Don’t be concerned, dear anon. It’s not just you. It’s not a great idea to make anything when you don’t really care about your characters’ problems.
Loki he doesn’t care a fig for. He literally mentions Loki’s biggest issue, being jotun, and dismisses it in a scene where Thor’s written to be in the right. He paints Loki solidly with the narcissist brush. Lucky me I’ve found meta that explains Loki’s behavior in Ragnarok within the context of his actual character and those identity struggles.
Not having so much luck with Thor. I think he likes the idea of Thor, but found his unhappiness and thoughtfulness boring. Oh gosh, a kind and thoughtful male protagonist who wants to negotiate before hitting something… impossible! It’s so damn boring to have a man who cares about the only family he’s got left, and who keeps hoping that family will be redeemed.
(Actually, I’m cool with Thor pretending to not care about Loki’s behavior anymore. I think it’s a smart tactic given the information Thor possess, and there’s no reason he couldn’t have come up with it. However, there are points in the movie where he seems genuinely callous towards Loki, and I can’t picture Thor ever feeling that way. There’s no way that Thor doesn’t become terribly affectionate after what we get to see of the hug scene.)
Yes, welcome, Anon! And while we’re at it, here are links to the rest of my postsbitching about how Taika Waititi clearly doesn’t give a shit about the characters he was making a movie about.
Hello world, here is my very first fan art and it is about Thor Ragnarok.
WARNING: Major spoilers ahead!
Don’t read any further
If you haven’t seen the movie yet.
In the final of the Ragnarok events Thor and Loki are going through a really hard times: they lost both parents, they lost home, it looks like even their past was a lie.
Thor suffers even more: Hela took away his eye, his hammer and his dearest friends. And on the top of the all this Thor is bearing great responsibility for the fate of his people.
Right now they truly need to be on the same side, and they need each other more than ever.
I think it would have been cute, but I don’t know that it would make a difference.
It’s not like Thor doesn’t already have scenes that are meant to show Loki being mocked or in Thor’s shadow (admittedly some of the best examples were cut, but I know people who believe Loki’s got no legit problems who’ve seen those scenes). People will write anything off to fit their idea of what a character’s about.
Some hate for Loki comes as a reaction to people who don’t acknowledge his faults. It puts a lot of thoughtful people in the middle of a big fight over the character. We expect him to be held accountable, so we hate him, and we ask people to recognize the motivations for his crimes as something more then “he’s just evil”, so we’re stanning for him or woobifying him.
Part of why so many people have decided Loki’s a shallow, lazy, power hungry narcissist is Thor: Ragnarok being deemed the best Thor movie (I know this because I’ve followed the same people, and I know that pre-Ragnarok’s release they saw Loki’s character slightly more sympathetically). I take issue with this because it’s the third Thor movie, and it completely reboots both Loki and Thor’s character arcs. The characterization just doesn’t flow well with the other movie in the MCU. People will continue to hold it up as the pinnacle of Thor and Loki, and retroactively apply the character traits they present in Ragnarok to the other movies, despite that not being how time and story structure works.
What I’m saying is that people who overlook Loki’s motivations aren’t concerned about logic or canon. They may say they are, but they’re really not. They just want a simple heroes and villains narrative, and that’s not what Thor is. It’s not even what Ragnarok is, truth be told, but somehow the movie successfully convinced people that a mean Thor was a hero (maybe because he keeps saying he is–people seem to believe everything that comes out of Thor’s mouth even when he’s demonstrably wrong and/or overreacting because he’s upset).
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.
Wow, thank you, you are proving my point entirely. None of the traits you mentioned in your paragraphs had anything to do with canon MCU Loki and you even acknowledged that. Remember the OOC fan fiction Loki I mentioned earlier? Yeah. I haven’t read any of your writing but I guess I don’t need to. Also, I didn’t know if you were intentionally racist but I guess I don’t have to ask that either LMAO. Have a nice day.
Next time, please keep your racism and fan fiction head canons to yourself when you’re trying to criticize a film maker. Otherwise you just look ridiculous.
Hey, @foundlingmother, @fuckyeahrichardiii, @illwynd, @kaori04, @princess-ikol, @rynfinity, and anyone else who’s been following this saga – @raven-brings-light, you might find this entertaining – I’ve been called a racist by someone who doesn’t understand sarcasm or intertextuality! (Or Hegel jokes either, probably, but that wasn’t terribly important.) Thanks for the laughs,
@wafflediaries, and now I can check off some more squares on my Tumblr veteran bingo card. How many points is this one worth?
This took much longer to finish than I intended but I got a message from @teenystarprince that had me inspired lmao
And right! I was wondering how they were going to go about it in the movie since I knew the relations from the comics and the Eddas before? And it was a fun variation. Fancy that conversation though (…which I’m pretty sure they had in Journey Into Mystery I think at one point but YOU KNOW)
Also, I wasn’t accusing you of writing fan fiction, I was noting that fandom generally has a perception of Loki that is not congruent with any canon portrayals of him. It is canon from previous films that MCU Loki loves attention, is terrible at long term planning but can quickly adapt to new situations, and is manipulative and enjoys playing cruel tricks (which is detrimental to his love for attention). These traits were all demonstrated in Thor Ragnarok.
Erm, actually, @wafflediaries, you said (and I quote), “Please stop being bitter just because he wasn’t lifted from your OOC Loki-centric fanfic.” Perhaps (as you seem to have confirmed in your later reply) that wasn’t aimed at me specifically, but as the originator of the post I did receive an e-mail notification with that reply in it, so you can understand why I might have thought that it was aimed at me.
Yes, all the traits you mention are part of Loki’s portrayal in earlier MCU films. But his love of attention is more complicated and subtle than shown in Ragnarok. In the first Thor film, he’s shown as being soft-spoken, almost retiring; it seems that we see him discover that he enjoys power and attention once he gets it for the first time. In the deleted scene in which he’s granted the throne by Frigga and some sort of prime minister guy, he hesitates to take Gungnir, and he looks to Frigga for reassurance, but a transformation seems to come over him when he realizes that yes, this power is really his by right.
Ragnarok seemed to make Loki’s insecurity out to be that of the Trumpian narcissist who’s constantly demanding attention and praise and deeply believes that he deserves it, but also feels threatened and lashes out when it’s withheld. That’s not the Loki we saw in Thor, who had genuine doubts about his worth and felt he needed to go to extreme (indeed, genocidal) lengths to prove it. Narcissists like Trump don’t feel like they have to do anything to prove their worth; they think the adulation is simply their due and something is profoundly wrong with the world if they don’t get it. Ragnarok also gave extremely short shrift to the issue that prompted Loki’s crisis in Thor, namely, the discovery that he belongs to a people that have historically been the enemies of Asgard. And it did not really acknowledge the other reasons for Loki’s long-standing insecurity, which were demonstrated in the first film: the fact that Asgardians don’t really respect his talents as a sorcerer who uses magic on the battlefield, or as a (sometimes devious and dishonest) diplomat who’d rather talk than punch his way out of problems. I’ve seen other people dispute that this was part of his characterization (I’m not tagging them, @foundlingmother; behold my self-restraint!), but it seems pretty clear that they missed the point of the deleted scene in which Thor says “Some do battle, others just do tricks” and a servant laughs at the quip (and by extension, at Loki), as well as Vostagg’s “What happened, silver tongue turned to lead?”, which the script explicitly describes as “needling” him, not good-natured ribbing.
So no, the complaint is not that Ragnarok introduced characteristics that were not present in earlier movies; it’s that it reduced Loki to those characteristics, thereby depriving him of depth and understandable motivation.
Loki is the Philosopher King 