Gorr’s Grudge with The Gods – Personal Yet Universal

Spoilers ahead.

‘Thor: Love and Thunder’ begins with a sombre scene of a starved and parched father-daughter duo praying to their God for a miracle in their dried desert land. Christian Bale plays Gorr, one of the last devotees of an ancient deity called “Rapu”, who pays no heeds to the human’s pleas for ‘sustenance’. And so… Gorr’s daughter dies in his arms, and the inconsolable father spends his last hours wrapped around her tomb of sand. In the afterlife, he meets Rapu and asks for his ‘eternal reward’ for worshipping him until his last breath, for never having lost faith. But Rapu mocks Gorr’s devotion and his daughter’s loss. Suffering for their Gods is one’s only duty, and there is only death after death, no rewards, Rapu tells his last disciple.

Faced with the futility of faith, Gorr renounces Rapu and kills him with the necro-sword, a mythical weapon which corrupts its wielder and has the power to slay Gods. So, from a pagan worshiper, Gorr’s grudge with Rapu spurs him on to become the ‘God butcher’. He scours through various planets, desecrating temples, murdering invincible deities, and spreading panic across the galaxy. He is met with a proper fight when he sets his eye on Thor, the God of thunder.

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We can argue that Gorr is the hero of this movie, getting rid of self-centered incompetent Gods. Gods who do nothing but bring war, pain and suffering upon people for amusement. His grudge with these all-powerful beings isn’t just personal but universal, his vengeance stands for every honest being who has terribly suffered and prayed in vain. He isn’t a maddened Titan like the arrogant Thanos, whose goal might have been for the betterment of the universe but involved random slaughter of half the population of the galaxy. Genocide will always be pure evil. Gorr’s also a more reasonable antagonist than the Scarlett Witch. She wreaks havoc across the multiverse in the want of kids who aren’t really her own… even though a much easier choice would’ve been to just adopt a bunch. And he definitely has more motive than all Spidermen baddies put together.

In the real world, it makes sense to believe there isn’t an immortal creator who holds the power to dictate our lives. Each time a child dies of starvation, it is only logical to think there isn’t no God who would’ve let an innocent perish for no fault of theirs. And since the galaxy continues to be a chaotic mess, rife with destruction, why do we need Gods? Either they don’t exist, or they must be killed for doing a terrible job. And Gorr takes up that assignment for the world. Too bad he meets an undeserved, unexplained death at the end of ‘Thor: Love & Thunder’.