Thor: Ragnarok

[Claudette Savagely]

I'm not arguing that the MCU isn't an interpretation crafted from mythology, what I'm saying is that we had an established backstory for Asgard with established characters from the first two movies.... and then this director came along and rewrote it to fit what he wanted.

I preferred Thor and Loki to talk as they did in then previous movies..... not as if they had suddenly grown up in Southern California.

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This may completely blow your mind but Odin's self-aggrandising narration in the opening sequences of the first two Thor movies, which constitute the bulk of our understanding of Asgard's history, are not actually unalterable fact just because he said it first. It can be very easily understood to be a partial and self serving account made by a character interested in making himself, his dynasty, and his nation look good. When a classically trained british actor delivers a line it does not become true for all time.

Edit: in stories, a character can be shown to have been lying about something after they originally said it. This is commonly accepted to be ok by a lot of people who write words.

Also if you think that two blokes speaking in vaguely south English accents sound like they're from California then I can only conclude that you've never left the Home Counties and are probably from central Buckinghamshire.

 

[Mark]

Weirdly enough @Mark despises "forced politics" in films when films depict colonialism as bad, but is totally ok when films depict glittering realms full of golden warriors who are mostly white jacking off about how awesome they are Edit: and killing loads of Edit2: obviously irredeemably evil dudes to self-congratulatory narration.

That's not any sort of political position, obviously, and it definitely isn't forced.

No sir! Totally neutral!

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Question: When did it become wrong for white people to have something to look up to? More precisely, when did it become against the rules to depict a mostly white civilization as virtuous?
Why do the Nordic guys with the funny helmets have to be bad while the barbarians we saw pillaging in the second movie are suddenly just common folks being oppressed by the evil space vikings?

I don't like the idea of retroactively turning the Asgardians into the bad guys just to satisfy the director's politics.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

Question: When did it become wrong for white people to have something to look up to? More precisely, when did it become against the rules to depict a mostly white civilization as virtuous?
Why do the Nordic guys with the funny helmets have to be bad while the barbarians we saw pillaging in the second movie are suddenly just common folks being oppressed by the evil space vikings?

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Man, you're not even fucking trying to disguise your politics, are you?

 

[Mark]

This may completely blow your mind but Odin's self-aggrandising narration in the opening sequences of the first two Thor movies, which constitute the bulk of our understanding of Asgard's history, are not actually unalterable fact just because he said it first. It can be very easily understood to be a partial and self serving account made by a character interested in making himself, his dynasty, and his nation look good. When a classically trained british actor delivers a line it does not become true for all time.

Edit: in stories, a character can be shown to have been lying about something after they originally said it. This is commonly accepted to be ok by a lot of people who write words.

Also if you think that two blokes speaking in vaguely south English accents sound like they're from California then I can only conclude that you've never left the Home Counties and are probably from central Buckinghamshire.

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Ok...... so you're cool with just ditching the existence of Odin's father Bor and Asgard's war against the Dark Elves ...and going with the new version of events where Odin himself built Asgard, apparently upon a pile of stolen loot he took from all the realms he colonized?

 

[mothematics]

Question: When did it become wrong for white people to have something to look up to? More precisely, when did it become against the rules to depict a mostly white civilization as virtuous?
Why do the Nordic guys with the funny helmets have to be bad while the barbarians we saw pillaging in the second movie are suddenly just common folks being oppressed by the evil space vikings?

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That burden you got there sure looks heavy.

 

[The Imperator]

Ok...... so you're cool with just ditching the existence of Odin's father Bor and Asgard's war against the Dark Elves ...and going with the new version of events where Odin himself built Asgard, apparently upon a pile of stolen loot he took from all the realms he colonized?

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Asgard can still exist with Bor, all this movie means is Odin decided to aggressively act after he took over from his dad, until realizing that was bad. The Dark Elves can still be bad guys, Asgard being colonial doesn't suddenly make omnicide-mc-evil face a good guy or a misunderstood oppressed guy.

England isn't suddenly the villain of world war 2 because they had colonies.

 

[Omegahugger]

Why do the Nordic guys with the funny helmets have to be bad while the barbarians we saw pillaging in the second movie are suddenly just common folks being oppressed by the evil space vikings?

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... Because the Nordic guys with funny helmets actually were kinda bad?

The only kind of defense you can really make for vikings* is that they weren't particularly bad for their age period. Which really isn't a good defense.
*and when you're talking "Nordics with funny helmets", you're talking raiding vikings. There's no one else described like that ever.

And I'm speaking as Dane here.

 

[Mutton]

While I disagree with the whole "everything is politics" angle, since when was there a shortage of stuff for white people to look up to?

Also, are there any nations that have been around for more than a century and who don't have a checkered past?

 

[Jace911]

That burden you got there sure looks heavy.

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I did nazi that joke coming

 

[changeling]

Question: When did it become wrong for white people to have something to look up to? More precisely, when did it become against the rules to depict a mostly white civilization as virtuous?

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Considering that both Avengers and Avengers Age of Ultron were both "AMERICA FUCK YEAH!" in style and substance, something you are only able to miss if you are inside the USA and really don't pay attention. White people outnumber all the others minorities in the main assemble by wide margin.. and then you have, movies like Dunkirk (white English heroes), the Martian (white hypercompetent scientists), Arrival (ditto, and the Yellow Peril Chinese as antagonists) what are you talking about? When precisely USA filmmakers stopped to depict a mostly white civilization as virtuous? I've missed that change.

 

[Mark]

Asgard can still exist with Bor, all this movie means is Odin decided to aggressively act after he took over from his dad, until realizing that was bad. The Dark Elves can still be bad guys, Asgard being colonial doesn't suddenly make omnicide-mc-evil face a good guy or a misunderstood oppressed guy.

England isn't suddenly the villain of world war 2 because they had colonies.

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And yet...we clearly see from the last two movies, that ASGARD didn't conquer the 9-realms in the last 5,000 years. Asgardian lifespans are between 4 and 5 thousand years. Putting aside the fact that we don't know when Bor died in the MCU and when Odin first became king.... when exactly is this conquest supposed to have taken place? It would almost certainly have had to be within the lifespan of living memory .....meaning Odin could not have covered it up like this movie claims.
What we get from this movie is that Odin had a crazy daughter who WANTED to conquer the 9-realsm...and he banished her to Hel for it. I'm not sure theere's any actual evidence that Argard ever went out and colonized anyone....and if they did....no one seems to remember it

... Because the Nordic guys with funny helmets actually were kinda bad?

The only kind of defense you can really make for vikings* is that they weren't particularly bad for their age period. Which really isn't a good defense.
*and when you're talking "Nordics with funny helmets", you're talking raiding vikings. There's no one else described like that ever.

And I'm speaking as Dane here.

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these guys.

While I disagree with the whole "everything is politics" angle, since when was there a shortage of stuff for white people to look up to?

Also, are there any nations that have been around for more than a century and who don't have a checkered past?

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Not many...if any, but those nations aren't looking for reasons to flaunt that past.
I'm not German, but that doesn't mean I don't feel bad for the entire generation of Germans who were raised to hate themselves for being German because of what a small number of their grandfathers did a long time ago.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

Considering that both Avengers and Avengers Age of Ultron were both "AMERICA FUCK YEAH!" in style and substance, something you are only able to miss if you are inside the USA and really don't pay attention. White people outnumber all the others minorities in the main assemble by wide margin.. and then you have, movies like Dunkirk (white English heroes), the Martian (white hypercompetent scientists), Arrival (ditto, and the Yellow Peril Chinese as antagonists) what are you talking about? When precisely USA filmmakers stopped to depict a mostly white civilization as virtuous? I've missed that change.

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Eh...AGE OF ULTRON is (IMO) trying to do a deconstruction/reconstruction of American foreign policy. The Avengers show up in Sokovia and blow the fuck out of HYDRA (that's good!), but the Iron Legion drones piss off the local population and their actions only further destabilize the region (that's bad!). Later, Tony and Bruce try and develop an AI which will proactively defend the planet against further threats (that's good!), only for said AI to go rogue and end up trying to exterminate life on Earth (that's bad!). Even at the end, when they save Sokovia/the world, they do so by basically destroying the city/county (and Civil War only further digs into why the battle was at best a wash).

Even the backstory of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver is about critiquing American foreign policy Tony's past as a weapons manufacturer.

 

[Omegahugger]

What we get from this movie is that Odin had a crazy daughter who WANTED to conquer the 9-realsm...and he banished her to Hel for it. I'm not sure theere's any actual evidence that Argard ever went out and colonized anyone....and if they did....no one remembers it

Click to shrink...

So what, Odin just decided to paint the ceiling with pictures of his daughter, her dog and their friends?

Admittedly, that would probably make him a better father than he's oherwise presented, but I don't really buy it unless Hela had a conqueror phase like other girls have a princess phase.

 

[Mutton]

Considering that both Avengers and Avengers Age of Ultron were both "AMERICA FUCK YEAH!" in style and substance, something you are only able to miss if you are inside the USA and really don't pay attention. White people outnumber all the others minorities in the main assemble by wide margin.. and then you have, movies like Dunkirk (white English heroes), the Martian (white hypercompetent scientists), Arrival (ditto, and the Yellow Peril Chinese as antagonists) what are you talking about? When precisely USA filmmakers stopped to depict a mostly white civilization as virtuous? I've missed that change.

Click to shrink...

I didn't even like Arrival and that's not a fair characterization at all. Same with The Martian who had the Chinese step in to help save the day where the West floundered.

Not to say that there aren't a ton of good white role models but let's not put others down to lift some up

 

[Mark]

So what, Odin just decided to paint the ceiling with pictures of his daughter, her dog and their friends?

Admittedly, that would probably make him a better father than he's oherwise presented, but I don't really buy it unless Hela had a conqueror phase like other girls have a princess phase.

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You're point being? She had to smash the fresco of Odin and his sons to get to the earlier one.... Clearly he likes family photos and Hela likes her pet dog

 

[tankdrop24]

This may completely blow your mind but Odin's self-aggrandising narration in the opening sequences of the first two Thor movies, which constitute the bulk of our understanding of Asgard's history, are not actually unalterable fact just because he said it first. It can be very easily understood to be a partial and self serving account made by a character interested in making himself, his dynasty, and his nation look good. When a classically trained british actor delivers a line it does not become true for all time.

Edit: in stories, a character can be shown to have been lying about something after they originally said it. This is commonly accepted to be ok by a lot of people who write words.

Also if you think that two blokes speaking in vaguely south English accents sound like they're from California then I can only conclude that you've never left the Home Counties and are probably from central Buckinghamshire.

Click to shrink...

I actually really liked how Thor Ragnarok contrasted against the first movie (the Dark world can go be boring someplace else), the world of Thor was shakespearean and serious, which in a way now gives the feel of people who are totally immersed in their society, and fully commit to it's narrative. In Ragnarok, Thor's been around enough to think for himself and come to his own conclusions about how the world works, so things have a looser feel as people are more willing to poke fun at the world they live in and not feel obligated like they have to take it seriously just because.

In the first film, it felt like the nine realms were a magical world that simply was, with the Asgardians slated to be stewards just because that was the nature of things. I found this characterization confusing considering how Guardians of the Galaxy portrayed the wider universe, and I really enjoyed that Ragnarok showed the former interpretation as more or less nothing more than a myth. Asgard is just a funny looking planet in a wider universe that happened to have access to magic for whatever reason and the nine realms are merely their conquests, even if it's population has come to believe otherwise. It's no wonder people like Strange who really do deal with magic that affects the fundamental nature of reality borderline rolls their eyes when Asgardians show up on Earth.

 

[The Imperator]

And yet...we clearly see from the last two movies, that ASGARD didn't conquer the 9-realms in the last 5,000 years. Asgardian lifespans are between 4 and 5 thousand years. Putting aside the fact that we don't know when Bor died in the MCU and when Odin first became king.... when exactly is this conquest supposed to have taken place? It would almost certainly have had to be within the lifespan of living memory .....meaning Odin could not have covered it up like this movie claims.

Click to shrink...

He almost certainly altered people's memories. He outright said his wife would have been proud of Loki for being able to do that, implying heavily she could do stuff like that. If he and her changed people's memories to cover up the past, just like they his the older soldiers and art of Hela, the timeline works out fine.

 

[Mark]

I actually really liked how Thor Ragnarok contrasted against the first movie (the Dark world can go be boring someplace else), the world of Thor was shakespearean and serious, which in a way now gives the feel of people who are totally immersed in their society, and fully commit to it's narrative. In Ragnarok, Thor's been around enough to think for himself and come to his own conclusions about how the world works, so things have a looser feel as people are more willing to poke fun at the world they live in and not feel obligated like they have to take it seriously just because.

In the first film, it felt like the nine realms were a magical world that simply was, with the Asgardians slated to be stewards just because that was the nature of things. I found this characterization confusing considering how Guardians of the Galaxy portrayed the wider universe, and I really enjoyed that Ragnarok showed the former interpretation as more or less nothing more than a myth. Asgard is just a funny looking planet in a wider universe that happened to have access to magic for whatever reason and the nine realms are merely their conquests, even if it's population has come to believe otherwise. It's no wonder people like Strange who really do deal with magic that affects the fundamental nature of reality borderline rolls their eyes when Asgardians show up on Earth.

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So..... Odin's nice quiet corner of the universe (a mostly white suburb) needs to be smashed because other more urban planets exist in the Universe?

The Very existence of a Sorcerer Supreme on Earth basically puts the lie to the idea that Odin Conquered the nine-realms as his own little kingdom.

 

[Arthur Frayn]

I didn't even like Arrival and that's not a fair characterization at all. Same with The Martian who had the Chinese step in to help save the day where the West floundered.

Not to say that there aren't a ton of good white role models but let's not put others down to lift some up

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Yeah, Arrival was literally about the need to communicate with each other, and how presupposing hostile intent can fuck up diplomacy even if it's undertaken with the best of intentions. The Chinese in the film aren't antagonists, but people trying to solve the problem as best they can, and who inadvertently trigger a crisis because they used a flawed methodology for establishing communications (for those who haven't seen the film, the Chinese team learns to speak to the aliens using a system based on Mahjong, without realizing that a game has an inherent bias towards competition and confrontation).

So..... Odin's nice quiet corner of the universe (a mostly white suburb) needs to be smashed because other more urban planets exist in the Universe?

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Bruh I can't even tell what you're mad about any more, that the film didn't show Asgard as a perfect Aryan Nordic paradise, that Waititi got politics in your peanut butter, or that the film had the gall to make a critique of colonialism.

 

[Mutton]

So..... Odin's nice quiet corner of the universe (a mostly white suburb) needs to be smashed because other more urban planets exist in the Universe?

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It didn't need to be smashed? The whole point was that Odin fucked up and doomed the rest of the people; Ragnarok was bad. Hela, despite what you seem to think, was a villain. Suture was a villain.

Shit, you could make a convincing case that the end is basically white flight if you want to go with that metaphor

 

[Arthur Frayn]

It didn't need to be smashed? The whole point was that Odin fucked up and doomed the rest of the people; Ragnarok was bad. Hela, despite what you seem to think, was a villain. Suture was a villain.

Shit, you could make a convincing case that the end is basically white flight if you want to go with that metaphor

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Eh, I interpreted it as Hela and Surtur being the "scourge of God" ("I am the scourge of God. If you had not committed great sins, God would not have sent a punishment like me upon you." - Genghis Khan). Hela and Surtur (to a lesser extent) are absolutely the villains, given that one wants to wage an unending war of conquest and genocide and the other is a giant fire monster, but both wouldn't have come into existence without Odin (and by extension Asgard's) metaphorical "sins" (i.e. their conquest of the Nine Realms).

They're bad guys, but they never would exist in the first place if Asgard hadn't been an imperialist power in the first place.

 

[Reveen]

Why do the Nordic guys with the funny helmets have to be bad while the barbarians we saw pillaging in the second movie are suddenly just common folks being oppressed by the evil space vikings?

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You realize that conflating continuity and kinship between "Nordic guys with the funny helmets" and Western Christian culture is absolutely fucking ridiculous and historically illiterate because those two broad cultural systems fucking hated each other? In fact the conquest/colonialism narrative can just as easy fit the interactions between Christianity and Norse paganism, going both ways.

Vikings really liked chopping up monks and friars with axes, and some of the people to receive Christianity's DEUS VULT treatment post-Rome were northern european pagans.

Like, fuck.

 

[Jace911]

Question: When did it become wrong for white people to have something to look up to?

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prolly the fact that "white" people don't have a shared heritage based on, for example, abduction and forced homogenization like black people in America and "white culture" is largely a racist reaction to black civil rights and doesn't really exist outside of Klan/Nazi/Trump rallies

Now, if you wanna talk about Polish culture or Russian culture or Welsh culture or French or Italian or German or Dutch or Scottish or Finnish culture then hey, there's some stuff you can look up to if you've really got an itch to reconnect with your good European heritage. But if you go looking for "white culture" all you're gonna find is white hoods and burning crosses.

 

[mothematics]

I find this doubly hilarious because afaik Mark isn't even culturally Scandinavian and here he is trying to defend my ancestors from what he thinks is unfair attacks

So..... Odin's nice quiet corner of the universe (a mostly white suburb) needs to be smashed because other more urban planets exist in the Universe?

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Wow you're not even trying anymore. That is hilariously racist. Whiter than curdled milk.

Asgard blew up because they lied to themselves about their issues and they came back to destroy them. This wasn't a morally consequentialist argument in that what happened at the end was good, it's that if you lie about the past then you're going to lead your people to ruin when your sins come back.

 

[MJ12 Commando]

Question: When did it become wrong for white people to have something to look up to? More precisely, when did it become against the rules to depict a mostly white civilization as virtuous?
Why do the Nordic guys with the funny helmets have to be bad while the barbarians we saw pillaging in the second movie are suddenly just common folks being oppressed by the evil space vikings?

I don't like the idea of retroactively turning the Asgardians into the bad guys just to satisfy the director's politics.

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It's fucking funny that you insist that the movie retroactively turned the Asgardians into the bad guys when like, the movie spends an extensive amount of time showing that the sins of the past might be haunting the modern Asgardians but they are not "the bad guys" or anything. Like, there is even a pretty goddamn long battle scene where Hela shows up and declares that they're going to go conquering again, and the entire Asgardian military decides that this is bullshit, and are willing to fight her for it.

Let me repeat that. The entire Asgardian military. The entire fucking Asgardian military. Would rather fight her and die than do that. Like, let me list the number of Asgardians who are actually enthusiastic regarding Hela's plan to get back to murdering people and taking their land for Asgard:

Done.

It's also funny that you're bitching to high heaven about the movie 'retroactively turning the Asgardians into the bad guys just to satisfy the director's politics' when you ignore that Marvel has fucking done this in the MCU repeatedly, from literally Iron Man 2 which "retroactively" turned Anthony Stark into a huge dick.