Tag: loki

oldadastra:

tehanufromearthsea:

firstorderforceuser:

Let’s look at the Thor/Loki dichotomy for a moment. There’s a very obvious yin/yang thing going on. Traditionally, this goes…

YANG: day, sun, light, fire, knowledge, science, masculinity, good

YIN: night, moon, shadow, ice, mystery, magic, femininity, evil

Thor and Loki’s respective appearances immediately set them up on
opposite sides of the divide. Thor is a golden, muscular hero, a
soldier, while Loki is a pasty, lanky master of deception, manipulation,
words, and magic, all of which have traditionally been
considered women’s weapons. There is this classic dichotomy in
traditional mythology where men use (righteous) force while women use
(evil) trickery and sorcery. In fact, Loki’s whole character arc stems
from resentment that he can never rule Asgard because of an accident of
birth – remember he spits at his father: ‘No matter how much you claim
to love me, you could never have a woman Frost Giant sitting on the throne of Asgard.’

When women defend and side with villains, people tend to explain
it away as a female character flaw: women are either deluded enough to
think they can ‘fix’ these characters or worse, they’re masochists
who love ‘bad boys’. What they forget is that women in both history
and fiction have always been set up as the evil ‘Other’. Even if they’re
not conscious of it, I think women instinctively understand which side
of the yin/yang dichotomy they’re on. Women might love Thor, but
they can’t really identify with him because he is a manifestation of
divine, socially-sanctioned, male-coded power in a world where female
power is typically seen as illegitimate or evil. But if you give your
story’s antagonist ‘feminine’ traits in order to immediately distinguish
him as the evil Other (and don’t even get me started on queercoding), then yeah, no shit, women are going to identify with that.

–from this post by @plain-flavoured-english

Signal boosting this for the SW fandom for a few reasons.

I think TFA is pretty transparently gender-flipping these roles, with sun-imagery-everywhere, staff-fighting Rey, and dark-imagery-everywhere, telepathic / telekinetic Kylo. I know he can fight. But look at the overall powers-distribution, here. And look at the fact that although Adam Driver’s physical build is very much in the same mold as the various men who wore the Vader suit, in fan imaginations he tends to get turned into a wispy shadow – skinny and Gothy and magic at the expense of muscle – unless the story is calling attention to the fact that he’s physically powerful. I think this is because the trope mixing goes against what people expect, so when they default to seeing what they’ve already seen before, they inadvertently change him. Because a guy with a Marine’s body who’s passionate about sorcery (still) does not quite compute for them. And this is particularly interesting because Vader had the same traits twinned, but with him the physical traits predominated. And when people overstated one side of his character at the expense of another, they’d make Vader less of a sorcerer and more of a warrior.

Let’s be real, here. Everyone gets unflattering assumptions made about them for siding with villains. It’s one of those things society energetically condemns people for. But the ways they’re shamed vary. And women get these particular, sexist assumptions a lot: that they’re stupidly compassionate and/or innately less moral. When, in fact, a morality that’s based on “people who do X thing deserve to suffer!“ has:

-been used against women a lot, and consequently, many of us will never be fans of it

-and isn’t innately moral at all. Let alone “MORE moral“ than what seems right to us

I hadn’t made this connection before. “ And women get these particular, sexist assumptions a lot: that they’re stupidly compassionate and/or innately less moral. When, in fact, a morality that’s based on “people who do X thing deserve to suffer!“ Thanks @firstorderforceuser

Interesting points here.