, when they’ve gotten Loki a little patched up, convinced Okoye not to kill Loki (”He tried to destroy the world!” she says – “He’s gotten better,” Bruce says), and Thor’s eyes were mostly dry, that Loki finally says through clenched, bloodied teeth:
“They’re in a pocket dimension.”
“Who?” Bruce whispers, stunned.
“Everyone. I told him he’d never be a god. He was just a warlord playing at being something powerful. He should’ve fucking listened.”
Þrymskviða. Compressed down, it goes like this: A Jotun steal Thor’s hammer Mjolnir and says he’ll only give it back if he’s given Freyja to marry, as she is the most beautiful goddess in all of existence. The gods argue over what to do for a while before Heimdall suggests they stick a bridal veil on Thor, says he’s Freyja, and pretend they’re giving Freyja (Thor) to the Jotun to marry so Thor can get close enough to the Jotun to steal Mjolnir back.
Now typically when people talk about this story, it’s with an element of disbelieving comedy. “Oh my god, who would believe Thor was a woman, let alone Freyja, the most beautiful goddess in the world?”
But I propose a different way to look at the story.
See, different cultures have different beauty standards. Modern western beauty standards may be a delicate hourglass supermodel, but that’s not always been the case. Greece, for instance, depicted Aphrodite like this:
Yeah. A Greek sculptor was told “sculpt the goddess of beauty” and they thought “alright, fat rolls, that’s where beauty is at, let’s do this”. And everybody else apparently agreed with them, because up went the statue. Beauty is a malleable concept is what I’m getting at.
Now this is where it becomes relevant that Freyja is not just the goddess of love, sex, and beauty. She’s also the goddess of war. And the righteous dead. Goddess of war in the same Viking warrior culture that gave us shield maidens, women who wielded seven fucking kilogram (15 lbs) shields in combat.
Sooooo … when the Norse storytellers said, “This is Freyja, goddess of war and the righteous dead, who rode giant murder cats into battle, she is the most beautiful goddess in the world”, I’m guessing they weren’t thinking of her as some willowy waif. No, I’m guessing they probably thought more along the lines of:
190 cm (6′3″), broad shoulders, built like a brick shithouse, with a jawline like whoa, and fully capable of murdering everything in her path.
Put in that context, the story of Thor dressing up as Freyja sounds less like a punchline about “how could anyone ever mistake Thor in a veil for Freyja?” and becomes more a case of “ohhhhhhhhhhh, no wonder all the gods thought this plan would work”.
It did, by the way. The plan totally worked.
it wasn’t thor’s figure that almost gave him away, it was his bad manners. he was snarfing down all the food and drink, and the jotun was like “hey i thought freyja was a LADY” and they had to explain it like well she was so psyched about the wedding that she hasn’t eaten for days.
at no point did the jotun add “also she’s fucking ripped wtf?” because yeah. of course she was. she was a war goddess.
k why is this gif the funniest shit i’ve ever seen it makes me feel like i’m entering another plane of reality
ok guys I haven’t been able to stop thinking about this gif since I saw it and I just need to unpack its various elements for a second:
1. the central tension of this scene, obviously, which is thor realizing jeff goldblum dicked down his kid brother
2. the fact that jeff goldblum either apparently never learned how to wink OR is trying and failing to bat his eyelashes
3. the way loki opens his mouth as if to try to explain himself to thor and then looks back at jeff goldblum and decides, nah, we’re good, there’s no coming back from this one
4. the fact that whoever made this gif decided this scene wasn’t hysterical enough on its own and added dramatic telenovela zooms
5. the combined effect of all of these elements being that not only can I not stop thinking about this gif but also I hear the kill bill siren whenever I look at it
Thanos, a philosophy and economics double major who thinks once you eat a plant it will never grow back: i have to slaughter half the universe’s population with the infinity stones, so that no one ever runs out of resources and starves
Thor, a phys ed and linguistics major with a minor in women’s studies, taking a sip of his strawberry protein shake: can’t you just use the infinity stones to create more resources tho?
just moving along like everyone else 