Love, Thunder, and Cancer

I try not to think about Thor: Love and Thunder for a lot of reasons.

Although my personal and professional interest in the MCU has certainly waned in a post-Endgame world (there are exceptions), to the point I probably do not have much of a tier list for the franchise anymore, it would still be the one movie I'd rank at the very bottom without hesitation. The humor is forced, whereas Ragnarok's felt like a wonderful reinvigoration of Thor as a character. It treats comic book arcs for characters like Gorr the God Butcher and Jane Foster's Mighty Thor as, well, things to be butchered. It's a truly atrocious-looking movie, even beyond the ways most people ding Marvel movies for looking these days.

None of these, however, are the primary reason I try not to think about Love and Thunder. That's because what I remember more than anything about the movie is coming out of the theater, my eyes stinging with tears, and apologizing to my mom, who I'd taken with me to cheer her up, for "the cancer stuff."

She had, relatively recently, been informed that her cancer had returned after seemingly beating it years prior, and had returned rather aggressively. She told me not to worry, and it was fine—at least she enjoyed the movie. Neither of us knew that she would be dead less than a year later. And now, three years after that, I write this piece sitting in the cancer center of my local hospital as my father undergoes the first of a series of daily radiotherapy sessions for skin cancer.

I don't know how long it will take. I figured this would pass the time. And I think, for the first time in quite a while now, about Thor: Love and Thunder.