I think the biggest problem I have with Thor’s characterization in Ragnarok is that Thor’s not a comedian, and a Thor movie shouldn’t be a comedy. Thor can be funny, and Thor movies can have funny moments, but the core shouldn’t be comedy. That’s more mainstream entertaining (I admit, I find Ragnarok amusing/entertaining), but it’s not Thor. It never has been. Thor has always been deeply emotional, (over)dramatic, and reverent. That’s why it pisses me off to see people say that Ragnarok is what Thor movies always should have been, and the characterization is the best it’s ever been. No. This isn’t Thor. Those characters aren’t Thor or Loki, they’re the comedic simplification of those characters.
This seems right. Guardians of the Galaxy should be funny (and it is); you can get some pathos out of Star-Lord’s and Rocket’s stories (and they do), but they basically are comedians – it’s part of their character. If Thor is funny in his movies, either Thor shouldn’t be in on the joke – the way Thor 1 gets humor out of his confusion and awkwardness without resorting to ridicule – or it should be dignified and deadpan, the way Thor is in TDW (“Space is fine,” hanging the hammer on the coat rack) and Age of Ultron (“You’re all not worthy”; stepping on the Lego and then nudging it out of the way; his interactions with Vision; “as long as there is life in my breast, I am… running out of things to say”; “With the exception of this one [Tony], there’s nothing that can’t be explained”). The bickering with Loki in TDW is also good Thor humor, because we see him as a typical brother, but it never breaks character. Oh yeah, and the bilgesnipe exchange with Coulson in The Avengers.
All of this is subtle humor. In fact, I got the most examples out of AOU, probably because clever, subtle humor is Joss Whedon’s thing; he’s very practiced at making old, serious, generally dignified people funny in an in-character way (see: Rupert Giles, Angel, Shepherd Book; Spike and Wesley are less dignified, but vaguely in the same category). I’m not sure exactly which added scenes in TDW he wrote (other than the bro-boat and the shapeshifting); I don’t think he wrote the bickering in the spaceship, but he might have (in case they expanded that scene in reshoots). It’s hard to make Thor funny, so you need a writer with a specific sensibility and skill set. Taika Waititi (and Eric Pearson, however much of his script actually survived) does not have that sensibility; his way of making ancient vampires funny in What We Do in the Shadows was to deprive them of dignity. So of course we should expect that his way of making Thor and Loki funny was to deprive them of dignity.
“Here’s the thing a wise man once said : ‘The opposite of love is not hate, its indifference.’ And Loki is not indifferent to Thor. He hates him. And in order to hate someone, you must still, therefore, love them. So I think there is, somewhere down the line, the possibility of redemption for him, because he is just in real need of self-esteem.”
This is absolutely my favorite thing about how Tom purposely plays Loki. He’s so very aware of how, no matter what way you look at this relationship, Loki canonically revolves around Thor, and it’s visibly obvious.
I was doing some giffing and basically re-watched Thor for the purpose (like it was a sacrifice, haha), and I just realised something that gives me new heartache.
Look at this gif:
When Thor broke the Bifrost, he and Loki went flying into the air and would have both fallen into the Void if Odin hadn’t caught them. Thor had no idea – he just couldn’t know – that Odin was going to grab Thor’s leg and save both brothers from dying/becoming lost in the space-time continuum. Still, Thor grabbed Gungnir, for which Loki was trying to reach in some desperate attempt to save his life. Thor still wanted to save Loki, after everything that had happened, and Thor didn’t have much hope, but he saw Loki falling underneath him, trying to get a hold of anything, and they both went for the staff, Loki to save himself, Thor to save Loki, even when he had no way of knowing it was even going to work. But fuck, this hurts the man. Thor tried to be there for his little brother when everything was literally and figuratively falling apart around them, and by the Norns, they might both die, but they’ll die holding that staff together and Thor will die trying to save Loki.
Loki is the Philosopher King 