Thor: Love and Thunder theory: is Tony Stark in Valhalla?

Spoilers for Thor: Love and Thunder ahead. The second post-credits scene formally introduced Valhalla to the MCU, and I believe Tony Stark is in there, likely meeting up with Jane Foster in that hallowed hall of heroes. My reasoning comes down to what looks like the MCU's secret definition of a god: someone with a huge amount of cosmic energy flowing through their nervous system.

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022), starring Chris Hemsworth, Natalie Portman and Christian Bale, ended by establishing that to gain admittance to Valhalla you must be a god who died in battle. I believe Tony Stark is one of those gods, and the evidence is spread across the MCU's earlier films.

Ego in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 shows what an MCU god is made of

Our first real look at what a god's biology looks like came with Ego the Living Planet in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2. When Peter Quill asks what he is, Ego answers, "I'm what's called a Celestial, sweetheart." At the center of his planet, Ego was a giant brain filled with blue cosmic energy.

Later in that film, Peter himself becomes a god by connecting with and channeling the massive amounts of cosmic energy inside Ego's planet. After Peter makes that connection to the light within the planet, Ego tells him that death would be a stranger to him because he is now a god: "Peter, death will remain a stranger to both of us as long as the light burns within the planet." Ego was a master of enormous amounts of blue cosmic energy, at least until Baby Groot killed him.

Blue dark energy runs from the Ten Rings and the Tesseract to Thor

We see the same idea in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. The blue dark energy of the Ten Rings kept Wenwu from dying for centuries and gifted him godlike power and authority. He had that cosmic energy flowing in his blood, and you can see as much in a close-up shot of his arm.

That blue cosmic energy has intrigued many entities in the MCU, including Red Skull. The blue energy of the Tesseract is known in the MCU as dark energy, and there was even an entire research facility dedicated to studying it before Loki destroyed the Joint Dark Energy Mission facility at the beginning of The Avengers. That's also where Mar-Vell did much of her research while she was alive.

Thor Odinson himself is a massive dark energy conduit. That's why he was able to decimate Hela's army without the aid of Mjolnir in Thor: Ragnarok. It's also why his lightning is blue in the MCU, never yellow like Electro's or gold like Zeus's. It's always specifically blue.

Gold energy links Zeus, the Eternals and Captain Marvel

What makes Zeus a god, I believe, is the massive amount of golden energy that courses through his veins. That's why the blood of the gods is gold in Thor: Love and Thunder. Gods like Zeus and the gods of Gorr's planet are all conduits of golden soul singularity energy. It's the same type of energy that flows in the synthetic bodies of Earth's many gods, the Eternals, which is why the Eternals wake up in front of Earth's golden sun after charging their bodies with its energy at the very beginning of their film.

This is why Captain Marvel is stronger than Thor in the MCU, as we saw play out in season one of What If...? She has more cosmic energy flowing within her, with both blue and golden energies powering her being. Captain Marvel was a movie about Carol Danvers unlocking her golden energy abilities by learning to believe in herself. Her golden power is the power everyone on Earth is entitled to, because it's golden energy from the sun, which is why the sorcerers of Kamar-Taj use golden energy for their portals. For the first two acts of the film, she only used the blue dark energy powers she got from the Tesseract.

Thor didn't get access to that golden power until he started wielding Zeus's golden thunderbolt halfway through Thor: Love and Thunder. From then on, his power was a combination of blue dark energy and gold soul singularity energy, and his attire reflects that: he wears blue and gold throughout the film. Arishem also told us that Celestials are born from the aggregated golden energies of intelligent life, so energy levels really do determine your status of godhood in the MCU.

Jane Foster entered Valhalla with the status of a god

That explains how Jane Foster, a normal human woman for most of her life, was able to enter Valhalla at the end of her life. Her body was flowing with both the blue and golden energies coursing through Thor Odinson's body at the end of the film.

It all comes from the enchantment Odin put into the hammer: whoever is worthy gets the power of Thor Odinson. At that point Thor was wielding his normal blue powers alongside the orange powers of Zeus's thunderbolt. So Jane Foster died in battle with the status of a god, and those are the prerequisites to enter Valhalla.

Why I think Tony Stark wielded the power of a god

I can't think of a human being who has had more cosmic energy in their body than Tony Stark did during the final Avengers battle. He didn't have one cosmic singularity like the Eternals, or two like Captain Marvel or the Scarlet Witch, with her red chaos energy and the yellow Mind Stone energy she had from Vision. Tony Stark had all six core energies of the MCU coursing through his soon to be fried body.

He used those energies to save the entire universe from certain doom, which is more than the gods of the universe were doing with theirs. They were just relaxing. In the last moment of his life, Tony Stark wielded the power of a god and became like a god, just as Jane Foster did. That's why Jane Foster likely had dinner with a flirtatious Tony Stark in the halls of Valhalla right after she arrived.

As a side note, Tony was a man in god armor ever since Iron Man 2. In that film he used Howard Stark's dark energy science, which Howard learned from the Tesseract, to make a new arc reactor. That blue dark energy arc reactor then got juiced up in The Avengers after being hit by Thor's dark energy lightning. It's all god power, and it all connects. That's why I believe Anthony Edward Stark is in Valhalla.