Character Highlight: Jane Foster (Thor)

In case you couldn’t tell by how long it took me to get around to her, Jane is fairly low on my list of MCU characters.  Although she has definite good points, Jane pales in comparison to a lot of other characters in the franchise, particularly other female characters (even without factoring in all the TV awesomeness, there’s Natasha, Peggy, Shuri, Valkyrie, and Hope, and those are just my top favorites!)  A few Jane-related spoilers for Thor and The Dark World.

Jane’s most enjoyable trait for me, unsurprisingly, is her mad astrophysics skills.  I really do love to see how she’s all about the science.  Her drive to know and learn pushes her to some serious gutsy-or-crazy recklessness, like driving into the storm created by the Bifrost to see what’s happening or agreeing to chauffeur what she believes to be a crazy homeless man to a cordoned-off government site so he can retrieve the equipment and research SHIELD took from her.  This is a woman who will risk basically everything in her quest for knowledge – case in point, her curiosity about the Aether in The Dark World, which nearls leads to her making like Fred on Angel – and while it doesn’t speak well of her sense of self-preservation, there’s still a kind of foolhardy admiration to be found in it.  I enjoy watching her throw her inconsiderable weight around when SHIELD raids her lab in the first Thor film, standing her ground even though it’s clear to all involved that this faceless government entity has all the power, and her best contribution to the franchise is the way she manipulates Erik’s Convergence devices (I don’t remember what they’re actually called – technobabble isn’t my forte) to combat the Dark Elves during The Dark World’s big final blowout.

This is what I like about Jane – her curiosity, her drive, her intellectual spark, and the genuine joy she takes at seeing things she’s never experienced before.  When Thor takes her to Asgard, I just love the satisfied way she whispers “quantum field generator” to him, pleased with herself at having figured out what the Asgardians’ “soul forge” was.  However, the further you take her from the science stuff, the less interest I have in her. 

I’m not quite sure what the movies are aiming for with Jane’s general social awkwardness.  Obviously, socially-awkward science geniuses are nothing new, in fiction or real life, but Jane isn’t really awkward in a way that I associate with that type of character.  She comes across less like an adult who isn’t used to talking to people without multiple PHDs and more like a skittish teenage girl trying to figure out how she should act.  Part of this is the “giggly school girl” thing that comes and goes in her interactions with Thor.  I get that he’s a god and has the arms to prove it, but it’s both weird and weirdly-inconsistent.  She’ll go from talking shop with Thor in one scene to practically twirling her hair in the next to impulsively slapping him then apologizing for it in the scene after that.  She’s all over the map, and I can’t get a handle on it.

Which is too bad, because naturally, there are plenty of ways to do “socially-awkward genius” tropes well.  I’d prefer to see this trait of hers written more consistently and/or organically, but even contextualizing it a little would go a long way toward smoothing it out.  A few lines about understanding numbers but not people, always having struggled with knowing how to act, or even how Asgardians aren’t any harder to figure out than humans might feel trite or obvious, but for me, I think they’d help to flesh Jane out and let me see that she’s kind of unsettled as a person rather than distractedly-written as a character.