The saddest part abut the red cape is that this is all about Thor again. This is not about Loki. He could imagine a scenario where Sif or Fandral pat his shoulder for slaying their enemies in battle with his illusions or anything else that is about appreciating what and who he is but it´s not. It ´s about Thor´s triumph. He is raising the hammer while he could present any of his own talents. We know he has enough of them but he thinks, and has learned that they won´t be appreciated. It´s not about himself and what he could have archived it´s about Thor. His hammer, his throne, his friends. No one in the audience is cheering for anything “Loki” they are cheering for Thor. Loki only slipped into his clothes. His whole time living there made him think that he does not stand a chance being himself, not in Asgard and not in front of his father. Being Loki has just brought him behind bars, pretending he is like Thor takes pieces of him into freedom again. He gives people what they want and that is Thor, not him. Loki was never enough. Loki is not enough, not even in his own day dreams.
that is the tragedy of loki.
@philosopherking1887 I hope you will at some point talk about this scene.
I see this analysis of it a lot, and I think that it’s a fairly accurate analysis of the scene as it stands on its own, but I don’t necessarily agree with what it says about Loki’s character. There’s a distinction to be made between wanting to be Thor and wanting to be Thor’s equal, and my interpretation of Loki is that I believe him when he says he wants the latter (or wanted…I’m not 100% sure what Loki wants anymore…probably not to get killed/tortured/used by Thanos). In the first Thor movie, Loki’s plan to impress Odin didn’t involve him becoming like Thor, but revealing to Odin the weaknesses of his bloodthirsty warrior son. Thor charges in and threatens the tenuous peace between Asgard and Jotunheim. I’m not sure what Loki’s plan was after that–I think things got a bit off track when he found out what he was and Odin took a nap–but I assume he would have used his skills to put things right, one way or another.
I think the real tragedy of Loki is that he knows he’s powerful, but nobody else realizes. It’s incredibly frustrating to know you’re brilliant and for nobody else to recognize it. For them to keep telling you that you’re not. Not only are you unsure of your skills, you’re unsure about what made you want to cultivate them. It can even lead to you sort of questioning your perception of reality. If nobody else agrees that I’m powerful, why do I think that? Am I deluded? It’s numerous layers of insecurity.
All that said, I could still make a case for a scene like this in the context of the movie. Loki has no hope of ever being loved in Asgard again. Yeah, now they recognize he’s powerful. They realize he’s a threat, and they hate him. So, I could see him indulging a fantasy of being Thor at that point. It would be much simpler for him to be Thor. I don’t think that’s always been his desire, or is even really is his desire at that point. You could argue that he sort of gets this wish. By the end of the movie, he’s living as somebody else, someone that the people of Asgard respect, but is still ultimately Loki. I don’t think he’s disappointed with that initially (obviously he’s going to be disappointed with it eventually because Loki’s never satisfied).
My mixed-up feelings about this scene mostly have to do with what was going on in my life when it was released. Seeing gifs of it is almost “triggering,” in a very minor way… it just gives me a little jolt of anxiety and instantly reminds me of the surrounding circumstances. In short, a close friend of mine had just had a textbook manic episode, which was clear to everyone but her. She agreed to check into a hospital, but shortly thereafter regretted it and decided that everyone else was “gaslighting” her. I started seeing Tumblr buzz about the scene while I was in class, so I obviously couldn’t watch it then, but I took a moment to watch it while I was in my friend’s apartment gathering some clothes to bring to her at the hospital.
I couldn’t help but read some of the symptoms of bipolar disorder into Loki, especially as this scene made him out. I don’t usually do anything with that in my fics; like a lot of other writers, I write Loki with my own set of mental health issues (basically, unipolar depression and anxiety), because it’s what I know. But I wonder sometimes if bipolar would be a better diagnosis, given his actions in canon. Maybe his breakdown in the first Thor movie is his first manic episode; it can manifest in early adulthood after masquerading as unipolar depression in adolescence, as it did with my friend. The urge to dwell in self-aggrandizing illusion shown in this scene doesn’t fit comfortably with how I usually portray Loki’s psychology; that’s another reason I tend to ignore it, besides the troubling associations. And I have no idea how to write mania from the inside.
Loki is the Philosopher King 