Hello there! I have a question! As a fellow Marvel! Loki lover do you ever feel conflicted about that with Loki? I almost kind of feel guilty about fantasizing about Tom being Loki at times! And I also sometimes at heart swear that Loki tends to nudge me a lot using picture of Marvel! Loki, if that makes sense? At least on my main account. Or am I just super overthinking?!
So I didn’t ever have as strong a thing for Marvel!Loki, as in the Loki of the Marvel canons, as I did for the version of same that emerged out of the Marvel!Loki and Hiddleston fandoms’ prolific and feverish iterations: the gifsets, the mashups, the fics. I mean the Hiddleston stuff here — all Tom’s shenanigans off-set, the weird interviews and skits and everything — as well as the blue million Marvel remixes which got very, very far from canon. Since I’m flat out of dignity and fucks to give just now I’ll confess the closest I ever came to a point that … no, I wouldn’t say I was really close to the edge of pop culture paganism, which at that point I’d never heard of, but on a good clear day you could probably have spotted pcp without the use of a telescope from where I was … may have been LDW!Loki. That blog has a LOT to answer for. The whole reason I started doing the kind of hey-let’s-poke-at-the-weird-thing research that gets a person in this sort of mess was that I was baffled by how mesmerized I was, because the actual Marvel canon seemed kind of meh to me. So why the fuck was I like this? What was going on here? Poke, poke, poke, you know if you listened to Tom though … ha ha funny joke, poke, poke, hmm mythology, oh here is a “Lokean” blog, omg woo lolno, poke, hmm mythology, GAH that thing, Thomas y the fuck, ugh that Lokean blog is kind of … no but omg woo poisoning nope, poke, ok um, the wtfs proliferate, no this is kind of fucked up, whoops a couple of texts that click at really deafening volume wait what 2 + 2 = 4 O_____________________o the rest is history
After I connected the dots I did go through a period of intense guilt over having come to something so important through something as obviously silly as a Marvel whatever the hell. I got over that — Loki has been systematically rubbing my face in my own snobberies and pretensions to break me of that shit since day one, it’s an ongoing process but I’m better than I used to be — partly for the reason you describe. It started to seem blazingly obvious to me that I, a human with pointless pretensions to highbrow taste, might be burning up with shame about the Marvel thing, but that Loki, a god, was perfectly happy to deploy and enjoy it freely, both for amusement and for convenience in semaphore/nudging. I don’t doubt that you get it from him. I still get it too, although he has diversified his cultural and historical referents considerably. (Also: since then I’ve found out about, and done the long painful climb down off my high horse about, pop culture paganism. I no longer assume that Marvel!Loki “is” only and always a mere medium or convenient meme or whatever for god!Loki. It seems legit that, in a different context, he might well function as an autonomous entity. I suspect that there’s a whole very complicated matrix of possible schemas for all this and that a lot of the possibilities coexist merrily together in blithe disregard of any putative contradictions. Me, I just try to stay humble and lie low, I can barely deal with one mindblowing incorporeal being in my life tbh.
Fantasizing about Tom being Loki: I have never fantasized about god!Loki looking like Tom or his Marvel role. I’m not all that visual about this stuff — I have very strong impressions of a distinctive physicality and looks but it’s kind of, um, qualitative? Metaphorical? It isn’t about his actually literally wearing some specific face. However, I totally ship Tom with god!Loki. Regardless, as long as you’re clear that they aren’t literally identical, I don’t think that I’d bother feeling guilty about using Tom’s image to articulate to yourself your thoughts, feelings, etc about Loki. It’s not like he doesn’t encourage it. It’s not like he’s a pedantic prude about these things generally. *buries face in hands* And FWIW, personal ahoy, my gut says that what Loki values is honesty and self-knowledge — in this context: frankly owning up to and exploring and understanding more about what makes one tick, as opposed to sitting there stewing in a pool of lukewarm rancid shame repressing and stifling all the things. That part may be just about me and my personal shadow work and specific no-words-for-it relationship with him, though.
