Rank the Thor's

[Shellhead]

I've been a Thor fan since the '70s, and I have mixed feelings about the Aaron run. The writing is mostly very good. The art is good. The stories are entertaining. Aaron uses a lot of characters and locations from established Thor continuity, and he uses them well. I didn't want to like Jane Foster as Thor, but I did. And there are some fun new characters. I really only have two problems with the Aaron run. First, he really goes out of his way to tear down Thor the Odinson. Second, he plays very fast and loose with everything about Mjolnir. Posts above have gone into more detail about both of these points. But aside from those two significant complaints, I think very highly of the Aaron run.

[The MunchKING]

I just want to know what possession of The Thor are we supposed to be ranking?

probably Mjolnir. it is the one thing he mentioned by name.

[Wildling]

Is it all right if I ask what people’s beef with Aaron is? Not wanting to break forum rules or anything.

I’ve never been able to read comics directly, just keeping up on vs forums and the like, but I remember people heavily praising the Gor the God Butcher stuff.

People were fine with that storyline, since as I recall previous Thor comics were comparatively treading water. No wonder Aaron kept coming back to highlights from there like Old Man Thor and the Necrosword. For the purposes of these discussions Thor was still getting into worthy enough business like holding a cracking Moon or planetoid together with strength to save an alien race.

It's just that some think Aaron reaaally overstayed the welcome.

[Pendaran]

My problems with the run had nothing to do with Jane Thor of themselves (I'd have vaguely preferred it when her id was still unknown for her to have turned out to be Sif, but that was just personal preference. Sif doesn't get a lot of focus time in comics, but eh) and everything to do with stuff like Odin reduced to a caricature to the point of being worth little more than a cheap impotence joke, and in general the repeating beating over and over and over the head with the whole "the gods in general suck" thing to the point where it was getting to be an outright seeming lecture of "were you into anything before this that treated them as not sucking? Well then you, the reader, were dumb for thinking that."

Overall I would say my problems had to do with what seems to often be an issue in comic runs past a certain point of "I don't know how to make the characters or themes I want to look good without making these other characters look really bad." Or "as a new writer on this established character, I don't know how to show they're any good without a standard, at this point outright cliché "tear them down to nothing before building them back up" arc." And the last is definitely not Aaron specific, you see it all the time these days, to the point that one of the eyerolly things about that brief Annihilators run was the writers deciding Quasar needed to have the perspective of "complete bungling new guy" despite being an established hero who had high scale experience and universe saving solo runs under his belt. The problem of these things is that if you tear a character down hard enough and in a mocking enough way, it can kill some in seeing them ascend. It basically treats any of their previous accomplishments/runs of stuff as having been without meaning.

It all falls under what is at this point a pretty standard catalogue of moves in a variety of comics from this whole overt, intended "everything before me was bad" vibe you get when some writers will take over a character or title in this whole attempted big make their mark way, for instance the new Avengers run where there seems to be an entire issue whose underlying theme is reducing any previous She Hulk run to a hyper simplified "you only liked this character before because she was funny. They sucked before they were changed and you sucked for liking any of it." (that run is.. *checks notes* Aaron, one grants as well...).

[Pendaran]

Though I would note a whole bunch of these sorts of moves aren't actually some new cliché/writing crutch. It's actually really old. It's as old as dirt.

For instance, the French Arthurian Romance writers that brought Launcelot into Arthuriana seemed to find it near impossible to do so without reducing King Arthur to something of an ineffectual do nothing from a fellow who previously fought giants and the like, and turning Sir Gawain, previously functionally the best of Arthur's knights in various materials, into this raging jackass person. "I'm not sure how to make my guy look good. I know, I'll make these other people look like garbage now" is a many times dipped into well.

[Harbinger19]

Fascinating...Reminds me of the Ron the Death Eater trope.

[Pendaran]

Sticking to Arthur lore, for a different example, once Galahad became a thing, well, clearly Perceval can't be the worthy knight who finds the holy grail!

Though he doesn't take it as bad as Gawain (or Arthur) get it, he just gets relegated to a secondary role in what is now Galahad's quest and also becomes someone Galahad has to rescue.

Really the shifts back and forth between the various medieval writers who all took a stab at Arthurian legend are a pretty solid forerunner of a lot of stuff you see like that in comics and genre material and etc. As much for that Arthuriana was something that was of itself a gathering of figures who in many cases were part of their own literary traditions into some huge conglomerated thing. Writers had characters they favoured and characters they didn't, and every so often you got "And my new totally awesome character I'm inserting is the super bestest and these guys suck by comparison!"

[Beadle]

I’ve never heard Red Hulk described in the form of Sir Galahad before.

[Pendaran]

I’ve never heard Red Hulk described in the form of Sir Galahad before.

That is frankly not the worst comparison in some ways ;p

[Cronus]

Sticking to Arthur lore, for a different example, once Galahad became a thing, well, clearly Perceval can't be the worthy knight who finds the holy grail!

Though he doesn't take it as bad as Gawain (or Arthur) get it, he just gets relegated to a secondary role in what is now Galahad's quest and also becomes someone Galahad has to rescue.

Really the shifts back and forth between the various medieval writers who all took a stab at Arthurian legend are a pretty solid forerunner of a lot of stuff you see like that in comics and genre material and etc. As much for that Arthuriana was something that was of itself a gathering of figures who in many cases were part of their own literary traditions into some huge conglomerated thing. Writers had characters they favoured and characters they didn't, and every so often you got "And my new totally awesome character I'm inserting is the super bestest and these guys suck by comparison!"

Yeah, its tough to nail down, "what motivates all this". Oddly, when Aaron first started writing Thor, he had some pretty coolstuff feats wise that I thought lined up fairly well with some of his other stuff.

Then he went all Jane on everyone and it's like...he started writing Thor like he personally hated him, like someone from your old neighborhood. It was just weird.

I will say there seem to be few at Marvel that care any about pushing Stan Lee's vision of Thor as the apex of superlatives....a "cape", as he put it.