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dreamer_marie
2011-05-16 09:37 pm UTC (link)

Roger Ebert didn't like it either. There's tons of wank in the comments.

I went to see it with my brother by default (we had the choice between Thor and a romantic comedy). Neither of us is at all familiar with comic books, but we thought it was rather bad. Thor was an utterly unsympathetic character, Loki was clearly the better politician, even though he seemed to suffer from rather extreme mood swings.
Also, am I the only one who thought the movie was kind of antisemitic? The bad guys live in Jotunheim ; blond, dumb, muscly guy=good and dark-haired, cunning, stereotypically Jewish-looking guy=bad, that kind of thing?

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	rhosyn_du 2011-05-16 11:55 pm UTC (link)
	Haven't seen the movie, so I can't comment on the rest of it, but I'm curious about the connection between Jotunheim and antisemitism. Is there some meaning to Jotenheim besides the mythological home of the giants? (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	dreamer_marie 2011-05-17 07:59 am UTC (link)
	Is there some meaning to Jotenheim besides the mythological home of the giants? We didn't know about that (we're not exactly scholars in Norse mythology), so we didn't realise that the name came from before the time there were Jews in Scandinavia. We just wondered WTF the screenwriters were thinking when they made up the name. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	spawn_of_kong 2011-05-17 08:35 am UTC (link)
	See, that's the kind of thing you would want to look up before jumping to any conclusions. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	phosfate 2011-05-17 01:14 pm UTC (link)
	:D :D :D (Reply to this)(Parent)

	rhosyn_du 2011-05-17 08:42 am UTC (link)
	Ah, okay. I just thought maybe there was some association I didn't know about. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	the__ivorytower 2011-05-17 12:36 am UTC (link)
	I don't know much of anything about the comic, but I've been reading Norse mythology for unrelated reasons. ...man, now I just want to see Thor and Loki crossdressing. That was awesome. (Reply to this)(Parent)

	spawn_of_kong 2011-05-17 01:29 am UTC (link)
	All I know is that Thor in the original Norse mythology was ginger, rather than blond. As for the lack of sympathy, I think that was the idea, at least as far as Thor's character arc goes: jerkish guy realizes he's been a jerk, learns humility, that sort of thing. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	dreamer_marie 2011-05-17 08:00 am UTC (link)
	He's still an idiot, though. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

	cmdr_zoom 2011-05-17 04:34 pm UTC (link)
	Well, yes. It sometimes seems (from the source material) that the main reason the Asgardians keep Loki around and put up with him being, well, Loki is that he's the only one of 'em that can count past ten without taking off his shoes. Of course, the trouble usually starts when Loki gets too full of his own cleverness... (Reply to this)(Parent)

	mindset 2011-05-17 02:22 am UTC (link)
	Uh... yeah, you might be. Loki might be dark-haired, but doesn't look remotely Jewish, and neither do the frost giants. Tom Hiddleston and Colm Feore are really, really WASPy. And I'm not sure what you think Jotunheim (trans: "the home of the giants"), a land of permanent ice and snow, has to do with antisemitism at all... (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)

dreamer_marie
2011-05-17 08:12 am UTC (link)

I didn't know about Jotunheim. But you have to admit that we're given little reason to root for Thor other than the fact that he's the eldest son, he's muscly and he's blond. Loki is dark-haired, cunning, way smarter than his brother and therefore he's de facto untrustworthy and mockworthy and the bad guy. Maybe it's not exactly antisemitic, but it's the kind of story that white supremacists lap up.

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mindset
2011-05-17 01:12 pm UTC (link)

OK, yeah. "Joden" = Jews. "Jotun" = giants. Jotunheim is an actual mythological name not made up by the screenwriters.

Loki was not untrustworthy because he was dark-haired, he was untrustworthy because he did untrustworthy things, like play various factions against each other and lie to people's faces. I don't recall any point where he was mocked, except perhaps by his own insecurities. He wasn't considered as a heir by his father because he was dark-haired, but because he was actually the son of the king of the giants and Odin planned him to be a peace-bringer (a new giant ruler raised in Asgard) instead. (Did you miss that section of the movie?)

And for Loki's deeds, you need to go back to the original myths, where he has always manipulated people (he's a god of mischief and chaos and a shapeshifter and one of the causes of the end of the world) and he has always been depicted as dark-haired.

White supremacists believe all kinds of shit. They lapped up Wormtongue in LoTR too, but that doesn't make the whole Rohirrim section of the Two Towers an excerpt of the Protocols. If they're going to go apeshit and seize Thor as "yay, another example of the Blond Good Man vs Dark Jew", they might as well focus on Loki's horned helmet while they're at it, since those stupid fuckers still think Jews have horns. But you ought to know, white supremacists already have a tendency to go for Norse mythology (much to the dismay of modern non-racist Norse pagans) since it's Germanic, so they probably would have gone wild over Thor anyway. (Although the Black Heimdall and Japanese Hogun and other races depicted in the movie's Asgard hopefully scared them away.)

Anyway, Marvel's Loki and the Thor plotline was created by Stan Lee (Jewish), Larry Lieber (Jewish), and Jack Kirby (Jewish). The movie was written by several people including J. Michael Straczynski (Jewish, and a former writer of the comic). Does that help?

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dreamer_marie
2011-05-17 01:55 pm UTC (link)

Yes, thank God for Token Black Guy and Token Asian. Possibly also Token Chick and the nurse who was turned into an astrophysicist for the movie. Otherwise someone might have looked racist and we can't have that.

And Loki definitely did get mocked by Thor's band of trusty sycophants. From the beginning of the movie, you get the impression that he's very low on the totem-pole (kind of a weird way to bring up a God-loving Giant-king, don't you think?).

I'm not saying that the movie-makers, or even the original comic-writers, set out to create a white supremacist propaganda empire. I just think this is a sucky movie with unfortunate implications. Clearly, you disagree, and that's fine. Hey, I like Harry Potter and Sherlock BBC, and neither really stands up to scrutiny. Just because you like something doesn't mean you espouse all the problematic views in it. But I think, at least in fandom, we can look critically at the material we love (or hate) and see what may be problematic about it.

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	sparkysrevenge 2011-05-17 02:56 pm UTC (link)
	Token Chick is actually a chick in the comics, too. That's his Asgardian girlfriend, Sif. (Reply to this)(Parent)(Thread)