Thor Odinson's arc in Thor: Love & Thunder was secretly teased in Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. Thor's arc in the MCU has been something of a disjointed one, in large part because the MCU pivoted after Thor and Thor: The Dark World. Marvel hired Taika Waititi to reinvent the franchise, and he gladly obliged, with Thor: Ragnarok serving as the end of one era and the beginning of another.

Stylistically, the Thor: Love & Thunder trailer makes it clear this film is indeed a spiritual successor to Thor: Ragnarok - albeit with a wider range of emotions. This time around, Waititi is drawing inspiration from a classic comic book arc by Jason Aaron in which Jane Foster wielded the power of the Mighty Thor after the Odinson became unworthy. She knew "there must always be a Thor," and so accepted the burden of filling the void he had left. Something similar appears to be taking place in the MCU, although here there's a very different reason the traditional role of Thor is currently unfilled; it's because Thor is trying to find a new role in the galaxy. As far as he's concerned, his Avengers days are well behind him.

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Curiously, this process of reinvention is hinted at in both Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame. There, Thor gained a powerful new weapon called Stormbreaker that he believed could kill Thanos. Stormbreaker is a fascinating weapon, adapted from the comics and bearing a unique visual appearance; it is both a hammer and an axe. Symbolically, its design represents the conflict at the heart of Thor's Phase 4 story; a hammer is traditionally a tool for building, while an axe is for destruction. Thor must decide whether he wants to be a warrior, or find a way to transform himself into a builder of some sort.

Chris Hemsworth as Thor in Love and Thunder Trailer

However uneven Thor's arc may be, there is a sense in which this conflict - the question of whether Thor will be the warrior who fights for Asgard or the one who builds the kingdom - has run through the entire franchise to date. Ironically, at first Thor was too like his father Odin - or, rather, the man his father used to be, when he led Asgard in plundering the rest of the Nine Realms. Odin judged Thor the warrior unworthy, and from that moment on the Odinson began a quest to reinvent himself. He seems to have met with some success by the time of Thor: Love & Thunder, even using Stormbreaker simply as a way of traveling the cosmos rather than as a weapon.

In mythological terms, it's common for a god or hero's weapon to serve as an image of their character or arc. There are actually profound parallels between Thor's Stormbreaker and the weapons used by Perrin in Robert Jordan's iconic Wheel of Time series, where he was torn between using the hammer and the axe. Thor's weapon Stormbreaker combines the two, perhaps hinting that Thor will finally come to embrace the duality of his nature. Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers; Endgame both teased this transformation of Thor becoming both builder and destroyer, warrior and a king. It will be fascinating to see how this plays out in Thor: Love & Thunder.

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