Fatty Thor or: How I Learned That Asgard Was Just a Mid-Level Sect
I was thinking about how to explain xianxia/cultivation novels to someone who has never read them, and the difficulty of them have an entirely different set of tropes due to their eastern roots. The best shorthand I could come up with was, cheesy kung fu movies meets superheroes.
Ancient martial arts drama, except everyone is throwing around mountain-shattering attacks, secret alliances, forbidden techniques, heavenly tribulations, and completely ridiculous power scaling. Which made me think about how those tropes would map onto similar pop culture media, and led me to my main assertion: Thor is a perfect mid-level senior brother for a sect.
In the Avengers movies, Thor feels powerful; he’s a god, he throws lightning, and he flies around by literally throwing himself with a hammer. He can take ridiculous hits and hit back even harder. To normal people, he’s terrifying.
But drop him into a cultivation setting? Thor is absolutely just some cultivation novice’s senior brother. Powerful? Yes. Handsome? Obviously. Dramatic entrance? Every time. But compared to the real monsters in the sect, he’s mostly just a very durable lightning-themed melee cultivator. Doctor Strange is folding dimensions and guarding the planet, Thanos is erasing people from existence, and Thor is still solving most problems with “hit it harder, with lightning.”
His role in the avengers makes it even better. He wanders off on side adventures, gets played for laughs, shows back up for the big battle, supports the main cast, and occasionally reminds everyone that he is technically way above the mortals in the room.
Which brings me to the best part: Thor isn’t just Elder Brother Thor, he’s Fatty Thor. The lovable, boisterous, good-natured comic relief side character who eats too much, jokes around, and has a surprising amount of romantic woes. It just took the avengers movies a while to realize what the sect already knew: Fatty Thor is a great elder brother, not a heaven defying protagonist.
I will now be exclusively referring to Chris Hemsworth as Elder Brother Thor, or Fatty Thor.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.