Jane Foster earned a warrior's rest after making a sacrifice so worthy that even she, a mortal, had gained the respect of the fallen heroes. She turns from the gates of paradise. She can't say she wasn't prepared to die.
The last regular issue with Jane Foster as the eponymous hero climaxes at this point. Having defeated the beast Mangog before it could ruin all of Asgard, Jane, sacrificing Mjolnir and succumbing to the cancer whose treatment was being wiped from her body every time she turned into THOR, still lived to the very end. In the comic, she is rewarded with this faith and love, and her sacrifice in spite of that love, by touching the heart of a man who had hated her for assuming his son's role. Working together with his son and the god-tempest once held in Mjolnir itself, the two Asgardians give Jane a chance at life, a chance to face her illness and overcome it as Jane Foster, rather than the mighty THOR.
This is not the Jane Foster that we see in the movie, but a different version of the character. The movie never dives into what cancer Jane has in its depiction of her treatment, but there is a level of similarity in their hero costumes. Jane makes the decision to die and go out with one last turn as she is not for the love of the life that she lived.
It isn't a problem that Jane's cancer plot is overshadowed by the fact that she is in a relationship with a man. It might be, but it isn't the problem that I've been thinking about since seeing the movie. Jane was shocked but happy when she saw the post-credits scene of Valhalla. That isn't TheMightyThor.
The three-year journey with Jane in the pages of her two THOR tiles is too vast to fit into a single movie. As part of the movie's general disparity between wanting to be a comedy romp while also engaging with plotlines dealing with things like cancer, or grief and loss, Jane's persona when she becomesThor in Love andThunder avoids much of the latter to focus on the former. She has a gag about trying to figure out a suitable phrase having tried many, many terrible ones. She gets to fight and kick ass, but she is more of a vehicle for comic relief, until it comes time for her to make her sacrifice for him and die in his arms, then she is on her. We don't know what cancer she has, it's just "cancer," touched on and left until it's time for her to be sick and dead at the end of the film. She is there to laugh and die.
Love and Thunder could never match the depth of life that the Jane of TheMighty THOR has. Her insistence to face her breast cancer head on as a human, not as an ally of gods, is a stark contrast to Love andThunder's Jane, who is an ally of gods. Even the simple act of kissing Sam Wilson's Captain America while on a mission with the Avengers is because she can. Jane is loving every second of it because it makes her feel alive in a way that her illness is denying her. In her final battle with the Mangog, she hit the creature with a powerful right hook and asked why she would die for the gods that hated her. You die for nothing but hate.
That love is for the man, in part, as it is in the movie. It isn't just for him. As we see a glimpse of her life, as a child with her parents, holding hands with the Odinson as a young woman, this line stretches up and up from Jane's punch. Jane loves more than just romantic love, but a love for life itself, and that is the sacrifice she is willing to make, not just a man.
I wish they could understand that. I wish Natalie Portman's Jane was given the time to have as much energy as her comic book counterpart had, so that she wouldn't want to leave yet. She was left to simply die, unexplored, unwanted beyond her necessity to push THOR into his new status quo as a clumsy adoptive dad. The first time Jane picked up Mjolnir, she was going to face death in the comic books. She was defiant with her love for life. Jane is asked to just accept it, if not for herself, but at least for the person it cares about.
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