illwynd:

foundlingmother replied to your post: sorry, wdym by their breakup in Ragnarok?

Yes, more power to them. I just wish they wouldn’t imply we’re crazy and stupid (and flat out say we’re wrong) for not seeing it as positive… Like, I’m sorry I don’t see Thor leaving Loki with a device meant to keep slaves in line active on him as this sweet moment of brotherly acceptance. (Sorry, lots of posts getting on my nerves lately. Couldn’t help but vent.)

OK guess i lied about not going into any more detail in a public post. 

See, a lot of the complaints I have seen about it, and a lot of the derisive responses to those complaints, have been about whether the device itself was cruel. But to me, that’s… missing the point a bit, at least with the way I see it, because I am completely not complaining about the physical pain Thor inflicted on Loki. They can bash the shit out of each other, that’s fine; I’m sure if you tallied up who had hurt who when, they’d both have a long list. I do think it was… reckless, to say the least… for Thor to leave him there helpless without any certainty of who would find him, but I would be able to overlook that as a lapse in judgment under other circumstances.

What bothers me is why. Telling someone who has known trauma around identity and belonging “who you are is as a person is inadequate and I will disown you unless you change to suit my standards” is…

I mean, I know some folks reading this are not gonna hear what I’m saying but are going to hear what they think I’m saying. So let me clarify. I am not saying how horrible Thor is for saying it. I don’t care whether it’s right or wrong, an acceptable or unacceptable action. That is entirely irrelevant. It could be 100% justified… but it would not have achieved the end that the movie claims. What I’m saying is that regardless of whether Loki got out and followed him back to Asgard, and regardless of whether they hugged and made nice with each other, that conversation did the opposite of what needed to happen to heal their relationship, and it may have effectively destroyed any chance of future healing between them.

The fracture in their relationship was around trust—not just Thor’s trust in Loki but also Loki’s trust in Thor. That was something that TDW got very right, for all its other flaws, because it showed that Loki started to come back from the edge when Thor chose to extend trust to him, treated him like his brother, took him seriously, and generally allowed Loki to believe that their relationship was not permanently stained. What Loki needed was to be able to trust in Thor’s love for him: that it wasn’t just circumstantial. That he, as a person, mattered to Thor, and that Thor would be able to re-accept him after his transgressions and would continue to value him. And Thor showing him so through his actions was working to fix their relationship and give them the space to talk things through

with some kind of honesty

and work their shit out. It was working, to the extent that Loki fully intended to die to save Thor. (The fact that Loki took advantage of circumstances when he woke up alive doesn’t change that and is, to my thinking, wholly in line with his character and his need to not let his feelings be used against him. Just died for your brother in a blatant display of love and loyalty? whoop better go and be a dick to fuck that right up!).

But the above scene from Ragnarok, Thor’s ultimatum, would utterly shatter Loki’s trust in all of those things. And, importantly, it would do absolutely nothing to heal Thor’s trust in his brother, either, because… I mean, it was compliance under threat of abandonment. That really doesn’t prove anything about someone’s trustworthiness or whether they have “changed.” All it proves is that you know where their buttons are located.

And that is exactly where the movie leaves it, with trust thoroughly shattered on both sides. Which is the end of any relationship if serious action isn’t taken to repair that trust. But no such action is shown or even suggested. Loki coming to save the day wouldn’t do it; he’d rushed to Thor’s rescue as recently as the previous movie, so that’s hardly new. Them fighting side by side wouldn’t do it; they’d done that thousands of times before. Hugs likewise. And if the issues were deep and serious enough to cause the breaking of a centuries-long brotherly bond, how could they possibly be resolved off-screen, without so much as a hint of how it happened? They couldn’t. It just doesn’t work, narratively speaking.  

So to me, that movie ends with their relationship completely broken. They are inhabiting the same space and they are ostensibly on peaceful terms, but any basis for trust has been destroyed. By any meaningful definition, their relationship is deader than a doornail.

And to me it is fitting, under those circumstances, that Loki would go and get himself killed kinda-sorta on purpose at the first opportunity as well. I mean, last time he was in a similar situation of having been rejected by those he cared about, he threw himself into an abyss. And this time he even got to continue to try to prove himself to Thor while doing it, just like one might feel compelled to do after such an ultimatum.

So yeah that’s why I call it a breakup. Because I don’t see any other way I can interpret it.

Thank you so much for saying this publicly. It was talking to you that led me to realize that Ragnarok destroyed the main characters, especially Thor, so thoroughly that I couldn’t make excuses for it, couldn’t keep liking it for bringing Thor and Loki back together even if I was uncomfortable with the way it belittled Loki’s grievances and turned Thor more self-absorbed than he had been at the beginning of Thor 1. Thank you for adding this to the discussion and redirecting it to something that really is more important than the points it has been getting unproductively stuck on. I’ll admit to getting stuck on the obedience disk, too, because one of the things that made me most deeply uncomfortable, even before you convinced me that Thor* was never giving Loki a genuine choice, was how smug, how self-satisfied and even gleeful Thor looked while seeing Loki in pain. But you’re right that that by itself could be explained as the anger of the moment (and I did try to explain it that way in some post-Ragnarok Thorki fanfiction, while also having Loki try to re-assert some independence and Thor actually listen to Loki’s side of things… as if that wouldn’t be too little, too late).

I think this point is especially important and unusual in the discourse:

I am not saying how horrible Thor is for saying it. I don’t care whether it’s right or wrong, an acceptable or unacceptable action. That is entirely irrelevant. It could be 100% justified… but it would not have achieved the end that the movie claims. What I’m saying is that regardless of whether Loki got out and followed him back to Asgard, and regardless of whether they hugged and made nice with each other, that conversation did the opposite of what needed to happen to heal their relationship, and it may have effectively destroyed any chance of future healing between them.

It seems like a lot of the disagreement between the Loki fans (myself included) and the Thor* stans has been about whether Thor* was justified in doing what he did. The Thor* stans insist that Loki was a terrible brother, constantly stabbing and betraying Thor, so he deserved to be punished and needed to be told that Thor* wasn’t going to put up with his shit anymore; and the Loki fans have probably spent too much time arguing that before Thor 1 Loki hadn’t given Thor any reason to mistrust him, and since then he’s had reasons for all of his betrayals. I think some of us have also added that punishment and ultimatum aren’t the means to real reconciliation, but it’s probably focused too much on whether or not Thor* is being physically, psychologically, and/or emotionally “abusive,” with all the baggage that word carries with it.

You’re emphasizing exactly the right issue that everyone invested in Thor and Loki’s relationship, whether sexual/romantic or just brotherly, should care about, regardless of which character they favor and independent of the moralistic language that people on Tumblr love to weaponize (and I don’t exempt myself here).

Telling someone who has known trauma around identity and belonging “who you are is as a person is inadequate and I will disown you unless you change to suit my standards” is…

The fracture in their relationship was around trust—not just Thor’s trust in Loki but also Loki’s trust in Thor. … What Loki needed was to be able to trust in Thor’s love for him: that it wasn’t just circumstantial. That he, as a person, mattered to Thor, and that Thor would be able to re-accept him after his transgressions and would continue to value him. …

But the above scene from Ragnarok, Thor’s ultimatum, would utterly shatter Loki’s trust in all of those things. And, importantly, it would do absolutely nothing to heal Thor’s trust in his brother, either, because… I mean, it was compliance under threat of abandonment. That really doesn’t prove anything about someone’s trustworthiness or whether they have “changed.” All it proves is that you know where their buttons are located.

OK, now all I’m doing is quoting you, but that’s because I really like the way you put it and it’s really, really important.