Yes, I definitely agree with you, and I think I’ve ranted about it before. Actually, I think his treatment is misogynistic in two respects: his character is treated the way female characters usually are; and the way his death happened – in the first 10 minutes for shock value, with unusual gruesomeness and brutality, and with that fourth-wall-breaking “No resurrections this time” line – shows utter contempt for Loki’s fans, who are understood to be mostly female.
I searched “loki’s death in infinity war” on my blog and came up with this post where I answered a similar question from someone else and also linked to previous rants about it and reblogs of other people’s rants. Here’s another one that I don’t think I linked in that post.
I’m not sure how you feel about Ragnarok, but I’ve also reblogged and/or contributed to a couple of long analyses of how Loki’s discarding in Infinity War was connected to the deflation and ridicule of his character in Ragnarok, which was ultimately a misogynistic fuck-you to his fans: here’s one, here’s another, and here’s a third.
Who remembers this video: Tom Hiddleston Loki transformation?
Published on November 2017. (Read Tom said the filming was in April 2017)
Now someone came with these shots. Check them out. Thoughts? I always thought the video was from Ragnarok! Credit: Adorablemarvels
I’d always thought this was from Ragnarok too. This just makes me sad. Did they film this because it was the last time Tom would put on the Loki wig? 😟
If Infinity War and Avengers 4 were filmed concurrently and this scene was filmed after the sequences in which the Avengers travel back to 2012, that’s entirely possible.
I’m only OK with this if I imagine it in a different context. I’m going to pretend this comes after Loki has done his damnedest to undermine Thanos’s team from within and actually keep Thor safe, rather than just dying pointlessly and leaving Thor no better off than he was. This is after Loki has played a long game and now his cover has been blown, or he’s been forced to reveal his true colors because he can’t do what Thanos demands to prove his loyalty. This is in the final act of Infinity War, not the first 5 minutes. That would be worth the acting job Tom Hiddleston is doing here.
Ugh, I really don’t like it when people reblog stuff about Loki’s death scene in Infinity War as if it’s touching or redemptive. It was just stupid. He would have done Thor a lot more good if he’d actually tried to be a mole in Thanos’s campaign and pull another long con. As far as he knew, Thanos was just going to kill Thor as soon as he’d killed Loki; he did, in fact, leave Thor to die, and Thor was just lucky the Guardians happened to be close by. If Loki had actually tried to make a go of the double-cross, Thanos might have kept Thor alive to use as leverage over Loki. Which would not have been fun for either of them, but at least Loki would have known that he was safe-ish, and it would have bought both of them time to figure out a way to get the better of Thanos.
I’m never going to write that better version of Infinity War, because I don’t really know how to write comic book movies and also I don’t have time. But in my head there’s a vague version of what it would have been like if Joss Whedon had been writing it, including Loki pretending to be on Thanos’s side for most of the movie(s) and setting up some truly ingenious way to betray him at the end. And maybe he would then die heroically or maybe he would actually survive to start over with Thor, I don’t know. But his arc would have been worthy of the character as Hiddleston, Miller & Stentz, Branagh, and Whedon had established him.
Oh, and we would have found out WHAT FUCKING HAPPENED with Loki and Thanos in between “Thor 1” and “The Avengers.”
I think that some people are choosing to interpret aspects of that scene as touching or redemptive because it makes them feel better. Because the alternative is embracing that it was utterly pointless and that Loki’s death was just torture porn, a plot device to hype Thanos as a villain and to fuel Thor’s manpain. And that is a bitter pill to swallow.
What I mostly can’t handle are posts that say shit like:
Aww…isn’t it sweet how Odin forgave Loki in Ragnarok. No. Because that’s not what actually happened at all. And Loki’s list of grievances against Odin are far greater than anything Odin might hold against him. One might be able to argue that Odin voluntarily stayed in exile because he realized what a piece of shit he was and felt guilty about it. Perhaps Odin learned what happened to Loki when he fell from the Bifrost and felt bad for imprisoning him. But since nothing was explicitly stated, we can’t know that for sure.
Aww…isn’t is touching how Thor forgave Loki at the end of Ragnarok. No. Because that’s not what happened. Loki realized that in order to make things work with Thor, he would have to set aside his long list of valid grievances and accept that Thor was simply never going to understand his suffering. Thor was never going to understand him. And Loki finally embraced that his quest to be regarded Thor’s equal was a futile one. This isn’t to say Thor is a bad person either. Just that he doesn’t have the capacity to accept or understand what Loki has experienced or to give him what he needs. As I have stated in previous meta, Thor is a product of a flawed society and flawed parenting, just as Loki is.
Aww…isn’t it sweet how Heimdall accepted Loki at the end of Ragnarok. Well no. Because that’s not what really happened either. Heimdall is no saint in all of this, although I suspect he’s a good deal more responsible than most of the people who surround him. He is aware of a lot more than anyone else too. Meaning he has no plausible deniability. He should have been aware of at least SOME degree of Loki’s interaction with Thanos, even if he didn’t see any of the possible torture or abuse. He was also probably aware that Odin chose to stay on Earth, instead of reclaiming the throne, and of all the positive things that Loki did while posing as Odin (such as separating infinity stones and sending them far away) which is why he does not attempt to arrest Loki for his deception.
Aww…isn’t it cute how Loki accepted who he was in IW? No, it’s not cute. Yes, I do believe that Loki said Odinson and looked at Thor as a way of saying “we are brothers, regardless of all the other bullshit”. It may have been his way of saying goodbye. But a lot of his dialogue during this scene comes from a place of deep dysfunction. Thor’s last words to Loki are words of disapproval. Which is appropriate, since the bulk of their exchanged dialogue is basically Thor either judging or disapproving of Loki in some capacity. Loki accepting that he is Jotun is good, in a way. But it still does not address the racism that prevented him from doing so sooner. Loki stating that he is the god of mischief is actually rather confusing. Because the word mischief implies a lack of purpose. It implies just doing random shit for laughs. And that is actually the opposite of the Loki we saw prior to Ragnarok.
People interpret things in a way that comforts them. A lack of continuity is frustrating. So they will knit things together in a way that makes them feel consistent, even if they are most certainly not.
I mean, Thor was also a victim of unbelievably shitty writing – or should I say “writing”? since so much was improvised or just dictated on the spot by TW – in Ragnarok.
Personally, it all just felt so cheap to me, how it played out. Like if you’re going to kill him off, can it not be in a more realistic way, deserving of his character and all the effort Tom Hiddleston’s put into him? I’d rather have just not seen him at all, really. Well, maybe not, idk. What do you think? (2/2)
I’ve definitely ranted about this before; here are links to some posts where I’ve talked about it: 1234
Anyway, long story short: I think the people who made IW (screenwriters Markus & McFeely, the Russos, Kevin Feige) didn’t give a shit about Loki as a character. The writers/directors who have mostly worked on Captain America movies clearly don’t really care about the Asgardian characters. The Russos basically confirmed that they used his death as “motivation” for Thor, to “strip him down to nothing” (as if that wasn’t something that had been done in every single other movie he’s been in…) and watch him claw his way back up. It also seems to be the case that they had to turn Loki (and Thor!) into an idiot to give Thanos a chance to “prove” how powerful and dangerous he is, which, needless to say, did not prove what they wanted it to prove.
This may be a stretch, but I also suspect that Marvel wanted to distance itself from Loki’s mostly female fanbase. Like much of the rest of the Marvel fandom on here (hello, Thor and Ragnarok stans!), the Powers That Be at Marvel think Loki’s fans are just a bunch of airheaded teenage girls and maybe the occasional sexually frustrated middle-aged woman who are just creaming themselves over Tom Hiddleston. Women weren’t supposed to go for the vaguely effeminate, ambiguously queer-coded, morally gray part-time villain; we’re supposed to be swooning over the muscle-bound, morally self-certain male power fantasies they’re selling (or Tony Stark, if we insist on a little more darkness; wise-cracking billionaires are still within bounds). I felt the “No more resurrections” line and the excessive gruesome brutality of Loki’s death as a deliberate spiteful jab at us.
I do not think Loki will be coming back in the future, relative to the timeline of IW, though we will be seeing him in the past when Tony and whoever else goes time-traveling in A4. I think “No more resurrections” was the creators breaking the fourth wall.
Oh, I also dug up a confirmation from the Russos that Valkyrie and some of the Asgardians got off the ship on escape pods, so there’s that.
The massacre at the end of Avengers: Infinity War often
gets most of the attention when discussing the movie, but that doesn’t
mean fans have forgotten the major death that kicked off the
bloodthirsty blockbuster. When Thanos attacked the Asgardian refugee
ship the Statesman, Loki bravely sacrificed himself to save his brother, seemingly completing his redemptive arc that began in Thor: Ragnarok.
Seeing as the God of Mischief has fooled us once before in faking his
death though, many Marvel fans aren’t buying that he’s really gone for
good. In fact, one individual has now noticed an easily-missed detail
about Loki’s death scene in Infinity War that might prove that he survived his tussle with Thanos and it’s not just wishful thinking on our part.
Reddit user @Radkarth has pointed out that Loki’s seen to be
right-handed across his many appearances in the MCU to date – anytime
he’s involved in combat, he wields his weapon with his right. However,
he’s used his left hand in two scenes in the franchise: he holds a
dagger in his southpaw during his fake death in Thor: The Dark World and again in Infinity War, when he stabs Thanos
As we know, this version of Loki in The Dark World turned
out to be one of his holographic duplicates, so you could theorize that
it uses the opposite hand to the Asgardian as it’s a kind of mirror
image of him. With that in mind, could the same reasoning be true of his
final scene in IW? We sure hope so, as if the use of Loki’s
left hand is deliberate, it’s a smart, subtle detail that shows a lot of
thought on the filmmakers’ part. And kudos to this fan for spotting the
connection.
Of course, this easily-overlooked detail also gels with the previously-discussed fan theory that the Loki that died in Avengers: Infinity War was
merely a hologram. If you’ll recall, that idea rested on the
character’s apparent selflessness seeming at odds with his personality,
but now there’s some actual evidence to prove it. And with Avengers 4 not arriving until next May, we’ve got lots more time to perfect the theory yet.
Loki: Surprise bitch, I bet you thought you’d seen the last of me.
YES.
It wasn’t a hologram in TDW; if it had been, Kurse wouldn’t have been able to impale him – either the illusion would have dissolved, or the blade wouldn’t have made an impact, like the stuff Thor throws at Loki’s projection in “Ragnarok.” But perhaps more to the point… I just rewatched Loki’s “death” scene in TDW and did not see him holding a dagger in his left hand. When exactly was this supposed to have happened?
“The thing with Loki is that, if he’s afraid, he won’t show it. He’s been highly trained, through the experience of his slightly traumatic life, to shield his fears.”
Tom Hiddleston on Loki.
“his slightly traumatic life”, I’m not crying, you’re crying 😭
Jeez, that interview was painful to listen to. That reporter has been hearing rumors or been given misleading information suggesting that Loki “goes back to” Thanos and Tom is talking about how Josh Brolin was having such a great time and he can’t say, “Yeah, actually, Loki pretends to be rejoining him for about 30 seconds and then Thanos brutally murders him within the first 5 minutes of the movie.”
In every mcu movie Loki has always used his right hand for daggers and magic so him using his left hand in Infinity War is odd and after he dissapeared for several minutes only to pop back up and draw Thanos’s attention cocky as can be (he even insults him) to him is odder and after he looked in the tesseract which shows visions of future and assures Thor that the sun will shine on them will an emphasis on Will is really really odd and the fact that Loki had the tesseract which he has mastered in ways humans have not but didn’t attempt to use once to escape with Thor or to fight a Thanos with (He just freaking dropped it wtf no seriously wtf) is really really really odd
He used his left hand? Are we sure they didn’t just flip the frame? Film editors do that sometimes for aesthetic reasons.
Loki is the Philosopher King 