foundlingmother
replied to your post “Still unfollowing people who post/reblog ill-informed kneejerk Whedon…”

In response to my comment: “on later thought, it occurs to me that Waititi’s mental ableism is more likely meant to be hurtful than Whedon’s sexism.”

I suppose if we believe he thinks mentally ill people are whiny and need a serving of tough love. But I kind of think he just doesn’t see Loki as mentally ill. There are plenty of people on this site who believe Loki’s suicide attempt was just him escaping punishment, that everything he’s ever said that’s given him depth (just wanting to be Thor’s equal) was a lie, etc. That he’s just a selfish trickster. I might be being to generous, but I kind of thought TW was (½)

(2/2) too mentally healthy to recognize Loki’s mental health problems, and too focused on the class privilege of both Thor and Loki to recognize they can have legit struggles that others identify with. I know a lot of people in real life who really honestly believe that wealthy people don’t have the right to be upset about anything in their life.

I’m going to guess the main reason some people don’t believe Loki’s suicide attempt was real is because of the bit in Ragnarok where Loki is telling the story at the Sakaarian cocktail party and says “at that moment I let go” and everyone laughs. Because that only makes sense if it’s a “Look how clever I am, I escaped Thor and Odin’s efforts to hold me to account.” If those people had actually watched Thor 1, and seen the empty look on Loki’s tearful face – or heard Kenneth Branagh’s commentary, saying “This is the moment when the thin steel rod holding his mind together just snaps” – they would not be saying that.

People who take Ragnarok’s claims to supersede previous canon are fake fans. That’s right, I said it. I’m not saying people who came in late, or even people who saw Ragnarok first, are fake fans; I didn’t get into the MCU until after AOU came out in 2015 (although I *did* watch everything in the correct order; I wasn’t raised by wolves). But if you think what comes later is somehow more valid – or that one later movie that goes against 3 (for Loki) or 4 (for Thor) movies’ worth of previous narrative and character-building can erase all of them – that just makes no damn sense.(*) People who are fans of Thor and Loki as they appear in TR – or as I prefer to call them, Thor* and Loki* (I use that philosophical convention to indicate false identity because Shmor and Shmoki just sound silly) – are not fans of the same characters as those of us who love them because of their appearances in previous movies, and it is beyond absurd for these latecomers to say that the rest of us are mistaken about who Thor and Loki really are, or that the “correct” characterization was only reached in the 4th or 5th movie in which they appeared. People who think that they are the same characters are just confused (somewhat understandably, but still).

As for TW: the inability to recognize mental illness as mental illness when it should be really fucking obvious comes very close to malicious ableism. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were skeptical of the existence of mental illness, and he thinks the whole thing is just an excuse for rich white people to be weak and lazy. Of course, mental illness is at least as prevalent among poor people and/or people of color… but it can be more easily attributed to adverse circumstances. TW is probably one of those people (like the people you know) who thinks that treating “mental illness” in poor people is a bourgeois effort to privatize social problems and keep the proletariat sedated in order to stave off revolution. (Not that I think TW is really a Marxist… but you get the idea.)

I’ve said this before, but it is a really bizarre and very recent attitude that only poor, underprivileged people have real and interesting problems. This claim isn’t even borne out in people’s consumption behavior: everyone is still fascinated by the lives of the rich and famous. Poor people’s struggles to make ends meet are entirely too common, and the people who actually experience that seem to find it boring to watch… though the bleeding-hearted rich might be interested in it as a kind of pity porn. From Homer to Sophocles to Shakespeare to superhero comics to tabloids, people want to hear about the high political struggles, epic battles, and screwed-up love lives of gods, heroes, and kings. They want the larger than life, but they also want to perceive the common humanity that the great and mighty share with everyone else – and yes, that includes the Greek and Norse gods, who were deliberately, profoundly human. Novels and TV have brought the travails of the middle class and sometimes the poor into the orbit of popular literature, but it’s still more often people’s love lives than their struggles against oppression… and shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Empire indicate that it’s still the present-day warrior classes, royalty, and aristocracy that fascinate. Social justice evangelists can insist that people shouldn’t care about these things, but they can’t truly claim that no one does care.

(*) A caveat: I do accept the recent X-Men movies’ cutting The Last Stand (2006) out of the canon because the general consensus is that it’s not up to the quality standard of its predecessors, and the writer, Simon Kinberg, has continued to write and produce the more recent movies. I’ll take a writer’s rejection of his own past work much more seriously than a new writer/director’s rejection of a bunch of other people’s work.