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fathercharlesoffdensen · 5 years

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In Defense of Fat Thor

I not only enjoyed Thor’s portrayal in Endgame, but found it to be a productive and well-developed(/acted, DAMN, Chris Hemsworth) characterization that has been steadily building up across each consecutive movie. Caveat: I do not fault anyone for being skeptical that the directors, etc. had it in them, considering the clunky nature of some of their previous creations, to say nothing of some of their interviews, etc. I am also not 100% surprised to see people maligning Fat Thor, and/or saying they don’t understand his trajectory and/or that they felt some of the humor at his expense took away from the legitimacy of having a fat, depressed, anxious character able to accomplish the same feats as when he had more physical prowess, etc. I disagree with this as well, in part because Fat Thor feels very personal to me, though not exclusively, and at the very least would like to propose a reading of many of the scenes in Endgame that offers a considerably more well-intentioned and good faith portrayal of Thor, with my own caveat that at least the anti-Ragnarok people using Fat Thor to further their agenda that Thor’s characterization sucks because Chris Hemsworth and Taika Waititi spent each day on set shaking Tom Hiddleston down for his lunch money and laughing at their own fart jokes are still wrong, which balances out everything else, because balance is still important, even if Thanos’ fuckboy interpretation of it is ridiculous. Anywho, apologies in advance for how messy this ends up being, I feel like my thoughts are very roundabout right now, but getting it out of my system will really help.

Thor has been ~emotionally fat~ for a while now, folks. As far back as Thor (2011), we see him disassociating, aka spending at least a few moments staring off into space in the midst of dealing with sudden upheaval, often because his angry outbursts have failed to be satisfying or get him what he wants/needs. One of the things that made me so excited to see a physical fallout to this in the MCU is that it actually ties into a bunch of other canons, too, including a recent spell in the comics leading up to the War of the Realms, wherein Odin sort of admits to his own role in breaking Thor, as far back as being “too drunk” to be there for his birth, as well as his being dubbed the God of Thunder because baby Thor used to wail whenever there was a storm, and Odin used to make fun of him for it because you don’t get a #4 Best All-Father coffee cup from your kids for nothing. @thishereanakinguy and I are even reworking parts of our Thorki paper for publication to put forth even more evidence that the pressure on Thor to be the Golden Child was too much, and that he’s been unraveling for a long time.

Again, none of these reactions to turmoil are new for Thor, though it’s fascinating that the conversation between Frigga and Thor in Endgame is largely focused on her assuring her son that it’s okay for him to fail, and/or for him to delegate tasks (there’s a recent comic that’s gone viral where Mister Rogers visits with Thor, and it has a similar bent), or realize that he has to shift his perspective on Who He Is. In part, it’s lowkey hilarious that Frigga, aka “send Loki some soup and some library books he’ll enjoy after our big fight because I still love that little asshole, never mind that he’ll probably receive them after she has been killed omfg,” is so blatantly ignoring Odin’s decrees to basically withhold basic affection from their children so that they’ll toughen up on their own, because fuck that noise. At the same time, Frigga imparts words that Thor (and Loki) should have heard and taken to heart a long time ago, and it’s painful to realize that Thor has felt as though he hasn’t been allowed to express his feelings, but so God damned great that that’s what Frigga hones in on. Notably, Thor isn’t trying to botch his trip to 2013 Asgard, either; he has a panic attack when he and Rocket arrive, and Frigga sneaks up on him because Frigga knows her babies no matter how much they are made of pizza or in Loki’s case magical artifacts. (Sarah read something saying that in households where the Golden Child and Black Sheep co-exist, statistically it’s common for the Golden Child to turn to alcohol and food, whereas the Black Sheep is more likely to turn to drugs/more illicit substances wherein they opt not to feel their feelings as much, and I was really floored by that because that really fits a couple of different scenarios that I’m familiar with for one reason or another.)

SO ANYWAY, we see Thor disassociating in previous movies. In TDW, even Odin comments on Thor’s confused heart, which Thor assures him has nothing to do with Jane Foster, even though it would be very easy for him to pretend he’s not actively thinking about Loki a thousand times a day and spending so much time stalking Heimdall and the broken Bifrost remnants that dude is like holy fuck please talk to your kid or I am going to commit treason again so hard. Thor reaches out to Odin for guidance/arguably comfort once Frigga dies, and his inability to provide either sends Thor immediately to Loki, who at the very least can help him properly realize the revenge he seeks, while also saving Jane. In Ragnarok, we get that great moment where Loki is talking directly to Thor, and Thor simply stares straight ahead; Loki doesn’t seem all that surprised by it either - he and Thor have different triggers and whatnot, but he knows the emo fuck who ends up at his cell in a fucking black poncho and handcuffs isn’t a new creation by any means, and he is into it fwiw. Even stuff like Korg admitting at the end of Ragnarok he carried around Miek’s presumably dead body because he felt so bad that he was dead warrants a little nod of understanding from Thor. Likewise, we see Thor stress-eating a bowl of bread at the beginning of Endgame, before the focus on his weight became a thing. Thor doesn’t run outside to see Tony Stark come home; whenever possible, he’s barely there, even before his five-year hiatus.

The use of well-placed humor in a three-hour sob fest does not seem all that weird to me. Shakespeare does it in all of his tragedies; and to continue this egregious metaphor, a lot of his comedies contain tragic bits, aka loss of family identity, which is arguably something that underpins how good Ragnarok is, as well. Being able to laugh at stuff has always been very important for me personally, though I realize it’s not for everyone. Still, I think there’s an additional caveat with Endgame regarding who the ‘fat jokes’ are coming from, aka arguably all of the Avengers have their own significant traumas to work through even before The Snap, and are also just trying to survive, even if they seem to fare physically better than Thor at this particular point in time. So Tony Stark calls him “Lebowski”; but as soon as the musical cues and Hemsworth’s amazing acting switches over into Thor being triggered by thoughts of all that he’s lost only minutes later, we see Tony, who canonically has major issues with being touched, putting his hand on Thor’s shoulder and allowing himself to be grabbed and held because he knows that is what Thor needs from him. Bruce, too, has to set a boundary for his own personal safety about being grabbed, but still gives in to Thor’s need for physical touch. One of the tragic touchstones of Ragnarok is that Thor doesn’t touch Loki once, even though in the first two Thor films and Avengers 1, he is constantly pawing at him. Thor wants to make a point in Ragnarok that he has decided he must let Loki go if that’s what Loki truly wants, and so he withholds his own instinct for physical contact - which Loki gives back to him, however briefly, in Infinity War by knocking Thor out of the way of Thanos and the Tesseract, to say nothing of how all Thor can do when he arrives at Loki’s corpse is to mewl and cling and bury his head and wait for everything to explode, himself included.

In any case, the other 'fat jokes’ come from Rocket, well established as being caustic in the face of personal tragedy, and having been put in the position even back in Infinity War of sort of making sure Thor keeps going, and Rhodey, who is probably just trying to deal with all these new people hanging around, and the fact that all of the structure in his life pretty much has been upended in a really short amount of time. Regarding Frigga’s “eat a salad” remark, as his mom, she seems to understand how much his physicality comes into play for him, and how devastating it is for him to see how others react to him seeming both physically and emotionally diminished. This is why it’s so powerful for him to still be 'worthy’ of Mjolnir, I think, and why that moment book-ended Frigga’s admonishment. Likewise, we don’t get a suspiciously fast glow-up wherein Thor’s all muscley again. He has to hold his own against Thanos in his current form, and he fucking does. Sometimes, life happens, and you have to respond to it as you are because you don’t have the time or energy to get everything in order first, and so you do the best you can. IMO, Thor did a pretty fucking good job.

I also find it completely understandable that Thor went off with the Guardians at the end of the film. (P.S.: Peter Quill is still absolutely intimidated by Fat Thor.) For one thing, I don’t think he’s going to stop trying to find a way to bring Loki back, regardless of what Clint said about the Soul Stone’s magic not being able to be reversed. For another, Valkyrie deserves her own glow-up into becoming Queen of New Asgard, as much as Sam deserves to be the new Cap. I’m of the mindset that Steve likely wouldn’t have gone back in time to be with Peggy if Tony had lived, and that doing so was him honoring Tony’s legacy by taking the advice that he gives several times in the film to go and live life while you have it. Likewise, as sad as it is for Tony to have died, I’m not sure he would have been able to rest, post-Thanos. You also can’t tell me for a second he hasn’t left all sorts of little messages and trinkets and whatnot around for his loved ones to find, cough AI Tony in Peter’s next suit or something cough.

Overall, I thought Endgame was a good send-off. It was well-acted, well-scripted, beautifully scored (Thor’s Pink Panther-esque theme when he’s trying to explain the Aether is amazeballs, as well as the theme that plays when everybody gets to the battlefield), and really just surprisingly, suspiciously good. I am glad that if we have to see this leg of the MCU end that it did so in such a way as to leave character arcs open to further interpretation, and I’m legitimately excited for a lot of them. While I don’t think everybody is required to be fake-positive all of the time, I do think that in fandom spaces, if one’s sole focus is how disappointing something is all the time, it’s not a productive or soul-enhancing use of one’s energy, and it makes me sad to see it. Nuance is important; the MCU has more of it than it’s given credit for having, and I hope more people realize that as it continues into Phase 4, or at the very least, that they find something they enjoy and keep coming along for the ride.

#avengers endgame spoilers #endgame spoilers #fat thor #meta #she wants the d(iscourse)

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kaescarribean-blog · 5 years

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week two

sunday, august 18

I’m writing this a bit far advance so I’m losing details of what has happened already, but I’m going to do my best! On Sunday, my two friends and I were just going to head down to Brewer’s beach to hangout and see what was going on with this Chili cookoff we had heard about. We assumed it would be a food truck or two, but when we got there, we couldn’t even recognize the beach we’d known for the last week! There was probably around 15 food trucks, a huge stage where a band was playing, and multiple boats pulled up to the beach. We recognized some people who we had hitch-hiked from earlier (...for a very short distance and with three friends, we made a judgment call and figured it was safe, thank god it was) on a boat, so we said hi and they invited us to come hang out! The rest of our NSE group saw us on the boat and came over to hangout too, the people were really gracious hosts and were excited to have so many people hanging out. We stayed down at the beach for a long time, and after we showered, ate, and met up at me and Blanca’s suite to hangout with some of the basketball team. We ended the night here, but it was a packed and extremely fun day, all without leaving campus!

monday, august 19

First day of classes! I only had one, which was swimming and snorkeling. It takes place at Brewers beach, but technically at the marine science building which is right down on the beach as well! I thought it was very lucky for the marine science department to have such a set up -- but it was incredibly difficult to find this building from campus because you had to take some sort of side road that is not marked and there are no signs on any of the buildings anywhere. We didn’t do anything in class besides talk about the semester, but afterwords since we were already down there some of my friends who were in the class and I decided to just stay down by the beach. It was pretty lowkey and I didn’t really go in far, but it was nice to get my time in the water due to class. I can’t remember much else happening today.

tuesday, august 20

The official first week of me landing in Charlotte Amalie! Time had already passed so much, and it feels like it could have been months since my arrival. This is my big day of classes, where I have Self Management: Wellness and Risk, Basic Design, World Lit, and Disparities in Health Care. Four classes a day definitely takes a lot out of you, and made it decently harder for me to keep up my streak of going to the water everyday. Two things that struck me today: one of my classes is a conference class, and another is a hybrid, which they did not tell me when registering. Conference classes are pretty common here since the St. Croix campus is so small (smaller than St. Thomas for me is hard to believe). It utilizes video chat, and we have cameras and microphones in each classrooms, and there is only a teacher in one of them. This is actually okay since the teacher is in the St. Thomas classroom, but it was so foreign to me and seemed so simple and everyday to everyone else. Hybrid classes exist for essentially the same purpose: lack of teachers. My World lit class AND history of the Virgin Islands class ended up being converted into hybrids, so you only meet once a week and then have the rest of your work online. This I really don’t like since I don’t do well with a lot of online classes, but I figured it would be good because I could have more time to do what I want and do work later. Anyways, I ate dinner and called it an early night due to the amount of schoolwork and stress I had to deal with during the day, and I was reminded that I will actually need to be doing some sort of studying while I’m here. Tragic. I’m also becoming more and more familiar with the idea that NO ONE in the Virgin Islands has any organizational skills or sense of urgency no matter the occasion, and to reallyyyyyyy stop expecting much when it comes to these things. Ex: paying tuition or registering for classes. Who cares, right? I guess not them!

wednesday, august 21

On Wednesday, I slept in very late and appreciated the lack of classes I have. The History class is the only thing I had to report for, so I organized my laundry and my room, and relaxed for a bit. At night, we went downtown into Red Hook, which is a very decent hop over to the other side of the island, and hung out at a view local dives with almost the entirety of the NSE group. Incredibly fun. One thing worth mentioning is the night time transportation. There’s not much to do for nightlife near the University, so to do something at night, we’re going to need to get into a car. The problem is that none of us have cars, clearly, and that the $1 safaris stop running at 6pm. So, we are forced into using the overpriced and tourist-targeted taxi system. They charge you for distance as well as per head, and they are always trying to rip you off and tell you prices far above what is reasonable, because they know they can take advantage of tourists. However, once you give a little pushback and show any general knowledge of the island, the usually loosen up and get you an okay price. This night, to get there and back per person was $12, but there were 14 of us in the van, so he made $168 dollars off of a 20 minute drive. And he wanted to charge even more! The point is, people always think we are tourists, and we’re constantly having to practice self-advocacy in order to not get taken advantage of.

thursday, august 22

I only went to one class today due to a combination of myself not making it to two and another getting cancelled (but me sitting in the class alone for 30 minutes). Then, I have no idea how I spent my day and there’s nothing in my camera roll to help remind me. I wish I did these daily instead of whenever I have time, I really want to do a better job about taking everything in! Some days are just mundane and I’m too tired by the end to recount all the happenings. Today must have been one of these days.

friday, august 23

No class - so, I think I may have gone into town, and come back and watch the sunset? One interesting thing that I’m not sure if I’ve noted is that the sun sets extremely early here, which I am a little bummed about. At home, because it was summer we were squeezing out daylight until around 9pm, but here, the sunsets at a very premature 6:45. I hope it doesn’t get earlier. That’s all I’ve got!!

saturday, august 24

Finally a day I remember! We got up early (8 am...but felt much much earlier) and one of my friends roommate has been going to school here for all of her 3 years, so she offered to lead us on this hike we always have wanted to go on! When you sit at the beach, you can see these rock/cave structures in the mountain, and we always talked about going. Today, we did! Though it took only about 30 minutes total, it was one of the hardest hikes I’ve ever been on. To call it a hike even seems disrespectful, it was literally an uphill mountain climb -- as in, you couldn’t be holding your phone or water bottle in your hand because you usually needed all four limbs to get your body up and over enormous rock structures. At one point, it literally seemed like the trail was at a 90 degree angle, and there was a rope on the side of a tree we had to hold onto to hoist ourselves upwards. Insanely challenging, but so breathtakingly beautiful once we got to the top! I don’t think I’ve ever sweat so much in my life. After this, we went home and took a breather for about an hour, showered, and then headed down for the beach. The school was throwing a cook out type thing, which meant lunch was served at the beach, which was fun. They also had many obstacle courses and games set up, but we were all far too worn out from the hike to participate in any of that. They had some kayaks for use which we did take advantage of, except the guard didn’t tell us we had to stay within the buoys, so we headed out way too far and they had to come get us in the rescue kayak and tell us to turn around, which all of our friends are still laughing about. One cultural thing that I don’t think I’ll get used to is how loud simply everything is. The music, the volume of people’s voices, their tvs, everything. So, the entire time the school was throwing this event they had music blasting louder than I’ve ever heard, and even at the most distant point we reached on the kayaks it was still too loud for all of us. When I’m at the beach I personally much prefer listening to the ocean or some sofftttt music in the background, but the locals do not seem to share this preference. For dinner, they clearly were serving the leftovers from lunch at the beach, and everything tasted stale and old. I don’t mean to leave this day on a bad note, those are just some observations I have that fit in here. This day was still amazing!

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