Tag: loki and thanos

loptrlaufey:

no words………*

OK, @foundlingmother, @led-lite, @tara-noire – I think the staging here suggests that Loki will spend some time (pretending to be) working with Thanos. See how he’s standing with Thanos’s generals while Thanos threatens Thor and then breaks the cube to get the Space Stone out.

Maybe Loki will claim that he usurped the throne of Asgard so that he could recover the Tesseract for Thanos after he (shamefully) lost it by losing the battle for Midgard. Why Thanos would accept that excuse, I’m not sure… but banishing Odin and posing as him for 4 years is a pretty impressive trick.

foundlingmother:

philosopherking1887:

foundlingmother:

philosopherking1887:

tobetterourselves:

philosopherking1887:

foundlingmother:

taranoire:

foundlingmother:

foundlingmother:

taranoire:

cathartic discussion time for all my loki stans: how the fuck is he going to be killed 

Thanos seems to have the Power Stone when he arrives on Earth via the portal. I imagine he uses that. Or perhaps Corvus Glaive skewers Loki with his pike.

And he defo dies protecting Thor in some way. I will accept nothing else (not that I’m accepting it anyways).

that’s such shit though he already “died” protecting Thor and I’d like to think that Thor and Loki are equals and that neither of them should have to die for each other to prove themselves 

*raises hands* I agree with you. I also think it would be a massive waste to kill Loki in Infinity Wars. His connection to Thanos would make for an interesting bit of plot, and I wonder if it will be addressed at all with him dead (which he most certainly will be, probably in the first five minutes).

Well, at least if Loki’s connection with Thanos is never addressed/explained, then Abyss will never become defunct (and I don’t have to finish it before Infinity War comes out, which is probably not going to happen anyway).

Okay my prediction is that Loki won’t die. I know that in the promos we’ve only seen him in that one scene, which doesn’t bode well.

But what if it’s because showing him later in the movie would be a spoiler?

Maybe:

– Loki will give the Tesseract to Thanos, but then it will be revealed at the dramatic conclusion that he had a devious plan to help the Avengers all along.

– We and/or Thor will think Loki is dead, but he’s actually alive and working for Thanos, giving a dramatic reveal when Loki turns up for the final battle.

I have about 80% confidence that Loki will die at some point in the movie, but I’m only at 50% that he’ll die in the first 5 minutes.

If Loki does not die in the first 5 minutes, I’m voting for some combination of the options you outline above: Thor (and possibly the audience) thinks Loki is dead, and he appears to be working for Thanos either when he shows up in the final battle or (if the audience knows he’s alive) during the time between his separation from Thor and the final battle. But then at some point in the final battle he reveals that he was planning to double-cross Thanos all along.

I hate to rain on everyone’s parade (all evidence to the contrary–my meta is one giant storm over parades of people who actually enjoy Ragnarok, and other Marvel movies occasionally), but what possible reason does Thanos have to trust/recruit Loki? Loki lost one of the Infinity Stones. Even if he gives the Tesseract over, the Mind Stone’s still gone, and Thanos may even know about Loki’s part in keeping the Aether from him.

Much as Loki playing double agent sounds cool to me, it just doesn’t seem likely. Thanos would seem stupid, weak, and desperate to trust someone that failed him before, and I’m pretty sure even Marvel knows that.

The reason I think Loki might be apparently allied with Thanos is not so much because Thanos has reason to trust him as because of something Kevin Feige said, reported in this article from The Mary Sue. (Ignore some of the other obnoxious things in the article, including calling Taika Waititi “our Lord and savior.” *shudder* *barf*) If you watch the video, the relevant portion starts at 1:57.

This also supports the hypothesis that Loki will eventually die in the movie, because Feige says he “might show up for a while.” “A while” does seem to suggest longer than 5 minutes, but who knows.

@led-lite

Hmmm… Again, much as the double agent thing is cool, I think it would undermine Thanos’ character (which has thus far been characterized by his brutality even to his minions/allies/children).

Now, if Thanos knows that Loki knows where the Aether is, but not where Loki sent it (which seems odd, but it could be possible), I could see him keeping him around until he… talks… (at which point I think I’d prefer him dying in the first five minutes–death is preferable to more torture)

But who knows. Maybe Marvel will find a way for Loki to convince Thanos he’s tots on his side, and we’ll get the double agent plot line with or without a heroic death later in the film.

They haven’t had a problem with undermining Thanos’s character before… he came off looking pretty fucking incompetent in Guardians of the Galaxy.

Hmm, interesting thought about keeping Loki around to tell him where the Aether is. I don’t think Marvel will show or even imply any really gruesome torture; probably just more electrocution or something. (Thor and Thanos have something in common!) But they’re definitely going for a darker, grimmer (or even grimdark) tone for this movie, so I certainly wouldn’t put it past them.

Or maybe Loki will pretend to be cooperating so he doesn’t get tortured. We can hope.

led-lite:

philosopherking1887:

tobetterourselves:

philosopherking1887:

foundlingmother:

taranoire:

foundlingmother:

foundlingmother:

taranoire:

cathartic discussion time for all my loki stans: how the fuck is he going to be killed 

Thanos seems to have the Power Stone when he arrives on Earth via the portal. I imagine he uses that. Or perhaps Corvus Glaive skewers Loki with his pike.

And he defo dies protecting Thor in some way. I will accept nothing else (not that I’m accepting it anyways).

that’s such shit though he already “died” protecting Thor and I’d like to think that Thor and Loki are equals and that neither of them should have to die for each other to prove themselves 

*raises hands* I agree with you. I also think it would be a massive waste to kill Loki in Infinity Wars. His connection to Thanos would make for an interesting bit of plot, and I wonder if it will be addressed at all with him dead (which he most certainly will be, probably in the first five minutes).

Well, at least if Loki’s connection with Thanos is never addressed/explained, then Abyss will never become defunct (and I don’t have to finish it before Infinity War comes out, which is probably not going to happen anyway).

Okay my prediction is that Loki won’t die. I know that in the promos we’ve only seen him in that one scene, which doesn’t bode well.

But what if it’s because showing him later in the movie would be a spoiler?

Maybe:

– Loki will give the Tesseract to Thanos, but then it will be revealed at the dramatic conclusion that he had a devious plan to help the Avengers all along.

– We and/or Thor will think Loki is dead, but he’s actually alive and working for Thanos, giving a dramatic reveal when Loki turns up for the final battle.

I have about 80% confidence that Loki will die at some point in the movie, but I’m only at 50% that he’ll die in the first 5 minutes.

If Loki does not die in the first 5 minutes, I’m voting for some combination of the options you outline above: Thor (and possibly the audience) thinks Loki is dead, and he appears to be working for Thanos either when he shows up in the final battle or (if the audience knows he’s alive) during the time between his separation from Thor and the final battle. But then at some point in the final battle he reveals that he was planning to double-cross Thanos all along.

Everyone knows I’m very Team “Loki’s-dead-before-the-opening-title-rolls”
but if he does survive I don’t want it to be with Thor ‘seeing’ him die again.

If he survives Thanos’s initial battle against the Asgardian Ark, I want Thor to get rocketed to the Guardians’ ship before he can ‘see’ it. 

Basically, I’d rather have Thor wonder if his brother is still out there than incorrectly thinking he’s dead…for a third fucking time. Sick of that.
But he’s definitely dead before the titles roll. Mark m’words.**

And again…Loki dies in part 3, but there’s some time stone fuckery in part 4 that gives us more screentime…which is fine by me. 

I think the BIG death, if they go for another in the finale of the movie, will be Cap. Cap or Tony, but leaning to Cap. I really need to start a deadpool.

**when I say I’m sure, I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I was spoiler hunting, I’m not shitty like that. I’m just narratively sure because it makes sense to me. /end disclaimer.

Oh good point about Thor watching Loki die – that has gotten old. Maybe he just doesn’t know whether he’s alive, as you suggest; or maybe Thor sees Loki give the Tesseract to Thanos, and perhaps even leave in his company, so he thinks Loki has betrayed him again, even more spectacularly than ever before, since he’s (apparently) allying himself with the person who slaughtered the Asgardians.

toomanylokifeels:

philosopherking1887:

toomanylokifeels:

kingloptr:

philosopherking1887:

These people insisting that when Loki let go at the end of “Thor 1,” he knew he would survive – that it wasn’t a suicide attempt, just a bid to get out of hot water – have they been around since 2011-12, or is this a post-“Ragnarok” phenomenon?

When I see people express that belief, I always think of how Thor and Odin know just as much

(if not more-so.. Loki only just learned his genetics)

as Loki does about what he and his body are capable of surviving. And if they both genuinely believed he was dead after that (which I gotta remind people was not JUST falling into ‘a void’ it was into a really fucked up wormhole warped into existence by the destruction of the Bifrost and all the debris from that powerful technology…), then chances were not high that it was survivable even for someone with his skills, and Loki would’ve guessed that too.

Loki didn’t care about the consequences. He cared about Odin’s approval. With Odin’s final words of disapproval, it was enough for Loki to give up entirely. Loki was denied the one thing that he really wanted so he let go. It was very much a suicide attempt.

Loki may concoct elaborate plans, but there’s little evidence that he planned on surviving his fall. It just so happened by chance that he did, and Loki being Loki he played along with it as if he planned it and as if he’s been in control all along. From then on he just uses this trauma to try to manipulate people.

e.g. Loki trying to manipulate Thor by saying Thor tossed him into the abyss or using his story to win the favor of new allies.

…but make no mistake, folks, Loki intended on ending it all in that moment.

From then on he just uses this trauma to try to manipulate people.

e.g. Loki trying to manipulate Thor by saying Thor tossed him into the abyss or using his story to win the favor of new allies.

I don’t think I’m on board with that interpretation. I don’t think “I remember you tossing me into an abyss” was Loki lying to manipulate Thor into feeling guilty, because if he remembered what actually happened, he would know that the distortion of the facts was too obvious for that to work—and sure enough, Thor comes back at him about “imagined slights.” I think Loki’s memories got screwed with in some way, possibly involving Thanos using the Mind Stone to amplify his resentment toward his former family, or possibly just involving a lot of shame and repression. But he seems to have had enough time to recover since then that he straightened out his own account of what happened.

I’m still wrestling with the “using his story to win the favor of new allies” thing. The fact that he was telling it for laughs still makes me a little uncomfortable, but yes, I’ve been getting a lot of people saying that they joke about their trauma to regain power over it, and I do that too, so OK. I’d hesitate to call it “using his trauma to manipulate people,” though. He found a way to turn it into a good story, which probably includes changing a lot of facts about the lead-up and pretending it wasn’t traumatic, and he’s using it to impress people on Sakaar.

Loki has a tendency to use his version of events to prove loyalty to new allies and/or to get people to sympathize with him. So, he might tell the same story in different ways to different people. Whether he’s impressing someone or trying to prove his loyalty, it’s a form of manipulation that he relies on. 

Loki does this to get Laufey on his side. He does this to trick Malekith. He does this to woo the people of Sakaar. He presumably does this with Thanos. It is possible that the mind stone amplified his resentment and strengthened his resolve, which sees Loki telling Thor that he tossed him into the abyss. 

I don’t disagree that it’s possible. He fell for some time, which would be enough to cause some memory mix-ups in and of itself let alone being in the presence of Thanos and the Chitauri. Perhaps, this will become clearer in Infinity War when Thanos reunites with Loki. 

…but Loki also has a tendency to tell a lie over and over and over again until he genuinely believes it. In the process of manipulating others, he has a tendency to trick himself. Instead of admitting he made choices that lead him to where he was in that moment, it’s easier to cast blame on Thor. 

So, I could personally believe Loki using this event to be manipulative no matter how weak an attempt it may be. He might not be fully conscious or aware of the fact that his retelling of the event isn’t entirely accurate in the context with Thor, but in other contexts he’s more lucid.

By using his trauma to manipulate people, I do mean that he’s using it to win him the favor of Sakaar. Manipulation isn’t always done for nefarious purposes, and I don’t think calling it manipulation is inaccurate in that context for that reason. It’s not a villainistic act, but he is trying to to get people to be sympathetic to him.

It’s something that he continually does in the comics too. A traumatic thing can happen to him, but he’ll find some way to use that to his advantage in the future. In doing so, people tend to forget how traumatic it was or the seriousness of the situation. This also enables Loki some level of control over his narrative. 

That’s why I interpret it as such.

…but Loki also has a tendency to tell a lie over and over and over again until he genuinely believes it.

I see this a lot in fandom characterization of Loki, and I tend to attribute it to him, too, but it occurs to me that I’m not sure when we actually see it. Some people will cite the thing about growing up in Thor’s shadow, or Odin’s favoritism, or Loki’s feeling that people in Asgard didn’t accept and appreciate him, but the sense I got from the first Thor movie was that all that was actually true. And Loki probably didn’t actually know the extent to which his defense before Odin and Frigga in TDW, that he wasn’t doing anything worse than Odin or Bor did, was true, but he seemed to have some inkling. So I don’t think any of those are cases of Loki telling a lie until he believes it himself. Then again, I’m not all that familiar with the comics—I haven’t even made it up to his reincarnation as Kid Loki (I keep getting bogged down in boring stuff early in the 2007 run)—so I may be missing some of the source of that characterization of MCU Loki.

Depending on the nature of the self-deception—and it does seem that he was eventually able to recover the truth, based on the “and then I let go” snippet in Ragnarok—Loki may or may not have been attempting to manipulate Thor with it. If he was, on some level, aware that that was not what happened, I grant that it was probably a somewhat misguided attempt to be manipulative. If, at the moment, he really, fully believed that Thor had tossed him into the abyss, I would consider it a recrimination rather than manipulation, and he would be entirely justified in confronting Thor with it. In any case, the reason I suspect the Mind Stone was involved in distorting his memories or motivating him to lie to himself in such a way is that we see it fostering discord among the Avengers, and we see Wanda use powers derived from it to taunt and unnerve them with their worst memories, regrets, and fears. (I also suspect that Loki got the power to pull out Valkyrie’s worst memory from his contact with the Mind Stone, but that’s getting pretty far out into speculative territory.)

Telling the same story in different ways to different audiences to convince them of his loyalty and/or get them on his side—that he definitely does. So yes, retelling the story of his fall in a way that will win him favor can be seen as falling into the same category as his presentations to Laufey and Malekith.

I rewatched Thor last night. I hadn’t seen it in a while. I didn’t really like it before. I thought the larger than life good guys were a bit sloppily depicted, but I enjoyed it much better this time after having read your musings on Loki’s psychology during the drama. I can appreciate it now. And when Loki falls into space, we can say goodbye to that characterization. I like Joss’ flamboyant sexy bad guy characterization, but it distort the character away from his Shakespearean complexity.

Well, as many of my readers/blog followers know, I think there are ways to square the tragic Shakespearean anti-villain in Thor with the (apparently) flamboyant sexy bad guy in The Avengers, and my longest ongoing work of fanfiction is an effort to do just that. Loki’s time in the Void definitely changed him; it hardened him in certain ways, but clearly he has also fallen under Thanos’s power in some way or other and remains vulnerable. His loyalty to his family and Asgard (though not Odin) was also recoverable, apparently, so whatever happened didn’t completely turn him evil.

Whedon was deliberately leaving open a possibility for redemption by showing Loki as under threat from Thanos, and not just violent and power-mad but fearful. He also showed that Loki was conflicted, and genuinely tempted by Thor’s offers of affection and salvation. Ultimately, I think Whedon came closer than anyone else to approximating the classical tone of the first Thor, though The Avengers was more epic than tragedy.

You seem so sure in your tags that Loki will die in IW? Can I ask why?

raven-brings-light:

Oh lots and lots of reasons. 

Narratively it makes sense from the footage we’ve seen so far. Thanos’s ship shows up at the Ark at the end of Ragnarok, then from IW footage we see a bunch of dead Asgardians, we see Thor about to get crushed by Thanos, we see Loki offering up the Tesseract…then Thor gets picked up by the GOTG floating through space and looking all burnt and stuff. Plus from The Avengers we know that Thanos is probably pretty pretty pretty pissed at him.

Combined with the rumor that someone dies in the first five minutes, it’s not hard to guess who that might be. 

From a utilitarian standpoint it makes sense too. There are SO MANY characters in IW, and there is no way they’re going to want to focus screen time on a secondary/tertiary character who’s not even a hero. It makes more sense to get him out of the way as soon as possible. Even more so when you consider that Loki is such a wild card…just his PRESENCE in Thor’s vision in Ultron was enough to confuse people and make them think he was behind everything and they had to get rid of it…best to just fridge him in IW.

From a “Hollywood” villain redemption standpoint it also makes sense. Hollywood doesn’t know how to redeem bad guys without killing them. They’ve been trying to make Loki more of a good guy, and what better way to complete that journey than to have him killed by Thanos while trying to save Thor’s life.

Also Loki is in practically none of the promo stuff, just the one shot of him with the Tesseract, and the only other bit we’ve seen of him was from filming a bit for Avengers 4 that was clearly a flashback or some kind of time travel to the past, which makes me suspect it’s because he’s just not in most of it.

Anyway, I WILL BE ABSOLUTELY ECSTATIC IF I’M WRONG.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Ugh, I hate that your reasoning is so convincing. I haven’t heard the rumor that someone dies in the first 5 minutes, though. Where did that come from? And what about the thing Feige said about Loki being allied with Thanos in Infinity War? That would be a really misleading way of characterizing “he hands over the Tesseract and gets killed immediately afterward.” (It would still be misleading, but somewhat more conventionally so, if the situation is what I hope it is: Loki pretends to be helping Thanos, but is planning to betray him.)

I’m somewhat inclined to think that they’d only be doing the flashback in Avengers 4 to Loki’s arrest at the end of The Avengers if Loki was still around and they were trying to clarify something about his motivations or his relationship with the Avengers. I could be wrong, but otherwise I’m not sure what the significance of the flashback would be.

If they are planning to kill him by having him sacrifice himself to save Thor and/or stop Thanos, I wonder if they have plans to bring in a Kid Loki. @sexualthorientation‘s recent posts have been making me want to see Timothée Chalamet as an adolescent Loki, Agent of Asgard…

loki-god-of-menace:

[Check this oooout.

I got the Art of Thor: Ragnarok for Christmas and this was one of the concepts for Loki and I’m just. This is one of their ‘new’ Loki concepts, but all I see?

Is field-marshal/general-of-Thanos!Loki, showing up 4 years after Thor 1 with the Titan’s army at his back and an ugly scar across his skull that dives into his hairline. This is Loki with fierce, but dead green eyes and skin that is like ash.

Something bad has happened. His skin is purpleish and white. The scar bespeaks something. It’s almost surgical; almost intentional, and his hair will not grow back to conceal it. But he’s armored and powerful as a lion, and different.

This ISN”T actually that, but that is instantly what I thought of.]