If you haven’t already sussed it out, it simply this: the idea of Thor is immortal.
When looking at the larger story of The Immortal Thor, which only truly becomes a little clearer in that final issue, it’s about Loki’s struggle to free everyone. Except, of course, to do so, they must be Thor’s enemy. It’s a largescale manipulation of Thor to slowly erode the very idea of Thor. First, when fighting Toranos, part of the idea is to define Thor and who Thor is. Thor defeats Toranos by giving him the idea of Thor, spreading it to the retroactively-imbedded ur-Thor, while also demonstrating how it is shared amongst many others. Then, when telling the tale of how Thor and Loki journeyed to Utgard once upon a time, Loki manipulates the story to alter the idea of who Thor is. Doubt is raised as Thor confronts a supposed younger/earlier version of himself, before he ‘learned’ humility, further emphasising the idea that who Thor is can change. Thor can be an African mutant; Thor can be an alien warrior; Thor can be an Elder God; Thor can be a selfish arrogant lout.
And, now, Thor can be a corporate shill.
Dario Agger and Amora the Enchantress, possibly under unseen manipulation/assistance from Loki, further call into question who Thor is by seeding the idea of a different version on Earth. While we, the reader, know who the real Thor is, would the average person in the Marvel Universe? As the issue progresses and Thor fights Thor, how would they know which is the real deal? One looks just like the new Roxxon reboot of the god, after all. While it seems like the point of this entire conflict is to frame Thor for murder, that’s only partly what’s happening. Thor battling Thor ends with the real Thor killing the fake Thor... but, if people think that’s the real Thor, then... Thor is dead.
When put into the larger context, it seems like there are two tracks of magic running parallel with Loki using Amora’s efforts to discredit Thor’s name and isolate him from Earth to their own ends, which relies on Amora’s spell, but has a longer view in mind. Thor no longer having a home on Earth because he killed Dario Agger and another Thor is good – people questioning the existence of a real Thor (or thinking him dead) is better. You can’t kill an idea like you can a living being, but you can discredit it, muddy it with competing ideas, and call its truth into question.
Part of Loki’s plan is when, in the form of Thor’s enemy, they trick Thor into crafting a weapon that contains his wisdom, Tormod the ax. During his battle with Roxxon’s Thor, the Odinson does not possess his ax. His mind is muddled by the belief that he’s a callow corporate shill, which causes him to not act as himself. Without his wisdom – the wisdom of restraint and humility – he lashes out in anger at the fake Thor and kills him. It’s not much different than Thor, in frustration, bringing his ax down on the forehead of the sleeping Skrymir in the lands of giants. The spell doesn’t only work because of Amora’s magic; it works because Thor believes his wisdom is (in at least part) held in his ax and that, somewhere inside, he’s capable of lashing out in that sort of anger. The seeds of this sort of muddled thought were planted earlier.
The 25 issues of The Immortal Thor break down the Odinson into pieces, picking out things that make him who he is and trying to separate them from the living being until he dies and, as we see in The Mortal Thor, the idea of him is vaguer, more abstract and distant. Here, he becomes something of a fictional being, infected by the storytelling of comics (with the playful thought bubbles) and faced with a twisted version of himself... that, as much as we and he would deny, is also Thor. It’s a hard idea to fully reconcile, but there is a basis in the history of the being that Amora uses to create this Roxxon Thor, the Keep, for it to lay claim to being, in part, Thor.
Introduced in the penultimate storyarc of Matt Fraction’s Thor run (The Mighty Thor #13-17), the Keep was created by Amora to be her perfect man. She accomplished this after Donald Blake (somehow separated from Thor when he died in Fear Itself) came to her, wanting to be made into a god in his own right. She feeds him a golden apple, casts a spell, chops off his head, and what spills out of his insides is the Keep. If Donald Blake and Thor are one being, at their core, and the Keep was created from Blake, then the Keep is, in part, Thor. By having Amora use the Keep to become the Roxxon Thor, Al Ewing is taking the initial idea of the Keep and Amora’s simmering feelings for Thor to their logical end. In the Fraction issues, the Keep is somewhat monstrous looking, like an Asgardian Swamp Thing to a certain extent – but wouldn’t her ideal man be her very own Thor?
Beyond that bit of playfulness with the idea of the Keep, its origins lying in Blake (Thor) means that, when Thor kills it, he is killing Thor. While Amora’s (Loki’s?) magic can do wonders, that root element of stemming from a version of Thor makes the Keep’s claim to the identity even more potent. That could be why, after Thor kills him, he doesn’t revert to the traditional appearance of the Keep. Instead, he remains in the form of this Thor that happens to have a short haircut that resembles that of Donald Blake. Just as Thor fought Toranos (and will later kill Toranos), Thor fights the Keep as Thor and kills the Keep as Thor... Thor is put into a position where he must kill different ideas of Thor, which only serves to undermine his own sense of self.
And that’s what Loki seems to want. I think.
Next week, I’ll discuss The Immortal Thor #11 and GODS #1-8.
