Bless your sweet heart @mentallydatingahotcelebrity – Bless your posts! I feel exactly the same! I agree with you about Hela being Loki 2.0 – she’s not an original character. She had no business being in their family like that. All they did was give her Loki’s backstory. They took that away from him too. As if to say, “Loki’s nothing special, his pain doesn’t mean shit – look at Hela”. Same beef with Odin, same unfavorited child, same disappointment locked away for eternity. That’s not original! THAT’S LOKI!!
They even gave her his lines,(“kneel”) and his colours – Waititi said Loki couldn’t wear his colours in this because “there was already enough green in the movie” – that makes as much sense as saying “Sif couldn’t be in the movie because there were already enough female badasses”. It’s bullshit, they stripped Loki of everything, everything that makes Loki Loki. They brough on a third sibling who had no business being there. They wedged Hela between Loki and Thor. Anything and everything to take the attention off of Loki. Recycled his story and gave it to Hela. Then they kept repeating “Loki has become predictable” like it was their mantra. Of course he was predictable – they didn’t let him have anything else!!
Ragnarok was Taika Waititi’s vessel to parade around a big F U to Loki and his fans. He insinuated the worst about him, turned him into a court jester, he tore him to pieces, mocked and ridiculed him, and left him like a shell. That’s part of the reason we got what we got in Infinity War.
I don’t mean to be disrespectful to those who love this movie, but I am tired of being dumped on about this. Nobody’s going to think twice about offending those who are seriously hurting from this movie, but yet we are expected to tiptoe around those who are eating it up. If what you wanted was a weak, powerless, lazy, “twink” of a Loki, then congradulations. But for those of us who didn’t, let us hurt, let us grieve, let us rant, and please just let us be.
Omg, exactly!
I’ve hated so deeply this way to strip off from Loki anything that was his own. His powers, his sassiness, his mood, his colors (what kind of sloppy excuse is “There’s so much green in the movie”?? I’m so baffled every single time TW open his mouth…).
They give us a character who’s not our Loki. The Loki we know. The Loki we love. Thor Ragnarok forced in our throats this poor parody of Loki, with no progression…just a silly knife-thrower. For not to mention how sad would it be for Tom let be pushed back in order to make room to all the silliness.
Bring back our Loki. The God. The Trickster. The Smart one. The Brilliant. The Green and Gold God.
The God of Mischief.
Thank you! I thought it was just me. Must as I loved Thor 3 as a film, I hated the way it pretty much emasculated Loki. I feel that was deliberate, to pave the way for Infinity War (& subsequent plot device). Loki (& his fans) deserved better.
Thank you for putting my thoughts so succinctly @thranduilista
the fact that people only see Jane’s (potential) return will ‘ruin’ Thor’s character is hilarious and offending at the same time. Girl is an astrophysicist, girl is an expert in quantum physics and space, girl had been a host for an infinity stone and survived. She has knowledge and experience to bring to the table, she is HER OWN CHARACTER and she is NOT defined by Thor or anyone. You all fake feminists praising Thor for being a feminist, for supporting women, and then you turn around and reduce Jane Foster, the world’s foremost astronomer, to Thor’s ex who will ruin his character. I see you there.
Taika Waititi and Chris Hemsworth were the people who ruined Thor’s character. He was just fine when Jane was around.
I’m honestly kind of stunned by the people saying that Ragnarok!Thor is a feminist. We have absolutely no good evidence of that, and a lot of circumstantial evidence (i.e., the fact that he’s a complete douchebro) that he probably isn’t. But then, I’m stunned by people saying Ragnarok!Thor is a great interpretation of Thor’s character, or a “ray of sunshine,” or anything other than a self-absorbed tool. So why does this surprise me?
Until further notice, I have decided that in the fictional world of the MCU, “Infinity War” did not happen. Neither did “Thor: Ragnarok.” I don’t know exactly what did happen because I don’t know how to write comic book movie plots, but it’s vaguely like all my most hopeful imaginings of what the movies would be like. It’s like an author died before finishing a series and left very scant notes on what was coming next.
In the real world, the movies do exist, and I will continue to express my anger at Taika Waititi, Chris Hemsworth, Markus & McFeely, the Russo brothers, and Kevin Feige when I feel it would be helpful to vent. But their work is like that unauthorized second part of Don Quixote: an absurd forgery that has marred the reputations of the characters and of the real artist(s) who created them.
While I’m at it, I might as well add “Captain America: Civil War” to the list. I don’t know exactly what Tony and Steve fought about, but it was a lot more substantive than the personal vendetta crap those hacks gave us. Though maybe we should be glad they didn’t try to touch on serious issues about right to privacy vs. right to know and voluntary vs. involuntary enhancement, since they think (their version of) Steve’s self-certainty is moral courage while Tony’s doubt is sin, and when they try to go “philosophical,” they give us Thanos’s Malthusian bullshit and try to convince us it’s compelling and sympathetic.
Avengers Infinity War BBC Interview: Tom Hiddleston Talks about “The Tragedy of Loki” Scene
Int: And then Matt Damon, surely that must have been a pinch yourself…
Tom: It was very weird, yeah, very peculiar. Taika and I were both feeding him lines of things that I have said over the course of… And I was of course trying to give Matt really witty lines, like, “It would be fun if you said this because I said this in Avengers,” and Taika would just be like, “Nah,” and giving him much funnier things to say.
I don’t want to bring Loki back and let him fall into the wrong hands again. I wish that beautiful death scene in The Dark World was true with his last words “I didn’t do it for him.”
Translation: “I was trying to keep the character consistent and Waititi shat all over that again and again”.
THIS.
Also I’d like to know WHY the heck Marvel and TW hate this amazing character so much. And why they try in every possible way to put him in bad light, demeanor him and cut him off so blatantly from plots.
They should be grateful to him and Tom for brought them fans and money.
TAIKA WAITITI IS FUNNIER THAN TOM HIDDLESTON JUST IN GENERAL AND THERE’S REALLY NOTHING Y’ALL CAN DO ABOUT IT
The comments on this is so fucking funny. Taika breathed new life into Loki. Y’all boring asses should be grateful.
Tom: Taika is funnier than me and all the other writers and directors I’ve played this character for.
Loki Stan’s: buhbuh he wasn’t a bland pretentious baddie for us to wet ourselves overrrrrrr.
I forgot about the smile after the snake story! You’re totally right, @sleepynegress. Best Loki scene.
This movie is the only time he actually seemed like an interesting, conflicted trickster instead of a greasy asshole.
The only thing I see is that a majority of Loki stans are only interested in seeing him reduced to a genocidal fascist Christian Gray wannabe
i think taika did a good job at writing canon loki.
no, not marvel.
i mean, Canon Loki
@note-a-bear @blad-the-inhaler I beg your pardon? In Avengers Loki’s goal was to rule the earth. How could he rule people if he killed them all? And you know what is genocide? Here is a living case: In the first Thor movie, angel baby Thor invaded another planet and slaughtered local residents only because they gave him a nickname, and he wouldn’t stop the massacre until Odin arrived and shouted him down.
And in TDW Loki was not a villain anymore. He was an anti-hero there, by saving Thor’s girlfriend almost at the cost of his own life, saving Thor at the cost of being impaled and revenging his mother’s death. Even Kevin Feige admitted Loki acquired the throne without betraying Thor, because Thor renounced it on his own account first.
Now I believe waititi stans have never watched the previous Marvel films but they pretend they have.
Hiddleston:
-“I feel so lucky with the writing, the way he’s been written. In Kenneth Branagh’s film the writing was very poignant, and you can see the vulnerability in him. Rather like Killmonger in a way, he doesn’t start out as an antagonist; he becomes an antagonist through the revelations. And then Joss Whedon wrote him as a very witty, very charming, very charismatic, and… So I’ve been quite fortunate with some beautifully complex writing of the character.”
-“The best thing about Loki is that if he is afraid he won’t show it. He’s been highly trained through the experience of his slightly traumatic life to shield his fear.”
-“Loki’s death on Svartalfheim was written as a death, and I would say Chris and I played that scene for real. That was meant to be that he redeemed himself, he helped save his brother, he helped save Jane Foster but that he, in the process, sacrificed himself.”
Waititi grossly misinterpreted and shat on the character that Hiddleston had painstakingly built; it’s a fact. If you need more evidence I have them. Some people need to learn the difference between character development and retcon. Other than the role of comic relief what did Gagnarok and Waititi give Loki?
Waititi’s solution was a story in which Loki is mocked and emasculated in almost every scene. It’s very funny, and Hiddleston plays it without visible qualms, but it leaves the character nowhere else to go.
The more I read his tweets/words, the more Taika Waititi seems the bully at my school who made my life a nightmare…
Which may be exactly why he appeals to bullies so much. He speaks their language.
So like, of all the things Waititi could pick on Loki for, he chooses to shit on him for being an orphan? What the fuck? That is EXACTLY what a bully would do. It isn’t funny, it’s incredibly mean-spirited. Kinda like making him joke about his attempted suicide.
What is hilarious to me, however, is Waititi trying to say that Loki only talks about himself and it’s annoying. Like… You do that more than anyone else, Taika. I’ve read interviews from you before, lmao. Don’t be a hypocrite.
I know it’s not worth trying to engage with the people who stan Ragnarok, Waititi, and Thor* (i.e., the version of Thor shown in Ragnarok, who is NOT the same person as the Thor of the previous movies he was in, and was definitely not the kind, goodhearted ray of sunshine that the Thor* stans want to pretend he is), so I’m not going to tag them. But note how simplistic and ill-informed their rebuttals are.
Yes, Tom recognizes that Taika is funnier than he is. But “funny” isn’t the only virtue in a character or a writer. The writers he praises, as @yume-no-fantasy points out, are the ones who gave him complexity to work with: Miller & Stentz (the writers of Thor 1) and Joss Whedon. And the way Whedon wrote Loki often was funny: “I’m listening”; “Are you ever not going to fall for that?”; “This usually works”; “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have that drink now.” But it’s a subtle humor (which I guess goes over some people’s heads?) and Loki is as often in on the joke as it is at his expense. Which is as it should be: he’s intelligent and mischievous and doesn’t always take himself seriously. If all the Waititi/TR/Thor* stans see is “a bland pretentious baddie” or “a greasy asshole” that’s their problem.
Similarly, if they didn’t see “an interesting, conflicted trickster” in the previous movies, all I can conclude is that they didn’t understand (or watch) the previous movies. In Thor 1, Loki secretly disrupts Thor’s coronation and subtly goads him into charging into Jotunheim (trickster) – not only “to ruin my brother’s big day,” but because he recognizes that Thor isn’t ready to rule (interesting). He finds out that he’s a member of a people that has historically been Asgard’s enemies (interesting, conflicted). He makes overtures to the ruler of that people, his biological father, offering to let them into Asgard to murder Odin so that Loki can take the throne permanently (trickster, conflicted); but then he turns around and kills his biological father to protect his adoptive father to prove his loyalty to Asgard and enmity toward Jotunheim (double trickster, double conflicted). He lies to Thor to keep him from returning to prevent him from going through with this plan (trickster), but on his way out tries to lift Mjolnir, desperate to be found worthy (conflicted); he obviously hesitates before he has the Destroyer strike Thor, and he does it in a way that isn’t guaranteed to kill him the way blasting him with fire would (conflicted). He tries to destroy the planet where he was born because he so deeply hates what he now knows he is; he begs Thor to fight him while fucking crying (have I given enough proof that he’s interesting and conflicted?).
I could keep doing this with The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World, but I have better things to do than write Reader’s Digest summaries of Marvel movies for people who didn’t understand them the first time around. (I didn’t exactly think they were intellectually taxing, but people continue to surprise me.)
I know interpreting graphs is hard and American schools (at least) don’t teach statistics very well, but here’s a hint: the spikes in interest in the search term “loki” indicate that The Avengers and TDW *generated*interest in Loki. These are searches from people who were not previously “Loki stans”; the loyal fans are the ones who sustain the lower levels of interest in between the spikes. No, Ragnarok did not “breathe new life” into Loki; very few new people became interested in Loki after it came out. And that was deliberate on the part of the filmmakers.
Also, what the hell is “Canon Loki” if it isn’t Marvel canon? Did Taika do a good job at writing myth Loki? Most of my myth expert friends don’t think so. Did he do a good job writing comics Loki? MCU Loki was never supposed to be identical with the Loki of the comics, for one thing; but for another, most of the people I know who are familiar with Loki comics (though there is one exception I know of) don’t think that Ragnarok Loki is a good representation of the Loki of recent comics, who is much smarter and more complex than Ragnarok Loki (not that that would be hard…).
Finally… if Taika is so into sympathetic representations of outsiders, he should have been thrilled with the opportunity Loki presented him. Instead, he decided Loki was to be dismissed as a spoiled, whiny little bitch and ridiculed for exactly the characteristics that make him an outsider: his mental illness, his (implicit) queerness, and his history as an adoptee from another race who spent most of his life ignorant of his heritage. As I’ve discussed before, you’d think that last part would present a great opportunity in a movie that supposedly wanted to make a point about imperialism and the victims of war, but I guess not. As for the other issues, the conclusion I’m forced to draw from Taika’s handling of them is that he’s a mental ableist who thinks Loki just needs to “grow up and get over” his problems (or maybe was faking them?) and quite possibly also homophobic.
This sounds positive, maybe, I hope? I don’t think they’re going to achieve the same level of depth and complexity with Thanos that Loki has reached, but maybe this is a good sign they’ll let Loki’s true colors fly?
This is good, right? Or promising, at least.
“What appeals to my brother and me about movies in general, characters in general, is the complexity that you can find within them. People aren’t simply this or simply that. Loki is a great example — somebody who is torn in two directions.”
It’s a big middle finger to Waititi’s “Loki is just a rich kid from outer space and we shouldn’t give a shit about his own problems”. 😏
Isn’t anything that constitutes decent writing and character development going to be a big middle finger to Ragnarok, though?
Here’s what I imagined happened…
MCU: “Just, you know, do whatever you want…as long as it ends with Thor and Loki on good terms, right before Thanos’ ship shows up.”
TAIKA: “Okay then.” (Makes Ragnarok)
MCU: “Oh wow, yeah…okay. Maybe we should have been more specific.”
You know, I get all the criticisms of Ragnarok, I see where they are coming from, I agree with a number of them, and they’re all valid even if I don’t agree with all of them, but…
I just wish there was a little more positivity around the film… for instance, I would love to read some in-depth positive discussion around it, because I personally enjoyed it, I think it did some new interesting things with the direction of Thor and Loki’s relationship and characters and I don’t think it butchered their characterizations. I do think that the style feels like a radical departure from the previous films, and that humorous style in which the narrative was painted jarred at times with the emotions it conveyed.
Most of the positivity I see on Tumblr tends to come from more pro-Thor, anti-Loki blogs (which I care absolutely nothing for) or from shippy blogs. Among the blogs I tend to relate more to (more gen-focused and Loki-supportive) the only discussion I can seem to find is discourse on how bad Ragnarok was. Which, again, I can understand, but at times it’s just a little downing.
I don’t like to be a downer, because I totally understand how it feels to be looking for positivity and coming across negativity instead. I consider myself to be more analytical than negative. Unfortunately, analysis can often result in pointing out the negative aspects of something.
However…I think I can explain why it is that you notice positivity coming from the pro-Thor anti-Loki blogs. Simply put -there’s a reason why people like the things that they do.
Thor appeals to a certain kind of person. More specifically, the manner in which he’s been characterized appeals to a certain kind of person. And that is the kind of person who finds movies like Ragnarok amusing. Thor is not a deep thinker. He’s not stupid by any means, but he’s not introspective. He’s not intellectual. And there’s nothing wrong with that. That’s just who he is. He’s a physical guy, for the most part. He’s a jock. He acts based on gut instinct. He doesn’t look below the surface of things. He sees no need to. He’s ego driven. And thus -he appeals to people who function similarly. The protagonist electrocuting his no good brother? That’s hilarious. Using the no good brother as a battering ram? He had it coming, of course. He’s no good. Duh!
To be perfectly honest, if one doesn’t dig TOO deeply, Ragnarok is a very entertaining movie. It’s visually stunning. The music is great. The dialogue is witty. If you completely disregard the established canon for the characters and don’t think too deeply about the implications of anything they are saying or doing, the movie is great fun. Thor fans are looking for what is explicit and Ragnarok is full of it.
Now -Loki fans are the opposite of that. They are deep thinkers. They take things very seriously. They want to to know the WHY of everything. They are largely made up of people who know what it is to be rejected and despised, or at the very least, to feel different. They see the pain that is unspoken. Behind every one of Loki’s words or actions, they see the contributing trauma. They see more than what is shown. Loki fans are always looking for what is implicit. Give them a film directed by a Shakespearean actor like Sir Kenneth Branagh and they will are happy as a pig in shit.
So, Ragnarok is not without merit. But you’re not likely to find many die hard Loki fans who don’t have at least some criticisms of its treatment of their favorite character.
I think maybe my calling certain blogs “anti-Loki” is a bit strong, through they are definitely pro-Thor. I don’t believe that people who prefer Thor are necessarily more shallow or less introspective, or that people who prefer Loki are deeper thinkers. It feels too much like generalizing and slapping a label on people. I have encountered a number of intelligent analytical people who loved Ragnarok and who also see Loki as a complex character more than a villain and who are pro-Loki AND pro-Thor (What do I even mean by pro-Thor? I guess I mean that they didn’t see Thor’s actions/characterization in Ragnarok as mainly problematic). I wish there were more of those people.
I’m not saying I want to see zero criticisms, I’m saying I want to see some other discussion mixed in as well. A lot of the problems Loki fans on here have seem to be with Ragnarok dismissing Loki’s past sufferings, experiences and depth as a character, when I don’t feel it did that. I feel like Loki changed and grew in this film, as he does in every film he has appeared in. To say that Loki has been moving beyond his past pain and trauma is not the same as belittling those experiences, even if I agree that it is easy to read the film as saying that Loki should “just get over it.” And that is one legitimate interpretation of the film, but it is not the only one, and it is not mine. I take issue with the concept that, if you can move on in any way from your past pain, if you can get better, then your pain and struggles must not have been real in the first place. It’s invalidating. That kind of thinking has got me stuck a long time before. It has got many people who suffer from mental illness stuck.
I appreciate Loki in Ragnarok, because he has clearly done some healing for himself in the interval, has started being willing to discuss some of what he went through (in the play and in his convo with Thor in prison), some of the sharpest pain has worn off, but he is still recovering, still struggling with how exactly to move on from it and who exactly he is in the aftermath. This is not unusual for those who have gone through trauma/mental illness, this is part of the recovery period where they are looking to build their life back.
Loki was afraid to confront Hela, which has been criticized as a cowardly characterization of the character – but I disagree. Fear is not cowardly, fear is a survival mechanism. Loki in the Avengers and in TDW would probably have thrown himself recklessly into the fight, regardless of the odds (and in this case I’m certain the odds are that Hela would have easily defeated them both and Loki KNOWS the odds because he isn’t actually stupid), because he was self-destructive and didn’t truly care about his life. In contrast in Thor 1, before he learns the shattering truth and even before he gives up all hope on the Bifrost, Loki clearly favored non-confrontational methods first, as on Jotunheim when he preferred to placate rather than provoke Laufey. In moving past some of his self-destructiveness, Loki is in a way going back to who he was before. There was nothing to be won from confronting Hela then and there, what he couldn’t account for in his panic was her following.
In my opinion, Loki was seeking his sense of direction in this film. He has overcome some of his past self-destructiveness, but without yet having a clear idea of where to go from here. Like I said, he’s been recovering, it’s a tenuous period where he is rediscovering and redefining himself, he’s going back and looking at his memories and taking back his own narrative – where he was once “the monster that parents tell their children about,” he chooses to be the “savior of Asgard” – but it’s a process and he was just not ready yet to confront Hela and save Asgard.
Loki says “Take US back” which means him AND Thor, and this is key. Loki was trying to get Thor to stay on Sakaar, and I’ve discussed this before, but I personally think Loki’s main, selfish goal throughout most of the film was to keep Thor alive, to not lose the last of his family. On the one hand, I consider this bravery, that Loki seems to have reached a level of honesty with himself, that he does value his family, the family that let him down and hurt him, inadvertently or not, and that could still reject him (see again his conversation with Thor, he had to know that Thor might still reject his help and invalidate his sincerity), rather than simply pushing them away and running from the pain of past and potential rejection.
Ragnarok is not perfect, obviously. The dynamic between the brothers is unbalanced, and Loki might not have returned to Thor’s side for the healthiest of reasons – their relationship will always have a flavor of codependency to me. But for me, this does not invalidate what I consider to be good character development and progress on Loki’s part. Besides, I love that I have a reflection of how messed-up and hurtful relationships can be in real life, even when the other person does love you. I also disagree that the narrative affirms Thor at every turning, he is mocked plenty as well while he flounders in Sakaar at the mercy of Valkyrie and the Grandmaster. The film stops mocking both Thor and Loki once they are back on Asgard working towards a selfless goal, rescuing the survivors on Asgard.
It’s just my opinion. I get most people will probably disagree with me, and that’s okay.
I can’t speak for other Loki fans who have been criticizing Ragnarok, but my problem with its depiction of Loki’s psychology is not that it shows him having “moved past” his trauma; rather, it either ignores it, or actively mocks and minimizes it. A few people who have a negative overall opinion of TR, like @foundlingmother, have decided for the purpose of fanfiction (or avoiding despair) to read the play as Loki’s self-therapy, his attempt to come to terms with his heritage and achieve some kind of catharsis regarding his sacrifice… but that’s an extremely generous interpretation, and I doubt very much that it’s the one the film’s creators (screenwriter Eric Pearson as well as director Taika Waititi) intended. The film doesn’t even acknowledge that Loki’s Jotun heritage was ever a problem for him or for Asgard; if the revelation in the play was intended to show reconciliation of himself and/or Asgard to the idea, it might have alluded to the fact that Asgardians (used to) regard Frost Giants as monsters. It also seems implausible that it’s supposed to help him move past his near-death experience, because the movie never acknowledges that Loki was actually stabbed, whether or not he believed he was going to die. Loki never contests Thor’s claim that he “faked his death” – suggesting that he staged the whole thing – and the movie invites us to think that the only reason he did it was to usurp the throne, and that the only reason he did that was so he could glorify himself and live in luxury, rather than, say, hiding from Thanos and trying to keep the Infinity Stones away from him, or even taking (not totally unjustified) revenge on Odin for his lies and maltreatment.
Someone else pointed out recently that the play has Loki say “I’m sorry about that thing with the Tesseract. I just couldn’t help myself,” and then his next line is “I’m a trickster,” which seems to be intended as an explanation. I guess I can see why he wouldn’t want to reveal to all of Asgard that he was under severe pressure from a bigger supervillain… but he didn’t have to mention it at all. This, and the implied explanation for Loki’s seizing the throne, is a general pattern: TR consistently reduces Loki’s motivation to “I’m a trickster, it’s in my nature” – or, effectively, “I did it for the lulz” – when his motivations in previous films have never been that simplistic. Arguably, letting the Frost Giants in to disrupt Thor’s coronation and goading him into trying to go to Jotunheim might have been partly out of mischief (“to ruin my brother’s big day”), but it was also because he wanted to prove to Odin that Thor wasn’t ready to rule – and he wasn’t wrong about that. His reasons for lying, betraying Thor, and causing destruction throughout Thor are envy and resentment, the desire to prove himself to Odin, and emotional pain over the revelation of his origins. His reasons for invading Earth in The Avengers are ambition, anger at Thor and Odin, and some level of coercion from Thanos.
There are definitely respects in which Loki acts like a trickster in earlier films, weaving complicated schemes, delighting in chaos, and hiding his true intentions; but he always has comprehensible, psychologically realistic motivations for his crimes and betrayals. What’s more, it should be clear from watching the previous movies that he almost never enjoys betraying Thor. FFS, he’s crying while he fights him at the end of Thor; he’s obviously affected, even tempted, by Thor’s pleas for him to come home in The Avengers, he hesitates before he drops the cage, he has tears in his eyes when he stabs Thor on the tower. As I’ve discussed elsewhere, TR ignores all of that and scrapes Loki’s psychology paper-thin, essentializing him as a simplistic version of the trickster archetype who just can’t resist the urge to betray people for shits and giggles.
It’s only because of this denial of Loki’s psychological depth and motivational complexity that TR can set up the bit where Thor “tricks the trickster” and gives that lecture about change. As @endiness (and others, probably) has speculated, the creators seem to have ignored all of Loki’s character development in previous films precisely so that Thor can get all the credit for his “reform” and “redemption.” It’s not at all clear why Loki betrays Thor on Sakaar; again, people trying to rescue the movie’s characterization can speculate that it’s because Loki is pissed at Thor for dismissing him, or maybe to keep Thor from what Loki thinks of as a suicide mission to fight Hela, but I think (and Thor’s little speech strongly suggests) the movie wants us to assume Loki did it for the same reason it claims he went after the Tesseract: “I just couldn’t help myself. I’m a trickster.” It’s really kind of rich that Thor is preaching at Loki about growth and change, considering how much Loki has changed over the course of the films, while TR regresses Thor back to the brash arrogance of the first film – no, worse; it makes him narcissistic and cruel in a way he wasn’t even at the beginning of Thor, as oblivious and insensitive as he could be. Many of the people who condemn TR are people who love Thor (almost) as much as they love Loki, and all of them agree that it ruins Thor’s character even more than Loki’s. I kind of don’t understand how the “Thor stans” can still call him a kindhearted little ray of sunshine in light of his behavior toward Bruce/Hulk as well as Loki… but as I said before, I think they’re motivated to like the movie and the version of Thor that together put Loki in his place.
As I’ve said, it’s possible to give the portrayal of Loki a more generous interpretation than I’ve offered, but part of the reason I seriously doubt it’s intended that way is that if you put the text of the movie, including the mocking tone of the little play, together with Taika Waititi’s interviews and other conduct, you get a picture of someone who is contemptuous of the rest of the Thor franchise, of Loki as a character, of Tom Hiddleston as an actor, and of Tom Hiddleston-as-Loki’s mostly female fans. Of course, people who are more gung-ho than I am about “the death of the author” have a policy of ignoring the artist’s intentions entirely, and that might be a good strategy if you want to stay positive about the movie.
I saw a post lamenting that there isn’t more “in-depth positive discussion” of Thor: Ragnarok from people other than anti-Loki Thor stans and Thorki shippers (who are probably also, incidentally, more Thor than Loki fans) and I’m like…
I kind of want to reblog with the observation that, from my own experience and that of others whose commentary I’ve seen, it’s possible to stay positive about the movie only if you don’t think very hard about it: a number of people who liked it initially (myself included) soured on it as soon as they started thinking seriously about its treatment of the characters, and some people have said that they’re deliberately avoiding thinking very deeply about it because they want to be able to keep enjoying it. But I also don’t want the OP to block me because I like their art, so I think I’d better not.
#Me talking about Thor Ragnarok and Taika Waititi x
More like he did a character assassination on Loki!
It was an even more gruesome character assassination of Thor, but strangely his fans seem not to mind…
RDJ is welcome to do his own movies under Waititi if he likes Ragnarok so much. Somehow I don’t think he will do that though.
Only if he wants Tony to be turned into an *actual* (as opposed to merely apparent) narcissist and have his traumatic experiences minimized and mocked. Because he’s just a rich kid from Malibu and we really shouldn’t care about his problems.
yeah it shows.. he definitely didn’t do it because he loved the characters @philosopherking1887 :’)
I mean, this is obviously meant to be taken as a joke… but you can tell the ugly truth if you’re confident that everyone will take it as a joke. (Though I have to say, I think fame was at least as strong a motivation as money.)
Loki is the Philosopher King 