Fem-Thor Review & Headcanon: Improving Jane The Thunder God
For about two years of Marvel comicbooks, starting in 2014, the Thor we knew and loved was replaced by a mysterious female, also called Thor, who picked up Mjolnir when Odinson could not. Of all the legacy heroes of the “All-New, All-Different” Marvel era, Fem-Thor, as she was unaffectionately dubbed by readers, eventually proved to be the most successful (though with persistent detractors).
In the book, we find out that behind the mask this new Thor is Jane Foster, the love interest of Thor’s comics dating back to the Stan and Kirby days. With this mystery resolved, a major question the reader is strung along by is why Thor Odinson dropped the hammer to begin with — specifically, what did Colonel Fury whisper to him in Original Sin #7 that caused him to suddenly become “unworthy”. With Odinson on the sidelines figuring this out, Jane is left to do what Thor does, protecting Asgard and Earth from Malekith and frost giants, though she also spends time working out why Mjolnir is talking to her and squabbling with new daddy Odin.
I like Lady Thor. Jane’s origin-pathos is up there with the classics, pregnant with dilemma and tragedy. She is dying. Breast cancer. She can pick up the hammer, and the magical transformation heals her temporarily, but it also purges her of the medicine that would extend her life in her human form. What a position to be in.
Jane Foster’s biggest problem is that her stories in The Mighty Thor are not really about her. They’re about wars and schemes and magic, and Jane is certainly there at the forefront of it all, but it’s not specific to her. It could have been the Thor Odinson in that role after all, and the stories would have been just as effective, if not more so. The substitution was not a bold new frontier, but a detour, change for the sake of change.
You can’t entirely dismiss change for its own sake. Jane looks the part, at least. Compare to the similar situation of Wolverine’s female replacement that happened around the same time:
Laura’s a good character, and deserved something she could call her own. Jane got that, and it’s one of the best looking new costume designs in years.
So in weighing the change, I say this: Jane Foster is a net positive for the series. But there wasn’t enough done to make the stories individual to her. That’s what would have made this a really great book.
By way of example, consider the hammer. Thor’s weapon isn’t a hammer (instead of a sword or spear) for no reason. A hammer is an essential Norse tool, needed in their communities for shipbuilding and throwing up makeshift homes in raids. Sindri giving the mythological Thor a hammer wasn’t an arbitrary gift, it was a perfectly natural Norse gift.
Thor Odinson of Marvel comics called the viking raiders his brothers for centuries. He sailed on the boats the Norse shipbuilders had wrought and drank ale in their houses and taverns, all the while working to prove himself to his father and to Mjolnir, lifting the hammer a little higher each decade, until he could wield it in battle, which he fought alongside heroes he had known for centuries since his youth, his long standing companions of the Warriors Three and Baulder and Sif and Heimdell, defending Asgard, his home since Freya gave birth to him, against it’s enemies such as Malekith and Mangog, and against his brother Loki.
If that is the backstory of Thor, where does Jane fit in? What makes the hammer an appropriate weapon for her? What is her skin in the game?
It’s important for a hero to own their stories. Jane Foster’s stories prompted questions like:
- Why does Jane inherit Thor’s friends and relationships, such as with the Warriors Three and the Avengers?
- Wouldn’t it be more interesting to see Thor Odinson fight Malekith, seeing as they have decades of history together?
- Why should it be Jane that picks up the hammer as opposed to anyone else, and does this make the idea of worthiness less special now?
These are the questions that have drove the fans mad since the start. They’re not unreasonable.
If Jane doesn’t quite fit into these stories, it’s natural to ask why the original Thor had to drop the hammer in the first place. This question isn’t actually answered in Jane’s comics. That’s left for a side series, The Unworthy Thor… and the answer doesn’t turn out to be a very satisfactory one.
To quickly recap, Gorr The God Butcher was the first major villain in Jason Aaron’s run, and Thor spent many (in-universe) centuries battling him, no doubt listening to monologue after monologue espousing why Gorr thought that the Gods (Asgardian or otherwise) should all die. In The Unworthy Thor, the content of the secret whisper that made Thor unworthy in Original Sin was revealed to us:
Apparently, that’s all it took to totally convince Thor of his uselessness, such that he immediately loses the use of his trusty magical weapon. And, inexplicably, his name. It was a ludicrous explanation, so ludicrous you could wrap your neurons into spaghetti trying to work out what Aaron was thinking.
I feel sorry for Jane. She doesn’t deserve to be in this position, where she is barely the hero of her own stories, and the very reason for her being there is a deficient one.
Let’s see if we can do something about that.
Head-Canon Starts Now
There is one element introduced to the Thor myth in this series that I think could have smoothed over this transition, and that is the Mother Storm, the sentient malstrom that was trapped inside Mjolnir, and to which the hammer owes it’s awesome strength.
Sentient is the key word here. The Storm is on better terms with Jane than with Odinson. Mjolnir flies for Jane (not only under her command) and even talks to her directly. It is implied the hammer has memories.
You might ask why would the Mother Storm forsake her companion of centuries in favour of an unimportant passer-by? The answer, I think, lies in one of the series side stories (The Mighty Thor Vol. 2 #12), where we learn how, millennia ago, all-father Odin battled the God Tempest which threatened all of Asgard, and entrapped it in the uru head of a hammer. This is Moljnir’s origin story, if you like.
Imagine then, the Mother Storm, having lain dormant in the hammer head for a thousand years, suddenly regained consciousness, remembering her battle with the manly norse king and her subsequent centuries of imprisonment. She senses herself in the hands of Odin’s headstrong offspring… and stubbornly drops to the ground, steadfast in unspoken refusal never to be handled by an Asgardian again.
I like this invention of mine so much it’s easy for me to forget it hardly exists in the actual comic. But it relaxes so many of the niggles fans have with the series, starting with being a much better reason for Thor to drop the hammer in the first place.
We still need to make sense of the whisper of Nick Fury that started theis whole fiasco. Here’s the scenario: Thor and Fury are fighting on the moon. Thor has the upper hand, but Fury is confident, telling him: “Never forget that it wasn’t a punch that took you down. That despite all your strength, in the end when you were beaten…”
Being privy to all the Watcher’s secrets, it’s certainly possible Fury would have known about the storm lying dormant in Thor’s hammer. Perhaps he also knew how to wake it. A few words of primal magic compelling the storm to “wake-up”, perhaps?
Why would Fury do this? Other than to win the fight, perhaps Fury also saw the coming battle against Mangog, the finale of the Fem-Thor saga, and realised that it could not have been won by Odinson alone, but (as was to actually occur in Aaron’s finale issues with Jane) the Mother Storm would have to stop Mangog herself? Fury is a strategist after all. He might have made a tactical substitution, Odinson for the Mother Storm.
We assume that Thor’s reaction here is because he cannot believe what Fury has told him. But What If… Thor genuinely hadn’t heard him?
“What didst thou say?!” Ha.
(If we rewrote this story from the beginning I might have chosen to axe Fury’s part entirely and have the whisper come from Loki, playing his archetypal role of trickster, who has somehow learnt the secret of the Mother Storm himself. He would lean close to Thor and utter to the hammer “Wakey, wakey” — for no other reason than it would amuse him for his brother’s own weapon to reject him like a woman scorned. Very in-character.)
However it happens, the feminine force of nature opens her eye, doesn’t like who she sees, and THUMP, drops suddenly and sullenly to the ground, and, more stubborn than the gods, refuses to move despite Thor’s blubbing.
I think this interpretation is pretty funny, if I do say so myself.
And wouldn’t it better justify Thor’s fury with Jane, the hammer’s new partner?
And wouldn’t that make it all the more impactful when the hammer and Jane, together, both sacrifice themselves to save the Asgardians, who are not (for either of them) their own people, nor have treated them well — but that’s what it means to be a hero?
Just a thought.
We also have a proper arc for Thor now, a path back to worthiness that makes sense, that isn’t just arbitrary — he must regain favour with the spirit of the hammer… perhaps offer reparations for the sins of his father? We all knew that Thor would regain the hammer eventually, but this way we don’t rely of some nebulous idea of worthiness, expectant for a resolution to the mystery that was always bound to be unsatisfying.
Now, the whole thing ties the disparate elements of the story more meaningfully into the Thor mythology, where each actor has a role to play and a meaningful connection to the others — Jane is the listener, the speaker for the hammer as well as the current hero; Thor is the disgraced son but has a redemption storyline.
There is no redundancy with these two characters now. In this story, you can’t replace Fem-Thor with Thor-Thor (as you could have done in the actual book), because in this headcanon Odinson NOT being the hero is inherently written into the drama of the story. The Mother Storm has to choose somebody else, and to satisfy the storm’s grudge it is has to be a woman, and it can’t be an Asgardian. Jane is there because she is what Thor isn’t. That’s a much stronger foundation on which to build a stories worthy of Jane.
And why particularly Jane, instead of, say, Roz Solomon? She was another of Thor’s romantic interests and somebody Odinson actually mistook as the new Thor before the truth was revealed. Well, it’s healthy for a story to leave some mystery, I think. But the fact that Jane is a nurse, a life-preserver, surely helped her case in the view of a water elemental, water being a life-giving element. Or, this deity being a storm, storms standing for caprice and anger, could choose Thor’s love interest specifically to spite him. But I wouldn’t choose to over-explain this aspect.
By the way, I’m really not trying to write a feminist story right now, but tell me there aren’t some positive themes in there. A mythological personification of womanhood liberating herself from a harsh male grip, choosing her own destiny through a mortal female. Then, the masculine and feminine, despite being at odds with each other to begin with, ultimately choosing to work together for everyone’s benefit.
It’s never too late for a retcon, Jason. I’ll settle for a special thanks credit.
