#bro comic DIALOGUE alone is more true to MCU Loki than MCU-show-Loki | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

langernameohnebedeutung · 5 years

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suzuwarahikaru replied to your post “what happens at 5 am?”

where is the essay, OP!?

@suzuwarahikaru Honestly, it’s drivel and I didn’t feel like it particularly went anywhere and it was just me monologuing about one aspect of a bigger question so that’s why I didn’t post it. But ok, just for some context: You probably know how the MCU was often criticised for having “bland one off villains” and that’s true especially in their early films - and that was time when Heath Ledger’s Joker loomed very large and Ian McKellen was famous for his performance of Magneto and the idea for a Magneto solo film had just been scrapped in favour of XM First Class. At that point apparently the MCU guys walked up with the demand that Thor 1 only has to give them 1 thing: A villain as good as Magneto which they could use in Avengers. Now, obviously it had to be Loki, because Loki is Thor’s most famous antagonist and he was the first guy the Avengers ever fought in the comics, and Loki in Thor 1 is satisfyingly complex - but now that Loki’s dead and has a solo show coming out in a while, people dug up that old quote and started arguing about whether Loki actually became a villain “as good as Magneto” - which I honestly wouldn’t care about, except this argument spilled a few “But Loki is great and Magneto is boring”-posts into the Magneto tag a while ago (which mixes with a lot of: Why did Cherik get a happy end but Stucky didn’t that’s so unfair!!!! posts) and then some comments started lowkey implying that Loki is a character who’s more attractive to sophisticated fans and that Magneto fans are usually men and Loki fans women (with the not so subtle implication being that Magneto fans are comic dude bros who like him for his cool powers and because he’s a Bad Guy(TM) I don’t really care about that, but over the course of this argument someone made a rather interesting post, wondering about what “went wrong” with Loki and while I love Loki as a character and as a villain, it made me ponder what could have been done to make Loki (even) better and to help him stand on his own 2 feet as a character and this was their post:

Now and this was going to be my response: Personally, I don’t think that having spectacular powers or anything make a villain good (they make good visuals though) but whether the hero learns something from fighting them, whether their motivation maybe reflects something that we experience as well and that maybe they unmask something that we usually don’t feel comfortable to address. And Loki has all these qualities.

I’m not going to try to objectively pinpoint where it ‘went wrong’ but it’s actually interesting to look at the XMCU and the MCU and to compare notes. The XMCU is often criticised for being too wordy, too slow-paced and “what’s with the constant time jumps and decade-hopping?” But I think that’s something the Thor franchise could actually have profited from, because…these guys are immortals and it just feels rushed in my opinion to watch their world fall apart in what is for them a matter of a long weekend.

For example, a bigger distance between the events of Thor 1 and Avengers would have lent more weight to Loki’s disappearance and Thanos torturing and brainwashing him, Thor’s and Jane’s relationship would have been given more time to develop (making their reunion in Thor 2 more meaningful). They could also have given her more time exploring Asgard/battling the Ether. We could have learnt more about the Dark Elves, the Frost Giants, the Nine Realms in general.

And that’s at least part of the problem, in my opinion: We don’t know enough about Asgard. You can’t just throw in an alien word without world-building and you can’t introduce characters who are millennia old by showing us 6 years of their lives and maybe 1 flashback. There is a reason why a show like Good Omens spent basically an entire episode on Crowley and Aziraphale’s lives through the millennia. Captain America got a film set in the WW2, Wolverine Origins covers over a century of Logan’s story. Magneto isn’t a better (or worse) villain than Loki, because as you said, the writing makes the character and both get pretty good and pretty bad writing at times. But a big difference is: We know a lot more about Magneto than we know about Loki.

One example of this is personal relationships. Something I never realised before I started typing this is how little space Loki is given to let him form/have/maintain/test/strengthen meaningful relationships.

Basically, all his meaningful interactions are inside his family. Magneto (to be clear, I’m bringing up so often bc the MCU apparently insisted on being rude af and asking Kenneth Branagh on drawing inspiration from a character who’s basically the opposite of Loki in every regard) gets a lot more screen time to develop his relationships with other characters, even if it means less CGI action scenes.

In fact, I’m currently tempted to find out how many 1 on 1 dialogue scenes Loki gets per hour of film vs. how many Magneto gets. Loki enters the picture with a family, ‘friends’, a biological father, servants, an entire kingdom of people who know him, but he barely gets to have any meaningful interactions outside of his family environment. Seeing him interact with a friend or even someone who hates him for reasons unrelated to his relationship with Thor or someone who supports him would in turn show us a lot about how he sees other people, how he sees himself, how he treats them, what he values in a person, what kind of people trusts (if he trusts) – that’s a lot of potential that was left pretty much wasted in my opinion.

One of the first things Agent of Asgard did was add Verity Willis to its main-cast so have a character for Loki to interact with, to serve as a moral anchor, and to call him out on his bullshit. Having relationships is powerful. In the MCU, Loki’s relationship with his mother is such an important, humanising element to his character. Also a lot of headcanons and metas and thoughts about Loki are inspired by those few scenes where we see him interact with the Warrior’s Three and Sif before Loki finds out about his parentage.

And even when encounters the Avengers, they meet once, they talk once, then Loki he returns to Asgard and they never meet again, except Bruce - and even then there’s barely any time to talk about what happened in Avengers 1. He doesn’t get to form any meaningful relationships with his adversaries when he talks to them in Av1, these scenes just exist to present the Avengers in a certain light. And in the end it’s canonised that Loki was brainwashed so it’s all pointless anyway. (pls (don’t) make me write an essay on agency and the MCU, because honestly, between Bucky, Gamora, Nebula, Loki and everyone else was brainwashed it’s actually worth a conversation)

Even in Thor 1 Loki never meets Jane or Darcy, one of the main-characters. And we never see a single frost giant after the first film. Erik Solveig is the only Earth character from Thor 1 Loki actually meets and he’s brainwashed for most of that and in Thor 2, they don’t get to meet again.

Imagine if Loki had had someone he trusted in Thor 1 and told them about finding out he’s a Frost Giant and they reject him and treat him like a monster. This could be three or four scenes that don’t throw off the film but would have been very powerful. Or imagine if Loki keeps his heritage a secret from that friend/trusted person and they find out in Thor 2 and confront him about it. Valkyrie and Loki never talk about him invading her mind or the things he saw.

We never get to see him alone on Sakaar to deal with what he presumes is the end of his home world and the death of everyone he knows and we never see him interact ‘win the Grandmaster’s trust’.

We never see him interact with the Hulk before they’re suddenly fighting side by side in Infinity War. We never find out exactly what the Aesir’s sentiments towards him are, what kind of prince he was in the past, how present he is in public, what reputation he has beyond silver-tongue mischief guy and which specific events shaped it.

If the MCU wants a villain “as good as Magneto” (which is already annoying bc they imply that Loki is not as good a villain which is such a subjective measure – Magneto done wrong is a horrible and downright offensive villain and trickster characters done right are amazing for revealing the flaws of a hero.*) then they have to give writers and actors the same means to do that with. The X-Men franchise, for all it flaws, always gave Magneto screen-time (so much that people criticised it).

There’s a Charles-and-Erik dialogue in pretty much every film, allowing us to follow the state of their eternal argument at every step. We see his friendship with Mystique grow and fall, we see Wolverine call him out on his bullshit, his attempt to make young Hank and Mystique feel better about their visible mutations, we know how he treats his followers, his new recruits, his enemies, his students, his wife and his daughter, (daughters, if we count The Gifted and his legacy), his colleagues, his lovers, his ex-lovers, allies and former allies, politicians, police, prison guards, Nazis, soldiers, insane Egyptian gods – and we get to learn his feelings and thoughts about all of these through personal interactions, decisions and gestures. And in turn we know how they feel about Magneto. What do we know about Loki’s feelings about people outside his family? How does he feel about Fandral? What are his thoughts on the Valkyrior? How did his views on Frost Giants change and when? Did he challenge them at all or did he just become cynical about them?

As I said, Loki is a formidable villain but I think that he suffers from the same problem as many MCU characters: We hardly know them. Think about Natascha whose been part of the franchise since Iron Man 2 but we hardly know anything about her. How much do we know about the family Drax lost? Or about Wanda’s family? About Pepper’s private life? We hardly know anything about them and especially when characters are thousands of years old and we know nothing about their past, it really creates a gaping hole in their biography and that really leads back to my original point: If we could spend more time with them, we would know them better and care more. One of the reason Dark Phoenix is a bit under-whelming is because we know very little about Jean and Scott in this time line.

There are two DCEU films I actually own and watched more than once: Wonder Woman and Aqua Man. And while I personally didn’t find Aqua Man that good, this film actually tells us a lot about him and despite my lack of knowledge about the DCEU and me being a giant Marvel nerd, I preferred Wonder Woman over Captain Marvel and that is because I felt closer to her character. It really boils down to a “show don’t tell issue” and for me, that would mean: Maybe fewer giant CGI battles. more people living their lives. *(which should also highlight why setting Magneto as a mark for K.B. is so off-mark. Loki is about unmasking hypocrisy, Magneto himself is a hypocrite who regards himself as a hero but often does immoral things and that for example gets unmasked by Wolverine, another social outsider with littl care for social conventions)

#suzuwarahikaru #fandom #marvel #mcu #Loki

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