I’m not quite sure why I feel compelled to make this declaration, though it may be vaguely related to posts I have seen floating around making statements about Loki and/or Thor that just flat out seem to defy logic. So here are a couple of short lists.
1. Things that are true in my head:
· When we first meet Thor he really would have made an awful king.
· Thor is not a dumb jock. He is intelligent, but at the start of the first movie he is really arrogant and lacks both empathy and the willingness to think about the long-term consequences of his actions.
· That Loki was marginalized by Thor’s friends but not flat-out bullied. That for years he was the annoying little brother who they really didn’t want around but who wouldn’t leave. (As a little sister who grew up in a neighborhood where there were no other little girls to hang around with, I know exactly what it looks and feels like to be Big Brother’s Tag-along).
· When Loki tells Thor that Odin is dead, it’s bc he still thinks Thor would be a horrible king and wants to make sure he stays on earth.
· When Loki sends the Destroyer after Thor, he has no reason to believe Thor has changed at all.
· When Loki sends the Destroyer to eliminate Thor, Loki has also kind of started to go off the rails with self-loathing and is Not Thinking Rationally, and at this time he really did intend to inflict serious, permanent damage. Frigga really should have recognized this and shaken Loki by the collar. I am not sure why Marvel chose to portray Frigga so passively here. She is a an objet d’art in this movie, which is unfair to her character.
· Loki fully intended to commit suicide when he let go of Odin’s spear, both bc of his perceived rejection by Odin and his internalized racism.
· Thor really does love his bro and showed amazing self restraint in not pulverizing him when they fight on the Bifrost, esp bc he has no idea why his little brother is acting like a psychopath.
· Thanos tortured Loki before sending him to earth (come on! look at that after credits scene with Selvig!).
· When Thor initially shows up in the first Avengers movie, he was totally ready to take Loki back to Asgard and give him All The Hugs.
· Loki would have taken All The Hugs had he not been scared shitless of Thanos.
· When Loki dropped Thor from the helicarrier and when he stabbed him, his aim was to incapacitate Thor not kill him. Loki never believed anything he did would cause more than minor injury Thor (c’mon—that tiny little dagger? That’s like an Asgardian mosquito bite; plus, he probably thought Thor would get stuck in that glass cage long enough to stay out of the way–I will never be convinced that Loki believed the fall would be fatal).
· Loki fully expected to lose the battle in NY and honestly figured being in jail on Asgard was the safest place to be.
· Odin is a dick.
· Loki really did get run through by Kurse’s blade trying to save his brother’s life. (and honestly this is the movie where I pinpoint his redemption arc, and I think that giving him a redemption arc in Ragnarok was redundant)
· Loki really did almost die.
· Loki disguised himself as Odin in order to hide from Thanos.
· A couple of years in a nursing home would in no way hasten Odin’s death nor did Loki intend it to, though I’m sure Loki took great delight in the seeing his all-powerful dick of a father reduced to being spoon fed by someone who used baby talk (“Open wide, Mr. Borson! We don’t want your tummy to get upset when we take our medicine!”).
· Thor is still not a dumb jock, but he is now capable of introspection and occasional outburts of humility. Jury’s still out on empathy, but I’m willing to be convinced.
2. Things in my head that I hope are true:
· That before Thanos showed up Loki and Thor at least talked about the fact that Loki took a big ass sword right through his sternum.
· That they really did hug.
· That Tony and Loki get shit-faced drunk together at some point and bitch about their shitty dads.
@foundlingmother–I’m not entirely sure I would call MCU Thor compassionate, because I think in order to feel compassion, one has to first be able to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, and as I said, I’m not entirely convinced Thor has developed much capacity for empathy. I’m thinking particularly in Ultron when Banner is traumatized over the destruction caused by the Hulk, and Thor goes all Viking warrior about the screams of the dead. Not so empathetic. (though, as I said, I am willing to be convinced if some one wants to take up that discussion).
I would say, however, that Thor has an incredibly strong senses of duty, honor, and obligation. That’s why he’s polite when he’s really supposed to be (hanging up Mjolnir when he goes to Jane’s apartment like the good boy his mother raised). That’s why he works so hard to save Asgard from Hela–it’s his duty. That’s why he finally gives in and agrees to be king–obligation.
I would also repeat that he really loves his brother, dammit, and no one can convince me otherwise. So I think you are absolutely correct, @lola-zwietbeste, there is no way Thor knew that Loki had been tortured when he dragged him back home in chains. And even though he was a dick, I don’t think Odin knew, either. Certainly they would both have felt honor bound to revenge Loki’s torture as a slight against family and realm, though it is bit odd that no one thought to do a little bit of forensic investigating. Again, Odin=dick.
@writernotwaiting not one single thing here I disagree with. So refreshing to see rationality in this fandom.
I agree with @writernotwaiting on virtually all of this, except for two minor points:
1. I do think that it is partially accurate to say that Loki was “bullied” by Thor and his friends. I base that claim entirely on things we actually see in the movie and in the “Never doubt that I love you” deleted scene that we all accept as canon (so nobody go off on me about it having been deleted). Nonetheless, I do not hate them or entirely blame them for this. Consult my explanations at the bottom of the threads here and here.
2. I think that throughout the movies before Ragnarok, Thor is working on developing… sympathy, if not empathy. He slips up every now and then; he doesn’t really get why someone would be distraught over having killed enemies, but he catches on when Steve and Tony signal that he’s saying the wrong things and tries to backtrack. There’s something a bit incongruous about expecting someone from a warrior culture like Asgard to feel compassion, to treat someone else’s suffering as one’s own. As ever, I find Nietzsche’s contrast between noble and slave values enlightening: compassion and the imperative to relieve suffering are very distinctive of slave morality; of course Thor is driven by honor and duty – and respect for those he regards as his peers (if not his equals), including the human Avengers. Respect involves being aware of someone’s feelings, taking them into account, but also holding the person to the standards you accept for yourself – which explains why Thor flips out on Tony about the Ultron situation.
Finally: as you know, because I’ve said it a lot, I don’t think the version of Thor we see in Ragnarok, whom I call Thor* to mark the difference, is the same character as the Thor we see in Thor 1 through Age of Ultron. For that reason I think it’s misleading to try to track a development through Ragnarok and (to a lesser extent) Infinity War. It would be like trying to draw conclusions about the character of Thomas Jefferson from his depictions in 1776 and Hamilton (for the musical nerds out there…). The fact that different writers are involved isn’t necessarily prohibitive, because comics series can go through a number of different writers without losing continuity; it’s about whether the new writer respects the characterization that has been developed by previous writers and builds on it in a psychologically realistic way.
I think perhaps I’ll forgo a discussion of Ragnarok here, as I suspect it would rapidly devolve. There are quite a few things I see as problematic about it, but many other things that I quite liked, so we can save that for some other time.
@illwynd I think offered a very nice comment on the issue of compassion, but I think you’ve already seen that. I might quibble about how or in what way certain values and their expressions overlap. Compassion is not empathy, but it could still be argued that empathy is a prerequisite for compassion. And far be it for an English major to argue with Neitzsche, but I don’t see respect and compassion as mutually exclusive.
However, these are, arguably, differences only in the nuance of terminology rather than differences in substance. Thor is (again as illwynd points out) not static (ooh, I made an electricity pun! lol)—he is constantly trying to be better. He is (to completely misuse another philosopher) neither being nor not being—he is always becoming.
You’re right that a discussion about the quality of Ragnarok would probably rapidly devolve, but I bring it up because it’s not irrelevant to the disputes about Thor’s character and his regard for Loki that have been going around. People on both sides have been talking as if TR–Thor is continuous with pre-TR-Thor and I think that’s the source of some of the confusion: Loki stans treat Thor’s behavior in TR as evidence that Thor was always an abusive bully and never cared about Loki’s well-being; Thor stans treat how obviously Thor cares about Loki in previous films as evidence that he still shows genuine love and concern for him in TR. I’m wondering whether, if we carved off TR, there would be more agreement about Thor’s growth from where we see him at the beginning of Thor 1 and his imperfectly expressed but sincere love for Loki from Thor through TDW.
I had a discussion with @illwynd (also relevant to @foundlingmother‘s reblog) and we agreed that we have somewhat different understandings of “compassion.” I tend to align it more closely with both empathy and pity than some people do, largely because of the way it’s used to translate the German word Mitleid: literally “with-suffering” (or, more intuitively, “suffering with”), which is the direct translation of the Latin components of compassion. The etymology is going to be a lot more obvious to German speakers than to English speakers, since Mitleid is made up of two ordinary German words, so it makes sense that the English word has lost some of those connotations. If, in general, compassion is being used to mean “caring about someone else’s well-being,” “wishing others well,” “benevolence,” etc., I definitely agree that Thor has that in spades – and that he’s a work in progress, even as late as AOU, and that’s part of what’s so endearing about him.
The point was not that respect and compassion are mutually exclusive; it’s just that they represent different impulses, different ways of regarding your obligations toward others. In a noble value system, respect is given sparingly, only to those you have judged your equals; in some Christian-derived value systems, such as Kantian ethics, you owe respect to every human being simply in virtue of their being human. Respect is about regarding the other as an agent, as someone who has intelligible goals and does things for reasons; compassion is more about regarding the other as a patient, as someone who feels and suffers. Given how deeply feeling is interwoven with our desires and motivations, they can’t be so easily teased apart… Maybe I think of respect as involving holding someone else a little more at arm’s length, recognizing the reality and the importance of their needs and goals to them, but not making them your own, and definitely not assuming you always know what’s going on with the other person or how they feel about their situation. Thor’s failure to ask Loki his reasons for his bad actions was a failure of respect as much as of compassion.
Loki is the Philosopher King 