Archive of Our Own ^beta

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(Originally posted Nov. 7, 2017)

I am extremely proud of Loki Odinson, my very own child, for finally starting to make better life choices

(no but for real though, one thing that’s really struck me in thinking more about his actions in Ragnarok compared to the other movies is just how much of what he’s done previously has been purely reactive–he’s still making choices, but in many cases they’re significantly constrained by others or otherwise in response to others, whether that’s expressed by lashing out at somebody, taking defensive action, or otherwise feeling like he’s backed into a corner and making the best of some very bad and limited options, looking out for himself because (he believes) no one else cares to. I can’t remember if he actually says “I had no choice” at any point but I feel like the idea is there in the first Thor movie, especially when he’s telling the Warriors that he’s the reason Odin rescued them from Jotunheim and also by the way Thor’s not ready to be king, and it just kind of keeps snowballing from there, decision after terrible decision made in response to Thor, Odin, the Warriors, Thanos and the Other, Thor and Odin again. His suicide attempt at the end of the first movie is a prime example–he’s making a choice, arguably, but I don’t think it seemed that way to him. I think it felt like letting go was his only real option. This is especially true again in TDW, where he’s reacting to and going along with others’ plans; even taking Odin’s throne at the end is as much a reaction against Odin and Thor as it is a choice for something.

And then in Ragnarok? Well, he starts out that way. He’s been generally fucking around on Asgard for three years and working out some of his issues in weird ways, again in reaction to Thor and Odin; then Thor shows up and Loki lets himself get dragged around, resulting in Loki somewhat stranded on Sakaar and again opportunistically making the best (…his best, anyway) of a not-super-ideal situation he didn’t choose. He keeps going in that vein for a while, where everything he does is some kind of reaction to the Grandmaster and an attempt to manipulate the existing situation, and I would bet that if he’d had a chance to talk longer when he was going to sell Thor out again, he would’ve said something along the lines of “come on, brother, you know what the Grandmaster’s like, I have to keep him happy, I didn’t have a choice.”

Except Thor is completely done with that. He short-circuits the whole process and leaves on a suicide mission to save Asgard because that’s his choice, and he forces Loki to think about what he actually wants and make a choice.

Once Korg showed up, Loki had plenty of options. He could’ve stayed on Sakaar and taken advantage of the revolution either to ingratiate himself with the Grandmaster or take over. He could’ve taken a ship and gone literally anywhere. Maybe Hela would’ve hunted him down eventually, but it’s a big universe and he’s good at disguising himself. He probably could’ve managed pretty well. Thor probably would’ve died, Asgard would’ve been destroyed, but Loki would survive by looking out for himself. He’s good at that too, after all. No one could really blame him for not wanting to throw his life away on a suicide mission.

Or he could do…the stupid thing. The Thor thing, not to put too fine a point on it. He could go through a not-really-stable wormhole, play the Big Damn Hero for once, and jump in on what is probably the losing side of a battle against the actual Goddess of Death. He could try to help Thor and save as many Asgardians as possible while running an extremely good chance of dying in the process.

And faced with that choice, he chooses Asgard. He chooses Thor. He commits, putting himself between Asgard’s people and their enemies and then going even further into danger without hesitation on what could’ve easily been a one-way trip to raise Surtur. He returns to Asgard’s remnant on the ship when it really would’ve been reasonable to take off and do his own thing after having helped save the day. He chooses–several times over–to take the hard, dangerous route for the sake of his people and his brother.

And I’m so fucking proud of him.)

(An additional note, after Tumblr user 191811110 commented, "It’s interesting to see that seen in a context of choice and not of duty":  

Well, I think that might be part of it, but duty seems like a much stronger motivator for Thor (and only part of the time for him, considering he resisted being made king until it was unavoidable), so I don’t see it as quite as much of a huge thing for Thor to do what he did. But I don’t remember duty really coming up much for Loki as far as his motivations go. The fact that he eventually decided to act in a way appropriate to a sense of duty to his people, in a major departure from his previous behavior, indicates that it was in fact a conscious, deliberate choice. What that says to me is, kiddo’s come a long way, and that’s why I’m proud of him.)

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(Originally posted June 16, 2018)

In an effort to make myself feel a little better about Infinity War and certain events therein, I want to talk about something that’s sad but in a not-completely-crushingly-awful way:

specifically, I want to talk about the contrast between Loki’s last words to Thanos and his last words to Kurse (because he absolutely did not expect to survive being impaled, fight me).

The similarities between “See you in Hel, monster” and “you will never be a god” are pretty obvious—Loki just has to get in the last word somehow, because he wouldn’t be Loki if he didn’t, and both lines show him being stubborn and defiant, metaphorically spitting in the face of the being that killed him. But the similarities are kind of superficial; it’s the differences that interest me. With Kurse, of course, it was a bitterly triumphant taunt, because at that point Kurse knew he was going to die too. Loki’s dying, but he’s won because he’s taking his mother’s killer with him, and he wants to make sure Kurse knows it.

With Thanos, well…at least assuming we’re to take the scene as presented (which is what I’m trying to accept, because then I’ll be less disappointed if Avengers 4 shows that to be the case, even as it’ll free up mental bandwidth to focus on better AUs if I’m not stressing as much about canon), there’s no trick, no triumph. Loki played his last gamble and it failed, and now he’s going to die. He has to hope that Thor will be able to beat Thanos somehow, eventually, but maybe he won’t, and in any case Loki won’t be there to see it. So although his last words sound like a taunt to Thanos, and they would function that way in a different context, they really don’t this time. You could say, for that reason, that Loki’s last words to Thanos are empty—or you could say that they’re less for Thanos at all and more for Loki himself (and maybe Thor, although it’s hard to say if Thor heard that part).

And that’s a very interesting way to look at it, because another difference is, Loki’s last words to Thanos took a lot more effort. With Kurse, he’s been impaled and he’s not doing good, but in that specific moment he was probably running on adrenaline and the high of having successfully taken revenge, which I imagine would help, and he wasn’t actively fighting; plus, he had the strength for a brief conversation with Thor even after Kurse imploded. With Thanos, again, none of those things are true. Despair would be a reasonable reaction, for one thing. For another, I mean, Thanos is literally strangling him to death. All of Loki’s strength is devoted to two things: trying and failing to fight for his life, and trying and failing to breathe. He doesn’t have energy or air to waste on saying something that isn’t going to make a difference, but he forces the words out anyway because it’s important to him to say it—more important, we could infer, than his last words to Kurse.

That’s the part that I find…well, encouraging isn’t the right word. Bittersweet, if anything; sad but in a not-completely-crushingly-awful way, and it adds to how proud I am of my disaster child that I love so much. Because the biggest contrast between “See you in Hel, monster” and “you will never be a god” is what it says about Loki himself, or rather, how Loki sees himself. Sure, he’s calling Kurse a monster destined for Hel, but he’s saying the exact same thing about himself. His death in the process of killing Kurse was the best he could hope for at that point, the best use of Asgard’s pet monster. He’d done something good and got his revenge, but that didn’t change the way he saw himself, as a monster who deserved nothing better than eternity in Hel. 

But by Ragnarok, a few years have passed, and although we haven’t actually seen it happening, it’s clear that Loki’s been doing some healing, in his own unconventional way. He’s had time to deal with some of his issues and reframe the narrative of his own life, and maybe he’ll never be completely happy with who and what he is (Asgardian, Jotun, son of Odin and Frigga, brother of Thor, God of Mischief), but…he’s begun to make peace with it. Coming back to Asgard and to Thor at the end of the movie cements that—and everything he says to Thanos explicitly affirms it.

“You will never be a god” is a statement about Thanos, sure. But it’s a statement about Loki, too. He’s not just a monster, and he’s not just the pawn Thanos made him. He’s a god. He’s Loki. After his very sense of self was shattered in Odin’s vault and everything that happened after, Loki knows who he is again. He is himself again, right up to his last breath, and nobody can take that away.

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(Originally posted May 6, 2019)

I finally figured out how to describe the thing that continues to baffle me the most about Endgame, which is: major parts of it feel too much like The Last Jedi.

I don’t mean that in an inherently negative way, because I didn’t hate The Last Jedi; I had some issues with it as a movie, some of which boiled down to “I understand what you wanted to do here and it worked, it’s just not what I want from the movies I watch” and some of which was more “I think I see what you were trying to do here but it didn’t really work,” but I didn’t hate it, certainly not the way a whole bunch of Mostly Dudes On The Internet did. one thing that definitely does stand out though–whatever your opinion on it might be–is that TLJ and The Force Awakens were made by different directors with different visions. some things that are teased in TFA are dismissed, left unanswered, or lightly mocked in TLJ, because it’s a different creative team that was more interested in exploring other narrative/thematic threads than the questions TFA raised (and which Abrams may or may not have had answers to, who knows).

In Infinity War, I’m pretty sure Steve never mentions Peggy. Thor doesn’t mention Jane. Thor does mention Loki specifically, a couple times; he also watches Loki brutally murdered in front of him (in a very serious, tragic scene that seems to lay very clear groundwork for a later reveal), reacts with helpless horror and grief, seems perfectly willing to die with Loki’s body, and tells Rocket he has nothing left to lose. his grief is raw and heartbreaking; it’s treated seriously, and it drives him to risk his life making Stormbreaker and then makes him more powerful in battle than ever before.

and then there’s Endgame, and it literally feels like it was created by somebody else. Steve is all about Peggy again. Thor is hung up on Jane and doesn’t mention Loki even once, even when he actually sees him in another timeline; throughout the entire film, his grief and trauma are treated as a joke. he does get to be badass again at the very end, but it doesn’t last very long and it’s not even close to his portrayal in IW.

like, if I watched these two movies without knowing anything else about who made them or when they were released, I would automatically assume they had different directors and that they’d been made at least a couple years apart, by people who had very different favorite characters and didn’t like the previous directors’ favorites very much. I would assume that the Endgame directors didn’t care a whole lot about Bucky but really really really wanted to bring Peggy back because they’re tired of Stucky fans, and that they thought the consistent portrayal of Thor as a strong muscular god was stupid so they were going to tear that down and mock him, and that Chris Hemsworth was bored with it too and wanted to do the exact opposite of IW, and that they didn’t like Loki at all but recognized that he’s a fan favorite so they grudgingly gave him a cameo instead of following up on IW’s obvious foreshadowing, and maybe that something happened behind the scenes between movies where Tom Hiddleston didn’t want to be involved anymore or he and Chris had a major falling out. I would have probably guessed, too, that Endgame was filmed by a team who hadn’t worked on any Marvel movies before but felt like they were making up for it by putting in a bunch of fanservicey callbacks to previous films.

and the reality is, not only were these two films made by the exact same creative teams with the exact same vision, they were also filmed at the same time and essentially made as one movie. there was no issue of one set of directors wanting to show up the others or deliberately mistreating the previous directors’ favorite characters. there was no time between filming for things to go sour behind the scenes (some of the stuff about Hemsworth does seem to be at least partially true, but it didn’t happen between these two films). but that’s how it feels, and it’s just…it’s baffling, it really is.

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the whole context is that it’s basically a joke, right? obviously it’s relevant to Peter because of all the Civil War stuff but for the most part it’s there so audiences can laugh at a fun cameo. because, I mean, it’s ridiculous–in part because we know Steve as a badass action hero and here he is doing these unbearably lame PSAs for high schoolers, and partly because of things like “what’s REALLY cool is following the rules, and I know this because I’m the guy who regularly breaks all of them”. there’s definitely some secondhand embarrassment if you like Steve, but it’s still funny.

then you get to the little bonus scene where he interrupts himself with something like “how many more of these are there?” and it’s still funny in a different way because now he’s sort of in on the joke, but at the same time it’s like…he’s tired. he’s not having fun. he doesn’t especially want to be here, doing this, even if he thinks it’s more or less a good cause and a good use of his time (debatable). he’s going along with it and he’s going to record all these stupid PSAs because he said he would but he would really like to be done now, please. and, you know, that’s enough to make me feel bad for the guy. but then if you consider the actual context–

he’s wearing the Avengers 1 suit, right? he gets that suit in Avengers 1, and by the time we see him again in The Winter Soldier, he’s working with SHIELD and wearing a different, much less flashy suit. so we can probably assume the PSAs were filmed fairly shortly after Avengers 1 and before he joined SHIELD. and part of Steve’s whole thing is that he’s the man out of time, so he’s always somewhat out of place, set adrift, no matter what else is going on, but at that particular point…he’s only been thawed out for a few weeks. absolutely everything he knows has changed. all his old connections are gone and his new ones are tenuous at best. he doesn’t know what he should be doing, and he definitely doesn’t know what he wants to be doing. Sam asks him “what makes you happy?” at the beginning of The Winter Soldier, and Steve gives him that horribly sad, self-deprecating smile and says “I don’t know.” 

everything is different. he has no idea what he wants to do with his life, he’s struggling even to know what the right thing to do is, so in the absence of knowing either of those things, well…there are always other people who are pretty sure what they want him to do. one of the criticisms I saw leveled at Avengers 1 was that Steve was out of character, because he seemed too uptight and said things like “we have orders, we should follow them” and “was that the first time you’ve lost a soldier”, compared to The First Avenger where his default position was “I will fight ABSOLUTELY EVERYONE who gets in the way of me doing what’s right”.  but he addresses that in the same conversation with Sam, something like “I tried to get back into it, follow orders…” and that wasn’t any good either, but he didn’t know what else to do. 

so when somebody, probably the Department of Education or something similar, came to him with this cool idea about Relating To The Youths by making these awful PSAs, well–he did the dancing monkey thing before, right? he hated it but he didn’t know what to do with himself and nobody really knew what to do with him, and people told him it was for a good cause, so he swallowed his pride and did it. the videos are another form of the exact same thing, and just like last time, he agreed to make himself look ridiculous for a theoretically good cause, largely because he had no idea what else to do. because he was completely unmoored, because he didn’t know what he wanted or what he should be doing or even what made him happy, because he didn’t have anything or anyone else, because doing what he’s told and making a fool of himself to help people is at least a little bit familiar. 

he figures himself out a bit when he joins SHIELD, probably, or at least that gives him some sense of purpose and direction even if he’s still depressed, but honestly? those videos were made at what was probably one of the lowest, most directionless points of his extremely weird life, and it’s possible they wouldn’t have been made at all if he’d felt even a little more sure of himself, his place in the world, and his ability to choose the right thing and do it. and once that context occurred to me, yeah, I started mostly seeing the PSAs as sad rather than funny.

(originally posted July 31, 2019; go reblog it if you have Tumblr and you're also sad now)

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I had some very mixed feelings about Spider-Man: Far From Home when I watched it, mostly about a) Tony and b) the ways that the MCU dealt with the aftermath of the Snap mostly by not dealing with it (also some irritated feelings that apparently they still went with "the Blip" as the official name even though I could swear they responded to popular consensus by calling it "the Snap" in the Far From Home trailer), but I liked MJ for fairly obvious reasons, and I now think she's neurodivergent in one way or another. 

it’s mostly that…in Homecoming she seemed very self-assured. she was weird and part of that seemed deliberate; she seemed to be a loner by choice. she and Peter aren’t really shown developing a friendship so I guess that happened between films, but by FFH they do seem to be friends just aside from having crushes on each other–-if nothing else they know each other well enough to have those crushes, considering they didn’t seem that interested in each other in Homecoming. and that kind of shows us a different side of MJ, I guess, now that she does have a few friends and doesn’t want to lose what she’s gained. she says something to Peter about it not usually going well for her when she has friends, which implies she’s not so much content being a loner, as much as she’s a loner by choice because she’s awkward around people, can’t quite grok social situations, doesn’t want to fundamentally change herself to try, and would rather push people away with the image of being a cool loner than try to open up and get rejected. her “weird” interests probably tie into that too–-she sort of flaunts them at this point as part of that semi-defensive image she projects, but they’re probably also part of the reason people started rejecting her, and that general framing made me go “oh, special interests”. 

people can be socially awkward and fixated on extremely specific topics without necessarily being neurodivergent, I guess-–but on the other hand most neurodivergent people tend to be socially awkward and fixated on extremely specific topics, and something about the way she talked about it just kind of said “hey, there’s something else here” to me. and given that I adore MJ but she and Peter don’t seem to have that much in common, I really like the idea that they’re both neurodivergent in some way (the somewhat common headcanon that Peter has ADHD makes tons of sense to me) and that’s part of the reason they’re drawn to each other. 

(originally posted Aug. 6, 2019)

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boy do I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about the Ragnarok deleted scene, aside from “ugh why did you wait so long to release this, it was a good scene, you could’ve put it on the home release instead of the idiotic one about Loki in the porta-potty,” anyway kiwimeringue on Tumblr asked about my thoughts and I figured I’d just try to throw it all into one post

things I prefer about the deleted scene:

• I’m sure he still would have been blamed for it but it’s slightly more explicit that Odin’s current state isn’t entirely Loki’s fault–and it’s less easy to blame him for Odin’s death, too, given that Hela is the visible proximate cause
• similarly, in this context it’s less easy to see Loki summoning the Bifrost as cowardly panic and more as pragmatism–I don’t think there was any mention of her being unstoppable on Asgard in the deleted scene, for one thing, and for another, Odin’s made it clear how dangerous she is and how much he despairs of stopping her, so Loki’s quick reaction reads more as “okay he’s right, gonna do what he says this time instead of pointlessly getting killed” than…panic (and Thor immediately stepping up to join him rather than yelling “no!” indicates he thought it was fine)
• presumably removes any need for interference by Dr. Strange
• …which also means Loki doesn’t begin the scene by landing on his face, and that’s nice
• Odin explicitly claiming Loki as his son AND ADMITTING HE FUCKED UP, WOW (I mean Thor immediately goes “no, we’re the ones who failed you,” but at least Odin said it, and from Loki’s reaction it’s clear he never, ever expected to hear it)
• it turns Loki’s mental attack on Val into something of a callback to what Odin can also do, which goes nicely with the “you inherited this stuff from me” bit and possibly emphasizes that Loki’s not the only one in this family who’s willing to fight dirty, even if these two specific instances were very different
• the scene itself puts a lot more of the blame on Odin where it belongs–my sense is that he’s like this because he was finally forced to recognize the depth of his fuckups and his response was fatalism and despair. the theatrical scene is more “surprise you have a murderous sister, peace out” and this one is more “oh god I fucked up, I fucked up so bad, everything is terrible and it’s my fault” (when he talks to Hela he still doesn’t take any responsibility for making her what she was, but at least he seems to feel more responsibility for the situation)
• Loki grabbing Thor’s arm: Good
• Loki’s reaction to Odin being stabbed is ouch and Feelings, which is partly nice because it’s an explicit reaction rather than something you might miss if you’re not specifically watching him, and it’s always good to see an onscreen rejection of the idea that Loki doesn’t care about anybody or whatever (I mean also it’s complicated feelings because, you know, Odin’s A+ Parenting, but feelings all the same)
• Loki’s face as Odin transfers his power is…kind of fascinating. he seems concerned because Thor is concerned and because the situation is freaky, but not…upset, or jealous, or hurt, or any of the things we saw at Thor’s first coronation scene. for probably a lot of reasons, he’s okay with it and that’s super interesting
• also feelings: Thor and Loki moving to put themselves between Odin and Hela
• the boys get thrown into dumpsters and I’m sorry but I love that

things I prefer about the theatrical version:

• it did make more sense, probably (it definitely made more sense in the context of the entire movie, because I don’t know how Hela gets to Asgard or the boys end up on Sakaar in the situation set up by the deleted scene, although presumably other elements were also reworked so those parts would have made sense if they’d kept it)
• it’s a nice peaceful moment and I do like how the movie kept returning to the clifftop, even later in Endgame when New Asgard was basically built there
• I find it hard to believe that Thor in particular would leave while there’s any chance Odin’s still alive, and honestly I’d be wondering if he would pop back up again later, so the theatrical version makes more sense that way and there’s a better sense of finality both for the viewers and the characters
• Odin as crazy drunk homeless guy is uh…insensitive at best, probably? so not doing that is generally better?
• Odin explicitly says he loves them (I guess we get this or the apology for fucking up but we can’t have both?) and he mentions Frigga
• actual dialogue between Brodinsons and Hela
• the deleted version heavily foreshadowing Surtur is kind of nice because it takes some of the responsibility for that decision off Thor’s shoulders and sets it up earlier as an option, but it also means Thor doesn’t get to be the one who thought of it or the one who has to start his reign by bearing that responsibility–so on balance I prefer Thor having to be that smart and that desperate more on his own, rather than just kind of going “oh that’s what Dad meant, okay Dad, I’ll just do what you said again”
• Thor’s dramatic Magical Girl Transformation blowing back/scorching the grass is a really cool visual effect that we don’t get in the alley

things I can’t make up my mind about:

• Odin definitely had a more dignified death in the theatrical release and in some ways that’s good because it’s a very serious moment that deserves to be treated seriously and I’m really uncomfortable with the high likelihood of Crazy Drunk Homeless Odin being played for laughs but also…maybe he didn’t deserve an easy dignified death given that he created this whole situation?? maybe it’s good that he actually did have to deal with his massive fuckup for at least a few minutes?? theatrical Odin doesn’t make me cringe but maybe he deserves to have fallen that far and to be forced to face just how badly he fucked up??
• do I have more feelings about Loki in the deleted scene or the theatrical version? trick question, both
• also, Loki is an absolute snack in both scenes and I really don’t know if one is better than the other that way
• I don’t actually want them to fight or for Thor to instantly blame Loki but it’s definitely interesting, and I like that they both visibly set it aside when a new threat shows up
• dirty alleyway? windswept clifftop? I LIKE BOTH

(originally posted Feb. 8, 2020)

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May 2, 2018

a follow-up to my previous Infinity War post: 

the more I think about Thanos, the more I dislike what they did with him. it’s probably kind of inevitable because I’ve been reading great fic for SIX YEARS, but like…I get that they wanted to humanize him since everyone fusses about MCU villains being too one-dimensional, but instead they made him kind of nonsensical and contradictory, and I particularly don’t like that now I have to decide if I want to go with my pre-IW characterization of him in WIPs (many of which, like a lot of others’ fics, work with the idea that Thanos is an old, extremely powerful enemy who’s returned, instead of some asshole who’s only been doing this for a few decades) or try to work his IW characterization/motivations into it. which is dumb because there was never any indication EVER in Avengers 1 or GotG that his motivation was so different from 616 Thanos. (I mean, fuck, MCU Thanos was literally introduced with a wink-for-the-comics-fans line about courting Death but I guess we’re just pretending that didn’t mean anything either.) although honestly if the intent was to get me to hate MCU Thanos more than I already did, well done I guess, because now he’s not only evil but self-righteous and self-pitying as well.

a theory, though: setting aside my other issues with how Thanos was written, there’s the whole fact that the snap happened the way it did, with most of the characters who turned to ash doing so directly in front of people who love them, which seems…maybe not as random as Thanos claimed the whole thing would be? obviously the real explanation here is, they did it for the Angst™, but because I like having in-world explanations for things too, my theory is…well, the Infinity Stones put together can do…anything. Thanos has a very specific goal, yeah, but the Stones are responding to his will in the first place, which means they might well do things he didn’t consciously intend. his whole thing in this movie is how much it’s cost him to do this, because Only He Has the Will To Do What Must Be Done, he’s really a noble suffering hero, why can’t these dumb sheep see that this is the Only Way To Save Anyone, etc. etc. barf, so–yeah, his conscious goal was to wipe out half of all life, completely at random. but at that point, well, maybe his subconscious tacked on “and everyone left behind should suffer like I’m suffering. they should ALL pay for this paradise I’ve created, the ungrateful bastards, not leave me to shoulder the burden ALONE." 

so everybody loses, nobody is left whole, and meanwhile this purple asshole has the gall to hole up in some random cabin and smile at the sunrise with the conviction that he’s done The Difficult But Right Thing. anyway I like this headcanon and I hate Thanos, the end.

(Originally posted in a reblog August 16, 2018)

fun fact, Thanos’s clear enjoyment of others’ pain is what prompted my fix-it fic! the Russos are now saying some bullshit about how Thanos changes after the Statesman because now that he has a couple Infinity Stones, he’s no longer killing indiscriminately, just relentlessly pursuing his goal and only killing people who strike him as serious threats (which means: yes, Tony, because everything always comes back to Tony somehow), and somehow that’s symbolized by him taking off his armor buuuuuut 

he took off his armor before he killed Loki, for starters, and also he did not have to kill Loki, he easily could have just smacked him aside and left but instead he took the time to do it like that and to make very sure Thor was watching and if that wasn’t enough, he walked over to dump Loki’s body right in front of him just to make even more sure to rub it in. so I guess the Russos theoretically mean after that Thanos set aside his obvious sadistic pleasure in watching other people suffer so he could focus on his ~noble goal~? 

OH BUT WAIT, I guess we’ve just decided to forget about Knowhere? “but we didn’t actually see him kill anybody there” right well I think it’s highly unlikely that he basically destroyed the entire place and was careful not to kill anyone but sure, for the sake of argument let’s go with that, so HOW THE FUCK DO YOU EXPLAIN THE BIT WHERE HE PRETENDS HE’S GOING TO LET PETER KILL GAMORA. just like on the Statesman where he wasted time making Thor and Loki (but mostly Thor, arguably, without actually-for-sure killing him to remove an enemy so that justification is still bullshit) suffer, he had what he wanted. there was absolutely no reason for him to wait around just so Gamora could beg Peter to kill her and Peter could finally make the horrible decision to do it, unless Thanos was waiting deliberately because he likes making people suffer. hell, he even pushes Gamora closer to Peter but doesn’t otherwise interrupt, making extremely sure they both have time for this awful, awful moment that ended up not accomplishing anything anyway. so as much as the part with Thor and Loki stands out to me for obvious reasons, that’s just the first time his sadism is on full display in IW, not the only time. 

in conclusion Thanos is fucking lying to himself because he pretends to be pragmatically, ruthlessly pursuing his ~very noble goal~ but in fact he is a punk bitch who gets off on others’ suffering and I hate him for all the wrong reasons, okay thanks for coming to my TED talk

(Originally posted in a reblog August 8, 2018)

A big part of the problem is how they did it, yeah. Like…I have zero interest in Thanos as a character so I was never excited about him essentially being the protagonist, but it could have worked. Instead they fell all over themselves trying to humanize Thanos in the mistaken belief that they were making him a better villain, and they did that first by giving him a worldview that is disturbingly fucking close to real worldviews that harm real people…AND THEN THEY NEVER LET ANYONE CALL HIM OUT ON HIS BULLSHIT.

I mean, obviously, he’s supposed to be the Big Bad, we’re supposed to take that as a given. But if you want to make somebody like Thanos understandable without backing off the evil, you can’t just figure it’s self-evident that he’s a bad guy when the movie itself validates his point of view. He tells Gamora her planet is a paradise now because he wiped out half the population (which is a lazy retcon for new characterization in the first place, given that GotG included Gamora’s rap sheet explicitly calling her the last survivor of her race), and…apparently, we’re all supposed to accept that. None of the good guys are given the opportunity to contradict him. You can’t depend on the directors’ commentary to clarify that oh yeah, of course he’s a bad dude and of course he’s wrong, his driving purpose isn’t really altruism but his fucked-up savior complex without actually pointing that out in the movie. This is not the sort of thing where you can just assume audiences are smart and they’ll get it, because a) they’re not going to get it if you didn’t do the work and b) there are already loads of people who will say “well you gotta admit, Thanos had a point” unless you actually show that no he fucking didn’t. 

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July 1, 2018

Anonymous asked: for gamora its possible that there was more than one race on her home planet and that other than gamora her entire race was on the half of people that thanos had killed

I mean…I guess? This seems unlikely, though, given that it’s not just her home planet but the homeworld for her entire species, to the extent that the planet and the species have basically the same name (which…kind of implies that the Zehoberei, if nothing else, make up the majority of the population), and there’s no particular reason to believe that the Zehoberei accounted for less than half of the planet’s total population and that Thanos’s supposedly fair, random culling would have just happened to wipe out all other members of that race while still leaving half the population alive. If that was the intent, too, it probably would have been addressed specifically in the movie as a way of reconciling new and old canon, but when Gamora and Thanos talk about Zen-Whoberi, there’s nothing to indicate he did kill her whole race–so it just contradicts the first GotG movie, which specifically says she’s the last survivor of her race. So I’d say it’s pretty damn likely that this is in fact a sloppy retcon to fit all the brand-new stuff about Thanos created just for Infinity War, and if the writers even realized they were explicitly contradicting themselves, they were too invested in their dumbass new Thanos characterization to care. (Also in GotG, Gamora says Thanos killed her parents in front of her, when Infinity War shows him preventing her from actually seeing it, so like…this isn’t even the only time they decided to ignore previous canon about Gamora in favor of attempting to make Thanos more sympathetic.) 

I also have no idea where this message is coming from, exactly, because I don’t think I’ve talked about this super recently, so I’m…not even sure why you’re telling me this now? Or at all, actually? Although this message by itself wouldn’t be so weird except I got it at the same time as a much weirder message (that wasn’t anon, oddly enough) on a similar subject, and I don’t know if there’s any reason two weird arguments about IW showed up in my inbox at once but if the idea was to argue me out of my IW objections, the combination is having the exact opposite effect.

Right around the same time I got that previous message about Gamora, megashadowdragon (who doesn’t follow me and has never interacted with me before, so this is all completely random) sent me this as a private message, which is not the sort of thing I would ordinarily post publicly, but–okay, look:

you know I found this on tv tropes what are your thoughts This is a very technical entry as it requires a bit of research. Nonetheless, it also contains some heavy fridge horror. Much ado has been made over “why didn’t Thanos just make more resources for everyone” and there’s more of an answer than “because there wouldn’t be a movie”. If you look up the experiments by John B. Calhoun on mice and rat population, we’ve been able to scale the results of his experiments and reach numerous conclusions regarding population sizes in proportion to resource availability. However, there’s an important aspect to consider, which is the difference between total population and population density. In his experiments, Calhoun had enough food and living space for all the rodents, but they would group together in dense social groups. He noted that twelve rats is the maximum number that can live harmoniously in a natural group, beyond which stress and psychological effects function as group break-up forces. It was a different number in mice, but the principle still applies. Among the aberrations in behavior were the following: expulsion of young before weaning was complete, wounding of young, inability of dominant males to maintain the defense of their territory and females, aggressive behavior of females, passivity of non-dominant males with increased attacks on each other which were not defended against. Why didn’t Thanos just make more food-producing industries? Because “hunger” is just the simplest explanation he could offer in a movie with a time constraint. The more technical reasoning is there were too many people living in densely populated areas, being forcibly oversocialized, leading to societal deterioration. Aggressive men fighting for no reason, mutilating random people, and possibly cannibalizing the young even when food was available. It’s not as simple as creating more living space for people, because social creatures are naturally inclined to live together which naturally leads to population density overfill. What horrors did Thanos witness in his youth to conclude that a galactic culling was the most positive outcome? Probably more than he’ll ever talk about. To further add to the Fridge Horror, considering that he is said to have been born and considered a “freak” on Titan, who knows if many, if not all of those aforementioned horrors were directed at Thanos himself? 

again, this is 100% out of nowhere, from someone I don’t know, who doesn’t follow me and has never interacted with me before, when I don’t think I’d even talked about this really recently, so it’s weird to begin with, right? (I mean…at the time I’m posting this, I guess I have, but because it took me so damn long to drag together the brain cells to respond, it was a few weeks ago that I got both messages.)

obviously I didn’t intend to wait so long to scrape my thoughts together but, well, here we are. My first impulse, if I was going to respond to this at all (which I was always going to do publicly, because…I mean, this is a weird, out-of-the-blue message, considering I hadn’t posted about my frustrations with IW Thanos in a bit and this person doesn’t follow me, so I have no idea why they decided to message me in the first place), was to say, basically, “I don’t care about Thanos so I don’t care what might or might not have happened to him, and anyway hurt feelings and a potentially tragic past are no excuse for genocide,” and then I felt like a total hypocrite because…well, looking at it that way, my defenses of Loki kind of boil down to that “You don’t have all the facts” screencap from The Office? Except I thought about it some more and realized no, of course Loki trying to wipe out Jotunheim was terrible but it’s not the same as what Thanos wanted to do, and here’s why: there’s a solid argument to be made from the text that Loki went the direction he did (in the middle of what was probably a psychotic break, but that’s not quite as relevant here) in part because he was a product of a society that was founded on bloody conquest, still seemed to view death on a massive scale as a necessary evil at the very worst, and definitely viewed many other sentient species as lesser and Jotnar in particular as monsters. Thanos, on the other hand, explicitly went against what his society viewed as normal or acceptable, considering he went “hey let’s fix all our problems by killing half the population” and everybody else’s response was pretty much “hey what the fuck”.  

Thus bolstered by the knowledge that I did in fact have an argument against potential charges of hypocrisy in this particular case, I thought about refuting the rest of the arguments in this pretty damn weird message, at least by linking to the links I added to my fix-it fic because most of those posts explain the issue better than I can, because this was a weird random message but it’s probably still important to push back on this kind of thinking, right? (If anyone who happens to be reading this also thinks the message has a point, please do check out those links.)

But I figured I’d check the person’s blog just to see if, you know, there was anything at all to explain why they might be messaging me, like mutuals in common or something else normal, and the first thing I see is a reblog equating Black Lives Matter with the fucking KKK. It didn’t get any better from there—generally a lot of anti-feminist, anti-liberal, anti-trans, anti-SJW, anti-LGBT+, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, etc. etc. reblogs interspersed with the occasional innocuous post about games—and, you know, that pretty drastically shifted the message from “random and weird but not that weird if it’s being sent in good faith” to “FFS Marvel this is what we meant, this is the real-life shit your garbage Thanos characterization is supporting, how did you not see this coming”

Here’s the thing, okay. Fandom isn’t reality. Of course it’s not. But my god, were you really not paying attention to the world around you? Did you really not realize that people who already blame immigrants and poor people for the problems rich people cause would latch onto this bullshit that you uncritically presented in a pointless attempt to make your villain “sympathetic” without giving a single hero the chance to go “hang on just a second, your motives are bullshit and here’s why”? Did you somehow not notice that far-right internet trolls have become a legitimately powerful political force and that pop culture is demonstrably an effective gateway to getting people there?

Because, you know, I would still think this is a dumb argument (with little to no textual evidence, I might add) for Thanos and his motives in general, even if it was clearly a good-faith argument strictly limited to a fictional situation (in which case I would just have to point out, his goal is to acquire something that can fucking reshape reality, you cannot possibly make me believe population density is somehow an insurmountable problem for the fucking Infinity Gauntlet). But it’s not. You know what these attitudes lead to in the real world? This attitude that scarcity is natural and inevitable, and overpopulation is what’s really killing us and our planet instead of a handful of exploitative rich people who could fix virtually everything and don’t? It looks like this. It looks like all the awful shit that’s constantly in the news these days. It looks like telling black people to get over it and stop asking for handouts without considering that just maybe the effects of generations of chattel slavery can’t just be brushed off or fixed with a good tug on the bootstraps (and oh by the way bootstraps have been taxed out of your price range but that’s still not our fault). It looks like causing the situations that create refugees and then refusing or even criminalizing the people who try to get help because somehow they’re dirty and dangerous, they want to take resources they didn’t earn, they’re an infestation of parasites, and we don’t have room for them—so we’re going to do whatever we can to send them back where they came from or keep them there in the first place, and if that means most of them die, that’s not on us, right? It looks like putting people in camps because we can’t deter enough of them or get rid of them fast enough and then maybe not paying too much attention when some of them just start disappearing because there are too many of them to begin with and it’s better for everyone, really, if the masses get thinned out a little. Scarcity and overpopulation, man. We’re full and our borders are sacrosanct for some reason. It sucks but that’s how it is and if you wanted a better life you should’ve been born into one but also it’s still your fault somehow and doing what you can to get a better life makes you a lazy parasite.

So no, I don’t have any sympathy for Thanos. I don’t think any part of his argument holds even the slightest bit of merit. I don’t think this weird speculation on his argument, which seems to hinge on the idea that it’s possible to draw totally reasonable conclusions about human society from experiments with animals, has any merit either. And I’m definitely not going to enter a debate about Thanos and his motives with people who say “sure, Thanos was a bad dude, but maybe he had a point” and really mean “well, wouldn’t it make things better if a lot of real people just stopped existing?” No. Fuck you, fuck Thanos, and fuck the Powers That Be at Marvel that didn’t realize or didn’t care what their movie was saying.

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(Originally posted in a reblog April 15, 2021; OP asked if anyone actually found Loki's death satisfying in IW, and why)

There are...things I appreciate about that scene, because I also had to make peace with it. I’ve said in a few different ways how immensely proud I am of Loki for what he did here (well, one of those is specifically about his choices in Ragnarok, but haha turns out all of that applied even harder to his choices in Infinity War except without the benefit of things turning out mostly okay in the end, ugh Marvel why). I think it was incredibly brave of him to make that choice when he must have had other options and he had to know it would end with him getting killed, so I do think his one IW scene is full of wonderful character moments that say a lot about who Loki is as a person. I think it’s, hmm, tragic in a way that isn’t completely awful that he invaded Earth and fought Thor for Thanos, had some extremely weird years in between, and ultimately sacrificed himself to save Thor from that exact same evil because when it came right down to it, he loved his brother too much not to. I mean that’s...that’s kind of a big deal.

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(originally posted July 19, 2018)

I keep thinking about Silent Hill 2 and 3, now that I’ve finished both of them (and I was, uh, semi-unspoiled for both), and it’s such a weird thing because I really don’t know if I could say which one I prefer because they’re so different.  I mean…obviously they’re part of the same series and there are a lot of similarities, but they’re all things like…the setting is mostly the same, of course, even reusing some maps, and the atmosphere is similar even in different locations. The engine’s the same. The gameplay is the same, aside from slightly improved inventory management in 3. You look at a screenshot from either game, you’d say oh yeah, that’s a Silent Hill game.

But narratively, they’re just…SO different, to the extent that it would make more sense if they weren’t part of the same series. Silent Hill 2 is almost entirely psychological horror, and it does some SUPER INCREDIBLY COOL stuff with layers and layers of symbolism, and I like how the plot beats successively deepen your understanding of James and the nature of Silent Hill itself, so that once you get to the final reveal it’s a concrete thing that makes you see everything that came before it in a new light. (Silent Hill 3 kiiiiind of has a similar late-stage twist of sorts but it’s not the same kind of “OH SHIT THAT’S WHAT THAT MEANT” realization, it’s more like “wait, so…she was…and then…yeah no I can’t keep this straight and my head hurts, I’m looking up a synopsis”.) Oh and then there’s the whole thing where Silent Hill seems to be semi-sentient and it draws people into itself and feeds off their guilt and fear to manifest all kinds of creepy shit because like, WOW THAT IS MY JAM. (It maybe helps that a lot of what I understand about the town comes from @mikkeneko‘s amazing MCU/Silent Hill fic Labyrinth, which expanded on this concept in some very cool ways that made even more sense to me after I played 2.) 

Silent Hill 3, for the most part, doesn’t do that last part at all–like, I guess there are hints, but it’s…really not the point? Despite how convoluted it is at times, 3 has a much more straightforward structure in general, with strong elements of psychological horror but relatively conventional enemies. Like…in Silent Hill 2, the enemies are all real but they’re also highly symbolic, so with only a couple exceptions, James’ greatest enemy is essentially himself, as represented by the semi-sentient, super-spooky, diffuse force that is the town. In 3, the real enemies are pretty much all humans (more or less) in a weird cult, which also makes them less meaningful and interesting. AND the game’s use of Otherworld locations outside of Silent Hill kind of confuses the issue of how much is the town itself and how much is…I don’t even know, honestly, general creepiness that exists because horror games I guess. (Just in general, 2 makes more sense than 3 does, in both its narrative and worldbuilding as well as the marriage of the two…which is funny, because it offers way less of an explanation of any kind for why Silent Hill is the way it is, but honestly I prefer it that way.) 

So that part is kind of a disappointment, because see above re: MY JAM, but the weird thing for me is that all of this still doesn’t actually add up to an overall preference for Silent Hill 2. Because like…3 has a female protagonist, for one thing, and call me shallow or desperate or something but that one thing makes me about 500 times more interested in any game regardless of other factors. If you go for the good ending, too, it’s ultimately a story about a teenage girl reclaiming her agency and her very self from people who were perfectly willing to hurt and kill her to get what they want, which…is also extremely much my jam…so even though I find all the symbolism with the enemies in 2 more interesting, and honestly my reaction to “the enemies in 3 are humans in a creepy-ass cult” was a big eyeroll, that still doesn’t actually translate into me liking one better. Plus some of the setpieces unique to 3 are really cool (abandoned mall, subway station, abandoned amusement park), and it does do some fun things with increasingly hellish Otherworld versions of earlier locations, and also I don’t remember ever having to escort anybody which was frankly a relief.  

I guess what this all boils down to is, I like both games a lot in different ways and for different reasons, and I can’t really pick a favorite between them. (The other question is, why did I write all this out, and the answer is, I have no idea.)

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(originally posted Dec. 2, 2018)

for real though the whole Silent Hill 2 level (levels?) between the Historical Society and the docks are just. fucking nuts. you start in a slightly weird if relatively normal building on ground level and then

• walk down a looooooooooooong stone stairway. no. longer than that
• go through a couple doors
• find a deep dark pit and jump down it
• wake up in the bottom of a well, find a door, go through some more doors and hallways, find a key
• which unlocks another door. that is in the floor. covering another deep dark pit
• shrug, jump down it again
• wander around a prison. why is there a prison so far underground? it’s Silent Hill. it be like that sometimes
• find a trap door covering another deep dark pit
• “Do you jump? Yes/No” I mean I guess I could finally chicken out at this one and just sit here
• more doors. another deep dark pit to jump down
• MORE DOORS. ANOTHER DEEP DARK PIT TO JUMP DOWN
• A N O T H E R  D E E P  no wait this time it’s…an actual elevator
• that just. keeps going. and going. and g o i n g
• hell is a labyrinth and you’re here forever now
• oh you made it. guess what’s at the end. GUESS
• ANOTHER DEEP DARK PIT TO JUMP DOWN
• BUT THIS TIME
• IT’S YOUR OWN GRAVE
• doors. boss fight. doors
• surprise!! you’re back outside at ground level. isn’t the lake just lovely tonight

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(originally posted Aug. 15, 2019)

apparently I did want to talk about it, because this got looooong (also please do not add more discourse to this post, it’s probably kind of shitty of me but I don’t super want to have a dialogue about it, I just want to barf out my thoughts and defend my own faves on my own post, so if you want to argue with me I would really rather you didn’t and just made your own post instead)

(I also only just realized that I only put “tony stark negative” and “tony stark critical” in the tags, not anywhere before the cut, so here’s your warning now if you didn’t see the tags that this is me being frustrated with a lot things about how Tony is written)

I can’t find the actual post now to screenshot or link because I just came across it on my dash, got annoyed, scrolled past, and then made my post when I couldn’t stop grumpily thinking about it (so at this point I also don’t remember who the OP was or who reblogged it onto my dash, which is probably just as well), but the gist was that almost all MCU title characters have storylines establishing that they’re wrong about something and they show growth by accepting that and working to improve…except Steve, who never acknowledges that he might ever be wrong about anything, with the implication that this makes him a bad, self-righteous character who is basically incapable of growth. several other characters–Tony, Thor, Dr. Strange, Peter Parker–were mentioned, but the state of fandom discourse makes me assume any Steve-negative post exists at least in part to show how much better Tony is, which…may not always be a fair assumption on my part, but I do think it’s fair to say that’s still a relevant context. and of course Steve is one of my favorite characters, so anything even mildly Steve-negative puts me at least somewhat on the defensive right away, which again is not necessarily fair. (the other post that’s already sitting in my notes is about Ragnarok, which is probably even less surprising.)

anyway the post made me grumpy to begin with and then doubly so because I couldn’t think of a good way to refute it aside from “yeah well maybe Steve’s just a better person than your faves and he doesn’t need a whole character arc about realizing he’s been an asshole and needs to change because he didn’t start out as an asshole to begin with, bet you didn’t think of that huh” which is of course VERY unhelpful. but then I started thinking about how I don’t think OP is right about the changed characters to begin with, given that a) it’s not really fair to compare a character who’s only had one solo movie (Dr. Strange) with characters who’ve had more, b) Spider-Man is kind of an edge case because he’s a teenager and a lot of the problems in his movies stem from a combination of him being a fucking teenager and Tony dumping him with tons of dangerous tech that he doesn’t have the training or adult impulse control to use safely and then blaming him when disaster inevitably results, and c) the characters who have had multiple movies and arcs focused on realizing they were wrong about something (just Thor and Tony, really) are…maybe not actually great examples because like 75% of that character development seems to reset after each movie and, actually, the narrative still operates under the premise that these characters are basically right even if some other characters don’t agree. like…I mean, the only lessons Thor really, consistently seems to learn are “humans are at least not totally worthless (but lbr they’re mostly silly and cute)” and “Odin is extremely wise and probably right about almost everything despite mountains of evidence–that grow with every single film he’s in–to the contrary”. 

and Tony, well–yeah, that’s his arc, in theory, and in theory I don’t have a problem with flawed characters who keep making the same mistakes because let’s face it, that’s a very human thing to do. but with posts like this, it’s like…you’re effectively arguing that he doesn’t really make mistakes overall, though, because it’s really just an opportunity for growth? and that when he does, the narrative shows he’s wrong, he admits he’s wrong, and he makes consistent efforts to change? which…again, obviously I have my own biases, but I have to see this as a weird interpretation because he’s basically been the main character of the entire MCU thus far, which means he’s likely to get sympathetic treatment and justification from the narrative even if he’s ostensibly being called out for fucking up, and that’s something I’ve definitely seen. his entire first movie is about him realizing how wrong he was and working to do better, definitely, but he ends up being his own worst enemy half the time and other people suffer for it. like…he wants to protect the world, okay, that’s a reasonable goal. you can argue that the vision Wanda gave him made things worse, and that’s possible, but I don’t know how much that might be true given that I’m pretty sure he was working on Ultron before that too (and her mind-magic mostly seemed to work by emphasizing something that was already there, not planting new ideas). so he ends up creating a murderbot, with good intentions but he still does it and he keeps it secret from the other Avengers, and now-sentient murderbot immediately reaches the conclusion that humanity is awful and they won’t need protecting if they’re all gone, and everything breaks very bad, and then Tony…basically does the exact same thing again, without telling anybody else, in hopes that it’ll work out better this time because JARVIS? and it does but that seems like mostly luck? and everybody manages to defeat the murderbot, barely, but a not-insignificant number of civilians die anyway because that tends to happen when a sentient murderbot goes on a rampage, and Tony feels really guilty about this when it’s shoved in his face, so he deals with his guilt by kind of…spreading it around and allowing the possibility of other major problems down the line so they can hand over some of that responsibility and he can feel less guilty. (that’s not the most charitable interpretation, yeah, but I also don’t think it’s an unreasonable one, based on what’s there in the text.) and then of course things blow up and other problems get dragged in and it’s a huge mess and half the Avengers are fugitives, and the general consensus sort of seems to be that nobody was completely right or completely wrong but Steve is the only one who actually apologizes for any of it (no wait, I guess Wanda and Vision apologized but just to each other) and Rhodey reinforces the idea that the Accords were a good idea with no major drawbacks…and then Thanos shows up and things get SO VERY MUCH worse.

and Tony is once again stricken with grief and guilt (not to mention half dead), so lashing out at Steve is understandable, but what he actually says is basically that this is all Steve’s fault because he wasn’t there (even though he immediately sent Tony that phone, which means Tony could have contacted him at any time but hesitated to do so even when monsters were basically falling from the sky), and he was right about the Accords and Ultron even if the latter didn’t work out so well in ways that probably could have been predicted, and…that’s what we’re left with. nobody else has a meaningful opportunity to say “now hold on a second, you cannot possibly be arguing both for accountability and for your right to decide for the entire world that exchanging some freedom for some potential security is a good trade, and also how are you saying you were essentially right about Ultron when Ultron is what kicked off the desire for the Accords” or, like, anything. (does the world need a suit of armor? going by the evidence…yeah, probably? but again. Tony. you tried that and you made a sentient murderbot instead so like, your track record is not great!!)

and then it all culminates with Tony sacrificing himself to save the universe, which I do at least think was a climactic, thematically resonant send-off for such a major character–for the final time, in the most final possible of ways, he reaches a point where there’s no more clever tricks and he reacts by selflessly taking the entirety of the consequences onto himself. I can’t say I’m happy with it, because I’m not a fan of character death in general even when it doesn’t involve my top faves, and it absolutely would have been possible for the filmmakers to keep him alive if they hadn’t gone into this with the specific intention of ending Tony’s arc with his death. (ditto on all the other major character deaths, which is a big part about why they make me mad–none of them really, honestly had to happen, some even less than others.) but regardless of my feelings on whether it had to happen, it’s inarguable that his entire arc from Iron Man to Endgame is that of a brilliant but selfish manchild who changes and grows until he doesn’t hesitate to make the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of the entire universe.

BUT THEN THERE’S SPIDER-MAN AGAIN.

spoilers if you haven’t seen Spider-Man: Far From Home but like, the entire conflict of that movie was based on two major things: a bunch of disgruntled Stark Industries employees, at least some of whom had to have legitimate, recent grievances (and frankly that whole mess demonstrates–among other things–that Stark Industries must have unforgivably lax security around its arsenal of world-ending weapons); and Tony’s decision at some point to essentially REMAKE ULTRON AND THEN DUMP THAT RESPONSIBILITY ON A FUCKING TEENAGER WITH ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN THE WAY OF WARNINGS, TRAINING, OVERSIGHT, OR EVEN BASIC FAILSAFES, like holy shit my computer spends more time making sure I definitely want to delete that file than EDITH does about confirming that yes this random teenager is a legitimate target for IMMEDIATE DEATH. all the other adults involved in this clusterfuck bear a good share of the responsibility for this too, given that not one of them ever seemed to think either “hey, maybe saddling a smart and very good but basically normal sixteen-year-old boy with the power and responsibility (but not the resources or experience) of a grown-ass adult with unlimited resources is not the smartest move here, and yelling at him when he inevitably fucks up this power and responsibility we dumped on him with no training whatsoever is not actually fair or reasonable” or even “maybe before giving a piece of massively powerful and dangerous tech to a sixteen-year-old boy, we should spend at least 15 minutes going over the device’s major functions and how to not accidentally kill someone, even if we figure things like ethics and privacy rights and knowing when not to use this tech aren’t that important”.

but, but, Tony still made the decision to give it to him, and he did so without building in any precautions at all, which is the exact same thing he did in CW/Homecoming with Peter’s new suit (yes, the Training Wheels protocol was a good step, but the fact that it could just be turned off that easily–and that Tony isn’t shown even trying to tell Peter to use the training programs or safely practice with the suit–shows that it really, really wasn’t good enough) except even worse because EDITH is about 100 times more invasive and destructive than the suit. and he pretty much scolded Peter in Homecoming for getting ahead of himself, but then the second Peter did well in a bad situation Tony was right back to making this teenager an official Avenger and giving him all this power and responsibility he’d just decided Peter hadn’t really earned, and Peter turned him down because at that point he had a better idea of his own limits and need for growth than Tony did, and then!! in what must have been one of his last acts alive!! Tony dumped an even bigger, more dangerous power/responsibility combo on him!!! way way bigger than the one he’d already turned down and maturely decided he wasn’t yet experienced enough to handle!!! without even giving him a chance to say no!!!! and did not take any of that (or the mess with Ultron and the lessons he theoretically learned there, or the mess with the Accords and the lessons he theoretically learned there, or for that matter the lessons he theoretically learned in his three solo movies about treating his employees well and making sure he knows exactly what his company is doing at all times) into account when designing it, handing it off to other adults who also should have been more responsible about it, and leaving it to a teenager against that teenager’s stated wishes, thereby ensuring that this teenager will follow Tony’s footsteps in being unable to have a normal life!!!!!

……………….but, okay, the point of the original post was that Steve is generally deemed to be Always Right and therefore he never has to change, and that makes him unrelatable at best and also not a great character. which…well, that’s part of the point, that’s why he was picked for Project Rebirth in the first place because he’s a good dude dedicated to doing what’s right; even before the serum, he was literally willing to die to protect a few people he barely knew (the grenade scene, remember). he was already starting from a point of selflessness and an understanding of responsibility that the others lacked, so it would be tough to give him a similar character arc without undermining or ignoring the whole point of the character. sure, though, even a character like Steve is imperfect and human and bound to be wrong sometimes, and when that happens he should acknowledge he was wrong and take steps to make amends, and if he’s never shown doing any of that, it’s true that it’s not great even if part of the issue is that he’s never really put in a position to do so. 

except, except DID YOU ALL COMPLETELY FORGET THE ENDING OF CIVIL WAR

like, sure, if what you wanted was to hear Steve say “I was wrong about everything and Tony was right about everything, and I will humbly submit to whatever you think is best regardless of my own convictions, my very good reasons for having those convictions, and my personal concerns for my friends, or at the very least I will humbly ask for forgiveness and accept whatever you throw at me, because Tony Was Right About Everything,” then…yeah, I’m sure it was a disappointment, especially if you figure Tony was right about the Accords and at least the intentions behind Ultron. it’s true Steve doesn’t really address any of that, which indicates he definitely still believes he’s right about those parts. but…look, the last time he saw Tony, he was fighting to save his lifelong friend from being murdered from a crime he didn’t necessarily remember and really wasn’t responsible for. once again I don’t blame Tony for reacting emotionally and lashing out at the nearest targets instead of the people who were really at fault, but that doesn’t change the facts of the situation, which are, Steve was fighting to save Bucky’s life. and when he did that by incapacitating Tony, he didn’t go any further; he took Bucky and left. and then he almost immediately sent Tony a letter of apology and a means of contacting him in return if an emergency comes up–and again, yes, his apology wasn’t “I’m sorry for everything because I was wrong about everything,” but it was a genuine, compassionate apology for the ways he’d hurt Tony even if his intentions were basically good. (this of course assumes that he really did know for a fact that Bucky killed the Starks and consciously chose to hide the knowledge from Tony, and frankly I’m not convinced that’s true, but it’s not really the issue here.) honestly, I thought his letter was kind of funny because it so closely followed the format of the apology-note meme–you know, “I was trying to do X, but I see now that I hurt you because Y” and everything. he didn’t apologize for opposing the Accords or protecting Bucky or fighting in Germany so he could get to Siberia in time to stop what he had every reason to believe was a much bigger threat, because all those actions stemmed directly from his convictions and sense of morality and he wouldn’t be Steve Rogers or Captain America if he was willing to compromise his most foundational convictions–but he absolutely did apologize for hurting Tony and recognized that he’d made at least one big mistake where Tony was concerned. 

Tony…didn’t. even before doubling down on the Accords and Ultron, I don’t think he ever really said, hey, at least some of this was my bad; most of what he said boiled down to “okay this situation isn’t ideal but I’m sure if I throw more money at it things will work out fine, more or less”. in the Raft and in Siberia he got close to saying that maybe he’d been wrong about a few things, but that all went out the window pretty quick, and I don’t think there’s ever a point where he–just for instance–at least apologizes for trying very very hard to kill Bucky. and by Endgame, apparently he’s pretty much walked back what little he did kinda sorta think he was maybe wrong about. so.

that’s…basically what I’ve got, OP’s interpretation is wrong because their facts are actually wrong and I was apparently annoyed enough to barf out all these words when I could’ve been doing anything else, the end

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(Originally posted June 18, 2019)

I have very mixed feelings about the villain in season 2 of Cloak & Dagger because on the one hand he literally, explicitly started hurting people because it’s the only thing that helps the crippling migraines that drove him to attempt suicide, and that’s…a real gross version of the already gross trope of vilifying disabled people

but at the same time my chronic headaches and I are just kind of like “oh mood” 

fixchick replied:

I dont think it was meant to fulfil the vilifying disabled people trope but rather showcase an existing and popular problem we live with these days wherein people feel justified to hurt others because they are hurt.

And i get that this hits differently for people with disabilities and/or mental illnesses but the issues with mental illnesses in modern day and previously is that the lines are blury , normal abnormal healthy unhealthy justified rage and lashing out they can all be difficult to clarify. And i think they did an okay job of showcasing that not anywhere near the best or even good but its at least a step in the right direction i think especially with the epidemic of justifying manipulative behaviour on tv these days.

my response:

well…yeah, I also don’t think they deliberately went for that trope. character portrayals that line up with negative tropes or perpetuate stereotypes can be deliberate and malicious, but more often they happen unintentionally, because people who don’t have certain forms of marginalization are unlikely to recognize a lot of the implications when writing characters who do. especially with Cloak & Dagger, with its thoughtful handling of issues like addiction and racist police brutality, I’m inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt; I certainly don’t think the writers sat down sand said, “people with chronic pain are the WORST. let’s make a villain with chronic pain to emphasize this and remind everyone being disabled means you’re probably evil!”

I mean, a big part of the reason I made this post in the first place was for that second sentence, where I’m literally and only half-jokingly saying that I can sympathize with the guy because I, too, would at least be tempted to do bad things if it meant getting rid of my chronic but relatively moderate headaches, and I would be a whole lot more tempted if my headaches were so bad I was actually attempting suicide and doing bad things was the only way to make them better. obviously I can’t say whether I would make the same decision, at least in some kind of comparable situation since the real world doesn’t have superpowers, and I hope I would make the right decision instead of justifying awful things to help myself with a differently awful problem…but I get it. I understand his decision even if I think his decision was wrong.

and none of that means the character doesn’t fall into an existing negative trope of disabled villains. his disability leading directly to his villainy kind of makes it worse rather than better. (a similar argument could be made about the protagonist of Breaking Bad, although in that case it’s more our broken healthcare system that makes him turn to crime rather than his illness itself, so I’m inclined to give it a pass on that particular aspect.) I think Cloak & Dagger is a very good show that handles a lot of complex real-world issues in a nuanced and realistic way, I understand the motivations of the character who hurts people to treat his chronic pain, and I am simultaneously very uncomfortable with this character’s backstory because it exists in a context of both real and fictional disabled people being vilified. these things can all be true at the same time.

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(originally posted March 5, 2020)

Sif: Loki, you must go to the Allfather and convince him to change his mind.

Loki: And if I do, then what? I love Thor more dearly than any of you, but you know what he is. He's arrogant. He's reckless. He's dangerous. You saw how we was today. Is that what Asgard needs from its king?

I feel like people forget about this scene when they discuss Loki’s motivations in Thor. Because…I mean, for one thing he’s right, Thor nearly got them all killed in Jotunheim and they’re all completely aware of it, but they all kind of just…brush it aside because they like Thor and they don’t trust Loki. I’m pretty sure this also comes right after he admitted he’s the one who told the guards they were going to Jotunheim–admittedly, this was kind of underhanded and the Warriors seem to see this as a betrayal of Thor, but again, Loki doing this saved their lives, and I find it really interesting that he just told them he’d done this when he really didn’t have to. Maybe they would’ve suspected him regardless, but he almost certainly could have misdirected them or fallen back on plausible deniability. For that matter, he could have told Thor’s friends that he tried to speak up for Thor but Odin refused to listen, which the audience knows is completely true, and left them with the idea that he’d done his best to get Thor back. If he was purely acting in his own self-interest, I can’t imagine why he would instead refuse to talk to Odin, leave out the fact that he already tried to intervene on Thor’s behalf, and offer a completely true justification for keeping Thor right where he is. He definitely didn’t need to volunteer the information about having talked to the guard.

Most of what he says and does in this scene seems counter to his self-interest, actually, and I’m sure a lot of that is down to most of his brain being devoted to screaming about The Scary Shocking Thing That Happened On Jotunheim, but either way it suggests to me that he’s not really performing here. In fact I think he’s being about as honest as it’s possible for Loki to be in the rest of his statement as well: that he deeply loves Thor (”more dearly than any of you” also says something about how he knows Thor more closely than they do as well, just by virtue of being his brother), and that Thor would be an incredibly dangerous king. He brings up the exact same thing later talking to Laufey, where he’s definitely performing (and performing for a very different audience), but in this case I think that mostly confirms that a not-insignificant part of his focus is on saving everyone involved from a King Thor who was manifestly not ready to be king. 

Does he have other, more selfish motivations for what he does throughout the film? Of course! (Are some of those motivations mutually exclusive? Probably, poor boy is uhhhh not at his best.) But I really think he’s absolutely sincere in both his love for Thor and his conviction that Thor becoming king as he is now would be disastrous for Asgard. He would have been raised to put responsibility for Asgard above everything else, and based on his choices at the end of Thor: Ragnarok, it seems safe to say that at least some of those lessons stuck. It doesn’t seem at all unreasonable to me that this sense of duty to Asgard was genuinely part of what motivated Loki to ruin Thor’s first coronation.

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(originally posted in a reblog June 10, 2020)

reason #9,853 for my general hatred of Endgame and why it will never go away: they had everything here to show the depth of Thor’s grief and even to make a pretty profound, important statement about how grief and trauma look different in different people and in fact grief and trauma are almost never pretty, sometimes the ways people deal with those things might even strike you as gross or pathetic and that doesn’t fucking matter, you can’t just have compassion for people who are pretty when they’re suffering. Chris’s acting absolutely sold it. virtually every time Thor was onscreen, all I could see was how broken he was and how he was just barely, barely making it through every minute, even–especially–when he was trying to pretend everything was fine.

and the directors took that to the editing room and went, nah, fuck that. let’s just make it an extended fat joke. let’s keep all the camera angles that emphasize his gut. haha look, it’s funny because he was a god and now he’s fat. his friends showing a shred of concern or compassion for him? no that’s boring, cut anything that might hint at that, just keep the bits where they give each other looks like “wtf is up with this guy”, just the parts to encourage the audience to laugh at him. we are so smart.

seriously, fuck those guys.

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(originally posted in a reblog Sept. 3, 2020)

What bothers me is that the famous "he killed 80 people in two days" isn't even accurate. I’m pretty sure she’s referring to people who died in the PEGASUS facility, but like…Loki killed a few people in the process of stealing the Tesseract. The rest, I am PRETTY SURE, died because Fury tried to collapse the facility on top of Loki. I mean, Loki seemed plenty dangerous so it was an understandable decision for someone like Fury to make, and it wouldn’t have happened if Loki hadn’t shown up, but…Loki didn’t do that. Which makes me wonder if Fury was entirely forthright about the cause of the facility collapse, or if SHIELD in general was willing to conflate “Loki killed people” with “our actions killed people because of how we tried to stop Loki” but either way…unless he’s been on a completely offscreen and otherwise unmentioned killing spree (unlikely, since he apparently went underground), he literally didn’t kill those people.  

Natasha being Natasha, I imagine she knows that, and she’s conscious of the flexibility of truth…so I could imagine her doing it deliberately and specifically as a method of information-gathering, probing at Thor to get a better feel for who he is as a person, who Loki is, who Asgardians are, and how they relate to each other. Any possible response from Thor would have been…illuminating.    

Of course, this makes more sense if you can tell she used that information in her scene with him, which…well, I was going to say no, but part of her strategy was in surprising him by showing up before Fury tried to torture him…and Thor’s quick “he’s adopted”, almost instantly backing down from defending Loki, not digging further into the circumstances, and then arguing not that Loki shouldn’t be tortured but that it wouldn’t work…that’s all a good clue toward what Loki might expect.     

(Additional note: I think there’s room to interpret Thor’s “no pain would prize his need [for vengeance] from him” statement more sympathetically to Thor, in that he could be saying it not because he doesn’t care if SHIELD tortures Loki but because he figures an argument about effectiveness is more likely to achieve the desired result of Loki not being tortured than an argument about ethics, and less likely to alienate important allies than a flat “I won’t let you do that” statement…but of course that’s purely an interpretation, and kind of a reach at that.)

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(originally posted Sept. 3, 2020)

I have this general idea that I’ve come to terms with The Awful Thing Marvel Did To Loki In Infinity War, partly because there’s tons of good fic that either fixes or ignores it and I’m more or less okay with that being more my fandom than actual canon (and/or I’m just kind of in denial that canon is canon), and partly because the upcoming show could still fix it in one way or another or at least do something interesting with this Loki (whom I still love, of course, and he also retains the potential to undergo the same general character development that Loki Prime experienced through TDW and Ragnarok)

and then I come across something discussing it and I get upset all over again, not just because I obviously didn’t want him to die, but also because it was done in a way that didn’t make any damn sense with lots of things that seemed like clues to a hidden meaning but ended up just being nonsensical, and because it was narratively shitty for several reasons and it absolutely did not have to happen, and because it would have been chef’s-kiss-perfect Loki whump if it hadn’t fucking killed him, and because it was so unnecessarily graphic and painful–and the last one especially because there was a reason for it to be so graphic and painful, which was, test audiences very understandably didn’t buy that Loki was really died, so instead of changing the scene so it made sense, these hack directors just made it one of the most graphic and painful deaths in the entire MCU, as if that’s what would convince people it was real. (it does bring me some satisfaction that they still failed, considering they went to all that effort in the exact wrong direction and one of the big questions until Endgame was consistently “is Loki really dead though, here’s evidence that maybe he’s not!” but like…not a lot of satisfaction, considering there wasn’t a whole lot of post-Endgame discussion about how, okay, we were all wrong but we were wrong because the scene didn’t make sense.)

and it’s like…ah. welp. still not over it then, I guess

in reply to a comment on the previous post:

it’s uh…well it’s because I was checking Does The Dog Die for something else, I don’t remember what it was now, and I was scrolling down kind of amazed at just how many things they list, and then I looked up Infinity War out of…morbid curiosity? and That Scene qualifies for several of the things they warn for, with users leaving quite a few comments providing details, so then I was forced to remember that, you know, it did happen in canon and it was really extremely graphic and it fucking sucked. (I was pleased to see what seemed to be a general consensus that yes, Loki is queer! except of course the context here was “does a queer character die,” which, yeah.)

in reply to another comment:

I’m…I guess kind of torn? because like I was saying, the fact that it is so unnecessarily graphic was one of the things that makes it so upsetting, that my favorite character ever got such a painful, graphic death compared to literally everyone else in the entire MCU I’m pretty sure, all because the directors were unimaginative hacks who decided that was the best/only way to convince audiences he was actually dead instead of, I don’t know, making sure the scene fucking made sense and didn’t raise like 10 unanswered questions.

of course, then I have to consider–if they’d gone the reasonable route of tying everything up neatly, not acting like they’re raising questions when really they just didn’t think it through, and making Loki’s death believable through ACTUAL LOGIC while dialing back the graphic nature of it…would I actually be any less upset? because I’d still be plenty upset that they’d killed him, and it would still be narratively shitty in a couple different ways (killing the queer character, redemption equals death, he dies mostly for shock value and to prop up Thanos as a threat, etc.). would it make me less angry if the scene were less sloppy without all these holes and loose ends because at least then I’d know they thought about it and respected the character, or would it be worse because this way it’s even easier to go “actually, fuck canon and fuck you”?

and on the other other hand, like…as a scene by itself, it was great Loki whump. fantastic Loki whump. some really nice moments of characterization, too, and I love what his speech to Thanos and his last words say about how far he’s come as a person. those things, for me, are purely good! and I unequivocally love those things when they happen in the context of fics that fix the situation either by not killing him in the first place or bringing him back! but at the same time in the canon context, it’s shitty and it makes me sad and angry, and I can’t really divorce the good parts from the bad parts when I’m thinking about it in the context of what actually happened in canon.

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(originally posted in a reblog Feb. 27, 2021)

my most charitable interpretation of this scene, which I guess is also basically my headcanon because I’m happier when I can reconcile pieces of canon that don’t make sense together and/or seem to retcon somebody’s characterization, boils down to…I guess three things:

1. I don’t have enough brain today to figure out whether the math makes any sense, but I think it’s at least somewhat reasonable to assume Thor means “we were both kids, roughly the same age, I don’t remember our actual ages and Bruce isn’t going to understand the actual numbers and ugh I can’t do math on the fly to figure it out so let’s say we were both somewhere in the vicinity of 8 in human years”
2. it was a toy knife/dagger, at worst maybe a very blunted training dagger that maybe left Thor with a bruise, which I agree is probably not the intention of the scene but there’s also nothing actively contradicting this idea
3. okay, Thor does introduce this anecdote as an example of Loki trying to kill him, but he almost immediately follows it up by trying to have a heartfelt conversation with Loki that hinges partly on reminding him of their younger years when they actually got along and things hadn’t gone completely to shit (I thought the world of you, I thought we would fight side by side forever, hey let’s do Get Help). YMMV on the way he does this or what he does immediately after (although I also have a headcanon about the obedience disk, because…I’m happier imagining Thor is not an idiot or an asshole), but textually, that’s what he does next, and it seems likely he at least hoped Loki would agree to go with them back to Asgard to begin with–so like, what’s even the point of trying to convince Valkyrie and Bruce that Loki’s even more dangerous than they already think he is, if he’s hoping they’ll all be working together? nah, if he were actually warning them or whatever, it would make a lot more sense for him to take them out into the hall or at least into the little kitchen area, not tell the story loudly enough that Loki can hear it and even glance at him for his reaction. and Loki’s reaction, of course, is to smile to himself in a way that looks…actually really sincere and honest? not, in fact, the way you’d expect someone to grin when thinking about a time they successfully pulled a nasty prank? no, it seems more like Thor’s reminding him of a good memory and I really don’t think that’s an accident, I think that’s part of his overall strategy for convincing Loki that he does in fact want to choose Asgard and their brotherhood over…whatever the other alternatives might be. Thor doesn’t really care what Val and Bruce think of Loki because they’re willing to follow him regardless, and it’s not like his story will make that much difference because Bruce already thinks he’s terrifying and Valkyrie already doesn’t like him. in the context of the next scene, I really think it makes sense to interpret this as Thor going “hey, Loki, remember when we were kids? remember when we did dumb shit like all kids do, and the stakes were really low and we were both basically innocent and nobody died? remember when we had fun together, all the time? it wasn’t all bad, was it? there was something worth preserving, wasn’t there?”

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(originally posted March 11, 2021)

it’s on kind of a similar note to the post I reblogged again recently, but I continue to be impressed by the strength Wanda shows in her repeated willingness to give up what little she has, pretty much as soon as she realizes it’s the right thing to do. I mean, after that bomb killed her parents and made her and Pietro spend two days buried alive as children thinking they were going to die, and she spent the rest of her childhood and teen years growing up as an orphan in a war zone…her anger was probably one of the few things that kept her going, along with the desire to take down Iron Man and everyone associated with him so other kids like her would be safe. when we meet her in AoU, she’s spent at least half her life driven by that anger and grief, and she’s done a few things that would make her even more invested in the idea that she was ultimately doing the right thing–and yet, the instant she realizes what Ultron is really planning and that she was wrong, she frees Dr. Cho, lets go of her plan for revenge, and starts working against Ultron, finally even working with people she reasonably blamed for her parents’ deaths. and then she even loses her brother for it–her only remaining family!–and she keeps trying to help people as an Avenger, leaves the safety of the Avengers compound because Clint asks her to help protect the world from more Winter Soldiers, gets locked up in a secret prison in a shock collar and straitjacket because of it, finally gets a year or so of relative peace and happiness with Vision (still in hiding, though), and gives that up too when it becomes clear that the only way to keep the Mind Stone from Thanos is to kill the man she loves.

and then even that isn’t good enough, she can’t have the tiny scrap of comfort that is knowing he died to save others, and she doesn’t get to have him back when so many other people get to reunite with their dusted loved ones. I haven’t actually watched WandaVision yet, but it sounds like it follows a pretty similar pattern–she’s lost everything once again, her grief and her magic combine to give her something back, she finally gets to be happy for a little while and understandably clings to that when other people try to take it away, and then…when she eventually lets herself realize that her happiness is dependent on others’ suffering, she lets it all go again, makes a conscious choice to lose her family again because it’s the only right thing to do. whatever else might be going on there, whatever might happen afterward (and dear God I hope she finds some happiness she can keep without having to compromise her morals), that all shows a pretty incredible degree of strength on her part.

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(originally posted in a reblog April 21, 2021, about how normal people in the MCU wouldn't be able to wrap their heads around the fact that they'd just disappeared for 5 years)

I’ll be honest, I think it would be a month at most after everyone returned that you’d start seeing memes like

it’s too big to really deal with it straight-on, you know? but we had pandemic memes almost from day one and I seriously doubt even something this huge would be an exception.

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(originally posted in a reblog May 15, 2021)

no but it’s worse than that, it’s not just about approval, it’s about wanting to be Thor. Because even in this happy fantasy world where everyone loves him, he can’t conceive of that happening in a situation where Thor also exists. He can’t imagine Asgard loving him as Loki. For the fantasy to feel realistic to him, he has to actually be Thor.

like! it’s not just that he’s king and everybody loves him! it’s not just that he’s worthy of Mjolnir! Thor isn’t there, and Loki is wearing his colors. the red cape is the most obvious, but whether it’s due to the lighting or an actual costume choice, even his normal leathers that he wears underneath the cape look mostly black, with virtually no sign of his signature green. and Thor is nowhere to be found, not as if Loki defeated him (has he ever really, genuinely wanted that?) but as if he never existed and Loki was always Thor, because not only can he not imagine anyone choosing him if Thor’s an option, he can’t even imagine anyone choosing him as himself in any situation. the only way it works, the only way he’s worthy like he’s always wanted, is if he’s…not himself. and then, maybe, everyone will love and accept him.

(incidentally, this is one reason I came around to loving the “your savior is here!” moment in Ragnarok–I found it kind of cringey and over the top when I first saw it, but at some point that changed to just kind of…you go, you funky little trickster god, you had these fantasies of only being loved if you could be Thor and then you ruled Asgard for a while as Odin and then finally you had the opportunity to save Asgard’s people as yourself, to get some of that approval you always wanted, and you grabbed it because why the fuck not. good for you. and I think this might have even been part of the intent of the scene? I mean yes, part of it is probably “haha look at that peacock, making the most dramatic entrance possible in a pose that mimics his stupid statue,” which I certainly don’t love, but…that’s it, there’s no comeuppance, he doesn’t trip on his cape walking down the ramp or do that grand entrance only to be greeted by dead silence and people only scrambling aboard when reminded their other option is the goddess of death and her fuck-off huge wolf, both of which are the types of things that do happen to various characters at different points in the film. he just indulges himself for like 30 seconds of being really extra, which has the added benefit of immediately assuring all these scared Asgardians that it’s somebody they know and not some trick from Hela, and then immediately gets down to business by ordering everyone onboard the ship–and then he’s greeted approvingly by Heimdall, joins the fight, and looks like a total badass doing it, all of which kinda seems like narrative approval in the context of this film’s overall tone. if nothing else I think it’s interesting and I’m proud of him for it, even if it’s not how I personally would have written the scene.)

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(originally posted March 31, 2021)

1. How did you first discover Loki? the first Thor movie, which I came to a bit late and didn’t watch until it was out of theaters.

2. When did you realize that you have become an official Loki fan? I was always predisposed toward liking him because he was the quiet, overlooked, angsty nerd to Thor’s popular jock…and then he had lots of family issues that I totally didn’t relate to, pffft and I was even more sold. it’s been a while, of course, but I’m pretty sure I remember finding his whole story incredibly sad and kind of going “okay but he’s still going to be a sympathetic villain in Avengers, right? because this sad boy was only barely a villain here!!!” I kind of went “…huh” at Avengers, and at this point I honestly don’t remember if at the time I really picked up on the many indications that he wasn’t completely running the invasion of his own free will or if I only realized later from Tumblr. I’m reasonably sure I did at least still find him sympathetic and everything between him and Thor to be super tragic, and I liked him enough to attempt cosplaying as him for SDCC 2012, but I probably didn’t get fully into the Loki fandom until I stumbled across Syrgja by @mykingdomforapen and discovered a whole new world of Thanos-related Loki whump. and I guess Loki apologism, once I discovered his invasion wasn’t quite what it seemed on the surface, but you know what, it’s 20-fucking-21 and I got tired of apologizing-in-the-other-sense for my Loki-apologist tendencies a long time ago.

9. Do you have a Loki song list? I do! it’s not posted anywhere though because it has no organization to speak of, it’s basically just…oh, a sad song about brothers. oh, a sad song about being lost in unending darkness. oh, a sad song about considering yourself a monster. oh, another sad song about brothers. which, uh, is also why I basically never listen to my own playlist! because it makes me too sad! specifically I can never listen to “Always Gold” by Radical Face, at all, ever. I have normal feelings about things.

I actually do want to post at least some of it, partly because I could do a couple very specific mini-playlists–one just for Loki’s awful gap year in the Void and with Thanos, and another that boils down to “Loki is in New Asgard recovering, having survived or been brought back in any one of a gazillion different ways, because fuck you it’s canon somewhere” (I actually do listen to those sometimes, for obvious reasons)

30. Team #greeneye or #blueeye Loki? I gotta go with green, for a few different reasons. I don’t think I noticed one way or another until I started seeing those posts about his eyes being a different color in Avengers, which I accepted because…I saw no reason to question it, and I was happy to have additional evidence that the invasion wasn’t entirely Loki’s fault. by the time I discovered that this was actually somewhat controversial, I’d “known” his eyes were green long enough that the alternative just felt…wrong? I still don’t know what the actual facts are regarding contacts and/or the lack thereof, and he’s inconsistent in official merchandise that shows a specific eye color, so that doesn’t really help either. but even aside from still wanting to be able to use his changed eyes in fic as evidence that he wasn’t totally in control (which I continue to do, because it’s really handy), green just…works better. it’s thematically appropriate! it’s another thing that distinguishes him from Thor! it’s his color scheme! and frankly there is not that much visible difference between many shades of green and blue eyes on actual, unretouched human beings.

(originally posted May 25, 2021)

3. Did someone refer him to you or you found him on your own? A little of both, I guess. @erlkonigstochter watched the first Thor movie before I did and told me it had a quiet overlooked nerd vs. loud popular jock thing going on, so I was kind of predisposed to sympathize with Loki even before I watched it. and then of course I saw it and it turned out Loki was goddamn tragic and also fuck Odin because WHO FUCKING DOES THAT WHEN THEIR KID IS ABOUT TO COMMIT SUICIDE, HOLY SHIT (yeah overidentifying with Loki in multiple ways has always been part of why I love him). I can’t remember if I properly got into the fandom as such until after Avengers, but I definitely didn’t start trying to write my own fic before then, and fandom was very much a feedback loop–gifsets and meta made me notice things I wouldn’t have noticed otherwise (like…I don’t think it even occurred to me that Loki was probably tortured before being sent to Earth until I saw others discussing it and pointing out the onscreen evidence, and then of course it was obvious) and have feelings about those things, and fanart gave me more feelings, and so did fic, which also gave me various ideas. so in the absence of fandom, I think it’s safe to say I still would’ve liked Loki a lot, but it’s hard to say if I would’ve gotten in so deep.

9. Do you have a Loki song list? Answered before but answering again because I want to share a few! currently I have 68 songs on my general Loki playlist, which I rarely listen to because I’m a baby and some of them make me too sad. but! I also have a handful near the end that I’ve been meaning to post as a mini-fanmix, because it’s actually not terribly sad and it’s about a very specific topic: post-IW/Endgame Loki recovering in New Asgard because fuck canon actually, and it’s kind of bittersweet because trauma’s a bitch and he’s going to be dealing with all this shit for a long time but also he’s alive to deal with it and so is Thor and they’ll help each other heal because again, and I cannot stress this enough, fuck canon. so far it’s got:
“No Monsters,” Roddy Hart & The Lonesome Fire
“Tender Offerings,” First Aid Kit
“Falling Slowly,” The Swell Season
“Saturn,” Sleeping At Last
“Never Quite Free,” The Mountain Goats, which really kinda sums up the whole concept
and then some combination of “In Harmony,” “In the Silence,” “Going Home,” or the original Icelandic versions of them, all by Ásgeir. these are all extremely gorgeous songs by the way, the whole list, and most of them are even available on Freegal, if your library has that.

oh and the other super-specific mini-mix is about Loki’s time in the Void, and so far the only one on there that’s a sure thing is “Meet Me in the Woods” by Lord Huron (possibly also “The Yawning Grave” by same). other possibilities include “The Colour out of Space” by Matt Pond PA, “The Cold, the Dark & the Silence” by Sea Wolf, “The Void” by Metric, and “Was There Nothing?” (or its Icelandic version) by Ásgeir, but tbh most of those are based on the title more than the lyrics. also it’s sad.

16. How would rate yourself as a Loki fan from 1-10? (1- casual,  10-stan™)  I’m gonna be totally honest here and say that I probably have to admit to 10. I mean–I’ve written a bunch of fic. I’ve made multiple custom figures. I’ve cosplayed five different Loki outfits (all fairly straightforward, but still). and of course, I have an army, which doesn’t even include all the other Loki stuff I have like prints and t-shirts. all of that speaks to a certain level of fanatical dedication, you know?

26. What’s your dream team for Loki? JUST LIKE. A FRIEND. LITERALLY ANY FRIEND, AS LONG AS THE FRIEND IS GOOD FOR HIM I’M REALLY NOT FUSSY but also I always wanted him to team up with the Avengers, you know, the thing that would’ve happened in IW/Endgame if the Russos weren’t such fucking hacks? could’ve even led to working with Nebula! that would’ve been extremely cool but nooooo, we can’t have anything nice! but uh, for things that might actually happen still, teaming up with Wanda would be fun. teaming up with Dr. Strange could also be cool if they both learn to respect each other. so yeah, if all three team up in Dr. Strange 2, I will be just…beside myself.

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(originally posted in a reblog June 12, 2021, of a gifset showing Loki's reaction to his own death in Loki s01e01)

should we talk about how he barely seems to be breathing here either while he watches Thanos choke him, like he’s hoping maybe this isn’t it, maybe this other version of himself pulled something off at the last second, maybe Thor saved him, maybe it wasn’t Thanos who ultimately killed him–

and then the onscreen Loki’s neck breaks, and it’s like the Loki watching just had all the breath (and hope) punched out of him, chest heaving like he’s the one who couldn’t breathe

…or should we never talk about that

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(originally posted in a reblog June 14, 2021)

I’ve said in a ha-ha-only-serious kind of way that I think the Time-Keepers are Kevin Feige and a couple more of The Powers That Be at Marvel, but honestly what came to mind with a lot of this is…whatever they called the old gods in Cabin In The Woods. they had to be appeased with a sacrifice but it was also crucial that the sacrifice always happened in the right way–i.e., an entertaining way, gory and titillating, horrific for the people living through it but exactly what the audience demanded because they were also kind of a metaphor for horror-movie audiences. I don’t know how meta the show might go with this, but it seems totally possible to me that the Time-Keepers follow one major principle in determining which events belong in the Sacred Timeline and which don’t, and it’s what they personally think is an exciting story. which could be very fun for meta reasons if it’s not pushed too far, but it would also be an exceptionally clear-cut way to show that they’re the bad guys, because…I mean, really, how morally bankrupt would it be to play out that kind of story with sentient beings’ lives just because you think it’s fun?

to be clear, I don’t think it’s some kind of deliberate reference, given that Cabin In The Woods and the MCU have nothing in common except one director and one actor, but I do think it’s an interesting parallel, and honestly this is what I’m going to assume about the Time-Keepers until I’m given a good reason to think otherwise. on the other hand there are a ton of classic sci-fi movies I’ve never watched, so if one of those has a similar setup that could have inspired the showrunners, then I might actually be onto something.

(this general idea is, incidentally, a pretty key component of the Norns’ portrayal in the amazing (WIP) Loki fic The Prestige, and actually I was also thinking about the Norns, partly because there’s three of them too but also because that image of Loki’s tape running out put me in mind of everything mythology-related I’ve read about the Norns or Fates cutting the thread of someone’s life.)

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(originally posted in a reblog June 14, 2021)

I find Mobius’s behavior throughout the whole interrogation scene to be…kind of fascinating, because he clearly does know Loki well enough to know what buttons to push, and he’s very good at thinking on his feet and using Loki’s reactions back up his own manipulation. it’s like…wow Loki you do so many terrible things and then just bounce! but also it’s hilarious that you were D. B. Cooper, and you know what, you’re smart and you’re good at things! you are a pretty awful person though, don’t forget about that. haha, you think that means you’re actually dangerous? aw, that’s precious. also check it out, you got your mom killed. oh that upsets you? let’s push it a step further and say you killed her, which isn’t actually true but close enough. oh hey, genuinely sorry for dumping you on your ass. anyway while you’re down there and I’m looking down at you, you’re the worst, you have no agency, and the best thing you’re capable of is also one of your greatest fears, that you’re only useful as a whetstone against which real heroes can sharpen themselves; on your own you’re still really just the worst. it’s preordained, so it’s kind of not your fault, but also it still definitely is, because it’s who you are. okay good work let’s pick this up again tomorrow!

and then in the last scene, it’s an almost jarring tonal shift: hey there buddy, good job on the self-awareness (about your own weakness and lack of control). nah, I don’t think you’re actually a villain though, and you can be better if you accept my help and help us in return (now that you’ve realized how much you’ve lost, how much you suck, and how few options are left to you). how about a job?

I’m not going to say I hate Mobius because I have no idea how things are going to go, and I can certainly understand why he’s willing to use this kind of manipulation to catch somebody who’s killing his coworkers, but damn, he is…really something.

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(originally posted in a reblog June 14, 2021)

and then Hunter B-15 comes in while he’s still trying to process that and also still crying, and he’s just…he’s done. he is so utterly, incredibly fucking done with these people and their bizarre combination of bureaucracy and unfathomable power, and maybe there’s no real point because he can’t escape and it sure doesn’t look like he can overpower them in the long term but like hell is he going out on their terms without at least a few more goddamn minutes in private to think.

so–no more fucking around. they go for each other, he takes a few hits, and then he overpowers her within seconds because he’s that good at fighting and at thinking on his feet. and once the collar’s on her, it’s the same scene we already saw most of in trailers, where it just looked like he was having fun, only…we didn’t know the context before, and it kind of changes everything. I do think he’s partly messing with her just for the sake of it, because she’s been the main one pushing him around this whole time so yeah, of course there’s something to be said for giving her a taste of her own medicine. and it’s…fun. kind of. (the scrunchy face is still cute.) but his heart’s not in it. he takes a little bit of petty revenge and then tosses the now-useless controller aside, tears still drying on his face, defeated and empty. he doesn’t try to set up a (probably pointless) ambush for whoever comes in next; he just sits down with the Tesseract, and waits for…whatever’s going to happen next.

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(originally posted June 14, 2021)

lol okay so I dashed off most of this the day of and then kept not posting it because I kept thinking I needed to add stuff, but then I ended up adding more stuff mostly in reblogs instead (should all be under the “my meta” tag if anyone’s curious) and now episode 2 is technically coming out tomorrow night in my time zone so obviously I need to just post this. bullet points of disconnected thoughts, some of which are probably at least slightly outdated by now but whatever, here you go

• seems very possible Mobius left the tape with him on purpose because he figured Loki wouldn’t be able to resist looking at it
• would have to check the timing but I’m pretty sure he started looking terrified as soon as Thanos came onscreen without really knowing the context (aside from the very basic outline of “it’s been several years and he reconciled with Thor”), which at least underscores that they weren’t buddies–Loki knew something awful was about to happen the second Thanos showed up sadly this is not true, the clip he sees first is him trying to stab Thanos, so…yeah it stands to reason that he’d know it was about to end badly no matter what
• other people have mentioned this but I love that we got to see Loki just like…existing?? like I know he’s never been the protagonist before and seeing him as the protagonist has always been one of the things that’s excited me most about the show, but now that it’s here I’m just kind of struck by how HE’S THE PROTAGONIST so we’re getting all these emotions and little gestures and moments when he’s alone that we only got in tiny, sadly easy-to-overlook snatches before (and it also occurred to me that I don’t think we’ve ever seen Loki eat anything, which is something else that might change)
• also his projection is fascinating, and so is the fact that he explicitly turned it around on himself, which seems relevant to all the theories about a lot of his other statements (”freedom is life’s great lie,” most of what he said to Natasha, etc.) being things that were drummed into him on Sanctuary rather than stuff he just came up with on his own, so that seems to cover a lot of the stuff he says in Avengers and here
• on the other hand it seems unlikely we’re ever going to get confirmation that Bad Stuff happened to him on Sanctuary aside from what we already saw in Avengers, which is frustrating, although to be fair I also wasn’t expecting to see Loki crying about his family in the first episode (and the most I’m really hoping for, still, is that nothing will explicitly contradict the idea, so…we’re good on that thus far, I guess)
• so the first half of the episode was…ehhh, I don’t know, but the second half was amazing. I know some people didn’t like that part either, but I felt like…okay, I don’t love him being humiliated so I would’ve preferred different framing for some of this BUT a lot of casual viewers still see Loki as a cackling caricature without having picked up on any of the stuff that very clearly showed otherwise, and this show wants to treat Loki as a person, someone worthy of audience sympathy, so they kind of had to go in hard and fast on that aspect to get everyone up to speed. like, yes, fans who’ve been paying attention know that Loki’s a person, that he’s wounded, that he doesn’t hurt people just because it’s fun for him, that he feels things very deeply, that he loves his family, but somehow the mainstream perception of him has missed like 85% of that, and the show’s just not going to have much impact unless it gets everybody on board with those very basic ideas. in terms of story structure it probably doesn’t make sense for this to be his lowest point, but starting from the bottom and eventually getting somewhere better is fairly standard, so at this point I can imagine tons of ways things could improve for him
• yeah I do hate the whole Sacred Timeline thing, see also my posts about how much I loved that Endgame canonically (I thought) established multiple timelines where everything was fine, so yeah I’m pissed about that because it means those timelines were canonically pruned
• like I don’t…hate it as a storytelling device? I just hate it for fandom reasons, and I’ve hated it in other fandoms when canon did something that seemed to open things up to all this incredible possibility and then went “actually no, we’re boxing it up again into this one specific Way That Things Happened” and for fanwork purposes it doesn’t matter all that much, I don’t think it’s actually that much harder to do AUs or go “okay well in this universe the TVA doesn’t exist, whatever” (in fact I wouldn’t be surprised if AO3 quickly develops a new canonical “not TVA compliant” tag for basically all Loki fic), but it is annoying that it’s now like “canonically, every AU is Not Allowed”, and if that ends up sticking as the status quo with the TVA considered good guys or at least a necessary evil then yeah, I’m going to be annoyed
• HOWEVER
• I don’t think that’s inevitable for a variety of reasons
• this whole show is going to deal with multiverse shenanigans and so will Dr. Strange 2, so it seems completely possible that the end result could be a status quo of “there’s a multiverse actually and that’s fine” (…although yes, I’ll be doubly annoyed if the end result of this show is a restored multiverse of some kind and the end result of Dr. Strange 2 is condensing it back down to a single timeline)
• the multiverse is a long-running comics tradition, which still seems to be the case even after…whatever event it was that collided a bunch of them and tried for a Highlander thing, look I wasn’t really following it and I know some characters ended up in other universes from where they started but I’m pretty sure we still have a multiverse of some kind
• almost all the recent Loki-centric comics have focused on questions of fate and agency
• Agent of Asgard in particular was about Loki eventually going “fuck you I won’t do what you tell me” and forging a new path (and, okay, it does seem like runs other than AoA have been the most influential here but again we’ve only seen one episode)
• Loki, specifically, is an agent of chaos and change, like that’s his whole thing going way back to mythology, because sometimes stagnancy is death and chaos is healthy, and of course myth!Loki (and earlier versions of comics!Loki) is always responsible for triggering Ragnarok, which isn’t just the end of the world but is also a natural, crucial part of a cycle of renewal, and yes the MCU already did Ragnarok but that doesn’t at all mean they can’t play more with those ideas
• Tom Hiddleston has brought up this specific point several times in recent interviews, that sometimes chaos is the one thing that’s really needed
• also, on Jimmy Kimmel the day of the episode, he kind of…planted a seed about the TVA maybe not being uncomplicated good guys because seriously what gives them the right to make these decisions for literally everyone
• so at the very least I think it’s completely possible that things aren’t quite what they seem, and that for instance we’re supposed to discover that Mobius is consciously manipulating him to turn him into the type of tool the TVA wants him to be
• also “the timeline wants to break free” shows up on a lot of merch, which does seem to indicate a free will vs. predestination theme
• I’m not at all familiar with comics!TVA, although I understand they’re considered villains (although to be fair, so were the Skrulls, and at least thus far that’s been inverted for the MCU), but their whole thing reminded me of a few other entities in a way that could be relevant:
• the tape running out was like the Norns cutting the thread of somebody’s life
• Those Who Sit Above In Shadow in AoA (and also maybe whatever was below the God Quarry in Infinity Wars although I’m less familiar with that)
• the gods in Cabin In The Woods, who were also kind of audience proxies in that they really just cared about the sacrifice being entertaining, which kinda seems like the only logical reason for the Timekeepers to prefer any given series of events over another

my personal hope for the series: the Timekeepers are ultimately the Big Bad and the rogue Loki variant is ultimately right in trying to wipe out the TVA (because sure I realize it’s maybe dumb of me but I still don’t want any Loki to be completely a bad guy!!); the major named TVA characters realize they’re the baddies actually and team up with a whole army of Lokis to take them down and GIVE US BACK OUR MULTIVERSE

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(originally posted June 19, 2021)

Anonymous asked: What did you think of the speech where Loki said he did the things he did because he had to in episode 1?

LOVED IT. LOVED. IT. the only problem at this point would be if they later have him be all “lol just kidding I lied, actually I love hurting people because it’s fun” and leave that as the final word on the subject, which seems…sort of unlikely! even if I don’t trust Marvel a whole lot in general!

but yeah it was great because it’s the type of thing we’ve been saying for years, based on actual onscreen evidence–or, at least, there’s been no onscreen evidence that he does enjoy hurting people just for fun (plus multiple instances where he’s gone out of his way to protect somebody), even though that seems to have been generally accepted as part of casual viewers’ concept of the character. so it was very, very satisfying to hear him say explicitly, IN THE VERY FIRST EPISODE, that not only does he not enjoy hurting people, but he sees it as necessary for his own protection because he’s painfully aware of his own weaknesses. it’s still not a good thing but it’s easy to understand, it’s what some of us have been saying about his motives all along, and I’d say it’s at least a few steps more self-aware than what seems to be the general Asgardian attitude, which is basically “be ready to throw down with anybody at any moment for doing anything that implies they might think we’re weak because that’s a gross insult” whereas Loki’s view is more “…because I know I’m weak and I’ll get eaten alive if I don’t appear strong enough to hide it.” it also seems reasonable to think that he learned this on Asgard in the first place, to some extent, and then the idea got extremely reinforced after he fell from the Bifrost, so it’s probably not even a new idea or something that’s unique to Loki.

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(originally posted on June 20, 2021)

Anonymous asked: I think Loki admitting to weakness doesn't come easy, I doubt they'd take that moment of honesty from him now. Also, the fight in the store, it seemed he was trying to get the people off him without hurting them too much. This reinforces what he said. What do you think?

oh yeah totally agree, that’s why I said it doesn’t seem likely that they’d try to take it back, especially because I think a good portion of the point of episode 1 was getting everyone on roughly the same page in regard to Loki, you know, not being a cackling evil villain who only cares about power. so although I’m still concerned about later stuff undercutting that just because I don’t trust Marvel all that much, I really don’t think it’s likely, because…in that case there wouldn’t have been much point to that entire second half of episode 1 going out of its way to establish stuff like “Loki loves his family a whole lot” and “Loki has feelings, we shouldn’t even need to say this but apparently we do”.

whether casual viewers have actually gotten the point kind of remains to be seen, of course, and going by some reviews, some of them extremely have not, but I guess you can’t be obvious enough for everybody.

and in the Roxxcart store, yeah, he wasn’t the one who attacked first, and he mostly seemed to be defending himself; he certainly didn’t go out of his way to hurt anyone. I also think he did sound concerned when he asked if the guy supposedly shopping for azaleas was dead, which I imagine was partly because he thought he was still talking to B-15 and probably hoped one of the “good guys” would still give a shit about random civilians. it also wasn’t lost on me that his instinctive reaction when Sylvie jumped to Randy was to catch B-15 as she collapsed, and he visibly stopped himself with a wary look at Randy, probably because diving for B-15 (who was still wearing a helmet and body armor, after all) would have left both of them vulnerable. in some ways that reflexive jerk toward her says even more about his instinct toward protecting people than him checking on her after Randy moved away, because I would imagine at least some of his concern for her is out of a reasonable level of self-interest–I mean, he was alone with her, it’s very likely he’ll get blamed if she’s hurt or dead, he might say different things to Randy if she’s alive and conscious, so her basic status is pretty vital information for whatever he does next.

but the way that his first instinct was to catch her when she collapsed–that’s the same Loki who spent the whole fight on Jotunheim watching everyone’s backs, and it’s the same Loki who equally instinctively protected Jane a second time with his own body in TDW even when it wasn’t part of the plan. and then of course in Ragnarok he brought the Statesman to save Asgard, immediately joined the fight (and ordered the civilians to get onboard), and ran off to risk his own life by raising Surtur the second Thor suggested it, when he could’ve done literally anything else…not to mention some of the smaller stuff in Infinity War, like tackling Thor out of the Hulk’s way but doing it with a twisting motion so he’d hit the floor first and avoid injuring Thor further. so yeah, I think there’s plenty of additional evidence to argue that left to his own devices, Loki doesn’t just not enjoy hurting people, he tends toward actively protecting others, at least if they’re people he knows in one way or another.

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(originally posted June 19, 2021)

I understand people saying it doesn’t make sense for Loki to get tossed around so easily in the show, but consider: I really like seeing Loki get tossed around

(also I do think it can make sense, TVA’s employees were apparently all created by the Time-Keepers for the specific purpose of doing those jobs so there’s no reason to assume they’re human just because they look human, especially considering how many nonhuman-but-completely-human-looking species we’ve already seen in the MCU; I’m sure the TVA deals with lots of different species at hugely varying strength levels, so I don’t actually find it far-fetched that Hunters in particular are a match for Loki physically…and yes, the people tossing him around in episode 2 were ordinary humans but they were also being possessed by somebody who is not an ordinary human, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable that they also had access to superhuman strength while they were being possessed)

(originally posted in a reblog June 20, 2021)

RIGHT, like, does it make sense that he gets tossed around so easily in this scene? maybe not (although maybe it also does)! do I…care? listen okay, listen, we’ve only had two episodes and here we get a quality scene of Loki getting tossed around, having to take a second to recover because he’s visibly kinda dazed and disoriented and probably had the breath knocked out of him and then taking some actual effort to get back on his feet, and not only does this delight me to the bottom of my whump-loving soul, it is also filmed in a way that only happens to protagonists and yeah it turns out I’m probably never going to be over that!! so to be completely honest no, I actually do not care whether the cause of this reaction made very much sense because this scene was fucking great okay!!!

so I’m biased to start with in that I’m actively looking for reasons that this does in fact make sense, I will freely admit that, but okay, try a couple things on for size: first of all like I said earlier I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suppose that these random-ass humans had access to superhuman strength while being possessed by somebody with superhuman abilities in general, which might be kind of necessary in this case given that this show has specifically put Loki’s weight at 525 pounds! (could a somewhat beefy but unenhanced trucker-type dude realistically throw around somebody who weighs 525 pounds, otherwise? I want to say no but actually I have no clue, I don’t do sports or actually exercise enough at all and I basically have spaghetti noodles for arms so all of this is way beyond my abilities, somebody else would have to figure out that part.) so even aside from Loki not putting up that much of a fight for a couple different reasons, it seems totally possible that it was an intentional writing choice for the Variant-possessed humans to be able to throw him around this easily.

and, the part of the fight immediately preceding this was…the possessed guy had that vacuum cord around Loki’s neck and that’s what he used to throw him, so…there’s a physical reason why he maybe was already not breathing super great, which might also contribute to him landing badly (because I’m very sure Loki knows how to fall, that has to be something you’d be taught early in an environment that focuses so much on fighting) and getting the wind knocked out of him? which, you know, fucking hurts!

and if we want to take that further, which of course I do, and go into something that is much more of a headcanon but that I still think makes sense…well, I don’t know how much time passed between episodes but it was probably less than a week and it certainly wasn’t more, so…just a few days ago, Loki had to watch Thanos strangle him to death, while also wearing a fairly tight collar that was upsetting in its own right and probably got real fucking hard to ignore after seeing that. and, you know, I realize I have a tendency to see angst and trauma where creators didn’t necessarily intend there to be, because that’s what I do, but it also seems reasonable that all these things could combine to give somebody a bit of a complex about opponents trying to choke him or yank him into the air by his neck! which is something else that might realistically contribute to a bad, painful landing!

…have I spent too much time thinking about this very short but nicely whumpy scene and justifying it to myself? NO I THINK I’VE SPENT THE PERFECT AMOUNT OF TIME ON IT ACTUALLY AND EVERYONE SHOULD JOIN ME

(originally posted in a reblog June 22, 2021)

I suppose it might be a bit of a stretch for me to say that only protagonists are filmed this way because it probably extends to other characters sometimes too, but in general it’s like…the camera stays with him for the whole thing, it’s a close shot, it’s lit and framed in a way that emphasizes the disorientation, and it all combines to encourage viewers to feel for/with Loki rather than just passively observing. it’s sort of a fight-scene equivalent of his breakdown in the time theater. we’re being asked to sympathize, to go “oh shit that looks like it hurt” almost more than seeing somebody take a blow, because a character already established as a badass needing to take a few seconds to recover conveys that in a way that just walking it off doesn’t.

the comparison to Steve jumping out of the elevator is a good one because it’s presented very similarly, and it’s in sharp contrast to the way we’ve seen Loki filmed in fight scenes before. when he’s playing the villain, he pretty much pops right back up from everything short of Mjolnir on his chest or a Hulk-smashing. instead the focus is on the satisfaction of Clint’s exploding arrow blowing up in his face, for instance, or Thor’s pain and grief when Loki stabs him. the closest thing is at the end when Loki drags himself out of the Loki-shaped hole in the Stark Tower floor, and even there the emphasis is on the defeat of the villain, rather than wincing in sympathy with somebody who just got beaten up. when Loki’s the good guy in a fight, like when he takes out a bunch of Dark Elves in TDW or fights Hela’s army in Ragnarok, he’s still not the focus–he fights, he looks good doing it, he gets a little tired maybe, but we’re not really there with him because he’s not the priority. protagonists, on the other hand, get visually and emotionally prioritized. we’re asked to take notice of their pain and effort, to hurt for them when they get knocked down and root for them to get back up.

it’s a pretty small moment, in this case, and I for one would be extremely happy for Loki to get something like this that’s even more climactic, along the lines of Steve in Winter Soldier getting back up after Bucky’s beaten him to a pulp, or Peter in Homecoming getting back up (after first trying and failing to do so) after having a whole building collapsed on him. but it’s still the exact same type of small moment that protagonists tend to get in fight scenes and other characters don’t, and just aside from the whump factor, I’m thrilled to bits every time I see Loki getting a recognizable Protagonist Moment. like…our boy is the protagonist, you guys! he’s really the protagonist, it’s really happening, I’m so pleased and I’m apparently never going to get over it

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(originally posted in reblogs June 22, 2021)

oh good I’ve been hoping someone would make this comparison! I’m guessing a lot of it’s for similar reasons, too–somewhat deliberately being obnoxious as a way of feeling out a situation with someone who doesn’t trust him (but also maybe downplaying his own threat level), and intentionally giving free rein to his manic impulses because there are waaaaay too many things he needs to Not Think About that are all way too close if he has a moment alone in his own head.

... I think there might be some of the same but in reverse–there’s no sun or fresh air in the TVA, as far as I can tell, so he just got his first taste of both for probably several days and maybe also immediately screwed it up, so some of this behavior might stem from a slightly frantic desire to keep from being locked down again (or worse, of course). but even though this part comes before he learns about Ragnarok, he’s still dealing with all the awful stuff he learned in the first episode–or, more accurately, not dealing with it by hardcore avoiding it and throwing himself into fixating on literally anything else. I think that’s also part of the reason he’s so manic during the TDW scene–partly it’s being let out of his cage and getting to do something for the first time in a year, but also, his mom just died and he had a huge breakdown over it, and the only way he can function now is to compartmentalize, keep moving, and not think about it.

so that’s mostly what I think is going on in episode 2, here and at other points. it looks like this piece of fanart was made before episode 2 aired, but honestly I think it summarizes his general state of mind for this whole episode.

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(originally posted July 1, 2021)

Anonymous asked: Check the Twitter account of the episodes writer. Apparently making them kiss on Lamentis was on the table for a bit. They’re definitely doing the romance thing :(

it still seems possible that they’re misdirecting people on purpose, and I’ll certainly be happier if they don’t make it a romance, but…even if they do, I don’t necessarily hate it? Mobius was being nasty about the whole thing but it’s hard to say how much of that was sincere and how much was just part of breaking Loki down to get information out of him, so it seems very possible that it’ll be framed differently in the last two episodes in a way that doesn’t, you know, dump on Loki for beginning to develop a healthier self-image. it’s also pretty clear that they are two very distinct people–they started out more or less the same, but that was a very long time ago, and I think it’s telling both that Loki reaches out to her with an apology, honest admiration, and an attempt at comfort that he’d probably never think to offer himself, and that they’re both adamant about being their own selves. (I very much do have feelings, for instance, about Loki snapping “Her name was Sylvie” at Mobius even when he thinks she’s dead, because it’s important to him that she’s remembered as her own self.) I also think that if nothing else, it’s more reasonable for this to have developed as quickly as it did than in a lot of onscreen romantic relationships (more than Jane/Thor, for instance, if I’m being totally honest), partly because they bonded over some pretty intense trauma but also because they’re still similar enough that they can fundamentally get each other in a way that would have to take a lot longer for anyone else.

again, I’d very much prefer that it not be romantic. but a lot of the criticism I’ve seen is based on things that could still easily be fixed in the remaining episodes (the narcissism angle, mainly) or things that could happen but certainly aren’t guaranteed. even if it is romantic, that doesn’t have to mean that the romantic part is more important than the basic human (for lack of a better word) connection between two traumatized people or the recognition that they don’t deserve to die alone. it also doesn’t have to mean reducing Sylvie to The Female Love Interest–and for that matter, if she doesn’t reciprocate the specific type of feelings Loki might have for her, it really…doesn’t have to be another excuse to knock Loki down? we’ve seen more from him because he’s the focus, but it’s fairly obvious that she cares about him too (she was the one who initiated physical contact at the end of the world, and she asked if he was okay when they reunited) and recognizes the importance of their connection after so much time alone. that all still exists even if they aren’t, like, the endgame pairing–it’s still crucial for Loki to realize that he’s not an awful person, he doesn’t deserve to be alone (in any sense), and of course he’s capable of caring about other people without dragging them down. like, those are important things for him to figure out about himself that aren’t necessarily dependent on actually being in a romantic relationship.

and then of course there’s the idea that Loki/Sylvie is a straight relationship that essentially ruins the point of Loki finally being revealed as queer, which…mm. I mean I get it, I do, it’s Disney and they’re super heteronormative so of course they’re more likely to go for m/f relationships above anything else and that’s not great, but…Loki is…very much still queer? he likes multiple genders! his queerness doesn’t depend on his partner’s gender! Sylvie is also apparently bi, given that Loki assumed they were the same that way and she didn’t contradict him, so–sure, it’s m/f but it’s still queer because both of them are queer, and to imply otherwise is pretty biphobic even if it’s understandable to be frustrated that Disney would choose the easier/safer route. it also doesn’t hurt that they seem pretty evenly matched both mentally and physically, and he openly admires her, which is…not that common in onscreen relationships! and, yes, if they never go any further into the genderfluidity aspect it’ll be an annoying cop-out, but that’s…also still something that could happen in the last two episodes, especially because I didn’t get the sense that Sylvie’s nexus event was being about being a girl.

Chapter Text

(originally posted Oct. 25, 2021)

finally finished reading Vote Loki and my headcanon is that his motivations were basically a combination of

• everything that happened throughout Agent of Asgard was real fuckin’ stressful and he wanted to blow off steam (in a way that was, in context, at least more low-stakes than a lot of the other stuff he was doing recently)
• and I was thinking Vote Loki took place before all the War of the Realms stuff, but actually WotR got started in 2015 and of course Vote Loki was in 2016, and I’m pretty sure Loki was involved in WotR stuff from the beginning and that was also very stressful, so…more reasons to want to fuck around with something that isn’t threatening literally everything
• he actually did want to make Nisa’s career, because he did feel kinda guilty and he does appreciate people who speak truth to power etc.
• as stated, he was doing it to help one of the other candidates win, but since we’re never told which candidate, why, or what they offered him in return, I’m gonna say that was also for a combination of reasons:
• whatever the other candidate was offering sounded great and he was like “you know what, I deserve this” because see above
• it was in fact related to early War of the Realms stuff because come on, his whole scheme in Vote Loki is actually pretty similar to his schemes in Doctor Strange and Avengers, both of which were about playing a role that would force Midgard’s most crucial defenders to step the fuck up, so I really have no problem theorizing that he had reason to think Midgard would ultimately stand a better chance later with one candidate over the other

I mean in general it was…weird? and 98% of the art was weirdly ugly (although of course Stephanie Hans’ variant cover was gorgeous)? and I do still find it obnoxious that Marvel decided to pull out more references to it much more recently, given that the original miniseries was supposed to be a satire of US politics in general but Trump′s campaign more specifically, and…like…that kinda hits different when the dude you’re parodying did in fact win and caused a significant amount of damage over four years, including the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans because he bungled the pandemic response that badly! and of course Vote Loki was supposed to be an obvious satire but haha turns out even Loki made more of an effort to calm violence from his supporters than the guy who was actually literally elected here in the real world! even the parody, that was supposed to be very clearly a parody because of course reality wouldn’t get quite that extreme, didn’t foresee anything like January 6! so at best it seems like it’s in pretty poor taste for Marvel to come back later with more stuff based on Vote Loki, is what I’m saying!

…anyway. the actual comic was…fine. I can at least interpret it in a way that satisfies me rather than having to go “they butchered his character so I’m pretending it never happened” and that’s all I was really hoping for.

like, this panel specifically—

is he being at all genuine here? don’t know, don’t care, the point is he’s still saying he’ll represent Americans who don’t support him because that’s, like, the bare minimum for a president, they at least have to pay lip service to the idea even if they don’t really act on it, and Trump couldn’t be bothered to do even that. Loki’s not American! he has no reason to care about representing all Americans! at this point he’s trying to turn people off! and also he’s a character in a political satire! and he still isn’t doing the thing that real politicians in real life—including but by no means limited to Trump, because he just showed all the other awful people that they could get away with it—have done and continue to do, which is explicitly dividing the country into “real Americans who support me” and “people who hate this country and should leave or maybe die”.

and, you know, the writers of Vote Loki didn’t know reality would make their satire look tame by comparison in some respects. of course they didn’t. it’s just, anybody at Marvel pulling it back out again (most obnoxiously to my mind, Marvel Strike Force doing a President Loki event storyline with updated banners clearly based on Trump’s 2020 logo) without acknowledging that it looks a little different in that context…it’s just…well, saying it’s in poor taste is probably generous.