Who Is The Female Thor? Five Possible Answers

With a new Thor series in the offing this October, Marvel Comics threw the audience a curveball [...]

By Russ Burlingame

With a new Thor series in the offing this October, Marvel Comics threw the audience a curveball today with the revelation that its lead will be an as-yet-unidentified female who will wield Mjolnir when Thor himself is deemed unworthy.

So...who could it be?

There are actually quite a few fairly viable candidates, although nobody seems to fit perfectly, which could suggest we're looking at a new character.

Thor Girl

The character currently known as Designate (also Taerne) first appeared in the issue seen above and remained "Thor Girl" for a while.

She isn't actually Asgardian, but used her Odin-granted powers to transform herself into an Asgardian goddess and becomes Thor's loyal ally, taking the name "Thor Girl" and the civilian identity of Jake Olson's 'cousin' Tara. Upon Odin's apparent death, Thor Girl lost most of her cosmic powers, but retained the identity of Thor Girl and some of the powers that manifested when she made the transformation.

She's played a tangential role in all the big stories lately, until Fear Itself when she was essentially chased off-planet for her connection to Asgard.

Jane Foster

Thor's longtimme love interest may not seem like the first name that pops into your head...

...but consider this: She's got a life in the Cinematic Universe that many other characters don't; she's got years of history that connects her to Thor, Asgard and the readers...and she's been featured in an issue of What If..? where she got Thor's costume and powers.

That last part may not seem particularly notable until you consider just how much Marvel seems to enjoy mining What If...? for story ideas from time to time. RobLiefeld noted it today on Twitter (you can see the tweet below).

He also said that he liked the idea of a female Thor so much that he and Robert Kirkman had actually addressed it in an unpublished issue of Killraven.

In any event, Jane Foster is a logical choice just in terms of common storytelling tropes. Lois Lane, for instance, has been granted temporary powers for a number of stories, most recently during All-Star Superman.

Valkyrie

Brunnhilde was selected by Odin to lead the Valkyrior, the Choosers of the Slain, a group of warrior goddesses who would appear over the battlefields of mortal worshippers of the Asgardian gods and choose which of the fallen were worthy to be taken to Valhalla, the land of the honoured dead in the dimension of Asgard. Brunnhilde served Asgard capably in this capacity for centuries.

She's also obviously got a costume that just LOOKS like Thor's.

Brunhilde played a part in Fear Itself and, after it was done, was a key player in Fearless Defenders, a fan-favorite and well-reviewed series that failed to ever really take off in terms of mainstream enthusiasm or sales.

Angela

Coming off the events of Original Sin, nobody seems more obvious than Angela. There are elements of the new Thor costume that are similar to Angela's own (the eyes, the decorations around the fringes of the cloth bits on her uniform and the dark lipstick in particular); she's been revealed as the daughter of Odin and the sister of Thor and Loki; she's been teased as someone who will have a major role to play in the future of the Marvel Universe.

Certainly becoming Thor would jive with all of that -- but it just doesn't quite feel right. It almost feels like the design similarities to Angela are being planted there on purpose, but in fact when it turns out the new Thor is somebody else, it will make perfect sense because as the daughter of Odin, Angela's look inspires the new champion of Asgard, or something.

It's also worth noting that I'm not clear on whether the transformation in Thor would affect hair color as well or whether the redhead Angela and the brunette Jane Foster would be excluded from consideration on those grounds -- although I'm betting not.

Earth X Thor

With the re-establishment of contact with Alex Ross recently, it seems like Earth X's Thor might have a legitimate chance of showing up in the mainstream continuity.

Also, the Earth X world is basically an extended What-If, so the same rules apply to this as we noted in the Jane Foster entry above.

In that series, Loki persuaded Odin to force Thor to live as a woman as punishment for failing to control himself in falling in love with a human woman. In the mainstream continuity of 15 years after that story, it could become interesting to see whether such an act would prevent Thor ending up in a relationship anyway, since same-sex couples are no longer taboo in comics, although ALL of this seems like a bit of a stretch. They've already done the gender-swapped Loki a number of times and it's not entirely clear that there's much left to say by just using a different Asgardian for it next time around. Still, one never knows...

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