Thor: Killed people of Jotunheim because he was called a “princess” and nearly led Asgard into war because of his immaturity, arrogance and hotheadedness
Odin: Punished him by banishing to Midgard to learn his lesson and become better; he can come back to become king of Asgard once he proves himself worthy 😊
Loki: Killed people of Earth because he had turned mad and villainous after returning alive from an abyss that he fell into and was presumed dead, where he likely experienced unimaginable horrors that broke him and possibly had his mind manipulated by Thanos (A little background: He had let himself fall into the void out of despair, as Odin had denied him approval even after he tried so desperately to prove himself a worthy son. This was shortly after he had been hurt and devastated over learning that his whole life had been a lie, that he was actually adopted and was in fact the abanboned son of Asgard’s enemy, one of those horrible monsters that he had heard so much about in bedtime stories and Thor had been so excited about slaying since they were children. He only ever sought to be Thor’s equal–for years he was made to feel inferior, to feel like he was living in the shade of Thor’s greatness, because of Odin’s blatant favouritism towards Thor and also as a result of growing up in a society with a culture that honoured warriors and scorned magic users like him–but then he just found out that from the onset he was never meant to be Thor’s equal in the way he believed he had the right to be.)
Odin: Told him his birth right was to die as a child, punished him by condemning him to life imprisonment and would have sentenced him to death if not for Frigga
That whole “you’ll always be the god of mischief but you could be more” speech that Thor gives Loki bugs me, because Loki is, and always has been, more than “just” the god of mischief. Who do the writers/director think they’re trying to convince of that? Us? This is something we already knew. Loki? Even Loki himself knows he is more than that, he’s spent all his life trying to prove it to Odin and Thor. And they shut him down at every pass. Oh, but those times were imagined slights.
THOR 1: “Hey Loki, you’re a piece of shit!”
AVENGERS: “Hey Loki, you’re a piece of shit!”
THOR 2: “Hey Loki, you’re a piece of shit!”
THOR 3: “You know what your problem is, Loki? You think you’re a piece of shit. But you could be more…”
It’s not noble to rescue someone from the peril you inflicted on them. Nor is it noble to disabuse someone of a notion that you yourself instilled.
I went into Ragnarok thinking “this is it…this will be the movie where Thor finally acknowledges that Loki’s pain is real and tries to reach some kind of understanding with him.” But Thor doesn’t want to understand. He only wants to be understood. That was the case even before Ragnarok. But in Ragnarok it was so much worse.
I really thought that Loki would find a way to let Thor know about what happened to him after he fell from the Bifrost. Which, to me, is an enormous plot hole. Thor seeing Loki show up on Earth after he’s presumed dead, and not feeling even slightly compelled to investigate is a giant plot hole. But they needed Loki to be a villain in that movie. So they just had him do villain-y things, because reasons.
Ragnarok tried to re-establish Loki as this hedonistic troublemaker who sits around, drinking his problems away. Which is amusing if you consider that Loki literally held Asgard together for several years while his brother, who had yet to actually spend any time ruling, ran around the cosmos doing who knows what. But we are to believe that Loki is this inept, immoral imp who cares about nothing and no one. When in actuality he is quite capable. The whole thing makes me ill. I look forward to the point when I stop caring about it tbh.
Really, it’s more “you are a piece of shit” again in TR rather than “you think you’re a piece of shit.” Or perhaps more precisely, “you rest content with being a piece of shit.”
There’s a peculiar kind of sadism in Ragnarok’s repeated insistence that being a trickster is just “in Loki’s nature,” that that’s who he fundamentally is (ignoring previous canon, of course), and then Thor*’s demand that Loki just stop being “the god of mischief” and become someone else. If that’s really his nature, it should be impossible, or else Thor* is ordering him not to be himself anymore… which is a horrible thing to demand of someone you supposedly love.
P.S. I can understand why Loki in “The Avengers” would feel like he needs to prevent Thor from finding out what happened, and I can also kind of understand Thor post-Avengers being too pissed to want to talk to Loki – though it’s far from admirable. But not asking Loki why he pretended to be dead, exiled Odin, and took the throne is an incredibly glaring omission in TR… though it makes sense from an external (or “Doylist”) standpoint if you regard it as part of the campaign to rewrite Loki as this capricious trickster. If that’s the case, Thor doesn’t even need to ask why; it’s for the same reason he does anything: because he’s a trickster and he just couldn’t help himself.
In response to my comment: “on later thought, it occurs to me that Waititi’s mental ableism is more likely meant to be hurtful than Whedon’s sexism.”
I suppose if we believe he thinks mentally ill people are whiny and need a serving of tough love. But I kind of think he just doesn’t see Loki as mentally ill. There are plenty of people on this site who believe Loki’s suicide attempt was just him escaping punishment, that everything he’s ever said that’s given him depth (just wanting to be Thor’s equal) was a lie, etc. That he’s just a selfish trickster. I might be being to generous, but I kind of thought TW was (½)
(2/2) too mentally healthy to recognize Loki’s mental health problems, and too focused on the class privilege of both Thor and Loki to recognize they can have legit struggles that others identify with. I know a lot of people in real life who really honestly believe that wealthy people don’t have the right to be upset about anything in their life.
I’m going to guess the main reason some people don’t believe Loki’s suicide attempt was real is because of the bit in Ragnarok where Loki is telling the story at the Sakaarian cocktail party and says “at that moment I let go” and everyone laughs. Because that only makes sense if it’s a “Look how clever I am, I escaped Thor and Odin’s efforts to hold me to account.” If those people had actually watched Thor 1, and seen the empty look on Loki’s tearful face – or heard Kenneth Branagh’s commentary, saying “This is the moment when the thin steel rod holding his mind together just snaps” – they would not be saying that.
People who take Ragnarok’s claims to supersede previous canon are fake fans. That’s right, I said it. I’m not saying people who came in late, or even people who saw Ragnarok first, are fake fans; I didn’t get into the MCU until after AOU came out in 2015 (although I *did* watch everything in the correct order; I wasn’t raised by wolves). But if you think what comes later is somehow more valid – or that one later movie that goes against 3 (for Loki) or 4 (for Thor) movies’ worth of previous narrative and character-building can erase all of them – that just makes no damn sense.(*) People who are fans of Thor and Loki as they appear in TR – or as I prefer to call them, Thor* and Loki* (I use that philosophical convention to indicate false identity because Shmor and Shmoki just sound silly) – are not fans of the same characters as those of us who love them because of their appearances in previous movies, and it is beyond absurd for these latecomers to say that the rest of us are mistaken about who Thor and Loki really are, or that the “correct” characterization was only reached in the 4th or 5th movie in which they appeared. People who think that they are the same characters are just confused (somewhat understandably, but still).
As for TW: the inability to recognize mental illness as mental illness when it should be really fucking obvious comes very close to malicious ableism. I wouldn’t be surprised if he were skeptical of the existence of mental illness, and he thinks the whole thing is just an excuse for rich white people to be weak and lazy. Of course, mental illness is at least as prevalent among poor people and/or people of color… but it can be more easily attributed to adverse circumstances. TW is probably one of those people (like the people you know) who thinks that treating “mental illness” in poor people is a bourgeois effort to privatize social problems and keep the proletariat sedated in order to stave off revolution. (Not that I think TW is really a Marxist… but you get the idea.)
I’ve said this before, but it is a really bizarre and very recent attitude that only poor, underprivileged people have real and interesting problems. This claim isn’t even borne out in people’s consumption behavior: everyone is still fascinated by the lives of the rich and famous. Poor people’s struggles to make ends meet are entirely too common, and the people who actually experience that seem to find it boring to watch… though the bleeding-hearted rich might be interested in it as a kind of pity porn. From Homer to Sophocles to Shakespeare to superhero comics to tabloids, people want to hear about the high political struggles, epic battles, and screwed-up love lives of gods, heroes, and kings. They want the larger than life, but they also want to perceive the common humanity that the great and mighty share with everyone else – and yes, that includes the Greek and Norse gods, who were deliberately, profoundly human. Novels and TV have brought the travails of the middle class and sometimes the poor into the orbit of popular literature, but it’s still more often people’s love lives than their struggles against oppression… and shows like The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, and Empire indicate that it’s still the present-day warrior classes, royalty, and aristocracy that fascinate. Social justice evangelists can insist that people shouldn’t care about these things, but they can’t truly claim that no one does care.
(*) A caveat: I do accept the recent X-Men movies’ cutting The Last Stand (2006) out of the canon because the general consensus is that it’s not up to the quality standard of its predecessors, and the writer, Simon Kinberg, has continued to write and produce the more recent movies. I’ll take a writer’s rejection of his own past work much more seriously than a new writer/director’s rejection of a bunch of other people’s work.
Literally everything Thor does in this movie is condescending and uncaring toward Loki. He’s not even remotely nice to him. His brother who said “Sometimes I’m envious of you, but never doubt my love” “I didn’t do it for him.” This entire movie was just a stage for Thor to be “awesome God of Thunder” and to put Loki in some sort of sideshow space.
Exactly where he started in the first film.
He’s back to just having to go along with Thor regardless of how he feels about the matter “let’s do get help, you love it.” “I hate it, it’s embarrassing” “we’re doing it”
Loki literally tells Thor he finds that modus operandi degrading and Thor essentially replies “I don’t give a flying fuck what you think, we’re doing it because I want to, so deal.” and Loki, of course, does exactly that.
Because that’s how it’s been with Thor for all their adult lives.
“know your place, brother.”
“Enough.”
TR took Thor back to square one. He’s not the mature, thoughtful king-in-training he was in TDW (I will ALWAYS prefer that version of him; it was true to his character arc). He’s gone back to the selfish, arrogant “it’s all about me” outlook. He doesn’t care about Loki, doesn’t ask his opinion– unlike the carefully executed plan of TDW where Loki gets to use his skills equally alongside Thor’s brawn.
But the one thing that really gets me about that comment above is this part: “while Loki thought it was an affectionate pat”
What. The. Hell?!?!?! God forbid Loki actually receive some real, genuine affection from Thor because he’s just a trickster, so he doesn’t really matter. That was beaten in our faces OVER AND OVER AND OVER by Taika Waititi–
Loki is just a dumb trickster who has no motive and no life-plan.
Loki just wants to drink margaritas and watch bad theater about himself because he’s a glorified narcissist.
Loki just wants to fuck the Grandmaster (or at least the GM wants to fuck him).
Loki and all of his past issues were non-issues, so stop feeling sorry for him.
Oh, and my favorite, though I don’t think I can contribute this to TW, but rather whoever wrote the script:
“You’ll always be the God of Mischief, but you could be something more.”
We’re supposed to admire Thor’s cleverness and kingly wisdom in this scene, when actually all this is doing is subtly reinforcing the fact that Loki’s been treated as the punching bag, the jokes-on-legs, the “if we have no SMART ideas I’ll just throw my LITTLE brother at the bad guys”.
What.
The.
FUCK.
I thought Thor was pretty cleverly executed given that he’s tried dealing with Loki in failure after failure to bridge that gap. The unconditional love of Thor 1 didn’t help, the attempt to regain common ground and offer a hand in Thor 2 ended in Loki faking his own death and usurping Asgard.
The problem was that Thor was enabling him rather than helping him. By Ragnarok he’s mature enough to guess how Loki is going to act, and he helps Loki help himself. Stepping back from the relationship logically, Thor’s love and trust has been abused time and time again and I don’t blame him from stepping back from it when he’s stuck in the same old loop of enabling Loki into the next fresh batch of bullshit.
I’ll preface the next statement by saying that I love Loki in all his incarnations dearly but it’s not as though he’s NOT guilty of some pretty despicable shit that Thor has been more than patient over (I’m talking about the entirety of The Avengers) so I think Thor is pretty validated in his suspicion and distance.
For what it’s worth, it DOES work and we see Loki in a better place at the end of TR and I suspect he needed someone he loves and respects to be sick of his bullshit in a dismissive way or he was never going to change. Which is reminiscent of what happened to his character arc in the comics but that’s a whole different thing. Loki’s been through a lot of writers in the MCU with varying quality and difference of characterization but personally I still think the biggest injustice is what happened in Infinity War.
Regarding the claim that Thor was “enabling” Loki by continuing to reach out to him, I would encourage you to read this post, because I really can’t say it any better. It was written by someone who liked Ragnarok for several months until having a conversation that led to the realizations described in the post.
The only reason “it DOES work and we see Loki in a better place at the end of TR” is because the same writer(s) who wrote that gambit ensured that it would work. (People who have read the novelization and said the betrayal-electrocution sequence wasn’t in there lead me to believe we have Taika himself, not Eric Pearson, to thank for that little bit of amateur relationship counseling.) It’s not like they tested it out on an actual person with the same complex of mental illnesses as Loki, as seen in previous movies. It’s not clear what he has (depression? bipolar? BPD?), but it should be clear to anyone that he’s unwell; he doesn’t just betray people for shits and giggles. And it’s debatable whether Loki is really in a “better place” at the end of TR. He’s been cowed into submission; he’s accepted a place as Thor’s inferior.
It also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to say that Loki abused Thor’s love and trust in TDW, except given the assumptions about what happened that TR wants to push on us. It tells us again and again that Loki “faked his death” – but a more plausible reading, considering that Loki’s illusions aren’t tangible, is that Loki actually was impaled, thought he was going to die, and took advantage of the situation when he unexpectedly woke up. And considering that Thor told him he would just put him back in prison after they finished avenging Frigga (“Vengeance. And afterward this cell”), can you completely blame Loki for doing what he did? Can you completely blame him for exiling Odin, after all the shit Odin has pulled? TR totally ignores all the intelligible reasons Loki had for doing what he did: avoiding getting thrown in solitary confinement for life, with no Frigga to visit him – or worse (remember, “Frigga is the only reason you’re still alive”?); getting back at Odin for his lies and rejection (and for locking him away without actually asking why he invaded Midgard…); putting himself in a position of safety and power from which he could hide from Thanos and make efforts to thwart him (remember, it was Loki who sent Sif and Volstagg to store the Aether with the Collector). None of that is even mentioned; it’s just because Loki is such an incorrigible trickster and wants to lounge around in his bathrobe eating grapes and watching self-glorifying plays. That’s never who Loki has been in the MCU. He always has comprehensible, psychologically compelling reasons for his misdeeds: envy, resentment, the need for his father’s approval, internalized racism, vengefulness, threats and coercion from Thanos. Naked hedonistic self-interest has never been a significant part of his motivation. It’s only by completely reframing everything he’s ever done that TR makes it remotely plausible that Loki needs this kind of “tough love” to just “get over himself” and start being a good guy. What he needs is for someone to really listen, which Thor, even with all his pleas for him to come home, has never done.
Literally everything Thor does in this movie is condescending and uncaring toward Loki. He’s not even remotely nice to him. His brother who said “Sometimes I’m envious of you, but never doubt my love” “I didn’t do it for him.” This entire movie was just a stage for Thor to be “awesome God of Thunder” and to put Loki in some sort of sideshow space.
Exactly where he started in the first film.
He’s back to just having to go along with Thor regardless of how he feels about the matter “let’s do get help, you love it.” “I hate it, it’s embarrassing” “we’re doing it”
Loki literally tells Thor he finds that modus operandi degrading and Thor essentially replies “I don’t give a flying fuck what you think, we’re doing it because I want to, so deal.” and Loki, of course, does exactly that.
Because that’s how it’s been with Thor for all their adult lives.
“know your place, brother.”
“Enough.”
TR took Thor back to square one. He’s not the mature, thoughtful king-in-training he was in TDW (I will ALWAYS prefer that version of him; it was true to his character arc). He’s gone back to the selfish, arrogant “it’s all about me” outlook. He doesn’t care about Loki, doesn’t ask his opinion– unlike the carefully executed plan of TDW where Loki gets to use his skills equally alongside Thor’s brawn.
But the one thing that really gets me about that comment above is this part: “while Loki thought it was an affectionate pat”
What. The. Hell?!?!?! God forbid Loki actually receive some real, genuine affection from Thor because he’s just a trickster, so he doesn’t really matter. That was beaten in our faces OVER AND OVER AND OVER by Taika Waititi–
Loki is just a dumb trickster who has no motive and no life-plan.
Loki just wants to drink margaritas and watch bad theater about himself because he’s a glorified narcissist.
Loki just wants to fuck the Grandmaster (or at least the GM wants to fuck him).
Loki and all of his past issues were non-issues, so stop feeling sorry for him.
Oh, and my favorite, though I don’t think I can contribute this to TW, but rather whoever wrote the script:
“You’ll always be the God of Mischief, but you could be something more.”
We’re supposed to admire Thor’s cleverness and kingly wisdom in this scene, when actually all this is doing is subtly reinforcing the fact that Loki’s been treated as the punching bag, the jokes-on-legs, the “if we have no SMART ideas I’ll just throw my LITTLE brother at the bad guys”.
What.
The.
FUCK.
I think that might actually be from TW, since people who have read the novelization said the electrocution and lecture/ultimatum scene wasn’t in there. Taika wanted to put in a “trickster tricked” incident to show that Thor is now smarter than Loki and solely responsible for Loki’s “redemption”… never mind that the betrayal made no fucking sense given Loki’s character as established in previous films, and all it showed (like the rest of the improvised “humor”) is that Thor is self-important, self-absorbed, and cruel.
(2/3) Plus, it’s handled SO CLUMSILY. The whole bit with Thor going ‘I’ll kill them all’ right in front of the King made it clear this racism was a whole systemic issue was NEVER fixed in their society! The perception of Jotuns never changed by the end of the movie! We never even get to find out what happened to Jotunheim ever, because it never gets brought up again. Instead, we find out that Grandpa Bor committed genocide too and throughout the movie it’s an entire non-issue?
(3/3) I think fantasy racism can work really well as a metaphor, IF the writer actually thought through every implication. I know as an American my perception of racism is way more heavily based on skin tone than most but the whole thing with Loki being able to look Asgardian read as ‘white passing’ to me and the implication of a white passing person trying to prove they’re not like the rest of their race? That’s so much to unpack, and the writers just threw out the whole suitcase.
Mmm, yeah, I totally feel you on all of this, Anon.
It’s interesting because like… So Ragnarok obviously has this anti-colonialist leaning, which is all about acknowledging the real horror of past events, and generally just accepting that there’s no Asgardian superiority. I don’t really think it was hard-hitting enough, and I appreciated there was something, but like…
It just felt weird to me for him to be like “colonialism is bad! what Odin did is wrong!” but also never acknowledge what happened to Loki. I appreciate that Taika Waititi isn’t much of a Loki fan (and certainly dislikes Loki’s fans), but it just seemed strange to take an anti-colonialist lilt without using this perfect example right in front of you.
What Odin and Frigga did to Loki (and I want to stress that it was Odin and Frigga, and that we shouldn’t excuse Frigga for her part in this) is what has happened to hundreds of thousands of native & indigenous children across the world. A child would be stolen from their real parents, forcibly “adopted”, bled of their culture, and would be systematically fed the evil ideology that the culture they came from is bad and wrong and uncivilized.
This has happened in Australia; this has happened in Canada – Hell, the last fucking “residential school” for First Nations kids in Canada only closed in ‘96! ‘96! 22 years ago, they were still fucking doing this. You know what that is? Literally, that is an act of genocide.
And like…
I think it’s just so fucked up that this keeps being boiled down to “he was adopted,” like, no… If they’d taken in this Jotunn kid, and he’d grown up knowing he was Jotunn but that he was still loved – that would be adopted. If they’d waited until he was like, an adolescent (say, the equivalent of 10/11) and told him he was a Jotunn but that he was still loved – that would be adopted.
But what Frigga and Odin did to him, raising him not only to not know what he was, but to despise where he came from…
That’s unspeakably and revoltingly cruel. There is literally no possible justification for it.
People can tell me time and time again “but they didn’t want to shock him by telling him what he was” – he wouldn’t have been shocked, he wouldn’t have been as upset, if Asgard did not explicitly and regularly call for the genocide of the people he is revealed to belong to. If he had not been raised believing that these people – his people – are monsters, creatures, savages.
“Loki overreacted,” like, no, man, he didn’t overreact, he fucking broke like shattered glass. “He didn’t have to try to kill an entire planet, though,” like bitch, why not? Thor did the same fucking thing like, a week ago.
I don’t think what he did was right or justifiable, and certainly, it was not a rational decision made by a rational guy, but… Guys, Thor did the exact same thing. Can you imagine having this wild, psychotic break, sobbing your eyes out and knowing that not only did your family never love you as much as your brother, as they claimed, but that they were right not to, and desperately trying to prove to yourself that it can’t be true by murdering the people you supposedly come from–
And then your brother coming at you with this hypocrisy? Actual proof, shoved right in his face, that Thor can do x, but if Loki does x, he is the actual, most evil monster in the world?
The only person that even TRIES to work on the perception of the Jotnar is Loki himself, and that’s in exploring his feelings in this play he wrote as Odin, with nine or ten layers of distance between his identities at the time.
It’s just so fucked up. It’s so wrong.
And I just don’t understand how they could shove all these facets into Thor (2011), and never unpack them in literally 5 fucking movies. You had so many opportunities, and you just… Ignored ‘em all.
Many male Disney villains are what we would call “camp.” Effeminate, vain, “wimpy” and portrayed as laughable and unlikable. Calling upon common negative stereotypes about gay men, these villains are characterized as villainous by embodying these tropes and traits.
Think about it: Often Thin/un-muscled figure, heavily inked and shadowed eyes (giving the impression of eyeliner and eye shadow?), stereotypically “sassy” and/or manipulative, often ends up being cowardly once on the defensive, many have comedic male sidekicks (such as Wiggins, Smee, Iago, the…snake that isn’t Kaa)
Other examples:
since i was talking about one of the disney man villains who doesn’t fit this stereotype yesterday…
Gaston.
my bf was listening to that song about him yesterday
and i mentioned that he is literally the most terrifying disney villain
why?
because his type of evil is banal and commonplace
there are white men walking around who are exactly like him
men who think that women are prizes they deserve
men who will not listen or pay attention to a rejection
men who will go out of their way, if rejected, to ruin a woman’s life
ppl often seem to miss this when discussion beauty and the beast since the stockholm syndrom ‘romance’ is also a giant icky thing
the terrifying thing about gaston is that he is supposed to be (as all disney villains) a hyperbolic cartoon
but he is the absolutely truest and most real villain
because he exists in the real world
we all know men like him
Also, if we’re talking about queer coded characters the MOST important of all the characters is Ursula who was bad off of a drag Queen (Divine) and has a whole host of negative stereotypes.
She’s also my favorite.
This post is sorely missing some seriously important historical context. The term for this as film history goes is the sissy, and as a stock character the sissy is probably one of the oldest archetypes in Hollywood, going back to the silent film era. Some of the most enduring stereotypes of male queerness—the limp wrist, swishing, etc—can actually be traced to the exaggerated movements of cinematic sissies in silent films. And it’s important to note sissies were portrayed in a range of ways, though they were generally used to comedic effect; queerness was considered a joke, and the modern notion of the “sassy gay friend” in films can probably be traced back to this bullshit too. It wasn’t until the Hays Code was adopted in the ’30s that sissies almost uniformly started being portrayed as villains. Homosexuality was specifically targeted under the euphemism of “sexual perversion”, and the only way it could fly under the radar in films under the strict censorship of the code was by coding villains that way in contrast to the morally upright hetero heroes. Peter Lorre’s character in The Maltese Falcon is one off the top of my head, but there are a slew of them from the ’30s onward, and this trope didn’t go away after the Code ended either. More modern examples in live action films are Prince Edward in Braveheart, Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, and Xerxes in 300.
So Disney just provides some of the most egregious modern examples of the sissy villain, but this is a really old and really gross trope that goes back years and years in Western film. There’s a fantastic book and accompanying documentary about the history of homosexuality in film by Vito Russo called The Celluloid Closet that gets into a lot of this.
It’s incredibly refreshing to see a response to a post like this that starts with “This post is sorely missing some seriously important historical context.” and then goes on to provide important historical context that adds information to the point being made. I was seriously wincing and bracing myself for “You guys, you don’t understand. It was different back then.”
(Of course, I wouldn’t have been worried if the name of the last poster hadn’t scrolled off the top of my screen by the time I got to it.)
There are some things that bother me about the first image being regarded as queer coded: 1) pink was considered masculine up until the early 1900’s (roughly pre- ww1), and was continued to be worn by guys thru the 1980’s.
As for the hair bow aspect, those were period correct as well.
Google, my friends. I agree with the rest of them, but…that first? He’s not queer coded. He’s just upper society jerk
Do you really think Pocahontas is a period accurate movie in any aspect?
The story we know of Pocahontas–or at least the one portrayed by the Disney film–is one told by John Smith himself. So, the reliability of a story that involves a woman being head over heels in love with the person telling you the story is questionable at the least.
Jumping in to add to the laundry list another (technically) Disney stereotypical queer-coded villain:
Though the GM’s queerness was not really coded, I still think it’s important to point out the enactment of the exact same features of the above-mentioned villains. It’s still frankly shocking to me that tumblr hasn’t dragged this movie for its regressive stereotypes. It was a huge step back for Disney/Marvel’s potential for respectful LGBTQ+ representation.
I think the lack of queer representation in MCU is the reason TR is regarded as a supportive movie for LGBTQ+ community, just because it has some queer characters that their coding is less implicit. But context is also important and some people fail to see that there is nothing progressive about it regarding the queer coded characters.
GM is a crazy and cruel tyrant whose entertainment is watching slaves kill each other. He is later taken down by the revolution started by Thor, the cis hetero hero.
Loki is shown as a vain, irresponsible, egotistic character. Unlike his portrayal in previous movies, his intelligence is downplayed to the point that his decisions seems stupid. It’s heavily implied that betrayal and untrustworthiness is in his nature. In the end Thor, the cis hetero man, inspires him to change to the good side.
Valkyrie(who is never given a name btw) captures and sells people as slaves. She is shown as an alcoholic who leads a pointless life. She finds herslef again because of Thor, the cis hetero hero.
stealing this image from angst-wizard’s reply to thorduna because i don’t wanna invoke the wrath of the majority of this fandom and write unsolicited criticism on other people’s posts
b) THOR LITERALLY LEAVES LOKI ALONE AND INCAPACITATED IN THE HANGAR WHERE LOKI CAN BE FOUND AND EXECUTED oh my god!!!!
it was punishment. not a cute brotherly therapy session.
“People I can’t understand.” Ha!
People you have decided are wrong and do not want to understand, so you make dismissive memes.
If you want to understand, I will explain it. Again. This is not merely a tough love moment, and even if it were, it’s deeply troubling that Loki, a character coded to be mentally, is fixed by that. By being abandoned, in pain (or mild discomfort, if you prefer), unable to move. Because that would not fix a mentally ill person. It solves none of Loki’s fundamental issues and grievances. Because Loki’s problem wasn’t that people were giving him too much attention and he needed to be shown that the world didn’t revolve around him. It wasn’t that he just needed to grow up and get over himself. That interpretation of Loki’s issues is deeply upsetting, because it’s exactly the sort of bullshit I’ve heard growing up neurodivergent and mentally ill.
It makes me wonder whether certain persons have read or seen this post or this informative reblog thereof, both by writer-bloggers that certain persons supposedly like and respect (at least to my knowledge). Perhaps those opinions are just dismissed as an eccentricity of otherwise good writers whose long tenure in the fandom grants them immunity from excommunication.
I wanted to write this post since I
watched TR but I wasn’t calm enough for it until now. Even writing so little
about how TR unfairly treated Loki’s character and disrespected him and his
fans in my TR reviews made me angry enough to start shouting in my head and
rendered me unable to write it the way I wanted. Then IW happened and it was
the cause for another wave of rage in me. So it took me a long time.
We always talk about how TR
disrespected Loki and took away a lot of his canon characterizations and
motives and his arc from him. I noticed we never explained it in details and it
caused a lot of misunderstandings about why we hate TR and what we mean. So
this is a detailed explanation of how TR took everything from Loki.
Again, great analysis, and I just have to highlight the conclusion:
“By dismissing Loki’s pain, the narrative paints Loki as someone who is always in the wrong and Thor as blameless in everything. It leads to Thor dismissing Loki’s pain and it leads to disguising Thor and Loki’s imbalanced relationship (Thor as superior and Loki as inferior the way they started in the first Thor movie) as reconciliation and healing.
“You know what all of this led to right? A Loki robbed of his sacrifice, bravery, intelligence and planning skills, his magic and power had no place in IW. He was useless in the authors’ minds. He was healed after all! What else could Loki do except failing at tricking Thanos when he could be outsmarted by Thor and Dr. Strange. What else could Loki do except attacking Thanos with a tiny dagger when that was all the weapons he was left with? At least they gave him his bravery back so his stupid attack makes some sense. In their minds the only way his story could end, and he could completely be redeemed was a true sacrifice (which was pointless since Thanos could still kill Thor) in which he actually dies with no resurrection. This is how they took away Loki from us, by taking away everything from his character first and then when he had nothing left they killed him.”
This is why I’m still so pissed about Loki’s death in IW. Not just because he died – not just because it was unnecessarily brutal and graphic – but because it made him into a plot device rather than a character; because it passed the judgment that he had outlived his interest and usefulness and could only serve as a functionary in someone else’s story. It wasted the potential for a payoff of the connection to Thanos established in The Avengers; it showed that the creators (writers, producers, and directors) did not care enough about Loki’s character to give us that payoff or even tell us what the hell happened with Loki and Thanos. But Loki’s treatment in Ragnarok should have shown us that it was inevitable. Of course Markus & McFeely couldn’t know how thoroughly Taika Waititi was planning to ridicule and emasculate Loki, but if they saw the basic script, they might have had some idea of how his power, intelligence, and complexity were going to be minimized, and how the narrative was going to tie a neat little bow on his “redemption” and “reconciliation” with Thor. And of course these movies have no time for recovery from trauma, except maybe if your name is Tony Stark (and he has RDJ going to bat for him).
I was glad that Loki turned out not to be dead at the end of TDW because I thought he was going to have more time to develop his relationship with Thor and achieve genuine reconciliation, that we might find out what happened with Thanos, that Thor might finally ask what happened, that they might confront the prejudice against Frost Giants that led both of them to kill so many in Thor 1. But now I agree with @lucianalight: I would rather that he had died being noble and clever (turning on the grenade while impaled!!) than live to have everything that made him a magnificent character negated and shat on.
Loki is the Philosopher King 