#iw thoughts

Straight after IW came out we had articles pinning all the blame on Peter Quill. If only he didn’t punch Thanos.

A week later it’s all Thor’s fault. The Russo’s said it himself. He should have gone for the head.

Now I see Wanda getting the blame. Because she should have killed her boyfriend as soon as there was a possiblility of a threat! How dare Wanda love someone.

The thing is. Almost every single character in IW made a choice that negatively impacted the outcome of IW.

Loki stole the tesseract from Asgard. Maybe it would have been destroyed with Asgard and it would all be over. Maybe not. But chances are Thanos wouldn’t have attacked the Asgardian ship if Loki and the Space Stone weren’t on board. And even then, if Loki hadn’t given up the stone - considering it was in one of many of his dimensional ‘pockets - Thanos would have had no way to get to it.

Wanda didn’t kill Vision the moment they found out Thanos was coming. But hold on, didn’t Steve argue for Vision to not be killed? And Steve was the one who brough the fight to Wakanda.

T’Challa and Shuri said yes to trying to remove the stone. Instead of argueing that killing Vision would be the better solution. (And one that wouldn’t have resulted in their country being attacked.)

Gamora made the choice to give up a stone for Nebula.

Quill punched Thanos instead of letting the rest of them finish the job.

Strange gave up the Time Stone (possibility the most important stone) for Tony - and had he not done that, Thanos wouldn’t have been able to reverse Wanda killing Vision.

Then of course, Thor went for the chest instead of the head. 

Yet despite all this they were still willing to make the hard choices. Quill willing to kill Gamora. Wanda ACTUALLY killing Vision.

Thanos’s plan makes no sense to me. Why would he wipe out half the universe to save us from extinction if he can do pretty much anything with the infinity stones like create more resources or more planets? And why are the original Avengers the only ones left alive? clearly he has something else in mind.

He is the one who brought the Avengers together in the first Avengers movie by sending Loki.

But after Civil War, the Avengers broke up and it would take more this time than just Coulson dying to put aside their differences. Thanos knew that, and he was right, because even the end of the world was not enough to make Tony call Steve. So pretty much like Ozymandias in Watchmen who killed a bunch of people to end the Cold War, Thanos killed every new character that got in the way of Tony and Steve’s friendship. Steve needed to lose Bucky who killed Tony's parents and Tony needed to lose Peter by the same hand that killed Bucky so they could fight alongside once again. Thanos is just a hardcore Avengers fanboy who couldn’t bear to see them fight one another in Civil War. So he brought the band back together.

If anything this a response to the opinion that Loki being brought back would ‘cheapen’ his death. But also a general comment on the obsession with redeeming characters and the idea that ‘death by redemption’ is the best way to do it.

Let’s start simple. With the fact that Loki as a character doesn’t need redeeming. The comic book version was so evil that the only way to ‘redeem’ him was to kill him and bring him back as a child (but even the younger Loki still had mistrust from everyone who remembered who he used to be). MCU’s Loki is nowhere near as evil. The most evil he’s been was his actions in the Avengers, we know he killed about 80 people but no idea how many died when New York was invaded. And there’s enough evidence to suggest from his state at the beginning of the film (and the fact he’s been running since) that Thanos tortured him.  He's done bad things and if you just bear in mind his characterisation in Avengers, yeah you can take him as evil, but across the entire film series he's not. Thor1 you can account all his actions to be lied to about who and WHAT he is. The most evil thing is TDW he does is fake his own death. He spends more time trying to PRETEND to be evil.

I call it ‘Death by Redemption’ but TV Tropes calls in ‘Redemption Equals Death’ Which is a familiar trope. Evil characters can only be redeemed when they die, particularly if they sacrifice themself. The most famous example is obviously Darth Vader dying for his son. A man who’d committed countless atrocities, of course death was the only potential way of redeeming him. In my opinion Death by Redemption should be the final option, other ways of redeeming a character (if that so happens to be the choice) should be considered first. Loki is not a character who needs to die to be redeemed.

Now if we argue Loki needs redeeming. Then in whose eyes does he need redeeming in? Not Thor’s. They’ve already made peace at the end of Ragnarok. Loki helping on Asgard and even returning to the ship at the end of the film, was more than enough to restore Thor’s faith in him. The only people whose eyes Loki can be redeemed in, are the Avengers. I’d argue specifically Clint and Natasha as they were the most affected by Loki’s action (Natasha because of what happened to Clint), potentially Tony because of the confrontation in Stark Tower. And for that to happen, he’d need to help the Avengers before his death and most importantly they’d need to SEE him doing it.

So let’s talk about how him coming back would cheapen his death.

The death that IF it wasn’t a trick, was incredibly poorly written. The cryptic words he spoke (’the sun will shine on us again’) that still need an explanation. His death served no purpose other than to get rid of the character for the rest of the film. (Don’t get me started about how Thor didn’t need to see Loki die to motivate him, that’s a rant for another day).

There’s also the matter that Loki has already died by redemption at the end of TDW. Sure it was a fake death, but we’ve already seen him sacrifice himself fighting with Thor, why would the writers cheaply kill him off in the same way?

But isn’t Loki’s character arc completed by his death?

No.

Personally I don’t think Loki’s character arc is complete, I feel like it was cut part way through. If anything was going to complete Loki’s character arc it would have been Ragnarok, but what Ragnarok did instead of complete it was to RESET it.  And while it came full circle in some ways (returning home and being welcomed) there's still some things that haven't been addressed that I feel would be necessary. Like what happened to Loki between Thor1 and the Avengers. The only way to complete his arc in regards to that is for him to help bring Thanos down in a more active way. We got a confrontation of sorts but it wasn't the right type to really fulfill his arc. To do that he'd need to play a part in Thanos' downfall (because he played a part in helping Thanos during the Avengers) which makes a confrontation feel like it isn’t enough.

To fulfill Loki’s character arc we should have seen Thor and Loki together as brothers after Ragnarok. 

If Loki is really dead, then Marvel has severely misunderstood his character. By believing he needs redeeming in the first place and by giving him such a cheap rehashed death.

In reference to what was discussed in the last days, the only point with which I disagree, is the idea about the Russo’s brother campaigning to expel out the Loki fans from the franchise. I mean, this is not as the markenting works, at least,as far as I know.Certainly, i’m not a marketing expertise , but , from my view, any publicity campaign doesn’t work about the premise “ hey, we are going to expel out this group of consumers from our cinemas, so that this larger group, the one with which we are really going to make money, they finally will feel more comfortable with our product”

And this argument is not new, I’ve been listening it for what? ten years? in different fandoms. 

ok, I´ll correct it: there are campaigns of that type, but mostly they are not intended for cheap and massive products, such as the blockbuster ones. 

 What a marketing campaign of this type  looking to do is something very similar to what a political campaign tries to do: get a lot of people sitting side by side in an bench, looking for the product,without looking too closely at the differences that separate him from his seat mate .

This a delicate equilibrium point, yes, in which Disney is making promises to all focus groups, many of which the company will not be able to fullfill, but they don’t care, because what they are interested in is in the words of Taika, put "bums on seats” The real problem of Disney is the need to create expectations about their next characters:this problem also faced Toriyama, to give an example, but, being the satirist that is, (side note: Waititi would make an excellent version of DBZ, the shares the same humor)he solves this by incorporating the old evil characters as part of the protagonist’s troupe. So, if the spectator says “hey, I don’t like this new evil guy, what happened with Picolo?Tory says: ”Hey, here’s Picolo, look“ Same with Vegeta. Or Frezeer. :cof,cof: 

 And all this works ok because Dbz works in the key of satire (you really don’t believe in that aaaaaaaall the bad guys can be redeemed, right?)

  tl;dr: the problem with the Russos’s is just what, before IW premiere,the fans declared to be their greatest virtue: they really lack of sense of humor. "Hey, never they’ll make bad jokes, they treated the characters seriously”

 Well, this is the consequences.