The 4 Ways Marvel Really Got Thor Wrong

Recently, Marvel Comics released their second movie about Thor. It’s part of their Avengers franchise of movies, which show very little scholarship about mythology. Many of us wonder if Marvel cares about anything more than making lots of money by way of vapid movies that are a lot of fun to watch. In doing so, they've utterly ruined the character forever. This must be remedied. Here are their four greatest transgressions.

Why would they do this to him?

1. Thor Speaks English At All
Some critics have pointed out that, historically, Marvel made Thor speak in a bad impression of Shakespearean English. A Norse god wouldn’t sound like Shakespeare. But this ignores the real contention: a Norse god wouldn’t be speaking English at all. He should be bantering in a dialect of Old Norse that’s unrecognizable even to modern Scandinavians. It would seriously help the authenticity of Marvel films if everything Thor said was utterly incomprehensible to any typical American moviegoer.

They didn't have contact lenses, either.

2. The Race Card
Some people have complained that Heimdall is blackwashed in the Thor movies, played by Idris Elba. Idris Elba is blacker than the average American imagines the average Icelander is. The average American doesn’t know much about how many ethnicities spread across Europe by the 13th century, and the average theologian has barely cracked why gods do anything, much less why they pick a specific skin tone or bone structure. However, Idris Elba has an amazing gravitas that we can all agree every god should have. Because Idris Elba is only one actor, most of the gods in the Thor movies don’t have this gravitas. Marvel screwed this up big time by not cloning Idris Elba.

No one asks if Tom Hiddleston is the right race to play a trickster god.

3. Thor Coexists With The Hulk
Look, it’s not that hard. The pre-Christian Nords didn’t know about radiation. There is nothing in their lore or cycles that references gamma waves or their implausible relationship to human emotion. The Incredible Hulk is simply irreconcilable with any of Thor’s mythology. Any modern science has no place in a shared universe with Thor, even science as miraculously bad as what supports the Hulk’s existence.

Yup. Pride, Instagram and Haar.

4. Thor Wasn’t a Comic Book Character
Our primary sources for the Norse gods are the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Gesta Danorum. While some of the manuscripts in the Prose Edda were illuminated with beautiful imagery, the stories of Thor were never relayed in screen-printed sequential art. Frankly, everything Jack Kirby ever drew looked entirely inaccurate to visual stylings of the 13th century Scandinavians. Worse: they didn’t have movies. Making the things into movies is fundamentally inaccurate. If Marvel had any cultural sensitivity, they would force audiences at all their premieres to starve around camp fires in the middle of a blizzard and have Stan Lee recount the tales orally. He’d probably do it. He loves cameos.

This is actually 100% historically accurate.

It's my hope that by starting a dialogue about Marvel's failure to accurately capture their source material, that we will bring about change. By forcing blockbuster movies to be entirely accurate to someone else's vision, and by stripping anything that anyone was having fun with, we will create films that no one wants to see. And once no one will go see them, no one will ever complain about them again.

The future is in your hands, True Believers.

Happy Urban Legend 5: The Call is Coming From Inside the House

We all pretend we were that teenager. Down on her luck, no cash from the parents, desperate to make ends meet, and then she gets the call. A wealthy family with a big house who just need her to watch the kids overnight. They'll sleep through all of it.

This lucky girl tucks the kids in at 7, and because it's a fiction, they don't make a peep. She's wandering the mansion and pocketing their candy bars when her cell rings. In older versions of the story it's the house phone, but who has one of those anymore?

"Hello?" she asks.

The response is heavy breathing, like the caller has been sprinting. It goes on for a few seconds before he hangs up.

She thinks that's weird, and Caller ID says it's an unknown number. Maybe a friend from school butt-dialed her. She's walking into the next room when her cell rings again.

"Hello?"

Heavier breathing this time, labored like it's coming through a cloth. She's about to threaten the call-troll when he hangs up again.

She goes to the foyer, looking out the windows, because if you've even heard of Horror movies, you look out the God-damned windows when this happens to you. There's no one there. She's convincing herself it was a dumb prank when her cell rings again. This time the shock is so great she almost throws it at the wall.

"Who the hell is this?"

There's more muffled breathing, and what sounds eerily close to a child's giggle. Then a muffled voice asks, "Have you checked the children?"

Like any smart young woman, she calls the police while fleeing the property. She isn't checking on crap until men with guns show up, and they do, with guns and radios and flashing lights. She gets several more calls while the police sweep the premises, begging her to send them away. By the second call, she sees movement in an upstairs window and realizes who's been trolling her. Every brat has a cell phone these days. She lets the sheriff be the one to catch the kids, and sticks around to see their parents have their own freak-out. The kids are grounded for life, and the parents pay her triple, so it's a happy ending. She doesn't spend the money on a new phone.

On the Twelfth Day of Christmas (At War)

This was posted under duress. My full apologies for this thing existing.

On the twelfth day of Christmas,

The Pentagon sent to me:

Twelve drumlines drumming,
Eleven specialists sniping,
Ten sergeants sleeping, 

Nine generals posturing, 

Eight drones a-flying,  

Seven SEALs a-swimming,
Six guys a-laying, 

 Five useless things,  

Four polished turds,  

Three French leaves,  

Two armored cars, 

And a cartridge in an MRE!