balderoncebrave:

womeninmarvel:

brevoortformspring:

What’s the difference between Richard and Dick? Or Harold and Harry? Or Thomas and Tom?

Misleading, because Freyja and Frigga are two different women in Norse mythology. Not that Marvel Thor is super concerned with being exactly like Norse mythology, but still. It would be comparable to swapping Venus with Juno. Or Thomas with Thaddeus merely because they are both male names that start and end with the same letters. 

Also even in Marvel comics, Frigga and Freyja are different characters, at least after JMS’ run in which Loki details Balder’s parentage.

Frigga is depicted as a one-night stand after 40+ years of being queen of Asgard throughout multiple authors’ runs. She is not resurrected by Thor with the other Asgardians after 40+ years of fulfilling the role of his mother while Gaia was off doing her Gaia things on Earth. Frigga’s 40+ years of serving as the Queen of Asgard is not considered important enough to resurrect. Frigga is completely dismissed even just 2  panels later, when the entire debate revolves around how Balder and Thor share the same father rather than any concern over where Balder’s biological mother and Thor’s step/surrogate mother might be.

Later in Fraction’s run, we get Freyja. Now, if Freyja were exactly synonymous with Frigga, then the entire debate about how Odin and Freyja needed an Aesir/Vanir heir would have been moot with the existence of Balder. It wasn’t. They continually went on about how they needed to join the realms to prevent their war. If Frigga and Freyja were synonymous, this would not be the case, and the entire story-arc would not exist because Balder exists.

As much as I would like it to be that Frigga exists in the form of Freyja (who did not have a presence in Thor comics up to the most recent runs), combining them—

1. falls under the overused and problematic trope of equating one character for another (which is particularly common in Thor comics with all of the combined mortal/Asgardian body/identity swaps like Sif and Jane and Valkyrie and Annabelle)

2. derails several storylines like the reveal of Balder’s parentage and the search for an Aesir/Vanir heir.

While I would be ecstatic to believe that what Loki told of Balder’s parentage was typical Loki bullshit-coated truth-nuggets, and he is the son of the All-Mother of Asgard (or at least one of them, because it clearly takes 3 women to do the job of 1 man >:( ), this is not the case.

Even in Norse mythology Frigga and Freyja were at times confused for each other, or thought to be aspects of one another. Mistaking one for the other is not that big a problem if they happened to have different names for the same character. The problem is the treatment—they are treated specifically as two separate characters, even though the one seems to have supplanted the other.