anyway i love that thor ragnarok parades around as this cute fun happy go lucky inoffensive film even though at its core it’s just a big resounding FUCK YOU against imperialism and colonialism. thor stands by and watches his ancestral home be completely destroyed because he figures out that asgard was built on the backs of invaded and enslaved people. the second his father’s crimes are exposed he does the right fucking thing and lets it all burn instead of excusing his own ignorance. that scene of the tapestry coming down is so goddamned fucking iconic i could cry oh man
I really recommend reading this piece by Chris Brecheen: http://www.chrisbrecheen.com/2017/11/the-return-of-your-dark-history.html?spref=fb
An excerpt:
“Other symbols are transparent to the point of invisibility at their core but slathered with so much laughter as frosting that they might escape cursory notice. When The Grandmaster (played brilliantly by Jeff Goldblum) engages in exploitation and human trafficking with a big smile and a manic affect, he reacts angrily, though hilariously, to his actions being referred to as “slavery.” Much the same way that capitalistic exploitation of labor is fine so long as we never make those doing it feel bad. At the end, in the first stinger, the same character (a defeated slaver–wink wink nudge nudge–doyougetit?) declares what is essentially a civil war (where he got his ass kicked) to be a tie.
Perhaps the most obvious and also subtle metaphor is Hela herself, who not only marks the MCU’s first woman villain, but arguably one of, if not the best. Naturally she too has symbolism both glaring and inescapable and somewhat muted. She walks onto the screen and declares herself returned and in control and can’t really understand why no one is happy to see her. In one scene with Thor she indicts Odin as: “Proud to have it, ashamed of how he got it" and literally reveals how a sanitized history has covered up the real one. (No, like LITERALLY it covers it up.) She asks where Thor thinks all the gold came from. And in doing so she reveals that the nine realms were conquered and Asgard is a colonialist and imperialist power. Their prosperity has come at the expense of those they vanquished. She says that she will kill everyone who doesn’t share her vision of Asgard’s return to glory and power.
The only thing that could have made this more overt would be if she were wearing a red MAGA cap during her monologue.
But the family dynamic of the Asgardian royals is far more subdued as subtext for colonialism and white supremacy. Each presents a facet both of the complexity of colonialist nations (particularly the US) but also of the periods in history. And it brings out the real metaphor of the film–the tension between the distant past, the recent past, and the present. Hela represents a violent, tyrannizing distant past that has made the colonialist power great, and now seeks to destroy any who would challenge her vision. And when most of Asgard rejects her, she draws on that past (literalizing the rise of long dead armies who will execute her vision). Thor is a young, well-intentioned and good hearted person who has benefitted directly from that violent past without knowing it and now comes face to face with it–and is shocked at its power (a moment literalized by the smashing of his hammer). Odin participated in the crimes, changed his mind, covered up the past, declared everything all better, and held Hela in check. Of course there is also Loki: a character who doesn’t care as long as he gets his.”
YES to all but the last sentence of that.
Loki is part of the colonialist/imperialist Asgardian history as well – he is the last thing Odin stole in his quest for dominance over Jotunheim.
My dad is Native American, and my dad loves to talk about how Loki reminds him of the tradition of colonizers taking indigenous children from their families and sending them to boarding schools or putting them in white foster families.
Think about it – first, we have no evidence that Loki was unwanted except for what Odin, the colonizer, tells us: that Loki was Laufey’s child, abandoned in the temple. But…if he was a newborn abandoned in a temple, how does Odin know who his father was? Given what we know about Odin’s history now, doesn’t it make more sense that Laufey placed his very much wanted newborn son in the temple in the hopes that it or the gods or the Casket of Ancient Winters would keep him safe while he and every warrior in the entire country apparently went to battle that night? That Odin, the colonizer, went to that temple to take the casket and the newborn prince so that Laufey, with no heir and no source of power, could never rebuild what was damaged that night? That Laufey grieved the loss of his son but had no power to take him back, compared to the strength of Asgard?
That’s what happened to indigenous children perfectly legally in the U.S. all the way up to the 1970s. Canada’s last boarding school wasn’t closed until the 1990s.
At the Carlisle school, a boarding school that Native American children were shipped to in Pennsylvania, they acted according to the motto “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” and that is exactly the approach Odin took with Loki. Loki is not told about his heritage. He is not taught anything about Jotun language, art, food, gender roles, family or political structure, or culture of any kind. He – along with Thor and every other Asgardian child – is taught only that Frost Giants are the monsters and that Asgardians – imperialist colonizers – are the peacekeepers. Asgardian culture is the only culture and is good; Jotun culture is savage and not worth talking about, let alone learning.
Loki’s internalized issues surrounding this carry him through the plot of the first Thor film, in which he attempts to prove that he is a true Asgardian – which he’s been brainwashed for fifteen hundred years, a truly unfathomable lifetime, to believe is the best thing you can be – and not a Jotun monster by setting up a scenario in which he is literally killing the Indian (Laufey) to save the man (Odin). That Odin does not value this action doesn’t diminish his responsibility for the centuries of work he did to turn Loki into a young man with no emotional framework for being able to accept himself for who and what he is and his subsequent spiral into this plan.
Loki is so emotionally damaged that when he thinks his Asgardian colonizer-father can only see him as a savage, he attempts suicide. This type of damage, too, was not uncommon for indigenous youth who were stripped of their culture and felt as though they were ultimately not capable of being either white or indigenous.
Loki later struggles with being manipulated by Thanos and the Mind Stone, and while this is presented as having started as some mad thirst for power on Loki’s part, it’s worth examining closer. It’s entirely plausible that what ruling Midgard meant to Loki was not infinite power (especially given the apparent benevolence he shows in Ragnarok when he is actually ruling – the Asgardians are neither overly surprised that Odin was actually Loki nor thanking Thor for relieving them of Loki’s rule, and they look as prosperous and happy as the ever have when Thor arrives), but rather a way to prove to Odin that Loki was like him: not a savage, but a colonizer in his own right.
The Dark World contains its own take on colonizers – Frigga is the center of that film even after her death, and nobody talks about how she embodies kind-hearted white feminist colonizer bullshit. She is sweet and strong-willed and a good mother and…and she kept Loki’s heritage from him as well. She teaches him her magic but never tells him that she isn’t the source of his. She doesn’t speak up when her Jotun (indigenous) son is sentenced to prison for actions contributed to by her Aesir (white) husband, who is both judge and jury. She visits him in secret, because she loves him but doesn’t love him quite enough to publicly act against her (white) husband. She’s the lady down the street whose foster children of color all loved her growing up but are now certain she would have voted for Trump, because she loved them as individuals but not enough to overcome her racism. And she did love Loki. That’s the hard part, and we can see Loki struggle with the emotions around that over the course of the film.
Loki’s actions at the end of that film come back to killing the Indian and saving the man – he fakes his death, and it looks like he’s setting himself free from the responsibilities of trying to navigate who and what he is, but he doesn’t actually choose freedom. He’s still so sure that being a Jotun is unacceptable that he has been walking through worlds as an Aesir – as Frigga’s son, if not quite Odin’s – and there’s nowhere for him to go emotionally or physically but back to Asgard. We’re initially led to believe he has killed Odin and is on the throne because he craves power, but the truth is that Odin is living out his days wistfully in New York and not even trying to return to Asgard, because…well, that part is a mystery. Does he think Loki will be a good king? It seems that way, given that Odin had not hesitated to prevent Thor from being the king when he wasn’t ready, but we can only speculate.
Loki rules Asgard for four years, which isn’t long compared Odin’s reign, which stretched across millenia, or even his own life, as he’s nearly Thor’s age (approx. 1500), but the people seem happy, healthy, and as well-off as ever when Thor returns. The only things about Loki’s rule that are relevant to this are that the Asgardians (aside from Thor) haven’t been engaging in inter-realm stuff at all as far as we can tell, because Loki is not the colonizer he tried to be under the Mind Stone’s influence, and…the play.
That play that was seemingly just in there for laughs. Watch it again, and you’ll notice that it’s not just Loki being, as Tony pointed out that he can be, a full-tilt diva. The play dramatizes his false sacrifice, yes, but it also contains a fictional retelling of his relationship with Odin. Any good therapist would have a field day with this line:
“Loki, my boy… ‘Twas many moons ago I found you on a frost-bitten battlefield. On that day, I did not yet see in you Asgard’s savior. No. You were merely a little blue baby icicle that melted this old fool’s heart.”
Loki tries to paint himself in a positive and tragic light, sure, but he does the same for Odin. He wants so badly to be able to believe that Odin raised him because he loved him that he rewrites what Odin himself gave as the reason for taking him.
“I thought we could unite our kingdoms one day. Bring about an alliance, bring about permanent peace… through you.”
Loki was intended to sit on Jotunheim’s throne as Thor’s counterpart, an Asgardian figurehead under Odin’s guidance, with no understanding of his own culture or the people he ruled. This is what was done to the sons of indigenous chiefs across the world through the boarding schools of the 18- and 19-00s. This is peak colonialism.
At the end of his life, Loki is able to start to move past his issues. He comes to save the Asgardians, because he knows that they are not Odin, though they benefited from his actions. Set free from the expectation that he return to Thor’s side just because they were raised as brothers, he returns to him anyway because he loves him and because he has learned to separate who both of them actually are as people from what Odin wanted them to be. In a moment of obvious symbolism if you think of him as a victim of Odin’s colonization of the realms, he carries out the resurrection of Surtur and helps his brother of choice destroy Asgard and the legacy of colonization that it was built on.
As he dies, he articulates all of the complicated things that he is – “Loki, Prince of Asgard, Odinson, the Rightful King of Jotunheim, God of Mischief” – but before that, before he calls for the Hulk, he starts with “Well, for one thing, I’m not Asgardian,” and in that moment, for the very first time in his entire life, Loki says that like he’s proud of it.
Loki is not the one part of the story of Odin, Hela, and Thor that isn’t about colonization and its evils – he is the direct victim of it. He is the colonized.