Tag: loki in the avengers

foundlingmother:

Forgive me for turning this into a long response, @foxhoundmemos, and @philosopherking1887 for restating a lot of what you wrote in response. I simply believe this an important enough point to make outside of comments.

foxhoundmemos replied to your post: *deep breath*  The second most irritating thing a…

@foundingmother, perhaps it’s because the text and framing of Whedon’s Avengers has him as just that, what with the kneel scene being in Germany, and one possibly two people who saw WWII right there, the nasty rape by proxy subtext in the ‘mewling quim’ scene and ramblings about ‘free will’ and his glorious purpose to rule this planet.

Now don’t get me wrong, I am a fan of Loki but it’s more to the presence Hiddleston puts toward the character than either Takkia’s buffon or Whedon’s horndog rapist takes on the character.

As for the scene with The Other or Loki’s trial explanation. Neither one of them have enough presence in the cannon to override the faschist bent that Loki has taken on between Thor and the Avengers. In Thor, Loki went extremes when put under pressure in the middle of a psychotic breakdown something that is not present in the Avengers. It’s clear that this is a Loki whose worst traits have been amplified and hardened while Loki’s issues and reasons no longer matter. 

First and foremost, @philosopherking1887 is correct, fascism is not another word for authoritarianism. Ethnonationalism is a key component of fascism. While Loki 100% spouts despotic bullshit, he never says anything that could be consider specifically fascist. I know a lot of people aren’t going to care about this point, but I think it’s important that words mean something, especially when talking about an ideology that’s on the rise again. People who call Loki fascist in Avengers do not understand the actual meaning, only that a vague comparison is drawn between him and Hitler, who was fascist.

Whedon’s sexism is an issue, and there are certainly elements in his movies that are grossly sexist and unnecessary, including the “mewling quim” line and the implication within the lines about Barton killing Nat. Very gross. Two things, however. One, there’s another line of Loki’s that, to me, sounds pretty rape-y: “Perhaps when we’re finished here I’ll pay her a little visit myself.” This implication is a lazy shorthand a lot of writers use to get across how evil a character is. How deranged. It’s gross and dumb. Two, I have to disagree that Loki at any point in the movie feels like a horndog rapist. A sadistic, sexist despot, I can see an argument for, but not horndog rapist.

My counterargument for the idea that Loki literally is a sadistic, sexist despot (or fascist, as fandom refers to it) in Avengers is that the movie frames most of it as a performance masking anger, desperation, fear, loneliness, etc. The scene in Germany stands out more than the scene with the Other, but it’s important to note the purpose of both. They’re both canon, after all, and so both must be factored into an analysis of Loki’s characterization. Loki in Germany is literally performing. That’s the entire point. He’s drawing the crowd’s attention to him so that Barton can do what Loki needs him to, and so that SHIELD will send in its team. The scene with the Other is there to make it clear that Loki’s not 100% in control. That there’s someone watching, ready to torment him if he fails. And it’s far from the only thing in the movie that suggests this. Loki looks horrible when he first appears (and even more so in Thor’s foreshadowing after credits scene), he trips all over himself, he avoids Thor’s questions about who showed him the power of the Tesseract, Thor briefly gets through to him on Stark Tower, he cries, etc. Subtext. And if you want text… Coulson states outright that Loki isn’t going to win because he lacks conviction. So, the movie doesn’t frame Loki as a sadistic, sexist despot. It frames him as an angry, conflicted, traumatized, and dangerous individual who says very intense (and, in the case of the sexism, unnecessary) shit in moments where he’s attempting to manipulate, intimidate, self-aggrandize, etc.

Loki’s issues from Thor aren’t absent from or unimportant in Avengers. The moment he shows up, they are invoked. Selvig refers to Loki as Thor’s brother, earning a dirty look. @philosopherking1887 mentioned the line, “I remember a shadow,” but that entire sequence with Thor’s intended to give us a sense of how deeply hurt and alone Loki feels as a direct result of what happened to him in Thor, and the way that’s fueling his anger and grab for power on Midgard. This attack is still very much connected to the mental breakdown that occurred in Thor, just instead of trying to prove himself and be the hero, as he was trying to in Thor, now he’s trying to hurt his family (as much as they’ve hurt him).

One, there’s another line of Loki’s that, to me, sounds pretty rape-y: “Perhaps when we’re finished here I’ll pay her a little visit myself.” This implication is a lazy shorthand a lot of writers use to get across how evil a character is. How deranged. It’s gross and dumb.

That is entirely correct. What you did not note, however, is that that line is from Thor 1, written by Ashley Edward Miller & Zack Stentz, not from The Avengers, written by Joss Whedon. That bit of grossness cannot be laid at Whedon’s door.

Some of what’s cited as “sexism” in The Avengers is probably better classified as an outdated, i.e. Buffy-era, mode of feminism: the theme of Black Widow being underestimated because she’s a woman and using that underestimation, by both Loki and the Russian mobster at the beginning, to extract information. TVTropes.org calls this the “Wounded Gazelle Gambit”; it might be considered a variant of the honeytrap, except that the female spy uses the assumption of weakness, especially emotional weakness, rather than her sexuality. Maybe I’m less bothered by it than some people because I am still professionally underestimated because of my gender (and stature) and it’s still satisfying to see that subverted, even weaponized. But The Movement has decided that utopianism is the thing to do, so here we are.

I must be innocent or out-of-touch for not interpreting Loki’s threat to have Barton kill Natasha “slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear” as having anything to do with rape. Threatening someone with torture is, of course, horrible, but it doesn’t have to be either sexual or gender-specific. The word “intimate” doesn’t always have anything to do with sex, and it’s most powerful when it doesn’t. Killing someone “intimately,” to me, means killing them while looking into their eyes, having seen how they break down in response to severe pain with no end in sight. That’s an especially creepy thing to threaten her with given that Clint is her friend, and it should be creepy, since Loki is trying to unnerve her. But the only things that I read as gendered were (1) targeting her emotional vulnerability and (2) calling her a cunt.

Loki dropped him like 25,000 feet in a glass cage, he told him that his father was dead, he backhanded him with the destroyer, he stabbed him in the chest – on several different occasions. The fact is that had Thor not turned the tables on him in that moment that he was going to hand him back over to the grandmaster to be put back in the cage and used for his battles. Thor and Loki are called gods for a reason. And he laughed b/ he knew that Loki would get out of it like he does everything.

lucianalight:

I got this ask in response to this post.

None of the things you mentioned can be considered as torture. Loki dropped Thor with the glass cage right after he saw that Mjolnir could crack the glass. The reason Thor stopped attempting to break the glass wasn’t because the glass was unbreakable, but because the cage would fall if he continued. So Loki knew Thor could free himself before the cage hit the ground. Yes, Loki lied to Thor about Odin’s death and he almost killed him with that backhand and IMO these are very horrible and

the worst things he ever did to Thor. Still they are not torture. He broke Thor with his lies but those lies showed Thor that the consequences of his actions can be very grave. Also an argument can be made that if Loki really wanted Thor dead, he would incinerate him with the destroyer not backhand him. The only time Loki really stabbed Thor was in The Avengers. They were fighting, and it was a stab to the gut not the chest and it was with a really small blade that didn’t harm Thor that much. The stab in TDW was an illusion(again that was a stab to the gut), because when he lifted the illusion Thor’s armor was intact while in The Avengers, Thor’s armor remained torn after the stab.

No one said Thor shouldn’t have stopped Loki from betraying him. But Thor could simply make Loki unconscious with the obedience disk(I explained in this post that the device has two settings). That would be acceptable. But Thor chose to leave Loki in constant pain with the device on for an infinite amount of time. Yes, Thor and Loki are called gods and they are more durable. But just because they can tolerate more pain, it doesn’t make it ok to inflict pain on them. It’s still pain and the obedience disc is a torture device. And no Thor had no way of knowing that Loki could get out of it. In fact he knew Loki couldn’t free himself. Thor with all his power, was paralyzed by the obedience disc. Even his lightning couldn’t get him free from it. Only the control device could free Loki. And he was unable to move.

What is torture?

“The action or practice of inflicting severe pain on someone as a
punishment or to force them to do or say something, or for the pleasure
of the person inflicting the pain.”

Thor didn’t just stopped Loki’s betrayal. He inflicted severe pain on him for an infinite amount of time

as punishment for his betrayal and then had the audacity to gleefully preach Loki about growth and change and laugh at his pain.

What Thor did in TR was torture and that makes him so much ooc that I don’t consider TR Thor, the real Thor.

I think it would be appropriate to reiterate what I said in the last post linked in the above (the one arguing that the obedience disc is a torture device), so here it is again for people who don’t bother to follow links:

< I’ve been seeing a lot of people try to justify Thor* by pointing out that Loki has done worse things to him; most commonly they will cite the incident in The Avengers where Loki drops Thor out of the Helicarrier in the Hulk cage. (This is such a common move that I feel like it’s got to be in some Thor* stan/ Ragnarok defense playbook.) Here is why that comparison doesn’t accomplish what they want it to accomplish:

  1. It was entirely reasonable for Loki to think he was not endangering Thor’s life. He knew Thor could get out of the cage because he had Mjolnir with him. As far as we can tell, in Ragnarok, Thor* had no way of knowing that the first people who would happen along were Korg & co. as opposed to, e.g., Topaz, who probably would have just killed Loki while he was incapacitated. Maybe he did have some way of knowing, but this was not made at all clear in the film. So even if he didn’t think he was endangering Loki’s life, he was being culpably negligent.
  2. In The Avengers, Loki was acting as an adversary, and everyone was completely aware of that. He was trying to hamper his opponents by scattering them, and possibly to demoralize Thor by showing that he wasn’t going to get his brother back. In Ragnarok, Thor* presented what he did as some kind of “tough love” – punishing Loki “for his own good,” with the aim of getting Loki back on his side rather than (as Loki was doing in The Avengers) turning him decisively against him. If you can’t see why that’s kind of fucked up, well…
  3. Loki is clearly aware that what he’s doing in The Avengers is wrong. He hesitates before he hits the button to drop the cage, and hesitates again (with tears in his eyes, FFS!) before he stabs Thor later. He’s conflicted, and it’s not unreasonable to think he regrets hurting Thor when he’s no longer under direct threat from Thanos (his attempts at self-justification in TDW have a defensive air that make me think the lady doth protest too much). In Ragnarok, Thor* just looks smug and self-righteous about the electrocution thing, even though he’s very aware that Loki is in severe pain. >

And I’m sure I’ve said it somewhere else, but again, it doesn’t really make sense to compare the electrocution in Ragnarok to the things Loki did to Thor in Thor 1 and The Avengers because in both of the latter cases, it’s made pretty clear that Loki isn’t in his right mind. In Thor 1, Loki has pretty clearly been profoundly disturbed by the revelation that he actually belongs to a race that he has been taught all his life to hate and fear (and that Thor has twice vowed to “finish”). He is convinced that the reason Odin always favored Thor is because Loki is really Jotun, not Asgardian, so he’s desperate to prove how very Asgardian and not Jotun he really is. I agree that it’s not clear whether Loki meant to kill Thor with the Destroyer; he must have known that killing Odin’s other son wouldn’t be a great way of earning his favor. (Maybe he had it backhand rather than incinerate him so he could pass it off as an accident… or maybe he lacked commitment there too.) At any rate, he is very obviously emotionally and psychologically unwell for… over half of the movie, tbh, but it becomes increasingly obvious in the last third.

In The Avengers, Loki shows up looking like shit; his eyes are wild and hollow and he’s saying some really weird stuff. When they communicate through the scepter, the Other threatens him and he looks terrified. No, Loki wasn’t completely under Thanos’s control and maybe he bears some responsibility for getting himself into that position… but again, he’s clearly been through some shit and is under severe duress. And, as noted above, he’s conflicted about hurting Thor.

Thor* has no such excuse or explanation in Ragnarok. On the contrary; he’s presented as being fully in control, cool-headed, rational, oh-so-cleverly out-thinking his clever brother. He even thought up this scheme in advance, because he predicted that Loki would betray him (for no good reason other than it was needed as set-up for the “trickster tricked” scenario where Loki gets his painful, humiliating comeuppance). Thor*’s action is more blameworthy than anything Loki has done to him because he does it while in full possession of his faculties and shows sadistic glee at making Loki suffer.

And no, Loki has not been stabbing Thor or “trying to kill him” since they were children. Taika Waititi pulled that out of his ass. It should be obvious from Thor 1 that Thor trusts Loki, that they’ve been comrades in arms for centuries, and that Loki’s betrayal and his demand that Thor fight him come as an incredible shock. If you want to accept the stabbing-since-childhood BS as canon, then you’d better stop citing anything Loki does in Thor 1, including telling Thor their father is dead and striking him with the Destroyer, because clearly you’re ignoring what that movie established as the longtime dynamic between them. You want to pretend previous canon doesn’t exist? Then at least do it consistently.

just-another-millenial97:

shercockled:

#can i jsut #cAN I JUST #FUCKING #LOKI THINKS THE ONLY REASON THOR CAME LOOKING FOR HIM IS BECAUSE HE STOLE THE TESSERACT#AND THE ONLY REASON HE WANTS HIM TO COME HOME IS SO THAT THE TESSERACT IT RETURNED #HE DOESN’T EVEN SEE THAT THOR MISSES HIM AS A BROTHER #HE DOESN’T THINK HE HIMSELF IS A GOOD ENOUGH REASON FOR THOR TO COME AFTER HIM #AND LIKE #HIS FUCKING EXPRESSION OF DISBELIEF IN THE SECOND ONE #LIKE #WHAT #THOR WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT #YOU DONT WANT ME HOME #AND THEN THE THIRD ONE #I DONT EVEN KNOW IF HE’S LAUGHING AT HIMSELF FOR ALMOST BELIEVING IT FOR A MOMENT#OR AT THOR FOR EVEN SUGGESTING IT #AND WOW OKAY I THOUGHT I WAS OVER THIS SHIT #BUT IM FUCKING NOT #I AM 300% DONE WITH THESE LOKI FEELS #FUCK

This is whole movie is so heartbreaking when you take the time to see it from Loki’s perspective

queencfthestarsdrfoster:

thewasandshouldbeking:

madetoruleyou:

fillingnegativespace:

littlekanima:

odinsmightymustache:

missisjoker:

There’s some things about Loki in the Avengers that don’t add up.

In first photo he looks like he was falling through a space dumpster – but he was relatively OK.

In second picture, a year (or so) after he fell through abyss, he looks like a drug addict in desperate need of a dose. He is all sweaty, shaky, his eyes are hollow, he is pale, and stumbles when he walks.

Why would Loki exchange unlimited power (he knew exactly what the Tesseract was since it was once held in Odin’s treasury) that he could have used to get ALL the realms if he wanted to for just Midgard? It doesn’t make sense.

And in the end- when he said “I’ll have that drink now" after getting Hulk smashed, didn’t he seem different? Like he had snapped out of something?

What the hell happened to him?

Thanos, that’s what. I believe after Loki got a glimpse of the Tesseract, Thanos somehow learned about it and abducted Loki. Tortured, threatened, put put him on a “drug” of some sort- maybe the scepter or some other sort of energy, poisoned Loki’s mind.

Thanos’s influence brought out features Loki already had and made them grotesque- all his anger, pain, jealousy, thirst for attention, taste for mass destruction. Once done, Loki became a tool for Thanos.

The way Loki kept talking about freedom- wasn’t it suspicious? Wasn’t it like a subconsciousness cry for help?

(To those who think this theory is an attempt to vindicate Loki’s actions and make him “innocent”- it’s not.) The scepter’s control was not breaking a man’s personality and creating something new- no- it was bringing up characteristics of the man and making them extreme.

also

the bit mentioned, “The scepter’s control was not “breaking man’s personality and creating something new”- no- it was bringing up the strongest characteristics of the man and making them extreme.”


Remember when Bruce was getting kind of worked up

and he grabbed that fucking scepter? 

image

ALL OF IT. You’re brilliant and I love you, beautiful individual that wrote this.

Headcanon accepted and filed in the official library under the letter B for Brilliant.

THIS

(PLEASE NOTE: I’ve made changes to this post to cut back on length and improve the organization of the argument)

The Scepter is basically the One Ring of Power. And this is 100% my take on Loki’s time between “Thor" and “Avengers", jsyk.

This is much more painful to read after Infinity War.

Loki wanted to get away from Thanos as far as possible. But in the end he didn’t run. He faced Thanos head on. Did he really feel like he had nothing more to lose?

scintillatingshortgirl19:

palladicannoneaccesa:

Tom Hiddleston in ‘The Avengers’, (2012). Dir. Joss Whedon.

Something I really love about this shot is the way Loki looks at the scepter for a second right before attacking with it. I can kind of see his thought process throughout the gifs – he arrives, just having come from whatever horrors he’s experienced with Thanos, disoriented, probably very scared on the inside. He examines this extremely powerful weapon he probably has no experience using. He gathers what little strength he has, collects his thoughts, can I really do this, and then he looks up, menacing,

there’s no turning back now, attacks in sudden full-villain mode, and proceeds to continue this way for the duration of the story – mad and murderous and unshakably determined, with terror and agony just barely contained under the surface. It’s one of those little things that shows how lost he is in this film underneath the “big bad villain” exterior. 

forassgard:

It was so fun because there was something of a showman’s elegance about it. (..) It was all going to be set to this amazing piece of Schubert, as it was. Joss’s script described: Loki flips his staff. And in the same beat, forehands a security guard across the face. And we did it in one take. I felt like I was seven years old when I was doing it. (x)

seidrade:

philosopherking1887:

seidrade:

shine-of-asgard:

lolawashere:

Tom Hiddleston as Loki featured in the Avengers: Infinity War – The Official Movie Special ​​​book.

Via Torrilla/weibo

I neither can nor want to read this tbh. Anyone else can give general heads-up as to how atrocious this is re: general vilifying, powers / intelligence erasure, backstory and so on?

@shine-of-asgard Its honestly fine if you want to read— that first page is just brief interview questions. Mostly Tom just talking about wearing his costume, getting into character, his acting relationship with Hemsworth (this part is quite sweet), his love of Branagh’s approach to Thor and his excitement/observation that people have latched onto the characters and seem to enjoy having real emotions in their blockbuster superhero movies. The “bad boy” bit in the title isn’t followed-up except for where Tom (probably jokingly) says the horns give Loki a bit of the devil about him.

What did catch my eye was the blurb about the Mind Stone on the next page— and the claim that Thanos didn’t know what it was when he gave it to Loki in the scepter. I’m sorry, what?!?! This is news to me.

WTF, Marvel? How do you keep making your big bad scary new villain sound like such a dipshit? At this point I believe my own account of what happened with Thanos more than I believe anything coming from these ass-clowns.

Also I just caught that it says “[Thanos] granted use of the stone to Loki to help him in his proposed conquest of Earth”

So like, not to take this too seriously because honestly, who knows how closely this kind of collateral print stuff is proofread by the higher ups…

But that sounds like it was Loki’s idea to target Earth— which is something that’s often been debated. Loki has a few lines in Avengers that sound like he’s doubtful of Thanos’ ability to deliver an army. The Other says something like “you’ll have your war, Asgardian” — doesn’t he? (I can’t pull up a video at the moment to see.)

I always thought that was a bit funny because Loki was clearly being threatened/coerced/tortured on some level and clearly under Thanos’ control. So why did it sound so much like he was trying to bargain, as if he were an equal partner in the venture? I always figured those comments were merely Loki trying to reassert his regal bearing and pull his pride together, trying to hide his fear before going off to “conquer.”

But… if Loki was the one who first suggested going to Earth (perhaps offering his services in order to save his own skin) his comments would make even more sense, because then of course he’d want to act as though he actually gave a shit about conquering Midgard as a general of Thanos. He’d have to make Thanos and The Other believe he was dedicated to not just Thanos’ cause, but his own selfish goals of ruling Earth— which of course, wouldn’t possibly compete with Thano’s goal of attaining the Stones.

Btw— if Thanos didn’t even know he already had the fucking Mind Stone in his thot little hands, how the hell did he know the Tesseract was on Earth? (Remind me— Do they say in any of the movies/deleted scenes specifically why Thanos knows about the Tesseract being found/reawakened on Earth? I forget if it’s explicitly mentioned that the energy signature calls to him or to the Mind Stone, etc. If that’s ever mentioned on screen, then something really doesn’t add up and this book is talking nonsense. But if it’s only a vague reference, perhaps we can deduce that Loki knew what the Mind Stone was, and/or told him about the Tesseract in order to entice Thanos into working with his plan.)

Either way… Loki probably knew if he played his cards right, there was a decent chance of Thor and Co. or even Odin himself preventing him from taking the Tesseract. So it makes me wonder if Loki purposefully leapt at the chance to also snag the Mind Stone from Thanos (getting caught and allowing the Avengers to analyze it, then later tossing it aside for Natasha to find— he practically giftwraps it for them) as well as botching the invasion and making sure the Tesseract would land in Thor/Asgard’s hands. Maybe he didn’t know which Stone would end up where, but he knew that anywhere was better than with Thanos, and not having either Stone would significantly hinder Thano’s ability to reach the Nine Realms.

Whew. So yes…

I always thought Loki purposefully pulled quite the fast one on Thanos by losing on purpose— but this would be potential proof that he pulled a double fast-one, knowing what the Mind Stone was before Thanos did.

Now I just want to know if Thanos was like, hmm you’ll need a weapon, how about this long piece of junk— and Loki saw the Mind Stone and was like YES I mean sure, I guess that’ll do, you’re the boss *shrug*

Yeah, I do think the way we were supposed to interpret those lines in The Avengers was that it was Loki’s idea to invade and conquer Earth. I also kind of suspect (as I acknowledged in the notes to the chapter of “Abyss” where I dealt with it) that the tag scene at the end of Thor, where we see Loki looking all beat-up and still in the formal armor he was wearing when he fell, was supposed to have taken place shortly after Loki fell, and maybe we were supposed to infer that he had fallen to Earth and somehow found the Tesseract himself.

But neither of those ideas made a whole lot of sense to me. I mean, I guess it’s possible that Loki has the ability to detect powerful magical objects. But I knew they were building toward something with Thanos and the Infinity Stones – I didn’t get into the MCU until after AOU had come out, so I didn’t start writing MCU fanfiction until I’d watched all the way through that – so I kind of thought of Infinity Stones as being Thanos’s thing, and it made more sense to me that Thanos was the one who had found the Tesseract using the Mind Stone, which we knew he gave to Loki. No, they don’t say explicitly that the Mind Stone detected the tampering with the Tesseract; there’s just that bit of ominous narration by The Other at the beginning of The Avengers, saying “The Tesseract has awakened. It is on a little world,” etc. They do show him handing the scepter to Loki in the same little intro bit, but I don’t think we’re supposed to draw any inferences from that.

There was also that exchange in The Avengers where Loki says “I have seen the true power of the Tesseract” and Thor immediately asks, “Who showed you this power? Who controls the would-be king?” That strongly suggested to me that Loki wouldn’t have known all that much about the Infinity Stones before his encounter with Thanos, which is why Thor immediately infers that someone else must have taught him. And that made me seriously question whether invading Earth had actually been Loki’s idea, because Thanos is the one who wants the Tesseract and knows how and where to find it. So… what gives? And that’s why I decided for fic purposes that Thanos convinced Loki that invading Earth was his idea, Inception-style. Using the Mind Stone, of course, because he had it. And he definitely fucking knew what it was, I don’t know what that writer was smoking. He temporarily relinquished one Infinity Stone in order to secure a second. It didn’t work out, but sometimes you gotta take a gamble to win big.