Is there a gay couple in thor love and thunder

While even the most bastardly cynical among us myself included may think that adults shouldn't need their identities affirmed by children's movies, what of the children? It's happened again, guys: we've been fooled, hoodwinked, led astray!

Gift guides. There's a whole cornucopia of queer people out there, and but a fragment will feel duly seen with shots of married lesbian couples, and a smaller sliver by alien rock people copulating with their stoney hands. The central issues are that queer audiences are presently reduced to objects for ticking off back-patting diversity quotas, and that the desire of queer people to see ourselves on screen is being exploited for commerce with little to none of the promised payoff.

Besides, the questions around marginalised representation are sticky at the best of times — these are populations comprised of individuals, woven together by social and biological traits but unique all the same. In Thor: Love and Thunder, the relationship between Thor and Jane Foster is said to take on an even greater significance.

There was the openly gay superhero Phastos Bryan Tyree Henry in Eternalsnotably the in-universe architect of Hiroshima's nuclear destruction. So what've we had since that first Endgame moment? Nor does rock alien fucking, or a sparing, angsty glance.

Below is a list of the gay moments, subtext, and energy that I could find in Thor: Love and Thunder, ranked by their level of gayness.

Breaking down the moments

An Asgardian kid insists on going by a gender-neutral name — this is nice, to be fair, subtly reinforcing the agency of children amid the increasing real-world hostilities for trans people. It's happened again, guys: we've been fooled, hoodwinked, led astray!.

There is no same-sex kiss in Thor: Love and Thunder, but the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe film directed by Taika Waititi does several moments for its LGBTQ characters to express themselves. To state the obvious, little of this amounts to meaningful queer representation.

You'd be forgiven for finding this all a little bit trivial: who really cares about who Thor noshes off, or who Captain Marvel goes to bed with, anyway? Thor: Love and Thunder, the fourth instalment in the Thor series, is the Queen's Gambit of gay dog chess.

Be warned: Spoilers abound. And that has been the problem which has hamstrung the MCU's relationship to sexuality across its year era of global domination: queerness is relentlessly commodified, included to wrangle more butts on seats, hardly as a reflection of real-world diversity nor as a moral stance.

The fall of Boris Johnson. Otherwise, there's the latent homoeroticism embedded into almost every superhero flick: the slicked-up, sculpted male bodies, the ridiculous costumes, male-on-male tension veering on angst, the arch macho of it all.

Tessa Thompson's canonically bisexual demi-god Valkyrie kisses another woman's hand, ostensibly to convey interest, and also butches up in a suit. He kisses his husband in one scene, resulting in widely-felt censorship in countries where to be gay remains against the law.

So far, Disney has tried to straddle the fence, breadcrumbing queerness while broadly capitulating to apparent market pressures. Hand-flailing flamboyance and nice, progressive words make for meaningful representation not. Such a scathing sentiment might feel harsh, but it rings awfully true: for better or worse, Marvel Studios is the most dominant cultural force in the present moment, yet across thirty-three movies and TV spin-offs, queer audiences have been offered just sparing slivers of tokenistic visibility.

Thor: Love and Thunderthe fourth instalment in the Thor series, is the Queen's Gambit of gay dog chess. While Disney initially took a public stance, it eventually relented, leaving this and other moments of gay intimacy on the cutting room floor in certain international territories.

There has been no press touting it as gay, no big queer celebs attached except Tessa Thompson who is an existing character, and no stream of articles touting "MCUs first gay couple-since the last ones-gettng banned".

There's an abundance of euphemism and innuendo, sure: Waititi's character Korg, an alien made of rock, talks about having two dads and has hand sex with another moustachioed member of his species. But for all of the well-intended mistakes Waititi and his cast have made in emphasising Love and Thunder 's queer bona fides to fans and the press, this isn't an issue isolated to one title nor one filmmaker: it's demonstrative of an unnecessary stalemate between profit demands and the exceedingly reasonable want for actual queer visibility.

A few fleeting shots communicate homoerotic tension between Thor Chris Hemsworth and Starlord Chris Prattbut it's simply the butt of a very early-noughties gag. According to director Taika Waititi and star Chris Hemsworth, the film will delve deeper into the emotions and motivations of the characters, particularly when it comes to their love for one another.