Thor: Love and Thunder’s villain, Gorr the God Butcher, is an interstellar atheist

polygon.com:

Monday’s new trailer for Thor: Love and Thunder gave us our first good look at the movie’s villain, Gorr the God Butcher, as a heavily made-up Christian Bale ominously intoned: “All gods will die.”

Movie viewers are likely more familiar with Bale than with the character he’s playing, and that’s entirely reasonable. Compared to Thor mainstays like Loki, Malekith the Accursed, Surtur, etc., Gorr is a relative stripling, first appearing in comics a mere ten years ago. He’s only really had two stories about him.

But it’s the sheer quality of those stories that’s remarkable, from the minds of writer Jason Aaron and artist Esad Ribić, that catapulted him to the ranks of the greatest Thor villains ever put on the page.

Here’s the most important thing to know about Gorr: He wants to kill every god who has ever existed.

A the dawn of all cosmic time, Gorr was an unremarkable alien from a planet so unremarkable that it had no name. His home was inhospitable to life, plagued by drought, famine, earthquakes, and wild beasts. Still, his people believed their gods were watching over them, listening to their prayers, and that misfortune was ineffable divine will. Gorr questioned those ways, and — after the slow, individual deaths of his wife and all of his children — cursed his people’s gods, for which he was banished from his tribe of starving nomads to wander alone until he died.

He was then present for a divine visitation — two gods, locked in battle, slammed meteor-like from the heavens into the desert, exhausted from their combat and succumbing to their wounds. As Gorr approached, seeing with his own eyes proof that gods existed, one of the armored figures called out to him… for help.

And that was the moment that Gorr the