Peter Parker: -on meeting Loki, offers his hand- Hi, I’m Peter!
Loki: -shakes his hand- Loki of Asgard.
Peter: Aren’t you like…a bad guy?
Loki: It varies from moment to moment.
Peter: So like…on a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst evil imaginable, like…killing puppies, and one being I’ll spit on your hotdog…where are you right now?
Loki: …maybe a three?
Peter: Cool. Lemme know if it gets above a six.
Loki: -thinking- I like him.
It had been a joke, a flippant line, but somehow, Loki found himself taking the youth up on it.
It was hard living around these heroic Avengers, hard trying to stay close to Thor. And when he felt his need for mischief rise too high, when he felt exasperation with these Midgardians turn too close to spite, he would casually say “Six.” to the young man, or sometimes “Seven.”
And Peter would spend the rest of his day with Loki. He would badger him with questions about magic, or drag him across his beloved city to see its entertainments, or take him along stopping petty crimes. He grounded Loki to the here and now, and distracted him from the churning, jagged shards of ice in his mind.
WE NEED LOKI AND PETER FICS
Yeah, the people who write the comics agree with you
imagine if someone really pissed Loki off and he turns to Peter and just “IT’s A TEN, CHILD”
Peter: OH SHIT. EVERYBODY EVACUATE THE CIVILIANS
@shesellsseagulls I know this isn’t your normal shtick, but IMAGINE!
ANYTHING with peter is 100% my shtick and I am HERE FOR THIS.
You know what cracky trash AU I could totally be down for? Hela using up a massive amount of her power and smashing back through whatever awful place Odin banished her to, so… like… she’s still magical and clever and strong, but her power level has been wrecked to “normal Asgardian” levels at least by breaking free. Maybe lower.
So, Hela breaks back into Asgard and tries to steal some of Odin’s treasures to make up for her slowly regenerating powers, but she can’t manage it. Too many guards on the vault or something. So, out of her mind with pain and fury, Hela steals Odin’s “true” treasures instead: kid!Thor and kid!Loki. (Hela has never forgiven her father for marrying that peace-loving witch of a woman. I hc Frigga as Hela’s step-mom, btw. (link to that post))
By some insane order of events, Hela manages to get away from Asgard with the equivalent of, like, a 13-yr-old Thor and a 10-yr-old Loki. Only… what the hell is Hela going to do with them? Use them as hostages? She’s weak enough that they can basically dogpile her to keep her from doing things and it works, and they’re such clever know-it-all shits. The only thing Hela can really do with her magic right now is hide them from Heimdall and his Sight, she can’t access the Bifrost, and she has no idea where they ended up. She was busy running for it while being chased by all of Asgard, thanks, and now her shitty asshole little brothers aren’t even bothering to pretend to be scared of her.
It’s bad enough that the bigger one keeps trying to fight her (even weakened to that of the average civilian, Hela is warrior enough to kick his ass, although the lightning trick is fucking annoying, she can’t taste her tongue), the smaller one with the decent grasp on illusion magic keeps trying to stab her in any and all sides while she’s distracted.
While arguing and fighting on this unknown planet, the three of them eventually stumble into Big Trouble of some kind or another. (What’s this? Vulnerable children of the All-Father? Yum.) Hela and her kid brothers have to put aside their differences to run for their lives. (They’re her hostages, damn it, she can’t let them die or call for help.) Through another insane order of events, Hela, Thor, and Loki end up on the run through the galaxy, accidentally getting involved in multiple plots, coups, revolutions, heists, and parties across multiple planets while trying to respectively evade the Asgardians also chasing them or get home. They leave so much chaos in their wake.
(Loki: “HE started it!”
Hela: “I don’t care who started the revolution! I’m ending it!”
Thor: *scoffs* “With what powers?”
Hela: “Shut up! You! I told you not to drink that stuff, but noooo-”)
Seriously, give me the trashiest, most crack-filled, wildest Kidnapping-Turned-Runaway-Road-Trip (turned Babysitting Gig from Hell) of a depowered Hela and her know-it-all hostages little brothers while some of the galaxy’s Biggest Bads try to catch the All-Father’s children while they’re vulnerable. Give me all the absurd, horrifying nonsense of a group of disaster gods screaming their way through surviving monsters.(At some point, kid!Loki stabs Thanos or someone equivalent in the ass. Because I need that to happen. It’s the highest point of Thanos that Loki could reach while the dude was threatening his brother. Thanos didn’t have much time to care about this though, because Hela soon stabbed him in the face like ten times for threatening her little brothers hostages.)
Give me all the bonding and a surprising amount of character development too, though. Hela has to come face to face with what Asgard’s conquering has done, without the power to be able not to care, and Thor realizes what his heritage is built on. Loki gets revealed to be a Frost Giant at some point, but his siblings still love him.
It’s beautiful, especially the part where all three siblings roll back into Asgard and 13-yr-old Thor (who has never had any decent taste in siblings in his life) is covered in ashes and blood but proudly like, “What up, we’re back. My murderous secret sister Hela is good-ish now and I love her!!! I love my Frost Giant brother too!!! Even if he looks like a weasel and eats garbage.”
(Loki: “We were all eating garbage! You ate more than I did!”
Hela: “Ugh. I surrender already. Can I shower yet?”)
hiddlestown struggles not to say “headcanon” in an interview
this is everything.
even fucking Tom Hiddleston refers to the grandmaster as “Jeff Goldblum.” He didn’t even play a character. Loki just hooked up with Jeff Goldblum.
ladies and gentleman, lets all highlight the fact that Tom sees a ‘’pretty woman involved’’ as a ‘’Pretty Woman TM scenario where a old dude finds your ass and dresses it up’’
the best thing about all of this (and similar posts) is that no one says “Loki slept with Grandmaster” it’s “Loki slept with Jeff Goldblum”
I kinda like to imagine what it would be like if it just… did not occur to Loki that Hela was gonna be genuinely evil about taking over Asgard. Anywhere else, sure, fine, he doesn’t care, but that’s not what you do with Asgard.
(Of course, on one hand, it absolutely did occur to him, he’s cowardly in many ways but not ignorant. On the other hand, following this thought thread for the pure amusement of it, Hela basically seemed to be the sincerely evil conqueror this chaotic neutral dandy been trying to be for the past few years but better, he would absolutely throw a fit and not think about it.)
Like, Loki landed on trash planet and was like, “Welp, I have been sorely, embarrassingly outmatched by a sibling I never knew I had, who is me but better at it. I live here in this trash heap now. I’m going to become the kept floozy of a madman until I murder him and also get smashed at 8 am for the rest of my millennia-long life while wallowing in my misery.”
Then Thor shows up and is like, “Loki, get your ass out of someone else’s bed, we need to go back and save Asgard from our villainous sister.”
Loki’s desperately like, “Uh no, you embarrassed me in front of everyone? I would kill everyone in this room and then myself before I ever went back to Asgard now. Go away. I’m plotting to rule this trash heap, where I now live.”
And Thor replies, “It suits you perfectly. One problem. Our villainous sister’s usurpation of the throne involves actually killing our people. She didn’t take over Asgard just to build great golden statues of herself, flirt with the entire court, eat grapes languidly, drink of all Dad’s good booze, and watch glorifying plays about herself while wearing Dad’s fanciest bathrobes. She’s not like you. She’s actually killing our people.”
And Loki’s just… completely flabbergasted, despite the fact that Hela’s first action was to make a very good go at trying to kill them both (completely normal thing to do in the Asgardian royal family, really).
Loki: “…She’s what?”
You know what, I just realized that Hela probably honestly could not give a shit whether her subjects are dead or alive. She’s the Goddess of Death. It’s straight-up not a concern for her. In fact, undead subjects are probably better for her, because then her control over their will is absolute.
Like, even if her resurrection abilities are limited to “relatively mindless zombie armies”, I think it’s pretty clear that Hela hates people. Like, sure, give her some rebels or enemies to conquer, torture, terrorize, and so on every now and again, just to keep things interesting, but otherwise? Do you know how much backtalk and small talk you get from the undead? Zero small talk from undead minions. Hear that? Zero whining or talking about new diets or baby showers.
So, Thor’s saying stuff like, “You can’t kill our people! It’s wrong!” And Loki, deeply insulted about how she’s going about this usurping the throne thing compared to him, is trying to reasonably point out that, “You can’t kill everyone in Asgard. What will you do once they’re all dead? You’ll have no one left to order around and act in your plays. You can’t rule over dead people.”
And Hela’s just completely unimpressed like, “…You’ve lost me. Oh. Oh, little brothers, you mean you can’t rule dead people. That’s cute.”
so i saw some people discussing how loki in ragnarok shouldn’t have been at all phased or subverted by dr. strange – which i agree with, but also, hey, it’s comedic and you can argue that he was taken off-guard, but upon re-watch, something stuck out to me –
there’s this moment when they appear at the bottom of the stairs and thor rolls down the last couple and stands up and he says
we could’ve just walked.
and it made me think of how magic works in terry pratchett’s novels, how (to paraphrase) the hard part wasn’t turning someone into a frog, it was not turning someone into a frog when you knew how easy it was.
like, the whole scene with dr. strange is just. all magic. all pointless magic. unnecessary magic, when, well. they could have just walked.
whereas loki doesn’t really rely on magic overmuch in the movie – he uses it as a tool, when he needs it, but if the job can be done with plain old non-magical trickery or a knife, he just uses those. he resorts to magic when he’s cornered by valkyrie, he uses it when his goals are most directly accomplished by using magic rather than by other means.
whereas dr. strange is using magic all over his scene, just to use it. just because he can. magic was unnecessary for ninety percent of what he did in that scene, the only time he needed magic was to whisk them away to norway. but he teleported all over the place even when he only needed to move a few feet, gave thor an ever-refilling beer that just spilled everywhere, floated around to make a show of how ~magical~ he was, when…
he could have just walked.
i mean, i’m very sure that the filmmakers intended it for comedic effect, but there’s also a layer there of dr. strange being much less comfortable with magic than loki is – loki doesn’t need to bust out the magic at every opportunity, it’s simply a skill, a tool that is completely under his control and at his disposal. whereas dr. strange (at least in his scene in ragnarok) is showing off, which reeks of insecurity.
i guess i’m thinking… if you take the magic away, loki is still a deadly, formidable opponent with many tricks up his sleeve, but dr. strange is just a guy in a cape.
I read somewhere that the actors for Loki and Frigga decided they should share a tic…to pick at their hands when they were upset or nervous. I decided to look for it, and lo and behold, it’s true! I guess that’s something of a ‘tell’ if Loki is in disguise, heh heh. Fauxdin indeed.
blackash26 