Thor & Loki parallel.
haha, i’m not gonna argue that thor’s attitude at the beginning of thor wasn’t horrible and problematic. okay. But Loki’s second chance came in the form of the Avengers… and Thor’s talks with him in attempts to persuade him back. Loki’s second chance even came at the end of Thor, when Thor confronted the Destroyer. Loki’s second chance came when Thor confronted him in the observatory and Loki attacked him.
Loki has had his second chances. He did not take them. He doesn’t want them.
I think the most apt sentence I’ve ever read on this subject was: Thor spent an entire movie offering Loki a second chance and he got stabbed for it.
This!
Man, you could so call me a hypocrite from my time in Who fandom because I justified the FUCK out of the Master’s actions but that was in Classic Who. You never really got to see any of his motivation. He was just doing random fail-tastic things. The most damage he ever caused was really through bumbling.
When you come into New Who with him being a complete compassionless psycho, I’m out. I don’t try to justify or make excuses for him. He crossed a line. And even if I can spin fanon around him to make it understandable WHY he did it, that he saw humans as lesser and unworthy of pity, that he was just so hurt he was lashing out. It still doesn’t make him right. He is still a villain who did horrible shit.
Same case with Loki. Boy just lost it and his pride or madness kept him from admitting he was wrong. Thor was not the best dude but he learned and grew as a person, Loki just let his problems take him completely and wouldn’t accept help.
I…sort of agree? I agree that it’s unfair to compare Thor’s attitude at the beginning of the movie to Loki’s actions at the end—the parallels are definitely there, but I think they’re there to indicate how much Thor has changed and matured compared to Loki, who hasn’t. And Loki has also been offered second chances several times in The Avengers and at the end of Thor, and he rejected them. That’s on him, I agree.
However…I don’t know, for me it’s kinda difficult to explain the different paths each took at the end of the movie by saying, “Well, Thor took that second chance because he’s a Good Guy, and Loki didn’t because he’s a Bad Guy.” Thor’s second chance came in the form of a lesson—he was stripped of his powers and banished to Earth, where he learnt humility by relying on the kindness of strangers and the value of (non-Aesir) life by befriending these strangers. The movie was like Thor-in-process, how Thor’s experiences on Earth molded him from a belligerent, entitled prince to the hero we know him to be in The Avengers. Loki had no such journey. Nothing in the movie really challenged any of his preconceived notions about other species. (Finding out that he was a Jotun really rocked his world, of course, but his own self-esteem issues meant that that realization only intensified an already-existing hatred.)
(I mean, OK, as much as I believe that Odin tries to be a good dad, he really doesn’t know what’s going on with his sons. The guy never realized that Thor might not be ready for the throne until he almost started another war with Jotunheim. Loki, whose character flaws are much more subtle than Thor’s (though probably more destructive) is gonna fly right under Odin’s radar.)
I guess what this boils down to is: yes, Loki, out of anger, pride, and self-pity, refused Thor’s offer of help several times. But he also didn’t share the sort of experience that Thor had, that might have given him the impetus to change himself.
tl;dr: Loki’s decisions are a result of BOTH internal character flaws and external factors/experiences. You can’t oversimplify it in one direction or another!
![amorremanet:
The archetype of the spiritual being is the angel. Since an angel has no body, it can never contain both good and evil in its being. Our sages therefore teach us that angels have no Yetzer HaRa (urge toward evil). It is only in a physical being that both good and evil can exist together. Although they are at opposite poles spiritually, they can come together in the physical man. One reason why God created man in a physical world was to allow him to have full freedom of choice, with both good and evil as part of his makeup. Without a physical world, these two concepts could never exist in the same being. The fact that good and evil can exist in the same physical space also allows good to overcome evil in this world. …In a purely spiritual arena, good could never come close enough to evil to have any influence over it. In the physical world, however, good and evil can exist together, and good can therefore overcome evil. Our sages thus teach us that one of the main reasons why man was placed in the physical world was to overcome the forces of evil. The Zohar expresses it by stating that we are here “to turn darkness into light.” …An angel may be created initially with a vast storehouse of knowledge, but it has no way of increasing it, at least, not beyond its own sphere of activity. Thus, for example, we find one angel asking another a question: “And one [angel] said to the Man dressed in linen… ‘How long shall it be until the end of these wonders’” (Daniel 12:6)? One angel had to ask the other, because he could not know something outside of his own domain. In the physical world, we can learn things through our five senses. We can hear, feel, smell, and taste. Our knowledge of things comes from our physical proximity to them. In the spiritual worlds, however, this does not exist. The only way that one can learn about a thing is to come into spiritual proximity with it. An angel cannot do this outside of his own realm. Man therefore has an advantage over an angel. The very fact that he exists in this lower world enables him to reach up ever higher.
Aryeh Kaplan, Commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah.
SPN/Mysticism = OTP FIVE-ever.Thirty Days of SPN Women, Day Five: Favourite ally character — Anna Milton.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lywqzok2CT1qashvpo1_500.png)
