MCU News & Tweets on Twitter

led-lite:

loptrlaufey:

WTF!!! ;_;

“You know I heard you were meaning to get in touch with me, but then I heard you were dead. And I also heard that you were a king and various other things.

But the fact is, Loki, you and I are not the sort people understand… we’re the sort people fear.

Now I got the information that I needed and now I have to break your neck. It’s just the way it is. I’m not—I’m just the messenger.”

This is creepy and very mafia-y!!

Yep… this is mob boss!Thanos. I don’t think this Thanos had any benevolent pretensions about balancing the universe. This is creepy in-love-with-Death Thanos.

seidrade:

lord-huggington:

loptrlaufey:

WTF!!! ;_;

?????????

This is truly bizarre and…creepy? Parts of the delivery make this almost sound improvised? (Would that be normal for test footage?) Either that, or at one point, Thanos’ motive for killing Loki was written a little differently? I don’t even know.

Anyway I’m so tired of his dumbass face, they wasted Josh Brolin on such a poorly written villain. Just gonna rewatch Deadpool 2 and think about his sweet lovely crush on Ryan Reynolds. (Tbh I kinda wish Ryan Reynolds got to be in charge of the MCU, he seems to actually get it. Anyway, tangent over.)

This sounds like they may have been toying with a different characterization of Thanos – when they weren’t making a bullshit attempt to make him sympathetic, and he was just an evil nutjob with a weird sense of humor (which was how I wrote him). Not that the way he killed Loki in the movie was particularly sympathetic, but they sort of made it a “Greedo shot first” situation with Loki siccing the Hulk on him and then making that unbelievably stupid attempt to stab him. At that point, Thanos could be construed as killing him to avenge personal betrayal in addition to the breach of their previous agreement. But in this video, Thanos seems to be saying that he has to kill Loki simply because he has no more use for him – which is what I would expect from a straight-up psychopath-in-love-with-Death Thanos rather than that asinine “humanitarian” version they ended up pushing on us.

MCU News & Tweets on Twitter

seidrade:

philosopherking1887:

seidrade:

shine-of-asgard:

lolawashere:

Tom Hiddleston as Loki featured in the Avengers: Infinity War – The Official Movie Special book.

Via Torrilla/weibo

I neither can nor want to read this tbh. Anyone else can give general heads-up as to how atrocious this is re: general vilifying, powers / intelligence erasure, backstory and so on?

@shine-of-asgard Its honestly fine if you want to read— that first page is just brief interview questions. Mostly Tom just talking about wearing his costume, getting into character, his acting relationship with Hemsworth (this part is quite sweet), his love of Branagh’s approach to Thor and his excitement/observation that people have latched onto the characters and seem to enjoy having real emotions in their blockbuster superhero movies. The “bad boy” bit in the title isn’t followed-up except for where Tom (probably jokingly) says the horns give Loki a bit of the devil about him.

What did catch my eye was the blurb about the Mind Stone on the next page— and the claim that Thanos didn’t know what it was when he gave it to Loki in the scepter. I’m sorry, what?!?! This is news to me.

WTF, Marvel? How do you keep making your big bad scary new villain sound like such a dipshit? At this point I believe my own account of what happened with Thanos more than I believe anything coming from these ass-clowns.

Also I just caught that it says “[Thanos] granted use of the stone to Loki to help him in his proposed conquest of Earth”

So like, not to take this too seriously because honestly, who knows how closely this kind of collateral print stuff is proofread by the higher ups…

But that sounds like it was Loki’s idea to target Earth— which is something that’s often been debated. Loki has a few lines in Avengers that sound like he’s doubtful of Thanos’ ability to deliver an army. The Other says something like “you’ll have your war, Asgardian” — doesn’t he? (I can’t pull up a video at the moment to see.)

I always thought that was a bit funny because Loki was clearly being threatened/coerced/tortured on some level and clearly under Thanos’ control. So why did it sound so much like he was trying to bargain, as if he were an equal partner in the venture? I always figured those comments were merely Loki trying to reassert his regal bearing and pull his pride together, trying to hide his fear before going off to “conquer.”

But… if Loki was the one who first suggested going to Earth (perhaps offering his services in order to save his own skin) his comments would make even more sense, because then of course he’d want to act as though he actually gave a shit about conquering Midgard as a general of Thanos. He’d have to make Thanos and The Other believe he was dedicated to not just Thanos’ cause, but his own selfish goals of ruling Earth— which of course, wouldn’t possibly compete with Thano’s goal of attaining the Stones.

Btw— if Thanos didn’t even know he already had the fucking Mind Stone in his thot little hands, how the hell did he know the Tesseract was on Earth? (Remind me— Do they say in any of the movies/deleted scenes specifically why Thanos knows about the Tesseract being found/reawakened on Earth? I forget if it’s explicitly mentioned that the energy signature calls to him or to the Mind Stone, etc. If that’s ever mentioned on screen, then something really doesn’t add up and this book is talking nonsense. But if it’s only a vague reference, perhaps we can deduce that Loki knew what the Mind Stone was, and/or told him about the Tesseract in order to entice Thanos into working with his plan.)

Either way… Loki probably knew if he played his cards right, there was a decent chance of Thor and Co. or even Odin himself preventing him from taking the Tesseract. So it makes me wonder if Loki purposefully leapt at the chance to also snag the Mind Stone from Thanos (getting caught and allowing the Avengers to analyze it, then later tossing it aside for Natasha to find— he practically giftwraps it for them) as well as botching the invasion and making sure the Tesseract would land in Thor/Asgard’s hands. Maybe he didn’t know which Stone would end up where, but he knew that anywhere was better than with Thanos, and not having either Stone would significantly hinder Thano’s ability to reach the Nine Realms.

Whew. So yes…

I always thought Loki purposefully pulled quite the fast one on Thanos by losing on purpose— but this would be potential proof that he pulled a double fast-one, knowing what the Mind Stone was before Thanos did.

Now I just want to know if Thanos was like, hmm you’ll need a weapon, how about this long piece of junk— and Loki saw the Mind Stone and was like YES I mean sure, I guess that’ll do, you’re the boss *shrug*

Yeah, I do think the way we were supposed to interpret those lines in The Avengers was that it was Loki’s idea to invade and conquer Earth. I also kind of suspect (as I acknowledged in the notes to the chapter of “Abyss” where I dealt with it) that the tag scene at the end of Thor, where we see Loki looking all beat-up and still in the formal armor he was wearing when he fell, was supposed to have taken place shortly after Loki fell, and maybe we were supposed to infer that he had fallen to Earth and somehow found the Tesseract himself.

But neither of those ideas made a whole lot of sense to me. I mean, I guess it’s possible that Loki has the ability to detect powerful magical objects. But I knew they were building toward something with Thanos and the Infinity Stones – I didn’t get into the MCU until after AOU had come out, so I didn’t start writing MCU fanfiction until I’d watched all the way through that – so I kind of thought of Infinity Stones as being Thanos’s thing, and it made more sense to me that Thanos was the one who had found the Tesseract using the Mind Stone, which we knew he gave to Loki. No, they don’t say explicitly that the Mind Stone detected the tampering with the Tesseract; there’s just that bit of ominous narration by The Other at the beginning of The Avengers, saying “The Tesseract has awakened. It is on a little world,” etc. They do show him handing the scepter to Loki in the same little intro bit, but I don’t think we’re supposed to draw any inferences from that.

There was also that exchange in The Avengers where Loki says “I have seen the true power of the Tesseract” and Thor immediately asks, “Who showed you this power? Who controls the would-be king?” That strongly suggested to me that Loki wouldn’t have known all that much about the Infinity Stones before his encounter with Thanos, which is why Thor immediately infers that someone else must have taught him. And that made me seriously question whether invading Earth had actually been Loki’s idea, because Thanos is the one who wants the Tesseract and knows how and where to find it. So… what gives? And that’s why I decided for fic purposes that Thanos convinced Loki that invading Earth was his idea, Inception-style. Using the Mind Stone, of course, because he had it. And he definitely fucking knew what it was, I don’t know what that writer was smoking. He temporarily relinquished one Infinity Stone in order to secure a second. It didn’t work out, but sometimes you gotta take a gamble to win big.

incredifishface:

philosopherking1887:

@foundlingmother replied to your post

“Ugh, I really don’t like it when people reblog stuff about Loki’s…”

Yeah, Thor 100% has the capacity to understand Loki’s grievances, he just didn’t get a chance to because he wasn’t even in Ragnarok, Thor* was. Heimdall might not be a saint, but I think it’s wrong to assume he saw Loki with Thanos. It seems unlikely he would have mentioned none of that. As for Loki pulling a double-cross… while I get the appeal of this, it seems like such an unrealistic culmination of Loki’s arc even ignoring Ragnarok.

I’m not sure I think it would have been Whedon’s angle.

I mean, I know that Thanos behaves kind of stupid in GotG, but I feel like having him accept Loki as his ally with all that happens… would have undermined him as a villain.

Right… I wasn’t completely on board with all of @juliabohemian‘s analysis on my other post. She and I seem to fundamentally disagree about Thor’s moral character and disposition toward Loki as shown in previous films: I think the character called “Thor” in Ragnarok is a radical departure from Thor as we’ve seen him in previous movies, which is why I refer to him as Thor*; she, and many other non-Thorki-shipping Loki fans, think that Ragnarok amplifies Thor’s previous tendencies toward self-absorption and insensitivity, but is not completely discontinuous with the character. I don’t see us coming to full agreement on that issue anytime soon, and that’s fine.

As to the issue of the double-cross being “an unrealistic culmination of Loki’s arc”… I actually disagree with you there. If you just mean it would have been unrealistic for Thanos to accept Loki as his ally, I do see where you’re coming from there, but there are ways around it. The idea of having Thanos take Thor as a hostage is one way. That way Thanos wouldn’t have to trust Loki; he would just have to trust Loki’s unwillingness to allow harm to come to Thor, which given what Thanos knows about him he absolutely would and should. I think that would appeal to Thanos for a couple of reasons:

(1) Good old-fashioned sadism. Whedon’s Thanos clearly wasn’t into any of that pseudo-benevolent Malthusian bullshit; the reference to “courting death” in the Avengers tag scene indicated that Whedon was picturing a Thanos obsessed with Lady Death like he is in the comics. No attempt would have been made to make that Thanos sympathetic. That Thanos is a creepy fucker who would have gotten a kick out of torturing Thor physically (just a little) and torturing Loki psychologically with the knowledge that a step out of line would mean pain and/or permanent damage to Thor. Ooh, maybe he would have cut off a finger or a toe when Loki made a decision to undermine Thanos that he was just barely able to pass off as an incompetent fuck-up. And Loki would have known that… and wouldn’t have hesitated to trade his own pain, but when it’s Thor’s it’s so much worse. (Should I be worried about myself, coming up with this shit?)

(2) It would mean that Loki wasn’t a completely wasted investment. If Thanos were a good economist (which clearly he isn’t…), he wouldn’t buy into the sunk costs fallacy, and he’d be perfectly happy cutting his losses and cutting Loki loose… but I think he’s into narrative neatness (OK, this is just “Abyss” Thanos now, never mind what Whedon would have done) and he would like the idea of making Loki useful after all. Plus, there must have been a reason he thought it was a good idea to trust Loki with the Tesseract retrieval mission – and the Mind Stone! – in the first place; he must think he’s good at some stuff.

If by “unrealistic culmination of Loki’s arc,” you mean it wouldn’t be a realistic place for Loki’s character progression to go, then I definitely disagree. Part of what was so objectionable about Thor*’s treatment of Loki in Ragnarok was that he was effectively demanding that Loki become a different person as a condition of maintaining a relationship with Thor* (classic sign of an abusive relationship, btw). Of course, that demand was also based on the faulty premise, assumed by Ragnarok but by none of the previous films, that Loki’s basic nature or “essence” was the “god of mischief” who betrays people out of hedonistic self-interest or just because he thinks it’s fun. I mean, it’s not unreasonable for Thor to demand that Loki stop betraying him, but when you’re working on the assumption that that’s what Loki has been doing their whole lives, instead of just for the past 6 really shitty years out of 1000+, and that it’s just in his nature to do that, then you’ve really gotta wonder why Thor put up with it for as long as he did… and also you don’t give an abusive “change fundamentally or I’m leaving” ultimatum; you just fucking leave.

One of the best parts of TDW, which totally got me the first time I watched it, was when Loki makes a show of betraying Thor to trick Malekith into drawing the Aether from Jane. That was absolutely brilliant because it was Thor and Loki, together, taking advantage of some of Loki’s most distinctive features – illusion magic, acting ability, and a reputation for treachery – to achieve a good aim they shared. Having Loki pull a long con on Thanos would be that gambit writ large. And ideally, this time – in order for it to represent a progression from the incident in TDW rather than just a replay – Thor would not be on on the plan… but he would indicate, perhaps while conversing in a dungeon with one of Thanos’s other unfortunate prisoners, that he believes Loki is still on his side and is planning to double-cross Thanos in the end. He doesn’t know; he harbors some doubts; but he believes. That would represent character growth for both Thor and Loki: Thor is forced to trust Loki for a long period of uncertainty; and Loki is, on some level, trusting Thor to trust him. That, too, would be a source of anguish for Loki – wondering whether Thor thinks that Loki has betrayed him again, more grievously than ever – but he hopes, and maybe even believes (William James will-to-believe style, because it helps), that Thor believes Loki is doing the right thing, in his indirect, strategic way.

@fuckyeahrichardiii, @illwynd, @incredifishface, @seidrade, I’m bringing y’all in on my harebrained IW do-over ideas because I’m curious to know what you think. (I’m never writing this as a fic, because I’m not that good at plot details, but just the outline.)

i appreciate it, but I think I’ll pass. I can’t engage this level of mind power into fixing a movie I wouldn’t even have made. I simply don’t want to give Thanos a second of my mental time. He’s a stupid character with stupid motivations and he bores me. I would have preferred ye olde “rule the universe hur hur hur” kind of villain 145977577647 times, and failing that, the Thanos in love with Hela / Death was a good route to go to.

So all the artistic and narrative decisions started from a point which for me was already irreparably stupid and boring. they killed Loki in the first 5 minutes, and that’s when they lost me and never got me back.

If I was to conjecture ways to improve this film, it would be with an entirely different villain, with different motivations, and so my contribution as to what part Thor and Loki played in that imaginary story that never was is moot.

i’m bitter and miserable and you’ll find me in the universe next door raving about the Transformers. Now THAT is a plot.

I completely agree with you about the version of Thanos we saw in Infinity War, as written by those dimwitted hacks-turned-freshman boys in philosophy seminar Markus & McFeely and made “sympathetic” by the equally sophomoric Russos. I’m only interested in reimagining the movie with the Thanos who was in love with Death/Hela, largely because in the fic I’ve been writing about what happened to Loki between Thor and The Avengers, that was the motivation I was assuming (and actually wrote in, long before we got the ridiculous movie version of Thanos). And also because I’m fantasizing about the version of IW that Joss Whedon would have written if he hadn’t gotten fed up with Marvel’s meddling in AOU. I really don’t think he would have killed Loki in the first 5 minutes, because he was the one who established the connection with Thanos in the first place and would have wanted to give it a satisfying payoff, and aside from that all the evidence suggests that he was genuinely impressed with the work Hiddleston and Branagh put into building Loki’s character and was invested in continuing to give him depth and interest.

I’m also vaguely assuming in this imagining that we got the version of Ragnarok that we deserved, though I’m also not completely clear on what that would have looked like. Thor and Loki would have had a real fucking conversation, for one thing. I think it was written and directed by Guillermo del Toro. Hela actually had half of her face missing (Guillermo loves that shit), and she and Loki bonded over being seen by the world and themselves as monsters. Maybe she was Loki’s mother, not Thor’s sister. And she definitely didn’t die at the end, because she needs to show up as Thanos’s would-be love interest in IW.

@foundlingmother replied to your post

“Ugh, I really don’t like it when people reblog stuff about Loki’s…”

Yeah, Thor 100% has the capacity to understand Loki’s grievances, he just didn’t get a chance to because he wasn’t even in Ragnarok, Thor* was. Heimdall might not be a saint, but I think it’s wrong to assume he saw Loki with Thanos. It seems unlikely he would have mentioned none of that. As for Loki pulling a double-cross… while I get the appeal of this, it seems like such an unrealistic culmination of Loki’s arc even ignoring Ragnarok.

I’m not sure I think it would have been Whedon’s angle.

I mean, I know that Thanos behaves kind of stupid in GotG, but I feel like having him accept Loki as his ally with all that happens… would have undermined him as a villain.

Right… I wasn’t completely on board with all of @juliabohemian‘s analysis on my other post. She and I seem to fundamentally disagree about Thor’s moral character and disposition toward Loki as shown in previous films: I think the character called “Thor” in Ragnarok is a radical departure from Thor as we’ve seen him in previous movies, which is why I refer to him as Thor*; she, and many other non-Thorki-shipping Loki fans, think that Ragnarok amplifies Thor’s previous tendencies toward self-absorption and insensitivity, but is not completely discontinuous with the character. I don’t see us coming to full agreement on that issue anytime soon, and that’s fine.

As to the issue of the double-cross being “an unrealistic culmination of Loki’s arc”… I actually disagree with you there. If you just mean it would have been unrealistic for Thanos to accept Loki as his ally, I do see where you’re coming from there, but there are ways around it. The idea of having Thanos take Thor as a hostage is one way. That way Thanos wouldn’t have to trust Loki; he would just have to trust Loki’s unwillingness to allow harm to come to Thor, which given what Thanos knows about him he absolutely would and should. I think that would appeal to Thanos for a couple of reasons:

(1) Good old-fashioned sadism. Whedon’s Thanos clearly wasn’t into any of that pseudo-benevolent Malthusian bullshit; the reference to “courting death” in the Avengers tag scene indicated that Whedon was picturing a Thanos obsessed with Lady Death like he is in the comics. No attempt would have been made to make that Thanos sympathetic. That Thanos is a creepy fucker who would have gotten a kick out of torturing Thor physically (just a little) and torturing Loki psychologically with the knowledge that a step out of line would mean pain and/or permanent damage to Thor. Ooh, maybe he would have cut off a finger or a toe when Loki made a decision to undermine Thanos that he was just barely able to pass off as an incompetent fuck-up. And Loki would have known that… and wouldn’t have hesitated to trade his own pain, but when it’s Thor’s it’s so much worse. (Should I be worried about myself, coming up with this shit?)

(2) It would mean that Loki wasn’t a completely wasted investment. If Thanos were a good economist (which clearly he isn’t…), he wouldn’t buy into the sunk costs fallacy, and he’d be perfectly happy cutting his losses and cutting Loki loose… but I think he’s into narrative neatness (OK, this is just “Abyss” Thanos now, never mind what Whedon would have done) and he would like the idea of making Loki useful after all. Plus, there must have been a reason he thought it was a good idea to trust Loki with the Tesseract retrieval mission – and the Mind Stone! – in the first place; he must think he’s good at some stuff.

If by “unrealistic culmination of Loki’s arc,” you mean it wouldn’t be a realistic place for Loki’s character progression to go, then I definitely disagree. Part of what was so objectionable about Thor*’s treatment of Loki in Ragnarok was that he was effectively demanding that Loki become a different person as a condition of maintaining a relationship with Thor* (classic sign of an abusive relationship, btw). Of course, that demand was also based on the faulty premise, assumed by Ragnarok but by none of the previous films, that Loki’s basic nature or “essence” was the “god of mischief” who betrays people out of hedonistic self-interest or just because he thinks it’s fun. I mean, it’s not unreasonable for Thor to demand that Loki stop betraying him, but when you’re working on the assumption that that’s what Loki has been doing their whole lives, instead of just for the past 6 really shitty years out of 1000+, and that it’s just in his nature to do that, then you’ve really gotta wonder why Thor put up with it for as long as he did… and also you don’t give an abusive “change fundamentally or I’m leaving” ultimatum; you just fucking leave.

One of the best parts of TDW, which totally got me the first time I watched it, was when Loki makes a show of betraying Thor to trick Malekith into drawing the Aether from Jane. That was absolutely brilliant because it was Thor and Loki, together, taking advantage of some of Loki’s most distinctive features – illusion magic, acting ability, and a reputation for treachery – to achieve a good aim they shared. Having Loki pull a long con on Thanos would be that gambit writ large. And ideally, this time – in order for it to represent a progression from the incident in TDW rather than just a replay – Thor would not be on on the plan… but he would indicate, perhaps while conversing in a dungeon with one of Thanos’s other unfortunate prisoners, that he believes Loki is still on his side and is planning to double-cross Thanos in the end. He doesn’t know; he harbors some doubts; but he believes. That would represent character growth for both Thor and Loki: Thor is forced to trust Loki for a long period of uncertainty; and Loki is, on some level, trusting Thor to trust him. That, too, would be a source of anguish for Loki – wondering whether Thor thinks that Loki has betrayed him again, more grievously than ever – but he hopes, and maybe even believes (William James will-to-believe style, because it helps), that Thor believes Loki is doing the right thing, in his indirect, strategic way.

@fuckyeahrichardiii, @illwynd, @incredifishface, @seidrade, I’m bringing y’all in on my harebrained IW do-over ideas because I’m curious to know what you think. (I’m never writing this as a fic, because I’m not that good at plot details, but just the outline.)