thelightofthingshopedfor asked

Loki and/or the MCU in general, if you've already gotten one of those!

veliseraptor

[send me a topic and i’ll tell you something i like about it]

I mean, I wrote some about what I like about Loki in Norse Mythology, but I can go on about Loki in the MCU. You know, if you want. 

one of my favorite things about Loki in the MCU is how complicated he is - how twisty, how it’s hard to pin him down. his motivations are both clear and opaque, and it often seems like they’re contradictory - he says one thing and projects another, he presents a different face in public or alone. he doesn’t like to fit in one mold. he plays roles, he performs, and every so often that mask gets pulled away and there’s a glimpse of what’s underneath - and then it’s back, and the thing is that both of those things are real, are true, are a part of Loki. 

also: I love how emotional he is. like, he denies it, he wants to be cold and closed off and impermeable, but Loki is a seething mass of feelings: anger and hurt and misery and yearning, and they’re all tangled together in this big gnarly mess that I don’t think even he knows how to untangle. he wants like six contradictory things at the same time, and doesn’t know how to choose one. 

and the identity issues around Loki, around him not knowing who he is or who he wants to be - the “performing roles” cuts into this, but also in Thor the way he is trying to re-establish his identity by symbolically eradicating the part of himself (the Jotun part) he desperately wants to reject, and the way that part becomes his synecdoche for everything he hates about himself. like, everything bad, as in his speech to Odin, comes from this one thing.

also, like, let me tell you about my feelings about self-loathing characters. there are a lot of feelings. especially specifically about self-loathing villains, actually. A Lot of Feelings.