I sort of have two ways of thinking about it which both involve the same understanding of the facts of the relationship, but differ in the attitude I take toward it. I definitely don’t think of it as a healthy, enthusiastically consensual relationship. There’s a clear power imbalance: the Grandmaster has absolute power in Sakaar and we have seen that he does not hesitate to melt people who displease him. Loki is a newcomer, and but for the Grandmaster’s favor, he could end up like Thor, a slave with an obedience disk forced to participate in gladiatorial fights to the death, or, you know, melted. Loki has exactly two things the Grandmaster wants: his entertaining company (they don’t call him Silvertongue for nothing) and his body. The relationship is fundamentally transactional: Loki is paying for his continued survival and (relative) freedom with at least his companionship (he’s at least acting as an “escort”) and very probably also with sexual favors. Loki is a “sugar baby” and the Grandmaster his “sugar daddy,” but the sugar in question is not just fancy clothes and food and drinks and a ticket into high society – it’s also his physical safety.

I am somewhat susceptible to the sugar baby/daddy kink and when I’m in that mood, I like Frostmaster as a “crack ship” – or, as some people have been (delightfully) calling it, a “trash barge.” I think the idea of it is kind of hot because Loki is Loki and Jeff Goldblum is a silver fox, and because Jeff Goldblum isn’t completely loathsome, I can imagine that Loki wasn’t completely repulsed by whatever physical intimacy was demanded of him. Nonetheless, the relationship unavoidably involves dubious or (as it was called in a philosophy talk I heard recently) flawed consent because the cost of refusal is so high as to be effectively coercive. When I think about it in those terms, it becomes a source of angst (as it is in one of my post-Ragnarok Thorki fics).