^ This scene right here is the best his hair has ever looked. Not too greasy, not too slicked-back, no Christmas tree spikes, just a little hint of a wave.
Fine. I guess I’ll just have to go it alone. Like I’ve always done.
I’ve talked about Loki’s response before, but I like this part too because in the first gif, Loki looks like he’s about to be like, “Now wait a minute, that’s totally not what happened,” but by the third gif, his face is more of a resigned, “You’re not going to believe me anyway, so why would I try to defend myself?”
Poor Loki. 😦
I think Tom Hiddleston included more of Loki’s POV and emotional depth in his facial expressions than were in the script.
Friendly reminder that Loki never showed any general ill-will toward Asgard or intent to destroy Asgard and that usurping Odin at the end of TDW didn’t necessarily have to bode ill for Asgard’s fate, as we had no reason to believe he would rule poorly. That Ragnarok revealed his “evil plan” being community theatre shouldn’t be much of a surprise – by which, I mean I didn’t expect the community theatre part, but I didn’t expect to see Asgard in tyrannical ruins under Loki’s rule, either. Loki has always proven himself sensible, analytical, and highly intelligent. He would have absolutely nothing to gain by using Odin’s form to run Asgard into the ground. Despite what Thor says about the Nine Realms being in chaos, I’m pretty sure things were fine and were always going to be fine under Loki.
And the other thing is… that line about the Nine Realms being in chaos – which has encouraged everyone to trash Loki as a terrible king and paint his usurping Odin as another horrific crime for which he deserved any maltreatment Thor subsequently decided to inflict on him – is an example of just how half-assed Ragnarok’s “critique of imperialism” really is (as @foundlingmother and I have discussed at length). So conquest is bad, but non-interventionism is equally bad? Sudden withdrawal from protectorates that have been left in no condition to protect or govern themselves is certainly not great, but it’s a complicated issue exactly what kind of aid or training withdrawing conquerors should provide. (Is it “weaning” away from dependency, or just extending the period of dependency? Doesn’t “teaching” self-governance involve a kind of cultural imperialism, as the conqueror generally ends up teaching the ex-protectorate how to imitate its own system of government?) It’s understandable that a comic book action movie isn’t going to explore those kinds of issues in depth (and boy, did Civil War massively fail on that score – though Black Panther did a pretty good job wrestling with it), but… if you’re going to bring it up in the form of a ham-handed allegory, you can’t also have this glaring (at least apparent) inconsistency and not address it.
This appears to be another example of the film dropping the ball on its otherwise worthy anti-imperialism message when it comes to Loki – probably deliberately, considering the lack of sympathy and respect the film and its creator show for Loki in just about every other context. As I’ve also discussed at length, Ragnarok missed, or simply passed on, an obvious opportunity to address Loki’s place in Asgard’s imperialist history, as the child of a conquered people raised in ignorance of his heritage and with such contempt and hatred toward his own kind that when he discovered he was one of them he tried to wipe them out. I’m going to excerpt the most relevant part of that old post:
Loki’s story could have been used to flesh out the narrative about colonialism. Recall Hela’s dismissive remark about bogus “peace treaties” commemorated on the redecorated walls of the throne room: that might have been an allusion to the one-sided “treaties” that Britain and the U.S. signed with American Indian nations and then trampled all over. Loki could have been one of those stolen indigenous children raised among the colonists and taught to scorn the people to whom he was born. But for some reason Waititi and the writers didn’t make the connection, or didn’t want to tie Loki in to that aspect of the story. … maybe it was just because Loki has been a villain and they didn’t want to draw a connection between a (part-time) villain – or anyway, a character they just don’t like – and the oppressed of colonialism (though making him queer is OK, I guess). For whatever reason, they wanted to keep Loki firmly coded as White (which makes him easier to ridicule!) and gloss over the part where he’s only white-passing (literally; he’s actually blue).
And I’m not the only one; @endiness put it nicely:
the movie features asgard’s ‘past’ history of imperialism and colonization as a major plot point… but then it excludes loki from the narrative when he easily has a place in it. like, how could he not when he’s the adopted (kidnapped) son of the leader of an enemy nation left in ruin after losing to asgard? and when odin literally admitted that he took loki for political purposes? but, again, nothing about any of this at all. (actually, even worse than loki and his heritage and the circumstances being entirely excluded from the story, it isn’t; it’s brought up but only in the context of humor explicitly at loki’s expense to make a mockery of the emotional complexity and depth of his character in the previous movies.)
So the upshot seems to be: hammer in your anti-imperialist message except when Loki might appear to be on the oppressed rather than oppressor’s end of the equation, when the issue threatens to give him more depth and complexity and make him remotely sympathetic. Condemn Hela and Odin (but only sometimes; Thor can still appeal to him for strength at the end) for being imperialists, but condemn Loki for failing to be imperialist enough.
Avengers Infinity War BBC Interview: Tom Hiddleston Talks about “The Tragedy of Loki” Scene
Int: And then Matt Damon, surely that must have been a pinch yourself…
Tom: It was very weird, yeah, very peculiar. Taika and I were both feeding him lines of things that I have said over the course of… And I was of course trying to give Matt really witty lines, like, “It would be fun if you said this because I said this in Avengers,” and Taika would just be like, “Nah,” and giving him much funnier things to say.
I don’t want to bring Loki back and let him fall into the wrong hands again. I wish that beautiful death scene in The Dark World was true with his last words “I didn’t do it for him.”
Translation: “I was trying to keep the character consistent and Waititi shat all over that again and again”.
THIS.
Also I’d like to know WHY the heck Marvel and TW hate this amazing character so much. And why they try in every possible way to put him in bad light, demeanor him and cut him off so blatantly from plots.
They should be grateful to him and Tom for brought them fans and money.
TAIKA WAITITI IS FUNNIER THAN TOM HIDDLESTON JUST IN GENERAL AND THERE’S REALLY NOTHING Y’ALL CAN DO ABOUT IT
The comments on this is so fucking funny. Taika breathed new life into Loki. Y’all boring asses should be grateful.
Tom: Taika is funnier than me and all the other writers and directors I’ve played this character for.
Loki Stan’s: buhbuh he wasn’t a bland pretentious baddie for us to wet ourselves overrrrrrr.
I forgot about the smile after the snake story! You’re totally right, @sleepynegress. Best Loki scene.
This movie is the only time he actually seemed like an interesting, conflicted trickster instead of a greasy asshole.
The only thing I see is that a majority of Loki stans are only interested in seeing him reduced to a genocidal fascist Christian Gray wannabe
i think taika did a good job at writing canon loki.
no, not marvel.
i mean, Canon Loki
@note-a-bear @blad-the-inhaler I beg your pardon? In Avengers Loki’s goal was to rule the earth. How could he rule people if he killed them all? And you know what is genocide? Here is a living case: In the first Thor movie, angel baby Thor invaded another planet and slaughtered local residents only because they gave him a nickname, and he wouldn’t stop the massacre until Odin arrived and shouted him down.
And in TDW Loki was not a villain anymore. He was an anti-hero there, by saving Thor’s girlfriend almost at the cost of his own life, saving Thor at the cost of being impaled and revenging his mother’s death. Even Kevin Feige admitted Loki acquired the throne without betraying Thor, because Thor renounced it on his own account first.
Now I believe waititi stans have never watched the previous Marvel films but they pretend they have.
Hiddleston:
-“I feel so lucky with the writing, the way he’s been written. In Kenneth Branagh’s film the writing was very poignant, and you can see the vulnerability in him. Rather like Killmonger in a way, he doesn’t start out as an antagonist; he becomes an antagonist through the revelations. And then Joss Whedon wrote him as a very witty, very charming, very charismatic, and… So I’ve been quite fortunate with some beautifully complex writing of the character.”
-“The best thing about Loki is that if he is afraid he won’t show it. He’s been highly trained through the experience of his slightly traumatic life to shield his fear.”
-“Loki’s death on Svartalfheim was written as a death, and I would say Chris and I played that scene for real. That was meant to be that he redeemed himself, he helped save his brother, he helped save Jane Foster but that he, in the process, sacrificed himself.”
Waititi grossly misinterpreted and shat on the character that Hiddleston had painstakingly built; it’s a fact. If you need more evidence I have them. Some people need to learn the difference between character development and retcon. Other than the role of comic relief what did Gagnarok and Waititi give Loki?
Waititi’s solution was a story in which Loki is mocked and emasculated in almost every scene. It’s very funny, and Hiddleston plays it without visible qualms, but it leaves the character nowhere else to go.
The more I read his tweets/words, the more Taika Waititi seems the bully at my school who made my life a nightmare…
Which may be exactly why he appeals to bullies so much. He speaks their language.
So like, of all the things Waititi could pick on Loki for, he chooses to shit on him for being an orphan? What the fuck? That is EXACTLY what a bully would do. It isn’t funny, it’s incredibly mean-spirited. Kinda like making him joke about his attempted suicide.
What is hilarious to me, however, is Waititi trying to say that Loki only talks about himself and it’s annoying. Like… You do that more than anyone else, Taika. I’ve read interviews from you before, lmao. Don’t be a hypocrite.
I know it’s not worth trying to engage with the people who stan Ragnarok, Waititi, and Thor* (i.e., the version of Thor shown in Ragnarok, who is NOT the same person as the Thor of the previous movies he was in, and was definitely not the kind, goodhearted ray of sunshine that the Thor* stans want to pretend he is), so I’m not going to tag them. But note how simplistic and ill-informed their rebuttals are.
Yes, Tom recognizes that Taika is funnier than he is. But “funny” isn’t the only virtue in a character or a writer. The writers he praises, as @yume-no-fantasy points out, are the ones who gave him complexity to work with: Miller & Stentz (the writers of Thor 1) and Joss Whedon. And the way Whedon wrote Loki often was funny: “I’m listening”; “Are you ever not going to fall for that?”; “This usually works”; “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have that drink now.” But it’s a subtle humor (which I guess goes over some people’s heads?) and Loki is as often in on the joke as it is at his expense. Which is as it should be: he’s intelligent and mischievous and doesn’t always take himself seriously. If all the Waititi/TR/Thor* stans see is “a bland pretentious baddie” or “a greasy asshole” that’s their problem.
Similarly, if they didn’t see “an interesting, conflicted trickster” in the previous movies, all I can conclude is that they didn’t understand (or watch) the previous movies. In Thor 1, Loki secretly disrupts Thor’s coronation and subtly goads him into charging into Jotunheim (trickster) – not only “to ruin my brother’s big day,” but because he recognizes that Thor isn’t ready to rule (interesting). He finds out that he’s a member of a people that has historically been Asgard’s enemies (interesting, conflicted). He makes overtures to the ruler of that people, his biological father, offering to let them into Asgard to murder Odin so that Loki can take the throne permanently (trickster, conflicted); but then he turns around and kills his biological father to protect his adoptive father to prove his loyalty to Asgard and enmity toward Jotunheim (double trickster, double conflicted). He lies to Thor to keep him from returning to prevent him from going through with this plan (trickster), but on his way out tries to lift Mjolnir, desperate to be found worthy (conflicted); he obviously hesitates before he has the Destroyer strike Thor, and he does it in a way that isn’t guaranteed to kill him the way blasting him with fire would (conflicted). He tries to destroy the planet where he was born because he so deeply hates what he now knows he is; he begs Thor to fight him while fucking crying (have I given enough proof that he’s interesting and conflicted?).
I could keep doing this with The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World, but I have better things to do than write Reader’s Digest summaries of Marvel movies for people who didn’t understand them the first time around. (I didn’t exactly think they were intellectually taxing, but people continue to surprise me.)
I know interpreting graphs is hard and American schools (at least) don’t teach statistics very well, but here’s a hint: the spikes in interest in the search term “loki” indicate that The Avengers and TDW *generated*interest in Loki. These are searches from people who were not previously “Loki stans”; the loyal fans are the ones who sustain the lower levels of interest in between the spikes. No, Ragnarok did not “breathe new life” into Loki; very few new people became interested in Loki after it came out. And that was deliberate on the part of the filmmakers.
Also, what the hell is “Canon Loki” if it isn’t Marvel canon? Did Taika do a good job at writing myth Loki? Most of my myth expert friends don’t think so. Did he do a good job writing comics Loki? MCU Loki was never supposed to be identical with the Loki of the comics, for one thing; but for another, most of the people I know who are familiar with Loki comics (though there is one exception I know of) don’t think that Ragnarok Loki is a good representation of the Loki of recent comics, who is much smarter and more complex than Ragnarok Loki (not that that would be hard…).
Finally… if Taika is so into sympathetic representations of outsiders, he should have been thrilled with the opportunity Loki presented him. Instead, he decided Loki was to be dismissed as a spoiled, whiny little bitch and ridiculed for exactly the characteristics that make him an outsider: his mental illness, his (implicit) queerness, and his history as an adoptee from another race who spent most of his life ignorant of his heritage. As I’ve discussed before, you’d think that last part would present a great opportunity in a movie that supposedly wanted to make a point about imperialism and the victims of war, but I guess not. As for the other issues, the conclusion I’m forced to draw from Taika’s handling of them is that he’s a mental ableist who thinks Loki just needs to “grow up and get over” his problems (or maybe was faking them?) and quite possibly also homophobic.
hiddlestown struggles not to say “headcanon” in an interview
this is everything.
even fucking Tom Hiddleston refers to the grandmaster as “Jeff Goldblum.” He didn’t even play a character. Loki just hooked up with Jeff Goldblum.
ladies and gentleman, lets all highlight the fact that Tom sees a ‘’pretty woman involved’’ as a ‘’Pretty Woman TM scenario where a old dude finds your ass and dresses it up’’
Loki is the Philosopher King 