Long and Rambling Notes on TDW: Jessica Pontificates

[borderline_mary]

So I'm back from basically nowhere! Mostly for you, Anne. I like you. Also I feel like you might discuss all the below stuff with me, because.

Disclaimer: I liked this movie. The first big chunk of stuff below makes it look like I hated it, but I’m just getting the bad stuff out of the way first.

Comments

[silent_lorelei]

OKAY SO THOR

Is it weird to call Thor the unsung hero of this movie? I mean, he is the hero, and that is very obvious, but I feel like the level of his triumph over adversity, internal problems and badass acting from Hemsworth is not as appreciated as it should be. I love everything you're saying about his depression and disillusionment with Asgard in general and his role in it in particular; he's a man who has lost basically everything he had to rely on and has no fucking clue what to do. He was thrown out of his home by a father who had always supported him before; told that his father had died and he was exiled forever; discovered that his brother who had always loved and supported him had betrayed him (and I'm pretty sure Thor also thought Loki wanted him dead, because if there is one thing Thor does not do it is get what Loki is up to, ever); had to fight his brother and confront the possibility that he had contributed to his descent into madness; saw his brother die; was told he would never see his lady again; was told to suck it up and go reconquer all the Nine Realms before everything fell apart so no pressure or anything; discovered his brother was alive but a fugitive criminal despot; tried to bring his brother home and was betrayed again; dragged his brother home in chains; recovered his lady only to discover she was in immediate danger of dying from some crazy magical illness he couldn't even understand; saw his mother die moments before he could save her; was told by his father that he had to let his lady die; committed treason after being forced into it by a father hellbent on killing all his people in a war; and finally managed to save his lady but had to watch his brother die again, this time for good. It's not surprising that he abdicated the fuck out of the throne of Asgard. In fact, the most surprising thing about it is that he managed to do so in such a calm and polite manner instead of going stark raving bonkers.

Thor may be the golden child of Asgard, but his life sucks. He's not a happy person. Maybe he could be someday, but that day is not today and it is not coming soon. He's lost his mother and little brother and discovered that his father isn't the man he thought he was, and to a certain extent has discovered that he's not the man he thought he was. His universe is inside-out.

[silent_lorelei]

One of the reasons I really enjoyed this movie so much, despite its manifold problems, is because it's a beautiful portrait of what can happen to children - even adult children - thanks to the actions of their parents, and how the same disaster or heartbreak can affect different people in wildly different ways. Thor has always been the beloved perfect son of Asgard, praised and promoted and relied on, and Loki has always been the misfit difficult orphaned black sheep of the family, disliked and mocked and misunderstood, and they are both (possibly irreparably) broken.

With Loki, it's almost easier to see his problems and his pain. Loki has never been given love or comfort or acceptance the way Thor has, and it's always eaten at him; he's had an axe to grind his whole life. Loki tries and tries to gain acceptance and fails at every turn, and eventually the repeated pain of that failure turns to bitterness. In classic ignored child form, if he can't get attention through love, he turns to getting it through hatred, misbehaving intentionally to force reaction, any reaction, out of the people important to him. At least if he's hated, if he's railed against, if he's called evil, he's being noticed; he's being confirmed. Someone is acknowledging that he is here and that he is important. He's learned over time that he can't be "good" by the standards of his loved ones, so in his miserable extremity, being "bad" is the only power he has left.

But for Thor, the problem is more insidious: he is good and he is loved and he is important, and it doesn't matter. He's good and powerful and strong and does everything he thinks he's supposed to do, and he gets kicked off of Asgard, betrayed by his family members and told at every turn that he fucked up. He's loved and lauded all over Asgard and constantly tries to live up to his heroic reputation, but he can't save the people who matter to him most, who still die in spite of all that strength and honor and effort. He's told he has to learn and grow and become a better person so he does, he does in spite of everything else going on around him, and then his father still looks at him and says he's wrong. Thor is good. He's always good. But he's never good enough, and he doesn't know how to be. He does everything he's supposed to do, everything he's always believed will make things all right, but nothing is ever all right. He can't understand why.

Loki can see the strings, understand why everything happens and see how it all makes perfect sense, and that bitter knowledge makes him half mad. Thor can't see the strings, and so he is adrift in a universe where nothing ever happens the way it's supposed to and nothing ever makes sense. Loki has been told all his life that he isn't good enough, and in the end he stops trying to be, realizing he's fighting a battle already lost. Thor has been told his whole life that he is good enough, but no matter what he does or how hard he tries, he still loses in the end as well. They're both men who have realized in the past few years that there is nothing solid under their feet; that they've been lied to their whole lives, or else that the rules of the universe have suddenly changed without warning. Loki knows where the lies are and who told them, and it makes him angry and vicious. Thor doesn't, and it makes him wounded and defenseless.

TL;DR: Loki and Thor are both victims of severe trauma and manipulation, and I love that this movie finally highlights that - that they're opposite sides of a single coin, not different creatures.

[silent_lorelei]

Also, thank god for this movie's return to the relationship between Thor and Loki, which finally reaffirmed their obvious and unbreakable love for one another. Avengers was a lot of fun, but it failed pretty hardcore in that area, despite Hiddleston's best efforts (which we can probably blame Whedon for most of the time - I remember him being quoted as saying that he wanted Loki to be much more of a straight villain because sympathizing him too much was confusing the audience). And Avengers wasn't really about them anyway - Loki was the main villain, but it was really a story about earth and the mortal heroes on it fighting the alien menace of the Chitauri, with Thor and Loki as side characters in between. Loki was barely there for most of it, fighting a battle he clearly didn't care much about winning; it was more of a stage performance he was giving and an outward expression of his spiral into nihilism than anything he actually cared about. The Loki of that time period had pretty much forgotten how to care about things.

But yeah, there were no interactions between them in this movie that I didn't love. So good the actors, so good their developed relationship.

[borderline_mary]

I didn't know that about the novelizations (there were going to be novelizations really?). Seriously it's like when video games get put out before they're actually done, except you can patch those. Agreed totally on Midgard; I think they basically only had it happen there because someone had the biggest pants tent for the idea of Darcy and Selvig and The Intern using their tech to warp shit during the battle and send Mjollnir flying off in confusing extra-dimensional directions for lulz. A lot of this movie seems to be motivated by lulz, actually; there are far too many moments where we're clearly expected to laugh, even when the humor is uncomfortable or excruciatingly badly timed (which is a lot) or way-overplayed. It's so overplayed at times it's almost like slapstick.

As for language, I can't confirm this as actually Marvel's creation, in fandom there's this so-accepted-and-ubiquitous-that-it-may-as-well-be-canon idea of Asgardian Allspeak, which is a magic thing Asgardians have which makes them understandable to everyone and able to understand everyone, with automatic fluency. I suspect that here it's just Stargate levels of not giving a fuck about the language barrier, but anyway.

Um piracy of Animatrix. Whut. More things I didn't know and WHAT THE HELL FILMMAKERS. I also forgot I'd heard of Tyr being in this film, and because I'd forgotten I didn't notice his absence in particular. :(

Yeah, that whole thing about Sif "proving" that ladies could be warriors was kind of wtf. Way to go with inappropriate cultural transposition SPECIFICALLY to cut out badass women. And if your male friend is correct, I will probably weep but I will be not one iota surprised, and then I will go watch Starship Troopers because at least it does gender equality in horrific death. The issue with Frigga not using her awesome illusory powers to actual good effect is part of this, I think, because if she did that then they would have a hard time fridging her without ALSO giving her the most epic bad luck and/or focusing too much on her badassery. The fight scene with the sword was the most they were willing to toss her, and more than that might have detracted from the soon-to-follow manpain. Actual myth!Frigg would have been right out.

I suppose I wasn't taking her feelings much into account in this scene, but even if I do, I'm still not okay with it, because even if her feelings are hurt, she's so much in a position of advantage and power over Loki that I'm not sure I can list all the dynamics. A partial list would be: she's his mother, she's the ONLY person who appears to have never outright rejected him, she's his protector and the only reason Odin didn't have him executed which both puts him in her debt and makes it dangerous for her opinion of their relationship to change, she's the only person with whom he ever has contact at all and is probably the only person with whom he'll ever have contact again. She has so much power over him in so many ways that it was unfair, cruel, and still skeevy to put him in the position of accepting or rejecting her openly as his family, and she's been married to Odin long enough that I don't believe she can possibly be unaware of the implications of doing that. She's his parent, and if she believes that relationship is still present, she has a responsibility not to openly force him to risk losing the only family he has left at this point or to put him in a position where answering her honestly could legitimately make him fear for his life (regardless of whether she'd actually turn on him after being rejected, Loki's got little enough reason to trust that ANYONE won't, especially not the only person left who hasn't), especially if she wants to actually protect him in a more qualitative sense than just keeping him breathing. You're correct that she's probably hurt; I don't see that as a good enough reason to say what she said.

[borderline_mary]

As for whether she was actually there... I've seen others postulate that she wasn't, but I honestly lean more towards Frigga outright ignoring Odin's "you'll never see her again" because she probably knows a trick or two for not letting her husband find out. He's not on his throne all the time, and I can totally see her just telling Heimdall to keep his mouth shut, because it's not TREASON for her to visit Loki. Odin didn't so much decree it as use it to hurt Loki during his sentencing. Frigga is shown in deleted scenes for the first movie to be unable to countermand Odin's direct orders concerning Thor's banishment, but being free to argue with him in a way that suggests he doesn't really give HER orders in that sense. Not that I disagree with you about this being EXACTLY the kind of self-loathing bullshit Loki would do, to conjure up his mother just to wound himself further, but I'm leaning on that scene being genuinely Frigga. Although, given all of the above, she probably doesn't get to do it much, so it's also entirely plausible he conjures her during the long, long periods of time when she doesn't visit.

"Good people in Odin's eyes is generally defined as People Doing What I Want Them To, and even that doesn't guarantee you any praise or comfort, as Loki can testify." <-----Yes. That is all.

Yesssss, I actually did notice Loki's reference to Hel and I did fully catch the implications you describe. Principally I focused on the knows-he's-sure-as-fuck-not-getting-into-Valhalla bit because ;;. Also I was busy making faces because Hela is Loki's daughter (actually like the myths, Marvel? NO).

Vanir isn't touched on much in Marvel, but it's described as being home to Asgard's "sister race." Frigga is Vanir in Marvel, and you're correct that Freya doesn't exist because Marvel!Frigga is Frey's twin and the daughter of Njord. Comics!Hogun is neither Aesir nor Vanir, but is from somewhere the fuck else and it's not really explicated; he just hangs around Asgard because he wants to. I think you're spot-on with the movie dumping him there because they didn't want to bother with him, although I wondered at first if it wasn't an actor issue, like maybe a contract thing or a time commitment conflict.

As for all you say of Thor and Loki... any chance you would post all this on Tumblr so I can reblog the shit out of it? (The reason I'm not on LJ much anymore is actually because the only people who ever talk to me on LJ are you and two others, and those two others talk to me more on Tumblr.)

[silent_lorelei]

I guess agree to disagree? If that is actually Frigg, I don't think she was in any way trying to make Loki choose family or aloneness with no middle ground, or even intending to imply that. I think she was just saying, "Ouch, dude," in response to something he said that probably read to her as hurtful (possibly she even thought he said it by accident - it seems like the kind of thing he'd say because he was made at Odin and realize a second later also hit her as a byproduct). And pointing out to him that even if he feels that way, she still considers herself his mother.

It's totes possible that I'm a little biased, because when I wrote a story with an illusionist character getting stuck in jail forever (I write the future!), he totally started conjuring illusions of his loved ones after a while as a sort of mental self-defense mechanism. That might have contributed to how obvious it looked to me, but I'm sticking by that interpretation for myself, anyways. I know there's more Frigga stuff on the cutting room floor for this movie, too, so we might get more confirmation one way or the other someday when the DVD comes out!

I think you might be right - Hogun getting kicked out of the movie smells like actor conflict to me, too, and he was probably filming 47 Ronin around the same time. I can't find anything on the internet anywhere to confirm, though.

I think we might be able to blame some of the for-the-lolz flavor of this movie on Whedon, too. Not his fault this time, but one of his strengths is humor, and Avengers was very widely praised for its hilarity in the midst of action; I feel like there may have been a lot of pressure on these writers to try to do things in the same vein, but since this is not exactly the most coherent script in the universe, it doesn't succeed nearly as well.

I should probably fix my tumblr... basically it is the front for me using the questionbox in an offsite Blogger blog (because i am a rebel against the system) for our mythology site, so I don't post with it because that might then confuse things for the followers of that blog. But, you totes have my permission to copypasta or screenshot or whatever and blog away. The feels want to be free.

[borderline_mary]

Last bit - I'm cool with agreeing to disagree, but that's not quite what I meant? You did make me think a lot more with your initial comment highlighting how Frigga would feel about Loki loudly disowning Odin, and I'm willing to back off on my assessment of her as deliberately manipulative; my point was more than her intentions don't make the power dynamics disappear, and she's not the sort of character I can see being totally oblivious to them. Ergo, while her feelings are valid and while I'm behind her attempting to communicate that she still considers herself his mother and even that she was hurt by what he said, I'm kind of not okay with her backing him into that corner in order to do it.

Oooooh I think I remember that story?

I'll see if I can set this up in a quote string. :D

[silent_lorelei]

Yeah, I think for me it's just that I don't believe she would have been in any way intentionally trying to put him in a corner? She's got some manipulation chops, but I don't think she'd use them on her kids, not in this here movie universe. I think it's more likely we're looking at a pretty typical parent-child painful argument - both hurting each others' feelings, not necessarily intentionally but because they're kind of mired in their own emotions despite their care for the other person. Loki feels pushed into a corner even though she wouldn't have intentionally done that to him; Frigga feels rejected even though he wouldn't have intentionally done that to her. Everyone is sad. Nickelback's "This Is How You Remind Me" plays softly in the distance. *flashbacks to teenagerhood*

Ha, it was The Self-Made Man, about Goze. Who did some pretty bad shit and legit deserved to be in jail, although thankfully he's started trying to clean up his act post-jailtime. (I can't find the LJ link for some reason? Blah.)