SparkNotes Version/Summary: My headcanon is that the end goal of Hela in Thor: Ragnarok was to turn the universe into a realm of the undead by enslaving the souls of the living in a trance-like state, similar to what Thor saw in his dream in Avengers: Age of Ultron.
I wanted to do more for Women’s History Month in March. With the time crunch to an upcoming convention and Avengers: Endgame, I had to make some sacrifices. However, I feel this theory of mine is important enough to merit a blog post, and since it’s Marvel-related I can move forward with it. (If this reads like an English paper, please know that it’s how I’ve been trained to present an argument.)
Remember that tangent I went on in my Captain Marvel review about how Carol Danvers should consider the possibility of taking over the universe simply because she is that powerful and she can just blow up anyone who gets in her way?
It was while I was pursuing that line of thought that it occurred to me that the MCU has already featured an overpowered female character who wanted to do just that.
Since then, I’ve rewatched Thor: Ragnarok. The whole movie is great, but the best part for me is Cate Blanchett as Hela, the goddess of Death. Seriously, I can’t take my eyes off her. Especially when she’s got her hair down. She is just soooooo fabulous. And of course, I loved cosplaying her last fall at FanX.
Thor: Ragnarok has been criticized for being too much of a comedy, but then again what could be more dark and depressing than the scenes of Hela just killing…and killing…and killing? Maybe the critics took home their blu-ray copies and just skipped all of Hela’s scenes.
Hela’s story in the movie is that she wants to conquer the entire universe simply because SHE CAN. She argues that it is Asgard’s responsibility because they are worthy to do so as the most superior people in the universe (not stated but definitely implied). It’s also because her dad didn’t let her do that before, and now he’s not in the way.
After Ragnarok came out, there was something small about Hela that bothered me for a while. She is the goddess of Death, but how so? In the movie, she conjures weapons, slaughters the innocent, and raises an army of zombies so she can kill even more people. In the comics and in Norse mythology, however, Hel/Hela rules over an actual realm of the dead, which seems more like the trait of a goddess than just being an overpowered warrior and conqueror. What does Hela killing people with magic weapons have to do with her being a Death goddess, besides the obvious?
Hela’s Deathly Origins
It’s not that the film incarnation’s ability to slaughter at will isn’t intimidating—you know it’s bad when it takes raising a fire demon and triggering the apocalypse to finally stop her. But it seems that Loki, Thor, and Odin in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and by extension, the comics, have more in common with their ancient Norse counterparts than Hela does.
In original Norse Myths, Hel is the ruler of the dead and the underworld where the dead abide. She isn’t so much good or evil as she is benign—but still associated with the darkness, decay, and despair of death. In the comics, Hela is more visibly connected to the Norse goddess than in the film. She is the ruler of Helheim and Nifleheim, and she can control the dead souls that abide in those realms. Comic book Hela has a sword called the Nightsword that she can conjure out of thin air. However, her mere physical touch is sufficient to end a person’s life.
The official Marvel.com guide states that Hela’s villanous deeds include “laying waste to the living and claiming souls unworthy of Valhalla.” From those few sources, it doesn’t seem like that either the original goddess or the comic book Hela are associated with warfare as much as the movie version. In that context, the character’s goal of conquest and habit of murder in the film is more puzzling to understand.
One item from the film that clarifies Hela’s role is her conversation with Skurge about being an executioner. Hela describes herself as having been Odin’s executioner back in his days of conquest—not just someone to execute his vision but in the literal sense as well. So she is responsible for destroying the “unworthy,” in body if not in soul. That little touch, however, doesn’t explain everything.
The zombie army that Hela raises in Ragnarok appears to be a nod to a comics. However, Hela creates this army with the Eternal Flame. The Flame has been in Odin’s treasure vault for some time. Hela may have used it in times before. Odin may even have used it—or kept it on hand in case of an emergency that was too big for Asgard’s living to handle (e.g., if the Dark Elves in Thor: The Dark World had completely overwhelmed Asgard’s forces). So in the MCU, raising an army of the dead isn’t an ability exclusive to Hela.
Hela raised the dead warriors of Asgard partly to subjugate Asgard itself, but, if she could have just gotten off of Asgard, she fully intended to have the dead warriors follow her in her new campaign to conquer the universe.
The living army that Hela killed on her arrival to Asgard certainly wasn’t going to follow her. It is sickening to watch that scene knowing that she is killing her fellow Asgardians. But Hela doesn’t think of them as such: she’s been gone for over a thousand years, this is the “new” Asgard of Odin’s “benevolent” regime. They aren’t the Asgard that she fought for back in the day. Hela has no qualms about killing off Asgard’s current military force because there is a dead one waiting for her under the Vault—and the dead are the warriors who fought at her side back in the day.
To make a brief counterargument, you would think that Hela would also use the Eternal Flame to raise the army she had just destroyed to bolster her forces even more—but let’s face it, raising the freshly dead would have been worse for the audience watching the film (zombie Warriors Three? No thanks), and as I just established, she doesn’t care about them.
Having an army of the dead of any kind brings Hela closer to her comics counterpart. The power to raise them, however, is not directly hers, so it doesn’t prove how Hela is actually “the goddess of Death” in general—more like the goddess of murder who just happens to have an undead army.
The Power of Death
You would think that sooner or later if Hela killed everyone who opposed her, then there would be no one left for her to rule. I’m not sure Hela would mind that much if she did have to kill everyone because she doesn’t like them. She tries to coerce the people of Asgard to accept her as their ruler—but her brutality makes her real unpopular really fast. Even Skurge ultimately turns against her.
On the other hand, the army of the undead does as she commands. They are perfectly obedient to her. Beings such as they would be much more compliant with her as their ruler. But does Hela really want to kill everyone in the universe and raise them as such ghastly beings with the Eternal Flame? Wouldn’t that be too much trouble? I have the feeling that she doesn’t want to resort to that extreme.
How could Hela accomplish subjugation and still have a realm or some kind of empire to rule?
In the treasure vault, she scoffs at the “fake” Infinity Gauntlet and the Tesserract, because she doesn’t need either of them to get what she wants, at least as far as creating an enforcer squad perfectly loyal to her commands, and reviving her pet wolf Fenris. But what if that was only one option among many? What if she doesn’t need the Eternal Flame to build her empire, or her dark weapons?
One thing I’ve gotten out of rewatching the MCU recently is that one of Thor’s most underrated attributes is his seer ability. We know that by Ragnarok he can see across the realms and talk to Heimdall—that can’t have been the first time he’d done that. Thor also has dreams that tell him of the future.
As I pondered the subject a few months ago, I remembered the dream scene in Avengers: Age of Ultron. Thor sees the people of Asgard at a feast, but behaving unnaturally, some of them performing a strange dance. Heimdall, the gatekeeper of Asgard, appears to him with glazed-over eyes and yells, “We are all dead! Can you not see?” The background revelers move in a trance, their eyes are dark: this is not at all like the Asgard that Thor is used to.
Thor has a feeling that the vision is important and he goes to the Water of Sight to find more answers. He doesn’t see much else that is relevant to Ragnarok—but of course, in the MCU the fate of Asgard is ultimately tied to the Infinity Stones.
I can’t say how much Joss Whedon or the Age of Ultron screenwriters knew about Hela. I really don’t know how far in advance some aspects of the MCU were planned out—if anything, they write it one movie at a time. But those are the facts.
Other people think that the dream is intended to tie to Infinity War, and that’s what the powers that be want us to connect it to. At the end of Ragnarok, Thor takes the surviving Asgardians into space to (hopefully) find a new home. They find Thanos instead (thanks, Loki). That could very well be the case. Prophecies and omens can have multiple meanings. I don’t think, however, that Joss Whedon was making that connection with the Asgard scenes in Thor’s dream: he showed off the Infinity Stones for that. He knew about Thanos but not what the Titan would do to Asgard specifically.
What if Thor was seeing an Asgard under Hela’s rule?
Hear me out: what if Hela doesn’t have to literally kill people, but she can kill their souls? She could have some ability we don’t know about, not shown in the film, that renders people spiritually dead, or mentally enslaved.
After the Avengers vanquished Ultron, Thor went back to space and he searched the cosmos for the Infinity Stones. The search proved fruitless. However, Thor began to have dreams about Asgard’s impending doom. Hela would have escaped her confinement as soon as Odin passed, whether or not Thor and Loki were present when Odin literally hied to Valhalla in a twinkling. Her arrival would have just been a bigger surprise—and a deadlier one at that.
This is the conclusion I have reached: Hela’s master plan was to destroy the entire universe and enslave every being in it in a state of living death. She would recreate the cosmos as a reverse Eden—a dead Eden.
What I mean by a “dead Eden” is this: in the Book of Mormon, a prophet taught that in the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were in a state of innocence where they knew no joy or suffering, and they could not change out of that state until after they partook of the Forbidden Fruit (2 Nephi 2: 22-23).
So imagine people trapped in a state of existence where they are not completely alive or completely dead, and they have no knowledge of what it is like to exist otherwise. Except it’s not a paradise: it’s a dismal and macabre prison. And no one has free will, or a way to escape. The ultimate dystopia.
A Case for Hela’s Dead Empire
I can’t completely prove this theory because it didn’t happen in the movie. Hela didn’t put any Asgardians in that kind of death trance. She didn’t even get to leave to at least attempt to subjugate other realms (granted, that would have been bad). There is nothing to definitely connect Hela with Thor’s dream in Age of Ultron, besides the general foreshadowing of Ragnarok itself. Checking some more detailed sources about Hela’s history in the comics does not support my theory either. Those of you who are comic book fans, if you can tell me what actually happens to the dead in Helheim in the comics, let me know.
One small detail I have found is a link to a summary of a Thor comic book on a database. The story is called “The Icy Touch of Death” and it was written in the seventies. The summary states that “Hela questions why people fear her touch when it can bring them such peace.” This particular statement about her touch of death reminds me of Loki using the Scepter to control people’s minds in The Avengers (2012)—receiving peace by relinquishing one’s agency to a higher power: to Loki or, in Hela’s case, death.
Another supporting detail is an article by Ryan Matsunaga written shortly after Age of Ultron premiered, way back in May of 2015. Matsunaga wrote specifically about how Thor’s dream was the buildup to Ragnarok. In one statement, he observes:
“…all of that demonic, surrealistic imagery wasn’t just random set dressing, it could very well represent Hel, the Norse underworld…Alternatively, it might be Asgard itself, thrown into anarchy under Loki’s rule…Thor’s vision in Age of Ultron shows Heimdall blinded and insane, implying some kind of cataclysmic event to come. Could this be Ragnarok? It sure feels like it.”
Based on the foreshadowing in Tony Stark’s dream in the same film, Matsunaga said that Thor’s dream was a “totally plausible” hint at future events. So this was just Joss Whedon’s vision of either Helheim itself or Asgard falling into ruin while its people just mindlessly dance.
The dream, however, was not referenced or returned to in Thor: Ragnarok. It was not crucial to Taika Watiti’s vision—which for some aspects of the film is to his credit. Waititi made enough references to the events of Age of Ultron to validate its place in the MCU. In the literal context of the dream, it was just Thor having a subconscious foreboding or warning telling him that he needed to be aware of what was going on at home and in the cosmos.
There are throwaway mentions in Thor: Ragnarok that Thor is having dreams warning him about Ragnarok—I’m not sure if this supports my theory or detracts from it.
But knowing what we know now, Thor’s dream could reference something that happened before Hela was imprisoned, and a warning that it would happen again. Thor came back to Asgard in Ragnarok to find Asgard relatively at peace with Loki masquerading as Odin.
Hela, however, brought Asgard into ruin. She may have only just been getting started. My point is, we do not have to discard Thor’s dream as unrelated information. Rather, it can be interpreted as a vision of a new dominion— “Asgard in Anarchy.” If not under Loki, then who?
The trance of the people in Thor’s dream being caused by Hela gives his dream in Age of Ultron a stronger tie to Ragnarok. This is the strongest argument for Hela being a goddess of death and a ruler of the dead, rather than of conquest and war, giving her role as such a place that makes sense in the movie and connects her more to her comic book version and the Norse goddess Hel. It also gives Hela a way to maintain control over the universe once she conquers it.
Hela Versus Her Family
An argument can be made that Hela’s goal of creating a dead universe was the reason that Odin imprisoned her. Hela is described as possessing a “ravenous” appetite to “consume” the cosmos. Hela enjoyed the killing and conquest that she did with Odin.
Odin reached a point, however, where he changed. Maybe he realized that the bloodshed of conquest was unnecessary or excessive. Or maybe that his empire would be better off if his subjects were alive and willing to give him tribute freely (or the dead really just can’t function to an extent). Maybe he saw that Hela just wanted to kill and never stop killing and turn the whole universe into a realm of death under her own dominion, and he realized he didn’t want that.
(Where was Frigga in all of this? I don’t know. I wonder if she was the reason for Odin’s ‘change of heart’.)
A very good meta post I found on Tumblr last fall argues that Odin’s greatest fear, and the root of his problematic parenting, was that he would be unable to control his children if they turned against him. The author of the largest section of the post claims that Odin only approved of Thor’s behavior as long as it suited Odin’s agenda. In the first Thor movie (2011), Thor crossed the line and got kicked out of Asgard, but was restored to favor when he tried to stop Loki from pursuing his own goals counter to Odin’s. It seems that Hela crossed her father in a similar way.
For a character based on the ancient god of Wisdom, Odin was not very wise about some of his life choices.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Bolyrxhg0v1/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=1kiafiyqfnqj4
One scene in the movie that addresses this drama is when Hela confronts Thor in the throne room before the final battle. Thor implicitly tells her that Odin abused him in the same way, and in addressing her as ‘Sister’ he acknowledges their relationship. Reading between the lines, he’s offering her a chance to stand down, to recognize that she doesn’t have to fight or kill anyone or be bitter about the past. I almost want to think that Thor could have offered to let her be part of whatever was left of his family. Then she delivers this line:
“You see, you never knew him, not at his best. Odin and I drowned entire civilizations in blood and tears…And then, one day he decided to become a benevolent king, to foster peace, to protect life, to have you.”
Hela was cast aside because she was no longer the heir or the servant-child that Odin wanted. Thor, however, was groomed to reflect Odin’s new image from birth. She hates Thor because he represents her and her murderous goals being cast aside and replaced.
Hela delivers the second part of the quote above like it was some kind of tragedy. It was a tragedy for her. You could argue that Odin’s new “beliefs” were his excuses for just getting rid of a child he no longer wanted, and for continuing to rule the Nine Realms. When she speaks of Odin as a “benevolent” king, and of the “peace” and “life” that he claimed as his new slogan, she is also saying that not only did Odin used to not care, or act like he cared, about those values, but Hela didn’t care for fostering peace and protecting life either. She loved ruling with terror and bloodshed. Murder is her forte.
I think this supports my theory that Hela wanted to kill the universe and rule over her subjects as the undead because she doesn’t see “life” as something to protect. Life is anathema to Hela’s agenda: life creates agency, agency feeds resistance. All Thor knows is that having Hela on the throne would be “the worst” thing for Asgard or the entire Universe, but he’s right.
An aside note: I think Cate Blanchett was a great choice to play Hela because she’s older than Chris Hemsworth and Tom Hiddleston, older enough to establish an age difference between their quasi-immortal characters. It also shows that Hela is from a different generation than the brothers—from when their father was a somewhat different person.
Comparisons, Contrasts, Conclusions
Hela, the goddess of Death, intended to use her death-related powers to subdue the universe, both to satisfy her imperial ambition of former days, but also to vent her daddy issues. Allow me to make a comparison, briefly, to Killmonger in Black Panther. Erik “Killmonger” Stevens is also a ‘god’ of death and war, in a sense, seeing how he used both to get into a position to challenge T’challa for the throne of Wakanda, and he has a reputation for being unstoppable at getting what he wants.
Killmonger has a very political and social goal: to fix everything wrong with the world he lives in by giving out Wakandan vibranium weapons to the oppressed and let them overthrow the “colonizers.” His motive of conquest, like Hela, is also about satisfying his anger: anger towards an unjust world, yes, but also towards the uncle who murdered his father—and who concealed Erik’s existence from the rest of the Wakandan royal family.
Unlike Hela, Killmonger seeks for revenge and justice, and he wants to topple and replace an imperial power (Euro-American colonial and economic power) already in charge. The similarity is that they both seek to impose their wills over other people, Killmonger with punishment, Hela with death. If Killmonger is bent on destroying human agency inasmuch as people resisted his ideal regime, then I don’t think it is too far-fetched to suggest that Hela wanted the same for all sentient life in the universe.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe has seen a lot of villains come and go. It seems with Phase Three—Captain America: Civil War and onward—the villains and antagonists kept getting better and better and finally peaked with Hela and Killmonger (I am not too impressed, I admit, with wanting to cut the population of the universe in half being the motive of Thanos but his methods are scary, and plus he has the gauntlet). Ghost, and Yon-Rogg and the Supreme Intelligence don’t exactly have the flare of the other three.
Hela is the MCU’s first official female villain, and she is probably my favorite (her baby brother Loki has turned out to be a little bit of an anti-hero—just a little bit). She wears dark hair and dark eye makeup like a goth teenager and she makes it look like the height of fashion. She walks around with her head held high because she is a goddess and a queen and she knows it. The fandom likes to joke that if Odin hadn’t been such a terrible father, then she and her brothers could have taken on Thanos and beaten him. I admit that would have been pretty cool.
To me, the theory that Hela has the ability to put people in a state of living death and she wanted to use it to control the universe makes her title “goddess of Death” more realistic. It makes her cooler, in fact. I hope you will agree.
What does this have to do with Captain Marvel? Everything. Carol Danvers has phenomenal cosmic powers that rival Hela’s, even if we didn’t see all of them in her debut film (and I suspect we didn’t). She also has a tragic backstory. She has plenty of reason to be mad at the people who held her captive for six years and used her. She didn’t destroy the entire Kree fleet—but she could have. Carol intended to go back to the Kree homeworld and set them straight. She let Ronan the Accuser and Yon-Rogg return alive as a warning. If no one believes them, Carol could easily turn any Kree who resist her demands into french fries.
Yet , by the time of Infinity War, Captain Marvel has been gone for a long time, Ronan became a terrorist in her absence, Thanos took the Infinity Stones with little resistance. Carol could have conquered the universe and ruled as an enlightened female despot. Or she could have at least stayed in the neighborhood of Earth and Xandar and maybe none of that would have happened. But she didn’t. Avengers: Endgame might reveal what she did instead, and the reason why.
One obvious contrast between Hela and Captain Marvel is that while Hela’s powers are darkness and destruction, Carol’s are light and radiance—literally photon or “light” energy blasts rather than cold weapons.
Both heroes and villains can have terrifying powers, but the difference between them is how those powers are used. Hela used hers to cause death and destruction on her own homeworld. She would have gone further, but thankfully Heimdall, Thor, Loki, Valkyrie, Hulk, Skurge, and all of Asgard stood up to her.
That being said, Hela makes being evil look good—and, I dare say, sexy. I LOVE cosplaying her and I need to do it again sometime. Seriously, why does Cate Blanchett have to play all the cool villains?
(okay not literally, I’ve only seen her in like 3 movies, but you know what I mean)
Sources and Futher Reading
By Me:
Knowing What We Know Now: Ragnarok Edition
The Geeky Mormon: Cate Blanchett as Lady Tremaine in Cinderella (2015)
Web Articles
‘The Icy Touch of Death’ Summary
Pin: Hel, Norse Goddess of Death
Bustle: What Are Hela’s Powers? (Comics/Pre-film)
Hollywood Reporter: Hela is a Remarkable Female Villain
Ryan Matsunaga, Thor’s Vision in Age of Ultron
Tumblr Meta: Odin the Problematic Father
The Apprentice Chronicles 
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