Thor's #1 thoughts *SPOILERS*

[CZor]

Jason Aaron is having fun with this becauepse he's sneaked in mention of unworthiness and Jane Foster. And this must be set before Secret Wars #2 because the dead old man Thor is here named as the one eyed Lawspeaker. But it looks like one eyed Lawspeaker has blond hair. But the one eyed old man Thor killed in SW#2 had a red beard, so this Lawspeaker is someone else. This has to be after SW#2, especially because of Beta Ray Bill Thor.

Tom Breevot confirmed Lawspeaker and SW #2 dead Thor aren't the same character...

[shgs]

The prejudice is entirely manufactured at this point, based on a story concept from over two decades ago. The Marvel universe is saturated with people with superpowers from so many different sources, is being born with it legitimately a big concern anymore?

Really, saturated? Marvel claims to have 9,000+ characters on its website. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that all these characters are earth-based, super-powered non-mutants even though the actual number is much lower. That's around about 0.00013% of the Earth's population having non-mutant superpowers by my estimation, even when overestimating massively. How is that saturated?

By contrast, there were around 16,000,000 mutants on Genosha alone, before Cassandra Nova's genocide. Unlike other super powered individuals, who tend to acquire their abilities in freak accidents or other unique, unrepeatable circumstances, mutants are simply born with powers. Not only do mutant parents beget mutant children, but non-mutants often give birth to mutants. Thus, not only is the mutant population, at its peak, far more significant that the non-mutant super-powered population, but it is capable of increasing in number in a way that the population of other super-powered beings simply cannot. Given that humans have mutant babies with relative consistency, but mutants extremely rarely give birth to non-mutants, the mutant race will continue to increase whilst the human race gradually decreases if left unchecked. Add the fact that this race that is destined to replace humanity has innate and often weaponisable superpowers, and it is hardly surprising that humans see them as a threat.

It's like everyone in every other Marvel story is genre savvy enough to realize superpowers = good thing, except in any story involving mutants in some story capacity. At that point it's 'you people' or 'anti-mutant' blargahlghalgalhglahlghla.

Superpowers = good thing? So Carnage = good thing? Elektro = good thing? The Hulk on a rampage = good thing? Sabertooth = good thing? There are a **** ton of supervillains and otherwise terrifying super powered individuals. Superheores = good thing, because they use their powers for good. Supervillains = bad thing, and of course people are scared of them. The thing with mutants is that - unlike superheroes and villains, which make up nearly every superpowered non-mutant - the majority of them don't tend to place themselves so obviously into the category of good or bad. A guy with the power to breath fire might work at a petrol station. The guy with razor sharp claws might work at a book shop. These people could be perfectly reasonable, or they could be psychotic killers and you'd never know. That's kinda terrifying.

That's an issue with the people who get them more than anything.

Therein lies the point. With mutant powers pretty much anyone could be given catastrophic and deadly superpowers, regardless of how malicious, unstable, sadistic, or straight up evil they are.

And I'm just going to reiterate here. The context the anti-mutant story point is used in this issue, is that for some reason Rune Thor thinks that the Thor who a) looks as humanoid as he does and b) has natural weather powers, is a higher candidate for racial discrimination over the horse-faced Thor, the tree Thor, and the fucking frog Thor.

It's got nothing to do with what she looks like. Firstly, racial prejudice is not just about superficial looks in real life (e.g. there is a fair bit prejudice towards Eastern Europeans in the UK, though we are all white) nor has superficial similarity ever prevented gay people, for instance, from being persecuted. Secondly, he is not derogatory of the characteristics that make Storm a mutant, he is simply derogatory towards the various mutant communities. This is Runey denigrating people because they come from a certain geographic area and/or community (which happens even within individual towns in the real world, let alone between different ethnicities or races) not simply because they are genetically different from him.

[Jumpoff AKA JohnnyBlazed]

Damn is it the new thing to completely just act punk out a spirit of vengeance like that? First that inhuman book now this , damn it's hard out here for a Ghost rider fan

[PiercedMonk]

If Strange says they saved what they could, they saved what they could, and therefore some number of the inhabitants of Battleworld are folks from the earlier universes that did not die but were saved.

Right, but there's no reason to believe that they were able to save anyone other than Sue, Franklin, Valeria, and the rest of the lifeboat passengers that were lost.

[jphamlore]

From mutants there is the potential to have a reality-warper on the level of a Clyde Wyncham, someone with whom Doom had extensive experience in Mark Millar's Fantastic Four run. That is I believe why Doom himself has anti-mutant prejudice.

[Drakeon]

Right, but there's no reason to believe that they were able to save anyone other than Sue, Franklin, Valeria, and the rest of the lifeboat passengers that were lost.

Just the liferafts since Sue, Valeria and.Franklin are not 616 either.

[PiercedMonk]

Just the liferafts since Sue, Valeria and.Franklin are not 616 either.

I'm pretty sure that when Doom and Strange talk about saving people that's who they're referring to, but until it's established somewhere in the actual book we'll have to agree to disagree.

[Nyadnar17]

Awesome first issue. Has anyone mentioned how similar the wound on BRT was to the one on Syder over in Armor Wars?

[Raye]

I'm pretty sure that when Doom and Strange talk about saving people that's who they're referring to, but until it's established somewhere in the actual book we'll have to agree to disagree.

Hickman has flat out said that they are not from 616. Now, when Doom and Strange said they were able to 'save' parts of the old they may not have necessarily meant just 616, so they could still be part of what he 'saved' but they are not OUR Sue, Franklin, and Valeria.

[Baron of Faltine]

From mutants there is the potential to have a reality-warper on the level of a Clyde Wyncham, someone with whom Doom had extensive experience in Mark Millar's Fantastic Four run. That is I believe why Doom himself has anti-mutant prejudice.

I don't think that for rune thor or Doom that is the problem.
The problem is, the mutant by their own nature are AGAINST the status quo. It is in their name, it is in the X-men mission, it is in their own nature coded to DNA level. Their are the next step. A mutation. A change in the base order.
And consider all of you guys, that Battleworld is RUN on status Quo. Barons are allowed to do as they please, as long they keep it. Chang eis not welcome in the jolly Doom's world. Also Mutants, as pointed out and due to this rebellious nature, are always involved in conflicts that always menace to spread beyond borders(the main fear..no better worry..about mutants is that the various mutant domain will become aware of each others and this could lead to them pulling together their efforts. Now the Barons - oddly more than a magneto- are on board of the Doom's ship, but is mostly a ruse. All barons are conspiring, either for desire of freedom or because their ego can't tollerate no being THEM the god emperor of Battlewordl.
In this context Thors, as main symbols of "the Man", the right hand of a pantheorn that fear any social change like it was the next ragnarok and that is classist and authoritarian to the point of self lesionism(flaws that oddly Loki himslef pointed out, even before his awesome Teen phase), are the obvious perfect choice for Doom's army.
AND Rune Thor is probably one more close to the most darker roots of the thor myth, and probably dislike Stormborn because:
a)she is a mutant, a race always causing trouble and not accepting their roles in life, much like Trolls and Frost Giants, always whining for better landas and better treatments- (if one think Trolls are treated like they are ***t in Asgard, regardless of what they actually do...)
b) She is a woman. good chance Rune Thor share the same chauvinistic feeling of Old man Odin about a female thor
c) She is Black...Again I got the feeling the Rune Thor would prefer all Thors to be from pure Viking lineage...

[vitruvian]

Right, but there's no reason to believe that they were able to save anyone other than Sue, Franklin, Valeria, and the rest of the lifeboat passengers that were lost.

Only if you're not paying attention. Strange goes on to talk about the inhabitants of the different domains being ignorant of their true pasts, meaning the majority of them were saved from the destroyed universes, not created from scratch. In fact, Sue and the rest of the Future Foundation members in the broken off section of the life boat are about the only ones we can be sure weren't saved from the 616 universe, since Hickman has stated that 616 Sue is dead and the one serving as Doom's consort is from a different world.

[vitruvian]

I'm pretty sure that when Doom and Strange talk about saving people that's who they're referring to, but until it's established somewhere in the actual book we'll have to agree to disagree.

They're talking about the inhabitants of many of the Battleworld domains, albeit not all of them, having been saved from a host of alternate universes. They just think they're native to Battleworld, with some few of them like the Spiders and Old Man Logan starting to understand the truth that they don't belong where they are and their histories don't make sense.

And the whole thing with Strange having to be careful about people finding hints about the truth of their and Battleworld's origins wouldn't make much sense if everybody except Doom, Strange, the inhabitants of the two arks (which have just now opened), and maybe the Future Foundation folks actually had been created from scratch along with Battleworld - because if that were the case, there wouldn't be any secret truth to uncover for the majority of Battleworld's inhabitants, since they were in fact created by their God Doom, although it would be a subtype of the Omphalos hypothesis with the world actually only having existed for eight years, just created with a false history going back much further. Nor would the variety of domains and inhabitants make much sense if everything was an original creation of Doom's, unless you want to posit that he lacks enough imagination to make anything other than carbon copies of worlds that existed somewhere in the old multiverse, so that he only 'saved' them in the sense of recording and making copies of them rather than retrieving the Incursion sites from the actual universes themselves.

[PiercedMonk]

Hickman has flat out said that they are not from 616. Now, when Doom and Strange said they were able to 'save' parts of the old they may not have necessarily meant just 616, so they could still be part of what he 'saved' but they are not OUR Sue, Franklin, and Valeria.

Ah, I must have missed where he said that. I'm somewhat surprised that's the case seeing as all the characters lost in the liferaft malfunction are the ones serving in Doom's court. That's an odd dramatic decision. Chekhov would not approve.

[vitruvian]

Ah, I must have missed where he said that. I'm somewhat surprised that's the case seeing as all the characters lost in the liferaft malfunction are the ones serving in Doom's court. That's an odd dramatic decision. Chekhov would not approve.

There, I agree with you. It honestly seems like it would be much cleaner for them to be from that broken off section of the raft.

However, every rereading of Strange's spiel in SW #3 further confirms me in the opinion that a whole lot of the inhabitants of Battleworld are people saved from destroyed universes rather than original creations or even Doom-created facsimiles. If there's even a real distinction to be made between transport and copying when effectively teleporting between universes... I think James' maxim that 'A difference which makes no difference is no difference at all' applies here.

[Noinden]

I don't think there is any sort of limit on how many times a character can appear on Battleworld, except in the case of Doom, maybe Strange. the multiverse was infinite, so there are potentially an infinite number of Janes. I mean if you want to put a limit on it, there are 40 domains, so that may be the upper limit of how many times a character can appear, but we know that some domains are actually made up of refugees from worlds that did not get a full domain, so there are potentially more than that. It's just that the writers of the event only have so many stories to tell with assorted characters, and more popular characters are going to turn up more often.

Oh I think Doom has limited one in particular. We've seen zero hint of ANY Reed Richards. Yet there are two running around, thanks to life rafts. Doom is going to be royally pissed at that! Because if there is anyone Victor does not want spoiling his creation it is Reed.