Marvel Update to Loki's Bio

[lynnenne]

Hello, friends! Welcome to your Sunday discussion post. This week's topic:

About a month ago, Marvel updated their official character bio for Loki to include this retcon:

Arriving at the Sanctuary through a wormhole caused by the Bifrost, Loki met the Other, ruler of the ancient race of extraterrestrials the Chitauri, and Thanos. Offering the God of Mischief dominion over his brother’s favorite realm Earth, Thanos requested the Tesseract in return. Gifted with a Scepter that acted as a mind control device, Loki would be able to influence others. Unbeknownst to him, the Scepter was also influencing him, fueling his hatred over his brother Thor and the inhabitants of Earth. [my emphasis]

What's your opinion on this "official" statement? How do you interpret it? Was Loki mind-controlled or merely made crankier than usual, the way Bruce was when he was holding the scepter during the big argument scene in The Avengers?

Does this change your view on Loki's character or his behavior? Is Marvel's "official" statement different from your head canon?

And why do you think they felt the need to update his MCU bio now, seven years after The Avengers was released in theatres?

Comments

[genarti]

Yeah, I'm another one who figured that was what was going on all along, or at least a strong possibility for it, so I wouldn't necessarily call it a retcon. The scepter influenced the Avengers just through proximity -- implied to include Thor, so it's not just the humans -- and Loki was out there carrying it around and so on, and canon neither says nor implies that he's immune to its effect.

I also figured that he was very possibly messed up by an unknown amount of time plummeting through the void of space, by some kind of torture/solitary confinement/etc from Thanos, or a combination, what with the dark circles under his eyes and the brittleness and all that. So I didn't think it was necessarily just the Scepter. And this bio doesn't actually rule that out, though it does strongly imply that the Scepter was the main thing messing with his head. I still like it being a combination of things, but I don't actually object to this.

The bigger question, I agree, is about the timing of updating his MCU bio with this now, and not having had it part of that before. I suspect that it's a combination of 1) the upcoming tv show, and 2) Thor: Ragnarok, in that they have newly strengthened reason to want to officially distance Loki from the more murderously authoritarian HUMANS CRAVE SUBJUGATION version of him we got in Avengers to make him as sympathetic as possible. While I think anything that has him be on Earth for any length of time is going to have to address those actions (and that body count) to some degree, and I hope they don't go the route of "so he's definitely innocent and it doesn't matter, ha ha let us never speak of this again" -- he's not innocent, and it does matter -- I'm all in favor of that distancing, rather than "oh that was Loki in his right mind, but anyway he and Thor are friends now so it's fine!"

[lynnenne]

I also figured that he was very possibly messed up by an unknown amount of time plummeting through the void of space

This is one of my favorite head canons - mainly because it gives him something else in common with Tony, and the more parallels there are between them, the harder I ship them. :D