Tag: the avengers

I rewatched Thor last night. I hadn’t seen it in a while. I didn’t really like it before. I thought the larger than life good guys were a bit sloppily depicted, but I enjoyed it much better this time after having read your musings on Loki’s psychology during the drama. I can appreciate it now. And when Loki falls into space, we can say goodbye to that characterization. I like Joss’ flamboyant sexy bad guy characterization, but it distort the character away from his Shakespearean complexity.

Well, as many of my readers/blog followers know, I think there are ways to square the tragic Shakespearean anti-villain in Thor with the (apparently) flamboyant sexy bad guy in The Avengers, and my longest ongoing work of fanfiction is an effort to do just that. Loki’s time in the Void definitely changed him; it hardened him in certain ways, but clearly he has also fallen under Thanos’s power in some way or other and remains vulnerable. His loyalty to his family and Asgard (though not Odin) was also recoverable, apparently, so whatever happened didn’t completely turn him evil.

Whedon was deliberately leaving open a possibility for redemption by showing Loki as under threat from Thanos, and not just violent and power-mad but fearful. He also showed that Loki was conflicted, and genuinely tempted by Thor’s offers of affection and salvation. Ultimately, I think Whedon came closer than anyone else to approximating the classical tone of the first Thor, though The Avengers was more epic than tragedy.

I came into the fandom because of Thor: Ragnarok, mainly because I love Valkyrie. I thought Thor’s character was sort of off-putting. How is his characterization different in the other movies?

Hi Anon, are you here to join the club of racists (apparently) who don’t understand why we’re supposed to like Taika Waititi’s interpretation of Thor? Welcome!

Honestly, I think the best thing you can do is to watch the other movies if you haven’t. In the first movie, Thor starts out as an arrogant warrior who loves to fight and thinks violence is the solution to every problem, but his father strips him of his powers and banishes him to Earth to learn humility. Aside from the arrogance and eagerness to fight, he’s very loyal to his friends and he has a gallantry about him… well, he’s representative of an ancient warrior culture, really. He loves to fight and feast and flirt; he’s a bit bombastic, but has a sense of chivalry; he picks on little bro Loki sometimes, he can be a bit of a jock/bully, but he loves and trusts Loki (more than he should) and isn’t willing to give up on him even when he’s descended into madness and is doing horrible things.

Thor tells the story of Thor’s maturation into a more patient and self-sacrificing person, and he continues that process of maturation through the other movies we see him in: The Avengers, Thor: The Dark World, and Avengers: Age of Ultron. He’s still a little too ready to solve problems by hitting things in The Avengers, still a little arrogant and Homeric-warrior-bro (he’s Achilles, basically), but he’s getting better, learning how to be more of a team player. In TDW and AOU he becomes progressively more serious and thoughtful, largely because terrible things keep happening in his life… he still has a sly sense of humor, and he spends much of AOU subtly trolling the human Avengers, but he’s also become very canny and perceptive.

Ragnarok just gave him a complete personality makeover with almost no regard for the way he’d been portrayed before. He was never that inarticulate – the Asgardians used to speak in an elevated, slightly archaic register, the way they do in the comics – and he was never as… mean as he is in Ragnarok. I mean, he’s a bit of a douche in Thor, but the point was that he got better.

thebaconsandwichofregret:

mizstorge:

thegestianpoet:

thegestianpoet:

i can’t believe thor wearing arm guards with loki’s helmet on them in avengers AND thor having a strand of loki’s hair braided into his own hair in age of ultron are both real things that the costume department did and loki in ragnarok still has the gall to ask poor thor “did you mourn me?” like yes loki you made your jock brother so sad that he started accessorizing 

image

@redwoodriver @agent0hio the receipts. the hair I thought at first was jane’s but in other shots it’s 100% black and silky lookin….. like hey marvel? I just wanna talk. i just wanna talk 

The thing is that unless these details are explained to the audience within the film, they might as well not have existed. Just like J.K. Rowling announcing to an audience at Carnegie Hall that Dumbledore was gay, but not mentioning it in the book that had just been published, it makes no impact on the way viewers interpret the film. And. unless the MCU makes the significance of these costume details explicit, it’s going to remain questionable as to whether Thor did these things in memory of Loki, or whether they’re immaterial as far as the films are concerned.

That’s not really the same thing. There is no textual evidence for Dumbledore’s sexuality, just Jo’s word.

The costume IS the textual evidence in Thor, it’s not announced but it is part of the text. My high school English teacher would allow me to use the armour and the braid as evidence in an essay, there is no evidence in the text for Dumbledore.

Small details are important in film, tiny things that aren’t necessary to the plot but if noticed enhance it are called World Building, your Dumbledore example is a lack of World Building

The gauntlets are indisputably a tribute to Loki; the hair thing is less clear. I saw someone speculating that it’s probably just a black ribbon, in which case it could be a sign of mourning for both Frigga and Loki. If it’s Loki’s hair… well.