Thor: Love and Thunder's King Valkyrie title highlights a big issue
The king is dead, long live the king.
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As is perhaps more frequent than we think, a key piece of information about a Marvel movie has been confirmed by, err, LEGO. In this instance, a new LEGO set consisting of 564 pieces, including the Goat Boat, has reaffirmed that for Thor: Love and Thunder, the people of Asgaard have a new ruler: King Valkyrie.
This isn't wholly unexpected. At the end of Avengers: Endgame, Thorhands the crown and throne to Valkyrie, tasking her with establishing a new home for their people.
In addition, Valkyrie star Tessa Thompson teased at the gender-unconventional title by saying: "As new King, she needs to find her new queen, so that'll be her first order of business, she has some ideas. I'll keep you posted."
This statement and her new mantle are meant to do two things: first, establish Valkyrie not only as ruler of Asgard but also as someone whose attitude towards gender strictures is laissez-faire. Secondly, it establishes her as canonically bisexual – she is looking for a queen, after all.
We are, of course, super-stoked to see Valkyrie in both a powerful and authoritative role and also as one of the first out LGBTQ+ characters in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. While Thompson has said she always played Valkyrie as bi, this wasn't canon confirmed until recently, and her on-screen coming out takes place after Eternals, which technically claimed the mantle for having the first openly LGTBQ+ characters. (In case you were wondering, no, we don't count that cameo.)
Discussing gender and superheroes is like trying to untangle a ball of yarn previously rolled up by a child on a sugar rush. Everything is twisted into an indecipherable mess, and to pull out one thread invariably snags another one.
The initial reaction to King Valkyrie is positive – Valkyrie is, unequivocally, the new ruler of Asgaard. Her title is the same as Thor's.
But beneath that, there is a question about the gender-coded power structure within language. Why isn't Valkyrie Queen? Or, rather, why doesn't the title of 'queen' feel the same as the word 'king'?
The obvious, and abridged answer, is that it's because King refers to men, the traditional holders of power in patriarchy – aka the real world. Though Thor and all of Marvel's movies' inner worlds take place in, well, not reality, as works of fiction they are still informed by and reinforce the strictures of the world in which we all live.
Making Valkryie king makes use of the same logic as gender-neutralising of the word 'guys' to reference a group of people of any gender. This tool, however, still presupposes that the default and power-having class is masculine. Until we also refer to a group of differently gendered people as 'gals', the term 'guys' is not gender-neutral.
One can then apply this logic mechanism to superhero movies in general. While the movies themselves are loved and enjoyed by people of all genders, they are often filmed from a male point of view (the male gaze). Those films or characters that buck that gaze are often met with criticism for being too feminine or too preoccupied with that gaze to start with.
Ironically, maybe, this helpfully illustrates the same power imbalance being fought. The male gaze is still seen as the default and therefore correct metric by which we measure what makes a good superhero film. This is a double-bind for characters like Captain Marvel, who presents in a less typically feminine way in order to reinforce the notion that she is powerful and then derided for it.
Another example is Birds of Prey. Cathy Yan's hyper-real pop-art inspired visuals and palette spoke directly to the point of view of the main narrator Harley Quinn. Much of the female gaze brought to Birds of Preyhappened organically, from the fact that not only were there a plethora of women in front of the camera, but behind it as well.
Those same aesthetic cues were later used in The Suicide Squad, and they were successful because they had been established as an indelible part of her internal world, created through the female-gaze driven Birds of Prey. They worked because we had already subconsciously absorbed them as intrinsic to who Harley is.
Thor: Love and Thunder is seeking to do something similar – establishing something fundamental about Valkyrie, instead of through visuals, through the use of language. Taking on the mantle of King is meant to highlight a total indifference to gender, but because she hasn't been given the space to truly explore what that means for her (through her own gender identity and her bisexuality) it runs the risk of ringing hollow, a box-ticking shortcut.
Language is inherently coded by power and gender, this is the trap into which even the best of intentions fall. We're all ready to hail King Valkyrie, as long as the movie supports this monicker with a fleshed-out character arc that backs up its claims of gender neutrality.
Thor: Love and Thunder is out in cinemas on July 8, 2022.
