Imagine being Heimdall and having a spirit so generous that you could sincerely say “welcome home” to the individual who once turned you into an icicle and is now showing up 15 minutes late without Starbucks to the apocalypse that he sort of started.
That’s because Heimdall knows that he himself was a traitor and deserved it. He also sees that Loki is more loyal than he has to be. Oh yeah, and his brother Thor was the one that told him to go start Ragnarok in the first place.
Heimdall commited treasons TWO times. The second time Loki-as-Odin pardoned him. Heimdall still was the gatekeeper in Avengers: AoU (2015).
OP is so willingly blind and petty? Loki showed up with an evacuation vessel to help a place he didn’t own any loyalty or debt to. As for “icicling” Heimdall, lol Loki would have been in his right to kill him if he wanted, seeing as he was King at the time.
Also? Heimdall only saw Loki cause Loki allowed him to, so guess who was being magnanimous in that scene? Yep, Loki.
And let’s not forget that Heimdall went for the kill, and Loki in response just froze him.
Yeah, that was a weird bit of writing in Thor 1, which is in most respects a very well-crafted movie. Why did Heimdall (apparently) attempt to kill Loki after Loki pronounced a banishment sentence? Was it revenge for having let the Frost Giants into Asgard, resulting in the deaths of two Einherjar? Did he believe Loki posed an immediate threat to the safety of Asgard? Also, why did Loki let Heimdall see him coming back from Jotunheim previously, and why did he admit to letting the Jotnar in before Thor’s coronation? He still had plausible deniability at that point.
I certainly don’t hate Heimdall, but he does seem inordinately hostile to Loki in Thor 1, and is suspicious of him – to the point of disobeying both Loki’s orders and Odin’s by sending the W4 to Asgard to retrieve Thor – before he has any good reason to be. I wonder if Heimdall’s hostility to Loki is a subtle allusion to the fact that in myth, they’re prophesied to kill each other at Ragnarok
Interesting point about Heimdall still being gatekeeper in AOU – that hadn’t occurred to me. So Loki must have banished him later… maybe it took him a while to figure out that it was Loki in disguise? If so, that’s a really impressive masquerade on Loki’s part; he must have been wearing the Odin glamour at virtually every moment, even when alone and/or asleep. Alternatively, Heimdall might have been aware but kept it to himself because after TDW, he knew that Odin wasn’t a fit ruler anymore. But then he might have threatened to reveal Loki’s identity because Loki did something he didn’t approve of, whereupon Loki banished him.
We first see Heimdall in Thor 1 when Thor and his merry band are approaching Heimdall for travel to Jotunheim. Loki speaks first and Heimdall cuts him off & harshly tells him “Enough.” Just another example of an Asgardian commoner treating an Asgardian Prince with disdain. Moments later, as “the Team” heads inside for transport, Volstagg walks past Loki and insults him saying, “what’s the matter, Silver Tongue turn to lead?” No one, at this point, knows that Loki gave info to Laufey that allowed a few Frost Giants to enter the Weapons Vault during Thor’s coronation. I’ve always been angered at the lack of respect Loki received at the hands of non-royal Asgardians from the beginning of the film.
Actually, Heimdall interrupts to say “You’re not dressed warmly enough,” Loki starts to say “I don’t know what you mean,” and Thor cuts him off with “Enough.” The upshot is that non-royals don’t show him deference and Thor reinforces that behavior rather than discouraging it. The deleted scene in which the servant laughs at Thor’s “Some do battle, others just do tricks” quip both establishes that dynamic and provides a presumed explanation: Loki’s use of magic is disdained, in keeping with the attitude in historical Norse culture that male practitioners of seidr are shamefully unmanly.
@tracheometry First, Loki didn’t think the Jotuns were his people because: 1. Odin brainwashed him to believe Jotuns are a race of despicable monsters. 2. Odin told him he was abandoned to die by the Jotuns when he was a baby. (It probably was a lie but that’s another topic.)
Second, Heimdall not only welcomed Thor back but even committed treason to bring him back. And Thor at that time was a murderer for hundreds of lives, who would have committed genocide if his daddy had not arrived and stopped him in time.
Third, in fact after Ragnarok Loki wanted to reconcile with Heimdall and explain everything to him, but Heimdall was unmoved and uninterested. From Avengers Infinity War prelude novel:
Bold of you to assume that people who comment on a post that we’re “delusional” are actually open to entertaining evidence or arguments to the contrary. Or trying to understand the nuance of a villain who is presented as sympathetic, not because his actions are supposed to be justified or excusable, but because we can understand the circumstances and the troubled mindset that led him to commit them. The contempt and mistrust Loki receives from other Asgardians feed into the insecurity, self-loathing, and hunger for approval that eventually push him into attempting genocide. He desperately feels he needs to prove what a good, loyal Asgardian he is not only because he’s found out he isn’t one by birth, but because his valor and masculinity – which Asgard prizes above all – are constantly being questioned, and he wonders whether his biological heritage is part of the reason he’s never seemed good enough.
The excerpt from the prelude novel paints a curious picture. Heimdall doesn’t hold Loki’s actions against him – but he still refuses to reconcile or establish friendly relations. I guess he has reason not to trust Loki, but if he really doesn’t still blame him, it’s not clear why he’s being so dickish.
SHIT. I hadn’t consciously made the connection between the fact that Loki is always overlooked and ignored when he speaks and the fact that he’s put in that muzzle at the end of Avengers. I always thought that bit was a link to the bit from Norse mythology where he had his mouth sewn up as punishment for teasing some dude (details elude me right now).
I feel like this entire phenomenon of “SHUT UP LOKI NOBODY WANTS TO LISTEN TO YOU”, besides the sort of mean chuckle at his expense that makes me feel guilty, is fascinating. With giant angst potential that explains a lot about how Loki looks at himself and why he snaps.
No, seriously. Imagine that this sort of thing has been going on for hundreds or thousands of years. Whenever Loki opens his mouth to speak, or share an opinion, or make a suggestion, or voice an objection, there’s a good chance he’ll basically get told he’s insignificant or irrelevant or reprehensible or just flat out wrong. Stop talking. Yeah, he’s a manipulative little shit, but seriously. His words are his biggest source of power. He’s not an up front fighter—his forte lies through persuasion and the ability to reason people into the decisions that suit him. And he’s perpetually being told “YOUR ABILITIES ARE WORTHLESS, GTFO WE DON’T WANT YOU”. So even the thing he thought he was good at is being undermined.
Extra bonus points if you incorporate canon mythology and the “sew his lips up” punishment. I mean just DAMN. Physical pain and the approval of his father in that sentence aside, that literally, physically denies his right to assert or defend himself. He completely loses his voice. He’s basically having it hammered home that people would rather not hear him at all, would rather pretend he’s not there, and he can’t even count on his family to disagree.
It’s just unbelievably fucked up.
(Addendum: he had his mouth sewn shut for making a fraudulent bargain with some dwarves.)
I was thinking that too, but chose to believe that it’s just the light.
It’s from Thor’s end-credit scene. Here’s a more clear gif:
It’s not the light. His teeth are bloody. His skin looks like it’s burnt. He is emaciated. It seems like his right eye has blood in it. He is clearly not in a good condition. This is even a worse look than his state at the begining of Avengers. More proof of physical torture at the hands of Thanos and his allies.
I have to stop myself from crying every time I see this Loki. Broken Loki, tortured Loki, a Loki who has been brought to the cliff’s edge of insanity and thrown off. Judging by how short his hair is here, and how long it is in Avengers 1, this end credits scene was not long after he fell. So who knows what further tortures and brainwashing he was subjected to before he was cleaned up and deposited on Earth.
The fact that he smiles, even if it’s a fake ironic smile, it just shows me how beyond sanity he is.
His look here reminds me of Rumplestiltskin played by Robert Carlyle
This scene caused me some trouble in writing my Loki-in-the-Void fic because I didn’t understand how Loki ended up on Earth, if that’s where he was, before he ended up wherever Thanos found him (or vice versa, I suppose), and I also didn’t know how he would have found the Tesseract without Thanos’s help. So I ended up saying this was a projection from Sanctuary, but the reason Loki looks like a beat-up version of himself at the the end of Thor is because Loki has to use the Mind Stone to send the projection that far and it fucks with his self-image, which is what he uses to create the projections. (I swear it kind of makes sense in context…)
So here’s a fun fact: the DESIGN of this costume took longer than the actual making of it. Admittedly, I wasn’t in as much of a rush, and it was in between other projects, but it still took about 5 months before I was happy enough with my concept art to begin actual production.
I thought a LOT about what I wanted to include in this design–what I wanted it to say about Loki’s character, what I wanted it to MEAN. As my ideas grew, so did the concept; I was drawing on his previous MCU looks, as well as inspiration from unused concept art and even the comics.
And so, in this long rambly post, here’s where I ended up. 🙂
Loki’s armoured costumes began as a reflection of Asgard and his status within it: highly symmetrical, bright gold—and their slow move over the films to asymmetry and heavy weathering is as much a reflection of his character as the writing. Here, in a look designed for Infinity War, there are even more complicated layers and further asymmetry—an assertion by Loki of his changing and many-layered nature, and his refusal to conform to any version of “Loki” but his own. There is also, perhaps paradoxically, an long-needed of the people and events that have shaped him into who he is, and hints of these are scattered throughout the design.
The right arm is for Asgard. Gold and gleaming, yet heavily worn with age, it both protects and conceals, and supports Loki’s weapon hand. The forearm bracer mirrors one of his first looks, when he was still a prince of Asgard. His comic-symbol, however, is hidden in the upper arm piece.
The left arm is for Jotunheim—the arm that revealed Loki’s true identity when touched by a Frost Giant. It is totally unarmoured, and wrapped in green and black, it is both bandaged and vulnerable. The symbols of the forearm, symbols of Loki, recall the markings of his Jotun form. The wrapped cloth allows for the flexibility of his magic hand.
The breastplate and “necklace” piece mark a continued acceptance of Loki as Loki. The necklace is the one piece in Loki’s costuming that has remained consistent, until Ragnarok, almost as a relic of his past. Here, it is reshaped into Loki’s own symbol, and laced with the green of his signature colours.
The left shoulder is for Odin—despised by Loki, and yet a creator of Loki himself. It is harsher and more geometric than the rest of the armour—a practical, unyielding piece that mimics Odin’s own costume—but is tempered by the ornate scrollwork on the edge, which is taken directly from Frigga’s battle armour.
The right chest piece is for Thor. In a loose recollection of Thor’s winged helm, yet still layered with Loki’s green, it pulls from the Asgardian arm, and melds into a thin gold line that continues across the chest and encircles the costume almost completely.
The cape is for Frigga. Made from soft but heavy wool, it embraces Loki on all sides, and the drape over the chest mirrors the drape of Frigga’s dress that she fought and died in. It partially conceals the left shoulder, and falls over Loki’s heart.
The snakeskin texture is a direct replacement of the textured leather in Loki’s previous costumes. While those pieces were in the pattern of the triquetra, an Asgardian symbol, the snakeskin is pure Loki.
Again, none of these thoughts were immediate. They grew from something very different over the months of thought and repaints on my tablet, and I can’t stress enough the importance of patience, especially with original designs. It was worth the wait to finally have this and know that I was happy with it.
For those who have followed this journey–thank you. I’m really not a designer, and this was such a new challenge for me. I’m still a bit boggled that I pulled it off, and the support and encouragement from you all has been amazing. THANK YOU! ❤
That whole “you’ll always be the god of mischief but you could be more” speech that Thor gives Loki bugs me, because Loki is, and always has been, more than “just” the god of mischief. Who do the writers/director think they’re trying to convince of that? Us? This is something we already knew. Loki? Even Loki himself knows he is more than that, he’s spent all his life trying to prove it to Odin and Thor. And they shut him down at every pass. Oh, but those times were imagined slights.
THOR 1: “Hey Loki, you’re a piece of shit!”
AVENGERS: “Hey Loki, you’re a piece of shit!”
THOR 2: “Hey Loki, you’re a piece of shit!”
THOR 3: “You know what your problem is, Loki? You think you’re a piece of shit. But you could be more…”
It’s not noble to rescue someone from the peril you inflicted on them. Nor is it noble to disabuse someone of a notion that you yourself instilled.
I went into Ragnarok thinking “this is it…this will be the movie where Thor finally acknowledges that Loki’s pain is real and tries to reach some kind of understanding with him.” But Thor doesn’t want to understand. He only wants to be understood. That was the case even before Ragnarok. But in Ragnarok it was so much worse.
I really thought that Loki would find a way to let Thor know about what happened to him after he fell from the Bifrost. Which, to me, is an enormous plot hole. Thor seeing Loki show up on Earth after he’s presumed dead, and not feeling even slightly compelled to investigate is a giant plot hole. But they needed Loki to be a villain in that movie. So they just had him do villain-y things, because reasons.
Ragnarok tried to re-establish Loki as this hedonistic troublemaker who sits around, drinking his problems away. Which is amusing if you consider that Loki literally held Asgard together for several years while his brother, who had yet to actually spend any time ruling, ran around the cosmos doing who knows what. But we are to believe that Loki is this inept, immoral imp who cares about nothing and no one. When in actuality he is quite capable. The whole thing makes me ill. I look forward to the point when I stop caring about it tbh.
Really, it’s more “you are a piece of shit” again in TR rather than “you think you’re a piece of shit.” Or perhaps more precisely, “you rest content with being a piece of shit.”
There’s a peculiar kind of sadism in Ragnarok’s repeated insistence that being a trickster is just “in Loki’s nature,” that that’s who he fundamentally is (ignoring previous canon, of course), and then Thor*’s demand that Loki just stop being “the god of mischief” and become someone else. If that’s really his nature, it should be impossible, or else Thor* is ordering him not to be himself anymore… which is a horrible thing to demand of someone you supposedly love.
P.S. I can understand why Loki in “The Avengers” would feel like he needs to prevent Thor from finding out what happened, and I can also kind of understand Thor post-Avengers being too pissed to want to talk to Loki – though it’s far from admirable. But not asking Loki why he pretended to be dead, exiled Odin, and took the throne is an incredibly glaring omission in TR… though it makes sense from an external (or “Doylist”) standpoint if you regard it as part of the campaign to rewrite Loki as this capricious trickster. If that’s the case, Thor doesn’t even need to ask why; it’s for the same reason he does anything: because he’s a trickster and he just couldn’t help himself.
Literally everything Thor does in this movie is condescending and uncaring toward Loki. He’s not even remotely nice to him. His brother who said “Sometimes I’m envious of you, but never doubt my love” “I didn’t do it for him.” This entire movie was just a stage for Thor to be “awesome God of Thunder” and to put Loki in some sort of sideshow space.
Exactly where he started in the first film.
He’s back to just having to go along with Thor regardless of how he feels about the matter “let’s do get help, you love it.” “I hate it, it’s embarrassing” “we’re doing it”
Loki literally tells Thor he finds that modus operandi degrading and Thor essentially replies “I don’t give a flying fuck what you think, we’re doing it because I want to, so deal.” and Loki, of course, does exactly that.
Because that’s how it’s been with Thor for all their adult lives.
“know your place, brother.”
“Enough.”
TR took Thor back to square one. He’s not the mature, thoughtful king-in-training he was in TDW (I will ALWAYS prefer that version of him; it was true to his character arc). He’s gone back to the selfish, arrogant “it’s all about me” outlook. He doesn’t care about Loki, doesn’t ask his opinion– unlike the carefully executed plan of TDW where Loki gets to use his skills equally alongside Thor’s brawn.
But the one thing that really gets me about that comment above is this part: “while Loki thought it was an affectionate pat”
What. The. Hell?!?!?! God forbid Loki actually receive some real, genuine affection from Thor because he’s just a trickster, so he doesn’t really matter. That was beaten in our faces OVER AND OVER AND OVER by Taika Waititi–
Loki is just a dumb trickster who has no motive and no life-plan.
Loki just wants to drink margaritas and watch bad theater about himself because he’s a glorified narcissist.
Loki just wants to fuck the Grandmaster (or at least the GM wants to fuck him).
Loki and all of his past issues were non-issues, so stop feeling sorry for him.
Oh, and my favorite, though I don’t think I can contribute this to TW, but rather whoever wrote the script:
“You’ll always be the God of Mischief, but you could be something more.”
We’re supposed to admire Thor’s cleverness and kingly wisdom in this scene, when actually all this is doing is subtly reinforcing the fact that Loki’s been treated as the punching bag, the jokes-on-legs, the “if we have no SMART ideas I’ll just throw my LITTLE brother at the bad guys”.
What.
The.
FUCK.
I thought Thor was pretty cleverly executed given that he’s tried dealing with Loki in failure after failure to bridge that gap. The unconditional love of Thor 1 didn’t help, the attempt to regain common ground and offer a hand in Thor 2 ended in Loki faking his own death and usurping Asgard.
The problem was that Thor was enabling him rather than helping him. By Ragnarok he’s mature enough to guess how Loki is going to act, and he helps Loki help himself. Stepping back from the relationship logically, Thor’s love and trust has been abused time and time again and I don’t blame him from stepping back from it when he’s stuck in the same old loop of enabling Loki into the next fresh batch of bullshit.
I’ll preface the next statement by saying that I love Loki in all his incarnations dearly but it’s not as though he’s NOT guilty of some pretty despicable shit that Thor has been more than patient over (I’m talking about the entirety of The Avengers) so I think Thor is pretty validated in his suspicion and distance.
For what it’s worth, it DOES work and we see Loki in a better place at the end of TR and I suspect he needed someone he loves and respects to be sick of his bullshit in a dismissive way or he was never going to change. Which is reminiscent of what happened to his character arc in the comics but that’s a whole different thing. Loki’s been through a lot of writers in the MCU with varying quality and difference of characterization but personally I still think the biggest injustice is what happened in Infinity War.
Regarding the claim that Thor was “enabling” Loki by continuing to reach out to him, I would encourage you to read this post, because I really can’t say it any better. It was written by someone who liked Ragnarok for several months until having a conversation that led to the realizations described in the post.
The only reason “it DOES work and we see Loki in a better place at the end of TR” is because the same writer(s) who wrote that gambit ensured that it would work. (People who have read the novelization and said the betrayal-electrocution sequence wasn’t in there lead me to believe we have Taika himself, not Eric Pearson, to thank for that little bit of amateur relationship counseling.) It’s not like they tested it out on an actual person with the same complex of mental illnesses as Loki, as seen in previous movies. It’s not clear what he has (depression? bipolar? BPD?), but it should be clear to anyone that he’s unwell; he doesn’t just betray people for shits and giggles. And it’s debatable whether Loki is really in a “better place” at the end of TR. He’s been cowed into submission; he’s accepted a place as Thor’s inferior.
It also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say that Loki abused Thor’s love and trust in TDW, except given the assumptions about what happened that TR wants to push on us. It tells us again and again that Loki “faked his death” – but a more plausible reading, considering that Loki’s illusions aren’t tangible, is that Loki actually was impaled, thought he was going to die, and took advantage of the situation when he unexpectedly woke up. And considering that Thor told him he would just put him back in prison after they finished avenging Frigga (“Vengeance. And afterward this cell”), can you completely blame Loki for doing what he did? Can you completely blame him for exiling Odin, after all the shit Odin has pulled? TR totally ignores all the intelligible reasons Loki had for doing what he did: avoiding getting thrown in solitary confinement for life, with no Frigga to visit him – or worse (remember, “Frigga is the only reason you’re still alive”?); getting back at Odin for his lies and rejection (and for locking him away without actually asking why he invaded Midgard…); putting himself in a position of safety and power from which he could hide from Thanos and make efforts to thwart him (remember, it was Loki who sent Sif and Volstagg to store the Aether with the Collector). None of that is even mentioned; it’s just because Loki is such an incorrigible trickster and wants to lounge around in his bathrobe eating grapes and watching self-glorifying plays. That’s never who Loki has been in the MCU. He always has comprehensible, psychologically compelling reasons for his misdeeds: envy, resentment, the need for his father’s approval, internalized racism, vengefulness, threats and coercion from Thanos. Naked hedonistic self-interest has never been a significant part of his motivation. It’s only by completely reframing everything he’s ever done that TR makes it remotely plausible that Loki needs this kind of “tough love” to just “get over himself” and start being a good guy. What he needs is for someone to really listen, which Thor, even with all his pleas for him to come home, has never done.
reading an article about child psychology & favouritism and
One child grows up feeling powerful, believing they can do or accomplish anything while the other child grows up feeling defeated with low expectations of getting what they want.
(2/3) Plus, it’s handled SO CLUMSILY. The whole bit with Thor going ‘I’ll kill them all’ right in front of the King made it clear this racism was a whole systemic issue was NEVER fixed in their society! The perception of Jotuns never changed by the end of the movie! We never even get to find out what happened to Jotunheim ever, because it never gets brought up again. Instead, we find out that Grandpa Bor committed genocide too and throughout the movie it’s an entire non-issue?
(3/3) I think fantasy racism can work really well as a metaphor, IF the writer actually thought through every implication. I know as an American my perception of racism is way more heavily based on skin tone than most but the whole thing with Loki being able to look Asgardian read as ‘white passing’ to me and the implication of a white passing person trying to prove they’re not like the rest of their race? That’s so much to unpack, and the writers just threw out the whole suitcase.
Mmm, yeah, I totally feel you on all of this, Anon.
It’s interesting because like… So Ragnarok obviously has this anti-colonialist leaning, which is all about acknowledging the real horror of past events, and generally just accepting that there’s no Asgardian superiority. I don’t really think it was hard-hitting enough, and I appreciated there was something, but like…
It just felt weird to me for him to be like “colonialism is bad! what Odin did is wrong!” but also never acknowledge what happened to Loki. I appreciate that Taika Waititi isn’t much of a Loki fan (and certainly dislikes Loki’s fans), but it just seemed strange to take an anti-colonialist lilt without using this perfect example right in front of you.
What Odin and Frigga did to Loki (and I want to stress that it was Odin and Frigga, and that we shouldn’t excuse Frigga for her part in this) is what has happened to hundreds of thousands of native & indigenous children across the world. A child would be stolen from their real parents, forcibly “adopted”, bled of their culture, and would be systematically fed the evil ideology that the culture they came from is bad and wrong and uncivilized.
This has happened in Australia; this has happened in Canada – Hell, the last fucking “residential school” for First Nations kids in Canada only closed in ‘96! ‘96! 22 years ago, they were still fucking doing this. You know what that is? Literally, that is an act of genocide.
And like…
I think it’s just so fucked up that this keeps being boiled down to “he was adopted,” like, no… If they’d taken in this Jotunn kid, and he’d grown up knowing he was Jotunn but that he was still loved – that would be adopted. If they’d waited until he was like, an adolescent (say, the equivalent of 10/11) and told him he was a Jotunn but that he was still loved – that would be adopted.
But what Frigga and Odin did to him, raising him not only to not know what he was, but to despise where he came from…
That’s unspeakably and revoltingly cruel. There is literally no possible justification for it.
People can tell me time and time again “but they didn’t want to shock him by telling him what he was” – he wouldn’t have been shocked, he wouldn’t have been as upset, if Asgard did not explicitly and regularly call for the genocide of the people he is revealed to belong to. If he had not been raised believing that these people – his people – are monsters, creatures, savages.
“Loki overreacted,” like, no, man, he didn’t overreact, he fucking broke like shattered glass. “He didn’t have to try to kill an entire planet, though,” like bitch, why not? Thor did the same fucking thing like, a week ago.
I don’t think what he did was right or justifiable, and certainly, it was not a rational decision made by a rational guy, but… Guys, Thor did the exact same thing. Can you imagine having this wild, psychotic break, sobbing your eyes out and knowing that not only did your family never love you as much as your brother, as they claimed, but that they were right not to, and desperately trying to prove to yourself that it can’t be true by murdering the people you supposedly come from–
And then your brother coming at you with this hypocrisy? Actual proof, shoved right in his face, that Thor can do x, but if Loki does x, he is the actual, most evil monster in the world?
The only person that even TRIES to work on the perception of the Jotnar is Loki himself, and that’s in exploring his feelings in this play he wrote as Odin, with nine or ten layers of distance between his identities at the time.
It’s just so fucked up. It’s so wrong.
And I just don’t understand how they could shove all these facets into Thor (2011), and never unpack them in literally 5 fucking movies. You had so many opportunities, and you just… Ignored ‘em all.
Okay I want to talk about Loki’s plan in Avengers. I just found this post which theorizes that it was Loki’s plan all along to present a big enough threat to assemble the Avengers so they could take down Thanos (but not SUCH a big threat as to actually do a ton of damage).
I’d like to complicate that theory a bit. Strap in, because this might be long. I do not think it was Loki’s intention to lose the Battle of New York…but I do think he considered getting defeated by a group that could go on to defeat Thanos an acceptable alternative. Basically, to survive, he either needs to impress Thanos by winning or lose in such a way that Thanos can’t get his hands on him. Either way, he’s still going to be in someone else’s power, so there isn’t a truly triumphant outcome possible for him.
The main reason I don’t think assembling the Thanos-defeating team was his conscious, primary plan is this moment:
To me, this proves that his actual plan was to turn Tony and sic him on the other Avengers, and I kinda think this plan would’ve worked (or the victory for Earth would’ve come at a much heavier price, like that nuke taking out the entire city and all the Avengers with it). Thor and the Hulk are both capable of defeating Iron Man, but they wouldn’t only be fighting Iron Man. They’d be fighting him, Loki, and likely the full Chitauri army, all while also trying to minimize collateral damage in one of the largest and most densely populated cities on Earth. Tony on Loki’s side would have tipped the scales and bought the Chitauri enough time to move the whole army through the portal and start spreading out. It would have been chaos, and for all we know, that was only Phase 1 of the invasion plan. The Black Order (including Ronan, Nebula, and Gamora at this point), the Outriders, and Thanos himself could have been waiting in the wings.
But the arc reactor prevented Loki from gaining his trump card in this battle, and he couldn’t win without it.
(Okay I just got sidetracked for like an hour watching Tom Hiddleston interviews from the Thor/Avengers era. Really nice line from him about Loki’s motivations in Avengers: “His motivation is to gain absolute power, and through that, self-respect.” Damn, son! Back on task now.)
So yeah, I’m fairly convinced that taking over Earth with the scepter and the Chitauri army was the real plan. But to what degree was it Loki’s own plan?
There’s a lot to consider. Thanos had the Mind Stone before putting it in the scepter and lending it to Loki for the plan (and so the Other could maintain influence over him). Based on what Wanda can do to people’s minds with powers she got from the stone and reasonable assumptions of what else it’s capable of, it would be very easy to, say, revise Loki’s memory of this:
into this:
I used to think Loki was just revising history to justify himself, but this is a completely nonsensical lie to tell to one of the only other actual witnesses to the event. He would not have referenced this moment if he remembered it correctly. He might’ve chosen “know your place” or said something like “I remember you recklessly starting a war in retaliation for a mere insult, yet you would condemn me for my ambition?” So yeah. A fake memory proves Thanos screwed with his head.
As far as I’m concerned, at this point he’s already off the hook for what he does in Avengers because he is incapable of making real, autonomous choices when his memories have been revised to suit Thanos’s goals. He is a puppet without self-awareness, not a free agent. But that’s nowhere near where this ends. He looks absolutely dreadful in the post-credits stinger of Thor.
And at the beginning of Avengers.
Could be the effects of falling through the void and traveling by Tesseract, but given that Thanos has no qualms about making children fight like dogs and replacing their body parts when they lose, the chances that Loki had a pleasant time are vanishingly small.
But before I forget, I want to address the eye color theory. Tom has blue eyes, guys, and so does MCU Loki.
At no point do Loki’s eyes have this extremely obvious starry blue cataract effect:
Thor got multiple very close looks at Loki’s eyes over the course of the movie, and he’s known him his whole life. He would notice something weird going on with his eyes.
Whatever Thanos did to Loki, I think he did it with the unfiltered Mind Stone, before he stuck it in the scepter, and it was done with much more precision than a brief poke on the chest. I think the blue gem on it when it’s in the scepter is some kind of mod designed to prevent Loki from using the Mind Stone for any purpose other than the ones Thanos allowed, while still letting the Other maintain whatever mental link he’d forged to keep tabs on him. Hence the mind whammy Loki puts on Clint and Erik turning their eyes blue instead of yellow or something.
Thanos’s plan is antithetical to what Loki wants when he’s in his right mind. The Loki of the first Thor film didn’t want power or a throne. He wanted to be loved and respected as Thor was. Loki is the God of Mischief, and we’re supposed to believe he really thinks freedom is a lie and subjugation is peace? Mischief requires freedom to exist! And would a Loki in his right mind try to do essentially the exact same thing Laufey did in 965? Loki who hated Laufey so much that he arranged to murder him and make it look like he did it to save Odin’s life, then desperately tried to destroy his entire planet? I think Loki in his right mind would be appalled by the plan to conquer and enslave Earth. But Thanos’s tampering has cranked up his self-loathing to the degree that he now wants to live up to the worst Asgard might think of him, which is to be Laufey over again. In this state, he wants to deserve having been tossed into that abyss by the brother he loved so that he can make sense of it, and what better way than this?
But he’s still working under extreme pressure. The Other seems to have a pretty strict timeline for him, and he’s not impressed with Loki’s efforts. He also seems to expect treachery. Why would he expect that if the recruitment process had gone smoothly or if Loki hadn’t shown signs of resistance? I think Thanos took a major gamble here. Asgard is currently severely handicapped by the loss of the Bifrost, but that won’t be the case for long, so this is his one shot at the Infinity Stone he knows is on Earth without interference from them (heck, maybe he knows about the Time Stone already too, but he only needs the Space Stone and then he can get the rest himself, so a minion like Loki doesn’t need to know about that one). Thanos spent as much time as he felt he could risk on reprogramming Loki into his Tesseract-retrieving tool, but it still wasn’t perfect. This accounts for how rushed and obvious Loki’s plan is. And also this.
Some part of Loki wasn’t committed enough. A committed Loki might have a backup plan if he failed to enthrall Tony with the scepter. A committed Loki might have come up with an entirely different, far more subtle plan that would have succeeded before anyone knew it was in motion. Instead, he lost. And maybe, deep down, beneath what Thanos did to him, that was what he wanted. Maybe Selvig was able to create a failsafe because Loki wanted there to be a failsafe. Maybe he reacted to defeat with resigned glibness (”If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll take that drink now.”) instead of rage and terror because he has some confidence that the Avengers won’t kill him and will defeat Thanos before he can do so.
So why, if Loki was Thanos’s puppet rather than his willing pawn, didn’t he tell anyone what had happened to him after the tampering wore off*? Pride. Asgard’s culture obviously prizes strength, but Loki, on top of already not being the Asgardian ideal, not to mention actually being a member of a hated other species, now he’s a victim. He’s spent his whole life wanting to prove himself to Odin, so how can he admit that he was weak enough to be tortured, manipulated, and brainwashed?
*I think the tampering would’ve worn off as the result of one or more of these factors: an exploding arrow going off in his face, getting Hulk-smashed, being in Asgard’s dungeon and worlds away from the Mind Stone, and the death of the Other (because he’s the one who canonically has the mental link with Loki, not Thanos himself).
Even as he refuses to deny responsibility for his actions in Avengers, Loki never acts that way again. In the Dark World, former friends are lining up to kill him if he puts a toe out of line, but he never betrays Thor. He goes along with Thor’s plan to *pretend* to betray him (which required a lot more trust on Thor’s part than he admitted to having), nearly dies protecting the woman he hated for having the audacity to change Thor for the better in the space of three days when he’d failed to do so over the course of centuries, and nearly dies again protecting Thor. (I do believe that wasn’t a trick. I think he came near enough to death to revert to his Jotun form, which changed his anatomy enough to make it no longer a mortal wound.)
Then he overpowers Odin and takes the throne, with which he does nothing villainous at all. Far from it. If he’d been on Thanos’s side, this would have been his chance to redeem himself from failing in Avengers. The Mind Stone was on Earth, and maybe could’ve insisted that Thor retrieve it instead of let Tony and Bruce hang onto it for a few extra days, but the Space Stone and Reality Stone were both within his immediate grasp, and he could’ve turned them over in exchange for clemency for himself. Instead, he sends the Aether to Knowhere and sits on the Tesseract in Asgard’s vault for the next four years, while spreading word of his own noble death in the form of stage productions. If it wasn’t for the surprise existence of Hela, this would’ve been a pretty foolproof way of thwarting Thanos’s plan indefinitely and keeping himself safe.
So there you go. I feel like this got pretty disorganized and I have a headache now so I don’t feel like tailoring it more than I already have, but I don’t think I left out any of the stuff I wanted to address. What we have here is a pretty sizable pile of evidence pointing to Loki not acting of his own free will in Avengers. It doesn’t excuse his actions in Thor (regicide and attempted genocide, in particular, as well as the attack with the Destroyer), though, and I’m kinda annoyed all of that got so overshadowed, because I’d really have liked them to deal with it.
Now, it’s possible that all these character inconsistencies between Loki in Avengers and Loki before and after it, all the indications that Loki wasn’t working for Thanos willingly or while in his right mind, and the offscreen lengths Loki is implied to have gone to to prevent/delay Thanos from acquiring/regaining three different Infinity Stones are all the results of lazy writing and failure to make the most of this character. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t negate how well these elements fit together.
As a writer, I know what it’s like to have my stories and characters come alive and do their own thing to the point where I feel like I’m being dragged along behind them, and the end result is, completely by accident, way more interwoven and coherent than I thought I’d be able to pull off. I’ve built arcs I never thought would happen, twists I never saw coming, and meaningful relationships between characters I never even considered including when I started. I’ve been in writing workshops where we tell each other all the cool things we noticed the particular writer doing in their stories, only for the writers themselves (me included) to be like “Yes I absolutely meant to do that you have recognized my true genius. *sweats nervously*”
So it doesn’t actually matter if all of this happened by accident, because either way, it’s there for fans of the character to extrapolate from.
Hopefully this was the plan all along, those elements were all deliberate, and we’ll see them come to fruition in a gloriously satisfying way in A4, but it would be just as good if they were accidental and the Russo Bros. noticed some or most of them and put them to good use for A4.
And if they didn’t notice and don’t have a satisfying plan for Loki? Well, then at least we still have fanfiction.
I love this meta!
This is a very interesting meta and in line with my own theory. I agree with most of it except some parts. It’s true that Tom’s eyes are blue but they did digitally intensify their color in the Avengers(also Thor isn’t really the most observant person). Therefore I believe Thanos messed with Loki’s head with the help of scepter, it just differes from the way Loki used it on Selvig and Clint. Also according to the Avengers movie, the Tessearct(the space stone container) and the mind stone housing are made of the same thing and are connected. I explained about the possible reason of it in my theory. And even Thanos can’t use an infinity stone directly without a medium that can control it.
(My headcanon’s also different about how Loki survived. I believe it was because the blade that loki was impaled on contained the Kursed blood which was responsible for Kursed’s invulnerability. So it had some healing powers and when it was affecting his body, Loki’s skin turned gray.)
Loki was supposed to have an important role in infinity war when Joss Whedon was involved. I think those plans were completely erased by Rossu brothers and I don’t have any hope that these details come to any fruition or a conclusion. So, yes, fanfiction.
I agree with all of @taaroko’s analysis, except for a few items:
2) I don’t think Loki would be all that appalled by the idea of conquering Earth; his murderous hatred for Laufey probably has a lot more to do with Asgardian racism and the fact that Laufey abandoned him to die. However, it is a fair point that Odin used the attempted conquest of Earth as a pretext for the war with Jotunheim, so for propaganda purposes he would have had to frame that as a terrible crime. I do like the idea that “Thanos’s tampering has cranked up his self-loathing to the degree that he now wants to live up to the worst Asgard might think of him, which is to be Laufey over again.”
3) I’m with @lucianalight on the explanation for how Loki survived being impaled in TDW; he was turning gray, not blue, as he appeared to die. HOWEVER, I do not think they were doing anything deliberately to make Loki’s eyes look more blue in The Avengers; I think it’s just a consequence of the dim lighting and the reflection from the blue light of the scepter he’s holding. I completely agree with taaroko that we weren’t supposed to think Loki was mind-controlled in the same way as Clint and Erik.
4) I think all of these elements were carefully planted by Joss Whedon, who still had some influence over how Loki was characterized in TDW: he was called upon to rewrite a couple of scenes that weren’t working, and Marvel needed to make sure that nothing anyone was doing in the individual franchises would mess up his plans for the ensemble Avengers films. That does not mean that Markus & McFeely (the writers of IW and A4) or the Russo brothers (the directors) give a shit about whatever plans Whedon may have had regarding Loki’s connection with Thanos or his involvement in defeating him, and Loki’s idiotic, anti-climactic death in IW strongly suggests that they don’t.
Loki is the Philosopher King 