Tag: fandom wank

goingrampant:

philosopherking1887:

philosopherking1887:

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

It reminds me how desensitized people are to ableism in films and every day life. Ragnarok has a lot of ableism. I don’t think it’s meant to be hurtful, but then neither is any sexism in the Avengers movies. It’s just two different filmmakers with two different failings in social justice/morality. But Whedon gets rampant hate, while TW gets called a literal god. Tumblr culture is fucking scary…

Let’s not forget the homophobia in Thor: Ragnarok that has somehow been converted, by some strange Tumblrian alchemy, to groundbreakingly wonderful LGBT representation.

Although actually, @foundlingmother, in this instance it wasn’t anything about sexism, it was some bullshit about how Taika’s characterization of Thor and Loki was more “accurate” to Norse mythology while Joss was importing Christianity and portraying them as Jesus and the Devil and I was like… I could write a lengthy post about how off-base that analysis is and also how beside the point that would be as an assessment of MCU films even if it were accurate, or I could just unfollow the reblogger and block the post.

I haven’t read a lot of Marvel comics, but the original silver age comics Thor 1 was based on definitely had Loki as a Satan stand-in, so it’s possible that any sort of reading of Avengers Loki as Satan is based on the comics being adapted, if only through continuity from Thor 1.

I think it’s more accurate as an analysis of Thor 1, considering the Fall narrative that’s going on… but in that case, Thor is definitely not Jesus, because he’s far from perfect. But that still wouldn’t serve the desired purpose, because Joss Whedon didn’t write Thor 1, and the point was to condemn him for putting everything in Christian terms, while claiming that Taika (no doubt thanks to his unspoiled indigenous heritage) is somehow in touch with the Norse pagan spirit. Never mind that the written sources of Norse myth that we have are post-Christian, or that the entirety of modern European literature intervened between those sources and the Marvel comics, and that in any case the MCU characters are not supposed to be identical either to the mythical figures or to any particular iteration of the comics.

*screams*

philosopherking1887:

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

It reminds me how desensitized people are to ableism in films and every day life. Ragnarok has a lot of ableism. I don’t think it’s meant to be hurtful, but then neither is any sexism in the Avengers movies. It’s just two different filmmakers with two different failings in social justice/morality. But Whedon gets rampant hate, while TW gets called a literal god. Tumblr culture is fucking scary…

Let’s not forget the homophobia in Thor: Ragnarok that has somehow been converted, by some strange Tumblrian alchemy, to groundbreakingly wonderful LGBT representation.

Although actually, @foundlingmother, in this instance it wasn’t anything about sexism, it was some bullshit about how Taika’s characterization of Thor and Loki was more “accurate” to Norse mythology while Joss was importing Christianity and portraying them as Jesus and the Devil and I was like… I could write a lengthy post about how off-base that analysis is and also how beside the point that would be as an assessment of MCU films even if it were accurate, or I could just unfollow the reblogger and block the post.

Not gonna reblog the post that inspired this thought, but… the Loki stans who claim that Thor’s behavior toward Loki early in “Thor 1” and before was abusive annoyed me a lot more before “Ragnarok” came out. People who fail to make a sharp distinction between Thor in T1, Avengers, TDW, AOU and Thor* in TR irritate me in either case; but frankly, I’m a lot less worried about the people who say Thor’s treatment of Loki was abusive than about the people who say that Thor*’s treatment of Loki (or Loki*) is love.

foundlingmother:

imaginetrilobites:

stealing this image from angst-wizard’s reply to thorduna because i don’t wanna invoke the wrath of the majority of this fandom and write unsolicited criticism on other people’s posts

image

b) THOR LITERALLY LEAVES LOKI ALONE AND INCAPACITATED IN THE HANGAR WHERE LOKI CAN BE FOUND AND EXECUTED oh my god!!!!

it was punishment. not a cute brotherly therapy session. 

“People I can’t understand.” Ha!

People you have decided are wrong and do not want to understand, so you make dismissive memes.

If you want to understand, I will explain it. Again. This is not merely a tough love moment, and even if it were, it’s deeply troubling that Loki, a character coded to be mentally, is fixed by that. By being abandoned, in pain (or mild discomfort, if you prefer), unable to move. Because that would not fix a mentally ill person. It solves none of Loki’s fundamental issues and grievances. Because Loki’s problem wasn’t that people were giving him too much attention and he needed to be shown that the world didn’t revolve around him. It wasn’t that he just needed to grow up and get over himself. That interpretation of Loki’s issues is deeply upsetting, because it’s exactly the sort of bullshit I’ve heard growing up neurodivergent and mentally ill. 

It makes me wonder whether certain persons have read or seen this post or this informative reblog thereof, both by writer-bloggers that certain persons supposedly like and respect (at least to my knowledge). Perhaps those opinions are just dismissed as an eccentricity of otherwise good writers whose long tenure in the fandom grants them immunity from excommunication.

foundlingmother:

Thor loves Loki. A lot.

Thor has done things to hurt Loki. He’s put Loki in his place. He’s failed to condemn Odin. He’s refused to mourn over their mother. He didn’t visit Loki when he was imprisoned. He didn’t plead for Loki after the events of Avengers. The list goes on.

In every instance, he had a reason for how he behaved. He put Loki in his place because Thor was insecure, too. He was the child with all the expectations. He also learned that behavior from Odin, who we see put Loki and Thor in their places over the course of the movies. He didn’t mourn Frigga with Loki, or visit Loki, or plead on Loki’s behalf because he was justifiably upset about what Loki had done on Midgard. Because whatever Loki had become wasn’t really his brother, so he avoided the pain this… impostor would inflict. 

Understandable. Still wrong. Still hurtful. Still convinces Loki that Thor doesn’t care. That no one cares after Frigga passes.

Loki loves Thor. A lot.

Loki has done things to hurt Thor. Fuck, he killed Thor once! Enough said (and yet you could say so much more).

In every instance, he had a reason for how he behaved. Even when he killed Thor, it was part of a serious breakdown (and perhaps not even well thought out). And there’s motivations for everything else Loki does, too (that’s why he’s an excellent villain–they’ve made a character you feel sympathy for, even while you must condemn his actions).

Understandable. Still wrong. Still hurtful. Still convinces Thor that Loki’s just bad. That he’s lost his brother (sometimes literally in the deceased sort of way).

My point is that it’s both true that they love each other, and true that they’ve both got a lot to apologize for and work through. And if they’re going to do that, it’s going to have to be a process that begins with them both acknowledging that neither is without motivations or lack love for the other.

Honestly, I think a big part of their problem is thinking the other cares less, or not at all. Loki’s whole “I don’t have the Tesseract” bit where he’s certain Thor’s only there for that (when obviously he’s their for Loki). Thor’s statement to Frigga that Loki’s not the boy she knew, and therefore not the brother Thor knew, either. His confusion over Loki attacking him at the end of Thor and denying their brotherhood. Jeez, they just keep feeding this assumption in one another!!!

I wish there were more people in the fandom who were willing to point out BOTH characters’ flaws and misdeeds at the same time, in the same posts. Though come to think of it… even when people do add nuance to their analyses, the stans for one character or the other will read any criticism or acknowledgment of flaws as a heinous attack and come after the person trying to admit nuance, assuming that they must be a stan for Character X and therefore hate Character Y.

I know that when talking amongst ourselves, people who are Loki fans in the first instance (I don’t consider myself a “stan” for anyone) have absolutely no problem admitting Loki’s faults. @imaginetrilobites tells me the same is true of primarily-Thor fans when they talk among themselves (I don’t know, they mostly don’t talk to me). But somehow when conversation happens between the two communities, each feels the need to present their own favorite as immaculate and the other character as a horrible person, solely responsible for all of the problems in their relationship – and this happens even when some people on both sides are Thor/Loki shippers. Like, WTF? Why would you ship your favorite character with someone you think is a horrible person?

There are probably some outlying members of both fandoms who really, truly believe their fave is completely blameless in everything: Loki stans who insist that Thor’s bullying and Odin’s bad parenting excuse everything he does in Thor 1, and that Thanos literally brainwashed him instead of just manipulating and/or torturing him; Thor stans who think that Thor was already perfect even in the first Thor movie and Odin banished him not because he had done anything wrong or needed to learn humility, but only because Thor had disobeyed him personally. But I’ve had a few discussions across party lines that lead me to believe that we don’t disagree as much as the vitriolic “debates” make it look like.

Admitting that your favorite did something wrong is not admitting defeat. If we’re good consumers of media, we love characters because they’re complicated and imperfect; because their virtues and their flaws are interestingly entangled; because they do bad things for what might, from a certain perspective, look like good reasons. Do your fellow fans and yourselves the courtesy of acknowledging the ways in which that’s true.

foundlingmother:

iamanartichoke:

lokiloveforever:

shaylogic:

Hey can we start some discourse on how there’s 2 halves of the loki fandom:

1. straight girls that wanna fuck loki

2. queer/mentally ill people that relate to loki

and how the first group tends to like Avengers 2012 Loki the most and prize his predatoriness and exotify his jotun heritage and don’t want him to heal as a person but want to keep him as a fucked up serial killer because that’s “hot”

and the second group was really excited when Ragnarok finally brought out the queerness that’s been so classic to the myths and comics that we’ve all been waiting for, plus thor got the character boost he needed and the whole thing was fun and the bros finally reconciled and loki healed and grew as a slightly more emotionally stable person

and then the first group of fans got pissy about this and were saying how marvel fucked up loki’s character and he should be going around wacking people with his staff and being intimidating rather than vulnerable and emotionally reaching out, and how they think thor was too overbearing or even abusive and that he was taking loki’s spotlight even though he’s the main character, and were maybe also angry that there was queerness beyond what they could objectify for slash

like it’s just occurred to me today that all the sudden tension in the fandom is coming from the straight girls getting upset that the Bad Boy Facade Loki they stanned over turned out to show his canon of being an emotionally vulnerable and traditionally queer character just trying to survive and find emotional/psychological fulfillment under his egotistical front, and they can’t deal with the fact that’s been his character all along

I’m not wording this well right now but yeah go off please

I’m a straight woman and I love Loki, not “just” because I want to fuck him, even though, yes, I find him extremely attractive. I have two seeing, working eyeballs in my head, so you can’t hold that against me. You’re saying straight women cannot relate to Loki because we just want to fuck him? So I can’t relate to him at all, you’re saying I have no idea what it feels like to be abandoned, out of place, misunderstood, unloved and antagonized? You don’t know, that’s what drew me to Loki in the first place.
Loki was always vulnerable, if you’ll care to pay attention to the movies. It was Loki in the first Thor that drew me to him that vulnerability, that realization that his life was a lie, that intense desire to be loved to the point that he was willing to kill or be killed for it, for his family, that was something I felt I could relate to. He’s always been trying to reach out!
What attracted to me to Loki when he was “a fucked up serial killer” was that he really wasn’t “a fucked up serial killer” at all, and people tend to choose to ignore that. If you pay close attention to the movies, you’ll find the details of what was really going on with Loki (exhaustion, torture, manipulation, mind-warping, on top of the emotional and mental trauma that he had already suffered in the first Thor).
And what makes me so pissy about Ragnarok was the way all of that desire and pain, what Tom Hiddleston has reffered to as “his closely guarded suitcase of pain” was wrenched away from him and opened up and put on a very disrespectful display, literally. You think I don’t want to see him be healed? I just want him “to run around whacking people with his stick”? I want him to be healed more than anything but what happened in Ragnarok wasn’t healing. It was parody and mockery. They simplified him in the crudest way. Robbed him of his magic, his aura and his mystery, and left a shell. They tore down everything that Tom Hiddleston devoted 10 years of his life to create. And, surprise, look what happened next – they got rid of him!

I never saw Loki as “just a hot bad boy”. I see the most beautifully crafted character full of passion and heart, expressing a desire to love and be accepted, and I don’t know a single person, gay or straight, who can’t relate to that. And if you say you can’t you’re lying.

You could say Loki belongs to those who truly love him, and let others alone to love him too, instead of just trying to pit gay and straight against each other, to satisfy some idiotic assumption.

I don’t think this is true at all. I don’t know what most people’s sexualities are and it makes no difference to me but my dash is full of wonderful discourse, critical thinking, analysis, and appreciation of Loki for his whole character, not what he looks like. His looks don’t hurt, fair enough. But regardless, probably this is all coming from straight people, LGBT people, whoever – it shouldn’t matter. 

Secondly, I have always identified as straight, and I have also struggled with mental illness for the better portion of my adult life (and I’m getting up there). I don’t particularly want to fuck Loki, but that’s beside the point. I relate to Loki most in his earlier movies – his mental illness, his role in being the less favored brother, being ignored, slighted, constantly compared to a standard and expectation he couldn’t possibly ever meet just because of who he was. And then to find out that he was a member of the race he’d grown up hearing were monsters and things, to find out his place in Asgard was not what he thought it was, to have been lied to, his identity stripped away. These are all very real struggles that a LOT of people can relate to. These are the factors that drew in so many Loki fans and filled the room at 2013 Comic Con.

I appreciate Ragnarok Loki. I liked seeing another side to his character and the movie is enjoyable if you don’t think too deeply about it. But.

and then the first group of fans got pissy about this and were saying how marvel fucked up loki’s character and he should be going around wacking people with his staff and being intimidating rather than vulnerable and emotionally reaching out … 

If your perception of Thor 1, Avengers, and TDW Loki is that he was an intimidating villain who whacked people with his staff, I suggest a rewatch. I highly encourage, in particular, Loki’s confrontation with Odin in the Vault when he discovers the truth, and the way he cries when he’s fighting Thor in the end. In Avengers, may I direct you to the fact that he is crying when he stabs Thor on top of Stark Tower. There’s also quite the interesting conversation with the Other that very heavily implies Loki has very little of his own free will. In TDW, you may be interested in the way he falls apart when Frigga dies, the way he tries to smile and it immediately crumples just after he and Thor argue on their boat, the part where he literally shoves Jane out of the way of an exploding bomb even though he’s only just met her and upon meeting him, she slapped him in the face.

Just as a place to start.

I’m not saying the intimidating scepter-swinger isn’t accurate. But it’s a VERY small part of who he is. The great thing about Loki is that he’s so layered and complex. Ragnarok has given him some distance from the previous movies’ events and it seems that, in that distance, he’s sort of come to terms (how he got to that place on his own is anyone’s guess). The point is, we get to see him feeling a little more light, a little more funny, a little more God of Mischief-y. This is yet just another aspect of who he is. If you like that version of Loki better, that’s fine. No one’s stopping you. 

But you shouldn’t put people into boxes and simplify their criticisms. It’s really not fair.

I am queer. My gender is a question mark. I don’t wish to fuck anyone, let alone Loki, because I’m aromatic and asexual. I’m neurodivergent with both autism and numerous mental health problems.

I identify with Loki for his queerness and mental health issues, and I dislike Ragnarok because I feel the movie is ableist af (the post I’m linking to does a fantastic job “summarizing” what makes me uncomfortable), and that it drains Loki of his depth that was canon in the previous films, not absent from them. I don’t think his queer-coding in Ragnarok is very good. The subtextual relationship we’re shown is one full of consent issues. It’s a sugar daddy/sugar baby deal where the “sugar” is survival. That’s not exactly the sort of pseudo-representation (it’s pseudo since it’s not explicit) that I was hoping for, and it’s even more frustrating considering they cut the scene that would have made Val’s bisexuality explicit.

I know lots of people who are queer and/or don’t want to fuck Loki who dislike at least aspects of his portrayal in Ragnarok, if not the entire movie. @philosopherking1887, @lucianalight, and @imaginetrilobites to name three off the top of my head. Like @iamanartichoke said, don’t put people in boxes. The divide is far from neat and tidy, and your assessment of the straight Loki fans isn’t even uniformly accurate, either. It’s wonderful if you enjoy the movie. Go nuts! Love what you love! But please don’t do this sort of generalizing that’s sort of a subtle way of invalidating the opinions of people who don’t have a fondness for the movie… 

Also, Thor didn’t need a character boost. He’s much better and sweeter and funnier and Thor-like pre-Ragnarok. The only exception is the lightning. I’ll admit Ragnarok did some badass shit with his lightning powers. I enjoy it a lot. Yes I do.

I appreciate @iamanartichoke‘s summary of the instances of emotional vulnerability and complexity in the pre-Ragnarok films; I myself have spent some time (such as at the bottom of this ridiculous thread) trying to dispel the absurd notion that Loki was a one-dimensional “mustache-twirling villain” or (in OP’s words) “fucked-up serial killer” and only became an “interesting, conflicted trickster” in Ragnarok. But I disagree with the concession that “Ragnarok has given him some distance from the previous movies’ events and it seems that, in that distance, he’s sort of come to terms.” The following parenthetical – “how he got to that place on his own is anyone’s guess” – is extremely telling, and I think the answer is simply that Taika Waititi doesn’t want us to believe that Loki’s problems were ever real. On that point, read the excellent post that @foundlingmother linked to. I’ve written on that topic myself, but never with quite that much force and pathos.

Taika either doesn’t recognize that Loki is mentally ill, or he simply has no sympathy for it. He ignores all of Loki’s complicated motivations for his previous betrayals and effectively says he just does it because it’s “in his nature” as “the God of Mischief” – i.e., “for the lulz.” And he can’t be said to reach any kind of genuine reconciliation with Thor because Thor* (the version of Thor portrayed in Ragnarok) takes the same approach to Loki that Taika does: he never asks Loki for his reasons for doing anything he did, including faking his death and impersonating Odin; he just gives that pompous, hypocritical speech about how he could be “more than just the God of Mischief.” I have written about this so many times, as have various other people… I should just bookmark all of those posts because I end up having to link to them so often to avoid having to rehash all of the arguments again.

OP’s understanding of the fandom divide is so completely wrongheaded it’s mind-boggling. Many of the Loki fans who loved Loki pre-Ragnarok and think Ragnarok made hash of his character – myself included – are mentally ill. They are people who came to identify with Loki because they saw themselves in him: because he was an outsider who never seemed to fit in with Asgardian society, because he was bullied for being different (subtly, yes, and maybe he even deserved some of it, but still: see the end of this thread for an argument to that effect), because he attempted suicide onscreen – and if that’s not a clear indicator that a character is mentally ill, I don’t know what is. And it’s equally absurd to say that we, the mentally ill people who identify with Loki, don’t want to see him heal and be happy. Of course we do. But we want to see it happen realistically, the way mentally ill people actually can recover: by confronting their issues rather than burying them or running away from them; by talking frankly about the things that have been bothering them with people who matter to them. That never happens in Thor: Ragnarok. A full acknowledgment of the depth and reality of Loki’s problems would involve an earnest conversation with Thor about the ways in which Loki felt slighted, inferior, taken for granted throughout their youth; about the impact of the revelation that he was Jotun and that their parents had lied to him about it his whole life; about why he did the terrible things he did in Thor and The Avengers, why he pretended to be dead and banished Odin at the end of TDW. Wanting Loki’s very real problems to be addressed instead of swept under the rug IS “wanting him to heal as a person.” As a person, not the way Thor* treats him in Ragnarok: as a problem to be solved.

Also, what the hell do you mean by “exotify his jotun heritage”? Some of us just want to see it talked about. Or even humanized, which is the exact opposite of what you seem to be implying. Loki apparently outs himself as a Jotun adoptee in that play (the “blue baby icicle” bit), no one bats an eye, and that’s the last we hear of it. WTF? What happened to the part where Asgardians consider Jotnar such monsters that young Thor wanted to “hunt them down and slay them all,” and Odin felt like he needed to lie to his son about his race to “protect him from the truth”? Zack Stentz (one of the writers of Thor) has said outright that Loki’s story is about internalized racism. Can we learn a little more about Jotnar and start to see them as people? Can we actually see Loki come to terms with his heritage by learning about it instead of, again, just writing it off with a joke?

And while we’re talking about how ridiculous this account of the fandom divide is, let’s discuss the fact that Ragnarok is not exactly a triumph for queer representation. Loki is never explicitly identified as queer; it’s all through stereotype and innuendo. I’m quoting from @fuckyeahrichardiii because she brought it to my attention and I really can’t put it any better:

I also have no idea why the movie hasn’t been savaged by tumblr for its frankly awful queer-baiting. We’ve got a regressive case of textbook villainous queer-“coding” (though it’s barely even coded) with the GM, who despite everyone’s obsession with JG, is a really vile person (imperialist, slaver), and the FIRST almost open depiction of same-sex relations in the MCU (Loki/GM) is characterized by suggestions of frankly horrific power dynamics. Like, really Taika?

(2) And Valkyrie being bi was barely a whisper in the movie compared to the joke that was the GM’s sexuality. Even so, Taika had the tired trope of the dead lesbian in operation as part of Val’s backstory which honestly gets him 0 credit as far as I’m concerned.

Here, while we’re at it, is a long post about the queer-coding of villains and the Hollywood tradition of “the sissy.” I’m finding it extremely ironic that this is being held up as “queerness beyond what they could objectify for slash.” Seriously? This fucked-up sugar daddy/baby relationship that can hardly be considered consensual, under the circumstances? You think the critics’ problem with it is that it’s too queer to objectify?

I strongly suspect that this attempt to write off critics of Ragnarok, and specifically its portrayal of Loki, as just “stupid, homophobic, neurotypical straight girls who want to fuck their fetishized version of Loki” is an evasive maneuver to avoid thinking and talking seriously about the content of the films. Why engage with your opponents’ arguments and analyses when you can score some oppression/social justice points by lumping them all into a privileged group and calling them bigots?

foundlingmother:

imaginetrilobites:

when people make fun of those who enjoy imagine-loki stuff

I fucking hate when people who are part of fandom make fun of how other people enjoy fandom! Don’t we get enough belittling from society at large? Having our interests or art called frivolous? Why would you do this to other people? Why? Just because you don’t enjoy something, doesn’t mean the people who do are dumb and deserve ridicule.

I don’t go in for imagine-loki content, but fandom isn’t made for me and me alone. I for one feel great pride that fandom has something for everyone. I like knowing that people are enjoying themselves in this space.

I make liberal use of the blacklist function on XKit. It only works on my browser, not my phone, but that’s where I do most of my Tumblring. If you don’t like seeing it, blacklist “imagine-loki” and check the “include URLs” option. If there are people whose opinions annoy me, I don’t block them (unless they’ve done something to offend me personally), let alone write blog posts complaining about them by name (that counts as bullying inasmuch as it has the potential to encourage dogpiling and anon hate-sending); I blacklist their URL so that I just don’t see posts they’ve contributed to.

curlicuecal:

warpedellipsis:

shinelikethunder:

Fuck, I miss the days when puffed-up intellectual posturing was the universal currency of fandom arguments.

For one thing, the wank was a lot more harmlessly entertaining than it’s been since the shift to a currency of puffed-up moral posturing.

But there’s also something subtler that I was only able to articulate earlier this evening. When most of the arguments are about who’s got the biggest nerd-dick, it’s possible to go “wait, back up, that thing you just said was waaay over the line” and not have it be part of the game. Criticism of someone’s behavior is more-or-less independent from the subject of the argument–not that it’s never dragged in as a tactic for winning the argument, but it retains the capacity to be independent. And generally, social norms will maintain an expectation that it be kept independent and only invoked when it actually applies, and that it can be invoked on either side without affecting their status in the debate (i.e. whether they’re right or wrong).

When the arguments are about who’s got the biggest social justice dick, all bets are off. Accusations of unacceptable behavior are one of the core elements of the debate. There is no “look, you may have the most righteous point on earth, but god you’re being a flaming asshole about making it”–that’s a move in the game, traditonally parried by accusations of tone-policing. The result is a lack of meaningful limits on how toxic you can be in an argument. Predictably, it tends to devolve into an arms race.

Not that the “intellectual posturing as debate currency” model isn’t vulnerable to pathologies of its own–but ultimately, they’re nowhere near as destructive to a community’s social fabric as making the unacceptability of someone else’s behavior the terms on which every single fucking petty fandom wank is fought. Right down to flamewars over whose ship is better.

>making the unacceptability of someone else’s behavior the terms on which every single fucking petty [issue]

It occurs to me that this is the same thing that nasty people and abusers rest everything on? It’s never about the actual subject, it’s always an emotional battle about how vile of a person you are and how *that* means you’re wrong and they’re right.

I’ve been trying to articulate for a while how this shift to the personal and the character-based and the “aha! I have discerned your TRUE NATURE” make it nearly impossible to counter them in any meaningful way. It becomes and assertion of the other person’s identity and motivations and internal beliefs.

When other people claim the right to assert your identity and internal self… the argument has moved so abstract and emotionally-fraught it’s going to be almost impossible to actually debate anything.