the more i think about ragnarok, the more problems i have with it and the more i feel like it’s ultimately a disservice (if not an outright insult) to loki’s character.
Loki’s 3 movie long development getting retconned so that Thor could be credited for it at the last hour in Ragnarok is the logical conclusion to the characterisation mess. Yep.
This whole mess reeks of Chris Hemsworth’s jealousy of Loki being more popular than Thor in the MCU. I maybe wrong but it seems likely that’s the case.
I don’t know enough about the actors to feel comfortable accusing them of active behind-the-scenes meddling, but there clearly was only one winner in this case and he was very eager to shit on the previous movies and outspoken about how cool and great it was that Thor was the centerpiece of Ragnarok. Hmmmm… So maybe he didn’t actively make it happen, but he sure is happy that it happened :/.
Oh, I’m perfectly willing to accuse Hemsworth of behind-the-scenes meddling. I also suspect that the recent coldness between him and Tom, and Tom’s relative lack of involvement in Ragnarok promotion, has to do with the fact that Tom was completely aware of TW and CH’s lack of respect for Loki’s character (and Thor’s!) and was trying to resist it but got steamrollered over.
W.r.t. @endiness‘s discourse about the mistreatment of Loki’s character in Ragnarok, I completely agree. In fact, @foundlingmother and I have discussed at length the way that TR missed – or rather, deliberately ignored – the opportunity to bring up the issue of Loki’s adoption and internalized racism in connection with the imperialism allegory. I’ve also remarked on the regression of Loki’s character and suggested an explanation in terms of replacing a Shakespearean villain with a simplistic version of the trickster archetype, and I’d be curious to know what y’all think of that hypothesis.
Regarding Loki using the story of his fall as an amusing anecdote on Sakaar, I think @endiness is completely right:
while i could find it entirely possible that loki was regaling them of his tales to somehow endear himself to the populace and i could find it believable that, in general, loki would use his pain and trauma in whatever way necessary to benefit himself… i doubt the sincerity of that in this movie. because when any of loki’s trauma was even mentioned at all, it was shown more as a joke at his expense rather than something actually meaningful and significant.
This is something else I’ve discussed with @foundlingmother and others. Ignoring authorial intent (which is often a good idea), one could certainly interpret this bit of storytelling, as well as the play at the beginning, as Loki taking ownership of his trauma and turning it into an asset so that it no longer has power over him… but I think it’s patently obvious that that’s not the interpretation intended by Waititi and Pearson (the screenwriter). They take every opportunity to minimize and ridicule Loki’s problems and motivations. The fact that the events can be given a better and deeper interpretation should not be credited to the film itself as a product of its actual creators, but to the ingenuityof the fans who actually care about the characters.
I also think @endiness makes some very good points about the lost opportunity to give Loki a prior connection to Sakaar, especially this:
“lost and unloved. like you. but here on sakaar, you are significant. you are valuable. here, you are loved. where once you were nothing, now you are something.” perfectly describes loki’s mindset for having let go in the first place.
In fact, I was somewhat concerned when I was reading stuff before Ragnarok came out about how Sakaar is where wormholes dump their trash that we would learn that Loki ended up on Sakaar after the end of Thor, which would automatically falsify the fic I’ve been writing about what happened to Loki between Thor and The Avengers. The nice thing about Marvel not caring enough about Loki to provide such an account that is that my fic will never become defunct and irrelevant 😛 (Though it’s still a possibility that Infinity War will explain the connection between Loki and Thanos instead of just having Thanos kill Loki in the first 5 minutes.)
You know what’s amusingly unamusing to me when I think about ignoring authorial intent and Ragnarok? In trying to make Thor cooler and Loki less complex, they ruined Thor’s character more than Loki’s. Most of Loki’s actions in Ragnarok can be manipulated to mesh well with the character we know from previous films. It’s Thor’s character that can’t be reconciled. The thoughtfulness, protectiveness, and subtle humor vanished, and the only traits he retains are hot-headedness, which he’d been working on, and ignorance born of bad parenting and Asgardian society, which he’d also started chipping away at (defying Odin in TDW was a great first step).
Interesting point, and I think you’re right that they screwed up Thor’s character more than Loki’s. The reasons I tend to focus on the damage to Loki’s character are (1) I cared more about Loki going in, (2) the other people who post threads criticizing Ragnarok tend to be Loki fans (how ironic is it that the Thor “stans” all seem to like the hash that was made of his character integrity?!), and (3) the character assassination of Loki was deliberate and malicious and I’m pissed about how little respect the creators have for Loki’s many fans (mostly female, natch) and for Tom Hiddleston, an actual Shakespearean actor who has poured a lot of heart and serious thought into the character.
I do still think that to rescue Loki’s character you have to ignore not only authorial intent but tonal cues, which are actually part of the text (and often the most explicit expression of authorial intent in the text).
Loki is the Philosopher King 