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Meta: Loki’s Deleted “Coronation” Scene
Time to deconstruct this baby.
First of all, let’s start with CONTEXT. Context part one: Loki has just been banished to his jail cell for eternity. Odin has just condemned him to a lifetime sentence without visitation rights by friends or family. He has disowned him and claimed not only that his “birthright was to die”–which Odin during Loki’s childhood repeatedly lied about by omission, and by outright statements such as “both of you were born to rule”–but also that he should be grateful to Odin for taking pity on Loki, a helpless bastard infant (allegedly) outcast by his royal Jotun family, and letting him live. Context part two: Loki protects himself by using lies and illusions. He dons masks and personae, and utilizes both physical shape-shifting and mirages of extreme elaborateness, as his arsenal. Not only as his blade, but as his SHIELD. So when Loki uses illusions, we know he feels either physically, mentally, or emotionally threatened.
What we see before us is Loki imagining up, and probably casting ornate illusions (to entertain himself in boredom and sorrow, because trust me, mercurial emotions and extreme intellect are a miserable combo in a prison cell) of, the coronation that never was. What do we remember that Loki’s said about inheriting the throne of Asgard? “I never wanted the throne [to Thor]: I only ever wanted to be your equal” (Thor 2011). However as equality with Thor, in Odin’s eyes, is contingent upon worthiness to inherit the throne, the throne becomes conflated with that equality, and Loki seeks it for the sole, very basic and dare I say very human desire to be accepted unconditionally by his family and culture. What do we also know? That Frigga once granted Loki the throne during the Odinsleep and Thor’s banishment, LEGITIMATELY, only to be taken away when Thor somewhat miraculously grew a conscience and a better perspective of how to treat his subjects in the Nine with respect.
What does this deleted scene, therefore, tell us? It tells us that Loki is –feeling threatened –protecting and entertaining himself –imagining what he longs for and believes he deserves.
So let’s interpret this “daydream,” and in doing so interpret where Loki’s elusive misconceptions and so-called “delusions” about his family dynamics, and the injustices done him, lie. Because let’s not forget: EVERY SECOND OF THIS DELETED SCENE IS SPECIFICALLY FROM LOKI’S POV. That makes it a splendid look inside his typically obfuscated psyche.
**********************
First let’s talk DIMENSIONS:
This view of the Throne Room is somewhat larger and certainly more densely packed than the view that we see during Thor’s coronation (which, food for thought, Loki surely remembers DISRUPTING by INTRODUCING FROST GIANTS INTO THE VAULT WHICH LED ULTIMATELY TO THOR RUSHING HEADLONG INTO JOTUNHEIM AND LOKI LEARNING HIS TRUE HERITAGE, WHICH WAS THE BEGINNING OF LOKI’S UNDOING–lots and lots of associations with the SHATTERING OF TRUST, SELF-THWARTING, AND THE UNVEILING OF TRAGIC TRUTHS for Loki EMBEDDED IN THE **VERY PHYSICAL AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL SPACE OF THE THRONE ROOM***. Never forget that!).
Also, note: cinematography is NEVER AN ACCIDENT: what we see, and the sequence of visuals we are presented in tandem with acting and a score, are conscious artistic decisions that feed the narrative for us on an unconscious level. So some filmographer decided that Loki’s perception of a coronation should be DISTANT, REVERENT, IMMENSE, DENSELY PACKED WITH TINY PEOPLE. Thor’s coronation, on the other hand, is much more focused on a few people closest to the elder and more gregarious sibling. His triumph is louder and more in your face. Loki’s has almost the religious fervor of a saint’s canonization, SUGGESTING A PATH LONG TRODDEN AND A VICTORY HARD EARNED (rather than a privilege taken for granted).
Next, let’s talk about WHO IS PRESENT:
People whom Loki claims to “loathe,” who were “only Thor’s friends.” Uh huh. While it was clear that Thor’s friends The Warrior Three and Lady Sif always tolerated Loki out of love of Thor more than loved or accepted the younger prince, in involving them in his daydream, Loki clearly conveys that he STILL VALUES their opinion of him on some level. Who betrayed Loki first in Thor 2011? Sif and the Warriors 3. Who was Loki’s FIRST EVIDENCE that he’ll never be offered the devoted fealty that Thor is offered? Sif and the Warriors 3. This is both a sentimental detail, then, and ALSO proof that Loki will always CONCEPTUALIZE A FRIEND AND POTENTIAL SUBJECT’S BETRAYAL, WILL SCHEMATIZE THAT TREASONOUS ACT, AS THOR’S CHILDHOOD FRIENDS. Interest side note: most people agree that Fandral was always the least abrasive toward Loki out of all of Thor’s best friends, so appropriate, isn’t it, to see him singled out in his own cameo?
Now, how about Loki himself. And this frankly I consider the most heartbreaking component:
Red cloak COVERING UP, rather than loudly boasting (as in Avengers Assemble), his signature green and gold garb?
Loki equates royalty with THOR (who, ironically, later says to Loki-as-Odin, “I’d rather be a good man than a great king (Thor: The Dark World)).” What does Loki say when Frigga interrupts, and asks what he’s doing? “I’m giving the people WHAT THEY WANT.”
“The people,” AKA Asgard, Loki is saying–and FULLY CONCEDING/SURRENDERING TO–they want THOR. Not just THOR THE PERSON, but also ***THE CULTURAL ARCHETYPE THAT THOR EMBODIES.***
The ERASURE of Loki’s own identity, and the ASSUMPTION of Thor’s–
–COMPLETE WITH MJOLNIR–are Loki’s ONE WAY OF RECONCILING HIS HOPE OF EQUALITY WITH HIS “BETTER” BROTHER TO REALITY.
“I remember a shadow. Living in the shade of your greatness.” (Avengers Assemble).
***From Loki’s POV, being accepted and loved and SAFE are contingent upon either standing in Thor’s shadow, OR BECOMING THOR.***
There is no way to be LOKI, and succeed, Loki believes, at this point in the game, exiled to a prison cell for th rest of his natural life, alone, and condemned for behaviors that Odin himself–and Thor, before Thor reformed!!!!–exhibited. To be Odin and Thor is both INEVITABLE and, because Loki is LOKI, and NOT Odin or Thor, DOOM. It’s a paradox in which Loki can’t win.
That Loki longs to erase himself and become Thor, but also full well knows he cannot, is evinced in what he says when Frigga tells him that creating too many illusions means getting lost in them.
What does he say? And in such a way that you MUST watch the video to get the full gut-punch tragic force of it:
“Precisely.” With all the sorrow and resignation in the cosmos. “Precisely.” I want to get lost in the impossible fantasy of being as unilaterally loved as my big brother. I want to possess all the traits that make a person an Odinson, and therefore, worthy. But green is not red, it’s red’s complement.
Cloaking myself in red will not make me Thor. I’m here in Asgard’s dungeons to prove it. ******************
A note, too, on Loki’s DEMEANOR ONCE CAUGHT:
First, we feign absolute mad glee. We pretend we don’t give a flying fuck anymore about how others perceive us (taken vastly to the task by the daydream itself). We rebuff the concerned query of the only person who MIGHT be capable of understanding us (Frigga) with another weapon: humor.
Then, as it always does with Frigga, who is both compassionate and perceptive, it falls flat.
And that is when we get defensive. That is when all hope is lost.
Come to think of it, a lot of my Loki feels stem from the fact that he is a huge example of mental illness and emotional instability being poorly handled and steadily made worse as a result.
After attempted suicide, massive implied trauma and multiple breaks…
There’s something that’s been bugging me about the first Thor film for a while, which is the fact Thor’s great “revelation” is this nebulous thing that is implied to have occurred but isn’t really actually presented to the audience? Like, yes, it would be a great shock to be dropkicked off your home planet and lose your fancy magic powers, but I’m not sure where and how that leads to “I was wrong to re-ignite war against our hereditary enemies, obviously they are people too, and I must stop Loki because Genocide Is WrongTM”.
Especially since the fate of the Jotnar is never picked up again? It’s just kind of assumed that- well, that no one on Asgard gives a shit if they did all die from delayed effects of the planet getting a hole punched into it. Despite Thor apparently believing that preventing such warranted smashing the Bifrost?
Granted, Asgard seems to rely on the Bifrost to the exclusion of possessing spaceworthy craft, so they couldn’t render aid if they wanted to?
But it’s weird that the last act of Thor hinges on Thor having had some great realization and it just-isn’t there?
Why did you change your mind, Thor?
Was Darcy watching Schindler’s List for one of her classes or something? Considering what is revealed about the war with the Svartalfar, does Asgard even have a concept of genocide, or is it simply considered a “dishonorable” tactic that is nevertheless lauded in practice because “yay, we won’t have to worry about that enemy anymore”.
What made you change your mind, Thor?
Why did you break the bridge when you had gleefully murdered someone for an insult 3 days before?
Why did you change your mind?
What made you change your mind?
…and why didn’t it seem to stick?
This deleted scene is the saddest thing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe because it confirms what Loki was saying all along.
In Loki’s wildest fantasies, he’s not sitting on the throne with Odin’s spear.
He’s wielding Mjolnir and being cheered and accepted by Asgard like Thor, as his equal.
And that fucking hurts.
One of the lines in “Thor: The Dark World” that gets overlooked, I think (possibly because Marvel cut it from the final edit) was when Thor is talking to Frigga about Loki, and she says to him that he and Odin always shone so brightly, it was hard for Loki to find any sun for himself, or something to that effect.
Anyway, this is such a massively important line, because it basically tells us EVERYTHING about Loki’s childhood, and how he felt. And here again is yet another example of how absolutely WRONG Taika Waitit’s view of these characters was, given what I heard about him wanting to include a flashback in Ragnarok showing Thor as a sensitive and bullied child, and Loki as dark and mean. That would have been in DIRECT conflict with everything we know about these characters, just like everything else in Ragnarok is.
From what Frigga says to Thor, it’s plain as day that Loki as a child was always struggling just to catch up to Thor, to try and be equal to him, not just in Odin’s and Frigga’s eyes, but in the eyes of probably the entire kingdom. It tells us that Thor, as a boy, was as popular and well liked, as charming and charismatic and as easy to make friends as he is as an adult, and that Loki was very much the introvert, quiet, awkward and isolated. And from Loki’s desperation to win Odin’s approval in the first Thor film, I think it becomes apparent that that desperation grew directly from his feeling inadequate and lesser to the standard of both his father and his big brother growing up. And it’s just so unbelievably sad, to envision that. To envision Loki constantly struggling, trying to match Thor, trying to make himself seem as good as Thor for Odin, trying to make himself seem like a “true and worthy son”, as he says in the first film. How anyone could miss this about his character is beyond me, unless they’re being willfully obtuse.
And we see from this one line, that Loki’s entire motivation is based on a feeling of lack on his own part. He feels like he’s less. He feels like he isn’t as good as Thor, and that Odin must not love him because he’s not as good as Thor, and until he discovers he’s a Jotun, he doesn’t know why, and he can’t figure it out, and he keeps trying and trying to do the right thing to somehow make him, in his father’s eyes, Thor’s equal. Think of the kind of psychological effect that would have on a person, especially a young man growing up in the kind of culture Loki did. Think of the burden of constantly feeling like there’s something WRONG with you, because you’re constantly measuring yourself against the perfection of an older sibling who everyone loves, while everyone treats you like you’re strange, and even are at times outwardly hostile and cruel to you. Think of the weight of trying to figure out how to change yourself so that others will treat you like they treat your perfect older sibling, but not being able to, because you don’t really know what it is about you that makes everyone dislike or hate you in the first place. And then think of what it must have been like, to discover you’re from a race of beings who the people you’ve grown up around consider to be monsters, who are those people’s mortal enemies, and coming to the swift and awful realization that that must have been it all along. That THAT’S what was wrong with you. That that’s why you’ve always been an outcast.
I just think that one moment from The Dark World was so important for understanding Loki’s character.
And yet, once again, Marvel proves it’s own stupidity by cutting it out. Just like they cut out so many scenes from the first Thor film which showed Loki in a more sympathetic light. Gee, it’s almost like they didn’t want people feeling for him. Too bad they ended up doing so anyway.
Literally can’t believe that it took the official marvel press release about it for everyone to finally accept that Loki was being Big Controlled by Thanos in avengers like…what the good fuck did everyone think he was doing in this scene. he looks UNHINGED. like he just got hooked up from that succ machine in Monsters Inc that drains your skin of all its melanin
I don’t want to piss off other fans, but I’ve been mulling over this for a while. The whole “Thor loves Loki and Loki loves Thor” “there is not Thor without Loki & no Loki without Thor” thing – I can’t see it. From Loki, yes, but not from Thor.
TDW was what really killed this supposed relationship for me. After Loki is put in his cell – to be locked away for the rest of his life, solitary confinement 24/7 – Thor doesn’t mention Loki at all. We’re not shown someone mentioning him, and Thor reacting with some emotion (hurt, anger, grief, nostalgia, regret, ANYTHING). Loki is out of sight and out of mind, and it’s easy for Thor to get over him. As I said just before, it would make sense if Thor was deliberately shutting down his emotions with regard to Loki, but we’re not shown that, either. There’s nothing.
The one exception is the deleted scene of a conversation between Frigga & Thor, after Frigga has been secretly visiting Loki. And that scene horrifies me even more than Thor’s silence does.
In the MCU, Thor explains that magic = science. He asks his mother if she regrets educating her son. Her asks why the “indulgences” of books and visits. Thor believes that Loki should be locked away and left to rot, for the rest of his entire life, and that even his mother shouldn’t bother about him. There is zero compassion, only confusion. He genuinely doesn’t understand why Frigga is having anything to do with her son anymore. This shows exactly how Thor is feeling about Loki – he doesn’t care. You would think they were speaking about a random prisoner whom Thor barely knows.
There’s no relationship there. There’s no love. Thor isn’t lost without Loki. He barely spares him a thought.
It’s not just TDW, though. I was shocked at how the first Thor movie ended. The focus is on Jane trying to get back to Thor, not Loki’s suicide. Like in TDW, Thor spends more energy pining over his girlfriend of three days than his brother of a thousand years. Yes, he’s anguished and grieving and horrified when Loki lets go. But he gets past that very quickly. Hell, Sif shows more emotion over Loki after the initial shock of his fall.
I know a lot of Loki fans don’t like Thor: Ragnarok, but unfortunately, it is canon. And I don’t think that the way Thor treats Loki is out of character for him at all – it’s got worse, sure, but it’s not much different. Why should the man who refused to acknowledge Loki’s grief for their mother, care about Loki’s feelings after their father’s death? Thor has already questioned if Loki has literally any good qualities anymore, and threatens to kill him if he “betrays” him again, so why not the electrocution scene?
You could say – oh, “you don’t understand what you love until you lose it”, but Thor has “lost” Loki 2x before his real death, and didn’t come away from that with any more appreciation for his brother. And the scenes where he grieves over Loki’s body are moving, but who wouldn’t react that way if a family member was killed in front of them – whether they were close to them or not?? Hell, I suspect I’d react that way if my father was killed like that, and I certainly do not love him.
Grief over a person – even the amount that Thor shows – does not necessarily mean a genuine, heartfelt love for them. There are all sorts of reasons we mourn a person. Often, it’s for ourselves rather than for them.
I’m sure that at one point Thor loved Loki. But he’s mourning for the past, not for Loki himself. As he says before letting him out his cell, the Loki he once knew is gone. But that’s always the case – we change, we grow, we become better, we become worse. I’m not saying Thor has to love Loki. Sometimes, because people change, we can’t love them any more. But Thor got over Loki pretty easily – his deaths, his imprisonment, even his relief at finding he was alive after all. Which suggests to me that his love for Loki wasn’t all that strong in the first place.
Maybe the script-writers didn’t intend it to be that way. Maybe the intention was to show that close, brotherly relationship that TH goes on about in interviews. But if so, they failed at making it happen, and this is what we were given instead.
please don’t hate me
You know, another thing that struck me about Thor: Ragnarok, and this is something I was suspicious and concerned about since long before the film actually came out, just from the news we were hearing about it at the time, and which was horribly confirmed when it actually was released, was that in all the reviews for the film (and I read dozens of reviews), I realized it was the first Marvel film, and certainly the first Thor film, that Loki had appeared in, in which he goes almost totally unmentioned in the reviews. And across the board, if he was mentioned at all, it’s the first time we don’t see the critics praising Tom Hiddelston’s performance, or talking about how Loki is a more interesting character than Thor. I knew that was going to happen, because the director kept making it a point, really, shoving in down people’s throats in interviews, that this was going to be “Thor’s film”, that Thor was going to be made front and center. As if he wasn’t front and center in the last two THOR films, and gee and wow, Loki just happened to be a more powerful and impactful character, despite his far lesser screen time. I knew the second I heard that, that Taika Waititi’s solution to the Thor problem would be to aggressively make Loki seem inferior to Thor, despite the fact that it would utterly ignore and even destroy previously established characterization for BOTH of them. Talk about uncreative, lazy writing. There’s a reason Tom Hiddleston and Loki don’t get even a fraction of the attention each was given in the previous reviews of the first two films, and also even The Avengers film. It’s because Waititi purposefully wrote a character who was both insignificant and flimsy, who was emasculated and idiotic. Basically, a character who had nothing whatever to do with the Loki of the first films. And yet I still see people trying to claim Loki progressed as a character, that he grew, etc… LOL, no. It was total character assassination is what it was, because Taika Waititi’s ass had a very real agenda in wanting to steal the spot light from Tom Hiddleston and give it to Chris Hemsworth. And I guess he succeeded, because again, look back over reviews of this film, and compare them to reviews of “Thor” and “Thor: The Dark World”, and notice the absolutely glaring difference in regards to Loki and how he’s perceived. In reviews for the first two films, Loki absolutely captivates the critics, many of them talking about how he’s the most interesting and complex character in the whole MCU. In reviews of Ragnarok, he’s either not mentioned at all, or he’s mentioned as being a wasted opportunity and inconsequential to the plot and story. That was purposeful on the director’s part. I absolutely know it was.
You know what’s the saddest part about Thor: Ragnarok? The fact that this is probably the happiest we’ve seen Loki. Stuck in a foreign planet when he was sure all his family had died and he could never go back to Asgard.
And is in that moment when he decides to get rid of the green aesthetic, which has always been Disney’s color for both evil and magic. He lets himself drink and laugh and goes for Prussian Blue and Yellow, which represent royalty and were most common for Frigga and the royal guard of Asgard.
He’s trapped on a planet where no one cares about who he is or whatever he’s done in the past. In Sakaar the Grandmaster has grown fond of him and he can use his silvertongue skills to climb to the top. He goes to parties and talks to people and they don’t side-eye him or wonder about whatever might be his next evil deed.
He’s acknowledged but not questioned.
He’s not perpetually teary-eyed or spitting hurtful words to people and while he is completely alone and without a family, he seems relaxed for once and happy.
“To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.”
— Hannah Kent, Burial Rites (via books-n-quotes)
You think you could make Loki tell us where the Tesseract is?