I dream of an endless summer

[natalie-k-pan]

10 Ways the Loki show Disappointed Me

part two

6) The trailer was misleading advertising. Marvel’s done it in the past with little to no backlash:

Iron Man 3 presenting the Mandarin as the ultimate foe for Tony to defeat, only to find out he’s a charlatan in a minor role.

Falcon and Winter Soldier was presented as a light-hearted buddy adventure, only to tackle darker themes about nationalism and racism. (Not saying that those themes were bad, just that the TFAWS’s trailer was not truthful to the story).

In the case of Loki, the trailer presented the plot as Loki making time-traveling shenanigans and being captured for breaking the timeline. They included the D.B Cooper clip, and the scenes of Loki in New York and as king in Asgard. These clips never show up in season 1. The D.B Cooper scene was a off-the-cuff moment, and the highly-anticipated (imo) President Loki was around for five minutes.

The trailer shows the storyline being about Loki breaking the timeline, with Mobius saying in a voiceover, “You picked up the tesseract, breaking reality. I want you to help us fix it.”

Marvel’s publicity team knew what story we would want to see from the character. And that’s not what we got: it was a mix of Loki tagging along with Sylvie to take down the Timekeepers, and detective-esque  scenes of trying to overthrow the TimeKeepers. 

It was never about Loki having an adventure, breaking the timeline, and having to fix it.

There’s a difference between having scenes that don’t make it into the final product, between not revealing enough of the story to spoil plot twists...and deliberately choosing certain scenes and quotes  to present a false version of the story.

I guess Marvel was worried that no one would watch it if they showed us the real product.

7)    Loki’s powers were wildly inconsistent, especially compared to what we’ve seen before.

In the past, we’ve seen Loki do illusions, duplication casting and in Thor 2, some very light telekinesis. After hearing of his mother’s death, he throws several pieces of furniture in into the cell walls with his mind. This is after losing the person who probably mattered most to him at the time, and feeling responsible for her death--it’s a powerful move showing his magical capabilities.

In the show, in Episode 3 we see him pull a Roomba towards himself in order to use it as a shield during a fight--pretty in-line with what we saw in the Dark World.

One episode later, an entire flipping tower is falling towards them, and he reverses it with his mind alone.

It was in the face of death, you say. Of course he was going to pull some cool new magical move.

Sure. In the face of death, I could see him jumping from throwing chairs to something heavier, like maybe a crumbling wall or a fruit stand.

BUT A TOWER?

 WHY?

 HOW??

He’s never done anything on that scale magically. In episode 2, he got tossed around by a (human) Alabama man. Why would he not use that move to bring the roof crumbling down if he was fighting for his life then?

So he’s got massive telepathic power when a building is falling but can’t use it in a fight against regular people.... okay?

Honestly, due to the fact that they’ve weakened him so much, and when Loki said, “I think we’re stronger than we realize”, I’m betting Season 2 will include Loki discovering the extent of his magical powers. 

 I don’t like this idea because again, it contradicts the previous canon. In Thor 1, Hogun literally calls Loki a “master of magic”. He went toe-to-toe with Thor and the Avengers and now can’t beat regular humans. A thousand+ year old being unaware of his own untapped potential doesn’t seem correct (yeah, they did that with Thor in Ragnarok, I know).

This Loki’s power levels jump up and down according to the plot, trying to make us believe that due to his spoiled past, Loki needs to apply himself to learn more about his powers.

 8)  Loki was out of character.

His lying and scheming was way too obvious. I was incredibly confused the first couple of episodes because it would be strange how he would be a pathetic buffoon  one minute and yet The only moment I was sold on his competence as a liar was episode 2 at the renaissance fair where he attempts to fool  the TVA. He was actually competent for once, but he gets caught, and goes into apologizing and sucking up 30 seconds later.   

He gets drunk when they’re on the mission on Lamentis. This didn’t make sense--when he was trying to conquer Earth, he had the opportunity to also goof off and he’s always been shown to take things seriously, with the exception of Ragnarok.                                                 

The “I’m a narcissist” scene. While Loki is the type to crave attention--in Avengers, Tony calls him a diva who wants his name plastered to the skies--it comes from a place of feeling overshadowed, never able to match his brother Thor.  Which we can see has some basis:

In Thor 1, his adopted parents raised him to hate his race,

lied to him about it,

 and when he was hanging over an wormhole, his father finally rejected him.

In Avengers, Thor tells him in  that his slights are “imagined”. 

 Thor 2, his adopted father told him his “birthright was to die”.

While it doesn’t excuse his actions in Thor and Avengers, it’s pretty clear that his family, particularly his father, have let him down.

So to make him experience character development and understand why he does what he does...the writers took him back to Asgard, and had Sif beat him up repeatedly until he admits he does terrible things because he’s a...narcissist.

It was pretty hard to watch that scene, especially because I related to Loki as someone who felt overshadowed and overlooked. He tried too hard to be what his family wanted, to show that he was “the worthy son”.

But here in the fantastic year of 2021, this show decided to throw away all of that emotional nuance away.

 9) The costumes were bad.

The brown variant jacket with its ugly orange block letters.

The guard suit on Lamentis looked like a cross between a purple sweater and a plague doctor mask. honestly makes me shuder to see it

Loki’s green-and-gold costumes are some of the most distinct, instantly recognizable outfits of the MCU. And he almost immediately loses it in the first episode. It ends being given to Sylvie, (like most of Loki’s better characteristics) and he stays in a detective skinny-tie suit instead. The costume is okay, but it lacks the flair and style he’s had previously, and he never gains it back.

10) The season finale really did showcase this show in the best way-- ig hype followed by disappointment.

For five episodes, we rushed towards the ultimate villain, the mastermind behind it all. Episode 6 was like...being handed a pack of bubble wrap, swinging your hand hard, expecting that satisfying pop! only to have it slowly putter out with a sad little sound.

First, Kang looked like he got his costume from Party City. The purple cape isn’t doing him any favors. Then, the man sat there and monologued for forty minutes, making jokes, telling us how he set the plot up, and how the multiverse worked.

 I know Marvel gets flack for there always being an CGI climactic action scene, but…they had 6 episodes leading up to the Big Bad, and for it to end that anticlimactically with a man in a Party City purple cape was a letdown. The finale had no menace, no teeth. In the words of Mobius, it was just…talkie-talkie.

All in all, this show really suffered from ignoring Loki’s past, where he would realistically be emotionally-wise, and a lack of focus on its title character’s development. Settings and costumes being better/unique would be also be nice, especially given its popularity. At the end of the day, I don’t see the character I empathized so strongly with in this show.

[natalie-k-pan]

10 Ways the Loki show Disappointed Me

(part one)

1)  They didn’t show us his time with Thanos and the Chitauri. Marvel confirmed that Loki was influenced by the Mind Stone during his time with the avengers “even if he didn’t know it”. 

Why bother confirming this mental influence if you’re not going to explore it in the show all about Loki? Just trying to smooth over the inconsistencies in Loki’s character between the movies?

It’s a huge gap of time, and his behavior is very different from Thor to Avengers--and the writers had the perfect opportunity to shed light on it, to explain a little of what was in this character’s past. Instead, the writers brushed it aside.

2)    The show ignored his family. This Loki is fresh from that point of realizing that he could never gain his father’s approval and attempting to take over a world for himself. Regardless, Loki’s family and their influence is a huge part of who he is and how he sees himself.

It contributes to his self-worth in how he sees himself as a monster. How he thought genocide was a way to win Odin’s approval, and of course, how he felt overshadowed by Thor. Instead we got a single line about being dared to pull of the D.B cooper heist, but any actual mention of family influence is not there.

We didn’t need Chris Hemsworth or Anthony Hopkins to show up—just cast someone as a much younger Odin, and a very young Loki. Show how his family influenced him at least a little bit, because it’s a huge part of who he is.

How is Loki supposed to love and accept himself without confronting that his family raised him to hate his entire race? For a show to explore Loki’s identity, this is fundamental.

3) The romance fell flat. I like Sylvie. I do. She’s cool. She fights exactly the way a Loki should—all fierceness and graceful dancing around far stronger opponents.

However, Loki isn’t really in a spot to have a whirlwind romance..you know, he just spent a year with Thanos, tried to take over the world, killed Coulson...? 

Their romance isn’t really built on anything. They don’t have chemistry.  She dismisses his upbringing as spoiled and charmed because hers was so much worse. His “charmed” life led to him trying to commit suicide. Sylvie can be dismissive of his pain if she wants--in character she’s probably not good at empathy after being on the run-- but for Loki to fall in love with her after that dismissal rings false. 

Just because two people are sitting together at the end of the world does not a romance make.

4)    Passive protagonist. After episode 2-ish Loki doesn’t make a lot of decisions. He proclaims he wants to rule the time keepers, and then he gets sucked into Sylvie’s quest to destroy them, and he falls in love with her…he seems to want a happy ending, so he’s helping her for that reason. He doesn’t have a central motivation that doesn’t belong to someone else, and he reacts to things instead of causing them.

5)    The settings were boring. With Loki starting off with the space stone, you’d think we would be going to exciting, strange places right off the bat. 

Instead, we get the Gobi desert, a field, a renaissance fair, a Walmart in Alabama (Roxxcart), French cathedral…why so many Earth settings in just the first two episodes for a series in all of time and space? It’s honestly sad that we ended up at Walmart.

Lamentis fell flat for me as well. It’s just a planet that is...purple. And having another planet falling onto it.

But still, just really purple.

Once again, sci-fi writers think that changing the background hues of a planet is great worldbuilding. Maybe next we’ll get a red planet? Or a yellow one?

(I did like the setting in episodes 5 and 6, but at that point, it’s a little late).

part two up soon.

[natalie-k-pan]

(in)complete stories

It seems to me the greatest fandoms engage with flawed stories the most. A lot of fanfic seems to come from people “fixing” the canon, seizing on small details and adding their own spin to them. Taking the characters and the bits and pieces that they loved and placing them in cafes or florists shops, or throwing them into entirely new universes.

I think that maybe these original stories have to be cracked, have to have missing pieces, dropped characters arcs, missing romantic moments, so we can fill them in with ourselves. Entwine our own imaginations, our own dreams into the blank spaces the original fiction gives us. We are captured by the story’s potential, and we try to fit it together like a jigsaw puzzle, giving parts of ourselves in the process.

And then the other part of me thinks, that a perfect story, with no missing pieces with every dialogue snappy and meaning something, and no room to bend…isn’t that good too? Isn’t it satisfying for everything to be wrapped up, neat?

Which is better, do you think?