I think you once asked what made people dislike Thor: Ragnarok, and a lot of people have probably said it already: I liked it, but in the way I like a crack fic. It’s very annoying to me that people are treating the characterisation from the first two movies as bad as if that’s not the characterisation that made us like Thor and Loki (and their relationship) in the first place. People wouldn’t care about Ragnarok if it wasn’t for the other two movies + Avengers.

I don’t think I ever asked WHY people dislike Thor: Ragnarok; I could write on that topic myself for days. I did try to get a count of Thorki shippers who dislike it, but it got messed up by non-shipping Loki stans who I already knew didn’t like the movie but kept reblogging to say (unnecessarily) why they didn’t like it…

I can’t like Ragnarok even as a crack fic for two main reasons. The first is that I can tell that the spirit in which it pokes fun at the previous movies and their fans is contemptuous and malicious; there’s a huge difference between that and the kind of affectionate parody you see within fandom itself. The second is that it just seems like a huge waste. This movie was supposed to be the culmination of a trilogy; it was supposed to close the emotional arc the characters had taken through the previous films. I came to the fandom late, so I’d only been waiting 2 years, but many fans had been waiting 4 years to see Thor and Loki together again, to see the end of their story. They, we, wanted something genuine and emotionally fulfilling; we got a crack fic, and not only that, but one that insulted us for caring. It strikes me as a waste of money as well as time and opportunity: Marvel spent millions on something that made fun of the films it was supposed to follow up and the people who loved them. I guess that’s working out for them, because it made a lot of money…

Ultimately, Marvel is a business, not an art studio; if one of its franchises is lagging in popularity and profitability, it’s perfectly happy to throw it under the bus – or as they prefer, “reinvent” it. Like most marketers, especially in comics, Marvel cares far more about the attention of young men than of women of any age. As others have observed, Loki is beloved by women, not by young men, for whom he is hardly the typical power fantasy (queer-coded and quasi-effeminate as he is) and might even be seen as threatening: what do women see in this elegant, cerebral, non-traditionally-masculine, morally ambiguous character? So Ragnarok catered to the male audience by making Thor a trash-talking frat bro and neutering Loki, making him seem incompetent, ineffectual, and even more effeminate, and putting him back in his “proper” place under Thor’s thumb.