#also consider purpled’s map from like a fanfic pov

[mellohimelody]

hmmm i wonder if purpled’s map of the old smp that he made on like his third day is still up- it would be interesting to compare it to eret’s recent map

#this is like an open question btw- if ya know if the maps still up or if it was taken down you can reply!! #i’m very slowly making my way through purpled’s smp vods #i’m thoroughly enjoying them #but i’m only on the third day so idk if he kept the map up #it would also be an interesting sort of parallel- purpled’s ufo.. an old building made with excitement for a future on the server with a- #-map that shows how everything once was (before the big wars.. before all of this carnage) vs eret’s museum.. built as a sort of memorial- #-to the past.. with a map that shows the current rough state of everything #i dunno i just think it’d be cool #ash rambles #mellohi-posting #purpled #dsmp #dream smp #idk eret’s tag #eret #also consider purpled’s map from like a fanfic pov #his ufo is dusty with disuse- one can easily tell that purpled’s been gone for a while. one might wonder why.. and where he’s gone. maybe- #-they’d realize that purpled hasn’t been seen around for a long time. maybe they’d just brush it off and move on. #the map’s pinned up to the wall by space-themed pins. it’s a bit torn around the edges.. and there’s small doodles in the corners.. but one- #-can still read the map easily. they stare at it.. their eyes carefully avoiding the drawings and other signs that a hopeful kid had been- #-the one to make this. no one wants a reminder of their shortcomings.. and one could certainly see their failure to make this child happy- #-and loved as such. after another moment.. they pull the map down and roll it up (carefully.. ever so carefully. it’s a piece of- #-history.. after all) and put it in their bag. they decide that if they couldn’t help the child who had created the map.. they could at- #-least immortalize the memory. / it shows up in the museum the next day. #anyway i might actually write a full one shot abt that cause it sounds cool #and also cause i’m a c!purpled Stan even though he has like two minutes of content #fksbfjsb

[rhowena]

Pile of stuff concerning what happened to Loki between Thor and The Avengers

Originally posted on r/FanTheories

https://inforapid.org/webapp/webapp.php?shareddb=IAxUFHnwkGJSYMj9OFbT8mRl5goHm9SC2qHbWw4knO1cng5qI5Wrg48nP1MdgbWlJmHj6UpwbN343IqnstQUwxIIO01M5Rvb

As it does not escape my notice that I’ve created a digital version of this meme, some navigation help for anyone who needs it:

Mouse over/tap an item or relation to view its description

For items with the yellow ‘Note’ label, select the node and then 'Notes on Item’ in the side menu to view an additional notes page

If an item has a globe icon it the top-left corner, click it to open a webpage

'Adjust View’ in the side menu has controls to zoom in/out, increase/decrease the distance between items, and filter items or relations by category

Relations (and items) are color-coded by type: solid green lines are for in-universe evidence (light green connects evidence to the theory it supports, while dark green connects pieces of evidence that should be looked at together), purple dotted lines denote parallels, and dark red lines mark cases of “one of these things is not like the other”

And an overview of the theories contained therein:

First, the central piece of tinfoil around which all other tinfoil is arrayed: remember how, at the end of the first Thor, Loki was pathologically obsessed with gaining his father’s approval? And how, when he next showed up after vanishing for an entire year, he’d gotten mixed up with a guy who keeps a menagerie of adopted children? And how, during his argument with Thor on the mountaintop, he said this?

Loki: Did you mourn? Thor: We all did. Our father– Loki: Your father. He did tell you my true parentage, did he not?

Loki: I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract and when I wield it—

Tom Hiddleston: There’s a bit where Thor says, “We all mourned! Our father…” and Loki interrupts him and says, “YOUR father.” And it’s that sense of 'don’t include me in this anymore. I have no relation or connection to you.’ It’s his way of saying 'I’ve let go, I’m gone, I’m on the outside of the fence, I’m happy here, I don’t want to come back in.’

If I may take a minute to get out some of my extremely complicated feelings on this, while there’s a bunch more evidence in favor of Loki having been another of Thanos’s children that can be viewed on the mind map, I want to highlight this pair of quotes because it’s everything implied by the words “Your father” that makes it into a devastating punch in the stomach which draws on both halves of Loki’s Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds characterization: his genuine love for his family is his primary redeeming quality and that he forswore it like this puts the terrible moment when he first knelt before Thanos and pledged himself to the Mad Titan’s service firmly into archetypal Faustian sell-your-soul territory, but when you consider the straits he was in at the time and the implication that Thanos initially ensnared him not through promises of power but by preying on him emotionally, it’s a very human kind of tragic mistake.

The other mitigating factor is that based on everything we’ve heard from Thanos’s other children, it’s a safe bet that he did in fact do unspeakably horrible things to Loki too – indeed, noticing the resemblance between the existing theories about Loki having been tortured/brainwashed and Gamora’s “He took me, tortured me, turned me into a weapon” was what prompted the above realization in the first place. (It’s reminiscent of Theon’s storyline in ASOIAF/GOT: yeah, he betrayed his adoptive family and did some generally awful stuff, but no one deserves what happened to him.) It also bears emphasizing that accountability cuts both ways: one of the key takeaways from the previous bullet point is that the suffering Loki went through doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for his villainous actions, but the other side of the coin is that Loki’s partial complicity doesn’t absolve Thanos of responsibility for the choice he made to take a broken, desperate young man who’d just lost everything and turn him into the rabid animal we saw during The Avengers, and I dearly hope that exploring the rich font of psychological horror that is that time period will erase any remaining doubt that Thanos’s claims of acting For The Greater Good are nothing but empty, egotistical, self-righteous posturing and everyone in the audience who insists on taking them at face value is being duped just as Loki was.

Stephen: No. I mean, come on. Look at your face. Dormammu made you a murderer. Just how good can his kingdom be?

As for where this is all going, I believe there’s a good chance that the Loki Disney+ series will be where they finally address this as a. the split timeline Loki the series will be following is still fresh from his time with Thanos and it will therefore have to explain what happened if we’re to understand the kind of headspace that he’s in at that moment and b. Tom Hiddleston has revealed that the series will also clarify whether or not Loki really is dead in the main timeline, and everything I have so far indicates that understanding the nature of his original pact with Thanos is essential to understanding both Loki’s choice to die and Thanos’s choice to kill him (see the 'Pledge of fidelity’ and 'Limited use’ notes pages on the mind map). Character-wise, I think one of the points of emphasis will be that Loki’s death in Infinity War doesn’t wrap up his story as neatly as it may appear to on the surface; truly completing his redemption arc will require him to confront this part of his past in full, and with it his guilt over everything he’s done and his fear that he’s wrecked his life and relationship with his family so thoroughly that he can never, ever fix them.

Loki: Can you? Can you wipe out that much red? […] Your ledger is dripping, it’s gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything? This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer… PATHETIC! You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code. Something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will *never* go away!

An additional giant red flag indicating we really should be asking more questions about that time gap is a group of lines in The Avengers which reveal that Thanos taught Loki how to use the Tesseract.

The Other: The Tesseract has awakened. It is on a little world. A human world. They would wield its power, but our ally knows its workings as they never will.

The Other: You question us? You question HIM? He, who put the Scepter in your hand? Who gave you ancient knowledge and new purpose when you were cast out, defeated?

Loki: I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract and when I wield it— Thor: Who showed you this power? Who controls the would-be king?

Sharing that kind of knowledge and power with someone as volatile as Loki strikes me as an monumentally terrible idea (and as much as I don’t want to be the person who throws a tantrum because their fanfic didn’t come true, I’m kinda salty that Thanos was defeated without it coming back to bite him in the ass), which leaves me wondering what Thanos hoped to gain that he believed would be worth the risks. My thoughts on that particular sub-puzzle are still somewhat hazy, but my basic sense is that there’s something weird going on between Loki and the Tesseract and wanting to exploit that connection is one of the reasons Thanos went to all the trouble of breaking him into submission.

Loki: So I am no more than another stolen relic, locked up here until you might have use of me?

The other reason for Thanos’s interest in Loki ties back to all that emotional twistiness I talked about earlier: he planned to leverage Loki’s anger and resentment towards his family in a bid to destroy Odin and Asgard from the inside.

Zemo: An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again. But one which crumbles from within? That’s dead… forever.

As a prelude to this, during The Avengers Thanos had additionally tasked Loki with killing Thor as a way to prove his loyalty and destroy the last remaining shreds of his own humanity, a test Loki failed because he still loved his brother too much.

Coulson: You’re going to lose. It’s in your nature. […] You lack conviction.

What’s more, Thanos anticipated this, and the Scepter’s influence over Loki was aimed at forcing him to go through with it if he refused.

Loki: I won’t touch Barton, not until I make him kill you! Slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he’ll wake, just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I’ll split his skull!

Lastly, even with Infinity War having established that Thanos simply gets off on emotional torture, that he would go out of his way to fuck with Odin personally by turning his second son against him leads me to believe there was a special hatred there stemming from some as-yet unrevealed history between the two. I mean, when I picture the alternate universe where Thanos shows up to attack Asgard with a corrupted Loki in tow like “You screwed up so badly that he chose me as a father figure over you” …that isn’t something you say to a complete stranger.

GRRM on writing villain POVs: That’s a comic book kind of thing, where the Red Skull gets up in the morning [and asks] “What evil can I do today?” Real people don’t think that way. We all think we’re heroes, we all think we’re good guys. We have our rationalizations when we do bad things. “Well, I had no choice,” or “It’s the best of several bad alternatives,” or “No it was actually good because God told me so,” or “I had to do it for my family.” We all have rationalizations for why we do shitty things or selfish things or cruel things. So when I’m writing from the viewpoint of one of my characters who has done these things, I try to have that in my head.

#mcu #loki #thor #thanos #odin #loki's missing year #theory #analysis #mind map #i swear i will turn this into an actual essay one of these days