You know, it wasn’t until I was talking to someone in person about Thor: Ragnarok that I realized how pissed I am that Taika Waititi clearly does not like Loki. This is evident to me in all his interviews about the movie, as well as in his approach to Loki in the film. (He also seems not to appreciate Tom Hiddleston’s acting ability, but that’s another story. At least Jeff Goldblum knows where the real talent in the cast is.) I don’t know what it is – maybe he’s one of those people who’s just incapable of sympathizing with (sometime) villains. In any case, he seems to have misinterpreted Loki’s character and simplified him into a cartoon version of himself: self-absorbed and narcissistic, with nothing but “poor me, I’m misunderstood,” “rich kid” problems that he just needs to “grow up” and get over.

I might be wrong, but I get the sense that people of many different socioeconomic and ethnic backgrounds find Loki compelling and sympathetic. Maybe Taika is just too mentally healthy? Most of the Loki fans on here seem to have some mental illness or another. I’m reminded of when my former roommate started reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians, on my recommendation, and said she couldn’t sympathize with the protagonist, Quentin, because he just couldn’t appreciate all the good things he had and was always whining about still being unhappy. And I’m like, yeah, that’s called depression. Everything in your life can be going great on the surface and you’re still miserable for no apparent reason. So yeah, Loki’s reactions to the (legitimately shitty) things that happen to him are irrational. Because he’s pretty clearly mentally unwell. I mean, he canonically – onscreen, FFS – attempts suicide. “Rich kid problems,” huh?

Or maybe the deflation of Loki’s character was deliberate. Taika kept saying in interviews that he wanted to make sure Thor was the best, most interesting character in his own movie. The implication, of course, is that in previous movies he wasn’t – which means that someone else was, and the obvious candidate is Loki (Jane Foster may have been a more interesting character than Thor in the first movie, but they gave her basically nothing to do for most of the second one). The difficult thing to do would be to make Thor at least as interesting as Loki. The easy thing to do is to portray Loki as less interesting than he is/was/could be so that Thor can outshine him.