Maybe Thor and Shellhead Should Bond Over Dad Issues

Back to Thor: Ragnarok for a moment. Watching Hela stalk through Asgard, complaining about how Odin has tried to rewrite the history of Asgard, reminded me of something. Yes, imperialism, obviously. All those European countries that wanted land or gold or slaves, and later tried to frame it as them bringing religion or enlightenment to the "lesser" peoples. That's the big one, and it was a good point to make. Like I said when I reviewed the movie, I had always thought the Asgardians just had their one realm out of the nine and they sometimes traded or warred with the others. I figured each group of people - Asgardians, Frost Giants, the Dark Elves like Malekith - each came into being in their own realm, and lots of fighting aside, mostly they end up staying in those realms. An uneasy balance, aided by comics' tendency to revert back to a particular status quo.

The movies are going a different route, though, which I think we saw at least in Thor: The Dark World, when there was a lot of chaos, uprisings, something going on that Thor and the others were struggling to keep under control. That could have been hostile external forces bent on conquest, but it could also have been internal strife, people not enjoying their realms being conquered.

The other thing it reminded me of, though, was an earlier Marvel movie. Iron Man 2, specifically the scene in the jail cell between Mickey Rourke and Robert Downey Jr. Rourke's Ivan Vanko, who believes Stark's dad stole his dad's work, which is enough to get him gunning for Tony. The part relevant here is when points out Tony and his family made their money selling instruments of death. Now that they're at the top, Tony's decided he's going to play savior. Stand up before Congress in a televised hearing and proclaim he's made the world safe, he's 'privatized world peace'. We never actually saw him do that, but he's saying he did, at least.

Tony, and Howard before him, made their fortune providing others with the means to kill each other in large numbers more efficiently. The Starks didn't conquer land, exactly, but they gained money and influence. Tony Stark can stand before a Congressional hearing and tell them to pound sand, and get away with it. The guy leading the hearing was a frickin' HYDRA agent, and they still couldn't do anything to him. How many people could manage that without getting their lives ruined? They had to wait for him to make a drunken enough ass of himself that Rhodey would feel compelled to put on a suit and throw down, then leave with the suit.

Now Vanko was not an unbiased observer. Tony does actually feel regret, after his own brush with what his products can do, that his legacy was going to be as an ironmonger or merchant of death. He became Iron Man initially because he didn't want that to be what he was known for. He needed to fix this, make amends. But from a certain perspective, it is Tony having achieved a certain amount of status, and trying to change the rules. Now weapons are bad, even though he's still making them. He was up to 42 versions of that suit by the third movie. He just keeps them for himself now. Uses them when he sees fit, based on what he deems necessary, and expects everyone to thank him for it. But he wants to rewrite the narrative because he feels bad about it.

Maybe Odin does, too. He got to a certain point, looked back over the charred corpses he and Hela left in their wake, and wondered if maybe he went a little overboard. So he tried to pivot, present himself and Asgard as more cultured and benevolent. Maybe they even were, I don't know. Hela as a viewpoint character on Asgard's backstory is not any more unbiased than Vanko was towards the Starks, though she probably is better informed. Still, she may not know what really motivated Odin's later actions. Although it's notable that, whether it was genuine remorse or not, Odin wasn't struck by it until after the Asgardians had a nice, cushy home and set-up.