#mcu crit cw

[icyxmischief]

[2/2] TVA Loki's personality and behavior is like some weird combination of his Ragnarok characterization and the earlier films, and it doesn't always come across well, especially when taking into account that this is immediately following the battle for New York. On top of that, there's the feeling that Loki was side-lined. He's not in the movies anymore, and they clearly don't want him to have a higher place in the MCU. Plus, again, there's the way they treated his fanbase. It feels cheap.

^^^^^^^ yeah

[icyxmischief]

I'll speak up for Sylvie at least partially, in stating that her actions are also induced by C-PTSD. This does not condone any acts of abusive manipulation; HOWEVER, it provides proportionate context by reminding we, the audience, that Sylvie is MANY steps behind Loki in her healing process by virtue of having had NO family and NO friends since she was a preadolescent child. She has not known safe touch--much less a safe relationship model--since that age. Everything good is contingent, in her schema of any interpersonal exchange. ANY. This makes her hostility and manipulativeness, while not acceptable, at least sympathetic.

Mobius gets less sympathy from me; maybe that's because his life prior to the TVA is still a blank. Maybe it's because he isn't "a Loki."

3.All this said, @valkyrieandstrangeridingaragorn has pretty much succinctly and completely explained why I ship NEITHER of Loki's potential significant relationships as they currently stand. They have also explained why I have never quite been comfortable with this series. Loki is NOT breaking toxic habits: he is repeating them (to the extent that I can assign a new relationship an old relationship name--Mobius is proxy Thor, for instance). There is no commoner trait in someone with C-PTSD sourced in unhealthy relationships. We just THINK Loki is doing better (I fell for it too, for several episodes in series 1!) because it's packaged, framed, in a glitzy over-stimulating new environment (the whole world of the TVA) with lots of humor (mostly at Loki's expense for...some reason, lol?) and the misleading promise that our Trickster has "his own show."

We're just so grateful that, after the borderline trauma of Endgame, he's still alive.

Down to Loki's suicide attempt in Thor 1, down to his every "rebellious" action, his Avengers Assemble attempt to model Caretaker One's (Odin's) behavior to make it into the "Worthy" club, and his codependency with his brother, this is the one way in which he is utterly self-thwarting-- this statement here:

"Because you did not experience yourself as lovable by your primary caregivers when young, you may be intent on care-taking and helping others to prove that you are valuable."

So where does that leave us? What, then, does that do with Loki's current mission to "know himself," to know "what makes a Loki a Loki"? It would seem to me that being able to bear being alone a little longer, to find himself irrespective of Other (yes, even another Loki), would be the best route FORWARD for this character. And then, being able to love and trust the company of another, without having to feel that love is conditional, and therefore, to placate the loved one, so is identity. In my opinion--just mine, so take it as it is--Loki has not yet met the person, or persons, who can fulfill him in this way.

Unfortunately, the second Loki series appears to be about strengthening the bonds with his new "family," to self-efface and exist as a bookend or complement to someone bigger and brighter (hi Thor) once again.

The worst part about spending your life developing your identity "in someone's shadow" (Frigga's words to Thor, of Loki, TDW) is that you become accustomed to staying there. The shadow just changes shape.

I dunno, guys.

Loki's behaviour for Mobius and Sylvie uncomfortably takes me back to the C-PSTD fawning trauma response that happens when violence feels imminent. He's playful in the TVA when threatened with murder, jokes to diffuse tense situations, kind after Sylvie is hostile. Sylvie and Mobius receive endless praise when they think he's broken or a clownish inconvenience. Reads like he's trying to break conflict through befriending, his lack of anger, boundaries, his silence after torture was scary.

[Source]

If you are a 'fawner', you may have not been sure if you were loved and accepted as a child, so you learned to meet the needs of others and appease them to prove your value and worth.

'Fawners’ learn early on in life that their true self-expressions and natural impulses are not acceptable to those they depend on for survival

You likely seek validation from others that you are acceptable and worthy of being liked or loved. You can be so ‘other’ focused and ‘enmeshed’ that you may have no idea what you actually feel, think, want, or need.

You may do anything you can to ‘keep the peace’, even if that means abandoning yourself, which in turn deprives you of the ability to negotiate on matters important to you.

Because you did not experience yourself as lovable by your primary caregivers when young, you may be intent on care-taking and helping others to prove that you are valuable.

This will also make you highly vulnerable to attracting narcissistic, abusive people who will exploit your willingness to deny your own needs in deference to their own.

[icyxmischief]

lmao make this [3/2] because I had on more thought: There's a sort of collective mourning/suffering/pain that the entire fandom went through with Loki's death that never healed for a huge part of the fandom specifically BECAUSE it was done in such bad faith and with such deliberate malice towards us. Because of that, it feels like all of the magic and excitement and wonder we all had years ago died with him. We lost our faith in the MCU to create good content for their fans.

^^^^ Go on as long as you like. For me, THIS is the thing. I can do headcanon gymnastics around the other problems with the Disney Plus series, but this is the part that I hate. After Endgame (which I could not even finish), the scrap of "at least he's alive" that I held onto desperately turned into frustration. He got a single ten-second cameo at the end of Antman Quantumania, and other than that has been small-screen--and even that I don't mind because of the new (somewhat regrettable) primacy of media streaming (aided, as so many bad changes have been, by COVID). But the way that Loki's sendoff in Infinity War was so "shut up about this originally one-off villain already, we don't care about the complexities he's come to symbolize for you"...that made me tired and angry and unable to "play along" with what has come ever since. I am not in the right frame of mind.

And here's Tom executive producing what's left, seemingly satisfied wth, even very proud of, it. I get it, people move on, their focus shifts, they become more casual about what used to be a passionate project. As someone who consumes that content, though, I've been uninspired for years. I keep hoping some of it will come back because I'm tired of losing and mourning things. Maybe it will, who knows!

[icyxmischief]

[1/2] TBH I think a not insignificant part of the issue with the Loki series is the fact that we watched the Loki we got to know over YEARS of movies die in an unnecessarily graphic, personal, and DELIBERATELY spiteful way towards his own fanbase, only to be replaced more-or-less off screen with a newer version of him that is like a hybrid of Ragnarok and pre-Ragnarok Loki. Like yeah the series had high viewership and was really popular, but the wound's still pretty fresh for most of us.

I'm so sorry, this got lost in a pile of asks that my executive dysfunction hasn't let me answer, but honestly....I feel this. I feel how you feel. I'm glad he's still alive in some form (I do believe he's Our Loki, just Our Loki allowed to have a chance to reflect on his trajectory a little more slowly and rationally...lol even if he's still without the reliable support he needs), but the pacing of only six episodes didn't allow his core fanbase time to adjust to this new trajectory, because his character development from unwilling villain, to antihero, to hero, was rushed, and crammed in with revelations about who really pulls the strings of the Marvel multiverse, and finally with Sylvie, who is a remarkable character, but who almost needs her own series to explore the really fecund themes of personal agency and choice and circumstance and fate and all those really meaty things. It also doesn't help that Love and Thunder came out only about a year later with Loki conspicuously absent from Thor's side, as his foil and counterpart, and frankly neither character is as interesting without the other, yet Thor as a character seems to have completely adjusted to Loki's absence....a writing and directing choice that I won't even go into right now, but that definitely was an additional sting.

I want to see Loki happier but this series didn't achieve that. Loki may be surer that his purpose is noble, but that's different. He is still alone and isolated and condemned by unjust higher powers to play a role it turns out he wasn't really born to play (villain, for "The Timeline" to stay singular). Fine, okay, that's a compelling way to give us a season 2. And I have always believed Loki is capable of altruistic acts. BUT the fact remains that he changed too quickly, and as a result, I look at him and say, "well, that's Tom Hiddleston playing a tall black-haired character with great skill, but I wonder who this character is." I don't see Loki. Not fully. Going from 2011 to 2017 with his gradual, unpredictable, morally gray development, to only six weeks of rapidly changing his fundamental characterization, is just too fast.

I think what I wanted to see was Loki gaining control of his own life, being a "better" person, but on his own terms, and in his own way. Loki will always be sly and capricious and opportunistic, and just a little bit of a pariah or outcast. He can still be these things and happy, but so far, no canon writer in the MCU has been able to pull this off plausibly.

What Marvel doesn't seem to understand is that Loki being an underdog and outcast resonates with many, many people, deeply. Therefore that outcast status has to be honored at the same time as he is permitted to grow. You can't erase it and make him someone who ever stays sedentary within any single identity. I think Tom Hiddleston is the one who said he's ALWAYS "between damnation and redemption," and that tension is what makes him compelling. The moment you resolve it and write him off as a villain OR as a hero, he loses his magnetism altogether.