Jane Foster

A friend of mine over on FB wants to go see Thor again and there was a discussion about it that I didn’t read, except one comment stood out to me, when he said he didn’t much like Jane Foster.

I love Jane Foster, and said so, and he wanted to know why.

This is why:

Because Jane is a female character who is unabashedly intelligent and never portrayed as anything less than attractive.

Because she has entirely realistic giggly googly-eyed reactions to gigantic blonde men without shirts.

Because she is the catalyst for much of the story in both films, as she’s the one who dares to chase storms and get in governmental faces and make risky choices in pursuit of her yes, inarguably Star-Treky, science, but science that certainly isn’t any worse than Vita-Rays or gamma radiation or arc reactors in peoples’ chests and yet somehow I don’t see people bitching about Captain America or the Hulk or Iron Man.

Because she’s been as brave as humanly possible in amazingly difficult positions, given that she’s an entirely normal person in physical terms and she’s dealing with gods.

Because she’s got female friends and she loves and trusts them and there’s no backstabbing or back-biting or fighting over men.

Because she’s a tenacious and driven female character and never condemned for that–warned about it sometimes, but never condemned for it.

Because they have actually delivered a female with strength of character, with an agenda of her own, with passions of her own, and she’s still somebody who faints or gets woozy when things get really rough because normal people in fact freak out when incredibly bizarre things happen to them.

Because, in short, Jane Foster is what a “strong female character” *ought* to be: a 3-dimensional, approachable, understandable, admirable, weak, silly, funny, clever, foolish–in other words, _human_.

And that, all of that, hardly ever happens on film.

And *that* is why I love Jane Foster.