Loki and Volstagg between ‘Thor’ and ‘Thor 2’
Look at his reactions, how much Loki has changed since Thor.
EXACTLY.
From a certain kind of emotional fragility that is born of a desperation to please and a lack of assurance about his place in Asgardian society and his validity among the ranks of people for whom he cares….
….to a hardened certitude and miserly self-serving myopic focus to win, to triumph over these people who never took him seriously, to NOT GIVE THEM THE SATISFACTION of seeing him upset, because Loki now knows the only role he can play among the Aesir is to be their downfall, their change, their chaos, their demise.
Self. Fulfilling. Prophecy.
Aided in large part by the “harmless,” callous disregard of “friends.”
And I am certainly not saying the Warriors Three, Sif, Thor or even Odin is to blame for Loki DOING what loki DID. Do I think they CONTRIBUTED to him going off the deep end? Yes.
Do I think he’s different because he’s made damned certain he’ll never be that vulnerable to the opinion of another person again?
Yes.
New Loki: Exhibit A.
Loki basically grew up and lived most of his life in an environment that was toxic for him. Not deliberately made so, at least not for him specifically, but it worked against him for a very long time until he got to the point of just always being on guard.
Imagine if you knew someone who was adjusted for breathing a different concentration of, say, oxygen than everybody else. They can breathe the same air as people around them, but it’s not right for them. They have to gasp. They have to struggle. They’re always ill. Nobody deliberately set this up, it’s just how it is. But the problem is that no one else seems to notice. They don’t bother to watch long enough to note the gasping and the illness, because the person does their best to cover it up – and for good reason. Whenever it IS noticed, they’re blamed for it. “Why can’t you just breathe like we do? It’s not that hard.” So they try not to let it show. And slowly they’re being poisoned, and it’s ignored, because surely it’s their fault if they can’t fit in just like everyone else. And they get the guilt and shame of that added on top, of being too weak and weird to handle it, while at the same time they KNOW they can’t help it, and so resentment builds equally alongside self-loathing.
That’s Loki. It’s funny and sad that, as Hemsworth put it, this “came out of nowhere” for Thor. Thor really must not have been paying attention. Because Loki’s been gasping and struggling for a long time now, and the person closest to him still manages to be surprised that a toxic life bred an equally toxic personality.
There’s also what he’s presumed to have gone through after falling into the Void, the stuff he’s seen, the torture we know he’s endured (because we see it in The Avengers). Likely he no longer cares about Volstagg’s threats here, because he has firsthand experience with so much worse. Nothing the W4 can do to him is even scary anymore… and all that is on top of no longer giving a shit about the approval of people who he now knows were never his friends in the first place.
Both physically and emotionally, Volstagg and his pals simply can’t even touch Loki anymore.
Slutty Yorick 