In Thor: Ragnarok, Asgard uncovers a secret it had buried: Hela, Odin's firstborn, the Goddess of Death, the conqueror who helped her father forge the Asgardian empire through blood and fire —and whom the realm later erased from its history once her brutality became inconvenient—. Hela returns to claim her inheritance and to reveal the truth: the "noble and civilized" Asgard was built on the very bloody conquests she embodies. For the theory of criminal heredity, Hela poses a brilliant inversion: she is not the black sheep of the lineage, but its repressed truth.
// The theoryWhat the lineage hides from itself
The theory of criminal heredity imagines that evil is inherited as an anomaly —the "bad seed" that appears in a good family—. Hela completely inverts that logic. She is not a deviation from Odin's noble line; she is what that line was before reinventing itself as civilized. Asgard conquered the Nine Realms with Hela's violence, and only afterward did it whitewash its history, hide its bloodthirsty daughter, and tell itself the myth of a peaceful and honorable realm. The theory, read through Hela, suggests something uncomfortable: that when a "civilized" power produces violence, it is usually not an anomaly inherited by accident, but the real inheritance of a violent founding that has been repressed. What passes from generation to generation is not a gene for evil, but a bloody origin story the realm prefers not to look at.
Repressed founding violence
Hela's great stroke is her question as she points to the palace's golden frescoes: "where do you think all this gold came from?". With it she lays bare repressed founding violence —the idea that all seemingly noble and peaceful power almost always rests on a bloody conquest it has hidden beneath a civilized narrative—. It is a thesis that connects the theory of heredity with postcolonial critique: empires, nations, "great families" inherit wealth and status founded on violence (Hela's, the colonizer's, the conqueror's), and then tell themselves as if that violence were no part of their blood. Criminal heredity, thus inverted, does not look for the criminal in the lineage's black sheep, but in the very founding of the "respectable" lineage. Hela does not stain Asgard's noble blood: she reveals that this blood was never clean, only whitewashed by myth. What is inherited is not a criminal anomaly, but a denied founding guilt.
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// The subjectThe truth that returns
Hela is a genuine villain —ambitious, cruel, genocidal in her plans—, but her dramatic force lies in the fact that she speaks a truth Asgard does not want to hear. Her return is not merely that of a conqueror; it is the return of the repressed, the part of history the realm buried and that comes back to reclaim its place. The theory of criminal heredity, in this key, reads her as the symptom of a collective denial: the violence a power refuses to acknowledge in its origin does not disappear, it is inherited underground and ends up surfacing. This does not justify Hela's crimes —she wants to subjugate entire realms—, but it gives her villainy a dimension of indictment: she is the monster Asgard manufactured by denying its own history, and who returns to force the realm to look at itself. The black sheep turned out to be the mirror.
Hela
// The crackNeither "the truth absolves her" nor "she is an anomaly of the lineage"
The crack with Hela is to let the truth she denounces absolve her of what she does: she is right about Asgard's bloody past, but her own project —to conquer and subjugate— is just as criminal, not a just correction of history. That a power hides its founding violence does not make legitimate the violence of the one who reveals it. The opposite crack, the one Asgard itself prefers, is to treat her as an anomaly of the lineage —"a monster that appeared in the royal family"—, which is exactly the lie the theory of criminal heredity feeds: to look for the criminal in a deviation of blood rather than in the structure that produced it. Hela is not the rotten exception of noble Asgard; she is what Asgard was and does not want to be. Holding both things —her indictment is true and her villainy is real— is the honest reading.
That the film ends with Asgard destroyed —the realm must die so its people can free themselves from a power founded on conquest— is a surprisingly radical conclusion: sometimes the poisoned inheritance of a lineage is not corrected by reforming it, but by recognizing that the whole house was built on a crime that must be left behind.
Looking at the blood in the foundations
Hela matters because she inverts the gaze of the theory of criminal heredity in the most useful way: instead of looking for inherited evil in the anomalous individual, she looks for it in the foundations of respectable power. Nations that tell themselves as peaceful and civilized, "old money" fortunes, venerable institutions: nearly all inherit a founding violence —conquests, plunder, slavery— that they have whitewashed beneath a noble narrative. Hela's lesson, joined to critical and postcolonial criminology, is that recognizing that buried inheritance is not stirring up the past for its own sake, but understanding where the power that presents itself as legitimate today comes from. True "criminal heredity" is rarely in the blood of a black sheep; it lies, almost always, in the gold of palaces no one asks about the origin of. Hela is the one who asks the question —and that is why, more than her villainy, it is her truth that endures—.
Three key takeaways
- Hela inverts the theory of criminal heredity: she is not the black sheep of Odin's lineage, but its repressed truth —the "civilized" Asgard was founded on the same bloody conquests she embodies—.
- She embodies "repressed founding violence": all seemingly noble power tends to rest on a bloody conquest it hides beneath a civilized narrative ("where do you think the gold came from?"). It connects with postcolonial critique.
- Neither "the truth absolves her" (her indictment is true, but her project is just as criminal) nor "she is an anomaly of the lineage" (the lie the theory feeds). True criminal heredity is not in the blood of a black sheep, but in the foundations of respectable power.
Sources · further reading
- Pinker, S. (2002). La tabla rasa. Viking.
- Fanon, F. (1961). Los condenados de la tierra. Maspero.
- Rafter, N. (1997). Creating Born Criminals. University of Illinois Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Hela?
Hela («Diosa de la Muerte») es un villano de Thor: Ragnarok, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. Asgard erased her from its history: the eldest daughter, the bloodthirsty conqueror.
¿Por qué Hela (Diosa de la Muerte) se convierte en villano?
Hela and criminal heredity: the firstborn whose violence Asgard concealed, revealing that the "civilized" realm was founded on the very brutal blood she embodies. The denied inheritance.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Hela?
El caso de Hela se analiza desde la Teoría de la Herencia Criminal. The theory of criminal heredity imagines evil as a trait carried in the blood. Hela, from Thor: Ragnarok, inverts the question: the conquering firstborn Asgard hid away is not an anomaly of the royal line but its repressed truth—the "civilized" realm was built on the same bloody conquests she embodies—. What is truly inherited is a denied founding violence.
