Is Taika Waititi Going To Have A Thor-Star Lord Romance In ‘Love And Thunder’?

A particular moment was not lost on most viewers when the Thor: Love and Thunder trailer finally aired yesterday. In one scene, Peter Quill tells his crew to stare into the eyes of the people they love, and then Thor drifts around, trying to meet his gaze. “Not me!” Quill says, annoyed. “What? Just listening,” Thor replies, before moving away:

The relationship between Thor and Star Lord to this point is that Thor is charming, as he is with everyone, and Quill finds him annoying. But is director Taika Waititi possibly going to make that into something…more pronounced, with Thor: Love and Thunder? Let me present some evidence.

Taika Waititi very much makes a point to write same-sex romance into his projects, or represent them with his own roles.

• What We Do in the Shadows – In the FX show, Guillermo is more or less in love with his vampire master (though by the current season, has somewhat soured on him).
• Jojo Rabbit – In Waiti’s Oscar winner, Sam Rockwell plays a gay Nazi who dies a hero’s death.
• Our Flag Means Death – Here, Waititi is one of three different LGBTQ couples on the show, playing Blackbeard who gets caught up in a whirlwind romance with Stede Bonnet, and the pair has been hugely embraced by the LGBTQ community in the wake of the first season of the show.

That’s Waititi, but there’s precedent for this as well in the source material. Maybe not between Quill and Thor specifically, but in the comics, Peter Quill is bisexual, something we also saw come up briefly in the recent Guardians of the Galaxy video game, though it’s been more explicit in the comics. While both Star Lord and Thor’s romantic interests in the MCU have been women to date, that doesn’t seem like it has to stay that way.

If not these two, I wonder if Waititi’s King Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) will be able to find her queen. A cut scene from Thor Ragnarok was supposed to confirm that she was bisexual. Why was it cut? You can bet it was more Disney than Waititi there. All of this may come down to whether or not Disney is ready to showcase a prominent LGBTQ storyline in a major MCU movie, something they have been deathly afraid of doing up until very recently (The Eternals had a gay member with a husband and family).

Of course, this may just end up being flirting. Given that Thor’s past love, Jane Foster, is a major character in this story, and Peter Quill is no doubt going to try to figure out a way to rekindle his relationship with alt-timeline Gamora, I doubt these two would end up together in the end. But what is Taika Waititi planning in the interim? I think that should be interesting to see.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.