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Valkyrie's Bisexuality in Thor: Love and Thunder Explained
Everything that Tessa Thompson has said about it.
Tessa Thompson has been updating fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe who are excited to see how her character, Valkyrie, factors into the Thor: Love and Thunder sequel premiering this July. However, those hoping for romance might be disappointed.
Whether Love and Thunder would do right by Valkyrie in that sense has been a frequent question ever since, and Thompson previously joked that her first point of order as King of New Asgard is to find her queen.
But it looks like things didn’t quite pan out that way, and the actress recently warned in an interview with Yahoo that Thor: Love and Thunder ultimately didn’t have the time to explore Valkyrie’s love life.
Thompson explained:
“We talked about it a lot, it was a big topic of conversation. 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.”
Although Valkyrie is canonically bisexual in the comics – and Thompson confirmed she played her with that in mind – a scene confirming her queerness was notoriously cut out of Thor: Ragnarok back in 2017.
The scene was allegedly axed “because it distracted from the scene’s vital exposition,” rather than something explicitly nefarious. Alas, considering the MCU’s poor track record with LGBTQ+ inclusion on the big screen, it still became a point of frustration for queer fans.
Overall, this doesn’t mean that Valkyrie’s bisexuality won’t be canonized at all. In fact, Thompson said that she feels “really good, personally, about where we got to.”
The actress added:
“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.”
Thompson is right, of course – but it’s hard not to look to all the examples of (perceived) heterosexual characters having romantic arcs or brief interactions in Marvel movies and wonder why it seems so much more difficult for the films to manage something similar with queer characters. Still, we’ll have to wait for the movie to see how things actually play out.
Thor: Love and Thunder comes out in theaters Friday, July 8.
Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
