Okay I want to talk about Loki’s plan in Avengers. I just found this post which theorizes that it was Loki’s plan all along to present a big enough threat to assemble the Avengers so they could take down Thanos (but not SUCH a big threat as to actually do a ton of damage).
I’d like to complicate that theory a bit. Strap in, because this might be long. I do not think it was Loki’s intention to lose the Battle of New York…but I do think he considered getting defeated by a group that could go on to defeat Thanos an acceptable alternative. Basically, to survive, he either needs to impress Thanos by winning or lose in such a way that Thanos can’t get his hands on him. Either way, he’s still going to be in someone else’s power, so there isn’t a truly triumphant outcome possible for him.
The main reason I don’t think assembling the Thanos-defeating team was his conscious, primary plan is this moment:
To me, this proves that his actual plan was to turn Tony and sic him on the other Avengers, and I kinda think this plan would’ve worked (or the victory for Earth would’ve come at a much heavier price, like that nuke taking out the entire city and all the Avengers with it). Thor and the Hulk are both capable of defeating Iron Man, but they wouldn’t only be fighting Iron Man. They’d be fighting him, Loki, and likely the full Chitauri army, all while also trying to minimize collateral damage in one of the largest and most densely populated cities on Earth. Tony on Loki’s side would have tipped the scales and bought the Chitauri enough time to move the whole army through the portal and start spreading out. It would have been chaos, and for all we know, that was only Phase 1 of the invasion plan. The Black Order (including Ronan, Nebula, and Gamora at this point), the Outriders, and Thanos himself could have been waiting in the wings.
But the arc reactor prevented Loki from gaining his trump card in this battle, and he couldn’t win without it.
(Okay I just got sidetracked for like an hour watching Tom Hiddleston interviews from the Thor/Avengers era. Really nice line from him about Loki’s motivations in Avengers: “His motivation is to gain absolute power, and through that, self-respect.” Damn, son! Back on task now.)
So yeah, I’m fairly convinced that taking over Earth with the scepter and the Chitauri army was the real plan. But to what degree was it Loki’s own plan?
There’s a lot to consider. Thanos had the Mind Stone before putting it in the scepter and lending it to Loki for the plan (and so the Other could maintain influence over him). Based on what Wanda can do to people’s minds with powers she got from the stone and reasonable assumptions of what else it’s capable of, it would be very easy to, say, revise Loki’s memory of this:
I used to think Loki was just revising history to justify himself, but this is a completely nonsensical lie to tell to one of the only other actual witnesses to the event. He would not have referenced this moment if he remembered it correctly. He might’ve chosen “know your place” or said something like “I remember you recklessly starting a war in retaliation for a mere insult, yet you would condemn me for my ambition?” So yeah. A fake memory proves Thanos screwed with his head.
As far as I’m concerned, at this point he’s already off the hook for what he does in Avengers because he is incapable of making real, autonomous choices when his memories have been revised to suit Thanos’s goals. He is a puppet without self-awareness, not a free agent. But that’s nowhere near where this ends. He looks absolutely dreadful in the post-credits stinger of Thor.
And at the beginning of Avengers.
Could be the effects of falling through the void and traveling by Tesseract, but given that Thanos has no qualms about making children fight like dogs and replacing their body parts when they lose, the chances that Loki had a pleasant time are vanishingly small.
But before I forget, I want to address the eye color theory. Tom has blue eyes, guys, and so does MCU Loki.
At no point do Loki’s eyes have this extremely obvious starry blue cataract effect:
Thor got multiple very close looks at Loki’s eyes over the course of the movie, and he’s known him his whole life. He would notice something weird going on with his eyes.
Whatever Thanos did to Loki, I think he did it with the unfiltered Mind Stone, before he stuck it in the scepter, and it was done with much more precision than a brief poke on the chest. I think the blue gem on it when it’s in the scepter is some kind of mod designed to prevent Loki from using the Mind Stone for any purpose other than the ones Thanos allowed, while still letting the Other maintain whatever mental link he’d forged to keep tabs on him. Hence the mind whammy Loki puts on Clint and Erik turning their eyes blue instead of yellow or something.
Thanos’s plan is antithetical to what Loki wants when he’s in his right mind. The Loki of the first Thor film didn’t want power or a throne. He wanted to be loved and respected as Thor was. Loki is the God of Mischief, and we’re supposed to believe he really thinks freedom is a lie and subjugation is peace? Mischief requires freedom to exist! And would a Loki in his right mind try to do essentially the exact same thing Laufey did in 965? Loki who hated Laufey so much that he arranged to murder him and make it look like he did it to save Odin’s life, then desperately tried to destroy his entire planet? I think Loki in his right mind would be appalled by the plan to conquer and enslave Earth. But Thanos’s tampering has cranked up his self-loathing to the degree that he now wants to live up to the worst Asgard might think of him, which is to be Laufey over again. In this state, he wants to deserve having been tossed into that abyss by the brother he loved so that he can make sense of it, and what better way than this?
But he’s still working under extreme pressure. The Other seems to have a pretty strict timeline for him, and he’s not impressed with Loki’s efforts. He also seems to expect treachery. Why would he expect that if the recruitment process had gone smoothly or if Loki hadn’t shown signs of resistance? I think Thanos took a major gamble here. Asgard is currently severely handicapped by the loss of the Bifrost, but that won’t be the case for long, so this is his one shot at the Infinity Stone he knows is on Earth without interference from them (heck, maybe he knows about the Time Stone already too, but he only needs the Space Stone and then he can get the rest himself, so a minion like Loki doesn’t need to know about that one). Thanos spent as much time as he felt he could risk on reprogramming Loki into his Tesseract-retrieving tool, but it still wasn’t perfect. This accounts for how rushed and obvious Loki’s plan is. And also this.
Some part of Loki wasn’t committed enough. A committed Loki might have a backup plan if he failed to enthrall Tony with the scepter. A committed Loki might have come up with an entirely different, far more subtle plan that would have succeeded before anyone knew it was in motion. Instead, he lost. And maybe, deep down, beneath what Thanos did to him, that was what he wanted. Maybe Selvig was able to create a failsafe because Loki wanted there to be a failsafe. Maybe he reacted to defeat with resigned glibness (”If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll take that drink now.”) instead of rage and terror because he has some confidence that the Avengers won’t kill him and will defeat Thanos before he can do so.
So why, if Loki was Thanos’s puppet rather than his willing pawn, didn’t he tell anyone what had happened to him after the tampering wore off*? Pride. Asgard’s culture obviously prizes strength, but Loki, on top of already not being the Asgardian ideal, not to mention actually being a member of a hated other species, now he’s a victim. He’s spent his whole life wanting to prove himself to Odin, so how can he admit that he was weak enough to be tortured, manipulated, and brainwashed?
*I think the tampering would’ve worn off as the result of one or more of these factors: an exploding arrow going off in his face, getting Hulk-smashed, being in Asgard’s dungeon and worlds away from the Mind Stone, and the death of the Other (because he’s the one who canonically has the mental link with Loki, not Thanos himself).
Even as he refuses to deny responsibility for his actions in Avengers, Loki never acts that way again. In the Dark World, former friends are lining up to kill him if he puts a toe out of line, but he never betrays Thor. He goes along with Thor’s plan to *pretend* to betray him (which required a lot more trust on Thor’s part than he admitted to having), nearly dies protecting the woman he hated for having the audacity to change Thor for the better in the space of three days when he’d failed to do so over the course of centuries, and nearly dies again protecting Thor. (I do believe that wasn’t a trick. I think he came near enough to death to revert to his Jotun form, which changed his anatomy enough to make it no longer a mortal wound.)
Then he overpowers Odin and takes the throne, with which he does nothing villainous at all. Far from it. If he’d been on Thanos’s side, this would have been his chance to redeem himself from failing in Avengers. The Mind Stone was on Earth, and maybe could’ve insisted that Thor retrieve it instead of let Tony and Bruce hang onto it for a few extra days, but the Space Stone and Reality Stone were both within his immediate grasp, and he could’ve turned them over in exchange for clemency for himself. Instead, he sends the Aether to Knowhere and sits on the Tesseract in Asgard’s vault for the next four years, while spreading word of his own noble death in the form of stage productions. If it wasn’t for the surprise existence of Hela, this would’ve been a pretty foolproof way of thwarting Thanos’s plan indefinitely and keeping himself safe.
So there you go. I feel like this got pretty disorganized and I have a headache now so I don’t feel like tailoring it more than I already have, but I don’t think I left out any of the stuff I wanted to address. What we have here is a pretty sizable pile of evidence pointing to Loki not acting of his own free will in Avengers. It doesn’t excuse his actions in Thor (regicide and attempted genocide, in particular, as well as the attack with the Destroyer), though, and I’m kinda annoyed all of that got so overshadowed, because I’d really have liked them to deal with it.
Now, it’s possible that all these character inconsistencies between Loki in Avengers and Loki before and after it, all the indications that Loki wasn’t working for Thanos willingly or while in his right mind, and the offscreen lengths Loki is implied to have gone to to prevent/delay Thanos from acquiring/regaining three different Infinity Stones are all the results of lazy writing and failure to make the most of this character. But even if that’s true, it doesn’t negate how well these elements fit together.
As a writer, I know what it’s like to have my stories and characters come alive and do their own thing to the point where I feel like I’m being dragged along behind them, and the end result is, completely by accident, way more interwoven and coherent than I thought I’d be able to pull off. I’ve built arcs I never thought would happen, twists I never saw coming, and meaningful relationships between characters I never even considered including when I started. I’ve been in writing workshops where we tell each other all the cool things we noticed the particular writer doing in their stories, only for the writers themselves (me included) to be like “Yes I absolutely meant to do that you have recognized my true genius. *sweats nervously*”
So it doesn’t actually matter if all of this happened by accident, because either way, it’s there for fans of the character to extrapolate from.
Hopefully this was the plan all along, those elements were all deliberate, and we’ll see them come to fruition in a gloriously satisfying way in A4, but it would be just as good if they were accidental and the Russo Bros. noticed some or most of them and put them to good use for A4.
And if they didn’t notice and don’t have a satisfying plan for Loki? Well, then at least we still have fanfiction.
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