[ SECRET POST #2069 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2069 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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[The City of Dreaming Books]


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[Teen Girl Squad]


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[Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind]


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[Avengers]


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[The Monkees]


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Notes:

Important: I'm really sorry about this, but I accidentally clicked the wrong thing and deleted the submission post from last week instead of saving it. Managed to save the first page (25) of secrets, but the rest (a bit over 100) are gone.

If you submitted something last week (Aug 26-Sept 1), please resubmit it here and it will still go up this week.

The submissions post for next week is linked below as usual.

Secrets Left to Post: 00 pages, 000 secrets from Secret Submission Post #296.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

IDK, I don't think Loki being influenced somehow would turn him into a helpless pawn necessarily. If he was actively fighting the mind control, it would explain why he got the Avengers to form a team to begin with. Loki's not the brightest bulb in the box but he's also not an idiot. Why would he get the Avengers to team up against him if he didn't have some reason for it? And I don't buy that he wanted to do it for the glory either because outside of Thor, he had no reason to give a fuck about them. It wasn't even because Thor liked them because Thor didn't give a fuck about the Avengers either at first.

So he could be mind controlled but fighting it off and still happy to manipulate the fuck out of the Avengers. If he started to lose the fight against it, it would explain why his ability to manipulate people went to shit as soon as he got to Stark tower. It's hard to understand how someone so skilled at reading people and getting them to react just so would suddenly suck so hardcore at it otherwise. Not without him suffering from boring old cliche generic evil villain overconfidence, anyway.

[(Anonymous)]

You mean Loki actually showed any ability to manipulate the Avengers before Stark Tower? His big moment would have been getting the Avengers to argue and be at odds with each other, which already would have happened without him because "ragtag team that doesn't agree" is half the point of the movie. He kind of indirectly got Bruce to hulk out, but what was really pissing everyone off is shit they found out about SHIELD themselves. He tried to intimidate Natasha, but it backfired. His most successful acts of manipulation were with a magical wand that did it for him.

Not without him suffering from boring old cliche generic evil villain overconfidence, anyway.

This is probably pretty much it. Joss Whedon didn't seem to be thinking about Loki's characterization as a formidable villain because hey, guys, wouldn't it be funny if he was just basically Wile E. Coyote instead? And so Loki's credibility completely went off the rails halfway through.

[(Anonymous)]

IDK he seemed pretty happy to be trololololing Steve, Tony, and Thor. He could have up and vanished at any point during that whole deal but instead he got them fighting because that's what he wanted right then.

But why get them to all meet up to begin with unless that was also a plan? He could have just vanished instead of agreeing to go into custody in Germany. I don't really think it was about Bruce because Bruce was totally unnecessary to his ultimate plan. He failed at psyching out Natasha but tbh I don't think she succeeded in manipulating him either. Loki's "...what" echoed my own because she drew her conclusion from nothing. And it turned out to be meaningless, too.

You could be right and Joss just wasn't thinking about it but Joss is pretty well known for giving his villains nuance and layers. He's also pretty well known for making his villains smart, or at the very least, really effective. If Loki was just doing the cliche villain thing, it would be going against Joss' usual tendency.

[intrigueing]

Oh I dunno, seeing Loki *think* he was being all Hannibal Lecter-ish and smart and manipulative and genre-savvy and putting on the impression that he was totally BAMF and scary and competent and dangerous, only for him to start epically failing halfway through the movie and continue to epically fail by underestimating everyone based on how much they sucked as a team at first every time he tried to reassert himself and winding up as just another pathetic supervillain was half the satisfaction of the film for me, tbqh.

I would've been bummed if Loki was as lame and stupid as he ultimately was in the Avengers had the plot been different or had he been going head-to-head with a single superhero, but in the Avengers? The Avengers wasn't really a "hero vs villain" story. It was a "hero vs hero being totally ineffective against villain -> all heroes vs villain who is actually no match for them" story. The "archenemy" of the heroes wasn't Loki, it was themselves. The story was them overcoming themselves — overcoming their conflicts with each other and overcoming SHIELD trying to control them and lead them around by their noses — in order to save the world (which wouldn't have needed saving if SHIELD and they themselves hadn't been proving the human race worthy of notice by alien races). Narratively speaking, Loki was more of a catalyst than a villain.

[terabient]

But why does Loki need to be mind controlled? IMO 'actively fighting mind control (but still being, well, controlled)' and 'Controlled because he's being threatened' are essentially the same thing, but Loki's reasons for his actions become harder to read if he has some level of autonomy. Personally, I like wondering how much of Loki's cruelty was due to his need to convince the Chitauri that he was their ally, and how much of it was just Loki being a dick. The mind control route removes a lot of that uncertainty, even if one assumes he was fighting against it.

As far as bringing together the Avengers and then failing miserably against them later...IDK I didn't think Loki was actively trying to bring the Avengers together; I mean, the only person in the whole movie who was trying to make that happen was Fury. Even S.H.I.E.L.D wasn't wholly on board with the Avengers being...a thing. Loki's just good at playing situations to his advantage. Like, I don't think he actually intended to get captured by S.H.I.E.L.D.; he just knew how to use his captivity to his advantage.

I didn't see his loss in Avengers as a huge personal failure--up until the Chitauri invasion the Avengers are doing a pretty good job of kicking their own asses, and when Loki confronts Tony at Stark Tower Tony's retort to Loki's taunting is basically "No, seriously, we've put aside our differences and we really will kick your ass now." From a viewer standpoint we know that's going to happen because it's a summer blockbuster, but from Loki's view there's not much evidence that the Avengers would be able to stop him.

[(Anonymous)]

+ all the numbers, this is pretty much how I saw it too.

And I don't think "Loki being crueler than he wanted to because of the Chitauri" makes him more sympathetic or woobified either, it just shows that he was willing to do anything to get a chance to act on his resentment and jealousy and egomania.

[(Anonymous)]

It could make him more sympathetic if you interpreted it as a response to them threatening him with a fate worse than death/"you will long for something as sweet as pain"/whatever rather than him wanting them to keep giving him toys to try to conquer the world with, but yeah.

[(Anonymous)]

Yes, this. In response to the second paragraph... Fandom likes to make Loki out to be awesome at planning things, but... he really isn't. At least in the movies, I don't know about the comics. He isn't proactive, he's reactive. He improvises. He's great at coming up with stuff on the fly and manipulating a situation to his advantage. But fandom likes to make him out to be this awesome god of plotting and stuff when he's really just good at making shit up as he goes along.

[(Anonymous)]

And even then, he comes off as the ultimate master of "Fuck you, I meant to do that."

[(Anonymous)]

Basically, yeah. He's the god of winging it and then making it look like you planned it that way all along. Screw mischief.

[(Anonymous)]

Considering he tried to commit genocide long before the Chitauri even entered the scene, I'm inclined to think that the cruelty was just him getting his kicks out of bullying someone weaker than he was...But that's just my take on it.