Gillen thinks part of the reason “Thor” is packed with emotional scenes is because the Thunder God has to deal with problematic family members like Loki or his deceased father, Odin. The character also has to regularly tackle dilemmas that arise from the way the mortal and the divine world intersect and interact. “You saw that in the relationships between Thor and the Oklahomans in JMS’s run [when Asgard was brought back at the beginning of JMS’s run, it floated above a small town in Oklahoma]. That lead to some of the gentler and touching moments in the series,” Gillen said. “Now that the Asgardians have relocated to Latveria things have changed. The mortals in that area are very different from the mortals in Oklahoma, especially Doctor Doom, who has a much different relationship with the divine.”
Indeed, Doom finds the very idea of gods to be offensive. “To him it’s like, ‘If you’re a god then who am I?’ He’s brilliant beyond all belief but he’s perhaps not as good as he wants to be and rubbing him up against gods like the Asgardians means you start talking about things like hubris,” Gillen explained. “I don’t think Doom would view the Asgardians as gods. He’d view them as some people he’s playing host to in his country. Doom is not a guy who bows.”
Gillen finds Doctor Doom to be an interesting foil for Thor and almost any superhero because, he said, the Doctor is the dark reflection of characters like Batman and Captain America. “There are these characters that are seen as the pinnacles of what humanity is all about and if you’re a more cynical person you might say Doom is one of those characters,” Gillen said. “Doom may be brilliant and incredibly capable but he’s also a very nasty portrait of humanity. He’s greedy, jealous, and overbearing. The fact that he is a darker paragon of humanity makes him my favorite Marvel villain.”
The other main villain of Gillen’s arc is of course Loki, who the writer sees as being motivated by rage and hatred. “He’s pretty petty for a god isn’t he? There’s a sense of an enormous grudge with Loki. He feels slighted and one of the best things about JMS’s run has been Loki’s slow burn plot to zap everyone in the world and bring it down in flames,” the writer explained. “‘Loki would like his revenge paid in full and that revenge is also very important to him. Some people if they could remove that from their lives they would. They have a sense of, ‘I wish I never hated in the first place.’ Not Loki though. He’s glad he hated in the first place. That hate defines him and makes him very pure. He often hides his motivations but when Loki really wants to show how he feels it’s primal. We return to idea of the opera in that Loki’s feelings are primal and dark things. It’s like his feelings are this black hole that the rest of the universe revolves around.”
