The Evolution of Thor Throughout the MCU... with Helen O'Hara from the Empire Podcast
This is a podcast that discusses the character Thor from Marvel Cinematic Universe created by a group called The Story Geeks along with their guest Helen O'Hara from the Empire Podcast. The main purpose of the podcast to review all the events that happened with Thor and how they changed him physically and mentally. The podcasts can be broken down into two parts: a review of all the movies where Thor is one of the main characters and the exploration of how Asgardians around Thor impact him. The podcasters have made a lot of useful and interesting claim about Thor, for example, they describe Odin as “Thor's confidence and strength”(45:47). And it actually makes a lot of sense because Thor did lose his confidence and strength right after he lost Odin. I am planning to modify this idea into the relationship between confidence and strength, or rather the importance of confidence as a part of good masculinity.
What is Toxic Masculinity? Salam
This is an article written by Maya Salam that discusses signs of toxic masculinity and why we should avoid them. The purpose of this article to draw people's attention on this social issue of toxic masculinity. The author Salam starts with some common words that refers to toxic masculinity and a recent example of how people with them being rude about an advertisement that address this issue. After letting her audiences know what is toxic masculinity, Salam provides professional guidelines to explain how toxic masculinity is an important issue. Lastly, Salam wrote about signs of toxic masculinity and urge people to take action on this issue. Since I will be focusing on how Thor transform from toxic to good masculinity, the signs Salam mentioned in the article will be extremely helpful. For example , one of the signs is "suppressing emotions or masking distress"(Salam). I can directly compare Thor's action or words with the signs and conclude whether Thor is being good and toxic.
Cates, Masculinity, Marvel-Style
This is an article written by Matt Cates and focuses on how and why Marvel's movies is having impact on roles and norms of masculinity in the society. The author Cates first used an example of Greek heroes to explain that they actually are role models for a lot of people. He then explores each main male character in Marvel movies and describes what kind of masculinity and personality they are expressing. The author provides a good summary on Thor's experience on earth: "slightly temper his rough edges, and allowed him to see the error of his smug and selfish ways".(Cates) I will be using this summary as the background to basically start my analysis on Thor. With this background information, the changes on Thor becomes more clear and it also emphasizes many of Thor's good masculinity traits in later movies.
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