Personally I'm mostly annoyed that Odin wasn't the one to die instead of Frigga. But if Frigga had merely been kidnapped and then rescued by Thor and Loki working together instead of dying, an important scene at the end of the movie would have been impossible. You might still decide it wasn't worth it to make that particular resolution possible, but Frigga's death does serve an important plot purpose and isn't just a source of Man Pain.
As for Loki's "death", it isn't a miraculous healing/resurrection that could have worked for Frigga if only the movie had allowed it, it's Loki faking his own death with illusion and then escaping so he won't end up spending the rest of his life in an Asgardian prison. It's not even that he gets a wound comparable to Frigga's and recovers, he doesn't appear to have been actually hurt at all. So we're talking apples and oranges.
I still wish Frigga's death hadn't happened, to be sure. But it would have been a very different movie in some ways if it hadn't, and a lot of things about that scene were done just about as well as they could possibly be. I'll be interested to see your take on all this once you've actually seen it.
Agreed. I knew Odin wasn't going to die because the franchise has too much invested in the father-son drama and because it would have locked Thor into kingship, which they probably wouldn't want for plot mobility reasons; Frigga was expendable, and the obviousness is another of my buttons here. But... hmm. Good to know.
I'm not talking about the technicalities of the deaths, I'm talking about how character death is used as a narrative device here. For Frigga, an older maternal figure, early and permanent death which isn't about her but about the effects it has on her male relatives. For Loki, a bad-boy heartthrob with a massive fan following, a momentary and impermanent bit of audience-reaction-lure drama which, given what you've said, turns out to have been his plan all along.
<3! I'm not sure when I'll see it, but other friend reactions are coming back positive as well, and I will look forward to it more now.
As for Loki's "death", it isn't a miraculous healing/resurrection that could have worked for Frigga if only the movie had allowed it, it's Loki faking his own death with illusion and then escaping so he won't end up spending the rest of his life in an Asgardian prison. It's not even that he gets a wound comparable to Frigga's and recovers, he doesn't appear to have been actually hurt at all. So we're talking apples and oranges.
I still wish Frigga's death hadn't happened, to be sure. But it would have been a very different movie in some ways if it hadn't, and a lot of things about that scene were done just about as well as they could possibly be. I'll be interested to see your take on all this once you've actually seen it.
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I'm not talking about the technicalities of the deaths, I'm talking about how character death is used as a narrative device here. For Frigga, an older maternal figure, early and permanent death which isn't about her but about the effects it has on her male relatives. For Loki, a bad-boy heartthrob with a massive fan following, a momentary and impermanent bit of audience-reaction-lure drama which, given what you've said, turns out to have been his plan all along.
<3! I'm not sure when I'll see it, but other friend reactions are coming back positive as well, and I will look forward to it more now.
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