Though the Thor films have not been among my favorites from the Marvel Universe, I’m really looking forward to the upcoming Thor: Ragnarok.
The movies aren’t loyal to the original Norse mythology, but it’s fun for me as one of Scandinavian heritage to see these tales adapted for the modern world and shared with millions.
There’s even a moment in the first one where Thor brings back an inebriated Eric Selvig (the Norwegian scientist) after a night on the town and says, “We drank. We fought. He did his ancestors proud.”
My family and I got a good laugh out of that one.
But.
Is this really OK in the modern world? I mean isn’t it exclusionary for everyone who isn’t of Scandinavian extraction? Isn’t Thor reinforcing a worldview centered on and biased toward Nordic culture? Isn’t it the height of offensiveness to say that a blonde-haired, blue-eyed white male archetype is a “god”? And he wields a hammer, which is clearly a phallic symbol stating male dominance. Isn’t this movie just about as evil as 100 Adolf Hitlers?
And we don’t just have movies about Thor; we’re forced to endure an entire day named after him (Thursday = Thor’s Day). Every. Single. Week.
[TRIGGER WARNING]
Not only do we reinforce this clear and unforgiveable example of white cultural imperialism with “Thursday,” but we do with most of the week: Tuesday (Tyr), Wednesday (Odin/Wotan), Friday (Frigga).
The days of the week. Are racist.
And if you think the days of the week aren’t protest-worthy, then you need to open your mind to the months of the year. That’s when things get really bad.
January is named after Janus, the two-faced Roman god. With just two faces, Janus reinforces a simplistic and wrong idea that we live in a gender-binary world. We have to protest the transphobic January. All month long.
February is named after the Roman festival of Februa, a fertility ritual for blessing women who wished to conceive in the coming year. Meanwhile March is named after the war god Mars, which celebrates excluding females from military roles. And which one has more days? Typical. White. Males.
These two months are clearly all about repressing women and regulating them to just birthing stock.
And while it’s an irrefutable scientific fact that every human being alive had to be conceived and carried to term inside a woman, promoting that to ensure cultural perpetuity is wrong and evil. (Denying science is only wrong when it’s about predictions for climate change.) Now let’s all go watch The Handmaid’s Tale!
April is named after Aphrilis/Aphrodite (goddess of love), May is named after Maia (goddess of fertility), and June is named for Juno (goddess of marriage). Might as well change the names to Misogynistic, Heteronormative, and Homophobic. Three-months of hate. Juno was even “married” to Jupiter, who was well known for his non-consensual affairs, meaning the entire month of June is a celebration of rape-culture.
Wait – we’ve even got a planet named after Jupiter. Can we protest an entire planet?
July and August honor the Roman emperors of Julius and August Caesar – owned slaves – but September, October, and November don’t offer a lot. They’re just named after the Roman words for seven, eight, and nine, so there’s nothing offensive … at least not on the surface. (But I’m sure we can find something. Those three months have to give us something more to protest than Columbus Day and Thanksgiving.)
December comes from the word for 10, but December is when we celebrate Christmas – an annual holiday about gift-giving and kindness that represents the pinnacle of the value system that created Western Civilization – which is inherently evil, so we can definitely protest December.
We have endless things to protest all year long and no reason not to: because the Google allows instant knowledge and social media rewards virtue signaling through mass gratification! (There’s no app to teach us wisdom, though.)
But stopping to think about this, I realized the whole line of thought is utter nonsense. When mobs, online and off, mindlessly protest everything from history to over-compensate for a lack of unifying values, the only thing they accomplish is alienating the rest of America.
We don’t need to protest Thursday. Thor is my culture and heritage and it’s OK for me to enjoy him.
…
But the rest of you are appropriating Thor from my culture. YOU’RE the real 100 Hitlers.
