14 DAY TRIAL // Either Marvel is not entirely aware of the scandal online, or they’re deliberately choosing to ignore all negative feedback on their announcement that, starting with October, Thor will be female in the comic series. Marvel Editor-in-Chief Axel Alonso and Thor writer Jason Aaron insist that the decision is a smart one, no matter which way you look at it.
The announcement was made the other day and displeased fans to a great extent because, they said, Marvel should have just created a new female character instead of taking an old one and changing it drastically.
On its part, Marvel insisted that the decision was meant to allow them to explore other stories, while also attracting a larger chunk of the female demographic, which, with this female Thor, would have proper representation.
Our article on the topic has so far dozens of comments from angry fans, including women, and this is just a mere fraction of the negativity going Marvel’s way online. Taking a male character and adding to it breasts and makeup and perhaps skimpier clothes doesn’t mean catering to the female audience, it just means ruining the male character by pretending you’re doing that, they say.
As Aaron sees it, fans should embrace a female Thor without this much fuss.
“If you’re a long-time Thor fan you know there’s kind of a tradition from time to time of somebody else picking up that hammer. Beta Ray Bill was a horse-faced alien guy who picked up the hammer. At one point Thor was a frog. So I think if we can accept Thor as a frog and a horse-faced alien, we should be able to accept a woman being able to pick up that hammer and wield it for a while, which surprisingly we’ve never really seen before,” he says in an interview on the topic with Time magazine.
At the same time, Alonso insists that the change will make sense as issues of the comics come out, even if it feels like it’s the dumbest thing right now.
“She wields the hammer because Thor can’t. This is different because for reasons we can’t disclose quite yet, Thor is unable to pick up the hammer. There are a number of women in Thor’s life, and we’re going to tease out for quite a while the identity of who this woman is. But one of the women in Thor’s life picks up the hammer. She is in fact worthy. And she becomes Thor. There’s only one Thor in the Marvel Universe. The character we know as Thor will not refer to himself as Thor anymore,” Alonso explains.
As for those who can’t imagine how a female Thor would make sense, Alonso says that fans always tend to overreact and then spew negativity at the smallest change of wind. Progress usually sparks controversy, and he knows better than to pay attention to the negative feedback they’re getting right now for this decision.
More importantly, he adds, even if this negative feedback doubles or triples overnight, they will still be going forward with the idea: at this point, there is nothing anyone could do to make Thor a man again.
So, to all those fans who left us a comment saying Marvel has lost them as customer with this decision, we’ll say this: Marvel doesn’t seem to care about you.