When you’re confused because you’re a villain whose attempted mass genocide twice but people are still trying to say you’re “good”.
When your confused because Loki is being called a villain when he hasn’t occupied that role except for once in Avengers and he attempted genocide only once on a nation Asgard was at war with using tactics not out of custom for the Aesir or estranged from their (decidedly wrong, but still present) morality.( See Bor’s seeming wiping out of all the Dark Elves i.e. “he killed them all” and Odin/Hela’s evident history of drowning nations in blood, as well as Thor’s “When I’m king, I’ll hunt the monster’s down and slay them all”, “Father, let’s finish them together!”)
So yeah. Unless you call attempting to rule Midgard a mass genocide, at which point an explanation on he intended to rule corpses should most likely be provided and the embarrassing body count of only 74 should probably be addressed.
Loki has done morally condemnable and wrong things, but he is not a villain in any traditional sense of the word, and has a body count comparable to beloved heroes (Thor, who mass murdered 145 Jotun in ten minutes because he was insulted).
This sort of thing really bothers me, to be quite honest.
It’s like people aren’t even paying attention to Loki’s story arc because he happened to be built up as an antagonist in Thor and showed up as the villain in The Avengers.
As if… villains can’t have redemptions?
A villain with a redemption arc? Wow. Who would have thought that was possible, am I right?
Yes, Loki tried to commit genocide of the Frost Giants in Thor, but that was after Thor tried to do the exact same thing and succeeded in killing over one hundred of them. Not to mention, it’s a very common trait for Aesir royals to destroy their enemies totally and thoroughly. Odin’s father was confirmed of committing such a crime and so was Odin. Thor and Loki both attempted it once and failed.
Loki’s motives and methods were questionable since Thor was banished for the very same act that Loki later tried to commit, but he just found out that he was a Jotun. He just found out that his entire life was a lie. He just found out that he is a member of a species that is openly despised by the people who raised him. He just found out that the people who were supposed to love him taught him to hate and fear what he was. He just found out that he was a monster, and in desperately attempting to prove that he wasn’t, he stumbled and became what he was most afraid of, which eventually led to a suicide attempt and a downhill spiral that led him straight into The Avengers. Was Loki right? No. Was Loki just? No. Did Loki have the motivation? Yes. Did he do something that Thor also did and technically succeeded at better than Loki did? Yes.
So, if Thor is redeemable in any way, why isn’t Loki? As a matter of fact, if the only criteria for always being a villain is doing bad things in one’s lifetime, then a lot of the Avengers we call heroes today should never have become heroes in the first place.
Yes, Loki was a villain in The Avengers. He did horrible, despicable things in The Avengers, but since then, his story arc has taken a new direction. In The Avengers, Loki wasn’t trying to commit genocide. He was attempting to take control of Midgard to rule it. Wouldn’t be much to rule if he simply killed all of the humans on the planet, would it? And guess what? He was working for someone else! Aka–Thanos. We actively see Thanos’ minions threatening Loki if he fails. While the movie doesn’t dive into the exact relationship between Loki and Thanos, it’s safe to say that showing up on Midgard with the scepter and an army probably wasn’t Loki’s idea. Since Thanos is the “ultimate bad” that MCU has been leading up to, chances are, the plan was probably Thanos’ idea and he took whatever means necessary to achieve it. Loki was the most detached from himself in The Avengers. He physically looked ill the entire movie and seemed the least genuine out of every other appearance he’s made. There’s plenty of subtext there to insist that Loki’s endured something terrible and isn’t on Midgard because he wholeheartedly wants to be there.
Does that make Loki’s actions okay? Of course not. Does that mean he was justified? No. Does that mean he’s committed some pretty awful crimes? Yep, it does, but does that make him unable to shift the direction his life is taking afterward? No. Redemption arcs have always and will always be a thing for heroes, villains, anti-heroes and just about any other type of character that’s fucked up in their lifetime.
In Thor The Dark World, Loki is the only reason that they’re able to get the Dark Elves away from Asgard. If Loki didn’t work with Thor, Asgard likely would have been destroyed. Loki fights alongside Thor to defend Asgard and he actively saves both Thor and Jane from harm and even death. Protecting Thor nearly cost him his life. Did he use his new position to gain some sort of advancement for himself at the end of the movie by taking the throne for himself? Yep, but Loki’s a chaotic neutral character by definition. He will almost always do what will benefit him the most if there are no other factors pushing him in one direction or the other. But Loki didn’t kill Odin, even though he had all of the motives in the world to do so.
His redemption arc only continues in Thor Ragnarok, because without Loki, the Aesir race would have gone extinct. He was the one who brought the ship to Asgard and boarded the surviving Asgardians onto it. He was the one who ignited Ragnarok in order to defeat and kill Hela. He was the reason that the survivors were able to escape and maybe preserve their way of life.
Loki’s made a solid transition from being an antagonist to a villain (it’s important to keep in mind that “antagonist” and “villain” are not synonyms. You can be an antagonist without being a villain) to something that resembles an anti-hero. Loki may not go about doing good deeds in a stereotypical sense of saying, “look at me, look at me, I’m good now,” and, instead, does them in his own way, but insisting that Loki is still actively playing the role of a villain is grossly exaggerated. That’s not the current direction his story is taking. You can’t disregard character development for the sake of saying, “he did bad shit, so he’s still a bad guy.” As I already said, if that’s the logic we’re using, most of our heroes shouldn’t be heroes at all.
No. I’m sorry but this is absolutely not true. Thor never really protected Loki from anything or anyone. Thor spent the entirety of the first movie treating Loki like his personal servant- “Know your place, brother.” -Those are not the words of someone who views his brother as an equal or someone he’s protecting. He dragged Loki into Jotunheim (even if Loki DID bring the Jotnar into Asgard, Thor didn’t know it and Loki tried to talk him out of going).
In Avengers, Thor spent the entire time manhandling Loki and threatening him. NEVER ONCE did he ask Loki if HE NEEDED HELP. NOT. ONE. DAMN. TIME. The closest he came to asking what had happened was- “Who controls the would-be king?”
Then in TTDW, Loki was only allowed out of prison because Thor couldn’t do the job himself. And Thor never realized that the reason Loki faked his death was to get out of going back to the dungeons.
Thor doesn’t deserve Loki’s life. Loki deserves to have HIS OWN LIFE without the expectations and constraints that have been placed upon him for so long by Thor and Odin.
Fight me.
Fight us.
“No. I’m sorry but this is absolutely not true. Thor never really protected Loki from anything or anyone.”
THIS to infinity.
I would echo what @starrynightfantasies has said here. Thor showed no concern for Loki during the first Thor film, or during the first Avengers film, or even during The Dark World. Thor broke Loki out of prison out of self interest. He fully intended to put him right back in that cell, as soon as he no longer needed him.
I would argue that we don’t know why Loki faked his death -because we haven’t been told explicitly. Most likely because that was never the ending the writers intended for TDW, and it was only changed later on.
Loki is not indebted to anyone. If anything, Thor is indebted to him. Without Loki’s intervention at the end of Ragnarok, there would have been no survivors. Without Loki’s intervention at the end of TDW, Jane and possibly Thor, would both be dead.
These are lovely gifs though. So I don’t want you to think this is a commentary on your gif making skills.
ALL OF THIS
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It’s worth noting too that on Jotunheim, Thor started the fight that put his friends in grave danger but it was Loki who then saved their lives.
Loki saved at least Sif and Fandral’s lives (I forget if there were any others, it’s been a while) but Thor was too busy claiming “glory” or some such shit to have his friend’s backs during the battle.
One of the lines in “Thor: The Dark World” that gets overlooked, I think (possibly because Marvel cut it from the final edit) was when Thor is talking to Frigga about Loki, and she says to him that he and Odin always shone so brightly, it was hard for Loki to find any sun for himself, or something to that effect.
Anyway, this is such a massively important line, because it basically tells us EVERYTHING about Loki’s childhood, and how he felt. And here again is yet another example of how absolutely WRONG Taika Waitit’s view of these characters was, given what I heard about him wanting to include a flashback in Ragnarok showing Thor as a sensitive and bullied child, and Loki as dark and mean. That would have been in DIRECT conflict with everything we know about these characters, just like everything else in Ragnarok is.
From what Frigga says to Thor, it’s plain as day that Loki as a child was always struggling just to catch up to Thor, to try and be equal to him, not just in Odin’s and Frigga’s eyes, but in the eyes of probably the entire kingdom. It tells us that Thor, as a boy, was as popular and well liked, as charming and charismatic and as easy to make friends as he is as an adult, and that Loki was very much the introvert, quiet, awkward and isolated. And from Loki’s desperation to win Odin’s approval in the first Thor film, I think it becomes apparent that that desperation grew directly from his feeling inadequate and lesser to the standard of both his father and his big brother growing up. And it’s just so unbelievably sad, to envision that. To envision Loki constantly struggling, trying to match Thor, trying to make himself seem as good as Thor for Odin, trying to make himself seem like a “true and worthy son”, as he says in the first film. How anyone could miss this about his character is beyond me, unless they’re being willfully obtuse.
And we see from this one line, that Loki’s entire motivation is based on a feeling of lack on his own part. He feels like he’s less. He feels like he isn’t as good as Thor, and that Odin must not love him because he’s not as good as Thor, and until he discovers he’s a Jotun, he doesn’t know why, and he can’t figure it out, and he keeps trying and trying to do the right thing to somehow make him, in his father’s eyes, Thor’s equal. Think of the kind of psychological effect that would have on a person, especially a young man growing up in the kind of culture Loki did. Think of the burden of constantly feeling like there’s something WRONG with you, because you’re constantly measuring yourself against the perfection of an older sibling who everyone loves, while everyone treats you like you’re strange, and even are at times outwardly hostile and cruel to you. Think of the weight of trying to figure out how to change yourself so that others will treat you like they treat your perfect older sibling, but not being able to, because you don’t really know what it is about you that makes everyone dislike or hate you in the first place. And then think of what it must have been like, to discover you’re from a race of beings who the people you’ve grown up around consider to be monsters, who are those people’s mortal enemies, and coming to the swift and awful realization that that must have been it all along. That THAT’S what was wrong with you. That that’s why you’ve always been an outcast.
I just think that one moment from The Dark World was so important for understanding Loki’s character.
And yet, once again, Marvel proves it’s own stupidity by cutting it out. Just like they cut out so many scenes from the first Thor film which showed Loki in a more sympathetic light. Gee, it’s almost like they didn’t want people feeling for him. Too bad they ended up doing so anyway.
Yeah, Taika is clearly biased against Loki, for whatever reason. Logic suggests that an anti-imperialist poc would identify with Loki’s character and his storyline, but Taika seems to have rejected him in favor of Thor. I can’t understand it at all. Can anyone think of a plausible explanation.
Well definitely Taika favors Thor, and what I think it really comes down to is, he favors Chris Hemsworth over Tom Hiddleston. Tom is a total professional actor and he takes his craft seriously. I don’t get that impression with Chris. Chris seems to have more or less given up trying to be a serious actor, taking on one comedic role after another, probably because all his attempts at serious drama got panned by the critics. And Chris has a goofy kind of personality with a goofy sense of humor, and for whatever reason, that appealed to Takia Waititi and they hit it off. You get the definite impression that wasn’t the case with Tom. Every interview with Tom done during Ragnarok’s promotion, he talks about how well Takia and Chris got along, and you just get the sense from it that Tom was very much the outsider to their little party. Takia is also one of those directors that HAS to put himself in his own films, which smacks of a massive ego problem. He isn’t satisfied with being behind the scenes. He wants to be the star too. Which tells me he doesn’t appreciate actors or understand what it takes to BE an actor. He’s one of these people, it seems to me, that thinks anyone can do it. But no, it takes a LOT of talent to be a good actor. It’s an actual art. I just don’t think Tom was able to relate at all to what seemed like the idiotic atmosphere on the set of Ragnarok, and I also get the sense that Taika Waititi aggressively shut Tom out of any collaboration regarding Loki’s character, for example Tom’s saying how he was trying to give Matt Daemon (Chris Hemsworth’s friend, by the way) lines that Loki would say, and Taika Waititi just kept telling him no, and giving his own lines, as if he knew better what Loki would say than Tom. He basically steam rolled him. Tom’s a sophisticated, very intelligent and high class man, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that irritated and intimidated a low class shill like Waititi.
wanting to include a flashback
in Ragnarok showing Thor as a sensitive and bullied child, and Loki
as dark and mean
I’m
sorry – what?? What
in any of the previous films could possibly suggest that?? Did TW
even watch them?
@littlefanthing@cosmicjoke I think a big part of why TW (and many fans) favours
Thor is that he has a more friendly, approachable demeanour. It’s
something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently – how we react to
people & interpret their actions is largely based on that, rather
than their actual personality/self. Acting in a friendly manner
doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a really accepting, caring, welcoming
person, but we often react to surface impressions of the person, so I
think that’s part of why people interpret Thor that way. (Also
because he’s the protagonist, but that’s obvious.)
Watiti admitted openly that he hadn’t seen the first two movies before accepting to work on the third one and in my eyes, that’s a warning sign of unprofessionalism. He did eventually watch them, but I somehow get a feeling he did so with a finger on the fast-forward button since he managed to so massively misunderstand them. Or perhaps he just didn’t care.
He’s also been openly saying things like “This is Thor 1 for me.” and “I’m going to respectfully disrespect everything you liked about the other movies.” (paraphrasing the wording here, since I don’t have time to look up the exact quotes).
He got away with it because the movie made a good profit and well, everybody kneels for a dick that squirts money.
BUT HE DOES LET HAPPY DRIVE HIM WHEN HE’S TAKING PETER HOME, BECAUSE GIVING PETER HIS FULL ATTENTION AFTER DRAGGING HIM INTO THE AIRPORT FIGHT IS MORE IMPORTANT TO TONY THAN FEELING PERSONALLY SAFE
are you loki, god of knives? 🗡🙄 
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