Entry tags:
day three of imagine dragons' thunder stuck in my head
It turns out that MAYBE THIS IS A FUN ACTION FLICK AND I HAVE TOO MANY EMOTIONS was really selling Ragnarok short, because while it is a fun action flick, and I do have many, many emotions about Thor as both a character and a storyline that I've been harboring since 2011, it turns out that this movie deserves and stands up to being thoughtfully delved into! I've been enjoying everyone's meta about it a whole lot, and also feeling wildly grateful that I love something that apparently loves me reciprocally on an intellectual and thematic level, because damn.
Anyway, I ended up having more thoughts about Ragnarok that are too long/potentially spoilery for twitter!
First, shoutout to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
oliviacirce for fielding the slightly less coherent, texted version of these thoughts. "That's my Ragnarok dissertation, enjoy brunch," I told her, and she very kindly texted back "YOUR RAGNAROK DISSERTATION IS EXCELLENT," before yelling with me a lot about heroism as collective action. So:
I was thinking about Ragnarok in conversation with the other Thor movies, because as much as in interviews Taika Waititi keeps saying that he designed Ragnarok to be a stand-alone and/or reboot film rather than a sequel, it really does feel like a conversation with its prequels in a way that most MCU movies don't -- it engages with the things that set it up, rather than just having shoutouts to what came before. Some of that is relatively simple, like what the movie is saying about Dark World: it keeps a lot of the aesthetic (throne room design, sparkly ascension death) and suggests that maybe Dark World was being way too dramatic with itself, see The Tragedy of Loki of Asgard (lololol).
But I'm really fascinated with what it's in conversation with in the first movie! First, the structure is really similar -- you've got two parallel plots happening, one of them v dramatic and on Asgard, and the other a weird comedy starring Thor on a planet he doesn't understand. But whereas Thor 1 is just sort of telling the stories of Thor and Loki both radically reexamining their place in the world, they're not really saying anything about each other, they're just a hero origin and a villain origin story sort of sitting next to each other until the ending. Ragnarok also does this ridiculous thing where the plots also mostly don't touch until the end, but they're both about terrible rulers raiding the rest of the universe for people to subjugate and for trash ("most of this is fake," Hela says, surveying the vault).
Also both movies are interested in where a god's power comes from and what it means to be a hero but they have SUCH different answers. When Thor gets his power back in the first movie when he ... proves himself to an object that may or may not be judging him by Odin's criteria? And heroism is sacrifice of self for others, but I don't think Ragnarok is disputing that part, it just might be disputing whether sacrifice is making everyone else stand back while you nobly walk to your death. Meanwhile Ragnarok says that Mjolnir is only a tool and that Hela's power (like Thor's??) comes from Asgard, so they destroy Hela's base of power but Thor keeps his because Asgard is people!! And what heroes do is ... run towards their problems, but also see what they actually are and then sometimes burn the problem the fuck down, and they also bring their friends! Because heroism isn't one dude standing there being Most Amazing, it's people getting together and taking collective action!!
Olivia: Also Ragnarok LANDS "heroism is collective action and you need a team" better than ANY other MCU film by miles
Me: Right, like, literally none of them could have done it all, they all needed each other or it would've ended terribly.
Anyway that is SO DELIGHTFUL to me, not least because I really love what it's saying about where one gets one's power and what heroism is. A GOOD MOVIE.
Unrelated to the above, it also took a few days for this to fully register with me, but I love Thor and Loki's relationship in this SO MUCH. Like, of course I always love it, this is me, but the emotional work this movie did with them is such a gift. I'm writing post-movie Thor/Loki fic now, obvs, and I feel like I can talk about completely new things and that I don't have to rehash any of the issues they had to deal with in previous fic, because Ragnarok did that work. My pairing type is definitely "friends-to-enemies who have too many emotions while stabbing each other" but usually the end-point of that pairing is ... where the movie ended? They begrudgingly talk about their feelings before the villain helps the hero save the world and decides to stay?? LITERALLY RAGNAROK DID THIS. So now I have the canon backing to do the next bit, and it is such a gift.
(I may also be writing Sif/Valkyrie fic, shoutout to Valkyrie for existing, I've been wanting to write an f/f Sif ship for years but couldn't convince myself she'd hook up with any of the other MCU women, speaking of gifts Valkyrie is the best gift of all.)
Anyway, I ended up having more thoughts about Ragnarok that are too long/potentially spoilery for twitter!
First, shoutout to
oliviacirce for fielding the slightly less coherent, texted version of these thoughts. "That's my Ragnarok dissertation, enjoy brunch," I told her, and she very kindly texted back "YOUR RAGNAROK DISSERTATION IS EXCELLENT," before yelling with me a lot about heroism as collective action. So:I was thinking about Ragnarok in conversation with the other Thor movies, because as much as in interviews Taika Waititi keeps saying that he designed Ragnarok to be a stand-alone and/or reboot film rather than a sequel, it really does feel like a conversation with its prequels in a way that most MCU movies don't -- it engages with the things that set it up, rather than just having shoutouts to what came before. Some of that is relatively simple, like what the movie is saying about Dark World: it keeps a lot of the aesthetic (throne room design, sparkly ascension death) and suggests that maybe Dark World was being way too dramatic with itself, see The Tragedy of Loki of Asgard (lololol).
But I'm really fascinated with what it's in conversation with in the first movie! First, the structure is really similar -- you've got two parallel plots happening, one of them v dramatic and on Asgard, and the other a weird comedy starring Thor on a planet he doesn't understand. But whereas Thor 1 is just sort of telling the stories of Thor and Loki both radically reexamining their place in the world, they're not really saying anything about each other, they're just a hero origin and a villain origin story sort of sitting next to each other until the ending. Ragnarok also does this ridiculous thing where the plots also mostly don't touch until the end, but they're both about terrible rulers raiding the rest of the universe for people to subjugate and for trash ("most of this is fake," Hela says, surveying the vault).
Also both movies are interested in where a god's power comes from and what it means to be a hero but they have SUCH different answers. When Thor gets his power back in the first movie when he ... proves himself to an object that may or may not be judging him by Odin's criteria? And heroism is sacrifice of self for others, but I don't think Ragnarok is disputing that part, it just might be disputing whether sacrifice is making everyone else stand back while you nobly walk to your death. Meanwhile Ragnarok says that Mjolnir is only a tool and that Hela's power (like Thor's??) comes from Asgard, so they destroy Hela's base of power but Thor keeps his because Asgard is people!! And what heroes do is ... run towards their problems, but also see what they actually are and then sometimes burn the problem the fuck down, and they also bring their friends! Because heroism isn't one dude standing there being Most Amazing, it's people getting together and taking collective action!!
Olivia: Also Ragnarok LANDS "heroism is collective action and you need a team" better than ANY other MCU film by miles
Me: Right, like, literally none of them could have done it all, they all needed each other or it would've ended terribly.
Anyway that is SO DELIGHTFUL to me, not least because I really love what it's saying about where one gets one's power and what heroism is. A GOOD MOVIE.
Unrelated to the above, it also took a few days for this to fully register with me, but I love Thor and Loki's relationship in this SO MUCH. Like, of course I always love it, this is me, but the emotional work this movie did with them is such a gift. I'm writing post-movie Thor/Loki fic now, obvs, and I feel like I can talk about completely new things and that I don't have to rehash any of the issues they had to deal with in previous fic, because Ragnarok did that work. My pairing type is definitely "friends-to-enemies who have too many emotions while stabbing each other" but usually the end-point of that pairing is ... where the movie ended? They begrudgingly talk about their feelings before the villain helps the hero save the world and decides to stay?? LITERALLY RAGNAROK DID THIS. So now I have the canon backing to do the next bit, and it is such a gift.
(I may also be writing Sif/Valkyrie fic, shoutout to Valkyrie for existing, I've been wanting to write an f/f Sif ship for years but couldn't convince myself she'd hook up with any of the other MCU women, speaking of gifts Valkyrie is the best gift of all.)