#sneckerdoodle

I also think one of the main reasons they rarely show abilities he canonically should have is b/c by the time Dr. Strange happened and blew open the door for magic in the MCU, Loki and his simpler, more sorta grounded magic had already been in 3 movies. But at least w/ Wanda they can get away with adding new powers b/c the in-world explanation is she’s still learning.

The thing is though - and my annoyance on this is not directed at you! Just to be clear! - Loki was shown using magic in Thor and Thor: The Dark World well before Doctor Strange came out (2011 / 2013 vs. 2016). Wanda was shown using abilities that were not called magic but sure looked like it in 2015. The marketing of Doctor Strange as “the intro of magic to the MCU!!” was...frustrating as hell, when there were two other magic users right there. (Cop out bullshit “magic is science!” oh please.)

As for not feeling like they could show/use more magic, the point of the post that I linked to is that the magic they show Loki doing is actually pretty extensive and shows a wide range - it’s just that they don’t use it. The on-screen magic usage for all of the things I listed in the first part of that post are there -  telekinesis, illusion magic, shapeshifting (if we count the magic that seems to dissolve with touch and the magic that he seems to use to be Odin, which can survive contact), transmutation (wine into snakes, admittedly in a deleted scene but still there), some kind of astral projection (in Thor: Ragnarok, when he sends an illusion of himself to Thor), conjuring of knives/weapons or other objects (e.g. the Tesseract), telepathy/mind magic (with Erik Selvig in the post-credits scene in Thor, ), possibly teleportation, changing his clothes with magic (Thor can clearly do this too, so maybe this is something else), selective invisibility (visible to Thor in Thor but not to anyone else), mind magic (used on Odin to make him forget who he is, and Val to force her to relive her memories), creation of force fields (deflecting bullets in The Avengers), travel across Realms by some means other than the Bifrost (how does he get to Earth without Heimdall noticing in Thor? maybe some pathway like in The Dark World so I might let this one go as noncanonical but still)...and I might be missing some.

They have it there, as a resource, as something that they can draw on for the character, and that they’ve laid the seeds for in their own movies - and yet they largely drop it by the wayside and decide that oh, we’ll throw in maybe one or two demonstrations of magic for Loki per movie, and otherwise completely ignore it as unimportant, because you know, Doctor Strange is the introduction of magic to the MCU.

I get that Doctor Strange took advantage of magic in new ways, and I was glad to see the MCU doing that - but it does rankle quite a bit that they had their chances before and chose to ignore them - which goes back to the “films/tv don’t know how to use magic users or do anything interesting with them” problem.

I feel like most of the book fandom stuff did have top Aziraphale, but the trend’s gone the other way since the show.

yeah? I feel like even when I was back reading older book stuff I was having a hard time tracking it down - though admittedly I was only on AO3, not dipping into Livejournal or FFN (or looking for webrings/the like). 

I actually have only barely paid attention to it and really just tracked the What’s Happening With Loki part, so I know basically nothing about things that aren’t him. At this point I really just...don’t follow Marvel events - I don’t think I’ve found a single one worth it except maybe House of M.

Not even for Russell Dauterman, alas.

Nebula and Valkyrie. It makes no sense, but boy would it be fun.

mine is if a fic has a wall of tags lol they could very well be good, but I always immediately skip