Thor: Love and Thunder sells Valkyrie out in the worst ways

polygon.com:

For a certain subsection of Marvel fans, hope for future features springs eternal — no matter how much common sense and past history suggests those hopes won’t bear fruit. In the case of Taika Waititi’s Thor: Love and Thunder, some fans were vocally hoping that the overwhelmingly positive response to Tessa Thompson’s turn as Valkyrie in Waititi’s Thor: Ragnarok would translate into a bigger role and more screen time for the character in the new movie. MCU-watchers who somehow haven’t noticed Disney’s consistent history of queerbaiting even hoped Valkyrie might get on-screen acknowledgement of her bisexuality, rather than leaving it to Thompson (who’s bisexual herself) to play it as one of the character’s hidden, unrevealed nuances. Thompson promising in a 2019 Comic-Con presentation that finding a love interest would be “the first order of business” for Valkyrie in the sequel fanned the fan flames.

But in keeping with the film’s pattern of constantly undermining its characters for jokes or for plot convenience — and the MCU movies’ similar pattern of setting up exciting female characters and then killing them off or sidelining them — Valkyrie gets cheated in some pretty profound ways in Love and Thunder. And the specific ways she’s cheated are particularly baffling, because it would have taken so little work to make the exact same character beats meaningful and resonant and let her feel like a developing person with her own story, rather than random set-dressing in a story that doesn’t care about her even slightly.

[Ed. note: Plot spoilers ahead for Thor: Love and Thunder.]

After the events of Thor: Ragnarok, Valkyrie was set up as the King of New Asgard, the Earth settlement for Asgardian refugees. (Thompson, always