So, I found out about Fosterson week (thanks fostertheory!) and today’s topic is Character Parallels!
Jane and Thor are mirrored to hell and back throughout both films, although unfortunately Thor 2 somewhat chickened out of the ‘Jane is co-protagonist’ thing that was going on. They’re two people with immensely different life paths but they are very similar, and the parallels in their arc are pervasive.
Jane and Thor are both leaders, intelligent, driven, sometimes headstrong individuals who while capable of making and executing excellent plans have a tendency to leap before they look. They have similar journeys; in many ways Thor 2 is set up as a precise mirror of Thor 1, with Jane taking Thor’s place in the narrative (then it wimped out). But it’s not just across the films.
I think the key event in Thor 1 is the assault on SHIELD. Here you’ve got Thor and Jane, both of whom have lost things of enormous significance to them, teaming up on a whim, a hope and a promise to get them back. And they talk, and the initial gap starts to bridge. Then, of course, there’s the conversation on the rooftop. Both of them have looked to the stars for a long time; they just saw different things.
But then there’s the Thor 2 mirror, or more accurately inverse upwards spiral; they’re both growing, and Jane starts from a position of greater maturity and wisdom than Thor in the previous film. The plot initiating event is not Asgard, or Vanaheim, or Svartalfheim - it’s on Earth, where Jane decides to walk through a wormhole and brings back a passenger. This sets up a story about Jane having to deal with what she started and avoid the rekindling of an ancient war - sounds familiar! The circumstances are different, but - in the aftermath, she goes to a strange realm in which she is a stranger, and people disbelieve her.
The mirror’s surprisingly detailed; taken to a strange medical facility, both of them struggle. Jane recognises and connects with the Soul Forge as Thor did not with the blood tests, but it comes to hostility all the same, and medics are thrown across the room by the Aether.
I’ve said before how the structure of Thor 2 is eerily exact against Thor 1, and it applies here as well. When one is made prisoner by a powerful force, the other plots to free them and sends a friend to bring them out. The shots are nearly twinned, Thor’s reaction to Erik and Jane’s to Sif.
Jane, like Thor, seeks to understand her new environment, but the endgame of the film comes on her home turf; she is rid of her internal disadvantage (the Aether here being the mirror of Thor’s Brought Down To Humanness) on an otherrealm, during a battle, and finds her own way home (Richard, peculiarly, acting as Heimdall in the mirror). Here there is another battle she must face, in short order, with her own weapons - in her case, SCIENCE! (And Jane also works co-operatively, there’s no ‘leave my brother to me’ there) And on this the fate of worlds depends. Where it ends is also a mirror; Thor/Jane holding on to a loved one, trying to pull them back to safety, as doom approaches the two of them, and Odin/Erik comes seemingly out of nowhere and averts the danger.
Where Thor 2 trips up is that it doesn’t seek to have Jane mirror Thor’s protagonism. It puts her in the same situations, but it focusses on his choices and muddies the waters, which is a shame because Jane is a damn fine hero and an excellent protagonist, one who learns and grows and does immensely cool things.
Thor and Jane work best as co-protagonists, a flexible team whose methods and resources differ but who parallel and mirror each other, play to each others’ strengths, and understand each others’ backgrounds, contexts and minds.
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