The Loki Paradox Good, bad, or just plain sociopathic? We've seen Loki's story throughout the comics (I was a comic fan since I was a kid) and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I've always enjoyed his character: I thought he was cute, I thought he was very interesting, and I thought he was deliciously evil...but never did I think he was a "gray" character. Never did I think he was good and bad. After he killed several innocent people and was the cause of many more dying, I was like, "Okay, he's a villain." I never thought, "Awwwh, he killed several innocent people on purpose, poor Loki, he's just confused." So, this is where the paradoxical part comes in. Why do so many fans of Marvel think of Loki as a gray character that's both good and bad? I could never wrap my head around it. I've written a few gray characters before in my stories, but if a character goes on a killing spree or even kills just one or two or three innocent people...then how are they still good? Can anyone explain this to me? I just saw a trailer for the new Loki show where Loki himself says, "I'm good...I'm bad...I'm both" and then smiles handsomely. It starkly reminds me of sociopaths who use their looks to lure in their victims before taking their lives in horrific ways. My personal verdict is that because Loki is cute and campy, people often forget about how many people he's killed personally or been responsible for killing indirectly and how many other serious crimes he's committed. It reminds me of the Star Wars universe where someone can turn evil and murder droves of people, but the good guys will still try to talk to them and convince them to come back the Light Side. Like...even if they listened and agreed to come back to the good side, does that absolve them of all crimes committed in the last few days or years? Does that mean all the Jedi/Younglings/innocent beings they killed are now forgotten and no justice will be enacted on their behalf? So if anyone has any thoughts on this paradoxical situation, I'd be glad to hear it.
You're discussing a lot of different things, but one of them is redemption/forgiveness for what are sometimes perceived as unforgivable acts. I used to think that there were some things beyond forgiveness, but I changed my mind after watching the movie 'The Mission'. But there are conditions that need to be met, mainly the person has to repent voluntarily and not just because they got caught. As for people's perceptions of Loki and overlooking his bad deeds, for many fans it could just be like Damon from 'The Vampire Diaries': he's HAWT.
Fictional characters are judged by different standards than real people. Part of it's simply the line between fiction and reality: It's easy to forgive fictional crimes precisely because they didn't actually happen. People die to show the stakes are high but since they're not only not real people, but not even fleshed out characters, they don't carry much of an emotional punch. Evil in fiction tends to relate to how much negative emotion they evoke in the audience, which is in turn influenced by how likable/relatable they are and their motives. Morally gray can also be used to refer to complexity. 'Evil' in fiction tends to refer to cartoonish cackling villains who do evil things for evil reasons. Morally grey characters may still do horrible things, but they aren't cackling caricatures, they have motives and goals, and emotions that might be understandable. Evil characters always behave in selfish or evil ways, morally gray ones may perform actions that the audience considers both good and bad. As for the whole ' good guys offer redemption' trope, that's more to show how good the good guys are (even though I agree it's stupid) than to suggest that the bad guy in question is actually morally gray or worth redeeming. tldr: certain kinds of fictional crimes are easy for most audience members to move past and terms like evil and morally grey tend to have different meanings when discussing fiction than when discussing real people.
Yes. It's because of the genre and tonal range the character exists in. The combination of the two unshackle Loki from certain social and moral objections that would undoubtedly emerge if similar characters (superheroes & supervillains) actually existed. This is a good thing in my opinion, one of the most attractive aspects of the genre. The same quality that allows an audience to not be infuriated at a grown man taking a thirteen-year-old into battle against the most dangerous criminals in Gotham, also allows that audience to accept redemption arcs of characters who are guilty of seemingly unforgivable atrocities.
You touched on something I mentioned, that Loki is campy, which is the same as a cackling caricature. In a lot of ways, Loki is a caricature, in how he has huge grandiose speeches just like cartoon villain. But I do see what you mean about morally grey, doing bad things for what you think are good reasons, but I don't think that means you're good and bad. That's what MCU fans think of Loki, that he does evil things like killing people but he still is good inside, I guess? I think that's a misuse of labeling someone gray. Just because you have goals and motives doesn't mean you're not evil.
It kind've makes everything less interesting to me tbh, that these heroes fight/kill bad guys...unless the bad guys are related to them, such as Thor, then they get to continuously fuck up and kill people and cause mayhem, because they're just "conflicted". So that takes away from their credibility for me as heroes. Even if a villain decides to be good one time, they should still face the consequences of their previous actions. But I guess I can see how the genre inherently asks the audience to not expect that from the movies.
Do you think most Star Wars fans would have wanted Darth Vader to face the full consequences of his actions if he would have survived Return of the Jedi? I wouldn't think so. That's the magic of certain genres (and tonal ranges) of fiction.
I'm not sure that Vader's redemption shouldn't be measured by our morality. He's a Jedi, and they see things differently under that religion. But even if we do use our morality, wasn't he a victim of the Emperor/the Dark Side himself? And didn't his final act in overthrowing the Empire and saving the rebels outweigh the bad he'd done? His redemption is the culmination of Luke's Hero's Journey. I find it refreshing that the story didn't end with Luke beating the bad guy and getting the girl, yet is still fulfilling to watch as a viewer. We'd lose that if Vader was irredeemable. As for Loki, let's consider his overall impact in his films. He's never trustworthy, but he does sometimes work with the heroes. Thor: Villain The Avengers: Villain Thor 2: Hero Thor 3: Hero Infinity War: Hero That seems to make him a grey character. If he's on the good side in most of his movies, I'd find it hard to classify him as a villain.
This seems topical: If I may add: Loki is a mischievous shape-shifting trickster god. Those are very common across many cultures and they're often culture heroes or at least meant to be amusing protagonists. Considering Loki's over-all portrayal as a somewhat troublesome and annoying but very useful member of the Aesir, I seriously doubt he was originally considered a villainous being. His role as an antagonist in Ragnarok may just be Snorri Sturluson wanting a Satan-like villain to wrap things up, or perhaps it was intended to be a tragic outcome for a character who over-all deserved better? With the lack of source material for norse mythology, we may never know.
The Jedi I don't think had anything in their code about forgiving people who kill younglings because they turn back good and I honestly don't believe Darth Vader killing the Emperor absolved him of the millions that died by helping the Emperor come to power and keep that power for years. And I would argue that Anakin never really tried to completely adhere to the Jedi way and instead continuously broke the rules, which led him down the Dark Side anyway, but I digress. As for Loki, I know in Norse mythology he was a trickster, but even in Norse mythology he did some truly unhinged things. But despite all that, I was just talking about the comics and the MCU and how he will kill people and then do one good act and the Avengers basically forget about all the lives he's taken and damage he's caused. Because, like Darth Vader, he helped us out so it doesn't matter what he did before? That logic is pretty weird and now that I think about it, its not at all present in the comics. In the comics if someone kills innocents the heroes don't forget about it just because he decides to turn good or does some good acts. So it seems to be specific to the MCU. As for Star Wars, there seems to be some wonky logic going on there that is in and of its a can of worms, and I'd like to reiterate the Jedi themselves is not where this logic stems from, first time we see it is Luke and that was his emotional attachment to his father that made him think that way and in the last trilogy we see it with Leia telling Han to "bring their son home" as if Kylo going cookoo and killing a bunch of people is of no consequence. But my main point was why do people (and now Loki too apparently in the latest Disney+ trailer) think Loki is good and bad? If someone kills innocents, to me that's evil no matter what the motives or goals are behind it. Not to mention all of the damage he caused in the process. I can understand why a sociopath would think they were good and bad, because sociopaths are screwy. But it's weird to me that MCU fans think Loki is just "misunderstood". When does a character go from misunderstood to sociopathic? I would think that killing people and destroying loads of property would be the breaking point, but apparently people are just like, "he was going through a phase, no biggie". Idk, maybe it is just MCU logic.
Fictional characters (maybe because people know what they've done aren't real) seem to be judged differently to real people. I watched a TV show recently and the character in that was literally a Hitler who has causes genocides in his past and killed thousands of innocent people, his motivation for this was to draw out the protag who wouldn't like the idea of whole villages being killed as long as he hid. Even having seen the mayhem and suffering he caused, even having a sub-plot of one of his victims wanting revenge he was the most popular character on the show and everyone seemed to think he deserved forgiveness and happiness. He deserved a life time in a jail cell or a lethal injection. His sob story past really didn't help us sympathise when the protag has also had an equally bad up bringing and yet remained a good person. Showing us a person's past can affect them, but doesn't excuse poor behaviour. I couldn't understand this. Some people make mistakes and deserve a second chance others don't, especially when, for the most part, this character continued trying to justify what he'd done.
In the Marvel movies Loki is presented as amoral, like Catwoman—sometimes ally sometimes enemy, and he doesn't seem to try to hide his evil. It isn't about morality, it's about the fact that some relationships are like this. Some people will forgive and/or forget the transgressions and continue to think of the transgressor as a friend. In the original Norse mythology Loki was the snake in the grass—hidden until it bites you, and then it immediately disappears back into the grass. It was the ancient version of what today we might call a hit-and-run attack, a person who masquerades as a friend until they stab you in the back, and then immediately goes back to being (or pretending to be) your friend as if nothing happened. This is a reality many people are unaware of until it's happened to them enough times that they see through surface appearances to the distasteful truth. So, from the viewpoint of these naive people, they seem to have an on-again off-again friend. This is exactly the thing certain ancient stories warn against, like Abel and Caine or some of the other stories of the good and the bad brother (Christ and Satan being the ultimate expression of it in the NT). Thor, despite being such a badass, is kind-hearted and keeps forgiving his wicked stepbrother out of compassion. He won't allow a single expression of open evil from a frost giant without smiting them mightily, but since Loki's evil is subtle and Loki is family he keeps forgiving. The Loki of the Sagas and the Eddas kept up a good show of virtue. He rarely betrayed any of the other gods, and when he did he made sure nobody else would see, and he often set up a fall guy to take the blame. One by one the gods came to know him, but it took a few centuries before enough of them did. He was quite the con man, would have made an excellent salesman or politician. Loki represents the kind of person who is charismatic but harbors secret resentments in his soul and is deeply envious whenever something good happens to you. When he should be happy for you he instead lashes out viciously, his face contorted for just a moment to reveal his hatred. Because these attacks are so unexpected and he recovers so quickly and puts on the friendship mask again, many people just think "Well, that was weird!" They're not prepared to believe the person they thought of as a friend is really so nasty. And Loki's wickedness started small and kept growing. They don't really show it that way in the movies. Ultimately the entire cycle of the Eddas ends with the punishment of Loki followed by Ragnarok, as if that's been the main point of it all the way through. His crimes started small but grew until he became the major problem that needed to be dealt with and that destroyed the gods. Possibly if they had seen it and acted sooner it could have been prevented, but it was fatal for all of them*. It's a strict warning against allowing wickedness into your life, either in the form of a deceitful friend or in your own heart, because the traits of Loki were in some ways the traits of Thor and the other gods, only magnified. As a warrior culture they all had an excess of pride and boastfulness. * And what makes it so terrible is that when one person finally sees the wickedness of a Loki among the group, nobody else does, they all think he's a great person and believe you're the asshat for suggesting otherwise. This allows them to poison the entire group against you and anyone else who has seen their true nature. Often by the time the entire group or the majority see it, it's too late.
Thank you for your detailed analysis. My friend just bought a book of Norse mythology and I can't wait to read it when she's done with it. I've only read one Norse mythology book and it was many years ago so I only remember parts of it, but I do remember Loki playing "pranks" on the gods that got increasingly vicious and I couldn't understand why they didn't just cut his head off seeing as how they were portrayed as really mighty and vengeful lol. But yeah, eventually they did come to their senses, it just seems like in the MCU no one really cares that Loki is a wanton socipathic murderer. I just watched a few minutes of the Loki show and Owen Wilson was joking around with him and being friendly like he wasn't talking to a mass murderer. I guess Marvel just likes to be jokey. But my main annoyance is with Thor, he kept trusting Loki and Loki kept betraying him and literally trying to kill him and it got to the point that I was like...why are you still giving him a chance? If anyone else had a sociopathic brother that was always trying to kill them, and had killed many others before, they would not keep giving them the opportunity to do it again. But it is what it is.
You make some good points. I've seen this trope countless times before in other medias, the evil sympathetic villain who commits horribly crimes against humanity but the audience likes them because they're goodlooking and sad. Or like Thanos, who killed half the universe with a snap. People were agreeing that his methods made sense when in actuality he could have thought of any other alternative to killing people. He had all the infinity stones...he could've made half the universe sterilized. But no, he HAD to kill everyone. That was the ONLY way. Yeah right. He was just evil and people for some reason bought into his twisted logic.
If you're interested in mythology, what I wrote here is a synopsis of the more detailed ( but rougher) thoughts I wrote up a while ago on my blog: The symbolic meaning of Loki—the dangerous narcissist within us all Loki is Fire, and bears similarities with Prometheus What I'm discovering is that the gods are often personifications of forces of nature, but also of human personality types that seem to fit with those forces. Here's a little teaser from Loki is Fire... (that I should have mentioned above): It turns out Loki is the personification of fire and its heat, and sparks are his tears. This explains why he can be so helpful sometimes but also treacherous, because living in the frozen North you would need fire, but it can also turn deadly. I think this makes him similar in some ways to Prometheus, who gave mankind the gift of fire, which was a sacred property of the gods, and he was punished terribly for it. The next few posts are also about mythology. Having studied Jungian psychology for a few years I love finding the connections between different mythologies/religions and figuring out what they're symbolizing. I also dug pretty deep into King Minos and the Minotaur if you're interested in Greek mythology (the first one takes a while to get to mythology, but it's because I'm relating it to psychology and I started there): What is this difficulty in connecting? Delving deeper into the Minos/Minotaur myth
Oh em gee, you know what's wild??? In my last reply I typed out a whole paragraph talking about how Loki should've been punished sooner but eventually they did tie him to a cliff and have his guts eaten for an eternity but a giant bird or something....and then I deleted that part because I realised wait, that sounds like Prometheus. So they MUST be very similar if I even confused Loki for Prometheus myself lol. And also another name for Loki I believe was "Wildfire" so I totally understand what you're saying. I'm interested in reading your links but I have a really important job interview coming up in a few minutes lol, so I'll look at the links later on. I used to work at my local college as an English tutor before the pandemic and they offered me another job recently. I actually stayed up til four oclock this morning because I was too nervous to fall asleep and then I just woke up like an hour ago and I had to force myself to get up and get ready haha. Now I'm going to watch youtube videos about how to take a successful interview, wish me luck!!!!
Too true. The weight that people (herd) give to voiced intent rather than evidential action makes my head hurt. It can make a man cynical to the bone if he's not careful.
This is slightly off topic, but is anyone watching the new Loki show? Spoiler alert, but in the most recent episode that I've seen he was running away from trouble and a giant building falls down from behind him and is on coarse to squash him flat...and he turns around and makes it fly in another direction. Loki made an entire skyscraper sized building fly away like it was nothing. He's never been shown to be able to do anything close to that...and everyone just accepts it. No one on any message boards or YouTube comments or anything that I've seen has seriously questioned why he was able to do that, when he's never done anything like that before in all the movies he's been in before? Am I just not as enchanted by the movie magic as everyone else is?
I haven't seen any of the Marvel shows, aside from the Netflix 'street level' series like Daredevil and Jessica Jones etc, but I understand the newer ones are going off the deep end in terms of postmodernism and presenting the characters weirdly, and that most people don't like it.
I actually really loved WandaVision, I still have a thorn in my side that they made Wanda an "Enhanced", that is a clunky word and doesn't roll off the tongue as easily as "Mutant", and they really did the fans dirty by catfishing us with Quicksilver...and it made no sense that Dr Strange didn't show up at some point...but overall I really liked the show, it was creative and we got that banger that is "Agatha All Along". I just blame my crystal clear memory lol. When I watch a movie I like then I usually watch it twice or three times and I soak in a lot of details, so when the next movie takes away all of Black Widows weapons, or Thor suddenly can't do the new lightning power he did in the last movie, or now Winter Soldier is getting beat up by rookies when he was originally shown to be damn near unstoppable in battle....I dunno, I just notice and it annoys me. I'm just holding out hope that Black Widow comes back alive lol, she was my absolute favorite.
Wait, do I understand correctly, that mutants now exist in the MCU? Exciting... sounds like the X Men might be on their way in. Of course, technically I guess the Hulk has always been a mutant, but they've never called him that. The MCU itself is set in an alternate universe from ours (and from the universe of the original comic books, otherwise the stories would have been set in the 60's). My theory is that these newer MCU shows themselves exist in their own alternate universe. And also that they're using them to test out ideas for the upcoming phases of movies, to see how the public reacts to various things. In fact in the comics they used to do what they called 'What If" stories, that didn't fit into the continuity, and where characters sometimes had different abilities or traits than they did in the normal continuity. My sneakin' suspicion is that these shows are the MCU version of What If stories.
My thoughts. Where exactly is the paradox? Everything in the world is relative. What is good? What is evil? If killing is evil, then killing the bad guys makes the good guys bad guys? Everyone considers themselves the heroes of their own stories. Everyone thinks that they are right and the enemies are not. Do we really see the struggle between good and evil, or do we just see the struggle between two opposing views of the world? Two opposite understandings of good. In Star Wars, General Thrawn, for example, was not exactly a bad guy. He fought on the side of the empire and through him their philosophy was well revealed. As a result, we get not a struggle between good and evil, but a struggle between order and freedom, justice and mercy. And when the question starts to become such an edge, everyone wants to get something in between. Nobody wants to live in a dictatorship, but nobody wants to live in absolute anarchy. Why do we forgive the good guys killing the bad guys, but not the bad guys killing the good guys? How and at what point do we determine that we have a good or a bad guy in front of us? Captain Marvel worked for the bad guys for the first half of the movie, and only changed sides in the second half. Does it mean that she was the villain in the first half, and became the hero in the second half? It's the same with Loki and other similar characters. If Loki are made a hero, all coming actions are no longer considered atrocities in our heads. If you chop off a man's arm and legs and let it slide into the lava, would that be a positive action on your part? Any action can be portrayed as heroic and villainous, and any character can be portrayed as a hero or villain. You just need to put the correct perspective. PS: Who do you consider yourself to be a hero, a villain or a secondary character in someone else's story?
I'm sorry I think you're making some false equivalencies. Captain Marvel was tricked. Loki has knowingly gone of destructive killing sprees most of the time hes on the Marvel movies. I'm of the mind that if you kill someone who is causing mass destruction then you are doing a service to mankind. If you kill someone who is innocent and minding their own business, you are a sociopath. Plain and simple. I don't see what's relative about this situation. How can you be good and bad if most of the time you're going on killing sprees? Makes no sense to me.
