Wednesday, 16 June 2021

Loki 'The Variant' - June 16

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, and the JP franchise seems to be doing its’ best to make it even moreso, if the rumors about the upcoming JW: Dominion movie are correct.

What are they about? In it, a T-Rex will be fighting a Giganotosaurus, and that is just wrong, and on several levels too. Let us go there.

…However, you may ask, what about Loki? And – ‘Loki’? Sadly, nothing. This week’s episode, ‘The Variant’, was a fun watch, as we saw the titular Loki suffer by trying to adjust to being the straight guy of the show/in the TVA, and suffering from it…within his soul, while people all around him aren’t impressed.

To elaborate, Loki is a showman; for him, a large part of his trickery is in pretending to be someone that he isn’t; the problem here is that he may be too chaotic on one hand: he switches allegiances and disguises at a moment’s notice, always trying to come up one step ahead regardless of what he was trying to do in the past and whoever he tried to trick earlier. He is inconsistent, he is selfish, and he is petty.

Only he is not. In the very first ‘Thor’ movie, when Loki appeared in MCU for the first time, Loki had a clear goal: first, he was trying to prove to Odin and the rest of Asgard that he was better than Thor, and then, when he learned that he was actually a frost giant rather than an Asgardian himself, he… remained constant to that goal, his epiphany just took him in an unexpected direction – genocide, by using Bifrost; the first ‘Thor’ film was done on a cosmic scale with a cosmic scope, and Loki was a worthy villain of that movie. And now?

And now Loki is depicted as a failure as both a character and a villain. In part, this is justified – Loki’s act as a trickster wore thin by the time of ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ movie, as Hela, who is his female counterpart in the Marvel universe, took over from him there, and died in it, but since Loki died quickly soon afterwards, in the ‘Avengers: Infinity War’ film, this does not really matter.

Or does it? This Loki variant in a blonde-haired woman, while the show’s main character is a dark-haired man, of course. Yes, he is gender-fluid, but since we are talking about Disney/MCU here, this may not amount to much, because Disney wants to make money, first and foremost. To do so, it’ll be ‘progressive’ to appeal to the native, U.S. audience, but it will also be ‘retrograde’ to the audiences overseas, including RF and China, so let’s leave Loki’s sexcapades to the fans, and going back to the canon…

Going back to the canon, we got nothing. Loki is reduced to being a glorified goofball, and then he meets the ‘variant Loki’, aka the series’ main villain, for now, and follows her to see how the other half lives and whether or not he can get his own mojo back. Spoiler alert: he cannot. Not until he commits to being either a hero or a villain completely, and that is not something that he is ready to do so; he is much happier being a selfish and self-serving asshole instead – such a fall for a once great villain. I hope that the show will stop assassinating his character soon enough and begin to rebuild it instead. Now onto the JW movie?

Of that, much less is known, but, again, we are talking about a T-Rex fighting a Giganotosaurus, and that is just wrong.

First, because of realism: Tyrannosaurus Rex lived at the very end of the Mesozoic, precisely 66 MYA, in North America. Giganotosaurus lived almost 30 million before that, during the Mid-Cretaceous period, in South America. The lineages of the two dino species have never crossed paths.

Secondly – and yes, I understand that I sound completely prejudiced here, but I honestly cannot help it – but Tyrannosaurus Rex would have won. Out of the two dinosaurs, it was the more derived carnivore and the better fighter as well. Yes, like the rest of the Cretaceous carnosaurs, the Giganotosaurus was bigger than the T-Rex…but with a much weaker bite. Like its’ African cousin the Carcharodontosaurus, the Giganotosaurus aimed to rip and tear the flesh with its scissor-like jaws and thin, blade-like teeth, whereas the jaws and teeth of a Tyrannosaurus evolved to bite through flesh and bone, (not to mention armored skin of some of the herbivores that it lived next to). Ergo, as soon as it got a grip on Giganotosaurus, the latter was doomed, as the Rex would literally bite and rip it into pieces, rather than bite and claw with forelimbs in order for Rexy to bleed to death, as the Giganotosaurus would aim to do.

This brings us to Spinosaurus, which already had killed a T-Rex…back in the JPIII movie, which has aggravated many dino-fans since then. As Dr. Wu would point out in the first ‘Jurassic World’ film, their dinosaurs are not exactly real, but here we need to talk about repetition: the third JW film seems to be repeating the third JP film, and as we have talked about in our discussions regarding the now-finished AoS, this sort of recycling is just bad.

…So, to recap. The third JW movie is about to dismiss all sort of scientific integrity that the franchise tried to cloak itself in, in the initial films, it seems to be recycling plot ideas from those initial films, (which means that it is becoming bankrupt in its’ ideas, not unlike how AoS became in its’ own later seasons), and that means that the JW franchise really is heading towards its’ own ultimate conclusion, at least for the immediate future. Sad, but that is real life. It sucks, as I have always said in my obligatory disclaimer.

This is it for now. See you all soon!

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