Jumping Off The Other Anon's Point - Fantasy Racism In The Thor Movies Is So Weirdly Explored? As A Muslim

Jumping off the other anon's point - fantasy racism in the Thor movies is so weirdly explored? As a Muslim American I felt a lot of parallels between the Jotunheim-Asgard situation and my own life post-Iraq War/post-9/11 what with the war during my childhood and lingering distrust (and Asgard leaving Jotunheim to rot afterwards definitely struck a chord) but at the same time, the movie so clearly didn't even know it was doing that. It felt like a race metaphor for the sake of a race metaphor 1/3

(2/3) Plus, it’s handled SO CLUMSILY. The whole bit with Thor going ‘I’ll kill them all’ right in front of the King made it clear this racism was a whole systemic issue was NEVER fixed in their society! The perception of Jotuns never changed by the end of the movie! We never even get to find out what happened to Jotunheim ever, because it never gets brought up again. Instead, we find out that Grandpa Bor committed genocide too and throughout the movie it’s an entire non-issue?

(3/3) I think fantasy racism can work really well as a metaphor, IF the writer actually thought through every implication. I know as an American my perception of racism is way more heavily based on skin tone than most but the whole thing with Loki being able to look Asgardian read as ‘white passing’ to me and the implication of a white passing person trying to prove they’re not like the rest of their race? That’s so much to unpack, and the writers just threw out the whole suitcase.

Mmm, yeah, I totally feel you on all of this, Anon.

It’s interesting because like… So Ragnarok obviously has this anti-colonialist leaning, which is all about acknowledging the real horror of past events, and generally just accepting that there’s no Asgardian superiority. I don’t really think it was hard-hitting enough, and I appreciated there was something, but like…

It just felt weird to me for him to be like “colonialism is bad! what Odin did is wrong!” but also never acknowledge what happened to Loki. I appreciate that Taika Waititi isn’t much of a Loki fan (and certainly dislikes Loki’s fans), but it just seemed strange to take an anti-colonialist lilt without using this perfect example right in front of you.

What Odin and Frigga did to Loki (and I want to stress that it was Odin and Frigga, and that we shouldn’t excuse Frigga for her part in this) is what has happened to hundreds of thousands of native & indigenous children across the world. A child would be stolen from their real parents, forcibly “adopted”, bled of their culture, and would be systematically fed the evil ideology that the culture they came from is bad and wrong and uncivilized.

This has happened in Australia; this has happened in Canada - Hell, the last fucking “residential school” for First Nations kids in Canada only closed in ‘96! ‘96! 22 years ago, they were still fucking doing this. You know what that is? Literally, that is an act of genocide.

And like…

I think it’s just so fucked up that this keeps being boiled down to “he was adopted,” like, no… If they’d taken in this Jotunn kid, and he’d grown up knowing he was Jotunn but that he was still loved - that would be adopted. If they’d waited until he was like, an adolescent (say, the equivalent of 10/11) and told him he was a Jotunn but that he was still loved - that would be adopted.

But what Frigga and Odin did to him, raising him not only to not know what he was, but to despise where he came from…

That’s unspeakably and revoltingly cruel. There is literally no possible justification for it. 

People can tell me time and time again “but they didn’t want to shock him by telling him what he was” - he wouldn’t have been shocked, he wouldn’t have been as upset, if Asgard did not explicitly and regularly call for the genocide of the people he is revealed to belong to. If he had not been raised believing that these people - his people - are monsters, creatures, savages. 

“Loki overreacted,” like, no, man, he didn’t overreact, he fucking broke like shattered glass. “He didn’t have to try to kill an entire planet, though,” like bitch, why not? Thor did the same fucking thing like, a week ago. 

I don’t think what he did was right or justifiable, and certainly, it was not a rational decision made by a rational guy, but… Guys, Thor did the exact same thing. Can you imagine having this wild, psychotic break, sobbing your eyes out and knowing that not only did your family never love you as much as your brother, as they claimed, but that they were right not to, and desperately trying to prove to yourself that it can’t be true by murdering the people you supposedly come from–

And then your brother coming at you with this hypocrisy? Actual proof, shoved right in his face, that Thor can do x, but if Loki does x, he is the actual, most evil monster in the world?

The only person that even TRIES to work on the perception of the Jotnar is Loki himself, and that’s in exploring his feelings in this play he wrote as Odin, with nine or ten layers of distance between his identities at the time.

It’s just so fucked up. It’s so wrong. 

And I just don’t understand how they could shove all these facets into Thor (2011), and never unpack them in literally 5 fucking movies. You had so many opportunities, and you just… Ignored ‘em all. 

How Ragnarok Took Everything From Loki and Its Consequences

I wanted to write this post since I watched TR but I wasn’t calm enough for it until now. Even writing so little about how TR unfairly treated Loki’s character and disrespected him and his fans in my TR reviews made me angry enough to start shouting in my head and rendered me unable to write it the way I wanted. Then IW happened and it was the cause for another wave of rage in me. So it took me a long time.

We always talk about how TR disrespected Loki and took away a lot of his canon characterizations and motives and his arc from him. I noticed we never explained it in details and it caused a lot of misunderstandings about why we hate TR and what we mean. So this is a detailed explanation of how TR took everything from Loki.

Keep reading

Okay, the throne legitimately fell to Loki in Thor 1, but the deleted scene also shows that as soon as the staff was in his hand, Loki began plotting a way to make it a more permanent position. But as they say, absolute power corrupts absolutely? Which is sad because he looked like a wounded puppy at the thought of taking the staff without permission, like "Wait, you mean me?" T_T Definitely a scene that shows the complexity of a baby Loki trapped by Odin's A+ parenting.

Obligatory puppy dog Loki: 

I don’t know that Loki immediately began plotting to make it a more permanent position out of corruption, though. I think that he began plotting to do as much as he could while he had the position to clean up Thor’s mess with Jotunheim and make himself the hero who killed Laufey, slaughtered the Frost Giants (which Thor wanted to do) and saved Asgard. In my opinion, Loki’s intentions were never evil or corrupt; he acted out of a desperate need to prove his worth - to prove himself equal to Thor, or maybe even better than Thor. 

It really makes me wonder how things might have turned out had Sif and the W3 not intervened - because, really, all Loki was trying to do was keep Thor away from Asgard until he had time to carry out his plan and come out the other side, victorious. I think eventually, he probably would have let Thor come back. But once the W4 went against Loki’s orders to bring Thor back, that’s when Loki got desperate and things fell apart. 

I don’t think Loki ever thought he’d have the kingship permanently. If nothing else, Odin was going to wake up eventually, at which point he’d be king again. Loki just saw an opportunity to prove himself, while taking Thor down a few pegs, and pounced. Idk, it’s all very interesting because there’s just so much complexity going on between the characters in this movie and a million different ways things could have all turned out. 

thor 2 is basically about everyone threatening loki not to betray thor and loki just not taking any of their shit for serious

This deleted scene is the saddest thing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because it confirms what Loki was saying all along.

In Loki’s wildest fantasies, he’s not sitting on the throne with Odin’s spear. 

He’s wielding Mjolnir and being cheered and accepted by Asgard like Thor, as his equal.

And that fucking hurts.