dearlokigodofmischief:

loki-god-of-menace:

eric-coldfire:

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.