I've Been Loki'd

[pristineungift]

 So, after reading my fic The High Priest of Loki, 

Comments

[vorquellyn]

I agree with you on most of what you say but I have a couple points of disagreement

[vorquellyn]

(cont

[pristineungift]

I really liked the Loki of the Thor movie. I thought he was a good transition to a Loki from the same universe that Marvel!Thor is supposed to be from, a good transition based on the rules this new universe is running by. As such, I take him as being as separate from Myth!Loki as mirror!Kirk is from regular Kirk. Some similar personality traits but very different upbringing and potentially vastly different responses to the same stimuli. I came out of Thor shipping Loki/Sif and unless I see him with someone else in the movies, I’ll probably stick with that. I get the gut feeling that the movie’s Thor, Loki, Sif, and Fandrel are a lot younger than the other Marvel versions of them. Partly because the movie explicitly showed Loki to have been a baby when the frost giants were defeated. Yes to all of this. I personally see the movieverse as carte blanche to pick and choose from whatever canons you want, so long as it doesn't directly contradict something from the movies. (Of if it does, it's an AU, w/e

[vorquellyn]

I suspect that part of the problem that Avengers has with its Loki is that I'm not sure Whedon and Branagh were communicating very closely. Branagh's version is wonderful and Whedon's version is traditional for Marvel. I do like Whedon's work but he's writing Loki much the way he wrote Caleb in S7 of Buffy. It's something he's comfortable with. The impression I get from Avengers is that he's autoing Loki so he can focus on the Avengers... which is my problem with most of S3 and S4 of Angel and S6 and S7 of BTVS. He's great at certain kinds of stories and characters but has a bad habit of chasing the things he finds shiny to the occasional detriment of the plot

[pristineungift]

Norse mythology is also extremely fatalistic and Marvel’s universe generally isn’t. So instead of a story about how no man can escape the end of all things, Marvel’s Norse characters are in a story about averting the end of all things. Which makes general Marvel!Loki come across as even more pointlessly cruel and mustache twirling.

Yeeeeeeesssssss thiiisssss so much this! And I think that's what's really bothered me about the character - I like my villains to have reasons for the things they do, and Loki doesn't always seem to. I get annoyed, you have some canons and the myths where Loki has purpose, and then others where Marvel just seems to use him like a bandaid for bad writing. It doesn't have to make sense! Loki did it!

And I see what you mean about duality. As I've been writing, I've found a lot of duality inherent in the character, though I see it as a creation and destruction kind of thing. No matter which incarnation, Loki is a chaos god, and chaos is something that encompasses both creating and destroying.

[vorquellyn]

This is why I wish modern moviemakers would leave most of the old myths alone. They are not in any position to do them correctly. Modern audiences come from a perspective where a dangerous disease outbreak might kill 40 people and food can be shipped in from somewhere else. On a deep level, most of the old myths are about the inevitable mortality of everything. Norse Man might have done everything exactly right and still died of a disease he didn't understand. Greek Farmer might have done everything exactly the way it succeeded last year and still had a crop failure. The capriciousness of the gods and the fatalism in most of their stories came from knowing they could die the next day just because. Don't get me wrong. I really prefer living in an age with better food and health care. But the kind of hero who struggles and does his part and dies in his turn is a completely different hero from the one who tells destiny where to go and averts his death. It doesn't translate well