Thor: Love and Thunder reminds queer fans exactly what Disney thinks they’re worth

polygon.com:

More than any other Marvel Cinematic Universe film, Thor: Love and Thunder arrived with a certain level of queer expectation. Some fans hoped the second film from Thor: Ragnarok director Taika Waititi would bring considerably more of what the previous film did well — not just in terms of wit and color, but also an expansion of Ragnarok’s rich subtext, a surprising amount of which can be read as queer. In Hollywood, blockbuster success is typically rewarded with creative freedom. Queer audiences could understandably infer that Ragnarok awarded Waititi and his collaborators a stack of chips that could be cashed in, at least partially, on the queerer story he says he wants.

Waititi and the film’s cast leaned into that reading on the Love and Thunder press tour, eagerly replying to fans who ask “How gay is it?” with quotes like “So gay.” But in the finished movie, it’s hard to see this queerness taken seriously. The most explicitly gay relationship is between fictional rock aliens that are all male and reproduce by holding hands over a lava pit. While that isn’t nothing — especially in the current political environment, where the very suggestion of something other than heteronormativity sends a reactionary media apparatus into a tizzy — it’s also cowardice. It’s a way to queer up a story without including actual queer people. (Valkyrie, an established bisexual character, does some flirting, but doesn’t really get a story of her own.)

Taken in isolation, the latest in a series of broken promises about screen representation in Disney films is disappointing, as it is when any art squanders what appears to be clear potential. But as the latest instance in Disney’s long history of queerbaiting, it’s absurd. As a company, Disney