A shorter version of the giant plot hole in the Avengers

The full post on the subject is here, but I figured that if I were summarizing at Ana Mardoll's I might as well post the summary here.

So, someone described the giant plot hole as mostly being about the abduction of Erik and Jane being the only one who might know why Loki wants Erik and would be easy to recruit (unlike some of the avengers) since she actually knows and cares about Erik.  That's . . . not it.  Good point, but it's not the giant one.

Post from Ana Mardoll's:

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It's more than that Jane [Foster] knows Erik. It's that literally the only thing they know about the problem they face, one that threatens the whole planet, at the beginning of the movie is that it somehow relates to portals. They only have two portal experts: Erik and Jane, with Jane having done more work on the subject. Since Erik has been brainwashed, Jane is literally all they've got. They don't call her in, they ship her off (for her own "safety", by lying to her.)

It gets worse when they get more information. They realize that Loki definitely intends to open a new portal, lead an army through, and conquer the earth. They really, really need a portal expert. Jane is all they've got (and would be the best choice even if she weren't) but they still don't call.

A lot of people think the omission was because Foster's actress was pregnant, but that wasn't even considered (and could have been worked around if she were willing, but they never asked.) It was that Whedon didn't want any of heroes' associated characters to be in the movie. Robert Downy Jr. had to fight to get Pepper Potts in the movie and she only got three brief scenes.

And it gets worse. Thor had some of his characters in spite of Whedon's prohibition, because they needed to be there because PLOT.  (The same reason Jane needed to be there.)  Those characters were Loki and Erik.

Sif, the warriors three, and the rest of the pantheon, were stuck in Asgard so they couldn't show up, but they were also more of secondary characters than Thor's main associated characters.

Thor's main characters are Thor himself, his villain (and brother) Loki, Jane Foster, Eric Selvig, and Jane's sidekick Darcy Lewis.

Notice anything about the omissions? The only Thor main characters they left out were the women. Granted there would be no point in calling in Darcy without Jane, but Jane is essential.

She should have been called in before they started assembling the avengers. She wouldn't have to be in that movie all that much, they could have have limited it to some video chat updates on the situation, but she kind of had to be there for things to make sense.

Mind you, ideally she'd have been on the helicarrier geeking out with Banner and possibly Tony. But Portman's pregnancy might have prevented that. The thing is, they didn't even fucking ask her.

And if they had asked, and Portman had said no to any involvement at all, they still could have said that she was working on the problem at a different location instead of, "We lied to her to trick her into going to a remote island for an fictitious consulting job at the observatory there so that she'd be safe. No, we didn't ask her if she wanted to be safe rather than help when her not helping out might mean the end of the world (which being on an island wouldn't protect her from.)"

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*  Loki is Thor's villain.  Erik is Thor's ally.  Erik was called in to work on the Tesseract while Jane continued to work on portals.

The movie involves Loki showing up through a portal and stealing the Tesseract so that he can open an even bigger portal.

Can't really do that without Loki, doesn't make sense to not have Erik since he was studying the Tesseract, and the whole portal thing calls for Jane.

Loki and Erik got included.