krakensdottir:

Apparently there is still some argument over whether Loki was tortured/coerced into the actions of The Avengers? And whether there was any mind-scrambling involved?

Well I can see why. I mean…

Thanos would never do a thing like that (torture), because he’s surely a nicer guy than Nick Fury who suggests it right off the bat;

Loki would totally sign up to assist a much more powerful being in universe-conquering, that’s totally smart and sane and how he rolls, no coercion needed to place himself at the mercy of a cosmic-powered asshole;

The Other has clearly never threatened him before, Loki seems to trust it completely and is totally shocked that they don’t have the happiest business arrangement;

Loki’s “plan” isn’t reckless or bafflingly stupid or full of holes or in any way uncharacteristic of him at all;

It’s not like he has those same dark sleep-deprived circles around his eyes that Barton and Selvig develop;

It’s not as if he talks like a madman spouting indoctrinated-sounding nonsense like a freshly converted acolyte;

It’s not like even Thor thinks someone is controlling him;

Not like Thor and Banner both allude to him clearly being “beyond reason”, i.e. not in his right mind;

Not like Loki’s carrying a scepter around most of the film that is shown onscreen to negatively effect the emotions and behavior of people who even stand in a room with it for a short time, and anyway he’d surely be immune to it if he was, being so emotionally stable and not at all vulnerable;

Not like mind control is a running theme in this film or anything;

Loki’s dialogue in a cut extended scene certainly doesn’t allude to having been “touched” by the same power himself;

And of course he appears to be in great health, pallor and sweating and stumbling and lank greasy hair and months’ worth of shadows under his eyes notwithstanding, so it stands to reason he’s A-OK mentally. He’s just evil. For the evulz.

Yes, I can clearly see you’d have to be a hormone-addled bleeding-heart fangirl desperate to redeem the hot villain to see ANYTHING suspect in any of this. Torture, mind control, pfft. When will we learn to stop thinking like that? Logic schmogic, stop using your brains, girls.

I love this meta with my life

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Loki was not “mind controlled” in exactly the same way as Barton and Selvig, which we know because his eyes are definitely not that bright crystalline blue. BUT he’s clearly been threatened, probably tortured, and also quite probably messed with in some way using the Mind Stone. As ever, please see my currently 72,000-word fic for details on how this might have gone down.

Philosopher_King – Works | Archive of Our Own

philosopherking1887:

Hey, guys! I’m submitting my dissertation on Wednesday (November 15), which means that I’ve been holed up working on it for most of the past few weeks, so I’m pretty stressed out but also lonely and bored. I also have not had time to write or post new fic recently, so I probably have no right asking you to go read my old stuff… but it would be really encouraging and cheering if someone wanted to read something of mine and leave a comment on it. Please, talk to me about my weird obsessions! (And reassure me that I haven’t been wasting my time on them…)

Many of my followers have already read all of my fic, for which I am grateful!! And I’m sorry for boring you by reposting old stuff. But for those of you who may not know: I write Thor/Loki fic as well as gen fic centered on Loki and his brotherly relationship with Thor. Or rather, I have written such and will start writing it again after I finish my dissertation.

Reblogs are, as ever, greatly appreciated.

Philosopher_King – Works
|
Archive of Our Own

Why was Loki able to extract Valkyrie’s memory?

ikoliholic:

philosopherking1887:

This is not something we’ve seen him do before. Not that he would have had any occasion to in previous movies, but this is kind of in a different category from other things he does with magic: mostly illusions, shapeshifting, and moving things around.

This is some wild-ass, blatantly self-interested speculation, but… what if the power to draw out other people’s memories is a relatively new ability that he gained from his interaction with the Mind Stone? Scarlet Witch got her powers from experimentation with the Mind Stone, and one of the things we’ve seen her do is get into people’s heads and make them experience things based on their worst fears and most painful memories.

This at least suggests that forcing people to re-experience memories is one of the things that the Mind Stone can do, in addition to co-opting their will to make them serve the aims of the wielder. I think everyone I know has dismissed the idea that Thanos was controlling Loki the way Loki controlled Barton and Selvig; that’s probably not something you can do to a magically powerful being like Loki. BUT Scarlet Witch was able to do the fear-exploiting thing with Thor, and Loki simultaneously experienced and forced the Valkyrie to re-experience her worst memory – that is something you can do to more powerful beings.

So… this provides some circumstantial evidence in favor of the theory I explore in my fic The Abyss Gazes Also about what happened between Thanos and Loki: that Thanos exploited Loki’s own fears, resentments, and insecurities and forced him to re-experience his most traumatic memories involving his family (especially Thor and Odin) to manipulate him into invading Earth on Thanos’s behalf and fighting against his adoptive family.

Tagging people who read my fic and might care: @angrymadsygin, @darklittlestories, @fuckyeahrichardiii, @iamhisgloriouspurpose, @ikoliholic, @illwynd, @lunariagold, @nursejoh53, @raven-brings-light, @writernotwaiting

@philosopherking1887 here for this theory… i thought something along these lines while watching the film:

“Well, THAT’S new. Has he been fuckin round with gemstones? Is this an easy device to do CHARACTER FLASHBACK + VERIFICATION? or is Loki just growing more into his skills in his spare time?”

answer? I personally think it’s probably all three 😀

Yeah… I’ve had some people reblogging saying they think Loki has always been able to do this, and I’m like… based on what? Probably they just want him always to have been as powerful as possible, but I’m big on consistency and constraints.

Philosopher_King – Works | Archive of Our Own

Hey, guys! I’m submitting my dissertation on Wednesday (November 15), which means that I’ve been holed up working on it for most of the past few weeks, so I’m pretty stressed out but also lonely and bored. I also have not had time to write or post new fic recently, so I probably have no right asking you to go read my old stuff… but it would be really encouraging and cheering if someone wanted to read something of mine and leave a comment on it. Please, talk to me about my weird obsessions! (And reassure me that I haven’t been wasting my time on them…)

Many of my followers have already read all of my fic, for which I am grateful!! And I’m sorry for boring you by reposting old stuff. But for those of you who may not know: I write Thor/Loki fic as well as gen fic centered on Loki and his brotherly relationship with Thor. Or rather, I have written such and will start writing it again after I finish my dissertation.

Philosopher_King – Works
|
Archive of Our Own

(Reply to The Neck Thing) I get why you would see it that way, that the gesture scared him because it threatened the mission. I always interpreted the longing look in his eyes to mean that the nostalgia of the touch made him consider taking up Thor’s offer: to stop everything and come home. That little laugh and head shake he does afterward always made me think that he was pushing the thought from his mind because he feels he can’t stop, because he feared Thanos or whatever reason he had.

Oh, absolutely. As I’m sure you know, because I talk about it a lot on my blog (it’s easier for me to point people to it than rewrite it on Tumblr as meta, but people usually aren’t interested…), I have written a fic, The Abyss Gazes Also, speculating about how exactly Thanos got Loki to the point where he was willing to go to Earth to fetch the Tesseract for him. It’s now reached the events of The Avengers, which I’m telling from Loki’s POV, and the most recent chapter deals with that conversation with Thor, including Loki’s conflicted feelings about Thor trying The Neck Thing on him (twice!).

Why was Loki able to extract Valkyrie’s memory?

led-lite:

philosopherking1887:

This is not something we’ve seen him do before. Not that he would have had any occasion to in previous movies, but this is kind of in a different category from other things he does with magic: mostly illusions, shapeshifting, and moving things around.

This is some wild-ass, blatantly self-interested speculation, but… what if the power to draw out other people’s memories is a relatively new ability that he gained from his interaction with the Mind Stone? Scarlet Witch got her powers from experimentation with the Mind Stone, and one of the things we’ve seen her do is get into people’s heads and make them experience things based on their worst fears and most painful memories.

This at least suggests that forcing people to re-experience memories is one of the things that the Mind Stone can do, in addition to co-opting their will to make them serve the aims of the wielder. I think everyone I know has dismissed the idea that Thanos was controlling Loki the way Loki controlled Barton and Selvig; that’s probably not something you can do to a magically powerful being like Loki. BUT Scarlet Witch was able to do the fear-exploiting thing with Thor, and Loki simultaneously experienced and forced the Valkyrie to re-experience her worst memory – that is something you can do to more powerful beings.

So… this provides some circumstantial evidence in favor of the theory I explore in my fic The Abyss Gazes Also about what happened between Thanos and Loki: that Thanos exploited Loki’s own fears, resentments, and insecurities and forced him to re-experience his most traumatic memories involving his family (especially Thor and Odin) to manipulate him into invading Earth on Thanos’s behalf and fighting against his adoptive family.

Tagging people who read my fic and might care: @angrymadsygin, @darklittlestories, @fuckyeahrichardiii, @iamhisgloriouspurpose, @ikoliholic, @illwynd, @lunariagold, @nursejoh53, @raven-brings-light, @writernotwaiting

@philosopherking1887 Honestly, my inclination as well. It’s not exactly like Loki would have been around to experience this happening so he couldn’t project something that he knew or witnessed, he had to have reached into her mind.

I further thought that Loki may have also been able to blend some of these new powers into whatever the hell he did to Odin because Odin would not have known or expected his son to come at him with these abilities.

(Sidenote, my ‘funny’ head canon is that Odin regaining his mind is what caused the actual destruction of that Shady Acres old folks home, take that or leave it :p)

Oh, interesting point about Odin. That actually suggests that the Mind Stone allows someone to delete or alter memories, or maybe even implant false ones. I was resisting the idea that that was something Thanos could have done to Loki – even though it’s a much neater explanation of the “I remember you tossing me into an abyss” line – because I thought it would be more interesting, poignant, and ultimately fucked-up if he was able to get Loki to the point he was at in “The Avengers” using only Loki’s own memories and emotions as raw material…

Why was Loki able to extract Valkyrie’s memory?

This is not something we’ve seen him do before. Not that he would have had any occasion to in previous movies, but this is kind of in a different category from other things he does with magic: mostly illusions, shapeshifting, and moving things around.

This is some wild-ass, blatantly self-interested speculation, but… what if the power to draw out other people’s memories is a relatively new ability that he gained from his interaction with the Mind Stone? Scarlet Witch got her powers from experimentation with the Mind Stone, and one of the things we’ve seen her do is get into people’s heads and make them experience things based on their worst fears and most painful memories.

This at least suggests that forcing people to re-experience memories is one of the things that the Mind Stone can do, in addition to co-opting their will to make them serve the aims of the wielder. I think everyone I know has dismissed the idea that Thanos was controlling Loki the way Loki controlled Barton and Selvig; that’s probably not something you can do to a magically powerful being like Loki. BUT Scarlet Witch was able to do the fear-exploiting thing with Thor, and Loki simultaneously experienced and forced the Valkyrie to re-experience her worst memory – that is something you can do to more powerful beings.

So… this provides some circumstantial evidence in favor of the theory I explore in my fic The Abyss Gazes Also about what happened between Thanos and Loki: that Thanos exploited Loki’s own fears, resentments, and insecurities and forced him to re-experience his most traumatic memories involving his family (especially Thor and Odin) to manipulate him into invading Earth on Thanos’s behalf and fighting against his adoptive family.

Tagging people who read my fic and might care: @angrymadsygin, @darklittlestories, @fuckyeahrichardiii, @iamhisgloriouspurpose, @ikoliholic, @illwynd, @lunariagold, @nursejoh53, @raven-brings-light, @writernotwaiting

starrynightfantasies:

lynx1825:

kate-vega:

Odin forgave Loki

Considering the shit Odin has done in his lifetime I’m amazed he had the nerve to stick Loki in prison in Thor 2. If he wanted to punish those intent on world domination that much we’d have only seen him from behind bars.

⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️⬆️ THIS!

This movie actually lends some credibility to my fanfictional speculation about why Odin treated Loki the way he did in TDW.

philosopherking1887:

mihrsuri:

A moodboard/fic poster for The Abyss Gazes Also (MCU, Loki) by @philosopherking1887 (won in the fandomlovespuertorico charity auction)

I bought (donated?) myself a thing. I’m feeling pretty good about my spending choices, and not only because it was for a good cause…

And now I’m desperately hoping that Thor: Ragnarok hasn’t contradicted the basic premise of the fic, because I would be sad if it became obsolete before I even finished it.

Tagging some readers/mutuals/friends(?) who might appreciate this: @angrymadsygin, @darklittlestories, @fuckyeahrichardiii, @illwynd, @raven-brings-light

philosopherking1887:

mihrsuri:

A moodboard/fic poster for The Abyss Gazes Also (MCU, Loki) by @philosopherking1887 (won in the fandomlovespuertorico charity auction)

I bought (donated?) myself a thing. I’m feeling pretty good about my spending choices, and not only because it was for a good cause…

And now I’m desperately hoping that Thor: Ragnarok hasn’t contradicted the basic premise of the fic, because I would be sad if it became obsolete before I even finished it.

Tagging some readers/mutuals/friends(?) who might appreciate this: @angrymadsygin, @darklittlestories, @fuckyeahrichardiii, @illwynd, @raven-brings-light