MCU: Thor Odinson (ESTP)

Se:

“This is so unlike you, brother. So clandestine. Are you sure you wouldn’t rather just punch your way out?” – Loki

“The risk is far greater if we do nothing.”

“Everything we do from here on is a risk. There is no other way.”

Thor is action-oriented. He prefers to deal with things instantly, and in a straightforward way. In the original Thor movie, after the initial invasion by the Frost Giants, Thor immediately wants to invade Jotunheim to teach them a lesson. Of course, he eventually does so in spite of his father’s direct orders. Generally speaking, Thor has a tendency toward brash and impulsive behavior like this, which is what initially gets him banished from Asgard.

As Thor matures, he learns to take more calculated risks. However, he still accepts risk with relative ease, and default to action rather than idleness. He inherently struggles with his father’s inaction, especially during Dark World. Once again, this leads him to carry out a risky plan against the wishes of his father. He views doing nothing as a far greater risk for Asgard.

Because of this overall theme, Thor excels at adapting to current situations and coming up with immediate solutions. He naturally deals with situations as they arrive, and doesn’t stress over having to figure things out on the fly. (We see this multiple times with random alien ships that he has to pilot for the first time amidst a high stakes situation.)

Thor gets a thrill from battle, which partly has to do with his culture and partly has to do with his personality. For example, in Avengers, Bruce Banner loses control, and Thor ends up having to fight the Hulk. He takes a hit from the Hulk, wipes the blood off of his nose, smiles, and then really starts giving the fight his all. Essentially, he enjoys the thrill of the challenge, which Hulk actually presents.

Ti:

“But, at the end of the day, you’re you, and I’m me. I don’t know, maybe there’s still good in you. But let’s be honest, our paths diverged a long time ago.”

“Pain. What is pain, but a construct invented by the weak? Okay. That’s very sharp!”

“All words are made up.”

“All right, I can figure this out. It’s just another spaceship.”

Thor relies on his logic and rationale rather than facts. For instance, when Odin is explaining that the Dark Elves are extinct, Thor instantly questions this, multiple times even, because of the situation with Jane. Odin gets extremely frustrated with him, because he sees it as an absolute fact. Similarly, when the Guardians of the Galaxy question the validity of a word he uses, Thor doesn’t reinforce the fact that the word is a real word, but instead he just approaches it from the angle of “All words are made up.”

Thor doesn’t often pass value judgement on others, although we do see him driven by Fe-themed values (which will be discussed in the next section). For instance, Thor understandably feels betrayed by Loki, and initially reacts to this betrayal in a more emotional way. However, later, during their attempt to escape from Sakaar, when Loki is saying that he wants to stay, Thor passes no value judgement, but approaches the decision pragmatically, explaining how the two are on different paths now. In summary, he essentially says that it makes sense for Loki to stay on Sakaar.

Along the same lines, when Jane feels like giving up because SHIELD stole all her research, Thor encourages her to keep going, not because of an ideal or value, but because she is right. In other words, he wants her to be loyal to the truth and to what she knows to be correct.

Thor uses rationale that makes sense in the moment to deal with the situation at hand. This rationale is not always honest or true to his feelings, but instead serves a practical purpose. For instance, when dealing with Hulk counterpart on Sakaar, Thor tries to convince Hulk that he prefers him over Bruce Banner, so that Hulk will help him. He later proclaims to Bruce Banner that he’s his favorite rather than Hulk, for similar reasons.

Fe:

“You’re embarrassing me! I told them we were friends!”

“The gates of hell are filled with the screams of his victims. But not the screams of the dead, of course. No uh… wounded screams mainly whimpering, and a great deal of complaining and tales of sprained deltoids and gout.”

“Well done, everybody. We collectively take credit for that because we worked as a team. We used our hearts and our minds to defeat the enemy with minimal loss or damage.”

Thor is group-oriented. He displays a preference for working with a team whenever possible. Of course, in these situations, he speaks in a collective way. He shares credit, and strives to boost morale. The values that Thor often promotes center around loyalty and brotherhood. He uses these to convince people to follow him into battle. For instance, during the original Thor movie, Thor reminds his warriors of their loyalty to him to encourage them to follow him to Jotunheim, against Odin’s wishes.

As mentioned briefly in the Ti section, Thor does cater somewhat to others, like with preferring Hulk or Bruce Banner. He tries to be socially acceptable, and will shift his behavior if it’s called out as rude or inappropriate (like when Jane got mad at him for breaking the diner’s mug). Similarly, when Black Widows asks for him to report on Hulk, in Age of Ultron, Thor initially focuses on Hulk’s devastating success in battle, until he observes that that’s not the type of response they want to hear. He instantly back peddles, and tries to diminish the violent nature of his initial response.

Thor overall appears to be concerned with his image, and how others see him. When fighting Hulk on Sakaar, Thor doesn’t interpret Hulk trying to defeat him as a personal betrayal, but instead, worries about the potential embarrassment because he’d just told everyone that they were friends.

Ni:

“I make grave mistakes all the time. Everything seems to work out.”

Thor’s frequently fails to consider the full potential consequences of his actions. In many cases, this leads him to make mistakes, some of which he regrets later. The obvious example is when he starts a war with Jotunheim and gets banished from Asgard. However, a more specific indication of his inferior Ni is his tendency to need extremely negative consequences to actually learn from these mistakes. Otherwise, he just shrugs it off as just another mistake that worked out fine in the end.

He seems to struggle somewhat with longterm pattern recognition, which is why Loki gets the better of him via using the same tricks over and over again. In spite of growing up with him, it isn’t until Sakaar that Thor actually recognizes how the situation will likely play out. Loki ends up shocked because his tried and true tricks finally failed to work. Thor even gives Loki a brief lecture on how he’s becoming predictable, and that he’s failing to change and grow as a person.