#by being found hilarious (good) but also be disrespectful for shoving aside legitimately serious topics.

[worstloki]

Okay, take it from someone who figured out at seventeen that she had spent fifteen years being the scapegoat child in a very abusive and toxic family. (Long ask warning!)

Ragnarok is hilarious.

Ragnarok is also really, really problematic. The two are not mutually exclusive.

I did not get triggered watching Ragnarok. I did, however, get angry about the casual violence and how it brushed abuse and toxicity under the rug.

In the same way, I did get triggered by the first Thor movie. But I loved its feel, its storyline, its world building, and (mostly) how it handled Loki’s character development.

Ragnarok had Thor be a staggeringly awful brother. Thor’s a very classic golden child, and Ragnarok played that as if he was the noble older brother disciplining the wayward younger brother. Thor’s knee-jerk response to pain and being hurt is to turn around and hurt Loki worse, simply because he’s used to targeting Loki. However, Ragnarok also gave Thor some of, in my opinion, the funniest lines in the MCU. I found myself laughing almost every time Thor was onscreen.

Ragnarok played abuse off as, at best, a joke, and at worst, something deserved depending on characters’ actions. Loki, the scapegoat child and target, who was near-constantly abused and belittled by Odin throughout his childhood, was played as “he was a Bad Child, cartoonishly evil, so he deserves whatever he gets.” On the other hand, Thor, the golden child who was spared from most of the direct abuse as long as he met Odin’s expectations of perfection, was played as “he was a Good Child, and he is our hero, so everything he does to people is deserved.”

Ragnarok, to me, sent the message that people are innately good or bad. If you’re good, then you can do whatever you want to people and it’ll be okay, because that’s what heroes do. If you’re bad, then anyone can do whatever they want to you, and you deserve it because you’re bad. That is a TERRIBLE MESSAGE.

The bottom line here is that good and bad aren’t black and white. That goes double for Ragnarok- its characters aren’t as black and white as it showed them to be, and it isn’t a black and white movie, either. Ragnarok is a terrible movie in a lot of ways, but it does manage to be genuinely funny. You can like one part of something while hating the rest of it. There’s no “this movie is Good” or “this movie is Bad.” It’s always parts- “this part of the movie is good” or “this part of the movie is bad.” Ragnarok is funny- it’s a comedic masterpiece, but only when it isn’t making jokes or poking fun at something it should be taking seriously. But the movie has some deep problems, and if its creators had taken what they were making seriously, we’d all be a lot better off.

I agree! The movie is funny and light and wacky, BUT, it also writes over previous characterisation/development and presents quite a few harmful messages AND not everyone will find the same things funny!

There are quite a few types of humour and depending on what the old characterisation means to someone there is no obligation to like the changes. What people think of things is entirely up to them, and handling issues in one way or another works better for different people.

I think it's incredibly ridiculous that people take saying something is good/bad is a complete summation of every aspect of something, especially when the movie can multitask. It's not like integrity and entertainment are mutually exclusive factors anyway?? Some people prefer one or the other or both and it's literally not a big deal.

#by being found hilarious (good) but also be disrespectful for shoving aside legitimately serious topics. #like...... you can say ragnarok is good because it has non-diegetic rep (valkyrie+heimdall) #but you can also say that the female characters in ragnarok were designed in accordance with the masculine-ideal centric genre #you can say hela was a female villain and go uwu but you can also say you didn't like it because she wasn't very fleshed out+expositioned #if you ignore that the perspective of those colonized by asgard is completely ignored and thor films generally frame things biased #then you could say that the film is anti-colonialist #everyone i've seen who didn't enjoy ragnarok takes issue with the way trauma and the abusive relationships are thrown under the rug or tone #so not liking something and saying it's ''bad'' can refer to many things #and saying that any argument that favours the negative side is subjective is wrong #im not sure what that other anon was on #but they need to maybe sit down and reread the ask they sent