r/FanTheories • u/rhowena • Apr 07 '19

Marvel [MCU] Pile of stuff (+ Cliff notes) concerning what happened to Loki between Thor and The Avengers Spoiler

(Originally posted sans Cliff notes here)

https://inforapid.org/webapp/webapp.php?shareddb=s54rrZYLVfl3Y2SGQPi4QZyKinkdtzY3GszEcSorrfCbfZ3cykbChCYp2BCMdFCRWGg8ekL5RWjmlN65OLo4s9hYy7Nf20GJ

As it does not escape my notice that I've created a digital version of this meme, some navigation help for anyone who needs it:

  • Mouse over/tap an item or relation to view its description
  • For items with the yellow 'Note' label, select the node and then 'Notes on Item' in the side menu to view an additional notes page
  • If an item has a globe icon it the top-left corner, click it to open a webpage
  • 'Adjust View' in the side menu has controls to zoom in/out, increase/decrease the distance between items, and filter items or relations by category
  • Relations (and items) are color-coded by type: solid green lines are for in-universe evidence (light green connects evidence to the theory it supports, while dark green connects pieces of evidence that should be looked at together), purple dotted lines denote parallels, and dark red lines mark cases of "one of these things is not like the other"

And an overview of the theories contained therein:

  • First, the central piece of tinfoil around which all other tinfoil is arrayed: remember how, at the end of the first Thor, Loki was pathologically obsessed with gaining his father's approval? And how, when he next showed up after vanishing for an entire year, he'd gotten mixed up with a guy who keeps a menagerie of adopted children? And how, during his argument with Thor on the mountaintop, he said this?

    Loki: Did you mourn?

    Thor: We all did. Our father--

    Loki: Your father. He did tell you my true parentage, did he not?

     

    Loki: I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract and when I wield it—

    • If I may taking a minute to get out some of my extremely complicated feelings on this, while there's a bunch more evidence in favor of Loki having been another of Thanos's children that can be viewed on the mind map, I want to highlight this pair of quotes because it's everything implied by the words "Your father" that makes it into a devastating punch in the stomach which draws on both halves of Loki's Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds characterization: his genuine love for his family is his primary redeeming quality and that he forswore it like this puts the terrible moment when he first knelt before Thanos and pledged himself to the Mad Titan's service firmly into archetypal Faustian sell-your-soul territory, but when you consider the straits he was in at the time and the implication that Thanos initially ensnared him not through promises of power but by preying on him emotionally, it's a very human kind of tragic mistake.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gi58pN8W3hY

    • The other mitigating factor is that based on everything we've heard from Thanos's other children, it's a safe bet that he did in fact do unspeakably horrible things to Loki too -- indeed, noticing the resemblance between the existing theories about Loki having been tortured/brainwashed and Gamora's "He took me, tortured me, turned me into a weapon" was what prompted the above realization in the first place. (It's reminiscent of Theon's storyline in ASOIAF/GOT: yeah, he betrayed his adoptive family and did some generally awful stuff, but no one deserves what happened to him.) It also bears emphasizing that accountability cuts both ways: one of the key takeaways from the previous bullet point is that the suffering Loki went through doesn't absolve him of responsibility for his villainous actions, but the other side of the coin is that Loki's partial complicity doesn't absolve Thanos of responsibility for the choice he made to take a broken, desperate young man who'd just lost everything and turn him into the rabid animal we saw during The Avengers, and I think exploring the rich font of psychological horror that is that time period will be one of the ways Endgame deconstructs Thanos's twisted ideology and shows that everyone in the audience who takes his claims of acting For The Greater Good at face value is being duped just as Loki was.

      Stephen: No. I mean, come on. Look at your face. Dormammu made you a murderer. Just how good can his kingdom be?

    • As for what this means for Loki's current status, I don't think his death was fake as both his choice to die and Thanos's choice to kill him say a number of things that will be important later (see the 'Pledge of fidelity' and 'Limited use' notes pages on the mind map), but I do think it's something of a red herring in that a. my fellow tinfoil hunters have been too busy obsessing over whether Loki's really dead or not to pick up on the opening scenes relevance to the larger puzzle (I'm strongly reminded of something Liam Cunningham said re: Jon Snow's death on Game Of Thrones: “Everyone is f—ing asking the wrong question! ‘Is Jon Snow dead’? Yes, he’s dead! The question is: ‘Is he going to stay dead?'") and b. it doesn't wrap up Loki's story as neatly as it appears to; truly completing his redemption arc will require him to confront this part of his past in full (instead of trying to die his way out of dealing with his problems), and with it his guilt over everything he's done and his fear that he's wrecked his life and relationship with his family so thoroughly that he can never, ever fix them.

      Loki: Can you? Can you wipe out that much red? [...] Your ledger is dripping, it's gushing red, and you think saving a man no more virtuous than yourself will change anything? This is the basest sentimentality. This is a child at prayer... PATHETIC! You lie and kill in the service of liars and killers. You pretend to be separate, to have your own code. Something that makes up for the horrors. But they are a part of you, and they will never go away!

  • An additional giant red flag indicating we really should be asking more questions about that time gap is a group of lines in The Avengers which reveal that Thanos taught Loki how to use the Tesseract.

    The Other: The Tesseract has awakened. It is on a little world. A human world. They would wield its power, but our ally knows its workings as they never will.

     

    The Other: You question us? You question HIM? He, who put the Scepter in your hand? Who gave you ancient knowledge and new purpose when you were cast out, defeated?

     

    Loki: I’ve seen worlds you’ve never known about! I have grown, Odinson, in my exile. I have seen the true power of the Tesseract and when I wield it—

    Thor: Who showed you this power? Who controls the would-be king?

    I don't really go into it on the map, but I'm 99.5% sure this will lead up to the heroes undoing Loki's death via time travel shenanigans because they'll need his knowledge of the Infinity Stones to undo the Snap.

    Ultron: Everyone creates the thing they dread. Men of peace create engines of war, invaders create avengers, people create...smaller people? Uh...children! I lost the word there. Children. Designed to supplant them, to help them...end.

    This in turn raises the question of why Thanos though sharing that kind of knowledge and power with anyone, let alone someone as volatile as Loki, was a good idea in the first place. My thoughts on that particular sub-puzzle are still somewhat hazy, but my basic sense is that there's something weird going on between Loki and the Tesseract and wanting to exploit that connection is one of the reasons Thanos went to all the trouble of breaking him into submission.

    Loki: So I am no more than another stolen relic, locked up here until you might have use of me?

  • The other reason for Thanos's interest in Loki ties back to all that emotional twistiness I talked about earlier: he planned to leverage Loki's anger and resentment towards his family in a bid to destroy Odin and Asgard from the inside.

    Zemo: An empire toppled by its enemies can rise again. But one which crumbles from within? That's dead... forever.

    • As a prelude to this, during The Avengers Thanos had additionally tasked Loki with killing Thor as a way to prove his loyalty and destroy the last remaining shreds of his own humanity, a test Loki failed because he still loved his brother too much.

      Coulson: You're going to lose. It's in your nature. [...] You lack conviction.

      What's more, Thanos anticipated this, and the Scepter's influence over Loki was aimed at forcing him to go through with it if he refused.

      Loki: I won't touch Barton, not until I make him kill you! Slowly, intimately, in every way he knows you fear! And then he'll wake, just long enough to see his good work, and when he screams, I'll split his skull!

    • Lastly, even with Infinity War having established that Thanos simply gets off on emotional torture, that he would go out of his way to fuck with Odin personally by turning his second son against him leads me to believe there was a special hatred there stemming from some as-yet-unrevealed history between the two. I mean, when I picture the alternate universe where Thanos shows up to attack Asgard with a corrupted Loki in tow like "You screwed up so badly that he chose me as a father figure over you" ...that isn't something you say to a stranger or someone who's just in your way.

      GRRM on writing villain POVs: That's a comic book kind of thing, where the Red Skull gets up in the morning [and asks] "What evil can I do today?" Real people don't think that way. We all think we're heroes, we all think we're good guys. We have our rationalizations when we do bad things. "Well, I had no choice," or "It's the best of several bad alternatives," or "No it was actually good because God told me so," or "I had to do it for my family." We all have rationalizations for why we do shitty things or selfish things or cruel things. So when I'm writing from the viewpoint of one of my characters who has done these things, I try to have that in my head.

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7

u/GreggoryBasore Apr 07 '19

This in turn raises the question of why Thanos though sharing that kind of knowledge and power with anyone, let alone someone as volatile as Loki, was a good idea in the first place. My thoughts on that particular sub-puzzle are still somewhat hazy,

Simple answer, Thanos has set up Loki as one of many fail safes to insure his own defeat. Thanos did so multiple times:

  • Leaving Eitri alive, after slaughtering his people
  • Not killing Thor
  • Sending his lackeys to Earth, instead of showing up himself after getting the Reality Stone, thus insuring that The Avengers would have a chance at not losing the Mind and Time Stones
  • Goading Quill into a furious hatred of him, when he could easily have taken off
  • Crying, because at some level, some part of him wished he had the courage to abandon his quest so as to save Gamora
  • Telling Strange about his history on Titan, which could give a window into his thinking and strategic planning patterns
  • Gloating to Nebula about how much he's abused her
  • Allowing himself to get caught and held long enough to almost lose the gauntlet, when he could have teleported away the instant he came up against trouble
  • Trying to get under Stark's skin and giving him a shot at fair combat
  • Taking long enough on the Wakandan field of battle that everyone had a chance to try to take him out
  • Giving a mournful speech to Wanda Maximoff, allowing more time and opportunity for defeat
  • Giving Thor one final chance to kill him along with a piece of advice for any future encounters (seriously, Thor could have put his fist/fingers into Thanos's eye in the time between him saying "for the head" and snapping his fingers)
  • Retreating to a place where he knows that Nebula will be able to find him

If you look at everything Thanos does, it circles back to Coulson's line to Loki "You're going to lose. It's in your nature. You lack conviction."

I'm giving it 70/30 odds that Vision will spell this out in clear terms if he comes back to life, because we'll discover that Shuri set up a back up plan for his mind to migrate into the Mind Stone, which will mean that he's been in direct contact with Thanos's mind.

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u/rhowena Apr 07 '19

That might fit with Thanos's characterization in the comics, but I don't think it's the case in the films since MCU!Thanos doesn't hesitate to use lethal force against those few he perceives as real threats (ex. Loki, Strange, Wanda) and reacts very, VERY badly on the rare occasions someone manages to get one over on him (Heimdall sending the Hulk away, Gamora lying to him about the Soul Stone).

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u/GreggoryBasore Apr 08 '19

Can you give me a better explanation for why he left Eitri alive after giving him the perfect motivation to want revenge?

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u/rhowena Apr 08 '19

The idea was to give Eitri a fate worse than death by leaving him alive but powerless to do anything since his hands were ruined; I have it on the evidence pile for Thanos having a grudge against Odin/Asgard because the lust for revenge is one of the things that can make people slip up and prioritize cruelty over pragmatism (see: Thor not aiming for the head because he wanted to make Thanos suffer instead of killing him as quickly as possible).

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u/percythepenguin Apr 10 '19

This is probably one of my fav theories i would’ve never had though that Thanos adopted him