Asgardians, Pain, and the Obedience Disk

foundlingmother:

I’ll admit right up front that I’m particularly sensitive to the argument that, if you’re able to function, your pain mustn’t really be that bad. I have had fibromyalgia since I was 8, and I was diagnosed with lupus just two weeks ago (fucking yay!). I’m in pain 24/7. My immune system attacks healthy tissue in my body. It’s fucking painful. And yet, I still function. Many people have doubted how much pain I’m in because of the myth that you can’t function when you’re in pain.

Today there was a lot of meta focused on asgardians and pain. The meta addressed people who call Thor’s use of the obedience disk on Loki torture. As goes the response to any argument that’s too pro-Loki, things quickly escalated to “he’s just mildly irritated by the obedience disk” and “Loki hasn’t experienced actual physical pain in the MCU except for maybe when he nearly died in TDW.”

*sigh*

I often state that asgardians can handle pain. That’s something I believe in. I think they respond differently to painful circumstances that would kill or severely disable a human. That’s based on evidence from the movies. Fandral’s impaled in Thor, and survives. Thor’s obviously been stabbed by Loki multiple times, and he’s fine. Both Thor and Loki have been smashed by Hulk, and both have had the obedience disk used on them, and they’re both still alive. Loki’s been in Thanos’ clutches, and he’s seemingly made a full physical recovery from that (despite looking incredibly fucked up and tripping all over himself in Avengers). For that reason, I tend to be more accepting of how physical characters get with asgardians. I forgive Loki stabbing Thor. I forgive Thor grabbing Loki by the neck and throwing him to the ground when they’re reunited in Avengers. My assumption is that asgardian culture is more permissive of acts we’d recognize as excessively violent (let’s not get into whether those acts are justified–that’s not the point) by virtue of asgardians being able to survive more.

What I mean when I say asgardians can handle pain is that they are durable. They are like Deadpool or Wolverine. Both can survive very painful, violent acts. That isn’t the same as not feeling pain.

Volstagg, when touched by a frost giant, shouts in pain. He quickly recovers from a severe case of frostbite, and is able to continue functioning, but he clearly feels the pain.

Loki is terrified of Hulk. If he doesn’t feel the pain of being smashed by Hulk, then why is he so scared of him?

Thor passes out each time the obedience disk is used on him. Loki can’t even fucking move when it’s used on him. My assumption was that Thor passes out from pain, and Loki’s in so much pain that he’s unable to function while that pain is sustained. That’s something the script states, really. It says he’s writhing in pain.

So yes, the obedience disk is a torture device. It superheats veins. I forgive Thor using it on Loki to disable him–he needs to stop Loki from betraying him. I still think Loki feels intense, sustained pain. I don’t agree that it’s just a mildly irritating device. I think Loki’s felt pain in numerous instances. Sometimes the characters inflicting that pain are justified, and sometimes they’re not. Hulk was justified. Thor was justified (for at least as long as he needed to disable Loki, and I happen to think the fact that he just leaves him disabled is ooc). Thanos wasn’t justified. Kurse wasn’t justified.

I’m kind of sick of fans not being allowed to feel uncomfortable with that scene. If people are uncomfortable watching Thor gloat over his brother’s twitching body, that seems reasonable. It bothers me that Thor uses it on Loki for the amount of time that he does (so much that I call it ooc because I don’t think Thor would torture Loki, or leave him to potentially die). It bothers me that it gets used on Thor, too.

I can’t even watch the scenes where the obedience disk gets used on Thor or Loki. I close my eyes. Watching them in pain reminds me of my own. I feel my own more keenly when I watch those scenes. I also feel very, very squeamish seeing the veins under their skin.

TL;DR: Asgardians are durable, but they still experience pain. People are entirely justified in being uncomfortable with the obedience disk. It’s very easy to interpret that device as a torture device. Please stop rolling your eyes when someone finds it uncomfortable to watch their favorite character(s) twitch in pain. Consider that your interpretation of a piece of media may not be the only “right” or even reasonable one.

To add something semi-relevant: I’ve been seeing a lot of people try to justify Thor by pointing out that Loki has done worse things to him; most commonly they will cite the incident in The Avengers where Loki drops Thor out of the Helicarrier in the Hulk cage. (This is such a common move that I feel like it’s got to be in some Thor stan/ Ragnarok defense playbook.) Here is why that comparison doesn’t accomplish what they want it to accomplish:

1. It was entirely reasonable for Loki to think he was not endangering Thor’s life. He knew Thor could get out of the cage because he had Mjolnir with him. As far as we can tell, in Ragnarok, Thor had no way of knowing that the first people who would happen along were Korg & co. as opposed to, e.g., Topaz, who probably would have just killed Loki while he was incapacitated. Maybe he did have some way of knowing, but this was not made at all clear in the film. So even if he didn’t think he was endangering Loki’s life, he was being culpably negligent.
2. In The Avengers, Loki was acting as an adversary, and everyone was completely aware of that. He was trying to hamper his opponents by scattering them, and possibly to demoralize Thor by showing that he wasn’t going to get his brother back. In Ragnarok, Thor presented what he did as some kind of “tough love” – punishing Loki “for his own good,” with the aim of getting Loki back on his side rather than (as Loki was doing in The Avengers) turning him decisively against him. If you can’t see why that’s kind of fucked up, well…

3. Loki is clearly aware that what he’s doing in The Avengers is wrong. He hesitates before he hits the button to drop the cage, and hesitates again (with tears in his eyes, FFS!) before he stabs Thor later. He’s conflicted, and it’s not unreasonable to think he regrets hurting Thor when he’s no longer under direct threat from Thanos (his attempts at self-justification in TDW have a defensive air that make me think the lady doth protest too much). In Ragnarok, Thor just looks smug and self-righteous about the electrocution thing, even though he’s very aware that Loki is in severe pain.

It troubles me that neither Thor himself nor the narrative – which consistently seems to take Thor’s POV as unproblematic and incontestable – considers that what Thor did might have been excessive. Yes, I get that it’s the “trickster tricked” narrative device. I get that Loki was going to betray Thor. And here’s why that doesn’t prove what people seem to think it proves:

1. Very simply, Thor could have done something less severe. He could have used the buzzer to incapacitate Loki temporarily, and turned it off before he left. Hell, considering how Thor tended to remain incapacitated for a while even after it was no longer active, he probably should have given his (obnoxiously self-righteous, manipulative) “pep talk” after he turned the thing off. But the least he could have done was not leave it on for an indefinite amount of time, leaving Loki vulnerable to whoever happened along first. (I’ve also seen people claim that Thor put it on a “lower setting,” which is why it’s OK that Loki endured it for several minutes continuously rather than a few seconds and why he recovered faster. Maybe; but again, this is not made clear.)
2. The way I read the film (as charitably as I could), Loki had good reason to be pissed at Thor. He had been trying to reach out and offer help, and Thor blew him off (that conversation is another post entirely, and other people have analyzed it at length, which I don’t need to do now). No, it wasn’t a good thing that he planned to turn Thor back in to the Grandmaster (though again, I doubt he thought he was putting Thor in serious danger; he was too entertaining as a gladiator to be melted). But you can also see why it wasn’t just an act of capricious malice, and therefore why it isn’t cleanly a matter of Bad Loki being bad and Good Thor needing to righteously punish him however severely he pleases.
3. Or maybe we are supposed to think it was an act of capricious malice, because as I’ve complained before, this film makes Loki’s motivations completely incomprehensible beyond “I did it for the lulz.” Which may be intended to recast him into the Trickster archetype (on a fairly simplistic understanding thereof), but is massively discontinuous with the way the Loki of previous MCU films is motivated. So part of the problem here is that the narrative has already set Thor up to be justified in punishing Loki by giving Loki no clear motivation for doing anything he does. This is just lazy writing. And if you know me, you know that I will usually bend over backwards to avoid blaming an apparent inconsistency on bad writing. (This is partly a reflex of my professional life. Most historians of philosophy assume that if you say that your subject’s argument is invalid, you have missed something. You have not tried hard enough to make it consistent. Kant always knows better than you. Kant scholarship is like Talmud scholarship: you never want to say that the source text is inconsistent, because it’s basically divinely inspired.)