Fic Writer

German Shepherd babysitting the Dobermans 

And then he gets there and ... it had to have been Bones that organized it in advance, because of them all, Bones seemed to be the most clued in to the whole Kirk and Spock thing ... it takes Bones, Scotty, and some random Engineer dude to STOP KIRK FROM JOINING SPOCK. And then *points up* THAT happens and I just ... ouch.

Fans: Loki grew up in stable environment and he is just spoiled narcissist

Loki:

Fans: Loki killed Frigga

Frigga:

Fans: Loki killed 80 people in 3 days & he enjoyed it

Loki:

Fans: Loki never cared about anyone but himself before series

Loki:

Fans: Loki went through a big character development in series because he doesnt want the throne

Loki 10 years ago:

The horrifying part is that, PER CANON the *only* thing we even SUSPECT Loki did *in his right mind* was letting the Jotuns into the Vault. But even THAT, insofar as I’m aware, can be questioned, because we never SEE him do it. He just takes credit for it with Laufey. It may have been confirmed somewhere, but if so, I’ve not seen it or heard about it.

Literally everything else he’s done in the movies has been AFTER getting the mindscrew from hell (the discovery that he’s Jotun), then torture, mind control, and all KINDS of further fuckery.

And even out his damn mind, he fought tooth and nail to keep collateral damage and civilian casualties as low as he could.

The Destroyer? Contrary to Fury’s claims, wrecks ONE STREET and it didn’t look like there was even one civilian casualty. And most of the property damage was thanks to Thor using a fucking tornado.

Avengers? HAH. Sit there and tell me someone with Loki’s brains and charisma couldn’t have played that ENTIRE DAMN INVASION completely differently if he’d ACTUALLY wanted to conquer Earth. And that ‘80 people in three days’ crack was probably the collapse of the PEGASUS facility - something Loki had ZERO control over. Yeah, he directly killed some folks there, but, like, half a dozen or so. Not eighty.

THEY FUCKING MAKE OUT IN FRONT OF GOD AND EVERYONE IN TREK THE MOTION PICTURE. Think I’m lying? It’s fucking CANON that Vulcan hands are sensitive as hell telepathically speaking. It’s also CANON that couples ‘kiss’ by touching the first two fingers of their hands together. And after Spock gets his brain rearranged by V’ger, he GRABS KIRK’S HAND and Kirk not only takes it but folds his other hand over the back of Spock’s while they have a deep discussion about FEELINGS. I CANNOT MAKE THIS SHIT UP.

And then, in Search for Spock THIS happens. Spock’s got a spectacular case of, at the very least ‘fried brain’ going on here, probably amnesia ... and the first fucking thing he remembers is KIRK. He gives every single one of the rest of the crew he’s spent years of his life with blank stares like he’s never seen them before in his life, has this little chat with Kirk and you can SEE the lightbulb go off over his head as he *remembers* Kirk.

Also can you explain why you like him? thanks!

Oh man I love Tony. Iron Man is what first got me so obsessed in the Marvel/DC superhero genre, so I treasure him a lot. Bucky is my number 1 and I like Steve too, I just happen to like Tony more. 

I think everybody in the mcu has made mistakes and made bad judgement calls but for some reason Tony is one of the characters where people feel the need to blame every single bad thing that happens on him. Worst of all he blames himself too. There have been so many characters that have made mistakes and been able to redeem themselves, some haven’t been held accountable at all, and for some reason none of the good things Tony has done outweigh his mistakes. Most of the problems arise from his desire to help people in the first place.

 At first his sarcasm and quirks where a lovable character trait and as time went by they stopped being funny and started being the result of an untreated mental illness, and people went from loving him to blaming him, because he acts out of fear and anxiety which is something other characters continuously take advantage of.

Shield takes advantage of Tony’s dependence on the Avengers, because let’s face it without Tony’s funding, his innovation and everything he does, there would be no Avengers. Not that that matters of course because nobody ever gives him credit for anything. Steve plunges into the ocean to save a city full of people and he’s hailed a hero. Tony does the nearly exact same thing and he’s taken for granted. Both heroic acts but the characters are treated vastly different. 

The entirety of the mcu rests on it’s neglect of Tony Stark and their continuous insistence on making him miserable. Without Tony’s continuous shitty treatment, they wouldn’t have any consistent storyline for the avengers. 

Tony ultimately has no support system. He has the Avengers a family which he cherishes but ultimately they don’t have time for him. (added: support such as Pepper, is one he’s for no reason in particular deprived of. It’s pretty clear that they will get back together but for Civil War he’s deprived of the most influential person in his life, for the sake of angst. Rhodey is a good friend but also has responsibilities of his own and after his injury in Civil War the focus in their relationship will be leaning towards him and his recovery [as it should]. So it’s less about how his friends fail him, but how the plot deprives him of the thing’s he cares about, mostly for no good reason. Due to this Tony is often left out of the equation and his feeling are pushed aside, in favor of the problems at hand)

Bruce is always pretty much looked after. People are wary of him, they feel sorry for him, Natasha becomes his personal nanny/LI for an entire movie. But at the end of Iron Man 3, Bruce can’t be bothered to listen to Tony talk about his feeling’s and everything that’s happened throughout the movie, and Bruce actually FALLS ASLEEP. 

[not my gifs] Full Video: X

Can we appreciate that Bruce has attempted suicide, is traumatized by his experience, feels guilty for the Hulks destruction, want’s to help people and live in peace and yet can’t be bothered to listen to a highly traumatized friend in need. A person he on many levels can relate intimately too. 

In fact it’s not that he just doesn’t pay attention, Tony is so irrelevant to him that he falls asleep. Tony’s a pretty shut off person. He cares so much that  he’s needs to close himself off so that he can function. So he only has a few people he would ever really open up too and when he finally want’s to talk to someone to be comforted, his friend falls asleep. With the excuse. “I’m not a therapist.” You don’t need to be a fucking therapist to listen to a friend in need. Tony doesn’t want to be psychoanalyzed. He want’s someone to listen, someone to care about him.  The worst thing is after he realizes Bruce is asleep and wasn’t listening, you can see the shift in his expression. He immediately closes himself off, makes a joke out of it, as if it doesn’t bother him. But it does. 

I hate this scene because it represents pretty much everything I hate about how people treat Tony. (added: I don’t want Steve stans to go off on me here so what I mean is that this scene isn’t too terrible but it’s representative of how people think of Tony and how they treat him.) As if his accomplishment’s are worthless. As if he hasn’t struggled, faced loss, as if he isn’t one of the smartest people on the planet. They make assumptions about him. Steve should know better than anyone that it’s not the serum, or the armor that makes the man. It’s the person underneath. He himself faced people that doubted him all his life, because he wasn’t as strong, wasn’t as capable, they didn’t care about his heart. Just like in this scene where he assumes things about Tony without knowing him. Just like people did to him, in enlistment offices, in school, throughout his entire life.

Not to mention Steve is trying to start a fight here. He’s trying to put Tony down, wants to fight him. To prove that he’s better than him.

Iron Man is Tony Stark and Tony Stark is Iron Man. Iron Man couldn’t be a hero without Tony Stark, and Tony Stark needs Iron Man to be a hero. 

Basically I love Tony Stark  I want people to realize how hard he works, what he’s sacrificed, and that if you strip away the suit, what left underneath is just as brave, kind, strong and courageous.

TONY STARK DID NOT TRY TO KILL STEVE ROGERS AND BUCKY BARNES.

Iron Man is lethal as fuck. The armaments on that thing, and the amount of boom they bring to the party, are terrifying IN THE FIRST ITERATION. By which, I mean the one with fucking flamethrowers that was made from bomb parts. After that, each iteration just got more and more terrifyingly, efficiently lethal. By the time of that whole mess in Siberia, Iron Man was fully capable of laying a fair-sized army waste SOLO.

And Tony Stark has shown, repeatedly, that he has ZERO compunctions with deploying those armaments in order to take an enemy down.

As far as I can remember, we don’t see him do anything unambiguously and purely selfish even once in the entire series.

In Thor 2011 he tries to delay the coronation for the good of Asgard to stop a warmonger taking the throne (Thor’s same motivation in Ragnarok btw - tho a milder version since he doesn’t intend to kill Thor or stop his condition permanently). He doesn’t want the throne for himself, and indeed his plan is so complicated largely because he is unwilling to kill or harm Thor or permanently remove him from the line of succession. (And of course his plan backfires with disastrous results for him). And then after he learns the truth of his heritage he has a suicidal breakdown and is just desperate to regain some scrap of Odin’s approval since his whole identity and life have been shown to be a lie and Odin has told him the purpose he took him for has been obviated.

His invasion of NYC to get the Tesseract is carried out on Thanos’s orders after Loki has been brainwashed and tortured so he’s clearly not benefitting there. 

In Dark World he fights (and ultimately sacrifices himself) to save the world, avenge his mother, and protect Thor and Jane. And he does the same again in Ragnarok, and very nearly dies while saving Asgard by raising Surtur. 

And of course in Infinity War he gives his life in Thor’s place. 

Even the play he has commissioned in Ragnarok serves the concrete purpose of undoing centuries of Odin’s lies and deprogramming Asgard’s violently xenophobic attitudes towards the Jotnar, so it can’t be counted as a purely indolent and self serving pursuit. 

1. Odin had been growing increasingly unfit to rule for a while - when he talks to Laufey, Laufey says, “Allfather, you look weary,” in a tone suggesting this creates an opening for Jotunheim to wage successful war on Asgard. Odin seems to have realized this himself since the opening scene has him in the ambivalent process of handing over the throne to Thor, but then the conflict over how to respond to the Jotuns in the vault happens, he changes his mind, and then several whole-ass movies pass where he just sits on the throne while growing increasingly tired and confused. In TDW, his plan for how to deal with the dark elves is for all Asgardians including himself to die fighting them in a battle he admits is pointless, and he refuses to consider any other options. Deposing him is reasonable when considering the good of Asgard.

2. The first thing Loki does after deposing Odin is to offer the throne to Thor. It seems to me like he knows Thor is more ready to rule now, but that Odin is too old-man-bullheaded to see it, so he essentially arranges for Odin to pass the throne on to Thor this way. When Thor says no, there’s no obvious other successor to pick, and if he just abandoned the throne, probably a civil war would break out over its vacancy.

You’re not going to admit that for the first time in your life, you committed a purely human, emotional act?

No, sir.

my mother died at home in a hospice cot, slowly shutting down over the course of about a week. when she had stopped responding, i remembered what dad told me about wishing he’d played music for grandpa, and i put the radio on her favorite country music station and kept it on for her until she died.

daddy died in hospital. no cassette players, no decent radios. the day after he was brought in, i thought again of what he told me, and i bought a little portable bluetooth speaker. even though he never woke up, was never aware, i played music for him too.

Studies of people in the last days of life have shown more brain activity in response to family talking than to staff members talking, so it’s not only hearing but /recognition/ that is still present, though comprehension is debated.

So talk to your loved ones, even when they can’t respond. Play their favourite music, prattle on about your day or your new puppy or your favourite memories of them.

At any rate, he went down and went down FAST. Literally within about a minute he went from being alive, active, and responsive to ... very much NOT.

Needless to say, my mom and I freaked a bit. Me more than her. She had to hold it together by force, because she was his medical power of attorney and had to Deal With Shit when the ambulance and cops came (cops here come automatically when it’s made clear a death is imminent on a 911 call, even if the person dying is dying of old age).

I managed to keep it mostly together by pretending grandpa wasn’t, you know, dying right in front of me. While also more or less begging him to keep breathing almost non-stop.

What kind of fucks me up to this day (and will for a while to come) is ... HE DID. Despite being beyond even the ability to open his eyes, every goddamned time ‘breathe, grandpa’ came out my damn mouth, HE DID. When I had to go quiet while they did the stethoscope thing ... he STOPPED. The minute I started up again, he responded.

Zemo was right about this.

They've been experimenting on people with that serum for decades.

First, the Red Skull injected the serum to himself and it resulted with the face of his skin burning off since the serum wasn't perfected yet. He didn't even mind it, and despite going against the orders of Hitler, he continued his work with the Tesseract until Steve took it with him when he buried his jet into water.

The second experiment was Steve. It was a shocking choice since the US wanted someone big and strong for the experiment, and not a sick, skinny guy like Steve. But as we all know, Erskine especially wanted Steve because he was a good man, not a perfect soldier. Since the serum enhances what is already within, Steve was able to come out of the experiment with no side effects. And he was the only one who didn't get corrupt.

The third one was Bucky. Now his case was a bit different than the others. He got injected without his permission. They had already started to use him as a test subject when he was captured by HYDRA before Steve rescued him from the facility in 1943. Later, when he fell from the train he was able to survive thanks to the serum. But there were side effects since his memories had been wiped out, and the serum increased his aggression as well. (for example, his brutality in fighting) Also, even with the serum, HYDRA couldn't save his arm.

The fourth was Isaiah Bradley. He got the serum, just like the rest of them, and was sent to Korea to take down the Winter Soldier. He failed his mission but was able to almost rip his whole arm off. Then, they imprisoned him for 30 years because he was a super soldier. He was experimented on both by the US Government and HYDRA at the same time. We don't know much about his side effects but I don't think he survived all of that with no damage. Later, the CIA got his blood samples and Nagel used them to make more serum with it.

Fifth experiment: In 1991 HYDRA assassinated Howard Stark in order to create more super soldiers and start the Winter Soldier Program (which I always wondered, where the hell did Howard get these from? CIA? Did I miss that part? Someone enlighten me, please.) Now, these subjects were stronger than Bucky because HYDRA didn't use Vita Radiation (Howard Stark used this to stimulate growth and also "stabilize" according to Peggy Carter) But these new serum made the soldiers even more aggressive and they weren't easy to control. So when one of them attacked a HYDRA agent, the others followed him but they were brainwashed and frozen in the end, just like Bucky. After Zemo found out about Siberia, he killed them all in their sleep.

Sixth experiment: There was a new experiment in 2001 under Ross's command. They basically added Gamma Radiation along with the serum (hey Bruce Banner!). After that failed attempt, they injected Emil Blonsky a variant serum with Banner's blood in it. Long story short, the side effects were huge and not pretty. He turned into the Abomination.

Seventh, you'd think they would learn their lesson but no. HYDRA created a new serum in 2013. This time it was mixed with Extremist, Gamma Radiation, and the Chitauri technology. As if they worked perfectly before. They called it the Centipede Project. (Agents of Shield fans would know more about it.)

Eighth was the Flag Smashers. They injected the serum themselves. There are 8 injected Flag Smashers in total. Karli in this case doesn't care about who she kills as long as it serves her ideology. She's blinded by her ambition and she's not afraid to get her hands bloody because she knows she is doing the right thing. Her followers believe that she's leading them to freedom. To a world that has no boundaries, a free world where there are no countries to separate people from each other. No governments. No patriotism. One world. One people.

The Ninth, we've seen it coming. John Walker managed to take one of the serums before Baron Zemo crushed them all, and he used it to inject himself. We'll see the rest of the side effects in the upcoming episodes but I think we all know he's definitely not the next Steve Rogers.

Now, why did I list all of these? Back in 2016, I could never imagine myself agreeing with Baron Zemo but he is right folks. There hasn't been another Steve Rogers. He was the only successful experiment. The others were either corrupted by the nature of the serum, or they were blinded by the power that comes with it. Or they were just not the right choice.

Walker is a great example of this. He was given the title of Captain America because he was a brilliant soldier. Not because he had a good heart. He was the exact kind of guy that the government would want to have on their side. He was the captain of the football team in high school, then became the first person in American history to receive Three Medals of Honor and he had an incredible military career. This guy was a born leader.

And yet, since the beginning of the show, he's been struggling to fit the perfect image that the people want. The perfect Captain America the US Government wants him to be. He knows he can't be the next Steve Rogers and that has been eating him up ever since. He didn't have the serum which made him vulnerable since he was basically a normal soldier. He wanted to have Bucky and Sam on his side as his wingmen. His enemies weren't scared of him. His ego was crushed from the beginning. He wanted to be in control. He didn't just want to be respected, he wanted to be afraid. He was desperate for more power and it blinded him. He is one of the supremacists Zemo was talking about.

Lemar was the last straw. And he finally gave in. He took all of his anger from Nico. He didn't care that he was killing him, it probably wasn't the first time he got his hands bloody as he mentioned about the ways that they used back in his day of service, earlier in the episode.

When he was standing in that square holding the shield which was covered in blood, it made me think of all the other experiments that the United States is responsible for. Honestly, they started this nightmare, and just because they got lucky with Steve Rogers (thanks to Dr. Erskine) they kept pushing to get another perfect super soldier.

Think about it.

MCU Steve Rogers was specifically shown to be willing to repeatedly lie in order to enlist. Had he been discovered by people who gave a damn about the law, he’dve got thrown in jail for that nonsense.

He refused, in other words, to take ‘no’ for an answer, even when ‘no’ was a reasonable, sane response. He disdained the other ‘help the war effort’ type jobs he *could* have done States-side without even being in the Army.

Also, yes, he claimed to hate bullies, but ... the only example we are shown is him picking a fight with some random guy that was whinging about the pre-movie reels at the movie theater. That’s not a bully, folks. That was a guy whose opinion Steve didn’t like.

Once is chance. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is a pattern.

Azzanno.

Steve, who had all of, what, *goes to look it up* Ok, IF his boot camp lasted the full time, he’dve had a whopping six weeks of training. All done when he was a five foot tall, ninety pound bit of fluff. Yet he decided he knew better than someone with probably literal decades of experience in the field (Colonel Phillips).

Again and again and again, Steve is shown to respect no opinion but his own, regardless of whether he is right or wrong.

Either every word that comes out of Steve’s mouth is gospel, or you’re an enemy to be eliminated/worked around, and that state of affairs was set in stone LONG before he even got the Serum, never mind all the malarkey that happened afterwards.

It’s just that, in the movies, Steve is framed as a HERO. And thus, all his actions are Good and Right and Just, whereas everyone else is not. Put literally any other damn name to Steve’s actions, and they would, at the very least, get side-eyed VERY strongly. Many of them would see the person responsible named a supervillain. Seriously. Try it. Go through the MCU movies in which Steve appears and put ... hell, since he’s framed against Steve anyway 90% of the time ... put Tony Stark in Steve’s place and watch how fast it changes how the sequence of events come off.

Sometimes, it’s just us the fans going ‘LOL. These two together = mayhem, chaos, blood and tears and I AM HERE FOR IT’.

like that’s such an awful, manipulative thing to do to a child, to raise him DESPISING the race, the culture, he came from, and then fucking lift the curtain like ooh! surprise! your brother’s blood is hot and he wants to murder you and your kind ‘cause guess what! you’re one of those disgusting frost giants!

LIKE.. nothing will ever make that alright, or fine, or in any way excusable. AND I’M SORRY, BUT FRIGGA ISN’T SOMEHOW NOT COMPLICIT IN THIS.

Even if Jotuns hadn’t been spoken of/treated like utter shit, Loki was set up to fail.

He’s Jotun. He’s an entire different goddamned SPECIES than Asgardians. And he was clearly expected to be the ideal Asgardian, and given ten different shades of shit when he inevitably failed.

And the *only* way Frigga isn’t in trouble right along with Odin is if Odin pulled some sort of shit with her. Like, threatened to kill her family if she didn’t obey him, or, given there IS magic when it comes to Asgard’s throne, he could have made some sort of magically-backed royal decree that she literally couldn’t break. And I can TOTALLY see Odin being EXACTLY that sort of asshole.

But that’d be the only way/reason Frigga doesn’t get in trouble, and unfortunately, it’s not outright stated (or really even hinted) that Odin did in fact do something like that.

Me: I liked the comics version of her. Even when she was a villain, the writers managed to not make her a Nazi and then refused to give her any character growth.

Them: The MCU gave her character growth! They made her an Avenger!

Me: But she never expressed that voluntarily working for Hydra (NAZIS!) was wrong, let alone working alongside “Ultron”. Having once been a Nazi and having no remorse over that makes a lot of the “accidents” that she has really suspect. Especially when you start taking into consideration how those accidents are suddenly losses of control where she had previously demonstrated perfect control.

Them: That’s just bad writing! You can’t hold that against her! And she didn’t know they were Hydra!

Me: Except in all the ways that she did know, because they made sure to demonstrate it in canon. Something that they somehow felt was unnecessary when it came to renouncing being a Nazi or showing regret for violating the minds & free will of countless people.

Them: She was sad! She was traumatized!

1) SHE COULD READ MINDS. I will (severely reluctantly) grant that when they joined, they didn’t know the people they joined were HYDRA. But once Wanda was able to read minds? All excuses about not knowing are null and void.

2) In emphasis because it needs it: SHE HAS MINDFUCK POWERS. That she has trained well enough, even as of AOU, nevermind WV, to use on people without melting their brains or whatever AND successfully get what she wants out of the mindfuckery.

I wonder how many times he’s heard about The Almighty Saint George Kirk. How much of a fucking *bludgeon* it must feel like to constantly hear about his heroism etc.

I mean, what George did was important as fuck, but ... damn. Growing up in that shadow must have been *something else*. Add in a canonically absent/nelectful mother and abusive ... stepfather? Uncle? Whatever. And yikes.

Loki does not “betray” his family over and over (despite what a certain actor and his director buddy seem to think). 

He was betrayed BY them. 

Betrayed by Odin, who kidnapped him, lied to him, and raised him to hate his own race. 

Betrayed by Frigga, who went along with Odin’s deception and was more concerned with keeping the peace than in standing up for her emotionally vulnerable son.

Betrayed by Thor, who treated him as a servant and belittled him in front of their peers, refused to listen to him, and never asked once for Loki’s point of view, or what happened to him. 

As a child, he was quiet, curious, and bright, NOT obsessed with stabbing (he’d never been obsessed with stabbing). 

People like to forget that Loki’s behavior from the vault scene in Thor 1 through the rest of his MCU run is the result of a huge mental breakdown from which he had NO ONE to turn to. To say nothing of a 1000+ years of being ostracized. He deeply loved his family and wanted nothing more than to make them proud. Which, you know, would be really hard to do if he betrayed them constantly. Then he finds out his entire life, and his place in the family, is a lie. And it breaks him. His actions from then on are a departure from his usual conduct, not the norm. Yes, he can be cunning, manipulative, and ruthless, but it’s not his default. Watch the deleted scenes from Thor to get a sense of how he was before the truth came out.

Yes, he was guilty of ruining Thor’s coronation. But Thor was in no way shape or form ready for the throne, so Loki dealt with it in the only way he knew would work. Why? I have to imagine Loki knows he’ll be dismissed if he speaks up himself, and he’ll just be labelled as jealous or untrustworthy (as we saw with the W3 and Sif). He probably learned long ago that resorting to subterfuge was the only way to get his points across, no one listens when he makes a point himself. He never intended for the fallout to be Thor getting banished.

Also, Thor is not a cuddly golden retriever or whatever people are saying these days. He was a bully, and he more or less stayed a bully. 

Loki was treated like such shit by the entirety of Asgard. All for the crime of being *different*. He didn’t glorify war. He didn’t prefer punching enemies in the face, bloodshed and ‘glorious battle’ and a ‘warrior’s death’. 

Which, if Thor, Sif, and the Three were anything to go by in the first Thor movie, basically amounted to the Asgardian version of ‘suicide by cop’. Because not a one of them had anything even remotely resembling a plan when it came to combat. Unless ‘hit/stab it. If it doesn’t go down, do it harder’ is an actual plan. Which it totally isn’t.

Loki preferred honeyed/poisoned words, daggers in the dark (literally and metaphorically) and long-range magical badassery. Which, it should be noted, kept both him and those he allied with ALIVE. He thinks. He plans. And for this, he is condemned.

Heimdall at least makes a tiny bit of sense. Given his ‘all seeing’ shtick, he HAS to have known Loki’s true origins, so him being a fucker to Loki makes a tad bit of sense, given Asgard’s attitude re: Jotuns.

But then I side-eye the fuck out of Odin. Again. Because he’s the fucker that brought a Jotun kid to Asgard to raise. Loki was *going* to find out the truth at some point. There’s no hiding THAT for the entirety of Loki’s life. And while completely eliminating prejudice and bigotry might be beyond Odin’s capabilities, he COULD have come down like the wrath of the Norns on anyone he caught mouthing off, which would have severely reduced that nonsense.

Tom has said as well that after viewing that scene alone it disturbed him how bad he looked; and that was likely at the beginning of his torture. Remember also with that and how they’ve said most films actually take place around the RL time of their release in mind; and you’re forced to realize that Thanos likely had him for roughly the whole year between the end of Thor and the beginning of Avengers when he made this appearance.

Given how he looks there, it’s safe I think to say that Thanos and gang snatched him up pretty fast. Which makes sense when you remember they know two particularly powerful stones are on Earth at that time (Space and Time) and probably weren’t willing to risk one of their longer running loyalists: hence the torture/contrrol and conditioning, as well as the reinforcement of it through his communication with The Other.

There are a lot of signs he’s fighting it hard though. Tony’s toss through the window on an angled building, missing teh slope AND all of the cranes below or more is the most obvious (that math is impossible to do on a whim without figuring it before hand, which eh had ample time to figure out since he got to the penthouse first: ask any engineer or mathematician the odds.. they aren’t just low.. it’s next to impossible to do that and have the subject survive as Stark did.)  Another in that scene is the fact that the second suit was building in the penthouse, which again he had time to check and make sure was clear: and would VERY likely have noticed that kind of machinery running in the walls.

He skips going after Fury with the mind stone in that first scene: allowing the Avengers to be activated, and having seen first hand in New Mexico during Thor that at the very least SHIELD likely has -some- relationship with his brother after the events on Midgard between Thor, Sif and the warriors three all having been there to put down the Vault guardian. (Barton himself could fight the control early on too, to an extent: this is shown/talked about in a deleted scene where they briefly talk about how Fury got out unscathed.)

There’s a bunch of little things like that, that had huge impact on the path of the story and subtly display he was put to the events of the New York invasion unwillingly: or at the least that he was tortured and beaten down until he was just willing enough between that and the mind stone for the coercion to take; even with a little out-world supervision from The Other.

This is just someone who was happily traipsing through sanctuary and decided to make a deal of his own free will where Thanos handed over an Infinity Stone and kindly asked him to express-post the Tesseract back 🥰🥰🥰

And this entire scene is just hot girl sh*t 😍😍😍

there’s also never the mind stone glowing when in use to support any claims of it influencing Loki’s behaviour, or any proof it influences that at all because it never happened when the Avengers were in the room 😌😌😌

I’ve seen it posited - and given both the visual evidence and Thanos’ *canon* heinous cruelty when it comes to torture (via *that scene* with Nebula, Jesus Fuck I’ve never seen the movie, just the ((no sound)) *clips* and that shit gives me nightmares) it’s entirely possible Loki was was put in a hot box or otherwise tortured with heat (which, given he’s actually Jotun, not Asgardian ... quadruple yikes). This on top of whatever other ‘delights’ Thanos would have cooked up.

Then there’s the FACT that the only way to get out from under the mind control is to be knocked unconscious. Which carries the horrifying implication of long-term sleep deprivation where Loki is concerned.

Also cubed - The *entirety* of Loki’s invasion plan was a GINORMOUS clue he wasn’t doing the invasion of his own free will. Think about it. Asgard is a warrior society, and unlike most of them, Loki has a goddamned brain and USES IT. He knows warfare tactics.

And yet. He made AS MUCH NOISE AS POSSIBLE coming to Earth. I mean, seriously. Even if there was no way for the portal itself to be less attention getting ... Loki could have SO EASILY played the ‘injured and confused as fuck accidental traveller’ card and schnookered the entirety of SHIELD until he’d recovered enough to do his thing. Instead he started a fight, killed a bunch of people directly and indirectly and mind-whammied at least three people, more or less *ensuring* SHIELD was gonna be on his ass nonstop from then on.

And then there’s the *entirety* of Stuttgart. You’re telling me that Loki, of all people, couldn’t have gotten into that vault and snagged the Iridium without needing an assist? Really? And again, he stopped for a bit of attention-grabbing theater by strolling out into the street and making a bunch of folks kneel. What the hell was the point of that other than to draw more attention to himself and what he was doing, thereby inciting more people to TRY TO STOP HIM.

Then there’s the final portal. It’s explicitly stated in the movie that with the iridium, Loki could have made the portal any damn size he wanted. So why the fuck did he make it only barely big enough for a Leviathan to get through? He could have had that damn thing open big enough to let the entire army through in one go. And again, he put the damn thing over a city with a *known* hero presence (Iron Man being the biggest name at the time) and a shitload of people *right there* who would be capable, ready and willing to defend the area (cops, a shitload of military and ex-military folks not to mention a few million plain civilian New Yorkers who every last one would have gone ‘oh, fuck no, and also, fuck you. IN THE FACE’) when he could have opened the portal somewhere a lot less populated and a lot more easily defended (on his part).

Last but not least, there’s Loki’s failure to mind-control Tony Stark. Given he had info on Steve and Bruce and Nat, it follows that he had info on Tony from Clint. SHIELD knew about the arc reactor in his chest. Even if Clint didn’t know the nitty-gritty details, he’d know there was a ‘thing’ sitting *on Tony’s skin* that prevented skin contact over the heart. And even if he didn’t, Loki FELT AND HEARD the scepter hit something definitely *not* skin. But his second attempt, he touched almost exactly the same spot (a difference of a few millimeters at most).