Tessa Thompson feels “really good” about how Valkyrie’s sexuality is portrayed in Thor: Love And Thunder
The character's bisexuality was "a big topic of conversation" with director Taika Waititi, Thompson says
Aux News Thor
Tessa Thompson has been a champion of Valkyrie’s sexuality from the beginning, but wouldn’t you know, Marvel deemed a scene confirming it too “distracting” in Thor: Ragnarok. But the MCU has gotten a bit more gay since then, so does Thor: Love And Thunder finally let the Asgardian warrior be out and proud?
“We talked about it a lot, it was big topic of conversation,” Thompson explains in an interview with Yahoo! Entertainment. “Because I think rightfully there’s this real want in audiences to see characters be very clearly queer or LGBTQIA+ inside these spaces. And I think it’s hugely important to have representation.”
She continues, “And also, I think as humans I think that we are not defined by our sexuality, and by who we love. And so sometimes I think to hang a narrative completely on that is a way of actually diminishing the humanity of the character. Because you don’t allow them to be anything else. … It becomes the only storyline, particularly in a movie like this where you don’t, frankly, have a lot of room for storyline.”
Okay… not sounding too promising, honestly. But Thompson has a positive spin on how that character was represented in the movie: “[There] was a lot of conversation in terms of how to treat that with Valkyrie. And I feel really good, personally, about where we got to. I hope that she’s a character that fans continue to connect to, that we have a lot of time to explore her, in all of her humanity. But whether or not she finds love in this movie doesn’t mean she’s not still a fabulous queer character that is open to finding love when it makes sense.”
So it sounds like Valkyrie won’t be finding her queen after all. But perhaps her sexuality will be confirmed in some other way (that hopefully won’t be censored for foreign markets).
56 Comments
Please stop using ther tem “bisexual” as it erases non-binary people. Kind of weird this keeps needing to be said. Is she pansexual? If not why is she playing a pansexual character?
Kind of a round about way of saying “the ambiguity is more compelling when attempting to tell a story”. She is making some good points. Shit, I just mansplained Tessa Thompson. Sorry.
Am I the only one who has a problem with celebrities being used as spokespeople for Disney’s inclusivity when Disney is a company that has shown time and time again that they care only about said inclusivity as much as they can use it, in certain markets, as a selling point? They’re all too happy to discard any such pretentions of idealism or morality when the market is suddenly not so accepting of marginalized group participation? When you edit Black people out of your movie posters you don’t get to pat yourself on the back for ‘representing’. Tessa’s comments here, at least to me, sound like a whole lot of meaningless platitudes to her corporate overlords. Even if there is some type of ‘non-binary’ scene in Thor, do we really believe it won’t be cut for China? Especially after the backlash to the Lightyear kiss recently?
“Okay… not sounding too promising, honestly.”So, EVERYTHING she says is positive about Valkyrie’s portrayal, but let’s ignore that because this THOR movie is not ABOUT Valkyrie’s sexuality?
Remember when you could just play a superhero without worrying about how gay they may or may not be? Man, those was the days.
Back then no one knew if the super heroes were gay but watching them sure helped a few audience members figure out where they stood sexually.
And how zero media representation led to disproportionate suicides, ideation and hate crimes!? I sure did love how——times change and that type of thinking is passé.
Let’s ask this guy.ETA: Fucking Kinja. There’s supposed to be a picture of Measuring Man here.
Not really. People have been calling superheroes gay since Fredric Wertham got a bug up his ass about Batman and Robin.
You sure it was a bug?
Does that picture predate school desegregation? If not, it can’t be by much.
Might be a matter of hours.
In the 50’s they had an actual congressional hearing where the star witness argued that Batman and Robin were gay lovers and Wonder Woman was lesbian propaganda, but okay.
okay!
I’m all for more MCU queerness, but anyone else remember when this character helped enslave people, possibly for centuries? Where’s the #JusticeFor them? 😛
To be fair quite a few of them were probably killed right away in the arena by the Hulk.
Yeah, we did, uh, kinda gloss over that and make her a monarch fairly quickly, eh?
She was depressed!
Special guest star Rupaul, holding back tears: I TOLD YOU TO SLAY, QUEEN, NOT ENSLAVE, QUEEN!Valkyrie: Shouldn’t you be off fracking somewhere.
The MCU loves to forget about heroes doing terrible things. Remember when Tony gave an army of killer drones to a kid?
I know it’s never gonna happen but man I would love if this movie ended with Jane realizing who she truly loved and her and Valkyrie end up together with Thor being totally cool with it.
I’d love it if some forgotten ex-gladiator she captured and sold to the Grandmaster came back and smashed her with a hammer. Then Thor and Jane part as friends.
I mean, Jane was only with Thor because she thought he was going to be king. Now that Valkyrie is king, well, she’ll switch side so fast you’ll think it’s halftime.
As long as he could watch?
Is she actually allowed to be gay or is it just a less than 5 second clip that is easily edited out for international distribution?
My guess is it will be a small mention of her queerness and that will be it. The story isn’t about her being queer, so an acknowledgement of it and then her continuing to be a badass superhero makes the most sense. Like Thompson said, her sexuality doesn’t define her, so the implicit knowledge that the character is queer but is also tough/funny/heroic/whatever just like all of the other superheroes goes a long way towards building inclusivity. The international markets that will likely want the scene cut out can fuck off for all I care. I wish Disney would stop pandering to them, but $$$.
Are real life gay people “different” in some way for 13 of the hours in a day? Or is their gayness visible in just the small moments anything else is?
That all depends on whether or not we’re having brunch that day.
Valkyrie will drive a Subaru Forester, wear flannel shirts and frequently talk about buying a fixer-upper with her ‘friend’ from the softball team.
ugh why even show up?
And what does being allowed to be gay entail? Is she supposed to present herself a certain way, talk a certain way or are you just looking for stereotypes?
They will probably deal with Valkyrie’s sexuality as much and as sensitively as Multiverse of Madness dealt with Wanda’s emotional trauma.
The thing about Wanda’s ‘trauma’ is that before the events of Endgame EVERYONE lost loved ones. Half the universe was wiped from existence. Why should she get a pass that nobody else did?“Um, yes judge, I know I enslaved an entire town and murdered numerous innocent people, but I was big sad!” “Case dismissed!”Since when does feminist empowerment = women freed from responsibility and accountability? Same thing we saw recently with Reva in the Obi-Wan show? Or am I just noticing it specifically with them because I’m a lowkey misogynist?
I’ll start by saying that I think MOST of the MCU material is fun but relatively shallow. And the longer it hangs around the more dull it gets (How many fucking world-crumbling crises can you have before we stop giving a shit?). That said, I thought WandaVision did an excellent job of dealing with the psychological trauma Wanda experienced as part of the Endgame events. I get what you’re saying about half the world losing *someone* and you’re not wrong, BUT a pretty significant follow-up to that is that for the majority of those people, their loved ones *came back*. Vision died. And Vision’s engine of life became part of the weapon that deleted half the population. With the film characters, we didn’t get to sit for any significant time with how losing people affected them. We got some of that, but the plot beats were a-knockin. (Fat Thor is fun but does it really do justice to the character’s loss?) So here comes WandaVision to give us character development for both Wanda AND Vision. Wanda not only gets Vision back, she gets to live a “Wonderful Life”. The show demonstrates that she knows, deep down, that what she’s doing is Wrong. She knows she’s hurting people. And eventually through the course of the show she fights off her wounded impulses. Now that doesn’t make her heroic, but it DOES make her self-aware and on the path to healing.Cue Multiverse of Madness, in which Wanda is utterly UNself-aware, backslid into doing outright evil magic MURDER, no concept of having done Wrong. And I’m not buying at all the “Oh, she’s influenced by the Darkhold”. Motherfuckers, MAYBE if there had been a Season 2 of WandaVision where Wanda gets a hold of the book and we SEE HER BEING CORRUPTED that would make sense. (And it further annoys me that they hired Raimi because I guarantee someone sold it as “Oh, Wanda got a hold of the Necronomicon, like in The Evil Dead! You made that, right, Sam?”)WandaVision very clearly left Wanda in a position of having to take responsibility for her actions. I don’t know that it was speaking to any kind of “feminist empowerment” narrative, so I don’t know why you brought that up except maybe you ARE a lowkey misogynist? If anything I thought WandaVision was making an interesting statement about how “strong female characters” in superhero fiction don’t have to just be about “power”, but actual depth of character. “Strong” is very, very often misused in that context. (See also: Everything Joss Whedon has touched.) (And I love Buffy with all of my heart but she *for sure* embodies Whedon’s misunderstanding of what “strong female character” means.)What’s extra frustrating to me about this debacle of a movie is that I have been very much NOT GIVING A SHIT about the MCU as a vehicle for story since Thor Ragnarok. That movie is hilarious and fun and just SO empty of stakes. Ragnarok was the moment that I realized “Oh, I couldn’t possibly care less about these dumb characters and their dumb stories.” And then after a few other movies and TV shows came out, I watched WandaVision and it brought me back in. A character-driven dramedy about the inner life of a morally gray superhero, played as a series of sitcom style-parodies? Yes! I can care again! Of course then we got more movies that I didn’t care about, and a couple of TV shows that I didn’t care about (I enjoyed Hawkeye but, again, don’t really *care* about that guy or his apprentice. And wow, fuck Moon Knight. Also, Loki is a chore even if Hiddleston is fun to watch.). And then I watched Multiverse of Badness. Woof.
Yeah it sounds like ur really “not giving a shit” about the MCU there buddy
It is entirely possible to consume pop culture without engaging with it personally.That said, you’re conveniently ignoring my pamphlet of a post. There was a time when I WAS engaged with the MCU. But as it grew and spread I began to engage less and less until I was essentially just consuming it. WandaVision engaged me once again! But everything I watched after it left me cold. And then Multiverse of Madness not only left me cold, it undercut whatever brief engagement I had felt earlier.
There’s nothing “low-key” about your misogyny.
“feminist empowerment”Ha-ha. You silly-ass.
if it actually was a intense, sensitive depiction of trauma I doubt it would’ve made as much money. Large audience seem to prefer 20 minute scenes of people pretending to shoot out energy at each other.
I very much wish I didn’t agree.But I do.
need a hug?
Drugs, not hugs.
Whatever gets you through the week.
At the risk of sounding controversial, it’s almost as if superhero movies aren’t the ideal vehicle for every theme and conflict. Like, maybe the inner lives of women would be better represented by something other than sexless, violent movies overwhelmingly produced by men.
This would be pretty shrug-worthy if there hadn’t been that ‘Valkyrie is going have a queen’ stuff from before. After that, going from ‘We are going to have a queer storyline’ to ‘Me and the director had a really awesome discussion about it’ is pretty oomph. Also, while her logic is sound, it can be interpreted as arguing that queer people never actually need to be shown to have queer relationships as that’s not the point of them, man.Even with that said, I don’t actually mind her not having a queer storyline in the movie, this is more about them basically trying to find their way out of a hole they themselves dug. What does continue to frustrate me is that argument that the cut queer scene from Ragnarok would have been a ‘distraction’ as I do maintain that it was actually a really important scene. I just rewatched the Valkyrie attacking Hela scene and in addition remembering just how beautifully shot it was, that one random woman clearly and obviously intentionally sacrificing herself to save Valkyrie basically requires knowing that the character is queer to really have a concrete sense of motivations.
I think the problem no one can acknowledge is that superhero movies are a limited genre with an implicitly conservative worldview. All the principal characters in the MCU are straight, and the plot of a movie can deploy heterosexual partnerships however it suits the story. Pepper Pots, Peggy Carter, Jane Foster, MJ, and Judy Greer (I guess that thankless role has a name) all have different roles depending on the movie, but their presence (like the violent conflict of the plot) reinforces the masculinity of the heroes. The straight romance, just like the third-act battle, is pro forma. It’s cool to say “BTW, Valkyrie is bi,” and they should absolutely do that. But it’s going to feel like tokenism because it’s tokenism. The private lives of secondary characters aren’t a big part of the movies (especially the Asgardians in Thor, who are intentionally statuesque and unknowable).
That you perceive the female love interest “reinforces the masculinity of the heroes” is a pretty toxic take. Also the implication that all heroes are male, and then hetereosexuality is implied with masculinity. I’m a bit baffled by what you just said.
The toxicity of the movies is embedded in their form. The creators of the MCU had the option of giving (in my examples) Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Spider-Man, or Ant Man a male love interest, but having a queer character would be at odds with the action-oriented premise of the movies. There are few if any action movies or superhero movies with queer protagonists, which is no coincidence – those stories are tied to perceptions of conventional masculinity (or damaged feminity – it’s also no surprise that Captain Marvel, Black Widow, and Scarlet Witch have been traumatized, since that’s another generic role for women). If you’re implying that the MCU isn’t aggressively masculine both on the creative side and in terms of the characters headlining the movies, I’m not sure quite what to say. Likewise, if you think it’s a coincidence that all the male headliners of MCU movies are straight, I don’t know what to say.
At Comic-con, the time you’re referring to, I got the impression that Tessa Thompson said that without consulting people like Kevin Feige first in an attempt to pressure them into a storyline. Maybe that’s the only way to get things done but it kinda seems thoughtless in heinsight considering they weren’t really on board from the sounds of it, which makes the whole thing feel like a bit of a false promise from Tessa Thompson to the gay community… which, is too bad.
Also, it would have added more credibility to her whole being an alcoholic thing now. Also I want to take a moment to point out that Valkyrie as an alcoholic is the only thing I don’t like about Ragnarok.
Making a joke out of alcoholism just isn’t a good thing.
Oh, absolutely. Just establishing that Valkyrie was queer would not only have filled so much empty space in that backstory, but it would have given her so much more depth without even having to spell it out.She wasn’t the just the last of her kind left after trying to take out Hela, she was that because her lover cared so much for her that she chose saving Valkyria with the sacrifice of her own life over her duty to Odin. That is some powerful stuff that they pretty implicitly set up in the movie and then removed the scene that essentially established it.
as a gay little boy, i was in love with Burt Ward as Robin, in the 1966 Batman TV series.
The Caffeine Spider feels “hunky dory” about Tessa Thompson!
The character doesn’t have to “find her queen” to be a good representation of bisexual people. As a bisexual man person dating someone of the opposite gender I am no less a member of the queer community than anyone else.