joss whedon: loki tortures and murders people for fun, and, despite being the god of CHAOS, is a fascist who says things like “it’s the unspoken truth of humanity that you crave subjugation”
taika waititi: loki is an annoying little shit who day-drinks, puts on theater about himself, and fucks his way to the top
joss whedon: loki and thor are gods, so they always talk proper and posh and in cryptic riddles so for no reason. it makes them seem more powerful and mystical.
taiki waititi: one time when they were kids loki turned into a snake because he knows thor loves snakes and then thor went to pick up the snake and then loki turned back into himself and screamed “yueagh, it’s me!” and then he stabbed thor
Taika Waititi has a deeper understanding of Norse mythological accuracy than Joss lol
It’s because Joss Whedon looks at all mythology and religion through a Christian-atheist lens. You can see it in Buffy and even a little in Firefly too. Even when he writes about other religions and their deities and practices, it still comes back to Christianity.
He wrote Thor and Loki as modern Western Christianity would portray Jesus and the Devil as opposed to how they actually are in mythology or the comics
That…is a really good addition as to why Whedon gets Thor and Loki
wrong and why Taika did a far better job with their
characters/personalities in Ragnarokthe fandom in 2012: JOSS WHEDON IS A GENIUS AVENGERS IS THE SUPERHERO FILM TO END ALL SUPERHERO FILMS LOKI IS THE SEXIEST COOLEST VILLAIN IN THE UNIVERSE EVER JOSS WHEDON IS THE SHIT
the fandom in 2018: Joss Whedon is Shit, everything he did is shit, here’s some para-meta to justify why everything he ever did is shit. TAIKA IS IN, HE IS THE SHIT, EVERYTHING HE DOES IS GENIUS, CAN HE DIRECT ALL THE MOVIES, OMG HIS CHARACTERIZATION IS THE ULTIMATE AND BEST, HIS THOR IS ACTUAL REAL THOR HIS LOKI IS ACTUAL NORSE MYTH LOKI AND EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE WAS WRONG AND BAD.
the fandom in 2022…??
Oh look, @fuckyeahrichardiii, it’s that hot take about how Taika has Deep Pagan Insight into Original Norse Myth Loki while Whedon is a horrible ignorant white dude who Christianizes everything. You know, the one I said I wasn’t going to reblog and argue with because I was too tired and had better things to do. That’s still true, but now I’m just feeling pissy.
Here’s my historically informed lukewarm Nietzschean take: all of Western culture and literature – including the comics that elizabethan-ho claimed were, like original Norse mythology, somehow Christianity-free – are steeped in the Christian worldview. If you were raised and educated in the European-descended Western world, you cannot escape it. It is everywhere. Even if you’re pagan, you’re still culturally Christian. I am Jewish and I’m culturally Christian. All of our liberal-democratic and/or socialist egalitarian altruistic morality is Christian morality. What’s more, as fuckyeahrichardiii helpfully informed/reminded me, all of the written sources we have on Norse mythology were written by Christians; they are already being interpreted, if a bit uncomfortably, though a Christian lens.
So what if Whedon was giving hints of Thor-as-Jesus and Loki-as-Satan? So were the Miller-Stentz writing team and Kenneth Branagh in Thor 1. I mean, it’s a little more complicated than that because they all show Thor as imperfect and needing moral improvement… so maybe he’s David, not Jesus. Except for the redemption through self-sacrifice thing, that’s a little Jesus-y. And if Loki is Satan, it’s definitely a Romantic Miltonian Satan, who was once an angel and whose fall is tragic. But the point is, it’s impossible to get away from Christian Biblical tropes when they are the skeleton on which the Western literary tradition is hung. We have only conjectures about what the pagan moral mindset was like. And you know what? It almost certainly wouldn’t be anti-imperialist. Yeah, let’s go conquer some shit, then settle down and marry and trade but also make sure the locals know who’s in charge.
Loki is the Philosopher King 