Marvel just changed what we know about Thor’s hammer Mjolnir. Now rather than an object of power, Mjolnir is a living consciousness capable of thought and emotion.

[screenrant.com]





The Cutter

Watch out....it could be powered by an Infinity Gem...

An article on io9 pointed out that, while Mjolnir being sentient/sapient may be new, the ability to change itself into a humanoid form isn't that far from what it's done before.

We've had one of Stark's armor become sapient (though that was really Ultron programming), now Mjolnir, what next, Cap getting an AI for his shield?

Totally don't care. Stopped caring when some idiot got the idea that Thor's name was a title rather than his NAME and something you can pass around along with Thor being suddenly unworthy because of something whispered to him when if he were unworthy he'd have been unworthy from that moment not from 'hey here's why you're unworthy' whispered to him by someone. Just like Doom, absolutely certain he was worthy, couldn't pick up the hammer because deluding yourself you're worthy won't make you worthy. Or Reigning Thor who after killing his alter ego after they were separated found he couldn't lift Mjolnir in spite of having the Odinpower inside him and thinking his act of murder wasn't going to affect his worthiness.

Nightmask Wrote:
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> Totally don't care. Stopped caring when some
> idiot got the idea that Thor's name was a title
> rather than his NAME and something you can pass
> around along with Thor being suddenly unworthy
> because of something whispered to him when if he
> were unworthy he'd have been unworthy from that
> moment not from 'hey here's why you're unworthy'
> whispered to him by someone. Just like Doom,
> absolutely certain he was worthy, couldn't pick up
> the hammer because deluding yourself you're worthy
> won't make you worthy. Or Reigning Thor who after
> killing his alter ego after they were separated
> found he couldn't lift Mjolnir in spite of having
> the Odinpower inside him and thinking his act of
> murder wasn't going to affect his worthiness.


Nightmask totally doesn't care, and I totally agree with everything that was said. I'm too far gone on current Marvel Comics stuff to even care enough to say how stupid all of this nonsense is, or how I think whoever came up with this idea should be shot in the face with a bus cannon. So my explaining how little I care will have to suffice for all that... since I'm not going to say those things.

Yeah, I stopped acknowledging their nonsense once they started doing stuff like making Nightcrawler a half-demon. As far as I'm concerned, Marvel continuity more or less ended in 1991 (Claremont leaves X-Men) picks up again from 1998 to 2000 (Heroes Return Avengers, Thor and Iron Man being returns to form) and is pretty much over at this point.

Even the more recent stuff that I like (Waid's Daredevil, Slott/Allred's Silver Surfer, Annihilation, Planet Hulk) is tainted by association.

So Mjolnir reveals a new power that Thor was never able to use before, but Jane Foster-Thor is able to use it because somehow she is even more worthy than Thor himself, even though we are never told what makes Jane so much more worthy, or at least why the real Thor is mow considered unworthy to even wield the hammer in the first place.
It's about as annoying as that scene where Jane-Thor woke up some sleeping goddess (was it Freya?) while it was implied that the original Thor could never have done it because he lacks the wisdom/compassion/whatever that supposedly comes natural to women.

Maniacles Wrote:
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> So Mjolnir reveals a new power that Thor was never
> able to use before, but Jane Foster-Thor is able
> to use it because somehow she is even more worthy
> than Thor himself, even though we are never told
> what makes Jane so much more worthy, or at least
> why the real Thor is mow considered unworthy to
> even wield the hammer in the first place.
> It's about as annoying as that scene where
> Jane-Thor woke up some sleeping goddess (was it
> Freya?) while it was implied that the original
> Thor could never have done it because he lacks the
> wisdom/compassion/whatever that supposedly comes
> natural to women.

Yes there's been quite a bit of sexism in recent years with the Thor comics, starting with the female gods taking over ruling Asgard and being treated as somehow 'better' just for being female, with subsequent writing of Odin as far more of a bastard if not downright evil than he used to be portrayed. No surprise that they're writing it like Jane is somehow superior to Thor at his best after all the work to tear him down and make him look somehow unworthy but can't actually give you a reason why because they know any excuse that they gave would be soundly ripped to shreds. It's what you see from bad fanfiction which would be justifiably derided but here it's writers managed to get employed to make their fiction 'canon'.

I don't think the word "canon" applies to comic books anymore, NM.

All this supposed worthiness of Jane Foster is kind of contradicted by Kamala Khan, who ditches the Avengers (FemThor included) to start the Champions as a reaction against excessive authoritarian violence. (If you want to read a really preachy comic, pick up the new Champions #1. First Marvel comic I've looked at in several months, and I'm not kidding, it's really preachy.)

FTJ Wrote:
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> I don't think the word "canon" applies to comic
> books anymore, NM.
>
> All this supposed worthiness of Jane Foster is
> kind of contradicted by Kamala Khan, who ditches
> the Avengers (FemThor included) to start the
> Champions as a reaction against excessive
> authoritarian violence. (If you want to read a
> really preachy comic, pick up the new Champions
> #1. First Marvel comic I've looked at in several
> months, and I'm not kidding, it's really
> preachy.)

Thanks for the warning since the last thing I want to be reading is a preachy comic book especially if it's one that'll be preaching how horrible I am just for being a man.

Exactly... because I know that, if I'm going to be a horrible person, I want to be a horrible person on my own merits rather than what genitalia I was born with.

I've not seen the issue, but I'm guessing if there's any "preaching," it's speaking against people not for being men, but for being sexist. There is a difference between the two.

No, the whole reason Kamala Khan organizes the Champions is basically as a Black Lives Matter thing. I'm not offended by it, but it was really contrived and lacking in subtlety to put it mildly.

FTJ Wrote:
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> No, the whole reason Kamala Khan organizes the
> Champions is basically as a Black Lives Matter
> thing. I'm not offended by it, but it was really
> contrived and lacking in subtlety to put it
> mildly.

If there's one thing Marvel no longer has it's subtlety and indeed seem to embrace overly contrived storytelling.

So...for the complete story on the retcon for Mjolnir it's as follows:

Powerful sentient cosmic storm loses an epic battle against Odin when it fell upon Asgard after Odin challenged it resulting in him locking it into a chunk of Uru metal gifted to him by the dwarves after he'd saved them from a troll invasion (being completely unforgeable he considered it a worthless rock of a gift).

Odin takes unforgeable metal prison to dwarves to commission them to forge it into a hammer so that he might tame and wield the power of the storm for himself. Dwarves eventually have to drag a star into their mountains to provide power enough to forge it, killing the star and requiring hundreds if not more dwarves to work the metal until the hammer is complete.

Odin tries to take hammer on a test drive, hammer refuses to yield to him and so after getting back to Asgard Odin places the most binding enchantments he can onto it and leaves it in the dusty weapons vault of Asgard and actually explicitly tells a young Thor to ignore it when he starts to try and touch it, with Thor saying he was sure he heard a voice calling to him. Obviously at some point after that Thor touches the hammer and takes up its power and it was just a smokescreen about Odin making the hammer as a gift for Thor and in fact it was intended after Odin couldn't command it that it never be used by anyone.

So apparently everything we've ever seen in the comics we're supposed to think was the sentient storm bound to the hammer 'playing along' when it let Odin and others take it up (including Tiwaz who treated it as a fairly minor trinket and had no problems moving it about) and somehow it's 'no longer playing'. So there's no real worthiness involved to the hammer (hey what do you know now we know why Red Hulk was able to beat Thor up with it) instead it's got a petty, spiteful woman's personality to it (unlike the petty, spiteful man's personality Odin has) and can create a facade temporarily that looks like Foster to pretend to be her to help cover up her secret.

Meanwhile they're doing everything that they can to tear down Thor (complete with his 'Unworthy Thor' comic) as if that somehow makes Foster look more worthy instead of just emphasizing how worthiness isn't an aspect of the hammer anymore and implying it never was.

Yep. Complete steaming load of B.S.

But how does Nick Fury's whispered secret to Thor tie in to this stinky mess of him abruptly losing his "worthiness"?

Thrudjelmer Wrote:
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> Yep. Complete steaming load of B.S.
>
> But how does Nick Fury's whispered secret to Thor
> tie in to this stinky mess of him abruptly losing
> his "worthiness"?

It doesn't since there's nothing Fury could have said that would make Thor unworthy, the only way to make Thor unworthy would be to actually change him at a fundamental level mentally so that how he thought and believed and acted was no longer worthy no whispered secret could do that unless it were an actual mind-altering infectious code transmitted via speech. But like I note the retcon removes worthiness as a consideration since worthiness has nothing to do with it all that matters is having the temperamental sentient storm in the hammer like you if it does it'll let you wield it and it'll lend you all its power and give you Thor's power too even though that doesn't belong to it really.

Got it, not only are the ignoring all the history dating back to the beginning, but even the more recent events leading up to the change in "Thors."

What about times when the hammer was physically broken? Shouldn't the entity have been set free?

Thrudjelmer Wrote:
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> Got it, not only are the ignoring all the history
> dating back to the beginning, but even the more
> recent events leading up to the change in
> "Thors."
>
> What about times when the hammer was physically
> broken? Shouldn't the entity have been set free?

Of course, if it had been a containment device for an entity which it clearly wasn't. When he blew it to shards against Exitar the storm obviously would have been released then IF it existed.

Nightmask Wrote:
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> When he blew it to shards against Exitar the
> storm obviously would have been released
> then IF it existed.


Or that time when the Destroyer's disintegrator cut through it like it was nothing...

Thrudjelmer Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Nightmask Wrote:
> --------------------------------------------------
> -----
> > When he blew it to shards against Exitar the
> > storm obviously would have been released
> > then IF it existed.
>
>
> Or that time when the Destroyer's disintegrator
> cut through it like it was nothing...

But hey like we've complained about bitterly in recent years Marvel doesn't have continuity anymore, just like DC it has Retcons-R-Us where any fanboy can get in the door and have his fan fiction become canon, at least until the next fanboy comes along and erases it. It's how we got not one but TWO heralds prior to the Silver Surfer as each writer wanted to be able to say HIS creation was first rather than Kirby's after all, thousands of Ghost Riders even though so many would have been well known to the world with thousands of flaming skeletons riding around, and of course Iron Fist becoming a legacy even though that was clearly impossible other than going forward from Danny Rand NOT backwards.

Nightmask Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> But hey like we've complained about bitterly in
> recent years Marvel doesn't have continuity
> anymore, just like DC it has Retcons-R-Us where
> any fanboy can get in the door and have his fan
> fiction become canon, at least until the next
> fanboy comes along and erases it.

At least DC has traditionally been more straightforward about it. Marvel keeps relaunching things every few months but it's hard to know what's a continuation and what's new.

Lately, I've heard people referring to "seasons" in comics, like TV shows. Every 6-12 months you get new #1's and a new story arc that might or might not have anything to do with the previous arc. Maybe I'm too old-fashioned but I find that confusing, and I think it diminishes the product compared to, say, Byrne FF or Claremont X-Men days.

I was peeved about Thor long before the current wave of crap since I grew up a fan of Mythology, not comics.

Want to talk about Thor's "worthiness"? You mean the guy that loved to brawl and would drink so much mead he could drain an ocean? The guy that slayed an uncountable number of giants just for being giants? He never lost his hammer then!

The main bit that always annoyed me is that Thor (or anyone else wielding the hammer) doesn't have to wear his magic gloves, gloves he had to wear because the hammer is supposed to give off sparks and heat when wielded.

I should add that if the idea had been used for a completely new character or an alternate universe version of Thor I'd not have problems with it. Epic battle imprisons living storm in mythic metal that's forged into an epic weapon that refuses to serve its captor and in spite of binding spells placed upon it chooses to serve his captor's son instead. High fantasy like you'd see in AD&D or some other magical settings, it's just not Thor.

Nightmask Wrote:
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> I should add that if the idea had been used for a
> completely new character or an alternate universe
> version of Thor I'd not have problems with it.
> Epic battle imprisons living storm in mythic metal
> that's forged into an epic weapon that refuses to
> serve its captor and in spite of binding spells
> placed upon it chooses to serve his captor's son
> instead. High fantasy like you'd see in AD&D or
> some other magical settings, it's just not Thor.

I agree with you, and could even see the idea in a normal 4-color world. But it's just not Thor and Mjolnir.

Ugh, just realized how this screws with the existence of Red Norvell and Beta Ray Bill. Both have what are supposed to be functionally perfect copies of Mjolnir Odin had created for them, all from a trip to the dwarves to have them fashioned and for Odin to pour his power into them. Now they're completely incompatible with this retcon for Mjolnir, Odin couldn't have created copies because it would require copying the storm for one, for another the retcon that Uru is impossible to forge means ALL cases we see of Uru being used become in violation of the retcon that it is effectively unforgeable (so there goes Thor's Uru-metal menace and Ulik's Uru knuckle dusters along with those copies of Mjolnir AND that lameass deal with Cap's shield getting Uru added to it).

That one issue causes issues all over the place. *sigh*

God but I miss Jim Shooter running things, the man kept the writers in line and in continuity so well and he respected the fans and the comics rather than what Marvel's been doing the last 20+ years.