Gorr the God-Butcher: A Child's Story

 Thor: Love and Thunder is a “classic Thor adventure” told by Korg to children and ending with a punchline that is poignant rather than funny. The audience of children frames the way the story is told in both omission of gruesome deaths and the prominent inclusion of children within the story. This child-focus also creates a connection between the narration and the other framing device about Gorr the God-Butcher, which in the source material was less child-friendly and certainly more lethal. There are a lot of scary and dangerous things in Love and Thunder – as Thor reminds us, these are (mostly) Asgardian children.

The reticence of early MCU to use the word ‘gods’ is wholly gone from this movie, although Thor is still from space. The gods in this story are the sort tp whom you can pray and they might hear you. The attitude of the gods is established in the interaction of Gorr, the last surviving devotee of his god, who takes his devotion for granted and mocks his belief in an afterlife. This god’s existence is not contingent on the existence of believers. The existence of a divinely lush oasis on an otherwise dead planet suggests a retreat of the gods from reciprocity of do ut des, which is mirrored in the hedonistic isolation of Omnipotence City. The corpse of the previous owner of the Necrosword, a weapon which can kill gods, suggests that Gorr is not the first to turn resentment towards the gods into direct hostility; perhaps the existence of gods who might aid mortals are a hindrance in the Celestials’ plans for planets such as Earth? Or perhaps the Necrosword is a weapon of an enemy of the Celestials, who want life, if only specific kinds, to exist? After this nameless god has dismissed his last worshipper, Gorr starts his career as Gorr the God-Butcher.

By the end of the movie, there has been a lot of love and even more thunder, but both have been recontextualized in such a way that Thor and others receive as happy an ending as one can find in the death and battle dominated world of Norse myth. Thor’s arc, like those of many MCU heroes, finds him in a state closer to his canonical self than at the beginning. The mid-credits scene promises the audience a new father-son dynamic to replace that of Thor and Odin for the next phase.