Since the first Thor: Love and Thunder trailer came out, Chri,s Pratt, who plays Star-Lord, has been getting a lot of hate from MCU fans who don’t like him.
What Happened?
Pratt is a fairly outspoken evangelical Christian who goes to Zoe Church. This church is thought to be anti-LGBT because its pastor, Chad Veach, made a movie that called same-sex attraction a form of “sexual brokenness.”
In a famous tweet, actor Elliot Page called out Pratt for being close to the church:
“If you’re a famous actor and you’re part of a group that hates a certain group of people, don’t be surprised if people just wonder why it’s not being talked about.”
Pratt’s loud and proud faith, combined with his right-leaning social media presence, led to widespread mockery and backlash after the latest Thor trailer came out. Young, socially aware MCU fans took to Twitter to make jokes about Pratt’s imagined discomfort while shooting a mildly homoerotic scene with Thor actor Chris Hemsworth. Fans also thought it was funny that Star-Lord, a character played by Pratt in Marvel comics, was recently shown to be bisexual.
Fans started to ask Disney to replace Pratt with another actor as the language got more and more hostile. Keep in mind that Pratt has never actually said anything homophobic in public. MCU fans seem to dislike him because of who he is, not because of what he has done. (Pratt’s tendency to play obnoxious, annoying characters probably has something to do with this.)
James Gunn Has Entered the Race
All of this is pretty silly. It’s a huge online trend that Disney could easily ignore. But Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn went on Twitter to defend the Star-Lord actor against the accusations. Based on his tone, Gunn seemed angry about the accusations, writing:
“What for? Because of your completely fabricated notions about him?for something that wasn’t true about him that someone else told you? “Chris Pratt would never be replaced as Star-Lord, but if he were, we would all go with him.”
For background, Gunn was famously criticized online because of some of his sketchy tweets, in which he joked about pedophilia a lot. This got him fired (temporarily) from Marvel, which gave him the chance to move on to Warner Bros.
to write and direct The Suicide Squad and Peacemaker, both of which were praised by critics and might be more interesting than anything Marvel will ever make. In response to Gunn, fans posted screenshots of far-right accounts that Pratt follows as proof of the actor’s supposed social conservatism.
Fans of the MCU might be right about Pratt, but it looks like he’s going to stay with the Guardians no matter what.
Of course, the idea that you have to be socially progressive to work for a company like Disney, which has been criticized for its half-hearted gay representation and even for censoring LGBT-friendly plotlines, might be funnier than anything Gunn ever wrote.
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