Otterskin :

Loki seems obsessed with becoming King, to the point that he is willing to let Frost Giants into Asgard, fight Thor and conquer Earth.

On the surface Loki fits well into a classic literary troupe: the conniving, scheming younger brother who wants his older sibling’s birth right and will do all manner of evil things to get it. Shakespeare deployed this troupe well in many of his plays, most famously in Hamlet.

However, just become Loki has a “lean and hungry” look doesn’t mean that we can just assume Asgard is like a Medieval monarchy. In fact many times throughout the films, we see and hear about Asgard practising a completely different kind of inheritance structure.

“Only one of you can ascend to the throne but both of you were born to be kings” – Odin in Thor 1

I postulate that under Asgardian tradition both Thor and Loki are equally eligible for the throne regardless of age, and Loki competing with Thor is completely legitimate.

I explain:

How Asgardian power structures work

Why Loki believes he should be the rightful King of Asgard

Why Loki’s competition with Thor for the crown is legitimate

How this competition shapes their characters and relationship

One more reason why Loki is devastated when he found out he was Frost Giant. 

 The Myth of Primogeniture

I feel a little bit like a chump since in my longer fic I’m writing now I did decide to default to birth/gender hierarchy, although I wasn’t exactly happy about it. I did think something like this was happening but wasn’t sure how to approach the story in that way. Now I wish I’d read this sooner, I have better ideas now about how to implement it.

I do think that when Odin said ‘You were both born to be Kings,’ he was still thinking of making Loki the king of Jotunheim, or, potentially, essentially having him be co-King with Thor by being a chief advisor, which is hinted at in a cut scene from Thor’s original script. And it is also possible that Thor was merely admitting that as the eldest, Hela did have a claim, but that it could be contested, which was something younger siblings could do to elder even in strict hierarchies. Plus there’s a chance her gender might weaken her claim in a society that seems to undervalue women.

This essays exists because of a one wonderful, insightful and very determined person who has been asking me to psychoanalyse the Odinsons for many years. 

In the course of researching this I binged watched all the films with Thor and Loki in, read as many commentaries, interviews with writers and directors as I could get my hands on, and browsed tumblr.

So here is a psychological analysis of Loki and Thor (the marvel movie versions). 

It explains: 

why they have such different personalities,

why they are not able to relate emotional to each other

how they feed into each other’s emotional dysfunction, which creates the conflicts that drive the films

Thinkers vs Feelers

  Thor and Loki have very different personalities, and often have difficulty relating to each other emotionally. Whilst some of the difference is genetic in origin, the vast majority of their personality differences and relationship dysfunction can be explained by their upbringing.

The development maturation model explains not only why Thor and Loki are different but also provides an excellent lens through which to examine their motivations, and emotions through the films.

The model predicts that during the first years of life, infants learn coping strategies to handle strong emotions. This is a vital part of human development which everyone undergoes but the path an infant “chooses” determines their future personality, their susceptibility to psychiatric conditions and response to psychiatric therapy.

All infants start off with the basic instinctive need to gain attention; it is an essential survival strategy but there are two broadly different methods that infants learn to use to gain attention. 

“Feelers” are infants who learn the best way to cope with emotions is to amplify them because this brings attention/comfort from the primary care giver. “Thinkers” on the other hand learn that internalising their emotions in favour of pleasing the primary care giver leads to attention/comfort.

I think the best analogy for Thinkers and Feelers is: 

If emotions were fine wine, the Feelers would all be drunk and the Thinkers utterly sober.

The functional Feelers would be amusingly tipsy, bringing joy and laughter to the party, whilst the functional Thinkers would be savouring all the subtle aromas of the bouquet and discussing the quality of the vintage. 

The dysfunctional feelers would be smashing up the wine cellar in a drunken rage, whilst the dysfunctional Thinkers would be stoically standing the in the middle of the carnage refusing to acknowledge that wine can stain their suits. 

Most well-adjusted adults exist somewhere on the spectrum between two extremes. They are able to retain the good parts from their original “path” and learn the beneficial strategies of the opposite “path”.

Thor the Feeler

From this model we can see that Thor is very much a feeler. He clearly expresses and amplifies his emotions throughout the films. At first, we see him doing this regardless of how it affects other people around him but as Thor develops, we see that he learns to control how and when he expresses his emotions. He is learning the “Thinkers” strategy of coping with emotions and applying it to balance out the negative impact of his “Feelers” strategy.

Thor’s “Feeler” instincts to express and amplify whatever he is feeling is part of the reason why he is seen as an honest and open person because he never tries to disguise his emotional state. We are hardwired to respond to other people’s emotions and thus superficially at least Thor is often easier to relate to than Loki.

When Feelers must deal with stressful emotional states, their instinctive strategy is to simply amplify their emotions. We see this clearly in Thor 1, when Thor has a screaming match with his father, and then flips a table over in anger. We see this again when Thor fails to pick up Mjolnir on Earth and cries rather dramatically in the rain. Even without an audience, Feelers instinctively over express their emotions as a coping mechanism. Some psychiatrists believe this is actually a helpful stress release mechanism, and Feelers are less likely to develop stress related psychiatric conditions.  

Loki the Thinker

Loki on the other hand is definitely a Thinker and, like all Thinkers, he experiences emotion, but that experience is superseded by his conscious thought process. A Thinker’s relationship with their feelings is far more complex than a Feeler’s. Instead of simply feeling the emotion and then expressing it, thinks see emotions as tools to be utilized in social interactions. Functional thinkers tend to only express emotions that are acceptable and appropriate to help lubricate social interactions. Other emotions that are not deemed to be social acceptable are suppressed and ignored.

Thinkers when confronted with stressful emotional states, first tend to over-analyse and then inappropriately contain their negative emotions. This containment allows the Thinker to feel in control, and projects the illusion of emotional control to others. However, Thinkers pay a high psychological and physiological price for this containment. Their strategy for emotional management creates more stress for themselves. Thinkers are more likely to develop depression, particularly treatment resistant types, anxiety and other stress related psychiatric disorders.

The best example of Loki containing his emotions is after he returns from Jotunheim and works out that he is a Frost Giant. Thor, the Feeler, would have screamed the place down and demanded answers immediately, but you can see that Loki keeps his negative emotions contained and does not express anything.

The scene in the weapons vault between Loki and Odin is an excellent example of a Thinker having what is essentially a nervous breakdown.

Loki starts off in control of his emotions and the conversation but swiftly we see the containment of his negative emotions crumble and collapse. The ensuing emotional outburst from Loki is like a dam breaking. It is not just the emotions that he has been holding back for the last few hours that breaks through but all of the negative emotion he has likely contained within himself for years. The emotions wash over him, and completely overwhelm his ability to analyse or contain them. What we then see is the Thinker finally Feeling emotion.

Moments like this, if handled well, can be very cathartic for Thinkers because for the first time they truly loose control and just experience their emotions. With that loss of control comes the chance to express emotion in its raw state. It can be a very liberating feeling, and during this process the Thinker is learning how to be more of a Feeler and balance out the negative impact of their chosen coping strategy.  With acknowledgement, and positive reception, dysfunctional Thinkers like Loki can incorporate Feelers strategies when managing their negative emotions.

Unfortunately for Loki, Odin falls asleep in the middle of his emotional catharsis, and Loki never gets the chance to truly express his emotions and be acknowledged for doing so. Therefore, he never learns the benefits of expressing his emotions. Instead we see that after Odin falls asleep Loki immediately feels guilty and reverts to the Thinker strategy of containing his emotions once again. His voice drops, he crouches down to touch Odin. Once again, he has forced himself to put his own emotions aside for the sake of someone else and from a psychological point of view this is both tragic and damaging for Loki.

Brotherly Love and Dysfunction

Why is Thor and Loki’s relationship so dramatic and dysfunctional?

The root cause of their relationship problems is not Loki’s jealousy or Thor’s disregard for Loki’s feelings, those are merely symptoms.

Just like the Holmes Brothers, Thor and Loki have opposite coping strategies for emotions and therefore they have very different emotional needs. Both of them are firmly entrenched and dysfunction Thinkers/Feelers. Whilst Thor does develop a more comprehensive and balanced approach to his emotions, this only happens when he gets thrown into a completely new environment and meets new people. Loki never get this chance.

Their dysfunctional Thinker/Feeler coping mechanisms significantly affect their relationship with each other. Unlike the Holmes Brothers, even as adults Thor and Loki spend most of their time together, they have the same social circle and that exacerbates their inability to grow and change.

Thor is locked in a perpetual cycle of expressing and amplifying his emotions without any kind of filter. This is because no one has managed to convince him that his emotions are not the most important things in the world. I can imagine that Thor, as Odin and Frigga’s longed for son got a lot of unconditional love and attention as an infant. He only had to cry to get the attention he wanted. As he grew older, crying turned to screaming and shouting. Essentially Thor’s emotional outbursts have always been rewarded with what he wants, eventually. Therefore, Thor has never had to learn the Thinker’s strategy of modifying his emotional expression to relate to other people.

It is not that Thor doesn’t understand or care about other people’s emotions: he clearly has the capacity to do both when he falls to Earth. He just doesn’t do it on Asgard because he doesn’t need to. In nearly all situations his emotions have been treated as being of paramount importance. The world almost revolves around Thor’s feelings. It is only when his outbursts are directed at Odin that they fail to get the effect he wants. Therefore Thor, instinctively shouts louder which escalates the situation and ends up getting him banished to Earth.

Apart from Odin, no one ever holds Thor to account for his emotional outbursts. When he flips over a table after his argument with Odin, no one even comments except for some light protesting about wasted food. Instead, Loki actually comes closer to acknowledge Thor’s feelings and provide him with comfort and advice.

Here we see that Loki is perpetually stuck in the cycle of enabling Thor’s dysfunctional Feeler strategy.

Loki has become a Thinker probably by necessity. He only got attention, comfort and acknowledgement when he displayed the right emotions. This is most likely because his parents had already got into a bad cycle of providing unconditional attention to Thor, and did not have enough capacity, when Loki arrived, to give him the same undivided unconditional attention. Therefore Loki learned to display emotions to please the people around him in exchange for attention. As he became older, Loki necessarily became the diplomat, the person who smoothed things over in disagreements. He puts his own emotions into containment so that he can display what other people want to and need to see. This is completely instinctive by the time we meet him in Thor 1.

Unfortunately, a dysfunctional Thinker like Loki simply feeds into Thor’s perpetual cycle of amplifying his emotions. He always has a captive audience in his brother, he always gets the acknowledgement he wants from Loki. He never has to acknowledge Loki’s feelings because his brother never appears to be inconvenienced by any negative feelings. 

This is probably why Thor loves Loki so much and just assumes Loki must love him back. This is also why Thor is so surprised when he finds out Loki actually resents him at the end of Thor 1. Loki is very good at containing his feelings, and a Feeler like Thor is completely ill equipped to read between the lines and see what emotions Loki isn’t expressing.

Thank you to @aphrodaisyacs and @mercia-lachesis for the tag!

Rules: Bold your fic preferences because why not, gotta choose one (near impossible, but go with your first gut instinct).

slow burn or love at first sight

fake dating or secret dating

enemies to lovers or best friends to lovers

oh no there's only one bed or long distance with correspondence

fantasy au or modern au (I prefer non-au settings but if I had to choose...)

smut or fluff

mutual pining or domestic bliss

alternate universe or future fic (especially if it's a canon-divergent au, my fave)

one shot or multi-chapter

kid fic or roadtrip fic (both. roadtrips are the best but also kiddos)

reincarnation or character death (resurrection? 100% into it. reincarnation? not so much)

arranged marriage or accidental marriage (not a huge fan of either but I chose accidental for the comedy aspect)

high school romance or middle aged romance

time travel or isolated together (always a fave)

neighbors or roomates

sci-fi au or magic au

bodyswap or genderbend

angst or crack (both. both at once is even better)

apocalyptic or mundane

Sure, here’s my go:

slow burn or love at first sight - Neither, I’m too Asexual.

fake dating or secret dating - Gonna have to pull my Ace card again.

enemies to lovers or best friends to lovers - Geez this card is wearing out

oh no there’s only one bed or long distance with correspondence - Nothing wrong with snuggles.

fantasy au or modern au - I mostly read fantasy so a fantasy au of a fantasy seems silly. Modern is more fun because you can translate things with more thought.  

smut or fluff

mutual pining or domestic bliss

alternate universe or future fic - Both? Both is good. 

one shot or multi-chapter - There is nothing so terrible as an unfinished multi-chapter, unless it is the one shot that should have been so much more...

kid fic or roadtrip fic - I mean most stories are roadtrip stories. A story is about leaving one place to get to another.

reincarnation or character death - Reincarnation? Like, as something else? ...then it’s not the same anymore. 

arranged marriage or accidental marriage - Not a big fan of either but accidental sounds more modern at least.

high school romance or middle aged romance - More old people in everything, please

time travel or isolated together 

neighbors or roommates - I guess family, so...long term roommates?

sci-fi au or magic au

bodyswap or genderbend

angst or crack - But only because I write jokes in my angst

apocalyptic or mundane - Both? Both is still good

 There you go, @aninfinitenumberofmonkeys​!

“What might happen if I expressed an interest in joining your… little revolution?”

The Kronian’s expression brightened. “That’d be terrific! The revolution could always use more revolutors. Except…” he frowned. “Might be a bit tricky, what with you going to be dead and all. It’d be right tough handing out pamphlets as a ghost. They’d fall right through your hands!”

Loki smiled through gritted teeth. “And what if I wasn’t a ghost?”

Korg shook his head. “No, but I’m afraid we can’t have zombies in the revolution. Not that I’d mind personally, understand, I’m pretty open-minded, but what would the others think?”

Loki stopped even trying to hide his frustration. “That isn’t what I mean either. What if I wasn’t dead?”

“Well, not to be gloomy or anything but I wouldn’t count on that,” Korg said cheerfully. “I’m sorry to say things aren’t looking too good for an escape just now. Those chains, for one thing. You’d have to chew your own arms off or something, and your teeth don’t look quite sharp enough for that, not to mention I imagine you’re pretty attached to them.”

I see so much of both who I am and used to be in his character: toxic parents, self-hatred, “scapegoat,” etc. And we see how these things contribute to the bad decisions he makes in Thor and in Avengers. In the past, I’ve said things that hurt other people and I did things that hurt myself. I thought I was in the right. You couldn’t tell me I was wrong. Sound familiar? Even when Thor tried to reason with him in Avengers, he refused to see eye to eye. He was stubborn and self-centered. He continued on with his destructive behavior.

Just to give you all an idea of what I went through before I started to grow, I’ve mentioned before that I’m biracial (Black), and the family I grew up with was mostly white. I was adopted by one Black and one white parent, and the Black side of my family had little influence on me since they lived on the other side of the country. My white parent is very toxic and very anti-Black. I held self-hatred for my “Black side” and grew up listening to microaggressions inflicted on me by white members of my family. I wanted as little to do with my Black side as possible, and when people throw this kind of hatred your way, you start to believe it. Even though I would have never labeled myself as anti-Black back then, I now know that I was. I’m now at a place where I’m learning to love my Blackness and I’m recognizing anti-Blackness and calling it out when I see it, even if it makes the toxic people in my life uncomfortable.

And the thing is, I think a lot of people who hold self-hate for themselves go through a self-destructive stage before they begin to learn the errors in their ways. If you’re like me, it takes someone you have a lot of respect for to call out some behaviors you’re exhibiting, and suddenly, you start reexamining your beliefs and the people in your life. Unfortunately, for Loki, it took the death of his mother in TDW for him to start reexamining his actions (it was he who told his mother’s murderer the best route after all).

What I see in Loki in Ragnarok is a person who is just starting to see the error in his ways and doesn’t quite know where he stands. He’s more awkward and he’s still making questionable decisions, but throughout the movie, I get the impression that he’s at least questioning those questionable decisions. And for the first time, he’s starting not to see his brother (who was just as much a victim of his father’s toxicity as he was) as an enemy anymore. I think what a lot of people in the Loki fandom don’t get is that once you start to get out of a dark place, there is awkwardness. You know you’ve done wrong, and because of this, you know people are right not to completely trust you. Loki has done some pretty unforgivable things, and he knows this. He knows he doesn’t quite fit in with the likes of Thor and company. Loki of 2012 would never dream of teaming up with his brother, but he knows it’s the right thing to do if he wants to save the people of Asgard. So he does it, regardless of how uncomfortable it makes him.

I breathed such a sigh of relief when I saw how they introduced Loki in Ragnarok. It was so beautifully done and showed how much the director understood the character. My least favourite iteration of the character is in Avengers and TDW, when I feel they were more focused on Loki’s comic depiction, which lacks the things I love in the original mythology. Not entirely - there’s still lots of humour based around emasculation in both (admittedly probably my least favourite part of the myths), but it feels like an unintentional reference. It’s just common to emasculate the bad guy and have your heroes look cool.  

In Ragnarok, I never felt that the humour was at Loki’s expense, or to make the heroes look good in comparison. The humiliation was shared, and the purpose was to confront all the characters with their ridiculous posturing; to shake them up. It felt equal and purposeful and thoughtful. It was humiliation with the goal of humility and growth, not just plain slapstick to make fun of the less-physically imposing villain. 

Honestly, I’m heartbroken that we lost this Loki. I can’t believe I’ve got Avengers Loki back instead for the Loki series. I remember thinking, after that movie, that we had a lot of work to do...and after TDW, I gave up hope that Marvel and I had the same hopes for the character at all.