I love the huge cultural differences in Space Marvel™… Asgardians like speak in iambic pentameter and use beatiful, eloquent words and then the guardians are like “y’all’d’nt’ve’f’i’dn’ve!”
Loki: our cruel and terrible sister, Hela, Goddess of Death, emerged from the unknown and brought upon our land a storm of suffering and chaos, the likes of which have never been previously known to civil creatures
Rocket: anyway this dickhead Taserface threw me in his pirate-ship prison cell lmao it was nasty
Valkyrie, Lady Sif: we are classically trained, elite, and highly effective warriors, who are equal parts dignified, celebrated, and feared
Nebula: lmao what if I cut off my own hand – oh my god I’m gonna do it, watch this
Thor: welcome to Asgard, the most beautiful and prosperous of all the nine realms!
Peter: here’s our ship, it’s tiny and disgusting but it’s all we have, we love it
Heimdall: Never before has an intruder slipped past me. I want to know how.
Drax: *laughing loudly w his head thrown back* If you kept your floors dry the intruder would not have slipped on his way past you!
Hela: Tremble before me, Asgard, as I usher in the dawning of a new age! We shall once again become the conquerors of the universe!
Groot: I am Groot.
One is a high fantasy book. The other is a dnd game
I point this out/laugh every time I watch the movie because it is everything. Its perfect subtle acting.
The comment is obviously for him because none of the others know what Loki means. Tony’s acknowledgment of it is small enough that only Loki notes it, no one even glances in Tony’s direction or questions why Loki would say that.
Loki made a funny for Tony in front of the other Avengers. If it weren’t obvious before that Loki thinks that Tony is actually on his level (“warm light”, impressed by the “no throne” speech, etc.) while he thinks everyone else beneath him, keeping them out of the conversation with an inside joke is a damn good way to show it. I want to expand more on this because I love analyzing their dynamic but I shouldn’t because sleep. Maybe later.
*it also echoes the “son of a bitch…” comment Tony makes when he figures out where the portal is set up and that he is basically “Loki: Midgard edition”. a lot of their defense mechs and reasonings are the same and parallels are everywhere which makes me happy. my fave characters are perfectly messed up and I love them. fight me.
Sometimes I think about the Tony that we had at the end of Avengers, smiling with his girlfriend in their tower after he saved New York from a nuke, building a new home base for the Avengers.
And then came the PTSD and the Maximoffs, Ultron and ‘together,’ the Accords and ‘did you know?’ and I think of the Tony we have now, sad, broken, tired. All his fault, always his fault, right, Stark? Still trying, but not with the effervescent drive of Avengers, but with the determination of a dying man.
And I hate it, but sometimes I think the Avengers were the worst thing that ever happened to Tony Stark.
😭😭😭😭😭
I love all the Avengers. I really do. But this is the damned truth. The Avengers are unequivocally one of the worst things to happen to Tony in his life – a life that was already full of worst things.
Tony’s relationship with the Avengers begins when Nick Fury approaches him about joining in Iron Man 2. Tony turns down any talk of the Avengers (”I don’t want to join your secret boy band”) because he’s dying. It’s in this same scene Tony learns Pepper’s new assistant “Natalie Rushman” is actually an undercover spy for SHIELD who has been assessing him (an assessment done while he’s on a self-destructive binge due to the whole “dying” situation).
After Tony has cured his palladium poisoning and put an end to Vanko, he approaches Nick again, actually excited about the prospect of joining the Avengers team now that he’s healthy, only to be turned down. Due to Romanoff’s less-than-flattering assessment of his character, Tony is only wanted in a “consultant” capacity. While it’s not overt, it’s clear this is a slap in the face, but Tony brushes it off and waives his usually exorbitant consultant fee solely to be a petty jackass to Senator Stern (because, get this, Tony still wants in – even if in a small role).
Tony’s next brush with the Avengers is in the The Avengers film itself. Tony is enjoying a quiet date night with Pepper when he’s interrupted by Agent Coulson who basically drags him into the “Loki stole the Tesseract from SHIELD” mess. Tony reminds Coulson that he’s a consultant, and Coulson says, “This isn’t about personality profiles anymore” to emphasize how dire the situation is. It’s actually Pepper who convinces Tony to get involved (or at least she’s the one who gives him the go ahead), because Tony was fully willing to tell Coulson “no” if Pepper didn’t want him to go.
We all know what happens next. The team doesn’t gel quite at first. Steve Rogers and Tony especially don’t get along. But then Coulson’s death is that sort of rallying moment to make them put aside their differences. A nuclear warhead is shot at NYC, and Tony – the man who isn’t even officially on the Avengers roster – is the only one who can put it in the wormhole and save everyone. Tony does this unhesitatingly, without even getting to say goodbye to the woman he loves, fully expecting to die, but miraculously he survives –
But lives forever with the psychological scars.
Iron Man 3 details how Tony is coping with his near-death experience – and it’s not good. He can’t sleep. He’s hoarding robots. He’s a “piping hot mess” and he admits in a vulnerable moment that Pepper is the only constant in his life holding him together. By the end of the film, it seems he might’ve resolved some of his trauma. He destroys his Iron Man suits. But then we see in Age of Ultron that Tony is still not well. He’s paranoid, jumpy, he still holds onto his suits. While helping the Avengers mop up HYDRA, Wanda Maximoff hexes him, making him see his worst nightmare.
And his worst nightmare? The Avengers – this group he considers a family even after being rejected by them – lying dead around him while he still lives.
In essence? It was Tony’s love for the Avengers that led to the birth of Ultron, because it was his fear of not doing enough to protect them that drove him to resurrect his and Bruce’s old pipe dream of a “suit of armor around the world.”
Of course we see no reaction from the group to Tony’s horrific vision because he he never tells them what he saw (he admits he can’t). Instead, they blame him, in one instance even physically assault him, for his mistake – a mistake he made because he loves these people so much.
Already we see a pattern with Tony and the Avengers. He’s always the odd-man-out. For one, he was never really technically an original Avenger (he got shoehorned in because of desperation). For two, he was the villain of Age of Ultron while the others got to be heroes (nevermind why he did what he did or the circumstances that led to that decision).
And then? Comes Captain America: Civil War. And it’s Tony’s desperate drive to keep the Avengers together that ends up breaking them apart. While Steve had already given up on the Avengers before the airport fight in Germany (as signified by the fact he removed his “Avengers” patch on his uniform), Tony was still trying to prevent further damage to the team (because he’s a foolish optimist). In his mind, he’d rather the Avengers stick together even under the imperfect Accords than be forced into hiding from their own government, living on the run. By the end of the film, once all the fighting is over, Rhodey is paralyzed, Steve and Tony are no longer on speaking terms, the Avengers are into the wind, T’Challa is back in Wakanda, and it’s only Tony and Vision at the Compound.
… And even then Vision leaves Tony too in Avengers: Infinity War.
In fact, it’s very interesting that, in Avengers: Infinity War, Tony doesn’t interact with any Avengers except Bruce – and even then he doesn’t fight alongside Bruce. Kind of intriguing that Bruce is
ultimately
the one who makes the call to get the Avengers back together even though Tony was the one who had the cellphone on his person for the past two years, right? Even more telling that, by the end of the film, Tony is the Avenger who is furthest from home. He is literally light-yearsaway on an alien planet while everyone else is back on Earth. This is symbolic of the place he’s always had in the Avengers “family” – left in the cold.
Tony’s love for the Avengers, his heart, has been the thing slowly undoing him from the inside out. He’s never truly belonged to the team (as the films have plainly demonstrated), but he tries and tries and tries to do right by them and protect them to the best of his ability. It’s the saddest fucking thing.
Hopefully Avengers 4 finally offers Tony some comfort for all this. Maybe he’ll finally find a family where he belongs.
thor (2011) is an interesting movie to me because i think, despite a few flaws, the reason it never really took off the way iron man or cap:tfa did was because the audience it reached didn’t match the intended audience. the intended audience was so confused by what they saw because it didn’t reflect their ideal in terms of what they thought a thor movie would be, while the audience it ended up attracting claimed the empty spaces and turned their “sub-fandom” into something that practically rejected the fandoms of mcu!iron man and cap at that time
what i’m trying to say here, in essence, is this:
thor (2011) is a chick flick
to prove my point, i went to the world’s most trustworthy database on film analysis, urban dictionary, and found a few definitions obviously written by men
A film that indulges in the hopes and dreams of women and/or girls. A film that has a happy, fuzzy, ridiculously unrealistic ending.
word which refers to movies characteristically geered at young females in their twenties and late teens. Must include: love scenes, kissing, something sad, a happy ending
A sappy film that is generally geared towards women. It is always a love story, usually a comedy, and nausea inducing in men.
Term for a movie geared for women. Quite often seen on cable TV like The Hallmark Channel and endorsed by people like Oprah. These movies make women the heros and show life from a woman’s perspective. Most men hate these films cuz they are cheezy and dumb. Pussy-whipped men like them…or pretend to.
A movie that embodies all that is wrong with the world; a movie which displays a gross over-indulgence into, and exploration of, the workings of the female psyche and the accomanying emotional tendencies.
Pornography for women.
every complaint i have EVER seen about thor (2011) was about anything contained to earth: jane, darcy, not so much selvig, thor being hammer-less and learning to calm down and be gentle, women only liking it because hemsworth is a 6′3 outback steakhouse victoria’s filet mignon with twinkly dream eyes
but i think that’s because that’s the sentimental part of the movie, the emotional part. it’s driven by a romance and the intellect of a woman (arguably two). thor has to learn to get in touch with his softer side in a world that’s a bit more fragile than his own, furthermore there’s no other steaks– i, em, i mean men like him to balance out. there’s no male audience vessel in this movie
none
oh, you’re thinking selvig? i’m thinking not! there’s no male audience vessel.
men can’t relate to this movie
oh, you think they can relate to THOR? in the words of drax, “this is not a dude, you’re a dude. this… is a man”. thor is the ideal boyfriend figure, he belongs to everyone who wants a boyfriend, all the thor stans i know are women and/or like men, if you’re a thor stan and a straight guy i automatically have my suspicions and my eyes are guarded by red flags
#THOR 1 IS A SHAKEPEAREAN CHICK FLICK #THOR IS FOR WOMEN AND THE GAYS AND THAT’S JUST FACTS #the reason why thor’s been called unrelatable for so long was #cos cishet dudes could not fucking relate to him #COS HE A KING MADE OUT OF SUNSHINE WHO LEARNS AND APOLOGISES #FOR HIS MISTAKES #SOMETHING THEY’RE INCAPABLE OF (via @spacefloozy)
You had me at
hemsworth is a 6′3 outback steakhouse victoria’s filet mignon with twinkly dream eyes
I don’t see a lie
“Thor is a Shakespearean Chick Flick” is the truest thing I have ever read. 1/3 of Thor is very Xtra dynasty/royal inheritance drama, and the rest is a romantic comedy.
I literally turned to my longtime Marvel-reading friend after the movie ended and said “You never told me Thor was for GIRLS.”
Script: EMERGING FROM THE THICK LOW-HANGING FOG IS LOKI! Resplendent in horns, arms spread wide, seeming to float towards the bridge like a mythical angel of mercy.
Can we talk about this scene?
I love how this compares to the Stuttgart scene from The Avengers. Instead of seeing him standing above the crowd, he is descending to stand among them. Oh, and save them, too.
Taika waititi did Loki good. RUSSO BROTHER DIDN’T DO JUSTICE TO LOKI
the fact that Loki’s death scene in Thor 2 was originally intended to be real & retconned later and the end where he’s alive was filmed during pickups has me SO fucked up because now I can’t choose between which headcanon I prefer re: his behavior in Ragnarok. like listen, okay, either:
1. loki was planning on playing dead the whole time and so his very sad death scene & everything he said therein was a calculated move and he was practically writing the theatrical version of it (starring matt damon as himself) as he went along
OR
2. loki really thought he was dying and every melodramatic word of his death scene was 100% heartfelt and then after he realized he wasn’t dead he fucking… woke up peaced out to go take over asgard (lol?) and several months later he was sitting on the throne and could remember every word of what he said to thor on that day and was like “wow im so fucking poetic. that should be a play. starring matt damon as Me perhaps”
So, for some reason, people always kinda seem to write the Jötnar as having the same diet as those of Asgard, despite the fact that Asgard is a vibrant, lush land with farms, and Jötunheimr is… You know. Frozen.
So, let’s talk about what the Jötnar are gonna eat.
So, building on my already established idea that the Jötnar don’t put on too much fat, and instead have extra muscle, they’re gonna need some damned protein to sustain it. Because we’re dealing with such a cold climate, we’re probably going to be looking at animals who’ll withstand the cold, but what you won’t see much of is any bigger, greener flowering plants or the like.
So,
Jötunheimr, in my view, has huge, wide, choppy seas. Big, massive waves, very salty, choppy water, and pretty much all the Jötnar are natural swimmers because, uh, they gotta be.
Being as the Jötnar are physically fit and muscular, as well as likely seafaring to at least some extent, we can expect them to eat:
various fish, as well as squid, crustaceans and molluscs
fish eggs
sea birds and their eggs
sea-faring mammals like whales, seals and walruses
sea weeds + plants
And because we’ve already seen some massive beasts that wander around
Jötunheimr, I’d also expect them to hunt that sort of thing. The Inuits eat polar bears as well as animals like caribou, and I definitely don’t think the Jötnar would shy away from hunting and butchering a predator as much as a prey animal.
All of this meat is gonna be super heavy in protein, oils and nutrients that the
Jötnar are gonna fucking need.
I feel like their diet is meat-heavy and meat-centred, but then they’re also gonna have what plant matter is possible to get hold of – I mentioned sea weed and other sea-centred plants, but I would also imagine they eat various edible mosses and fungi that survive the sub zero temperature in the relative warmth of the caves beneath Jötunheimr, and then there’s also stuff like tubers and hardy grasses that they probably eat a fair amount of too.
You know what they’re probably not used to?
Milk. They almost definitely do not eat milk, or cheese, or anything of the kind, except extremely rarely, and I imagine that while the
Jötnar aren’t entirely lactose intolerant, they probably can’t stand to have more than a little bit of milk at a time once they’re no longer babes in arms, and definitely not processed into butter, cheese or any other dairy product.
Then, sweets. Notice how, uh, everything I’ve mentioned so far does not taste sweet. In fact, a lot of it is going to be heavily salty (much of the fatty meat and fish) or bitter (the weeds and tubers). I don’t think the Jötnar eat sweets, and in fact, I imagine they either have no capacity to taste it, or have a very small capacity for sweetness, and are swiftly overwhelmed by pretty much any sweet taste in their mouth. Even a little bit of honey or sugar would just make them gag.
Also, as a result of the stuff they eat – really heavy on meat which probably doesn’t come around that often, and subsequently is probably saved over time, as well as on very tough plants and tubers, I’m actually super attached to the idea of the Jötnar having mildly acidic saliva?
Firstly, it’d break down the plants and tubers easier, making them much, much easier to chew, but it also means they’d be able to withstand meat that had slightly rotted without any issues at all, as it’d just burn right through the acrid nastiness of it, and subsequently rotted stuff which is already a bit acidic would probably be considered a huge delicacy.
Also, I think the Jötnar do have alcohol, but now that you’ve listened to my acid delicacy theory… Yep, you guessed it! I feel like it’d be kind of similar to poitín, which we make here in Ireland out of potatoes (yeah, I know), but instead out of frozen roots and tubers. So it’d be like, very bitter and very acidic, and probably straight-up poisonous to most Asgardians.
The key moment in the entire mcu. Loki’s decision to let go, to fall through the void, to basically kill himself, shapes the entirety of the marvel universe.
If loki hadn’t had let go he never would have encountered Thanos. He never would have been given the mind stone, or led Thanos to the space stone on earth. The avengers would have never have formed. Even if there had been a different threat, odin would have never used dark magic to send thor to earth unless it was loki he was fighting. There would never have been a nuke sent to New York. Tony would have never gone through the portal. Tony would never have built Ultron. Wanda wouldn’t have joined the avengers. Vision wouldn’t have existed. Loki wouldn’t have been imprisoned so frigga would have lived as no one would tell the kurse where to go. Odin wouldn’t have been weakened and die of grief. Meaning that thanos would have been out matched, and, as the tessaract was originally part of odin’s treasure chest, he would have stopped thanos from getting the space stone. And if thanos didn’t have the space stone, none of the events of infinity war would have happened.
All of this happened because loki. Let. Go.
I wonder if loki ever realised the significant effect he would have on the universe. I doubt it. I think he let go because he believed himself as insignificant. He was a second son. Everytime he strive for greatness he was overshadowed or stopped by his father and brother. Loki thought himself a footnote in the universe, but instead, he was the author.
As in the comics, Loki truly is the god of stories. He’s been shaping the story of the mcu, even without knowing it.
It was loki’s story that led us into this mess, and you can be damn sure it will be loki’s story that gets us out of it…
I think the factor that a lot of those “Loki versus Doctor Strange” posts are overlooking is the vast cultural differences in attitudes toward magic that are in play here.
Like, Loki comes from a culture where magic items are mass-produced tools and commodities. Doctor Strange was trained in magic by a culture where even the most trivial sorcerous gadgets have personalities and opinions and probably enjoy messing with your mind.
Loki comes from a culture where the most basic application of combat magic is hitting stuff really hard. Doctor Strange was trained in magic by a culture where the most basic application of combat magic involves giving the space-time continuum a wedgie.
While there’s no doubt that Loki is an enormous skilled magician, fundamentally he approaches magic as a technician would; magic is a complicated and esoteric tool, but it is a tool, and a commonplace one at that. Doctor Strange gets everything he knows about magic from a bunch of cloistered weirdos who regard even the tiniest exercise of magic as a profound expression of one’s truest self and think making a guy choose between being a wizard and ever walking again is a fun character-building exercise.
Basically, what we’re looking at here is an engineer versus an Artist™.
There are certainly cultural differences between Loki and Dr. Strange that I think relate to their differences in approach to magic and I agree with some of this. However, I really think that Loki is just as much an artist as Dr. Strange is a scientist. Dr. Strange was a man of science before he was dropped in a culture that asked him to set aside every thing he believed to be true.
Dr. Strange still approaches magic scientifically. He studies and studies, and he hungers for more. He experiments with different techniques. As a surgeon, he would have to have creative qualities but certainly being dropped into a totally new culture – I think – helped him think even more abstractly and expand his idea of what is and what is not possible.
On the other hand, Loki has always used magic creatively but he was dropped into a culture that valued control and order. Yes, magic is approached in a very mechanical way so to speak. It is commonplace in Asgard, but not the kind of magic that Loki actually likes to do. It’s either highly frowned upon or banned altogether to do the kind of magic Loki actually likes to do.
In Asgard, you’re not supposed to use magic to be deceptive or to bend the rules. You’re supposed to learn what you’re taught. You can use it to fight your opponent, but tricking them is viewed as weak and dishonorable. It’s much better to fight for honor and glory, so sure that just means hitting things very hard for the most part. This is very limiting.
Loki can abide by those rules sometimes and he can use magic on a technical level using proper spells and tomes and magical items because that’s what he was taught to do, but… Loki is magic. He can do things that his peers can’t. He creates as much as he borrows from lessons, and he probably genuinely believes that Dr. Strange is just as below him as his peers in this regard.
I don’t want to or mean to be pedantic here – but Loki has tried to separate himself from the culture he was raised into for a reason and I believe that is in part because Loki is an “architect” as much as an “engineer.” The movies don’t do a good job of showing it, but Loki eat, breathes, and sleeps magic in a way that no one else in his society does which has given him much frustration.
Hence, why Loki sets himself apart from others who “do” magic.
The MCU was trying sell a narrative about Bucky wanting a ‘Simple Life’ after being freed of HYDRA, herding his sheep and goats in the rural Wakanda farmlands… but that entire narrative was wiped away when Bucky grinned at the security dome and said “god I love this place”. And it was beautiful.
Because we all know that Wakanda technology is EXACTLY why Bucky wanted to stay in Wakanda. We all know he spent his days hovering around Shuri, just watching her work in the labs because he wanted to see the technology being built. We all know that Bucky lived in a modern apartment in the city and was in awe of all the tiny technological advances. Bucky probably used his sheepherding money to buy Wakandan tech, too – and it was probably tech that did nothing of importance, Bucky just wanted it because it was cool. He probably couldn’t contain his excitement over dumb stuff like kitchen equipment, and Wakandans found him oddly endearing because of that.
This is the boy who spent his last night before being shipped to the Front at a Stark Expo because he needed to see a floating car. A city in Wakanda is everything pre-war Bucky would have dreamed of a Perfect Future.
Tasertrickslove 