Favorite Characters: Valkyrie (The Avengers)

And as usual, by “The Avengers,” I mean, “Avenger or character in an Avenger-adjacent film,” much like Peggy or Hope.  Anyway, going into Thor:  Ragnarok, I was so pumped for Valkyrie, and she did not disappoint.  Funny, complex, badass, capable – the whole package.  I’m not sure what’s going to be happening with her going forward, if she’s going to be involved in the Infinity War stuff or other later films, but I sure hope we get to see more from her (Valkyrie-related spoilers.)

Thor encounters Valkyrie upon his arrival in Sekarr, where she saves him from scavengers only to sell him to the Grandmaster as a gladiator.  Right away, we (and Thor) are hit by the force of her.  She’s both an adept warrior and a hard scrapper, rather blithely unscrupulous and more than a bit of a mess.  She has plenty of skill and strength to back up her threats, but her hard drinking can thwart those intentions, throwing her off her game and forcing her to just scrape by against opponents she could waste with ease when she’s at her best.

As the film goes on, we get a better sense of Valkyrie and why she’s the way she is.  An Asgardian and former elite warrior of Odin’s, she left Asgard long ago after the first war against Hela.  The extent of the carnage and the loss of her fellow warriors was hard on her, and what’s more, she became disillusioned with the idea of fighting and dying for the sake of conflicts arising within the royal family.  As such, when Thor tries to convince her to go back, she’s not having it at first – in her mind, the royal family can clean up its own messes.  She’s already given enough of her blood, pain, and heartbreak on their behalf.

Really, Valkyrie is a well-done example of a familiar trope, the once-noble warrior who’s become both damaged and jaded from the traumas of their past.  As with many of those characters, her story is about overcoming that trauma and learning to again be the hero she once was.  That said, I’m not sure if I’ve ever really seen the archetype played in this way by a female character.  I’d be curious to learn a little more about Valkyrie’s comic book history and how closely her canon character aligns with how she’s portrayed in the movie, because after Ragnarok, it struck me that there’s really no self-conscious sense of her being a “female version” of that archetype – she just is.  Either way, I like it.

Not that it’s all trauma and damage from Valkyrie, not by a long shot.  Despite the darker roots behind the issue, her drunken fumbling in her fight scenes provides some good physical comedy, and her world-weary deadpan goes nicely with Thor’s more overt humor.  Not to mention, when she pulls it together, she’s awesome.  I absolutely love watching Valkyrie fight in this movie – the sloppier stuff early on for its entertainment value, and the cleaner, more focused stuff later for its sheer heroism and badassery.

Side note:  while Tessa Thompson, like Zoe Saldana and Pom Klementieff from Guardians of the Galaxy (the only other actresses of color with a major role in the MCU films,) is playing an alien, she’s the first MCU actress of color whose character gets to look like a woman of color rather than an obvious alien.  Throw in Hela as the films’ first big female villain and Taika Waititi as its first director of color, and Ragnarok isn’t doing too bad!  (Now just bring on Black Panther, Marvel!)