WARNING: The following contains spoilers for Thor #3 by Jason Aaron, Mike del Mundo, Marco D'Alfonso, and Joe Sabino. 


Jason Aaron and Mike del Mundo's new direction on Thor means that the God of Thunder is having more fun than he did in the past. Previously under Aaron's hand, the Odinson and Jane Foster dealt with their own morality and the sins of their past. This current run, however, is content with being as wild and audacious as Thor: Raganrok was last year. The previous issue alone featured a hammer that became two hammers, a Bomb Hammer, the start of a possible romance between a T-Rex and a talking dog, and a singing demonic train. And that was all before concluding with Thor's niece Hela rising from the water on top of her giant wolf Fenris.

Thor #3, like many other comics this summer, is all about a wedding. More specifically, that of Hela and Balder, who has been operated as Hel's king in her absence. After a rather lengthy fight where Thor's party fight Hela, Fenris, and Tyr, the Asgardians bicker about who should rule Hel; Balder isn't going to give up the throne, Hela won't settle for anything but the throne, and the Sindr Queen's army and the War of the Realms are quickly growing closer. To make sure everyone's happy and ensure that Hel doesn't go through a civil war, Loki comes up quite the solution: Hela and Balder just get married then and there.

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All things considered, it's certainly much cheerier wedding than the Batman/Catwoman or X-Men affairs from a few weeks earlier, and even manages to be fun in its own way.  Despite the fact this all done more out of self preservation than actual love, it gets right what the X-Men wedding did not, and that's just embracing the inherent absurdity that would come from a union between people with super strength and silly costumes.

Tyr, who began the issue trying to kill Loki, tears up during the wedding. Thor's dog Thori declares himself the "best flower girl in Hel." Skurge tries and fails to give advice to a heartbroken Karnilla after he's spent the majority of the issue sleeping in his truck. Try as they might, there'll never be a normal in their lives, so they may as well just embrace the fact that their lives will be weird, all the time.

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Naturally, the wedding doesn't go off completely without a hitch.

Loki and Thor know Hel's forces won't be enough to fend off Sindr, they'll also need the souls of Valhalla. And since the newlyweds to be are tied up in their ceremony and don't know how to get to Valhalla, Thor proposes (heh) that his brother murder him then and there, so the God of Thunder can find the Valhallan forces needed for the incoming battle. So, just mere moments before Balder and Hela can seal their union with a kiss, Loki kills Thor.

On the upside, this isn't the worst thing to happen at this wedding. On the downside, this completely ruins the wedding, as Balder is ready to execute the God of Mischief instead of carrying on with the ceremony -- despite the priest's insistence to "not let a minor murder ruin a perfectly good wedding." And if it the murder couldn't make everything fall apart, what happens next certainly would. It's not a wedding without someone objecting to the union, and sure enough, that comes to close out the issue. "Sorry, but I'm spoken for, " Hela smirks, as Thanos walks in declares the whole ceremony "a farce."

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The wedding in Thor doesn't really happen, sure, but it makes up for it by embracing some of the tropes that make trashy weddings fun to watch. There's the family infighting, and the "love triangle" from Thanos' arrival. Shortly before that, Karnilla and Balder nearly confess their feelings for one another. There's the murder, and Loki giving his daughter away. All of it is utterly ridiculous, but grounded in the Odinson family dynamics that have made Thor's corner of the Marvel Universe continuously compelling over the years. This is really only a situation that Thor could get into after the release of his wackiest film to date, and the whole issue feels like something that Taika Waititi would've come up with if Marvel Studios gave him free rein.

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Thanos' arrival is usually a harbinger of awful things to come, but given the direction that Thor has taken in a short time, he'll probably wind up being more fun than he usually is. He's equally dramatic and messy in his own way, and if there were any time to remind readers of that, it would certainly be during this bonkers wedding his girlfriend is forced into.