#ragnarok discourse

[lazy-cat-corner]

Let’s set aside our differences for a moment and think about the things we have in common.

Side note: This meme doesn’t apply to the fans who use harassment, name calling, doxxing, mean anons, and threats in their discourse. Because I really don’t care for that shit on my dashboard and they don’t deserve my shitty memes.

[foundlingmother]

“Everything anti-Ragnarok people bring up is just them reaching.”

A list of a few things that are just what blatantly occurs in Ragnarok that someone might find problematic:

Male hero and audience surrogate side-eyes a woman emotionally invested in a piece of media (based on a scene that is specifically meant to be emotional)

Queer-coding of villains

White male crown prince of an imperial power is the anti-slavery voice in a conversation with a Black woman who turned to slave trading because she needed the money to self-medicate with alcohol after developing PTSD

White male crown prince of an imperial power longs to achieve power level of his father, the late king of an imperial power who he just learned “drowned entire civilizations in blood”

“Ragnarok is only two hours long. They couldn’t address all of the things anti-Ragnarok people complain about.”

Take your pick of rebuttals:

You’re right, movies have never depicted multiple meaningful relationships or character arcs in two hours.

You’re right, there isn’t a moment of Ragnarok wasted. We REQUIRE Skurge using that Shake Weight, Thor getting a haircut, and the not at all schadenfreude moment where we linger on Banner twitching, seemingly dying, after he decides to potentially sacrifice his humanity to save Thor’s people.

Thor introduced the rich, realistic (in as much as it can be) dysfunction within the Odinson family, introduced themes of racism and imperialism (even if they didn’t fully know what they were doing), developed Thor, achieved a believable and intelligible downfall for Loki that depicted neglect, abuse, mental health issues, and suicide in a serious manner, included multiple named female characters with distinct personalities, had some of the most iconic humorous Thor moments, and set up the conflict in Avengers in two hours, but Ragnarok didn’t have time?

Gamora and Nebula screamed at each other for a handful of minutes and had a more satisfying and nuanced reconciliation than Thor and Loki in a movie where Gamora is only one of five main characters.

If your Thor movie doesn’t have time to adequately address the main conflicts between Thor and Loki, it’s not a Thor movie.

[mystuffmy]

Melhor série

Ragnarok-2020

[latent-thoughts]

I recently read a pro-Ragnarok post (don't want to name the person) claiming that The Avengers (2012) and TDW emasculated Loki with cheap humor, whereas Ragnarok gave him depth and a proper humor that suited him. And that it dealt with Loki's issues with his family in a good way. By making him grow up and realize that he was the one responsible for feeling hurt because he clung to the false claims of Odin and used them as pretext to commit many wrongs.

And I was just staring at my laptop screen like-

I can't with this. Seriously. Ragnarok belittled Loki and invalidated or straight up made fun of his issues. The humor in it mocked him, for fucks sake. Presented him as a lazy ass reprobate who Thor had to put up with all his life. Presented him as a weakling who got his ass kicked by everyone. Made a joke out of his suicide attempt and also presented his near death experience as a fake.

I admit, small, tiny parts of it were decent. But as a whole, the movie did no service to Loki (or even other characters with intellectual prowess, such as Bruce Banner).

I just had to rant for a bit here.

[alwida10]

Signs of abusive relationship that can be found in the Thor-Films

@alstee We talked about aspects of a narcistic personality disorder we can find in the Thor-films in this thread. The original thread is adjectant to a gif-set, which is why I don’t want to post there. The people who make those gifs are forced to “listen” to the discussion even if they don’t wish to be associated with the anti-Ragnarok party and I don’t want to pull someone into the discussion.

Also, this got kinda long, therefore I put it under the cut. :) 

The following text is a quote from you, @alstee, taken from said thread, because I would like to have all relevant points in one thread together.

If anyone is interested, I’ve been skimming through the book The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment by Stephanie Donaldson-Pressman, and it’s super interesting! It’s aimed at therapists, but it’s easy, if sad, to read as a general audience person.

I’ve heard internet anecdotes of people who had to try several therapists before they found one that could actually help them, because the first ones ended up validating/siding with the NPD parent’s perspective (big WHOOPS, continuing that gaslighting) and/or didn’t really get what kind of damage and toxic family dynamics they were actually dealing with.

Now, reading through the book, there are example cases where the patient starts seeking therapy for specific problems, not having the slightest idea that their parents did anything wrong or unusual in their parenting, until a neutral third party correctly identifies the cognitive dysfunction in what the patient is saying, and digs deeper to trace the path of that dysfunctional thinking right to the source.

Also, tell me these two following bits don’t scream MCU Loki:

(This first one explains Loki’s whole behavior in Thor 1 and Thor 2, to a T.)

(And this one is in a section about romantic relationships, but I can see this whole thing running through Loki’s subconscious in every scene where he has Thor or Frigga standing in front of him.)

(@lucianalight​ You have written excellent meta posts about this which opened my eyes in the first place – I had read about this topic years before, but not made the connection to Odin’s family; I hope you don’t mind a tag here?)

 <End of quote>

So, I am not completely done reading ‘why does he do that? - inside they mind of angry and controlling men’ by Lundy Bancroft so I raise no claim to completeness. Two short remarks at the beginning: The book describes situations in romantic relationships and is therefore not exactly pointed towards sibling relationships as we see in canon MCU between Loki and Thor. Since I believe abuse to work in many situations similarly, I am still using it to interpret the brothers’ relationship. But this is of course a point that can be discussed.

Second: the book describes situations in which a woman is abused by a man. Therefore, a “he” in the text refers to the abuser and a “she” to the abused. Loki would in this context be labeled “she”, since most signs point towards him being the abused one. The book states very clearly that abuse can happen in same-sex relationships as well and is just as bad and worthy of condemnation as abuse in hetero-relationships. The wording simply eases the reading process because you always know if the author refers to the abuser or the abused.

1.       Is Loki really abused?

I marked the points yellow which I think might be true in his case. Here some gifs why I think so:

Source of the gif and a nice meta about TDW

The gif is relevant both for “are you afraid of him” and “do you feel like the problems in your relationship are all your fault”.

Source

Also, when we see Thor and Loki for the first time in Thor 1, Loki doesn’t appear to have any friends of his own. As to the aspect of isolating him from his family:

Source

2.       Disrespect is the soil in which abuse grows.

I think we know Thor doesn’t respect Loki like he respects other people such as the Avengers and other Aesir.

Gif source.

But Thor doesn’t know of Loki’s heritage until the end of Thor 1. So where does this come from?

This whole topic is connected to the first of my introductionary remarks. Abuse in romantic relationships is so common, because there is an imbalance of power in combination with the feeling of being above the other. Due to our social conditioning, the man is mostly more powerful than the woman, and there are far more abused women than abused men. People often argue a woman could abuse a man just as well. The author meets this point that this is true on a surface level, but abuse is mostly based on entitlement. Men, who are raised in a belief of superiority, feel entitled to be catered by their wife and entitled to use force if she refuses or fails to do so.  

So, we are back at Odin again, who certainly knew about Loki’s heritage and didn’t fail to act upon this knowledge. And not only his dismissive attitude towards Loki carries over to Thor, but also to the staff, as we see in the famous “spilled wine”-scene of Thor 1. So Odin basically taught Thor that he’s better than Loki.

And based on this learned disrespect, Thor feels entitled to enforce the respective behavior in Loki.

Thor shows signs of this power over Loki very early. Loki is the only one of his group he doesn’t ask to accompany him. He just assumes it. And Loki complies. He orders Loki around on Jotunheim, but Loki doesn’t comply this time. We can’t know if Thor would have gotten back to him, because he gets banished before he has the change to. We see Thor quite often demand something from Loki in the following films without Loki obeying. It mostly gets violent after that. But since it still are superhero films we can’t count this as abusive behavior because it’s somehow ‘normal’ in this context. I don’t remember Thor using physical force to make someone else do as he wishes in the films. Interestingly, if he does so it would rather invalidate the theory of him being an abuser, since most abuser make sure only to exhibit this kind of behavior in private, because they don’t want to hurt their public reputation. So if he would threaten people more often, it would rather mean that he’s a brute than an abuser.

Since we already discussed the narcistic personality disorder I would mention that both things can appear in combination:

You might have noticed that I did refrain from using examples from Thor – Ragnarok up to this point. This is intentional. Because most points that indicate Thor would act in an abusive way are relatively rare in the first films (Thor 1, Avengers and The dark world). Thor 1 even sketched out a redemption arc from his arrogance (which is the basis of entitlement) and even though he has his flaws in TDW he isn’t giving in to most of his urges. In the boat scene he threatens to punch Loki, but he doesn’t act on his urge. This is means he does, in fact, NOT feel entitled to do so. He remembers Frigga and recalls he should not. An abuser is different from an angry man because he thinks he has the right to hurt the other one.

This tone changes in Thor - Ragnarok:

I will try to make this as conceive as possible and therefore use a list of methods abusers use in interactions (split into two parts because it was to long for one picture):  

Sulking, Refusing to talk: Thor’s behavior in the cell when Loki visits to talk.

Ridicule: He throws stones at Loki in the cell.

Source

Distorting what happened in an earlier interaction: 

Source

(Ok, this one is not sure, since we don’t know what actually happened. But he says first “I dumped her!” and then “It was mutual dumping” which fits the point that past actions get distorted.) 

Using a tone of absolute certainty and final authority: In his talk with Hela about her past.

Source

Everything is your fault: Thor demands Loki to lift his magic before Odin’s death. He implies Hela’s return is Loki’s fault. He blames Loki for the situation in the nine realms.

He changes the subject to his grievances: When he talks to Bruce about his fear being on a planet and changes to the point that Bruce has to help him fight Hela.

Part II: 

Provoking guilt/Turning your grievances around to use them against you: 

Source

Playing the victim:

Source

Threatening to leave you:

Source

But the major point will always be the physical violence. Here some quotes concerning that:

Source 

[loxxxlay]

listen. i love self deprecating humour.

there. i said it. T.T please dont come after me with pitchforks lol

for some people, self-deprecating humor is not a good idea because it makes things worse in the long run. (for example, the idea that saying youre dumb often enough makes you believe it?)

but for me, its not like that. for one, it helps me ease anxiety (similarly to saying sorry when bumping into someone). and two, it actually helps me internally believe the opposite. because so many of my coping mechanisms rely on humour and sarcasm, the way i can face my own insecurities is *through* sarcasm and humour. by sarcastically saying im dumb, im actually strengthening the sincerity of opposite - that I'm smart. in the long run, ill believe the latter more.

to combine this with another facet of myself - i identify strongly through certain characters. when im whumpifying a character, im imagining myself in the same whumpifying situation (as opposed to imagining myself as the whumper - which, interestingly, is prob why so many of my villains lack character depth in my stories lol). first of all, imagining myself in such situations is absurdly enjoyable to my id brain. but second of all, its a way of practicing coping mechanisms and strengthening myself through the disembodied whumping of a character that i identify with.

so basically if you combine those two things.... self-deprecating humor and strong identification with whumpable characters, i guess it sometimes leads to strange habits on my part.

for example, my favorite character in Doctrine of Labyrinths is 100% felix. inside my brain, theres absolutely no question. but i talk so positively about mildmay that people probably assume mildmay is my favorite.

i think it ties to those two things. i identify and place myself within the whump that is done to felix. and since felix becomes an extension of my identity, i insult, tease, and ridicule felix because its actually an extension of my self-deprecating humor.

of course, when you add all this together with me being Autistic... it means that my tone is not often clear and that my sarcasm is sometimes too dry for people to catch. over the internet, this becomes especially exasperated T.T

anyway i think this is why a lot of my pro-ragnarok posts end up getting people vehemently defending loki and debating with me. and i think this might be why a lot of my opinions about endgame thor (and honestly even ragnarok thor) are hard to land in any particular group on tumblr. i engage with ridiculing language that minimizes the abuse loki has gone through (again because its an extension of my own coping mechanisms), and i enjoy the trauma that thor has gone through in a way that other people dont really get behind (or get behind in a radically different way) (i.e. i LOVE thor's haircut in ragnarokbc of the trauma of it, which so few people understand)

so yeah idkkk what my point here is. ive been thinking about this a lot the past few weeks and i kinda had a breakthrough this morning about why i am this way and why its so hard for me to feel like i belong. so im kinda just thinking out loud in a way that might make me more understandable to all of the sections of fandom that probably are super annoyed at me lmfao

[prodigal-son-tm]

i’ll be honest, i didn’t even really care about the thor movies until i saw ragnarok. now i’m eager to rewatch the first two, and i think i’ll appreciate them a lot more. i know some people were disappointed by the change in tone in ragnarok, and the fact that it was a little less somber than expected, but i really loved it. this movie made me fall in love with thor and loki in a way that i never had before.

[foundlingmother]

Loki and Thor: *share over a thousand years of brotherly loyalty and affection*

Loki: *betrays Thor a few times during the course of the MCU under specific circumstances and for intelligible reasons*

Ragnarok!Loki: *betrays Thor, either for no reason or because Thor unnecessarily goads him into it, despite it being an extremely dumb thing to do that logically would get them both killed*

Ragnarok!Thor: “Oh brother, you're becoming predictable. I trust you, you betray me. Round and round in circles we go.”

Fandom Thereafter: “Lol that Loki! Compulsively betraying his brother all the time!”

Me: -_-