iamanartichoke:

Sorry for not answering this sooner, I had to think about it, haha. I really enjoy the concept of pre-Thor Loki because there is just so much we don’t know about who Loki was before everything went to shit. We have a basic idea of his general personality, of course – the envious younger brother, the mischief-maker, the less-favored prince. Even despite these attributes, though, Loki clearly holds Thor in high regard (”sometimes I’m envious, but never doubt I love you”) and never meant for things to go as far as they did. 

When I think about pre-Thor Loki, the quote I always come back to is when Kenneth Branagh states (in his commentary on the Vault scene): “This is the moment where the thin steel rod that’s been holding your brain together snaps.” Truly, this moment is life-altering and devastating for Loki, but Branagh implies that Loki’s mind was fractured to begin with. We don’t generally think of healthy brains as being “held together with thin steel rods,” and it begs the question, why was Loki so unstable in the first place? Certainly as a result of his upbringing, as far as I can guess. (Whether or not mental illness is inherent in his brain chemistry is a different question, but it bears mentioning that mental illness includes conditions like anxiety, depression, etc, and that these conditions can be a result of one’s upbringing.) 

I (like so many others) take such issue with Thor calling Loki’s grievances imagined slights because they are very much not imagined and, if anything, they are the worst kind of slights because by nature they are designed to break a person down steadily over time. If you tell a dog it’s bad enough times, the dog will eventually believe it. In the first twenty or thirty minutes of Thor, if we include deleted scenes, we see Loki being openly laughed at by a servant (!!), admitting he’s envious but telling Thor he loves him anyway, only to get a “Thank you” in response (without any reassurance of Thor’s feelings in return), a nasty comment from Volstagg on the rainbow bridge about Loki’s silver tongue, and Thor snapping for Loki to “know your place” when Loki tries to talk Thor down from literally starting an intergalactic incident. 

Furthermore, after Thor’s banishment, Loki admits that he told the guard of their plans. It’s important to note that he’s not being sneaky or underhanded – he straight up admitted, “yeah, I told them we were going, and I’m not sorry because Thor is out of control and his idea was fucking stupid.” And what’s his payback? As soon as he leaves, the Warriors 4 talk about him behind his back, say he’s always been jealous of Thor, and wonder out loud if Loki is the traitor Laufey spoke of. Why would they immediately assume that Loki is a traitor to his family and his kingdom? Like, that escalated really fucking quickly. 

All of these things show us that Loki is treated as less than, for no real reason other than he’s very different from Thor. Different, in Asgard, seems to mean, not as good as. The narrative tells us we should just accept this treatment of Loki because he turns out to be the villain (although the argument has been made, many times, that his actions weren’t villanous at this point – but, I digress) so one can assume that the same is true of Asgard – everyone should just accept that this is how Loki is treated, everyone is used to Loki being the punching bag, and no one should feel badly about it. 

I don’t even think I’m answering your question right, I’m sorry, but what I’m trying to get at is, if this is the sort of treatment we see Loki getting just in the beginning of the movie, imagine a (very, very long) lifetime of the same sort of treatment. Imagine how broken down someone would have to be after that. Even if Loki’s upbringing wasn’t bad, in that he was privileged with wealth and title and family and all of that, it was definitely emotionally abusive. And I think that it’s very possible to feel like you have a nice life, to feel like other people have it worse than you, to feel like you deserve all of the imagined slights heaped upon you, until you snap. This is why Loki was hanging onto mental stability by a thread. This is why he suffers a complete mental breakdown – because, in addition to this toxic environment and mindset he’s been conditioned into, now he learns that he is something he’s been taught to believe is savage and disgusting and inferior. He loses all hope of ever being worthy, which makes him double down on his efforts to attain that worthiness. In his heart, maybe he knows it’s a lost cause, and maybe that’s why he fights so hard for it, anyway. 

So, did he have safe havens? Probably. He probably holed up in the library with his books and scrolls, or maybe he had a favorite reading spot in the gardens, or maybe he liked to lay in the grass and watch the stars. Did he have secrets, things that were only his? Most definitely, as Loki in general (I think) is a private person who wants things to keep for his own, things that he doesn’t have to share with Thor. Did he hang out with Thor’s friends for obligation? No, I think that at first, he really wanted to be a part of their group. They’re all shown to be so close in age and class (except Volstagg, who seems older) that it seems like these are the people he should be friends with, and would be friends with, were he just more like Thor. I’m sure, eventually, he realized that they didn’t like him (and he didn’t really like them, either) but it was probably also a situation where Loki didn’t have any other friends, so he might as well hang out with the ones who tolerated him, sometimes, sort of. 

Sorry for babbling at you and I don’t know if that answered your question or not, but I have a lot of Feels about Loki’s treatment in the first movie, and also the implications it has on his life beforehand. Thank you for the ask!