the fact that people only see Jane’s (potential) return will ‘ruin’ Thor’s character is hilarious and offending at the same time. Girl is an astrophysicist, girl is an expert in quantum physics and space, girl had been a host for an infinity stone and survived. She has knowledge and experience to bring to the table, she is HER OWN CHARACTER and she is NOT defined by Thor or anyone. You all fake feminists praising Thor for being a feminist, for supporting women, and then you turn around and reduce Jane Foster, the world’s foremost astronomer, to Thor’s ex who will ruin his character. I see you there.
Taika Waititi and Chris Hemsworth were the people who ruined Thor’s character. He was just fine when Jane was around.
I’m honestly kind of stunned by the people saying that Ragnarok!Thor is a feminist. We have absolutely no good evidence of that, and a lot of circumstantial evidence (i.e., the fact that he’s a complete douchebro) that he probably isn’t. But then, I’m stunned by people saying Ragnarok!Thor is a great interpretation of Thor’s character, or a “ray of sunshine,” or anything other than a self-absorbed tool. So why does this surprise me?
As I said in my post last night, I don’t know how to write comic book movie plots, so I definitely won’t be writing any replacement sequels. I really just write long conversations with a lot of feelings and sometimes also porn… plots are not my strong suit. So my only gesture at a sequel to The Dark World and Age of Ultron is this fic where Thor and Loki talk it out and hug it out and then fuck it out while talking it out some more.
You watched both Ragnarok and Infinity War in the same day? That might be worse than the day that my friends and I (hi @iscariotsss) marathoned all three of Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit movies. At least we had a lot of alcohol… but that turned out to be bad when I was starting to get a hangover watching the third one in the theater. I’m not good at day drinking.
Until further notice, I have decided that in the fictional world of the MCU, “Infinity War” did not happen. Neither did “Thor: Ragnarok.” I don’t know exactly what did happen because I don’t know how to write comic book movie plots, but it’s vaguely like all my most hopeful imaginings of what the movies would be like. It’s like an author died before finishing a series and left very scant notes on what was coming next.
In the real world, the movies do exist, and I will continue to express my anger at Taika Waititi, Chris Hemsworth, Markus & McFeely, the Russo brothers, and Kevin Feige when I feel it would be helpful to vent. But their work is like that unauthorized second part of Don Quixote: an absurd forgery that has marred the reputations of the characters and of the real artist(s) who created them.
Avengers Infinity War BBC Interview: Tom Hiddleston Talks about “The Tragedy of Loki” Scene
Int: And then Matt Damon, surely that must have been a pinch yourself…
Tom: It was very weird, yeah, very peculiar. Taika and I were both feeding him lines of things that I have said over the course of… And I was of course trying to give Matt really witty lines, like, “It would be fun if you said this because I said this in Avengers,” and Taika would just be like, “Nah,” and giving him much funnier things to say.
I don’t want to bring Loki back and let him fall into the wrong hands again. I wish that beautiful death scene in The Dark World was true with his last words “I didn’t do it for him.”
Translation: “I was trying to keep the character consistent and Waititi shat all over that again and again”.
THIS.
Also I’d like to know WHY the heck Marvel and TW hate this amazing character so much. And why they try in every possible way to put him in bad light, demeanor him and cut him off so blatantly from plots.
They should be grateful to him and Tom for brought them fans and money.
TAIKA WAITITI IS FUNNIER THAN TOM HIDDLESTON JUST IN GENERAL AND THERE’S REALLY NOTHING Y’ALL CAN DO ABOUT IT
The comments on this is so fucking funny. Taika breathed new life into Loki. Y’all boring asses should be grateful.
Tom: Taika is funnier than me and all the other writers and directors I’ve played this character for.
Loki Stan’s: buhbuh he wasn’t a bland pretentious baddie for us to wet ourselves overrrrrrr.
I forgot about the smile after the snake story! You’re totally right, @sleepynegress. Best Loki scene.
This movie is the only time he actually seemed like an interesting, conflicted trickster instead of a greasy asshole.
The only thing I see is that a majority of Loki stans are only interested in seeing him reduced to a genocidal fascist Christian Gray wannabe
i think taika did a good job at writing canon loki.
no, not marvel.
i mean, Canon Loki
@note-a-bear @blad-the-inhaler I beg your pardon? In Avengers Loki’s goal was to rule the earth. How could he rule people if he killed them all? And you know what is genocide? Here is a living case: In the first Thor movie, angel baby Thor invaded another planet and slaughtered local residents only because they gave him a nickname, and he wouldn’t stop the massacre until Odin arrived and shouted him down.
And in TDW Loki was not a villain anymore. He was an anti-hero there, by saving Thor’s girlfriend almost at the cost of his own life, saving Thor at the cost of being impaled and revenging his mother’s death. Even Kevin Feige admitted Loki acquired the throne without betraying Thor, because Thor renounced it on his own account first.
Now I believe waititi stans have never watched the previous Marvel films but they pretend they have.
Hiddleston:
-“I feel so lucky with the writing, the way he’s been written. In Kenneth Branagh’s film the writing was very poignant, and you can see the vulnerability in him. Rather like Killmonger in a way, he doesn’t start out as an antagonist; he becomes an antagonist through the revelations. And then Joss Whedon wrote him as a very witty, very charming, very charismatic, and… So I’ve been quite fortunate with some beautifully complex writing of the character.”
-“The best thing about Loki is that if he is afraid he won’t show it. He’s been highly trained through the experience of his slightly traumatic life to shield his fear.”
-“Loki’s death on Svartalfheim was written as a death, and I would say Chris and I played that scene for real. That was meant to be that he redeemed himself, he helped save his brother, he helped save Jane Foster but that he, in the process, sacrificed himself.”
Waititi grossly misinterpreted and shat on the character that Hiddleston had painstakingly built; it’s a fact. If you need more evidence I have them. Some people need to learn the difference between character development and retcon. Other than the role of comic relief what did Gagnarok and Waititi give Loki?
Waititi’s solution was a story in which Loki is mocked and emasculated in almost every scene. It’s very funny, and Hiddleston plays it without visible qualms, but it leaves the character nowhere else to go.
The more I read his tweets/words, the more Taika Waititi seems the bully at my school who made my life a nightmare…
Which may be exactly why he appeals to bullies so much. He speaks their language.
So like, of all the things Waititi could pick on Loki for, he chooses to shit on him for being an orphan? What the fuck? That is EXACTLY what a bully would do. It isn’t funny, it’s incredibly mean-spirited. Kinda like making him joke about his attempted suicide.
What is hilarious to me, however, is Waititi trying to say that Loki only talks about himself and it’s annoying. Like… You do that more than anyone else, Taika. I’ve read interviews from you before, lmao. Don’t be a hypocrite.
I know it’s not worth trying to engage with the people who stan Ragnarok, Waititi, and Thor* (i.e., the version of Thor shown in Ragnarok, who is NOT the same person as the Thor of the previous movies he was in, and was definitely not the kind, goodhearted ray of sunshine that the Thor* stans want to pretend he is), so I’m not going to tag them. But note how simplistic and ill-informed their rebuttals are.
Yes, Tom recognizes that Taika is funnier than he is. But “funny” isn’t the only virtue in a character or a writer. The writers he praises, as @yume-no-fantasy points out, are the ones who gave him complexity to work with: Miller & Stentz (the writers of Thor 1) and Joss Whedon. And the way Whedon wrote Loki often was funny: “I’m listening”; “Are you ever not going to fall for that?”; “This usually works”; “If it’s all the same to you, I’ll have that drink now.” But it’s a subtle humor (which I guess goes over some people’s heads?) and Loki is as often in on the joke as it is at his expense. Which is as it should be: he’s intelligent and mischievous and doesn’t always take himself seriously. If all the Waititi/TR/Thor* stans see is “a bland pretentious baddie” or “a greasy asshole” that’s their problem.
Similarly, if they didn’t see “an interesting, conflicted trickster” in the previous movies, all I can conclude is that they didn’t understand (or watch) the previous movies. In Thor 1, Loki secretly disrupts Thor’s coronation and subtly goads him into charging into Jotunheim (trickster) – not only “to ruin my brother’s big day,” but because he recognizes that Thor isn’t ready to rule (interesting). He finds out that he’s a member of a people that has historically been Asgard’s enemies (interesting, conflicted). He makes overtures to the ruler of that people, his biological father, offering to let them into Asgard to murder Odin so that Loki can take the throne permanently (trickster, conflicted); but then he turns around and kills his biological father to protect his adoptive father to prove his loyalty to Asgard and enmity toward Jotunheim (double trickster, double conflicted). He lies to Thor to keep him from returning to prevent him from going through with this plan (trickster), but on his way out tries to lift Mjolnir, desperate to be found worthy (conflicted); he obviously hesitates before he has the Destroyer strike Thor, and he does it in a way that isn’t guaranteed to kill him the way blasting him with fire would (conflicted). He tries to destroy the planet where he was born because he so deeply hates what he now knows he is; he begs Thor to fight him while fucking crying (have I given enough proof that he’s interesting and conflicted?).
I could keep doing this with The Avengers and Thor: The Dark World, but I have better things to do than write Reader’s Digest summaries of Marvel movies for people who didn’t understand them the first time around. (I didn’t exactly think they were intellectually taxing, but people continue to surprise me.)
I know interpreting graphs is hard and American schools (at least) don’t teach statistics very well, but here’s a hint: the spikes in interest in the search term “loki” indicate that The Avengers and TDW *generated*interest in Loki. These are searches from people who were not previously “Loki stans”; the loyal fans are the ones who sustain the lower levels of interest in between the spikes. No, Ragnarok did not “breathe new life” into Loki; very few new people became interested in Loki after it came out. And that was deliberate on the part of the filmmakers.
Also, what the hell is “Canon Loki” if it isn’t Marvel canon? Did Taika do a good job at writing myth Loki? Most of my myth expert friends don’t think so. Did he do a good job writing comics Loki? MCU Loki was never supposed to be identical with the Loki of the comics, for one thing; but for another, most of the people I know who are familiar with Loki comics (though there is one exception I know of) don’t think that Ragnarok Loki is a good representation of the Loki of recent comics, who is much smarter and more complex than Ragnarok Loki (not that that would be hard…).
Finally… if Taika is so into sympathetic representations of outsiders, he should have been thrilled with the opportunity Loki presented him. Instead, he decided Loki was to be dismissed as a spoiled, whiny little bitch and ridiculed for exactly the characteristics that make him an outsider: his mental illness, his (implicit) queerness, and his history as an adoptee from another race who spent most of his life ignorant of his heritage. As I’ve discussed before, you’d think that last part would present a great opportunity in a movie that supposedly wanted to make a point about imperialism and the victims of war, but I guess not. As for the other issues, the conclusion I’m forced to draw from Taika’s handling of them is that he’s a mental ableist who thinks Loki just needs to “grow up and get over” his problems (or maybe was faking them?) and quite possibly also homophobic.
Many of Loki fans are the ones who identify with him exactly because they were disrespected, mocked, left alone, rejected and never been understood. For many of us what we feel about Loki is very real, it’s like what we would feel for a real person. Is it alright to reject and erase someone if they are being disrespected and belittled by others? Is it ok to disrespect them more? Surely not. We should stand up for them and defend them, no matter what. And frankly I don’t give a damn if the whole fandom disrespect Loki or see him differently or generally disagree with me. This is my opinion and I stand by it. So let’s agree to disagree.
I strongly suspect that Anon has been following the blogs of people who accepted the characterization of Loki in Thor: Ragnarok and seem to think, mysteriously, that his presentation in previous MCU films was some kind of “mischaracterization.” (Relative to what, I’m not sure – Norse myths? Comics? Which comics?) In response to @foundlingmother‘s comment: there need not be anything inherently disrespectful in calling Loki a twink, but much of what I’ve seen in the Thor/Loki fandom and adjacent subcommunities is people reducing Loki to “the Grandmaster’s trophy twink” or “a day-drinking bottom,” saying that’s all he ever was and that the depth and complexity that fans and/or Tom Hiddleston had previously attributed to him was somehow an illusion.
The fact that Anon thinks no one in the MCU or Thor franchise fandom respects Loki anymore indicates that to a great extent, Thor: Ragnarok achieved what it and those responsible for it (Taika Waititi, Chris Hemsworth, screenwriter Eric Pearson) set out to achieve: it reduced Loki in the minds of (casual) fans to a figure of ridicule, subservient to Thor and of no emotional or psychological interest in his own right.
Many of the people who hate what Ragnarok did to Loki – and to Thor! – have been silent because there seemed to be no place for them in the Thorki fandom or the mainstream MCU fandom, so it would not be difficult to get the impression that everyone simply accepts Ragnarok’s retcon of Loki’s character.
Given the way his character was reduced in TR, I can see why it might seem that he needed to be killed – that he had no more character development left in him and the only worthwhile thing he could do was to die for Thor. It has even occurred to me that I’d rather see Loki die than let Hemsworth and Waititi get their hands on him again – though I’d certainly rather that he died well, which he did in TDW but not in IW (his death was incredibly stupid and eminently avoidable).
It’s actually kind of reassuring to hear that you thought Tom was the one being more aloof toward Chris; I sort of thought Chris was turning the cold shoulder toward Tom. I don’t really know why, but I kind of wonder if it had anything to do with Tom not being completely on board with the “reinvention” of Thor and Loki’s characters in Thor: Ragnarok. Pretty obviously Chris Hemsworth was the driving force; he recommended bringing on Taika Waititi, he wanted to do more “comedy,” he was tired of speaking in archaic language and basically just wanted to get paid to be himself on film. In interviews, Taika kept talking about how he wanted to make Thor the most interesting character in his own film; the unspoken implication was that Loki had always been the most interesting character (which many of us know is true). So in order to steal Thor’s thunder back, Taika and (to some unknown extent, given how much was improvised) the screenwriter, Eric Pearson, reduced Loki to an effete, narcissistic, incompetent caricature of himself, mocked and minimized the traumas he had experienced, and eliminated all of the psychological and motivational complexity he had shown in previous movies, leaving him with only two features/motivations: (1) he’s essentially “the god of mischief,” and therefore he likes to betray people just for shits and giggles; and (2) he really wants Thor to love him.
Tom Hiddleston is a very smart man and a consummate actor. He really sank his teeth into the role of Shakespearean tragic hero that Kenneth Branagh and the screenwriters of Thor 1 (Ashley Miller and Zack Stentz) gave him. He had one hell of a good time as the twisty, theatrical, not-so-secretly tortured villain Joss Whedon wrote for The Avengers. He threw himself into the pathos and the desperate mania of the conflicted antihero in Thor: The Dark World (some credit to Markus & McFeely, even though I think they’re dimwitted hacks; some credit to Joss Whedon, whose main prescription as script doctor was “more Loki”). I don’t know if you’ve seen him in The Hollow Crown or Coriolanus, but it’s hard to tell he’s even speaking Elizabethan English because the words flow off his tongue as if he was born speaking them, and he makes the meaning and the feeling in the language so lucid that I feel like I was born hearing it. He disappears into his roles; there’s almost nothing of Tom in Loki, or in Jonathan Pine in The Night Manager, or in Freddie Page in The Deep Blue Sea.
And then they gave him this pathetic caricature in Ragnarok and wanted him to play second fiddle to a version of Thor who wasn’t even really a character anymore, just Chris Hemsworth dressed in space armor. They stripped away all the depth and complexity that Tom had been bringing to Loki over the years; they gave him almost no psychology to work with. For an actor who pours his heart and soul into his roles, who was trained in Shakespeare and swims around in it like a fish, can it have been anything other than disappointing and humiliating? But Tom is so good-natured and obliging, it seemed like he couldn’t blame Taika or Chris – his “brother” of 8 years, who had betrayed him for the sake of his own vanity; he just seemed dejected and unenthusiastic about the whole thing. It seemed to me like Chris was shunning Tom, and the only explanation I could offer (aside from other interpersonal things I couldn’t possibly speculate on, or like… judging him for the Taylor Swift business) was that Chris was mad that Tom wasn’t wholly on board with the thoughtless, petulant destruction of the character he had been building for years, the character dynamic he’d thought they had been building together. If Tom is being aloof toward Chris, good for him. Chris fucking deserves it.
I don’t think I ever asked WHY people dislike Thor: Ragnarok; I could write on that topic myself for days. I did try to get a count of Thorki shippers who dislike it, but it got messed up by non-shipping Loki stans who I already knew didn’t like the movie but kept reblogging to say (unnecessarily) why they didn’t like it…
I can’t like Ragnarok even as a crack fic for two main reasons. The first is that I can tell that the spirit in which it pokes fun at the previous movies and their fans is contemptuous and malicious; there’s a huge difference between that and the kind of affectionate parody you see within fandom itself. The second is that it just seems like a huge waste. This movie was supposed to be the culmination of a trilogy; it was supposed to close the emotional arc the characters had taken through the previous films. I came to the fandom late, so I’d only been waiting 2 years, but many fans had been waiting 4 years to see Thor and Loki together again, to see the end of their story. They, we, wanted something genuine and emotionally fulfilling; we got a crack fic, and not only that, but one that insulted us for caring. It strikes me as a waste of money as well as time and opportunity: Marvel spent millions on something that made fun of the films it was supposed to follow up and the people who loved them. I guess that’s working out for them, because it made a lot of money…
Ultimately, Marvel is a business, not an art studio; if one of its franchises is lagging in popularity and profitability, it’s perfectly happy to throw it under the bus – or as they prefer, “reinvent” it. Like most marketers, especially in comics, Marvel cares far more about the attention of young men than of women of any age. As others have observed, Loki is beloved by women, not by young men, for whom he is hardly the typical power fantasy (queer-coded and quasi-effeminate as he is) and might even be seen as threatening: what do women see in this elegant, cerebral, non-traditionally-masculine, morally ambiguous character? So Ragnarok catered to the male audience by making Thor a trash-talking frat bro and neutering Loki, making him seem incompetent, ineffectual, and even more effeminate, and putting him back in his “proper” place under Thor’s thumb.
yeah it shows.. he definitely didn’t do it because he loved the characters @philosopherking1887 :’)
I mean, this is obviously meant to be taken as a joke… but you can tell the ugly truth if you’re confident that everyone will take it as a joke. (Though I have to say, I think fame was at least as strong a motivation as money.)
Give me Loki stand proudly for himself, out of Thor’s shadow.
Give me Loki smiling arrogantly at his enemies.
Give me sassy Loki, tricky Loki, free-to-be-himself Loki.
Give me a Loki who doesn’t need to prove his value to anyone, even less to his brother.
Give me a Loki who doesn’t give up.
Give me a Jutunn Loki who uses his Frost Giant powers against Thanos. Or whoever else.
Give me Loki full of strength. Full of power. A Loki who doesn’t need to steal his strength to anywhere.
Give me a Loki in all his glorious God’s aspect. Radiant. Powerful. He’s a God: show us in all his rightful, strong aspect.
Give me a Loki proud of his Jotunn heritage, without renounce at the Asgardian culture.
Give me Loki as he deserves to be represented.
Just…..yes…THIS
This is what we all want for Loki and exactly what Marvel is going to rob him of. Prohibiting all this, also robs Tom of enjoying giving it to him. It would have been amazing to watch him do it.
Give me Loki laughing at Doctor Strange’s feeble attempts to use magic on him. Because someone who’s been using magic for millennia, who’s known for being quick-witted, who’s strong enough to imprison Odin for months, isn’t going to be defeated in five seconds by some human who’s just barely learned magic.
This ⬆
I was so upset and angry during all Dr. Strange’s scene. A scene with no sense at all. Impossible to occur if you stop and think seriously. I mean…come on!!
Who’s Dr. Strange? A sorcerer? An illusionist? A human being trained to be a magician? And who are you to think to have a tiny chance against a God?
A God.
Louder for the people in the back.
A God.
Maybe someone has forgotten it, or maybe it’s convenient to remarks only when they want point out that Loki is “the villain who cheats his brother with tricks”.
Well, guess what?
Loki is a God.
No, wait, it goes better and better.
Loki is a Frost Giant with the powers of his people, and an Asgardian God. Like Thor.
Frigga teaches him magic.
And he grows powerful.
He became a God. And a warrior.
He’s a God.
Does this thing works only for Thor?
Loki is a God, and all those funny tricks and golden sparkles in the air, can only makes him smirks more amused before to wipe him away from his sight with a gesture of the hand.
Only in the Thor-centered fantasy world of TW we have to see such idiocy as the “I’ve been falling for thirty minutes!” scene…
“only in the thor-centered…” i keep saying Ragnarok was “told” by Thor.
They shot. They deleted. Better not to shoot.
Never was such a rich and so incredibly robust character so thoroughly squandered, deprived of potential, and relegated to second rate status as the way Marvel has so diminished and wasted Loki. A profound shame.
Wait, what? There was a scene between just Loki and Hela? That might have been cool… but of course they couldn’t keep letting Loki upstage Thor. And the way the whole movie was written, it might have just served to make Loki look (even more) pathetic.
Loki is the Philosopher King 