Review: Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard Book 2: Rick Riordan Hates Women. (Spoilers) (Part 2/3)

Rick Riordan must’ve had a gun to his head while writing the second book in this abysmal series with how much forced “diversity” there is. If you thought The Sword of Summer was bad, be prepared for a butt load of intersectionality politics in book 2: The Hammer of Thor that make it unreadable.

I’m going to put aside numbering the problems in The Hammer of Thor because for the most part, it had all the same problems as The Sword of Summer, but made worse because while Fenris was a semi-interesting aspect of the main plot of stopping Ragnarok, The Hammer of Thor completely does away with any semblance of originality and uses trope after trope. Most of the gods we see in the book (such as Thor, Heimdallr, Frey, Odin, Loki, etc.), we already know from the Marvel movies. Even worse, this time we are introduced to Samirah Al-Abbas’s half-brother, Alex Fierro.

Next to Magnus’s constant complaining about capitalism and rich people (despite living in a lavish hotel for the rest of eternity), Alex Fierro’s constant whining about being trans/gender fluid is just as annoying if not even more annoying. I’m going to refer to Alex as a he/him because despite the constant pronoun changes throughout the book, he will always be a guy even if he wears a skirt and can shape-shift.

While I could’ve somewhat tolerated a trans character in the series as long as the character was likeable and the story was good, as a biological (i.e. REAL) woman, Alex Fierro’s character did nothing but piss me off for the entire book. He has the same annoying tendencies as Dylan Mulvaney (even before Mulvaney was a thing) but is as whiny and entitled as his new boyfriend, Magnus.

Did I mention that Magnus is now gay/bi/pan now? Add that to the list of “oppressed” minorities he represents.

Shortly after Alex is introduced, one of his first lines of dialouge is after a thane introduces him as “the son of Loki”, to which he ardently denies reality, demanding that everyone refer to him as the “daughter of Loki.”

Everyone, please ignore the fact that this mentally ill person has yarbles! Bow to the power of a constantly changing identity because in order to show your true self, your true self must always be changing!

It has been a fact acknowledged throughout history for thousands of years that if a person is born with male genitalia, then that person is male. If he thinks he is a woman, then he has a serious mental disorder. You demanding that I call you by your prefered pronouns is ridiculous. If you’re trans, I will call you by the pronouns that you were born with, not the ones that you like that can change as you decide you’re no longer a trans woman, but rather a unicorn. I’m not trying to hurt you. “Misgendering” someone isn’t a hate crime. It is an act of kindness. The people who call you by your preferred pronouns might be being “nice”, but they are pushing you down a dark, destructive road that you will regret down the line.

Alex’s character only gets worse from there. Not only is he rude and obnoxious, but reading about him from Magnus’s point of view is downright confusing. Since he’s constantly demanding that everyone refer to him as a “she/her” some days and a “he/him” on other days, whenever his pronouns change suddenly from chapter to chapter – or even in the middle of a chapter – it becomes hard to understand who the heck Magnus is talking about. One moment, you might think he’s talking about an actual woman, then you realize he’s talking about a guy. Since Alex doesn’t seem to know what he is, I vote that we either call him by what he is – a guy – and use “he/him” pronouns or we refer to him as “it”.

Pronouns aside, the part that pissed me off the most about Alex was in the scene where he announces that he needs to pee and runs to the women’s restroom because he identifies as a girl in that chapter. This was the chapter where I realized that Rick Riordan must really hate women to agree to write that scene. Trans-women are dudes and given that Alex constantly changes pronouns, it’s safe to assume he still has all the plumbing. In real life, allowing men to use the women’s restroom is extremely dangerous. Only a perverted man would walk into a women’s restroom. You might think that that scene isn’t a big deal since it’s fictional, but let me remind you that in 2021, a 14-year-old girl was raped by a 15-year-old boy who claimed to be “non-binary” in the women’s restroom. Also in 2021, a man who identified as a woman walked into the women’s section of the Wi spa in Los Angeles naked, exposing himself to countless women and young girls. Incidently, the man who came in had been on the official sex offender list since 2006 and is awaiting trial for seven accounts of indecent exposure. In February of this year, the court was allowed to proceed concerning the incident and two eyewitnesses from the spa claimed that he had a full erection for about 30 minutes to an hour. Since much of what we’re seeing today concerning transgenderism in teenagers and even adults is a social contagion promoted through this kind of stuff (“If you’re cool, then you need to be part of the alphabet spectrum, otherwise you’re an evil cis-person,”) it’s very concerning that Disney would allow that to be published.

Speaking of Disney: why would they allow that to be published? Well, the reason why is because Disney has been woke for a while and in 2015, the trans agenda started kicking off in modern media. While it wasn’t as bad as it is today in 2023, it was inchworming its way to becoming mainstream. Because it was the teacher’s union and the librarian’s union pushing the LGBT+ agenda, they could control what authors wrote with the threat of, “We’re not going to buy this unless you put what we want in it.” And since they are the largest buyers of books and are the largest money makers, Rick Riordan had to sell his soul to them. He had to put in the LGBT+ inclusion. He had to include the minorities. He had to write this cash-grab of a book. If he wanted to be successful, he had to appease the teachers/librarian’s unions.

So that’s what he did and obviously it worked. He got what he wanted – he got the Stonewall Book Award slapped on the cover of The Hammer of Thor – even if it has helped lead pre-teens and teens down a dark road of mutilation, sterilization, and sexual abuse, even if it has helped to put real women in danger, even if it has helped to lead to transition-regret six, seven, eight years later and helped lead to suicide. This type of stuff needs to stop. It needs to be stopped and you vote with your dollars. If there is one book that I hate the most in this series, it is this one. If you are a parent or a teenager who is waking up to the realities of the cult of LGBTQIA+, especially don’t buy this book and don’t recommend it to your friends.

Until next time,

M.J.