Tom Hiddleston as Loki featured in the Avengers: Infinity War – The Official Movie Special book.
Via Torrilla/weibo
I neither can nor want to read this tbh. Anyone else can give general heads-up as to how atrocious this is re: general vilifying, powers / intelligence erasure, backstory and so on?
@shine-of-asgard Its honestly fine if you want to read— that first page is just brief interview questions. Mostly Tom just talking about wearing his costume, getting into character, his acting relationship with Hemsworth (this part is quite sweet), his love of Branagh’s approach to Thor and his excitement/observation that people have latched onto the characters and seem to enjoy having real emotions in their blockbuster superhero movies. The “bad boy” bit in the title isn’t followed-up except for where Tom (probably jokingly) says the horns give Loki a bit of the devil about him.
What did catch my eye was the blurb about the Mind Stone on the next page— and the claim that Thanos didn’t know what it was when he gave it to Loki in the scepter. I’m sorry, what?!?! This is news to me.
WTF, Marvel? How do you keep making your big bad scary new villain sound like such a dipshit? At this point I believe my own account of what happened with Thanos more than I believe anything coming from these ass-clowns.
Also I just caught that it says “[Thanos] granted use of the stone to Loki to help him in his proposed conquest of Earth”
So like, not to take this too seriously because honestly, who knows how closely this kind of collateral print stuff is proofread by the higher ups…
But that sounds like it was Loki’s idea to target Earth— which is something that’s often been debated. Loki has a few lines in Avengers that sound like he’s doubtful of Thanos’ ability to deliver an army. The Other says something like “you’ll have your war, Asgardian” — doesn’t he? (I can’t pull up a video at the moment to see.)
I always thought that was a bit funny because Loki was clearly being threatened/coerced/tortured on some level and clearly under Thanos’ control. So why did it sound so much like he was trying to bargain, as if he were an equal partner in the venture? I always figured those comments were merely Loki trying to reassert his regal bearing and pull his pride together, trying to hide his fear before going off to “conquer.”
But… if Loki was the one who first suggested going to Earth (perhaps offering his services in order to save his own skin) his comments would make even more sense, because then of course he’d want to act as though he actually gave a shit about conquering Midgard as a general of Thanos. He’d have to make Thanos and The Other believe he was dedicated to not just Thanos’ cause, but his own selfish goals of ruling Earth— which of course, wouldn’t possibly compete with Thano’s goal of attaining the Stones.
Btw— if Thanos didn’t even know he already had the fucking Mind Stone in his thot little hands, how the hell did he know the Tesseract was on Earth? (Remind me— Do they say in any of the movies/deleted scenes specifically why Thanos knows about the Tesseract being found/reawakened on Earth? I forget if it’s explicitly mentioned that the energy signature calls to him or to the Mind Stone, etc. If that’s ever mentioned on screen, then something really doesn’t add up and this book is talking nonsense. But if it’s only a vague reference, perhaps we can deduce that Loki knew what the Mind Stone was, and/or told him about the Tesseract in order to entice Thanos into working with his plan.)
Either way… Loki probably knew if he played his cards right, there was a decent chance of Thor and Co. or even Odin himself preventing him from taking the Tesseract. So it makes me wonder if Loki purposefully leapt at the chance to also snag the Mind Stone from Thanos (getting caught and allowing the Avengers to analyze it, then later tossing it aside for Natasha to find— he practically giftwraps it for them) as well as botching the invasion and making sure the Tesseract would land in Thor/Asgard’s hands. Maybe he didn’t know which Stone would end up where, but he knew that anywhere was better than with Thanos, and not having either Stone would significantly hinder Thano’s ability to reach the Nine Realms.
Whew. So yes…
I always thought Loki purposefully pulled quite the fast one on Thanos by losing on purpose— but this would be potential proof that he pulled a double fast-one, knowing what the Mind Stone was before Thanos did.
Now I just want to know if Thanos was like, hmm you’ll need a weapon, how about this long piece of junk— and Loki saw the Mind Stone and was like YES I mean sure, I guess that’ll do, you’re the boss *shrug*
Yeah, I do think the way we were supposed to interpret those lines in The Avengers was that it was Loki’s idea to invade and conquer Earth. I also kind of suspect (as I acknowledged in the notes to the chapter of “Abyss” where I dealt with it) that the tag scene at the end of Thor, where we see Loki looking all beat-up and still in the formal armor he was wearing when he fell, was supposed to have taken place shortly after Loki fell, and maybe we were supposed to infer that he had fallen to Earth and somehow found the Tesseract himself.
But neither of those ideas made a whole lot of sense to me. I mean, I guess it’s possible that Loki has the ability to detect powerful magical objects. But I knew they were building toward something with Thanos and the Infinity Stones – I didn’t get into the MCU until after AOU had come out, so I didn’t start writing MCU fanfiction until I’d watched all the way through that – so I kind of thought of Infinity Stones as being Thanos’s thing, and it made more sense to me that Thanos was the one who had found the Tesseract using the Mind Stone, which we knew he gave to Loki. No, they don’t say explicitly that the Mind Stone detected the tampering with the Tesseract; there’s just that bit of ominous narration by The Other at the beginning of The Avengers, saying “The Tesseract has awakened. It is on a little world,” etc. They do show him handing the scepter to Loki in the same little intro bit, but I don’t think we’re supposed to draw any inferences from that.
There was also that exchange in The Avengers where Loki says “I have seen the true power of the Tesseract” and Thor immediately asks, “Who showed you this power? Who controls the would-be king?” That strongly suggested to me that Loki wouldn’t have known all that much about the Infinity Stones before his encounter with Thanos, which is why Thor immediately infers that someone else must have taught him. And that made me seriously question whether invading Earth had actually been Loki’s idea, because Thanos is the one who wants the Tesseract and knows how and where to find it. So… what gives? And that’s why I decided for fic purposes that Thanos convinced Loki that invading Earth was his idea, Inception-style. Using the Mind Stone, of course, because he had it. And he definitely fucking knew what it was, I don’t know what that writer was smoking. He temporarily relinquished one Infinity Stone in order to secure a second. It didn’t work out, but sometimes you gotta take a gamble to win big.
Loki is the Philosopher King 