Quote Originally Posted by JKtheMac View Post
I don’t even agree that he is thousands of years old. I much prefer to see him in the way he was presented under Aaron as being a little over one thousand years old give or take a couple of hundred years. The whole Ragnarok cycle stuff can he hand waved away as nothing more than a passing fancy of a few writers who wanted to write a more mythological Thor. It has mostly been retconned out of existence from my own personal perspective since Secret Wars.

But that’s a bit of a tangent. I am not saying he needs to be “very modern” I am saying his stories need to be modern. Mythology in the context of modern storytelling has the power to enlighten us and see the world around us in new and interesting ways. Ways that can’t be expressed simply and often can’t be expressed outside of storytelling. To do that the characters need to speak to us now.

Take what I have already claimed to be one of my favourite issues of Thor of all time. Thor #10, ‘A Boy and his All-Father’. The power of that issue for me is its direct addressing of dysfunctional fatherhood in a very modern and relevant way. A way that spoke to me and my own life, and probably many others who have had more difficult parental relationships than I ever did. On one level it was timeless story of a father and son rivalry, and on another it couldn’t have been told in any previous decade. Only now are these kinds of issues being addressed in ways that acknowledge how our culture places expectations on fathers.
I like this reading of Thor being relatively young, because if he is young now; then it makes sense for King Thor to exist especially since Odin himself is over 1,000,000 years old as seen in Avengers One Million (please don't debate with me on the merits of the timeline that Aaron has set up).

Thor's age also has to do a lot with his brash and impatient self and the fact he doesn't really have an identity beyond the wielder of Mjolnir and it isn't until War of The Realms does he finally get his identity.

For me whenever there is a new writer I always take it as a soft reboot; for ardent continuity fans, I say this is a fools folly; because it's not possible and it doesn't matter how much mental gymnastics you do.

Sure Ragnarok happened, Odin is strong man, Thor is a unflinching god man that MRA's can look up to... until he isn't.

I can imagine a ton of Aaron fans will be upset with Cates when he decides to change things up, but alas this is the nature of the medium.