It would have been vastly more entertaining had Thor come out of the closet. The Fabulous Thor! His outfit was always a little camp anyhow. Turning him into a grim transgendered feminist fighting to impose equalitarian thought control is as boring as it is offensive:
Thor a woman? It’s hard to believe the most macho, overtly masculine character in the comic canon could possibly be reimagined as a broad. But that’s almost certainly precisely the reason Thor was chosen: as a fuck-you to so-called nerdbros from the achingly progressive staff of today’s comic book establishment.
This has led to some questions from comic book fans. Questions such as: will Wonder Woman turn out to be a tranny? Is the Incredible Hulk only incredible because he endured cruel fat-shaming as a teen but didn’t let his size define him? And shouldn’t Spider-Man be a gay latino?
That last one’s not a joke, by the way: in 2011, Marvel unveiled a bisexual Spider-Man that was half-black and half-latino, called Miles Morales, to the consternation and confusion of ordinary comic book fans, as part of its Ultimate series of character reboots. We’re told “erasure,” whereby people’s pasts are scrubbed out by those in authority, is a social justice issue. Well, right now there’s erasure going in the basic, canonical biographies of some of Marvel’s most cherished superheroes.
Captain America, too, is changing: he’s becoming black. Changes like this are designed to provoke readers, and they do–not because readers are racist or sexist, but because they understand that certain characteristics are intrinsic to certain characters. James Bond and Captain America are obviously white. It is a part of their personalities. Thor is obviously a man; to suggest otherwise is daft.
What sticks in the craw of the fans I’ve spoken to about female Thor is how utterly transparent the political posturing is behind the change. There is no good literary justification for making Thor a woman, they say–and the results have been execrable. You can write intelligent satire about masculinity without making a classic masculine icon into a girl, an observation that seems to have escaped Marvel’s writers.
Of course, what all of these transformations most strongly indicate is the fact that Marvel believes women and minorities to be totally uninteresting. Not only does it highlight the fact that women and minorities can’t create their own characters, but even pro-intersectional white men can’t manage to create them in a manner that interests anyone, least of all women and minorities.
It’s exactly the same thing as a communist government taking over a capitalist society. They don’t understand how it works or why it works, they can’t create it or maintain it, but they can certainly manage to run it into the ground.
This comment from the SJWs at IGN is hilariously inapt:
“Not only do these scenes subtly acknowledge and render inert the
concerns voiced by real life detractors, but they also paint the
character in a stronger, more resilient light.”
— IGN
Subtle? The only way Marvel could have handled it any less subtly was if Thor spent the entire issue reading The Vagina Monologues with Gloria Steinhem at Wellesley.