he waits dreaming application
✢ The Player
Player Name: V.
Age: 22
LJ: laevsilaufeyson
AIM / MSN / Y!M: AIM (hodudududuh)
E-mail: easypeasyeasypeasy@gmail.com
Other Characters: --
✢ The Character
Character Name: Loki Laufeyson
Fandom: Thor (2011 film)
Canon Point: End of film.
Age: Unknown. Several millennia.
Appearance: Have a look.
Abilities / Powers: Loki, being Asgardian (or rather, a jötunn raised as an Asgardian), has strength and speed superior to that of the average human. He is also superhumanly durable and can heal very quickly, the latter augmented by his powers of sorcery.
In that vein, he is capable of shapeshifting to take the forms of animals or other people, though he can only take on their appearance, not their abilities. He has appeared as both male and female forms of himself in the comic canon as well.
He can create illusory duplicates of himself - images which are very detailed and look and behave exactly as he wants them to but which appear to have no real tangible form - they cannot be touched or, one assumes, interact with objects.
He also seems capable of summoning or banishing objects, or concealing them - the exact nature of this particular power as shown in the film is unclear - and manipulating things telekinetically. Also unclear is whether or not the bursts of energy he fires with his staff are a power of his or a feature of the staff itself, but in the comics, at least, he is capable of firing beams of energy. He is also capable, in the comics, of telekinesis, telepathy, teleportation (interdimensional or otherwise), and generating force fields.
Finally, he is capable of imbuing certain objects and people with powers, something like an enchantment which requires constant maintenance on his part.
I have included what I see to be the most pertinent abilities here, but a more detailed write-up can be found at the Marvel wiki.
Inventory: Just his armour and his collection of throwing daggers.
Personality: The easiest way to define Loki is by his names. Take, for instance, Loki Silvertongue: that implies a clever manipulator, cunning and charming, prone to flattery and persuasion. One who misleads and lies, furthermore, and does so very well. Secondary implications include a conniving personality, a self-serving individual with a taste for dishonesty. Perhaps also a flirt, which Loki is certainly known to be. All of these, in fact, are quite fitting.
There's far more to him, however. There's also the God of Mischief, a nickname well-earned. This implies a prankster, a clever fellow with a sense of humour that may sometimes run towards the cruel. This is also suitable - nobody enjoys a good joke better than Loki does, and he's lived long enough to make it into an art. He's also lived long enough to grow bored of standard trickster fare, which only makes him more dangerous.
The pursuit of stimulation is hardly his sole motivation, but it has contributed to his gaining a slightly modified version of that nickname: the God of Evil. This is, perhaps, something of a misnomer in a number of ways. In plenty of others, it's really quite appropriate. Loki is amoral and callous, often cruel, and quite mad. It's the madness that seems to get him into the most trouble. He is, after all, also a rather sensitive and caring individual.
So whence the madness? For that we look at his given names. The first, Loki Odinson. This is the name with which he was raised and it is the name he continues to use even after discovering his true heritage - though how long that will last remains to be seen. It is a name which implies privilege, the son of the king of the gods, though that implication may be slightly misleading. True, Loki was raised a prince of Asgard. However, he was never shown remotely the same degree of attention and care as his brother Thor.
This, too, has its reason, and so Loki's birth name: Loki Laufeyson. Loki, son of Laufey, the king of the frost giants, old enemies of Asgard and prophesied to be the gods' doom at Ragnarök. And more than this: Loki himself is foretold to take their side in that final battle. It is perhaps no surprise that Odin's feelings toward him were conflicted, but it is these conflicted feelings precisely and their inevitable outcome which leads to Loki's madness.
He is, after all, Old Man Loki - a young man by Asgardian standards, but far older than the oldest living Midgardian, caught in the limbo between being too young to be taken quite seriously and still being ancient beyond human conception. Years of neglect and unfair treatment take their toll on humans, and humans never have had to face millennia of it. In the film, this gives Loki his defining characteristic: his jealousy.
He is jealous of his adoptive brother Thor while at the same time yearning desperately for his love and attention. He wishes for Odin's regard and manufactures a dangerous and reckless scheme to cement it while at the same time sabotaging his own chances of success by attempting to eliminate Thor from the picture. He loves his adoptive family as intensely as he despises them, though he despises nobody more intensely than himself. He sees himself as a monster, inherently lesser than his Asgardian relatives.
On the other hand, however, he is extremely arrogant and prideful. He believes deeply that he deserves better than his lot and goes very far to get it, however flawed the reasoning which leads to the specifics of that attempt.
Loki is, in sum, a very conflicted individual. He bears his dichotomies well, however, straddling the line between madness and kindness as well as he does the age line and the gender line. The outcome is a strange fellow, amoral and mischievous, occasionally callous and occasionally loving, moody and dangerous but a powerful and generous ally. Just as his many names suggest, his major character trait can be summed up in a single word: volatility.
History: Loki was raised alongside his brother Thor on Asgard - a race of advanced extraterrestrial beings who discovered early on in Earth's history how to travel between it and their own realm via a 'bridge' of sorts, described in the film as an Einstein-Rosen bridge - in essence, a manipulation of spacetime to bring two points closer together, a wormhole. The Asgardians are superhumanly long-lived and possess capabilities far beyond that of the average human being. On Earth, they were often worshipped as gods.
Thor and Loki were raised by Odin, the king of Asgard, and both were groomed towards leadership, though only one could ascend the throne. Thor was shown particular favour early on as the eldest child, and Loki came to resent this. Early in the film, he plans to play a trick to spoil his brother's coronation day - he sneaks several jötunn (Frost Giants, historical enemies of Asgard) from their planet to his, ostensibly so that they can attempt to steal back a particular artifact of theirs, a casket which augments their powers of frost manipulation.
They fail, but Thor is furious and demands that Asgard retaliate. Odin refuses and forbids him from going to Jötunheim. Loki manipulates Thor into going anyway, and upon their return Thor is banished from Asgard, leaving Loki next in line for the throne instead. And, indeed, when Odin falls ill, he does ascend to the throne, though not before learning his true background.
During the fight on Jötunheim, he came in contact with a jötunn, and rather than being burned as another Asgardian would have been, he was unharmed and indeed began to take on their bluish colouration. Later on, after Thor's banishment, Loki confronts Odin and learns that he is not Asgardian, but rather the son of the leader of the jötunn, Laufey. This conversation, and the subsequent fight, seems to be what prompts Odin's illness and Loki's ascension.
To cement his position as king, he visits Thor on earth and informs him that their father, Odin, is dead, and the conditions of peace with Jötunheim included that he remain in exile. Upon his return, he makes a visit to Jötunheim himself and promises Laufey that he can sneak him and several of his men into Asgard to assassinate Odin, with the intention of stopping the assassination and manufacturing an excuse to retaliate and destroy Jötunheim entirely in order to earn his adoptive father's favour.
Thor arrives in time to thwart Loki's plan, and in response to his failure and Odin's disappointment in him, throws himself off into space - though it is unlikely that he actually dies, given his pending appearance in The Avengers.
First Person Sample: Linky one.
Third Person Sample: Linky two.
Other: Thank you!