1. Script setting: A compelling suspense setting? Or did you take it with you by digging a hole and not filling it?
2. Deep excavation of characters: independent personality or script slave?
(Additional discussion on 7.22 "Why can't love save Loki?")
Part1. Script setting: compelling suspense setting? Or did you take it with you by digging a hole and not filling it?
I have to say that the director and screenwriter of Loki's solo drama still have considerable skills. From the perspective of script setting, there are quite a lot of remarkable points in this drama, such as a relatively excellent sense of rhythm, lines that fit the characters in the play and have less nonsense, and are appropriately interspersed while advancing the main plot. Funny clips / tribute to MCU previous work / comic stalks / buried eggs, these all make people feel the joy of continuing to discover small surprises under a good viewing rhythm. At the same time, the suspense setting of this drama is very good, and the appetite is full and the next plot development cannot be guessed, which makes people full of expectations for the next episode.
But again, the finale exposes the fact that the story as a whole is not satisfactory, which can be seen from the continuously falling ratings of major websites and the sharp complaints of Chinese and foreign netizens. The sixth episode shouldn't take all the blame on your head, because from the perspective of script creation, the ending has been decided when the show starts, and the ending will not be transferred by our will. So, it's not that the sixth episode was unfinished, but that there was a problem with the creation of the script from the beginning.
Scripts are generally not written "Loki violates the law of time, gets caught by TVA, then meets Sylvie, then they fall in love, then kills fake time keepers, then reaches void, then meets Hao Kang" Viewing Logic Line. On the contrary, I speculate that the writing process of this script is, first of all, this as a connecting show must lead to Kang as the boss of Marvel Phase 4, and then Loki must meet him, how? Just let him go through untold hardships to gain love and grow, and then meet him at the end of time, and then it is better to ask some agency to arrest him, then the time and space police TVA! So the real creative process is to make an outline backwards, and then through details, character images, character dialogues, etc., slowly plump up the branches and leaves on the trunk (the general outline of the story).
When the story is over and we see the whole picture of the big tree, we can find that there are quite a lot of suspense and foreshadowing in this show that have not been answered in the final episode. There are a few points that I couldn't figure out, and they have already affected the understanding of the plot. I can only tend to the screenwriter who insists on writing this way, and you have to believe it if you don't believe it. This instead makes the advantage of the show's "good at setting suspense to hang people's appetite" into a disadvantage, because setting suspense, it is meaningless if you don't answer it; if you bury a bunch of foreshadowing but don't recycle it, you dig a hole and don't fill it.
Inventory of several huge plot holes and personal complaints:
1. Why does Loki and Sylvie's love on Lamentis interfere so much with the divine timeline?
I understand it backwards and can only say that Kang just insisted on choosing them to take over, so they couldn't let them die, but that doesn't make sense at all. Because their death has no effect on the end. This point has not been answered until the end of the season, and can only be understood as "because love can save the world!".
When Kang didn't become the final boss, I also thought that the old loki was the boss, and he wanted to make loki an evil version of himself, going the way of "Agent of Asgard" ("Asgard 007"), but the fifth episode came out Again, this conjecture was overturned. . . .
2. Why was Sylvie taken as a child?
Likewise, there was no explanation for why Sylvie was caught until the end of the season. Sylvie questioned Ravonna Renslayer on the elevator, and Ravonna said she didn't remember. I thought it was a foreshadowing, but it didn't happen. Some netizens speculate that because she is a good Loki who wants to protect Asgard, but Riki in Thor 1 is also a bit naughty and bad boy who wants to protect Asgard (on the whole, she is still a good boy). Then maybe little Sylvie sees the other prisoner who was taken away and says "help him", but... that's also far-fetched, especially when the boss behind the scenes isn't old Loki, but Kang.
If it is said that this is all because of TVA's rigid and rigid administrative capabilities, it should be more implied or explicit to reflect this. Otherwise, what I feel now is that we need a ruthless woman to be the heroine and make Loki fall in love with her. So where did this person come from? Just create a person who is able to fight in the end of the world. As for the reason for being arrested as a child, I haven't figured it out yet. As for why a little girl fled so easily with one kick, Ravonna, as a former analyst who killed Mobius in one hit, couldn't catch a little girl, and the surrounding staff didn't even have any remote attack/control weapons, and they didn't interfere. Asking is Kang has the final say. (Kang: Everything is under my control)
As a comparison, I think in modern society, we are twisted to the police station and can't run away. The police will surround you with shields, forks and electric stun sticks every minute... And then this TVA is still caught in a dangerous time. Guilty, I feel that your business ability can't catch people at all. And what is more incomprehensible is why tva does not have long-range weapons. A small stick, as the saying goes, an inch is long and an inch is strong. If I keep a distance, it will be over.…
3. Why did Kang choose Loki and Sylvie?
This is also a very inexplicable and speechless question. I really don't see that either of them has the quality and quality to control the flow of time in the universe. It can only be said that they were forced to install it in order to shoot Loki's drama and draw Kang. plot. Kang himself gave a thirty-minute speech without any reasonable explanation for it, well, you're Kang the Conqueror, and you're right in whatever you do.
So what does this passage say? This paragraph shows that Comrade Kang is a poor third-rate writer, after all their story was written by Kang :)
Of course, there are still many bugs in the character settings. For example, TVA is weak like non-recyclable garbage. How did it catch so many dangerous times? For example, magic and gems cannot be used in TVA, and the employees are all holding small sticks, why not bring a few flash bombs/smoke bombs/various bombs, and then take a few guns in, and it will kill one in no minute (so you guys In terms of business ability, I feel that you can't even catch ordinary human beings who are more capable). For example, Loki's magical ability and extremely unstable combat power, in this play, I feel that he can't even beat ordinary people...
Theoretically speaking, I don't really care about fighting like a stage play. After all, I'm not watching Ip Man or Eternal Dragon Saber. I can also use the money issue to prevaricate the magic issue. But when the script lost the core and the characters lost the core, all these problems were magnified. When the show lost its attractive characters and core issues, all the bugs in the setting and the forced explanations and contradictions in the plot were infinitely magnified and irritated.
Part 2. Deep excavation of characters: independent personality or script slave?
Since it is a personal drama, the characters must be the core topic that cannot be avoided. There is only one core character here, and that is our protagonist - Loki. So in this play, is it a brand new Loki with a unique temperament and free will, or is this character a slave to the script?
I think that although the creative team worked hard (maybe) to show the former, the actual show is the latter.
In this regard, we can first ask a very simple question: what is the use of the protagonist Loki in the play ?
The answer is useless . The plot core of this show is not Loki, but the heroine Sylvie. Everything Loki does has become a foil for the "big heroine" Sylvie, whose only role is to accompany the heroine in love. Good guy, the protagonist of this play has no role in promoting the plot of this play. This is a book written by the main creator of the "feminist" who was stunned and came out to be beaten.
Of course, you can say that this is Loki's road to growth and redemption. Although I can see that some of the main creators have such intentions, this thin story is not enough to support this issue. Especially when compared with Loki's personal comic trilogy ("Searching for Mystery Journey", "Young Avengers V2", "Asgard 007"), the script of this play is like a science fiction love story written by junior high school students. Nobel Prize in Literature and Hugo Award.
The simple plot turning point of the story can be summed up as Sylvie kills a lot of time keepers for ulterior motives and gets the TVA's attention - Sylvie bombs the timeline - Sylvie kills the time keepers - Sylvie comes to the end of time - Sylvie finds out that the boss is behind Alioth - Sylvie decides to possess Alioth - Sylvie meets the culprit, Kang - Sylvie stabs Kang to death and stabs a Marvel Universe Phase 4.
The weird thing about this story is that you take out all the parts of the protagonist Loki and find that it's still a complete story, and it's not bad at all. So what is the role of the protagonist Loki? Aha, Blind Student, you discovered Hua Dian, that is, you fell in love with the heroine Sylvie.
Does it look familiar? Isn't this the narrative logic of the heroic work of the hero who has been criticized for 10,000 years - the hero is strong, handsome (preferably blond), firm-willed, never give up, encounter setbacks first, But in the end, he woke up and went through hardships (it's best to be scolded by the villain), but he finally strengthened himself and saved the world. In the process, there is also a beautiful woman who falls in love with him. And it's better to be a proud and arrogant woman who just started playing the princess and has a rebellious temperament. Finally, she was convinced by the charm of the male protagonist and fell under the pomegranate skirt of the male protagonist. From a viewing point of view, it's best to still have a warm kiss when you defeat the boss (or after it's over).
Replacing the "male protagonist" in this routine plot with our female protagonist Sylvie, is there no sense of disobedience? And our poor real male protagonist Loki can only be reduced to a vase character who falls in love with the real female protagonist under the narrative of the big female protagonist, and a jumping clown who contributes funny scenes and mentally retarded ideas from time to time.
This "feminist" plot is quite low-level, because the essence is only to reverse the gender, but the underlying narrative logic is the same. Deliberately strengthening the female role, emphasizing the dominant position and high suppression of the female role, and deliberately weakening the male role, creating the illusion of a "big heroine". To borrow the words of Mr. Dai Jinhua, the "big heroine" is just a fantasy that replicates male logic. The main creative team, guided by the logic of women's superiority/deliberately "long live women's rights", can't write female characters at all.
If you don't believe me, let's try to see the role of Sylvie, the favorite and most satisfying role of director Kate Herron, who is passionate about women's rights. What kind of charm does she have? In fact, from my personal point of view, I didn't find any brilliance and three-dimensionality that differentiated her from the traditional individual hero role, which is as flat as a piece of paper. Her whole character motive is "revenge for the way you ruined my life when I was a child", or the very simple and rude kind of revenge of "I cut you down". Her character is that she is reckless and does it without a backup plan. I cut the wires with a kitchen knife in my hand, and the recklessness of sparks and lightning all the way.
From the character setting alone, she is a fairly simple and flat person. Simple people have the benefits of simplicity, and one of the biggest benefits is easy writing, ie, character behavior and ideas are linear and very easy to speculate. The re-enactment of the traditional male-dominated personal heroic narrative has put a "beautiful and miserable" trait label on the "big heroine" Sylvie. She is beautiful, capable of fighting, and has a tragic childhood. but,
Such Sylvie, can she be called Loki?
What makes a Loki Loki? This question is thrown up many times in the show, but they never give a good answer for one reason, they don't know the answer themselves.
Can a parallel universe variant with the same DNA sequence (maybe not exactly the same, after all, an X and a Y chromosome look different), can be called "Loki"? Loki's answer to the question about Loki's traits in the show is "Independence, authority, and style". It is not ruled out that because this is Loki's own lines, he is suspected of talking nonsense and boasting, but these three words are completely insufficient to represent Loki, the "villain" who represents chaos, evil, betrayal and lies.
So where did our beloved Loki come from? What kind of person is he?
In fact, it is difficult for me to summarize his character in a few words, because he is so complicated and contradictory, and three or five labels are not enough to include him. He is a contradictory being, a sharp being, a complex being. Tom Hiddleston's stunning performance in Thor 1 brought Loki's character a new trajectory of destiny, allowing him to escape the fate of the masked villain and forge a new path of his own. Kieron Gillen, author of JIM, wrote in a blog post, "Whatever Loki becomes next, he will carry a shadow of Hiddleston's Loki."
He reneged on his promises, made deals with the wicked, and turned to the enemy when he turned his face, but he had justice in his heart, "that has to be Loki's way"; he often cocooned himself and shot himself in the foot, but he was clever and clever, Loki will always be He has his own plans; he bears the shackles of a given fate, he is the villain destined to bring Ragnarok, he is a born, destined villain, but he does not yield to fate, so he kills himself, seeks Opportunities for "change" on the front line.
He is neither pure evil nor pure goodness, he walks on the edge of good and evil, black and white. He dances in shackles and finds a unique way in the fire.
At this time, I finally felt the sense of disobedience. Loki in the personal drama has been pushed forward by external forces, and has been in a kind of confusion of "who am I, where am I, and what should I do". He was extremely passive, aimless, and at a loss. The original intention of the screenwriter and director may be to show us a "Loki that is different from the past", to let him find himself in confusion and unknown, to let him in the constant failures that backfire and frustrations with small plans but no foresight grow in. But they were wrong, at least on this point.
Loki of Thor 1&2 and Avengers 1, as well as Loki in all personal comics, has always been a very subjective person. He may be lost, he may doubt, he may fail, but he will never lie down and die. He is a restless man. Although he has a naughty and bad side in his character, he also has a restless escape in his heart. He fanatically prays for chaos and instability. He does not trust "long-term trust and stable security". Stability is stability for him. As his title of God of Mischief, God of Lies, God of Evil suggests, he is an insecure who loves chaos.
Thor 1 is the starting point of the new Loki's destiny. All comics and movies after 2010 are based on the Loki in Thor 1, so we will start from the origin.
Loki in Thunder 1 is a man with family trauma, Odin hid his origins, and he is ostracized and distrusted by the people of Asgard. Loki himself is a very smart and insecure man, he uses lies to cover up his thirst for trust and love, he smiles to hide his sadness and anger, which in turn exacerbates the straight Asgardians Distrust and alienation from him. When all the anger and depression that had built up over a long period of time finally exploded when Loki found out who he was, his uncontrollable roar that was shattered in an instant showed not only his anger at Odin's hiding the truth, but also his own anger at Odin's hidden truth. Anger as a bargaining chip to negotiate peace with Jotunheim. He felt that he had been taken advantage of, that he felt that his love for his parents and brothers—and for Asgard as a whole—was betrayed, though sometimes wicked, but true to his heart. He felt unequal and unfair, as he had always felt.
Under the feudal patriarchal system of Asgard, King Odin, who represents the supreme power, has long favored Thor, and Thor has won the love and respect of everyone by force. From the dialogue in the movie, we can see that Thor has always been on Loki's head since he was a child (it feels like he has a particularly good brother or sister, and then he is always compared). In a 2010 interview with Higgins on the set of Thor 1, he referred to Loki as "a man who was hurt by family estrangement and a strong sense of loneliness, who felt constantly excluded from others, especially his older brother. In a way , he was pushed too far, so he came back for his revenge. When the whole world is rejecting you, you fight back.” Thor, who is no bigger than the thoughtful, Loki is keenly aware of this deprivation of attention and an invisible disadvantage in public opinion, so he first chose to hide his feelings, and then chose to use lies and pranks to win attention and happiness. . The joy that lies and pranks bring to Loki is that when a person is in a low unequal position for a long time, the prank makes the other party embarrassed. Get a short-lived high status and a sense of control and inner pleasure.
On this basis, Loki of Avengers 1, out of unwillingness and disappointment to be denied by his father, began to launch his hysterical and desperate revenge against the earth. He felt the great anger inside him, and the strong desire to prove himself, regardless of the means. He wanted to prove that Thor had the talent and strength to claim the throne, and so could I; if Thor could rule the people, so could I. He wanted to prove that he was no worse than Thor, or better than him. From the tearful roar of Loki at the end of Thor 1 "I never wanted the throne, I just want to be your equal (I don't want the throne, I just want to be equal to you)", it can be seen that what he desires is never the center of power, he Just wanted a sincere approval. And this desire was brutally betrayed by his arrogant father, so he let go, fell into the depths of the universe, and began his journey of revenge.
(So is there really no one to criticize Asgard's shit-like homeschooling :)
The director and writer of the solo drama have a biased misunderstanding of the character of Loki. Loki, written by the main creative team of the personal drama, has a good heart in his heart. In fact, he did not want to lie or betray, but he was blinded by anger for a while; A bad idea that will fail; he is like a mischievous middle school student, doing childish and funny pranks, but when a big crisis comes, he can only be at a loss, and he is led away by the assertive monitor to watch a movie one step at a time. In their eyes, Loki is an innocent, traumatized, unloved, lonely child who didn't grow up. They thought that such a character, like a rebellious teenager, could save him from fire and struggle as long as he had a strange and vigorous love affair.
But congratulations, they were wrong again.
The character of Loki is a character who bears the shackles of fate and a sense of tragedy. He is not a pure bad person, but he is definitely not a good person in the traditional sense. He has indeed done a lot of extreme and bad things, such as destroying the entire planet Jotunheim with the energy of the Rainbow Bridge in the MCU, killing disobedient civilians indiscriminately on Earth; During the period of masking villains; for example, even in JIM, when he finally began to want to be a good person, he would kill many people and even himself because of his schemes. When the writers removed Loki's tragic shackles and stripped away the dark and evil side of Loki's character (leaving only the comical side), they simultaneously removed the character's complexity. There was a question on Zhihu before asking whether Loki's tragic fate was due to circumstances or personal character. My answer to this is both, and the two are intertwined and inseparable. He may have chosen to treat people with betrayal, lies, and distrust because of his family of origin issues that magnified the dark side of his character; but it was also a part of his character. Lies and betrayals also go hand in hand to make Loki himself, a Loki like no other.
Therefore, Loki's shining point is the fireworks in a dark night sky. If you strip away his dark side, it will be like watching a fireworks show in broad daylight, dull and boring.
Disney, Marvel, and even the general direction of online public opinion all tend to favor heroes and protagonists without moral taint. And the character of Loki is an anti-hero, and should not be washed into a silly white sweet. Rather, Marvel and Disney have lost the courage to let characters face the dark side of human nature in character creation and excavation.
So, on such a difficult and bloody road of self-transformation, who can give a villain like Loki the real redemption?
The only answer: Loki himself .
Here I am talking about myself in the narrow sense, not the other me in the parallel world with the same DNA in the play. When I finished watching Little Loki's trilogy, I realized that there is one thing Kieron Gillen (writer of "Quest for Mystery" and "Young Avengers V2") and Al Ewing (writer of "Asgard 007") want to express Yes: you can't get rid of your past, when you want to get rid of it like a stubborn flea, it will come back and attack you; when you finally have the courage to talk to your past, your sins, your Guilt, reconcile with everything you have, and you can complete this difficult path of self-redemption to change your destiny.
In order to complete the "return to the righteous" of such a bad villain, the playwright has carried out extremely rude overthrow and whitewashing. And their most deadly and rude means is to use the guise of a "self" love in a parallel universe that may be completely different except for some of the same DNA fragments, in order to achieve a false "self-reconciliation" with themselves.
You can certainly think of Loki and Sylvie's relationship as "narcissism", a so-called "self-reconciliation". So let me ask you a question, do you think identical twins feel they are the same person? Their DNA is exactly the same, and they even grew up in the same environment. If you think they are the same person, have you respected their individual will?
So by analogy, a person who has a completely different life experience, even a different DNA, a different appearance, a different personality, what you are carrying, and even your goals and pursuits are different, if Some people say that it is a variant of your parallel world. Do you agree that "he/she" is you, and "you" is also him/her?
What is narcissism, what is self-reconciliation when you fall in love with someone who is statistically and biologically completely different from you? This is nothing but Disney's old-fashioned game of playing heterosexuality and love to save the world under the gimmicks of "narcissism" and "self-reconciliation".
(Section 7.22 Supplementary)
Why dating can't save Loki?
Director Kate Herron mentioned that the theme of the film is indeed self-acceptance, but the way they take it is to let Loki and "big heroine" Sylvie fall into a teenage love. This is to set a good goal, but the direction has gone wrong, so the faster you run, the more you get off topic.
Because fundamentally speaking, love and self-acceptance are actually two propositions, and using love to cover up the proposition of "self-acceptance" is a veritable idea of stealing the concept and being lazy. Falling in love is an irrational process. As the saying goes, "Love comes too fast like a tornado". Love is impulse and mutual attraction, and it is the heartbeat under the action of hormones and external hormones. Self-acceptance is an extremely rational process, rational to cruel. The first step in self-acceptance is knowing yourself, then dissecting yourself, and then accepting yourself.
Loki is an extreme narcissist, and extreme emotions generally have two sides at the same time. For example, conceit is usually accompanied by inferiority, and aggression is usually accompanied by insecurities. And the extreme narcissism that Loki manifests in the play is also accompanied by the self-loathing and self-doubt that he hides deep inside. To achieve true self-confidence, a person must face the source of inferiority and conceit deep in his heart, and cut all his sins, shortcomings, dark sides, and everything with a knife and put it in front of him drenched in blood. Then accept all this, they make up you, they are an indispensable part of you, you can't escape, you don't need to escape, you just need to keep moving on on the basis of all this, and then you will become more Good, unique self.
It's also a topic of constant touch and discussion in Loki's personal comic trilogy - Journey to Mystery, Young Avengers V2 and Asgard 007. In JIM, little Loki has to face the instigation of the evil version of himself, the pressure of public opinion and the imprisonment brought by his identity-because the identity of Loki itself represents evil and betrayal; in "The Young Avengers V2" , Loki has always had to face the torture of his own guilt, so that the guilt has become a ghost that keeps instigating in his ears like in Hamlet; in "Asgard 007", little Loki is all the time Shouting again: "I am the unforgivable sin", he had to face the various sins he had committed in the past, as well as his identity imprisonment and the aftermath of his sins.
He is the god of lies, but if you want to truly grow, you have to be honest with yourself.
This is a very cruel, bloody, absolutely rational speculation and struggle. Of course love is beautiful, two people in love are attached and need each other, one lonely soul is close to the other. But the impulsive love brought about by a suspension bridge effect cannot reach such depth. Like Loki in Asgard 007 said, "No more ego games. No more jealousy games and revenge games and "make me king" games. I don't need the whole of Asgard to love me. The game of conceit, the game of jealousy, the game of revenge—and stop playing the 'make me king' game. I don't need all Asgard to love me)."
A person who has accepted himself no longer needs to humbly seek approval in the words of others, nor does he need a throne of a power center to show his status and force others to recognize his strength. At this time, Loki already has the ability to love, he smiles confidently and magnanimously, he already has the confidence, love and courage to face everything.
One more criticism, our dear feminist director was so excited that after the third episode aired, he tweeted that Loki was a double - "Because the director himself!" - Loki likes both women and men, and then in the follow-up In the plot of the narcissistic gimmick, a heterosexual relationship was made with great fanfare, and inexplicably, the two of them saved the world because of their love. I'm stupid. In the name of LGBTQ, the director danced and performed a Disney-style dog-blood love story based on heterosexuality.
In contrast to the comics, Loki in Asgard 007 and its sideline switches freely between male and female bodies, he is "Trickster, Shapeshifter. Moon King and wanderer (Trickster, Shapeshifter. Moon King and Wanderer)" , she is also "Goddess of stories. The moon queen. The magic theatre. (Story goddess. Moon queen. Magic theatre.)"; Saying to Thor "My son and my daughter and my child who is both"; Loki to ex-X-Men in Young Avengers V2" Prodigy said: "My culture doesn't really share your concept of sexual identity. There are sexual acts, that's it )".
Compared with the magnanimity in the comics, the narrative of love in this play is twisted and conservative. The main creators play the LGBTQ+ border ball and hold high narcissistic gimmicks, but they cannot hide the extremely conservative heterosexual supremacy in their bones, and they are afraid of blatantly engaging in sexual minorities to be attacked by public opinion and thus losing economic benefits. In order to attract audiences who like love stories, a blunt and awkward love story was inserted abruptly; in order to cater to political correctness, I had to use the flag of sexual minorities awkwardly to please both sides and dance awkwardly. It can only be said that this wave of Disney is ugly enough.
So the main creators of this show must have read Loki's personal comics (there are various comic authors in the credits at the end of the film). But they just superficially took the character modeling settings of the comics, pasted a few simple lines, and buried some small stalks in the comics as easter eggs, but this thin and far-fetched story cannot support the character Loki. , and can not support the tragic sense of fate expressed in the comics, nor can it support the grand theme of self-salvation and changing fate.
Ha, the story.
A lie is a story told.
A lie is a story.
Loki, what were you the God of again?
View more about Loki reviews
