Tessa Thompson‘s Valkyrie is confirmed to be a lesbian, and in ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ this new King of Asgard will be seeking her Queen. It has been rumored for a while that Marvel’s upcoming ‘Eternals’ would also feature an LGBTQ character, and now Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has confirmed that this character is male, although he didn’t get into specifics. ‘Eternals’ stars Richard Madden as the strapping Ikaris. Madden, who is heterosexual, played gay in the Elton John biopic ‘Rocketman’. ‘Eternals’ also features Don Lee as Gilgamesh the Forgotten One, Kumail Nanjiani as Kingo, and Barry Keoghan as Druig, who is likely the villain of this movie. (It’s probably not Druig.)
Discussing the mystery gay Eternal, Feige said to Entertainment Weekly:
“He’s married, he’s got a family, and that is just part of who he is.”
You’re doing it wrong, Marvel. You know who else is married and has a family? Hawkeye, a.k.a. the BORING one. And on top of that, it sounds as though ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ is partly built on Valkyrie getting hitched. Who wants to see that?
The Marvel movies aren’t exactly romantic-comedies, but romance plays a big part. Actually, romance tends to play a part in almost all movies (and TV shows, and songs, and…), honestly, but it’s usually the process of meeting and falling in love, or on the opposite end of the spectrum, about relationships ending. There aren’t many media projects about people that are happily married with kids, because, no offense to anyone that is married with kids, that’s kind of boring.
Tony and Pepper weren’t married to begin with. Neither were Steve and Peggy. The budding romance between Thor and Jane, Quill and Gamora, Wanda and Vision, Banner and Natasha, etc. played a part in their various movies. T’Challa and Nakia have a complicated past in ‘Black Panther’. Hope Van Dyne seemed to hate Scott Lang in the beginning, but thawed over time. (Actually, I still kinda don’t buy that last one.) That “will they or won’t they” tension is a huge draw. It’s fun and it’s entertaining.
By marrying the two gay characters off, it’s basically like saying “Hey, here are your two gay characters! But they’re hitched, so no sexy time for them! They’re old and boring now. Take what you can get.”
Joe Russo appeared as a gay man in ‘Endgame’, and a fuss was made over that. But, like… big whoop. Some nobody that DOESN’T EVEN HAVE A NAME is gay and that’s supposed to be celebrated and groundbreaking? It’s not. If that’s what they needed to do to test the waters, so be it, but I don’t think any LGBTQ person took any feeling of representation or empowerment from it.
Basically, the sentiment is that gay characters are okay, but only if they’re neutered. No one wants to see a randy gay male character flirting with other men. They have to be in a longterm relationship with kids, rendering them essentially sexless. Jeremy Renner is really cute, but there really aren’t any memes touting how hot he is. That’s because he’s a boring ol’ married dad. (Well, and he’s not as stacked as Chris Evans or Hemsworth.)
I don’t even think that an entire Marvel movie needs to be built around a gay romance. None of the existing movies are ABOUT romance. But a team movie like ‘Eternals’ could easily have a gay subplot without taking a character’s sexuality off the board by marrying them off.
Until then, I guess we can all keep shipping Valkyrie and Captain Marvel until Marvel squashes that by pairing them off with others.
‘Eternals’ is scheduled to arrive in theaters on November 6, 2020. ‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ is scheduled to open on November 5, 2021.
