#in the movies odin (and loki to some degree) and not homophobics

[the-mjolnir-owner]

So I heard that yesterday was bi visibility day and I all have to say is: there's a reason the rainbow bridge is called a bifrost and not a straightfrost

[lokiinmediasideblog]

"I Remember it so you don't have to": MCU Loki in the 2010s: Rape Culture, Villain Queer-coding, and Homophobia

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I know Loki is Tumblr’s sweetheart since 2011 (and that subsets of Loki fans are insufferable, fuck those that harassed and singled out Kate Herron and Sophia Di Martino because Sylvie). But a part of me will always be protective of the character outside of Tumblr despite his popularity. I hate seeing bad takes about how Odin was a wonderful father and king, and Loki was just an ungrateful bastard.

Although Tumblr (and many AO3 fics) seem to excuse Loki of all wrongdoings (letting the Frost Giants in and the attempted genocide), I see the opposite outside of it, where he even gets blamed for Hela getting out of her imprisonment. And I have seen a horrible take saying that he should have been left to die as a baby because “he ruined Thor’s life” by some Odin apologist that clearly lied about liking Loki. So he seems to be quite polarizing in that respect based on social media of choice and demographic of users. And some people get a little weird about the Loki hate because how dare you like the sympathetic villain that isn't as masculine as the heroes (I will go more in detail and show some examples).

I joke around that I defend Loki from Redditors because I especially dislike the takes of cishet men that get offended when a girl said she preferred Loki over Thor, and pretend to be “concerned” over “impressionable young women and girls that will get into abusive relationships”. And if you haven’t seen those, well I did while growing up, and I took them personally.

The Nostalgia Critic, one of the men behind the death of media literacy and criticism, even made a video complaining about the phenomenon of Loki thirst. It made me spitefully not care about any other Avengers (2012) character. It’s still up on YouTube, and it was a bit patronizing. Also, he thinks Thor 1 Thor looks like a girl (joke?), make of that what you will...

There was also a propensity to make homophobic jokes about Loki in parody skits. Loki was not canonically queer yet in either the movies or the comics, but he was queer-coded and people could tell, based on the jokes and quips directed at him. There’s one parody skit where Thor and Loki go to court-appointed therapy and one of the jokes is that Loki likes to fuck himself with bananas or “plantains because they’re bigger.” One of the worst parody skits was The Key of Awesome’s Thor:TDW parody.

Loki is put into a “normal” prison instead of the “glowy” kind he kept escaping from. The main joke was Loki getting raped in prison. And that now he can’t act all “haughty” about Thor’s request for help, and is instead the "desperate" one. And you’ll see some old comments over how hilarious that is. And people arguing about how weak or powerful Loki is and bringing the Norse myth about him being raped by a horse into it as proof that the terrible “joke” makes sense and could happen in cannon.

An example that almost made it into the screen is a deleted scene in Thor Ragnarok that I refer to as “the director’s barely disguised fetish”, where instead of falling for 30 minutes, Loki gets locked in a portable restroom while men continuously enter to piss. Loki’s trying his best not to get pissed on. Thor opens the stall giggling, and of course Loki is rightfully angry about being trapped there. It seems to veer into the “bad guys deserve sexual assault as punishment” to an uncomfortable degree.

I often just keep quiet on MCU Loki defense discourse because:

1. Loki is a popular character with many defenders.

2. Subsets of Loki fans are ridiculous and use false pretenses to harass writers and actors. And the discourse that arises from this is mind-numbing and pointless.

But I remember all this crap from the early 2010s, and I am not fond of Loki being deemed "Just evil, whiny, and ungrateful". There’s also the very questionable tropes from earlier Thor comics (hell some of these should ellicit WAY more backlash than Sylki if you really care that much about rep). I also don’t like being told what characters I should and shouldn’t like, and I have taken that personally ever since.

A part of me feels a bit unintentionally gaslighted when people act like there was no backlash to Loki being popular. It has the same vibes as the increduloulity of Gen Z regarding how BAD homophobia in the 2000s and early 2010s was.